Joe Speedboat

by Tommy Wieringa

  ‘Wow,’ Joe says as we watch him from the top of the landing, ‘he’s pretty good.’

  ‘He could make a living at that,’ Christof says.

  Engel is thinking about it.

  ‘If it was me I’d paint it blue.’

  In response to a mysterious kind of magnetism, Christof and I turn our heads at the same moment in the direction of Lomark and see P.J. coming along the Lange Nek. That kindles a flame in the two of us, but the company she’s in creates a cold counter-current: Joop Koeksnijder.

  ‘Dirty Nazi,’ Christof hisses.

  That never dies out. Of course Look-at-how-cool-I-am Koeksnijder isn’t a Nazi, but his grandfather was, and that’s still the first thing that comes to mind when you see his grandson, especially when he’s with P.J. Eilander. The prick. We hate Jopie with a hatred fed by intense envy. And we hate that even more. He possesses the object of our dreams – look, she gives him a shove and he hops away, you can feel their obsession with each other all the way over here. Like disgruntled old men, we turn back to Mahfouz and his boat.

  It takes forever for P.J. and Jopie to get six feet away from us, where they stop to view the activity down in the old shipyard. Koeksnijder nods to us, Engel and Joe return his greeting.

  ‘He’s building a boat,’ I hear P.J. say in amazement.

  Her Afrikaans has worn away to a faint accent.

  ‘Enough of those around, I’d say,’ Koeksnijder says.

  I don’t look at P.J., because she can read my thoughts this way too.

  ‘Joe,’ she asks, ‘isn’t that your mother’s husband? The man from Egypt?’

  Joe nods.

  ‘Papa Africa,’ he says, and that really makes her laugh.

  Koeksnijder moves behind her and a little to one side, in the attitude of a man protecting something.

  ‘Papa Africa,’ P.J. repeats. ‘So what does that make me?’

  ‘The daughter of the man who hurt me last week. Two cavities.’

  Koeksnijder lays a hand on P.J.’s lower back, the way impatient husbands do on Saturday afternoon as they propel their wives past the shop windows.

  ‘We’re going across the river,’ P.J. announces. ‘Bye-bye!’

  Christof mumbles something dull, Engel says, ‘Good luck with your finals.’

  The gates of the ferry close behind them, we watch them go.

  ‘She likes you,’ Engel says to Joe.

  ‘You’re the one who deals with the women around here,’ Joe says. ‘I’ll stick to things that run on petrol.’

  Engel, accustomed by now to his own electrifying effect on girls, shakes his head in disbelief.

  ‘She never looked at me even once . . .’

  In preparation for their lives to come, Joe, Engel and Christof attend the orientation day for higher education. Joe comes home from the polytechnic looking disappointed.

  ‘Worthless,’ he says, ‘I could teach myself that just as easily. That place smells of nothing.’

  It’s only when he goes along with Engel to the art academy, just for a lark, that he finds what he wants. The Applied Arts section has exactly what he was looking for: lathes and CO2 welders. The studio is full of mysterious constructions in various stages of development, and the walls are hung with the most minute working drawings.

  ‘The whole place smells like machine oil,’ he says.

  Only then do I realize that his comment about the odour of nothingness at the polytechnic was meant literally. He follows his nose, and that’s new to me.

  Engel signs up for a major in illustration, Joe for the applied arts. In order to be admitted, they have to present work that demonstrates both their talent and their motivation. Engel shows up with a portfolio full of work that qualifies him immediately, Engel is a natural born artist if ever there was one. I’ve never thought of Joe as an artist, though, and as far as I know he never has either. He could just as easily become an instrument maker or a technical engineer. But although he admires engineers for giving the world its motor skills, when he thinks about it he finds himself better suited to a freer curriculum.

