‘Hey, I didn’t know you had a crush on me,’ P.J. says from the floor.
She sounds surprised, teasing. It embarrasses me less than I’d expected, maybe because she’s seen me come, you could say we belong together now, somehow. The look she gives me, it’s the look that says something’s on its way, I know it well by now. She gets up and takes her beer from the table.
‘But you exaggerate,’ she says. ‘You guys here just aren’t used to much. Durban wasn’t really so special. And whether I am or not . . .’
Special enough to write a novel about.
‘Your diaries, you mean?’
Metz.
She’s startled; I don’t know why I’m doing this, maybe I’m pissed off at her for being so late, maybe I don’t want to be anything but helpless.
‘Did you read that?’
A coolness has entered her voice, she’s on her guard. I nod.
‘What did you think of it?’
The man can write.
‘That’s not what I mean,’ she says sharply. ‘What he wrote about me, do you believe him?’
Belief is an act of love.
‘What do you mean?’
So I believe you.
P.J. can’t help laughing.
‘You’re a sophist, Frankie Hermans.’
My diary, his novel – who are you?
She looks, and thinks.
‘This, Frankie, this, here, right now, that’s all I can say about it. It’s not all that mysterious, that’s only what Arthur makes of it.’
At the end of the day, we’re all named Achiel?
‘Yeah, maybe you could say that. Achiel, yeah.’
It’s the first time that name’s been spoken out loud, and we laugh. She comes over and stands beside me.
‘Have I ever told you how attracted I am to intelligent men?’
And so the mood has shifted to the kind of steaminess familiar to me from the time she jerked me off. She kneels down beside me and puts her hands on my thighs.
‘Intelligence is irresistible.’
My head starts to glow, this is what I’d been hoping for, no, what I’d been praying for. She unzips my trousers but I point in alarm at the curtains; my parents can see us like this. P.J. gets up, closes off the darkness outside and bolts the door. As she walks past, she takes the dishcloth from its hook.
‘Where were we? Oh, yes.’
I’m as hard as glass, she asks, ‘Are you clean?’ and I nod. Then she takes me in her mouth. I caress her hair, the inside of her mouth is wet and warm, her head moves up and down. I see her face from the side and my dick sliding in and out of her mouth, she smiles up at me, it’s too much. The sperm squirts powerfully in her face. Sorry, sorry. Only when I’m completely drained does she let go and wipe off the cum with the dishcloth. Her hands, so unbelievably much warmer than the official thirty-seven degrees centigrade, slide under my sweater. My skin responds with uncontrollable shivers. She pulls my sweater up over my head and worms the sparrow claw out of its sleeve so that I’m sitting half naked in front of her. The light above the table shines bright on my white, asymmetrically curved torso, I rise to my feet and click it off. Paradise by the desk lamp on the floor.
‘Come.’
P.J. helps me up and we move to the bed. I let myself fall onto it, she unlaces my clodhoppers. She pulls off my shoes and my trousers, I’m lying helpless before her. Under her sweater she’s wearing a white bra. There are pale marks on her stomach, my hand asks for her. She puts her hands behind her back and unsnaps her bra, her arms slide through the shoulder straps and I see her breasts. I’m sweet on her.
She squeezes my dick, her jeans and panties fall to the floor. I see the shadow between her legs, there where I’ve never been. P.J. climbs up and straddles me, feeling around under her. ‘Have you ever done this . . . ?’ I shake my head. Then she sinks down halfway on my cock, sighs deeply and shiveringly and impales herself on me. Her eyes are closed, mine are wide open. She leans forward and puts her hands on my chest while her lower body moves up and down, independent of the rest. Nothing more than this is needed, this is all I ask for.
Her head is bowed and a waterfall of curls is hanging before her face, behind it her loud breathing and sometimes a whining sound as though she’s suffering a pain too great for words. Her pelvis slides powerfully up and down, our pubic hair grinds together, my hand slides over her buttocks, across her lower back to her stomach and her shaking breasts, ‘Yeah, yeah, grab them,’ she pants. The nipples are hard, my attention is divided and I no longer feel my dick that’s melted away inside her. When P.J. moans that she’s coming I grab her by the back of the neck, spread my fingers across her scalp and feel the strong waves rolling through her body. She collapses on top of me, her breathing is a storm in my ear. She lies there like that for a long time. I remain motionless, slowly the feeling returns to my cock sticking in her down there. P.J. sits upright and slides off me.
‘Jesus, that was great.’
She climbs down the front of my body.
‘You’re still hard.’
She starts jerking me off, my dick is shiny with her wetness.
‘I want you to come, Frankie.’
She leans down over me and flutters her tongue across the head of my dick.
‘Come now.’
Her hand slides up and down without pause, I wail and explode in her mouth.
At three in the morning I wake up, the stove is hissing and I pull a blanket over us. P.J. flutters her eyelids, smiles and sleeps on. I don’t want to sleep, just look, but sink away again anyway. I wake up when I feel her body pulling away from mine and sliding out of bed. It’s still dark, she’s getting dressed.
‘I have to go,’ she whispers, as though there were someone else in the room.
