He leaned back in the pew, then thought better of it.
‘If He’d wanted us to do so much bowing, why didn’t He make us with a hinge at the back?’
I burst out laughing. A lot of people looked around, I simulated a spasm. Joe sat there, keeping a straight face. Christof stood up stiffly from a pew at the front and walked to the coffin with his grandmother in it. A couple of nieces and nephews followed him, they all put a rose on the lid. Men came to lift the coffin onto their shoulders and carry it up the aisle and outside, and with that the whole thing was pretty much over. The visitors crowded out behind the bearers. Piet Honing gave me a friendly nod.
It was hard for me, having Piet be so nice all the time. I could never have been that nice back, simply because I didn’t have enough of it in me. It would always be a transaction in which I found myself short of change, and that left me feeling guilty.
I was the last in line and rolled down the little ramp at the side entrance. There were a few people standing around out there, lighting cigarettes and commenting on the service, the rest were walking behind the hearse. We were bathed in the light of a limitless blue sky. I watched the tail of the procession disappear and had to take a shit. I went home.
There was no one out on the street, and the shops, usually filled at that hour with housewives with little children, were empty. I turned right on Poolseweg and heard footsteps behind me. Joe passed me, he was running toward his house. He waggled his eyebrows at me as he went by. At the bottom of Poolseweg he suddenly stopped and turned around.
‘Hey, Frankie, how much do you weigh anyway?’ he asked when I got up to him.
A year earlier I had weighed a little over fifty kilos, and I hadn’t put on much weight since. I held up five fingers and saw his lips moving along with his thoughts. He seemed to be calculating something.
‘Fifty kilos, right?’ he said. ‘How much difference can it make? You feel like taking a little spin in the plane?’
My eyes grew big in horror. And I still had to shit real bad. It made my stomach hurt.
‘Not a long ride,’ Joe said. ‘Just a little spin, to get the feel of it.’
Between that moment on Poolseweg and the moment when he climbed into the cockpit in front of me, all swaddled up like a samurai, a little more than sixty minutes went by. I could have used each of them to change my mind. Like when he took me home first, where sunlight fell through the windows like fire, and stood at the back window for a while looking out at the dishevelled General Cemetery where his father was buried – all that time I could have said no.
I hoisted myself out of the cart and grabbed the edge of the table. Like a drugged chimp with one short leg I lumbered across the room, holding onto chairs, tables and cabinets. Joe turned around and looked at me in dumb amazement.
‘Hey, man, you can walk?’
If walking was what you’d call it. I crossed from the dresser to the toilet door and disappeared behind. I pulled the door closed hard after me and sat down on the pot with my trousers still fastened. I had to go so bad that I broke out in a sweat. I clenched my teeth and wormed my way madly out of my trousers while my intestines did their best to rid themselves of their freight. Sometimes you have to go so bad and you can still keep it up for a long time, but as soon as you get close to a toilet you need superhuman willpower to keep it all in. It seems like intestines know when there’s a toilet around.
Just in time. I couldn’t do anything to muffle the dull, heavy farts.
‘Well, well!’ Joe said from the other side of the door.
That door was nothing more than a framework of slats with lily-covered wallpaper, so the voice of my intestines was as clear to him as it was to me. A second wave came rolling out.
‘Man-oh-man!’
I felt like dying. Just like with Engel and that urinal. Maybe that’s the way women feel at the gynaecologist’s, butt up in the air and legs wide while a cold ice-cream scoop grubs around inside them.
When I came back into the room, I didn’t look at him. The light lifted the ramshackle objects in my house and examined them from all sides – wear, poverty and age had nowhere to hide. I gimped my way over to the dresser beside the bed to wrap myself up for the flight.
‘If I had a dog that smelled like that,’ Joe muttered, ‘I’d take it out and shoot it.’
We went to his house to fetch a bike and, for better or worse, lugged my suddenly-six-times bulkier corpus onto the baggage carrier.
‘OK,’ Joe panted, ‘and now don’t move.’
He seized the handlebars and tossed his left leg over the crossbar. Standing with his right foot on the pedal he used his full weight to get us rolling. At the end of the street Joe stood on the pedals and accelerated, but made it only three-quarters of the way up the long slope to the dyke before he had to hop off. I almost flew off the baggage carrier.