  On the day of the entrance exam he unbolts the wings of his plane and lashes the whole thing onto a trailer. Dirty Rinus drives him to the academy; when they go in the porter says, ‘You’re not allowed to smoke in here, sir,’ effectively banishing the little farmer out of doors for the rest of the morning. Joe rolls the fuselage into the building and installs it in the room where the evaluation will be taking place. Once the wings are back on it, all the space is taken up. And does it really work? a professor asks. Joe climbs in and starts the engine. A tornado tears through the classroom. He’s accepted.

  *

  But let’s go, time is running short, next Monday will see the start of the big test to show who’s ready for the world and who isn’t.

  There’s cruelty in the fact that the exams take place on the loveliest day of the year. The fields are groaning with vigour, trees unfurl their leaves with the pleasure of a person stretching his limbs. Above it all shines a tingling spring sun that urges everything on to more, while we sit row by row in the assembly hall and have no part in it. We shuffle our feet restlessly, cough faintly and chew on government-issue biros. Cursed be the first to finish and turn in his exam with serene superiority. Cursed too the man on rubber soles who sneaks along the aisles. And completely cursed be P.J., with whom I share the same electives, leaving my mind eclipsed sevenfold by things other than anaerobic dissimilation and the pseudopodia of amoebae. Shame on her for the lustiness of such a body. It emits signals of nothing but plenty. I ogle the white flesh of her rounded upper arms like a starving cannibal, and feel little and evil at the deregulating message of her hips as she leaves the room while most of us are still hard at work. A few weeks later I will look first under the letter E on the list of candidates and see that she has passed with a 9 for biology, and nothing lower than an 8 for the other subjects. I myself prove to be a solid 7.8 man, but let me blame that on her presence.

  Joe and Engel chose maths, chemistry and physics, which to me is like decoding a message from another planet. The only one who chose two full years of economics was Christof – in order, I believe, to learn the tenets of the entrepreneurship in store for him by birth.

  All three of them pass their exams too, but Joe forbids his mother to hang out the book bag and flag. Even Quincy Hansen passes at last, albeit only after resits in Dutch and English.

  And so you’ve finished school, and then this happens: ‘It’s a solution,’ Pa says, ‘a solution.’

  ‘We’ve talked about it a lot,’ says Ma. ‘If it doesn’t work out, we’ll think of something else.’

  ‘Let him try it first. There’s no harm in having to do something. You think we used to be able to do whatever we liked? Working hard every day, and you didn’t ask yourself whether you liked it: you did as you were told.’

  ‘Frankie, you don’t have to do anything. It’s a start.’

  ‘A solution is what it is! Just the thing for him. The best for everyone.’

  ‘But don’t you go thinking . . .’

  ‘He knows that already.’

  ‘That we want to make money off it, all we want is for you to be able to stand on your own two feet. When we’re not around anymore.’

  ‘Is he asleep?’

  ‘From all that studying, sure, the boy’s worn out.’

  ‘He never misses a night at Waanders’ though. If he can do that, he can work too. I’m telling you, it’s a solution.’

  Pa removed the plastic tarp from the pile in the garden and stood there looking at it for a while. It resembled nothing so much as a tangled mountain of pickup sticks, and I saw doubt creep into his movements. He pulled on a few loose ends and leaned a couple of parts up against my house. He avoided looking inside, he knew I was peering at him from the shadows. One hour later he had the pile sorted out: bars with bars and grids with grids. These he used to build a scaffolding against the side of the house. Left over now was a wa
shing machine and what I knew by then was a press for making briquettes. That machine was to be the start of my career as a briquette presser. Paper briquettes, for the fireplace.

  Here’s how Pa figured it: I would go door to door collecting old newspapers, and because I was a charitable cause in and of myself, people would be pleased to help out and we would have loads of paper from which to press briquettes.

  The garden had now become a workshop. The paper was rinsed and pulverized in the washing machine, after which I scooped it into the press. On the side of the press was a handle I used to press the metal lid down onto the paper pulp, squeezing the water out of it. Then I laid the moist briquettes on the scaffolding against the wall. Pa would take the dried lumps to the wrecking yard, where he would sell them to customers in wintertime, or use them to heat the canteen, don’t ask me. ‘I tell you, it’s a solution . . .’

