Joe Speedboat

by Tommy Wieringa

  ‘Oh, Arthur is as psychotic as they get. He’s tried to commit suicide three times. But the things he’s taught me! It’s amazing, the things he teaches me! With him it’s totally different from anything I’ve ever known, I’d never thought that existed, you know what I mean? It’s hard to explain.’

  ‘Even better than Jopie Koeksnijder?’

  At that P.J. laughed so hard that the coffee splashed over the sides of the mugs.

  ‘And what about here, Frankie? Anything happen around here?’ Joe asked when his story was finished.

  I frowned. I couldn’t come up with anything worth telling. It had been quiet without him, without Engel and Papa Africa, even without Christof. Almost everyone I knew had left, and the ones still around didn’t interest me. Quincy Hansen had stayed, of course; I wouldn’t be shot of him as long as I lived. He was working at Bethlehem Asphalt, doing minor administrative work. What a waste of all those years of valuable learning.

  I was still pressing briquettes myself, although production had taken a dip since the rains had set in.

  ‘Really, nothing?’ Joe asked.

  I shook my head and wrote: Papa Africa?

  ‘Shit situation. Anything’s possible. Theoretically, he may even have sailed back to Egypt, but . . .’

  Joe’s expression reflected the incredible hardships of such a journey.

  ‘It’s possible, though,’ he said. ‘Stranger things have happened. What do you think, would he have tried that? I mean, you two got along.’

  Difficult.

  ‘Difficult, but not impossible! I looked at the map; he could have gone right out to sea. Along the New Waterway to the North Sea, through the Straits of Dover. If he stuck close to shore, then along the coast of France toward the Atlantic, the Bay of Biscay, northern Spain, I mean, why not?’

  He dug into the tobacco and pulled out a honey-coloured wisp. I scratched my chin and tried to imagine the route, but Europe’s outer boundaries were fairly vague in my mind.

  ‘Imagine it, all the way past Portugal to Gibraltar, it’s possible! If Thor Heyerdahl could cross the Atlantic on a papyrus raft, why not Papa Africa in a felucca all the way to Egypt? He was a good sailor, that’s for sure, and if you had a little luck with the weather, why not?’

  I nodded, despite all my petty objections.

  ‘Think of all the things he must have seen once he was past Gibraltar . . . Algiers, Tripoli, Tobruk, and then you turn right past Alexandria and sail straight into Egypt. I could see him doing that, really.’

  Joe needed that faith, it was as hard for him to accept the loss of his stepfather as it was for his mother. But where she submerged herself in gray mourning, he created the heroics of an odyssey. He had thought the whole thing through, he seemed capable to me of making the journey himself just to prove that it could be done. And preposterous or not, it cheered me up, the possibility of a happy ending. If Joe thought it was possible, who was I to say it wasn’t? He was the can-do man. But if Papa Africa truly had tried to sail back, there was one thing Joe hadn’t mentioned.

  Why? I wrote.

  ‘You remember her hiding his passport?’ he asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘There were other things, too,’ Joe said. ‘One incident I remember was after Ramadan, right before Christmas last year. Maybe it had nothing to do with it, I don’t know, but I’ve never forgotten it in any case. You know Papa Africa never ate pork, he seriously thought it would kill him, or at least give him hives. Things like that were haram. He had lots of things like that; if India had been his daughter, for example, he would have had her circumcised. Or he believed that the left hand belonged to the Devil, so you should never eat with it, because that was haram too. They used to argue about things like that, or at least my mother did, he never argued back. He was too calm for that, you remember how he was. “She has a hot head,” he would say, and leave it at that. The day before Christmas, though, my mother made lamb meatballs for dinner. The next day, on Christmas Day, she asked him how he was feeling. Fine, he said, why did she ask? You don’t feel sick or anything, she asked, no different than usual? He shook his head no, everything was fine. Then she hit him with it: “Because yesterday you ate pork. Not lamb, pork. You see, it doesn’t give you hives! Allah didn’t punish you!” And she went on like that, while we just sat there stunned.’

