Mother, it’s for you. That’s the way I want it.
She looked at me long and hard, I looked back coaxingly, mixed with a kind of anger. She nodded, folded the notes one by one, made a bundle of them and said she hoped it wasn’t ‘bad money’. She slipped the bundle into her apron pocket.
Joe came by during his lunch break to see how things were going. He massaged my arm and rubbed it with Tiger Balm. Then, after filling the mustard glass with rollups, he went back to work.
Sun and clouds came and went in a restless pattern that made the house light at times, dark at others, a phenomenon that had made me feel sombre even as a child. At a quarter-past five, Joe returned.
‘Man, this place is like a haunted house. Have you been outside today?’
A little later he was pushing me along the dyke. The sky was the colour of zinc, heavy clouds were squeezing all the light out of the washlands. A final, pale crack of sunlight stood ajar on the horizon. A swarm of starlings was searching for a place to roost, gulls argued above the dark fields, and far in the distance veils of rain brushed against the greyness. The prospect of another winter weighed on me.
Twelve days later I was ready at last for a light training session. It came as a relief: using my muscles intensively had become a remedy for the darkness inside. The dumbbells, the arrival of that neutral soul Hennie Oosterloo, the tournament in Liège; it had kissed awake the man of action in me. Wearing out my locomotor apparatus freed my mind, because of the endorphins it released. That was the first conclusion to be drawn from arm wrestling. The second was that I was a temple of burning ambition. That had nothing to do with Kensei’s philosophy; it was all rage and bloodthirstiness, and I understood now why some sports were symbolic massacres.
I racked my brains over how I could ever defeat colossi like Mehmet Koç. How one sweeps away a mountain of sand with a feather, that question.
I could see only one solution: hypodermic redemption. I suggested this to Joe, but he never added such rough remedies to the training program. ‘If we can get as far as we did in Liège with just a few months’ training,’ Joe said, ‘then you’re nowhere near the limits of your natural ability.’ We did increase the volume of protein supplements, though, and the number of repetitions, and he gave me a jar of creatine, a controversial performance enhancer made from animal tissue. ‘An advance on your birthday present,’ he said.
They say lots of activity boosts your testosterone. Maybe that’s why I dreamed so immoderately of P.J. during that period. Lewd dreams, with no fucking whatsoever. Can you dream of copulating when you’ve never actually done it? What I remember of those dreams are violent, exhausting scenes between me and other men before she and I even touched. That touch brought on feelings so ecstatic that I knew they had to exist in real life as well. She twisted her body in such a way that, in the course of things, I could never see her cunt. That was the trick my dream mind played, to camouflage my lack of anatomical insight.
But the truly special thing about those dreams was this: that I walked upright, ran and leapt. And when I made love to her, it was with a body that was whole.
It was Joe who arrived with the news that P.J. was at her parents’ and that she was ‘not doing well’. Not doing well meant: beaten up by Lover Boy Writer. In a fit of psychotic rage he had damaged home and garden, as well as the temple of his beloved. She had been at her parents’ place for days without showing her face. I saw a disturbing correlation between the violence in my dreams and that of her slaphappy Lover Boy Writer.
Joe and I went to Acacia Florist’s on Breedstraat and had a red-and-white bouquet put together for delivery to the White House.
‘It’s actually more the season for autumnal tints,’ the noodle of a shopkeeper said.
We ignored him.
‘Would you like to add a text for the recipient?’
Joe looked at me.
‘You’re the writer around here.’
The shopkeeper handed me a folded card with a hole punched in it. I wrote:
We’re around.
Your friends
Joe and Frankie
‘What kind of a text is that?’ Joe said. ‘Don’t you have to write something like “best wishes” or something?’
I shook my head. I had full confidence in P.J.’s ability to decode the message; she would read that we were here if she needed us, and that we were thinking of her without imposing our presence. That’s the way it was.