She moves her hand lightly over my forehead, then she’s gone. A wave of cold air from outside rolls through the room, I fall asleep again.
A couple of hours later Joe drives out of the camp at Siwa for a ride around the oasis. He goes thundering into the nearby sand dunes, the scoop sticking out high above the cab; a horned beast disappearing into the desert.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ Joe says that evening on TV, ‘when you come out of the dark and suddenly see that dome of light against the sky where the oasis is. Just punch it and head home through the date palms. You have to stay focused for so long; at the end of the day, for example, you can ask any driver you choose whether he saw that tire along the way, or a pair of shoes lying in the road, and he’ll tell you. Everyone is so incredibly homed in all day on the tiniest deviation in that narrow strip of vision.’
On Tuesday morning the caravan starts crossing that part of the desert they call the Great Sand Sea, with dunes a hundred metres high. Joe’s out of sorts, someone installed a generator behind his tent and the droning kept him awake all night. Around noon they enter the White Desert, a hallucinatory landscape of limestone and blinding white sand. Close to Dakhla they come down off the plateau to the oasis. Tomorrow they return to civilization. Almost one hundred drivers have already been eliminated in the desert, a few more will be added to that; only three out of every ten participants will actually make it to Sharm el-Sheikh.
On the fourteenth day Joe reaches the Nile. He crosses the river at Luxor and heads out the next morning into the Eastern Desert. The route bends north, the next-to-last encampment is at Abu Rish on the road connecting Beni Suef on the Nile with the Gulf of Suez. On the sixteenth and final day comes the longest stage in the whole rally: about four hundred kilometres on asphalt, by way of Suez to Abu Zenima on the coast of the Gulf of Suez, where they then go off-road again for another four hundred kilometres through the Sinai range and the sizzling heat. After crossing the Sinai, they come out at Wadi Watir. At the village of Nuweiba on the Gulf of Aqaba they will go back onto the road for the final kilometres south, to Sharm el-Sheikh.
*
The news that Joe had dropped out of sight in the rally a few kilometres before Nuweiba c
ame as no surprise to me. He was last seen in the mountains close to the coast, and only noted as missing that evening when he failed to make it in under the time limit. That night on ‘Speedboat in the Sand’ the interviewer is on camera for the first time and reports in dramatic tones about the disappearance of Joe Speedboat and his race-dozer.
I die laughing; with Joe there’s never a dull moment.
It’s late January by the time Joe finally shows up in Lomark. Without the bulldozer. He chuckles a bit about all the commotion. He’s as skinny as a rail, his hair is bleached by the sun. His face and forearms are a reddish brown.
First he went to Amsterdam for a few days to see P.J., now he’s come back to put his mother’s mind at ease.
‘So how’s things, Frankie? Anything happen around here?’
His standard question whenever he’s been away for a while. My throat is tight, visions of doom dance through my head. I write: Watched lots of RTL 5.
‘Yeah, that was funny. I don’t think old Santing sold any more paint because of it, but at least he was on camera.’
What did you do with the bulldozer?
He laughs slyly.
‘Left it there.’
With whom, pray tell? Papa Africa?
‘Let’s just say that he can start his own earthmoving comp -any now. Or something.’
Joe clasps his hands behind his neck and sinks back in his chair contentedly. Suddenly I see it in a flash, an extremely clear insight is what it is: he will always come out on top. The treachery of lesser gods won’t cause him to topple. He will suffer for us, he will chop down a forest and change the course of a river to help against the pain, but he will emerge unbroken. That realization makes me feel like digging a hole in the ground and disappearing into it forever.
Joe is going to see Christof this evening, on Monday he has to start work. He pats his pockets, takes his lighter off the table and smiles.
‘All right,’ he says, ‘I guess I’ll be moving.’
and then
This is later, many years later. A lot has happened, and finally I have come to understand the profound truth of the things-aren’t-what-they-used-to-be men on their bench by the river: things are, indeed, not what they used to be. Even the dismay at that fact isn’t what it used to be. You learn to live with such findings, like bleached bones.
After Joe came back from Dakar, Christof asked him straight out if it would be OK for him to invite P.J. to his fraternity’s annual gala. He couldn’t find another date. ‘You’ll have to ask P.J. about that,’ Joe said, ‘not me.’
And so P.J. went to the gala of the Utrecht Student Union in a close-fitting silver-gray dress, and no one could figure out how Christof had hit upon such a beauty.
That night he lost his virginity. All three of us had now converged in her loins.
The next summer, at a pavement café in Utrecht, Christof told Joe that he was having a relationship with P.J. too, and that she had chosen definitively for him, Christof. And that she didn’t want to see Joe anymore, which is what it boiled down to. She had no liking for the ragged, painful nerve endings at the end of a relationship.
Joe didn’t punch Christof in the mouth, nor did he break his neck; he hopped in his car and, just outside Oosterbeek, blew up the engine. He walked the rest of the way home, packed his backpack that night and left a note on the table saying he’d call, and that’s all we know. People say he was seen in a bulldozer working on the E981, and that he had a black beard, so it could just as easily have been someone else.