  Joe licked the gummed edge on the final cigarette and wormed it into the mustard jar along with the others.

  ‘I mean, go figure. India was furious with her, but he didn’t say a word. Talk about a fucked-up Christmas.’

  That Joe had come back to Lomark to stay was something I realized only in late November, when he found a job as a hod carrier. Every weekday morning at six he would be freezing his butt down off at the dyke, where the van came by to pick him up along with a couple of other guys. They took the back roads into Germany, where they worked on the construction of new apartment complexes and industrial estates. Illegal cross-border labour was nothing new, it had existed for centuries on both sides. Through a complex network of contractors and subcontractors, construction workers were funnelled through to Germany, where no taxes or social premiums had to be paid for them. They received their wages by the week and it was their tough luck if they fell from a scaffolding or if a U-beam landed on their foot. Joe had seen a man who had gone into a coma after being hit on the head by a concrete element that was swinging from a crane. His buddy went to the office to complain, but they told him it was the man’s own fault, ‘Man soll aufpassen an der Baustelle,’ et cetera, and the friend had grabbed the contractor and started strangling him with his own necktie. Stuff like that.

  At the end of the week the Gastarbeiter drank potato schnapps in the van, went out to dinner at a dingy, steamy restaurant with gutbürgerliche Küche, and came home pissed as newts. When the frost settled in the work stopped, and that was the end of Joe’s construction career; when the new year came he got a job at Bethlehem.

  He began driving bulldozers.

  Now that the Ratzinger family had handed over a son to the asphalt plant as well, you might think they had become naturalized. But Lomark doesn’t open its arms that easily, things like that take generations around here. And even then . . . But Joe was back on the grounds where he’d once built an airplane, working this time for Christof’s father, Egon Maandag. Production was still on hold because of the high water, but foreman Graad Huisman taught Joe what he needed to know. He received bulldozing lessons. Sometimes at coffee break Huisman would suddenly start weeping. The maintenance men sitting around the canteen didn’t even bat an eye, Joe said; since he’d been diagnosed with cancer of the knee, Huisman cried almost every day. The canteen smelled of oranges and tobacco smoke.

  Joe was now one of the men in orange overalls, on the grounds themselves he had to wear a white hard hat. It had never occurred to me that someday he would have to work for a living like everyone else. When the water went down he walked to work; sometimes his mother walked with him, on her way to the river to see if Papa Africa had come back yet. They would say goodbye at the gates, Joe with lunchbox in hand and a lump in his coat pocket where he kept an apple or an orange. The day crew would gather in the canteen to run through the production schedules, then they all went to their posts. Joe climbed into the cab of the Liebherr, slid his butt back and forth in the seat until he was comfortable, then started the engine. The machine coughed thick, black smoke, Joe revelled in the way the engine throbbed. The heating and the radio he always turned all the way up. Radio, Joe said, is the opiate of the working man.

  The grounds were dotted with hills of sand and gravel that had been brought in by barge. In accordance with the operator’s directions, it was Joe’s job to continually fill the dosers: huge, partitioned hoppers that held the ingredients for the asphalt. He drove back and forth between the dosers and the piles of minerals, which he bit off in chunks. From the dosers the material went by conveyor belt into the bowels of the asphalt machine.

  Lunch wa
s at twelve-thirty.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Aw, nothing.’

  ‘Got in late last night, I guess.’

  ‘No, not this time either.’

  ‘Oh. So what else is up?’

  ‘Aw, nothing much.’

  And so spring came. But east wind and spring storms came as well, to punish those who had rejoiced too soon. The trees in the cemetery drummed their wooden fingers against the back of my house. The windows were steamed, I read in the piles of newspapers that the E981 would almost definitely bypass Lomark completely. The municipal newsletter said that a committee had been set up to protest against the decision. The members feared that the village would be caught between the two transport arterials into Germany: the river on one side and the E981 on the other, especially if Lomark had no exit of its own. That was crucial. The only way to reach us then would be to get off at Westerveld and drive along the dyke to Lomark. It was a monstrous plan.