All things considered, the whole operation had already cost so much effort that I wished there was some way I could get out of it. It was so damned cold that it turned your face hard and sullen, the wind whipped tears from my eyes that I couldn’t wipe away because I had to hold onto Joe. Like a warm, heaving animal he fought his way upwind along the dyke to the spot where he’d stashed his plane. My legs with those black leather circus shoes at the ends of them dangled alongside the baggage carrier, I couldn’t rest them on the frame and so I had to sit the whole damn way with my full weight resting on my nuts.
Halfway between Lomark and Westerveld we coasted down off the dyke and onto Gemeenschapspolderweg. Along that road were three isolated farms. The wind was finally behind us. To the left and right the black fields lay fallow, ploughed for the winter into frozen furrows with frost on their backs. We cycled up a private road, gravel chirped beneath the wheels. At the end of the road was the farm that belonged to Dirty Rinus. So this was where the plane had been hidden all this time! I saw no trace of Rinus himself or his brown Opel Ascona. In the yard stood a wheelbarrow, its handgrips the only things not encrusted with a layer of dried manure and straw, otherwise the thing seemed covered with it. Joe rode to the shed all the way at the back and leaned me, bike and all, against the wall.
‘Wait here for a minute,’ he said, as though I had any choice.
He disappeared through a little stable door. It wasn’t hard to figure out why he’d parked the plane at Dirty Rinus’s; Rinus didn’t give a shit – the one thing he had plenty of – about anything. Sitting there against the brick wall like a sack of potatoes, I could see into one of the stalls where a row of Belgian Blue cattle stared back in despond. They were up to their knees in manure. Along their bellies I could see horizontal scars. Caesarean sections: Belgian blues are mutants with a birth canal that’s way too narrow; their calves have to be cut out from the side.
I was cold and my balls ached. Somewhere a pair of doors slid open, followed a moment later by the strangled cough of an engine that had been standing still for a while. After the first few tries it caught. I recognized the sound: a 100hp Subaru engine. Joe let it idle for a few minutes to warm up the oil and water.
Until that moment I could have changed my mind. We would have gone back home, Joe would have shrugged in puzzlement but forgotten it quickly enough, and I would have been relieved not to have to go through with it. But once the plane came around the corner, it was too late.
I don’t think I had fully realized that I was going flying. Only when I saw that sky-blue monster appear again after a whole year did a wave of fear and excitement go coursing through me. Joe circled around the yard and turned the plane with its nose toward the pasture. Then he turned off the engine, stepped out onto the wing and climbed down.
‘Like a charm,’ he said, sounding pleased.
He went around behind me, put his arms under my armpits and locked his fingers across my chest. He pulled me off the baggage carrier like a drowning man. His breath brushed my face, I could smell Mahfouz’s cooking.
‘Help out a little here,’ he grunted, ‘you’re too heavy
for me.’
I hung in his arms like a baby learning to walk. With my good hand I grabbed hold of the wing and nodded to him to let go. It was the first time we’d ever stood beside each other. I was more than a year older than Joe, but a head shorter.
‘Let’s see, how are we going to do this?’ Joe said.
He found a ladder with liquid-manure spatters on it and leaned it against the side of the plane. He himself stepped up onto the wing and into the belly of the machine, then held his hand out to me.
‘If you just . . . yeah, the first rung, then I can give you . . . give me your hand . . . now put your foot up, your foot! One more . . . hold on . . .’
And so I arrived breathlessly in the plane’s rattan bucket seat. Joe pushed the ladder away and sat down in front of me, half on the metal superstructure because there was only one chair. Together on a bicycle built for one.
‘Can you see all right?’
My head stuck up just above the edge of the cockpit.
‘Here we go, Frankie.’
He turned the key in the ignition and started the engine. We taxied through the open gate and into the pasture, a strip of frozen grassland stretched out before us. Joe put the plane into neutral and pulled on the handbrake. Then he opened the throttle the whole way. Thunder rolled, a frozen hurricane roared around our ears. I was chilled to the bone.
‘Flaps out!’ Joe shouted.