  Summer was in full swing, the exams seemed far behind me now, and on some days I actually felt – how shall I put it? – useful. I pulled on the press plate so hard that my hand hurt, from the bottom of the grillwork trickled a greyish sludge, water mixed with pulp and printer’s ink that had been used to report the birth of a polar bear or sixteen people killed in Tel Aviv. Headlines flashed by each time I loaded the machine, sometimes I found myself immersed in newspapers that were a year old. They weren’t very different from today’s paper, in fact; news articles were as hard to tell apart as Chinamen.

  As in a sort of time machine I rocketed back and forth between an armed insurrection in April and the fall of the president in October, and looked through the window of the washing machine at how the world’s events sloshed around a few times before decaying into gray porridge. Load, fill, press, dry – mechanical and efficient. On a good day I could press about forty to fifty briquettes. Load, fill, press, dry. It was simple, and it made me happy. In some strange way I felt a connection to Papa Africa – as Joe, Christof and Engel now called him – working on his boat at the old shipyard.

  When I had some strength left in my arm at the end of the day, I would ride out to see him. I liked the work around a boat, and shivered whenever he planed the wood away into a tight curl. He worked himself into a lather, standing amid a sea of light yellow wood curls that smelled heavenly. A long telephone pole that would be the mast lay on a set of sawhorses and was planed to fit. Whenever Papa Africa straightened up from his work, the pain in his back made him moan and he would rest his hands on his hips as he stretched.

  He walked around his boat, surveying it critically.

  ‘This is what I use to make my ship,’ he said, holding up his ten fingers.

  Then he pointed to his head.

  ‘And this is for the mistakes.’

  I also liked the pounding of the chisels, which sounded from a distance as though someone were beating out music on a hollow tree.

  Papa Africa began building the hull with overlapping planks, working from the keel up and hammering the wooden skin into place against the timbers. When he was finished, a real boat was there, not quite finished but also not too far from completion. The curls went flying from the yardarm.

  Christof, who knew a bit about boats, said that a felucca like this one used an ‘Arab lateen rig’. I’d never gotten used to his know-it-all tone. He displayed his incidental knowledge with so much aplomb that sometimes I went home and looked it up afterwards. I was never able to catch him out.

  Christof would be going to law school in Utrecht. I wouldn’t miss him. But yet, when I stopped to think about it, he was as much a part of my life as Joe or Engel. I’d had a few years to watch him closely and would have been surprised to find anything that had escaped me. I knew his tic, a contraction of the muscles around the right eye that pulled the corner of his mouth up with it. It was only slight, and it went very quickly, as though he were winking at invisible things, and I wondered whether he knew that his tic only appeared when Joe was around. Otherwise I knew that he countenanced absolutely no onions on his fries-with-the-works, and that at the age of sixteen he’d had a wet dream that featured his mother with three breasts.

  Even if I didn’t like him very much, maybe you could still call it a kind of friendship when you know someone that well, like a part of yourself that you’d rather not face.

  My working days began on foot. The machines and scaffolding offered enough places for me to grab hold and move around. By seven I was already up and about, early enough to hear the roosters crowing at the farms out in the polder. The first hour was too serene to ruin with washing-machine noise, I spent it reading old news and smoking cigarettes others had rolled for me. Around eight I began operations. The briquettes, gray and fragile when I took them from the press, dried within about a week into firm, light-brown loaves. After noon my legs would start hurting; then I would plop down in the cart and work like that for a few more hours in the afternoon sun.

  I felt healthy and strong, I had my first real wages in my pocket, and sometimes I would sit with Joe down at the ferry landing and drink the beer I’d brought along in the saddlebag on my cart. He, Christof and Engel were still around, and if you stopped thinking about it you could imagine that things would always stay this way, that we would always form a kind of community and that I could occasionally sit at the quayside with Joe while he flicked bottle caps into the water and Papa Africa stretched his back and moaned.

