I grinned awkwardly and sucked beer through my straw. On this day, every match would be dedicated to her, I would crush them one by one until there was no one left.
Meanwhile the contests went on, lightweights and heavyweights, each at their own table. The blood-drunken screaming in a host of tongues drowned out all thought. Joe tried to point out my next opponent, a Russian, who was continually obscured from view by the mass of bodies moving wildly to the rhythm of the struggle. Then I caught sight of him: Vitali Nazarovitch, pale skin and eyes of faded blue. Beneath his T-shirt he had a torso like something from a men’s health magazine. I rotated my wrist, round and round. Pliability is a living hand, says Musashi.
Not long afterwards I was staring at Vitali’s neck muscles, which bulged like the roots of a great tree. I liked arm wrestling so much, I guess, because of the cheerful stupidity of the whole thing. There were no hidden agendas or intentions. No words were spoken, yet still it involved an intense primary contact. Nazarovitch had a workingman’s strength, unlike the body-builder’s strength which pops like a balloon if you put too much pressure on it.
The first match went nowhere. We used up the entire three minutes and ended in a draw. During the pause I noticed Nazarovitch looking at P.J. Not furtively, not with a pseudo-accidental glance, no, openly and self-confidently. I didn’t dare to look whether she was responding to his flirting.
Until that moment the Russian and I had shared a symmetrical rhythm. Now that was shattered. Just before the big push a flash of light went off in my mind, a bolt of lightning. I came out of the corner with such force that I was afraid for a moment that my muscles would tear from their ligaments. The Russian groaned as he hit the table. Hurrah for creatine.
Joe gave me the thumbs-up. The Russian shook his head in the direction of two of his buddies. I wanted him to toss and turn on his cot that night, trying with all his might to deal with a defeat he couldn’t understand, I wanted him to be too disgusted to even masturbate. In his dreams he would relive his childhood fears, the next day he would be tired and irritable.
At the start of the third round Nazarovitch stuck his jaw out aggressively, but I had gauged his strength by now: he couldn’t beat me. A draw was the best he could hope for. In that knowledge, I attacked.
‘ . . . with your spirit calm, attack with a feeling of constantly crushing the enemy, from first to last. The spirit is to win in the depths of the enemy. This is Ken No Sen.’
And that was the end of the third round. The Russian could slink back on board his filthy steamer. He wouldn’t forget me for a while.
‘You moved way up on him,’ Joe said. ‘I’ve never seen you go way out like that. It did the trick. Be careful you don’t shoot out of the box, though, watch your balance.’
Number three was a Czech truck driver in leather clogs. His breath stank like water that had been left standing in a vase, which wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t been in the habit of exhaling forcefully as he wrestled. I heard a German behind me say that I had ‘the body of a child, but the arm of a heavyweight’. I could live with that.
The Czech bit it in two rounds.
Around me there grew a kind of admiration, fuelled by puzzlement and awe. One of the heavyweights, a 120-kilo giant, came over unannounced and shook my hand. He said something to Joe, we thought it was Polish.
‘I think he said something nice,’ P.J. said after he was gone. ‘He didn’t seem angry, I don’t think.’
Suddenly we felt a bit out of place in the Hafenrestaurant, amid that crowd from the fringe, from a world that seemed realer – because harder – than our own. We smiled at each other encouragingly and resolved to remember it down to the smallest detail.
There was some fantastic wrestling going on, and the smell of garlic and beer-breath grew ever stronger. Joe fetched three sausage sandwiches and two half-litres for P.J. and himself, a bottle of Rostocker for me. I preferred the bottle whenever possible. And no one, except Ma, knew my peculiarities the way Joe did. He almost never had to ask, most of what he knew about me was a result of his own attentiveness. That’s the way it had been ever since he blew up that substation that supplied the fair with electricity: no fair for Frankie, no fair for anyone.
The crowd in Rostock had more confidence in me than the one in Liège, where only a few people had bet on me. Here things went much better, money flitted back and forth each time the announcer called out the name they had given me: ‘das Ungeheuer’, the Creature. This was the next-to-last match: if I won this one, I’d be in the finals.