  Signs appeared along the national highway in the pastures of farmers who sympathized with the protesters. LET LOMARK BREATHE was the most poetic one. It was the brainchild of Harry Potijk, chairman of the committee of the same name. Potijk compared the walling-in of Lomark with suffocation; this imagery had more impact than any subtle argumentation. Harry Potijk was the ideal spokesman, and this was to be his finest hour. For twenty years he had been chairman of the local historical society, and he could orate like the old-fashioned books he had digested during countless hours of autodidactic effort. With the arrival of the E981, his life – uneventful till then – took on the glow of an ideal. He was given the opportunity to advance the committee’s arguments during a Town Council meeting.

  ‘And if a sound barrier is built, as indicated in the plan before us,’ he said, ‘and the river rises, what then? We will be trapped like rats. There will be nowhere for us to go, the dyke road is flooded, our homes are filling with water and the only route of escape is hermetically sealed with a sound barrier.’

  He paused to allow his words to sink in with the council and the public gallery.

  ‘My question then, Mr Chairman, is this: do you plan to equip each household with a rubber boat?’

  Scornful laughter rose from the gallery.

  ‘Please stick to the facts at hand, Mr Potijk,’ the chairman said.

  Potijk gave a servile nod, but that was a ruse.

  ‘And if you say that the water will never reach such heights, what do you know of climatic change around the world? Of the ecological imbalance now blamed on global warming? Of the melting icecaps?’

  At this point in his speech he pointed dramatically at the wall, on the other side of which rivers churned and the earth hissed with heat.

  ‘Has it slipped your mind that the river this summer reached an all-time low, and that a few years back the water was higher than it has ever been before? Have you forgotten so soon? Even Mr Abelsen, a man known to you, now ninety-three years of age, has never in his life seen the water so high. There are forces at work about which we know nothing and which we cannot predict, so that we must take into account today what seems only a doomsday scenario in the distant future . . .’

  The committee’s proviso was clear as a bell: the motorway could be tolerated as a fait accompli, but not the lack of an exit and entrance ramp at Lomark. Lomark must be given its own exit and entrance, a windpipe, an asphalt smoker’s lung.

  When Harry Potijk realized that there was little he could expect from the mediocre-minded town fathers, he piloted his supporters along a more radical tack: one Wednesday afternoon they left in a hired van from Van Paridon Rentals for the houses of parliament in The Hague. In their imaginations the demonstrators may have been preceded by the sound of fife and drum, but reality consisted of the cobblestones of the Binnenhof beneath a gray sky, and no one who listened. A few attempts were made at the yell they had practiced on the bus, but the war cries fell to the earth as mutely as insults in a foreign language. A man with a briefcase and umbrella passed by at one point and inquired politely about the purpose of their gathering.

  ‘An MP,’ whispered Mrs Harpenau, the librarian.

  Harry Potijk rose to his full height and began rattling off the group’s mission statement, but was soon interrupted.

  ‘Oh, so this is about a highway? But then you’re in the wrong place, you should be at the Ministry of Transport. On Plesmanweg. It’s quite a way from here.’

  Dazed, the group left the Binnenhof and headed for the address he’d mentioned, which was indeed a long walk. They stopped along the way for coffee and sandwiches, then it began growing dark. Mrs Harpenau and two of the others wanted to start home, because of the children . . . and that was the end of the march on The Hague.

  The photo that appeared in the Lomarker Weekly was taken from so far away that the signs were unreadable, and the huddle of protesters looked painfully small there on that huge square.

  I’ve kept that photo. It shows how laughable we are, even in the pursuit of good.

  The spring fair brought us something new: Mousetown. As an attraction it was fascinating, precisely because it was so dated. You passed through a black curtain and found yourself in a darkened, unpleasantly hot space where the bitter smell of mouse piss and sawdust snapped at your nostrils. What awaited you there was the rather static spectacle of a wooden castle, at eye level for children and wheeled pedestrians like myself. The castle itself was two stories high, lit from the inside by clumsily sunken lightbulbs. The streets around it were illuminated by Christmas lighting, with bright yellow sawdust scattered on the ground. The entire fortress covered about ten square metres and was surrounded by a moat, its water as opaque as that in the water bowl of the guinea pigs Dirk used to keep – all of whom, one by one, had died a death as hideous as it was mysterious.