  P.J. had already left; she had enrolled in the literature program in Amsterdam and found a room there. Someone told me that Joop Koeksnijder had gone to visit her once, and that she had treated him like a stranger.

  I saw Koeksnijder at the street market one afternoon and suddenly understood what I’d seen before, the time he and P.J. had crossed the river and stopped to talk to us: a man about to lose his most valued possession. In essence he was already braced against the pain back then, it was already in his movements, but his awareness had continued to put up a fight. Now that she was gone, what we saw was a pauper who’d once been made king for a day.

  I felt sorry for him – he had grown smaller, a figure from the past, not half the self-assured titan he had once been, but I’d be lying if I said that my relief wasn’t greater than my pity. I didn’t want to see anyone with P.J., and particularly not him.

  She was my most valued illusion.

  The situation was less than ideal: in the realm of fantasy I had to share her with Christof, who was subject to the same visions. I eliminated him from my daydreams with axes, trucks and heavy objects that fell on him at my behest.

  *

  Each Saturday I went door to door collecting scrap paper. After a while everyone knew what I was coming for, sometimes they had the bundles of brochures and newspapers waiting for me. The brochures were no use to me, but I let it go, it was touching to see the care with which some people tied up handy packages for me, bound with lengths of twine and knotted at the top. They seemed pleased to be able to do something like that. I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with it.

  Some of them made me wait outside, others said, ‘Come in, Frankie, do come in!’ and gave me a cup of coffee or a cigarette. Until then I had seen those houses only from the outside. This gave me lots of new insights. Now I could write my History from the inside as well. How do we live? What happens behind closed doors? What does it smell like? (Shoe polish. Furniture wax. Buttered frying pans. Old carpet.) Here in Lomark we listen to a transistor radio on the kitchen table, beside it a copy of the radio guide and lying on top of that a set of keys and a giro slip from a Catholic charity. In the living room, family photographs on the mantelpiece (Catholic families always taken from far away because otherwise they don’t all fit in the viewfinder) and the eternal houseplants on the windowsill.

  But what does that tell you? That things have gone well for us, during the second half of the twentieth century? We drive comfortable cars and heat our middle-class homes with natural gas. The Germans are long gone, after that we were afraid of Communists, nuclear weapons and recession, but death is worse. No on
e tells us what to do, but we know what’s expected of us. Don’t talk about a thing, but never forget anything either. We remember everything, and in silence we hoard information about those who surround us. Between our lives run invisible lines that separate or connect us, lines an outsider knows nothing of, no matter how long he lives here.

  I’ve heard and seen a lot in those houses. I’ve heard the voice with which we speak around here of present and past, I’ll do my best to let that be heard as well. About the National Socialist Movement, for example. When the Dutch National Socialist Movement received 8 percent of the popular vote during the parliamentary elections in 1935, we here in Lomark shouldered our share of the load. Some of the things-aren’t-what-they-used-to-be men remember real well. If they would talk about it, it would sound like this:

  He came here to give a speech, Anton Mussert, born beside the big river just like us. He was there for us, for the shopkeeper and the market gardener still reeling from the Crisis, who never got a penny of government support. He was a former head engineer with the Utrecht Province Department of Roads and Waterways, a man of the delta. We, who wanted nothing but a return to the old certainties, applauded loudest for the man who promised to restore Faith in God, Allegiance to People and Fatherland and the Love of Work. The meeting was held in the Ferry House down by the river. It was a winter evening, and they arrived from Utrecht in a couple of cars, they drove there along the Lange Nek. It was a small army of men in hats and long overcoats who climbed out and lined up beside the entrance, in the weak light shed by the lamp above the door. As though on cue they raised their right arms in the fascist salute and shouted a powerful ‘Hou Zee!’ You could see their breath steaming, when they went into the Ferry House they were silent and disciplined.