The very next tournament, in a backstreet district of Vienna, was a fiasco. I won’t go into it in depth because it was a glitch, an isolated dip in another otherwise steadily rising curve. There’s no sense boring people with things like that, I think. It was a paradoxical defeat, because it came in a period when I was experiencing exponential muscle development. That produces greater strength in the long term, but deep depressions in muscle capacity in the short term. That, in short, is how we lost Vienna. One thing, though: my picture appeared in the paper for the first time. What you saw was mostly that arm with the veins bulging out along it, and the beautifully defined muscle groups. Above all that, a head that looks like it’s about to explode. Until that picture started making the rounds of friends and family in Lomark – Joe had bought a whole pile of the Wiener Zeitung – almost no one knew what we were really up to. Once they found out, though, they erupted in a sort of boundless curiosity about our doings. With his story Joe became the man himself in the canteen at Bethlehem. A match was organized on the spot between the operator and Graad Huisman. Huisman won and, before long, began weeping again over the tumour in his knee.
At coffee the next morning Ma said people were driving her mad with questions. Whether it was really true that I had beaten men twice my weight, and whether I had actually won a tournament in Antwerp. In the Sun Café, where the incident with the roofer remained unforgotten, the rumour went around that I could never have become so strong without the use of ‘pills’. I noticed that people were looking at me differently – that people were looking at me. It was very invigorating.
Around that time I started smelling different. I don’t know whether it was just perspiration or something else as well. I don’t know, for example, whether you can smell testosterone. In any case, both Joe and Ma started throwing open the window whenever they came in. Joe even bought me a stick of deodorant, Beiersdorf 8x4, which to this day stands unopened on the kitchen shelf as one of the countless memories of him.
I still rode past the Eilander residence each day, on the way back from my training route to Westerveld. I flew by so quickly, in fact, that I barely had to time to peek in. Sometimes, when Joe had told me that P.J. was at home, I didn’t peek at all. I hoped she would see me and come outside and call my name, and invite me into that mysterious house which I had never seen from the inside. I wanted her to feed me beer the way she had fed me rosé that summer day, I wanted her to say intelligent things and pass along to me exciting details about the world of writers she now knew from up close. When she would ask me how my own writing was going, I would inform her that I had stopped, which was true: I no longer wrote.
I had spent years constantly painting the view from my own head, and then it was over. I would announce this with the romantic decisiveness of the artist who doesn’t believe that his talent obliges him to anything, but who sees it as something he can leave behind like an old pair of gym shoes. As casually as possible I would then draw her attention to my wrestling arm, and she would realize that I had become a man of action. Times had changed, other things were required of me. And after all, wasn’t writing an extremely unmanly activity? One to which arm wrestling was vastly superior? She would understand that. She would admire my stance, and think about Lover Boy Writer, who I imagined as a deeply neurotic pen pusher with puny limbs. The comparison would work in my favour. And then we would – we would, we would . . .
I can’t claim that the Strategy of Becoming Stone was always successful.
We heard nothing from P.J. about having been
beaten up, it remained a wild supposition. Joe said he had seen contusions next to her ear and above her eye, bruises that were already getting better by then and had faded to a yellowing glimmer. She hadn’t said a word about it.
Before long, though, it became clear that it was no isolated incident: once again, she came home damaged. We heard that she had refused to go to the police. The manhandling of girls with pin-curls and lovely broad cheekbones is, of course, forbidden by law, but without a police report that’s not much help. The White House became her rehabilitation centre. This time Joe and I sent a funny get-well card showing a dog with its tail all bandaged up.
Now she responded – by knocking on my door one wet and muddled Saturday morning.
‘I’m not intruding, am I, Frankie? Regina said Joe might be here.’
But Joe was probably out working at Dirty Rinus’s. He had bought a marked-down bulldozer from his employers at Bethlehem Asphalt and was fixing it up. All I knew was that he was planning to enter some race with it. I gestured to P.J. to sit down across from me. Then I saw it: her bottom lip was split. Two stitches held the rip closed, and there was a disfiguring red lump on her chin. My eyes filled with tears of rage, but P.J. shook her head.