I found myself seated across from a stoic. Stoics were what I feared most. ‘If you think, “Here is a master of the Way, who knows the principles of strategy,” then you will surely lose.’
He was a stocky Asian, not very tall but with impressive shoulders. I was particularly on guard, of course, because I assumed that Asians by nature were closer to the Strategy of the samurai.
He had an iron grip, but I attacked just a little faster, putting my hand on top. His counteroffensive threw me completely off balance. He pushed with everything he had in him, groaning like he was shitting rocks.
‘Come on, Frankie!’ P.J. shouted, sounding rattled.
There was no way I could keep this up, I was losing horribly. All he used was the Fire and Stones Cut, pounding as hard as he could in hope of a sudden victory – and that’s what he was getting. Until a miracle happened – a miracle, and nothing less than a miracle: I felt a violent shiver pass through his arm into mine. The Asian gave a sharp little cry and suddenly relaxed all his muscles, bringing us back to perpendicular. He yanked his hand away and grabbed at his forearm with the other one, making sounds of pain quite different from ours: the sort of high-pitched, wailing cries that ninjas make in cartoons. Joe was beside me in a flash. ‘What happened?!’ After a few minutes my suspicion was borne out: with the force of his own attack, the Asian had torn a tendon in his forearm.
I had passed through the eye of the needle.
‘How lucky can you get?’ Joe said.
‘I thought I was going to die,’ P.J. said, squeezing my good shoulder. ‘He looked so . . . mean, as if there was no difference between this and murdering someone.’
The final was going to be between me and someone called Horst, last name unknown. But first we watched the heavyweight semi-finals, in which the same Pole who had shaken my hand pulverized his opponent. It was a real tour de force, the alpha silverbacks at their best. It bothered me to know that I had to follow an act like that. The audience had come here to be entertained, to spend a few hours void of thought. So when it was my turn, I – for the first time in my life – laid on my handicaps a little thick. Horst, looking like a Viking with his blond beard, was a bit taken aback to find himself sitting across from some Quasimodo. The audience did what it needed to do: they lapped it up. I looked around the crowd. The mood was tense, something could happen any moment. A little man screamed at me, flecks of foam flying from his mouth. Horst took up his position. My hand disappeared in his.
‘Ready . . . Go!’
Without blinking an eyelid, Horst pushed me past the critical forty-five-degree limit. I heard a muffled shriek from P.J. and tried with all my might to get out of my predicament. I tapped into reserves I had never touched before and made it back almost to perpendicular, at which point Horst simply attacked anew. I never left the defensive and Horst won the round, but he seemed disappointed at not having slammed me against the table.
I flexed my wrist back and forth. Fixedness means a dead hand. We started all over again.
‘Tut-TUT!’ Joe shouted.
‘With very quick timing you cut, scolding the enemy.’
Come on then, you blond bastard. But my attack was neutralized by his. The Nazi swine. I realized that I had only one chance: to bend his wrist, which meant I had to pull him toward me a little in order to get past dead centre. Pliability is a living hand. I looked at Joe, who glanced quickly at his stopwatch.
‘Thirty seco
nds!’
Thirty seconds. Fuck you, Kartoffelsalat.
‘Fifteen!’
I had worked him toward me very slowly, in accordance with the principle of Knowing the Times, now was when it had to happen. His hand was bigger, but mine was stronger; all physical performance in my life until now had been the product of manual effort. I put so much pressure on my wrist that my molars cracked, his wrist bent far over backwards. It coincided perfectly with the final whistle and both referees awarded me the round. I had won on a technicality; it was my most strategic victory to date.
One round to go. My arm was still feeling good, no cramps or stiffness, I felt capable of breaking his morale. Horst Worst began the third match with barely visible reluctance. He had been counting on finishing up in two rounds, and now he was faced with a draw. And with an opponent whose muse was looking on. (Can you see me, P.J.? Do you admire me?)