He popped the handbrake and we leapt forward. I grabbed him around the waist and we shot ahead with a deafening din. I felt his body working the pedals and the joystick, which he pulled all the way back when we reached full speed.
We were off. The ground disappeared beneath us, I screamed. The plane shivered, the wings swept left and right but we were already twice as high as the tallest poplar, with nothing more to worry about. There was a cheerful tingling in my scrotum. Behind and off to one side I saw the river and the washlands. Joe turned ninety degrees to the right and flew parallel to the river, heading for Lomark. The icy cold wind made my eyes and nose run and paralyzed my lips, but I ignored it. The plane stank of petrol.
From the looks of it we were going to hold at this altitude. It was hard to say how far up that really was. Below us the world reeled past like a slapstick film. Every rise and every hill that usually cost me so much effort was now nothing but a bump. My entire biotope, including all the things ordinarily hidden behind houses, hedges, ridges and dykes, was laughably flat and obvious from here. At this height there were no more secrets, and that was sad and lovely.
Every once in a while Joe looked back over his shoulder and shouted something unintelligible. The plane shuddered across the blue-golden sky and I was reminded of those old monster movies where Godzilla and all kinds of other dinosaurs moved just as unnaturally and jerkily as we did in mid-air.
In the milky distance I saw the electrical plant blowing its vertical plume of smoke. Joe pointed down. We were above Lomark. In the depths lay the cemetery, where Louise Maandag’s funeral seemed to be over. I tried to trace the road to Het Karrewiel where the funeral guests should now be eating their sandwiches. I found the restaurant, in the parking lot I saw the last few people in black on their way to the big dining room for coffee and sandwiches with salami and cheese, with no idea that we were up above them.
Joe shoved the joystick to the left, the left wing plunged down and the right one came up as he banked toward the river, back where we’d started. In my stomach I felt the jubilant sensation of falling. We were going to put the plane down before they had to saw us out of the cockpit like two frozen primeval hunters. The plane levelled out. I picked out the ferry landing and the old shipyard and then a wee little man who looked like he was dragging something much bigger than he was. Joe saw him too.
‘Mahfouz!’ he screamed over his shoulder.
The river gleamed and the cars’ roofs glistened along the dyke. I tried to take it all in at one go in order never to forget.
When I saw Rinus’s farm coming up fast, I was stunned – the landing! I didn’t want to think about the landing, I’d never watched Joe make a landing before, the landing was the hardest thing of all about flying! I thought about death, about how, together, Joe and I . . . and suddenly I wasn’t so afraid of it anymore. We passed over the farm and now I saw Dirty Rinus’s Opel parked in the yard. The plane turned and lost altitude fast. The pasture was right in front of us and Joe was starting his approach. He was going to try to be as close as possible to the ground when he got to the field, I felt his body go tense, the wings shivered nervously and we were still going way too fast . . . Pull up! Pull up, man! But he headed on in, with the pasture looming like a wall. Joe pushed the throttle all the way in and pulled the flaps all the way out, the noise dimmed but the earth was still coming up at us like a fist. Then the wheels smacked the ground. The plane hopped and came back down again, we raced across the field and I saw chunks of dirt flying up. We were losing speed fast.
Right before the fence Joe brought the plane to a halt.
The landing had taken an alarming number of metres more than liftoff.
When he killed the engine, Joe’s body relaxed. The silence came pouring into my ears.
Two metres in front of us, Dirty Rinus was leaning against the fence, a rollup dangling from his lips and his index finger raised in minimalist greeting. Joe turned to me and gave me a purple-lipped grin.
‘That was a tight one,’ he said.
The edges of his ski goggles were rimmed with ice.
Things are looking up. The washlands are almost dry, the willows bend over the pools left behind. Their lower branches are hung with flotsam, between them the coots paddle in search of nesting material. At dusk the bats come swarming out and at night, when you hear the first frogs, you know the weather will be getting better soon. Mahfouz could use some spring sun as well. Sometimes we sit on the quay together, soaking up a little warmth while he scans the sky to see what all that trumpeting could be about.
‘Nile goose,’ he says.