‘It looks worse than it is. It was such a sweet card you two sent me. But how are you doing, Frankie? I’ve been hearing lots about you, that you take part in contests? With your arm?’
Arm wrestling, I wrote. The pegs and the square of chalk were still on the table; I assumed the starting position and motioned to her to do the same. She planted her elbow across from mine in the fading box, our hands folded around each other.
‘And now?’
I pressed a little and she pressed back.
‘That’s it?’
I nodded and let go. That was it.
‘No, show me! I want to feel how strong you are.’
She laughed, then winced at the pain in her torn lip. I put my arm back in the box and pressed her with great composure against the tabletop, as though lowering her onto a bed.
‘I couldn’t do a thing,’ P.J. said in amazement. ‘No wonder.’
Tournament in Rostock next week, I wrote. Come along.
‘Rostock? Where’s Rostock?’
Mecklenburg-Vorpommeren, on the Baltic.
The stakes were high at Rostock, and rumour had it that Islam Mansur would be there.
‘That’s where you and Joe are going? Maybe I will come along. I don’t want to go back to Amsterdam, not for a while anyway.’
She laughed again, this time more carefully.
And so it came to pass that Joe and I stopped by the White House on Friday morning to pick up P.J. Her upper lip was a bit less swollen now, the stitches had been removed from the lower one. She was carrying a floppy brown shoulder bag. For a girl, she travelled light. Joe opened the tailgate for her, she climbed in and said good morning to me. Kathleen Eilander came out of the house in a duster shiny with wear, but even in that old rag she was still attractive, her breasts showed only a hint of sag.
‘Take care of my daughter, Joe,’ she said with that strange accent of hers, ‘she’s the only one I have.’
I think Kathleen Eilander sensed that I was staring at her through the window, for she suddenly crossed her arms as though she felt cold. I’d been staring in order to collect material for masturbatory fantasies in the future, and quickly averted my gaze. Kathleen watched us pull away, but didn’t wave.
No one said much for the first few hours. It was hard to tell whether or not it was a painful silence.
‘I’m starving!’ Joe said, once we were well into Germany.
We stopped at a gas station. In the toilet a cleaning lady was mopping the floor, outside the traffic hummed rhythmically across little bumps in the concrete roadway.
‘I ordered Kartoffelsalat with a curry sausage for you,’ Joe said as I slid into the booth. ‘You have to keep your strength up.’
My gaze moved to the glass doors of the fridge beside the counter.
‘Beer’s on its way.’
The man at the table beside us was polishing his cutlery with a napkin. P.J. was in a quiet mood, we couldn’t get her out of it. Joe stood up and went through the swing doors into the petrol station. He came back with a road map of Germany, unfolded it halfway on the table and ran a finger along our route.
‘Hey, a village called Lilienthal, here, close to Bremen. You remember Lilienthal?’
Of course I remembered Lilienthal: Otto, the engineer with wings on his back who had flown a few metres back in the nineteenth century. Joe’s index finger travelled on along the E37, which became the E22 at Bremen, and then on past Lübeck. The Baltic! From there a stretch along the coastline, past Wismar, and then Rostock.
It was late afternoon when we drove into the docklands of Rostock. Darkness had almost settled in. We saw huge ferries, glistening palaces waiting to set sail for Kaliningrad, Helsinki or Tallinn. We drove past supermarkets where Scandinavian passengers were buying cartloads of alcohol and tobacco. Joe turned down a quay and we passed a wall of pine logs leaking tears of sap. The smell was overpowering. At the end of the quay, blindingly lit by huge halogen lamps, a ship full of scrap metal was being unloaded. A mechanical claw bit off chunks of the residue of the industrialized world, out of the hold there came crushed car bodies, refrigerators, wheels and nondescript household appliances. With a sweep of its arm the crane brought the junk on land and dumped it atop an apocalyptic mountain of scrap.
‘Ah me,’ Joe said, ‘look at that: the end of all motion.’
We heard a sound behind us. P.J. was awake: her head appeared between the front seats.