OK, Horst Wessel, this won’t take long. I’m going to burn you down, pizza face. With your faggy beard. Does it hurt? This is Frank the Arm calling, are you ready for the ultimate humiliation? It’ll only hurt for a moment. Here it comes: in the name of the Father . . . the Son . . . and the Holy Ghost . . .
Horst went way down, but not all the way. I wanted to crush him completely, and the thought of shouting occurred to me. ‘Shout according to the situation. The voice is a thing of life. We shout against fires and so on, against the wind and the waves. The voice shows energy.’
The first time I shouted there was something hoarse about it; it had been so long since I’d shouted. The second shout was already fuller, stronger. The third time, though, it was a shout I believed in myself: rounded and powerful and the embodiment of the struggle. And Horst buckled. ‘We shout after we have cut down the enemy – this is to announce victory.’
Die, dog.
We went out to dinner at an Italian place in the centre of Rostock. It was almost midnight, in the Burger King across the street they were busy mopping up. The waiter put a bottle of red wine and a beer on the table. I had been sensational, my arm was twitching from the energy still being released. P.J. fed me quattro stagioni and tomato salad with basil. Meanwhile I smoked and drank – all at the same time and in indecent quantities. We were feeling like free agents, heroes. We thought about Lomark and laughed, because we were out conquering the world. We would become travelling ronin, landless prize-fighters without a lord, free beneath the living sky. I was ecstatic and wanted it to never end, which is usually about the moment closing time arrives. We were allowed to take with us one more bottle of wine and a couple of beers in a plastic bag, but then it was really Schluss. We exited laughing and noisy, it was grand to feel that something had gone the way we’d dreamed.
Now we had to find a hotel. Someone pointed us toward the station, which was bathed in unreal, green light. Close by was the InterCity Hotel, but it was full of visitors to a trade fair for the offset industry.
‘I could always just drive home,’ Joe said.
Still cheerful, we headed out of the quiet city. At the commuter village of Kritzmow we got our last chance: along the highway lay ‘Kritzmow Park’ with a supermarket, a bank, a Spielparadies and a hotel. We parked the car and wandered around the empty amenities centre until we found Hotel Garni.
‘All right,’ Joe said, ‘you never know.’
He rang the bell, and did it again after a couple of minutes. The intercom produced a rattling sound, then a woman’s voice.
‘Ja?’
The door remained shut; the desk closed at eight. Joe had an ace up his sleeve, however, and announced that we were travelling with a handicapped person who was completely exhausted. Where he came up with the word ‘Behinderte’ was a glorious mystery to me. The voice on the intercom had to think about that one. From the corner of my eye I saw a curtain move on the first floor, and to illustrate my defects I swayed back and forth a bit in my cart. The electronic catch on the door buzzed open.
The woman at the top of the stairs was businesslike, but not unfriendly. Breakfast was served until ten in the morning; P.J. got a room of her own, Joe and I would share a double. In the room we sat around having a few more drinks, but the thrill did not return, the experience had started wearing thin. After half a bottle of beer P.J. said good night and went to her room. Joe collapsed in an easy chair, I fell on my back onto the bed.
‘I saw what you did,’ he said with his eyes closed. ‘You pulled him toward you slowly, but without him noticing. It was brilliant. I knew that when you looked over you were asking me how much time was left, I knew it right away.’
He raised the bottle to his lips, but it was empty.
‘How’s yours?’
Mine was empty as well. He sat up and looked around the room, searching for the plastic bag with bottles from the restaurant.
‘Fuck, I guess P.J.’s got it.’
He went out of the room and closed the door quietly behind him.
When I woke up the clock radio said 03:52. In alarm-red digits. The light was on, I was still dressed, and Joe’s side of the bed had not been slept in. The shock came after the perception: he had been gone for almost two hours. A crippling realization spread through my body: Joe and P.J . . . .