Two Egyptian geese go squabbling low overhead. That’s late March. Then comes April and the fist you made against winter unclenches. But too soon. In April the wind starts blowing like you’d forgotten it could ever blow. Your house shrinks beneath the hammering. Out on the street people shout to each other, ‘Weird, this wind, huh?!’, meaning that it crawls into the cracks in your brain and drives you raving mad. It goes around yanking liked a spoiled kid on whatever it finds. You thought everything was battened down but the whole world is flapping and moaning. Including, of course, shutters, gutters and decorative elements. The wind changes pitch and volume all the time and you can hear church bells and children’s voices in it. It feels to me like it’s coming straight off the Russian tundra, a filthy east wind that humps against the back of my house and makes it impossible for me to study.
The geography book I’ve buried my nose in speaks of permafrost and tundra landscapes (‘agriculturally, such soils are of no significance’) that remain eternally frozen. Sometimes to a depth of hundreds of metres. Finals are in May, I have a 7.8 average for my exams but I’ve still got the jitters. I long for the moment when it’s all over – it’s not the thought of it but the longing that’s so nice, that every day brings you closer to the moment when you stand on the banks and watch Jordan calmly roll by. My fervent longing is one I share with twenty others who, at this same moment, are all struggling with extracts, workbooks and low bacteriological activity in the tundra. We long collectively for thereafter. But when all this is behind us they will enter the promised land, and I will remain behind. I’m very much aware of that.
When the wind finally dies down it starts raining so hard that the streets foam. That goes on for days. But one morning you wake up with the feeling that something is missing – the noise is gone! The rain has stopped and the wind has blown over. Somewhere a wood pigeon is cooing. The branches outside are motionless, they drip and glimmer in the early sunlight. You hear jackdaws happily tumbling through the sky
above the cemetery.
That is late April.
From down by the river comes the sound of handiwork.
I know now that it was a keel beam Joe and I saw Mahfouz dragging along the day we flew over the river. He’s building a boat.
‘It’s a felucca,’ says Mahfouz, who’s too busy to talk much these days.
Joe says the boat symbolizes the love between Mahfouz and his mother. Other people have their own song, they have a boat. The first time they met, Mahfouz gave her a model boat, a felucca, which is now on the windowsill in her bedroom.
They have something with boats, those two. After they got married in Cairo they took a short cruise on the Nile. One night they stood on deck and looked up at an uncommonly clear sky full of stars, and that was when Regina had a vision. She saw a wooden ship being driven by bent-backed rowers; she and Mahfouz lay on a bed of pillows on the afterdeck while girls in white stroked the air above them with ostrich-feather fans. He was a prince of great beauty, she a lady from the highest ranks of society. Regina’s eyes shone with tears when the vision faded. ‘We’ve done this before, Mahfouz,’ she’d said. ‘This isn’t our first life together.’
Joe shakes his head. ‘She married my father as a Hindu princess and Mahfouz as Nefertiti. She’s the whole history of the world rolled into one.’
At the spot where the Demsté shipyard once stood – the firm went bankrupt in 1932, but when the water’s low you can see what’s left of the slips – Mahfouz has built a framework of planks in the form of a ship. It’s not very long, six metres or so, and it’s shaped differently from what you usually see around here. The frame is only the rough form of what the boat will be, but it looks broader than our sailboats. The front and back curve up only slightly, more like a cargo ship than a yacht. Here and there along the quay are sawhorses with planks laid across them, and weights to slowly bend the wood into shape.
Regina bikes down along the Lange Nek to bring Mahfouz tea, bread and cigarettes. She devours him with her eyes, her Nubian. The colour that our winter wiped from his face is gradually coming back. He’s building her a flagship, she lights his cigarettes and pours him tea with enough sugar in it to knock the enamel off your teeth. Reluctantly he lays aside his plane and sits down beside her. From her bag she produces sandwiches wrapped in silver foil. Ferryboat passengers stop and look at the shipyard’s small-scale resurrection. Mahfouz works amid the paintless sloops on their trailers with flat tyres and the green river buoys twice a man’s height, all waiting to be hauled away by Hermans & Sons. He works hard, he wants to launch the boat this very summer. The steam box he’s built to bend the stubborn rib beams consists of a length of pipe; he hangs the rib in the pipe, boils water on a small fire under it, and the steam disappears into the pipe and softens the wood.
Joe Speedboat Page 11