‘Where are we?’ she asked in her sleepytime voice. ‘Oh, wow.’
We watched the salvaging and fantasized about the world coming to an end, a judgment day that nibbled quietly at the back door while up front consumer squandering continued apace, and no one was any the wiser for it. Joe backed up a ways, closer to the wall of pine logs, where we had a view of the next step in the evolution of scrap. Another crane was swinging a magnet the size of a Mini Cooper, using it to pick out chunks of metal and load them onto trucks. As soon as the crane operator turned off the magnetic field, the metal fell into the truck beds with a nasty tearing noise.
Parked on the asphalt flats to our right was a lonesome Trabant with a handwritten sign in the back window: ZUM VERKAUF. A ferry blew three hollow blasts for departure.
We drove on slowly past the docks, trucks stood lined up at attention to one side in massive car parks, along some of the quays we could see the sharp silhouettes of dozens of articulated cranes against a sky full of artificial light. When we stopped and Joe turned off the engine you could hear the blissful sound of diesel motors and generators. We entered that sublime state of mind you encounter whenever you see something grand and massive. P.J. leaned forward.
‘I’m so happy to be here with the two of you,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to say that.’
I stared straight ahead at the black water that glimmered like oil. Joe started the car.
‘Let’s see if we can find that harbour restaurant.’
We drove past Nissen huts, a little power plant and more petrol stations than we’d ever seen in one place. Ost-West-Strasse was easy to find; in fact, it was the main drag along that part of the waterfront, where the Hafenrestaurant was too. Names in this place served only to indicate function. The Hafenrestaurant was a low, rectangular building, with everything on the ground floor. MITTAGESSEN AB 2.50 read the sign in the window, and hanging from the building itself was a neon sign advertising Rostocker Pils. Yes, please.
Inside, under the suspended ceiling with sunken fluorescent lighting, we found two competition tables and a crowd of men. Hardly any women, which meant that suddenly all visual attention surged in aggressive, uncontrolled waves in P.J.’s direction. Most men would broadcast signals of desire upon seeing a woman like her, but in the harbour restaurant it was a tad worse: we were dealing here with truck
drivers and seamen, a group that had little contact with the fair sex. Still, P.J. didn’t seem shocked by the hormonal turbulence she caused.
For the first ten minutes or so, after hearing that Islam Mansur wasn’t going to show, I was very pissed off; I had hoped to see the Arm Saint at work, to catch an analytical glimpse of his strategy. But the place was full of Asians, blacks and countless Bohunks, fellows tough as nails, as well as pipsqueaks of whom you wondered how they stood up to life at sea or on the docks. Joe and I knew that we were witnessing something unique: a place at the edge of the world, full of men from every continent who spent their lives circling the globe just to earn their monthly wages. P.J. offered to fetch drinks. In order not to further aggravate the place’s steamy atmosphere, Joe said, ‘No, let me do that.’ I got my Rostocker Pils at last; it even had a straw in it. It had taken us almost nine hours to get here; P.J. was the only one who had slept, Joe and I were running on a jacked-up kind of antsiness.
At eight-thirty I moved into position for the first time that evening. I was more accustomed now to being, at least briefly, the centre of attention, and that helped my concentration. In fact I had no desire to even see my opponent, I would rather have fought blindfolded; thoughts and expectations of him only distracted from the Strategy.
My first opponent seemed to be taking part on a bet, as a joke that had gotten out of hand. Without wanting to be blasé about it, I crushed him completely. P.J.’s delighted applause made me feel good. Wait until I really get rolling, I told her in my thoughts. Joe helped me off the stool and into my cart, we moved to a vantage point in the lee of the swarming crowd, between the yellowed, mordant potted plants beside the entrance. For the first time that day P.J. crept out of her shell of silence.
‘That arm of yours! It looked like someone’s thigh, it was almost scary . . . those veins!’
Joe nodded, well pleased.
‘Like a thigh, that’s right. Months of work went into that.’
Joe Speedboat Page 20