I sat straight up in bed, beset by images of Joe and P.J. who had entered a world where I was no longer needed. A single bed was enough for them. That I was lying alone on the double bed only thickened the poison. I had brought it on myself; I had asked her to come along, out of vanity, because I wanted her to admire me. For her I had won the tournament – and Joe had walked away with the main prize. The hot beast of jealousy gnawed at my innards. He knew what I felt for her, how could he not know! Technically speaking, that made him a traitor. Joe Turncoat. Our affinity, my everlasting deference to him: meaningless. The disaster couldn’t have been more complete, this was a crisis the ramifications of which could not be over-seen. I would be tossed back into deepest loneliness. Never to wrestle again, never to see P.J. again, or Joe: to avoid the two of them like the plague for the rest of my born days. Never to say a word about it, but to be consumed from inside by prideful bitterness.
04:37 and he still hadn’t come back. Joe and P.J.; I had never thought it was really possible. I swear. Even though it was so obvious. And it went so easily: Joe closed the door behind him and everything changed. Should I go and look for him? Wait in front of her door, sneak in, find them? Naked, asleep?
Strangle them.
WHEELCHAIR ATHLETE EXTERMINATES LOVE NEST
05:20. Outside, the traffic had started rolling.
We got back on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday morning I turned on the transistor and left it tuned to Radio God; I wanted to hate. A marriage was announced, between Elizabeth Betz and Clemens Mulder. The groom’s name, as it happened, was not entirely unfamiliar to me: it was the roofer from the Sun Café.
‘The vows will be celebrated at two-thirty,’ the man of God said in a Vaselined voice.
The roofer, too, had found a female of the species with whom he could produce little roofers. And no one raised a finger to stop them. The man of God continued with the week’s deceased.
‘Mrs Slomp, having passed away at the age of eighty-two.’
Organ, lento.
‘Mrs Tap, having passed away at the age of fifty-seven.’
Organ, andante.
‘Mr Stroot, having passed away at the age of seventy-three.’
Organ, allegro moderato.
‘Let Thy light shine upon these families in their hour of mourning.’
Organ, allegro con brio.
When the man of God said it was time to bring the Lord our gifts of love, I switched to Sky Radio.
On Wednesday my picture appeared in the Lomarker Weekly. I was wrestling with the Czech, the two of us listing like a ship. INTERNATIONAL SUCCESS FOR LOMARK DUO was the headline above the article, which dripped with local sentiment. The information was correct but caricatural; Ma, however, was so proud of that story. She was, if I’m not mistaken,
more interested in the newspaper report than in the way it really went. Pa’s silence was deeper than ever. After the discovery of the briquette fraud we had been living with our backs to each other, both of us with different kinds of shame in our souls. Ma said he had hung the clipping beside the coffee and powdered-soup dispenser. For weeks, ‘the newspaper story’ served as point of departure for most of her conversations; she didn’t know that Joe had lost his virginity only a couple of hours after that picture was taken. That his hands, accustomed to gears and drive shafts, had never felt anything so soft. That he had been walking around ever since in a sort of loathsome glow, while at night I sweated the love out of my system like a fever. I masturbated myself silly, as the only remedy against fits of jealous frenzy.
My friend and my dream lover had broken the triangle, the triangle that forms the basis for every sound construction. I had lost contact with the new connection, become a floating point in the darkness. Ever since Joe had come back to Lomark and started work at Bethlehem, I had believed in the illusion of unchangeableness. Now he was in love.
But how could I shove Joe and P.J. out of my life? They were the only people with whom I felt any kinship. I was confronted with a crucial moment in the process of growing up: the capitulation.
It took a lot of willpower when I was around Joe to act as though nothing had happened. We attended tournaments, and I kept looking for Islam Mansur. I think Joe never noticed anything of the cold depths between us. I doubt whether he ever knew that I loved P.J., that I had longed for her from her first day in Lomark. He had never been particularly receptive when it came to affairs of the heart. He told me all about it. About how, when the violence in their relationship became habitual, P.J. had left Lover Boy Writer. The writer had gone on pestering her for a while; his own pathetic narcissism wouldn’t let him accept anyone leaving him.
‘Sometimes I’m glad it happened,’ Joe said, ‘that he fucked up like that. Not the punching and stuff, but you know. Otherwise this never would have happened.’
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