  The element of motion in Mousetown – a fair, after all, is the celebration of flying, spinning and/or swaying movement; little wonder, therefore, that Joe could be found there almost all the time – consisted of a few hundred mice. The visitors watched the rodents swarm with a kind of fascinated horror. The animals pissed, shit and screwed in what in the human world would be called public places, which produced a great deal of laughter. There was a drawbridge leading to an island in the moat which, along with the back wall, formed the edges of the mousy world. The city was rectangular, you could walk around it on three sides, and the back was a plywood barrier crudely painted with clouds and a sun. The city itself was well lit; the area around it, where the people stood and stared at the storybook plague of rodents, was dark as a haunted house.

  Of course I saw Mousetown as a parable for Lomark, that stinking nest in which we were trapped in each other’s company, caught between the river on one side and the future sound barrier on the other. Harry Potijk’s committee, however, failed to underscore their arguments with that particular metaphor.

  One day I saw Joe and P.J. at the fair. They were standing at the Spider, their backs to me. P.J. was waving to someone being flung around in one of those seats, and Joe was counting the money in his wallet. God, it had been a long time since I’d seen P.J. Had she lost weight? I looked at her golden blond curls and heard myself sigh like a melancholy hound.

  After Joe had gone to Amsterdam he and P.J. had sort of become friends, and they saw each other whenever she was in Lomark. Which wasn’t very often. The last time had been at Christmas, but I hadn’t seen her then because I hadn’t felt like going to midnight mass. That made it almost nine months now – months during which my time had stood still and hers had sped up.

  I rolled along behind them in the direction of Mousetown. The noise coming from all those rides grated on my eardrums. It was tough going on the flattened grass, the fair was probably the only time I left the asphalt and paving stones behind.

  I didn’t want to be seen. I was suddenly furious at the thought that I didn’t live on my own two feet but could only look up at her, speechless and stunted. I had to force myself not to think about what I might
have grown to be . . . the height from which I might have looked in her eyes, the words I would have used to make her laugh, the way Joe did, the way that asshole of a writer made her laugh. (Since becoming aware of his existence I had run across his name a few times in the papers. When I did I mocked him and crumpled the paper into a ball. Somewhere, he had someone who hated him.) In P.J.’s presence my defects were aggravated, I became as crooked and little as I already was. There was no salvation from that.

  In one of the most frank, most personal entries in my diary, the kind that simply has to be true because it’s about feelings (tears tell no lies, haha!), I talked about the nasty predicament in which I found myself.

  . . . allowed to dream, but don’t kid yourself into having any

  expectations. I dream the colour of my love for P.J., the

  staggering orange of a rising sun. I won’t be able to tell her

  that. This is completely fucked. I mean, when it comes to my

  life touching hers I might as well be dead or a Chinaman from

  Wuhan. Sometimes it feels like I’m going to cry, but that’s

  nonsense, I’m going to turn to stone. Work on that. Never stop

  practicing, Master Musashi says. Do not think P.J. thoughts.

  That weakens. Practice practicing. Become stone. This is my

  Strategy.

  I closed myself up in the darkness of Mousetown in order to think diffuse thoughts, about how they transported an attraction like this from town to town, for example, or what you would have to do to keep the population from exploding. If the mice were allowed to reproduce at will, before you knew it the whole city would become a roiling blanket of soft little mousehides, they would form factions, the struggle for resources would begin, all against all and each one for himself, a bloodbath . . .

  Maybe the owner got rid of the nests with a spade or a Dust-buster. It was also possible that the baby mice were eaten by the adult animals, a phenomenon I had seen once with Dirk’s guinea pigs, who had exterminated their entire nest one night in an inexplicable fit of fury. We found the hairy babies the next morning: bitten in two. Those otherwise so daffy guinea pigs had in their hearts a horror you would never expect. Not long afterwards the adult animals met the same fate. The culprit was never brought to justice.