Does it surprise anyone to hear that Christof got P.J. in the end? Not me, not really; he too was to have his chance, and when it came along he seized it. Christof could offer P.J. one thing her other lovers could not: order and certainty – throughout the centuries, the only demand placed by the citizenry on its authorities. That might have played less of a role, of course, if he had not made her pregnant. Christof’s family moved heaven and earth to persuade her not to have an abortion, and not long afterwards a bulldozer (not a Caterpillar, but a Liebherr: Joe would have been horrified) began clearing the plot of land between Lomark and Westerveld where Christof and P.J.’s new house would stand.
Christof went into an accelerated program to get his law degree, and took a job at Bethlehem Asphalt. P.J. never finished college.
I have at last also discovered who it is that Christof resembles, the question that had become a sort of eternal obsession for me. I found him in the book Hitler’s Helpers: he is the spitting image of Heinrich Himmler, I swear. That book had been on my parents’ shelf for a hundred years. During a medical examination at the Lüneburg prisoner of war camp, Himmler, when asked to open his mouth, bit down on a cyanide capsule. The photograph was taken shortly afterwards. In the top left corner you see the shiny tip of a boot, Himmler is still wearing his glasses and lies wrapped in a blanket on the concrete floor. Christof all over, the way he’s lying there.
I rediscovered that book the night after Ma’s funeral. She died after coming down with a rampant cancer of the lymph system. We had buried her and were sitting in the living room with relatives when I saw Hitler’s Helpers on the shelf. I flipped through it and found the section with photographs. Dirk was looking over my shoulder.
‘Looks just like that buddy o’ yours,’ he said.
There is one thing I still think back on with the greatest of delight, and that is the day Christof and P.J. married. The wedding was held in the church and P.J.’s dress was groaning at the seams from the child she would bear soon afterwards. Nieuwenhuis was all smarmy with Love, I was sitting in the aisle. When they left the church, P.J. glanced at me. The newlyweds drove off in a hired Bentley. The reception was held that afternoon at old man Maandag’s place, the villa he’d had built outside the village after the Scania had destroyed the house with the gables on Bridge Street. It was a blazing summer afternoon, with plenty of poppies and cornflowers still in bloom. Christof was king for a day; his father gave a speech about princes on white chargers, the final words of which were ‘Who shall buy her a white charger?’ At that moment Christof came around from the back of the house leading a white mare, his wedding present for P.J. I have to give it to him, that was real class.
P.J. cried, the way she’d cried the day Joe pulled away from the Rabobank in his bulldozer. She kissed Christof and patted the horse’s neck clumsily – she’d never really been much of a pony girl. The guests stood around admiringly, oohs and ahhs and so on, and Christof grinned from ear to ear. Then, at that moment, from out of the sky, came the sound of an engine: a lovely, purring growl that no one noticed at first, on lovely days like this one the sky was always full of small planes. This time, though, the sound became increasingly compelling, forcing itself as it were on the wedding party. Someone looked up, more and more heads turned in the direction of the noise that was suddenly very close. Then someone shouted, ‘That thing’s going to crash!’ and the crowd blew apart as though someone had tossed a stink bomb in their midst.
A sky-blue airplane.
From low across the fields it came storming at the villa, trailing a banner behind it. Christof’s mother was the first to knock over a table as she dove for cover, the clear tinkle of breaking glass made me shiver. The plane looked like it was still descending, then it roared right over our heads. A lot of guests made a dash for the house, the field behind was full of people running, but when the shadow blackened the patio I looked up; the association I had was that of a huge, ominous cross about to crush us. The pilot pulled up, I saw that he was wearing ski goggles and his teeth were bared in a grin. Around that point is when I started laughing and couldn’t stop.
In the middle of the patio one woman stood frozen, staring at the shape the plane made against the sky: Kathleen Eilander. Her mouth hung open a little, she raised one feeble hand and pointed.
‘There . . .’ she said. ‘That . . .’
I don’t know whether a lot of people were able to read the words on the banner at that moment, but later
the text buzzed its way around. I’ve said it before: with Joe there was never a dull moment. This is what it said:
WHORE OF THE CENTURY
in nice, neat letters. I almost choked with laughter. So he had read that book at last and, on this glorious day, put it to good use!
A pathetic note was that no one had thought amid the panic of holding onto the horse, which went galloping off across the fields to God-knows-where. The plane made a wide sweep and came back for a final salute. At that moment a furious, no, a seething Christof came running out of the house with his father’s hunting rifle. His mother screamed as he cocked it, aimed and fired at the plane vanishing in the distance. He missed, or else the plane was already too far off in the direction of the village. Kathleen Eilander set a chair upright, sat down in it and watched the plane go. ‘The horse!’ someone shouted. Christof swore and took off after it with a few of the others.
Those who stayed behind stared at the wreckage in silent amazement. P.J. stood there like a billowing spinnaker of lace and silk amid the ruins of her wedding day. It was as though she couldn’t decide between anger and hilarious laughter. My own laughter wouldn’t stop, and in fact it has lasted until this day. P.J. looked at me, then at the colourful ribbon of wedding guests chasing a white horse across the fields, and shook her head slightly. She poured two glasses of champagne from one of the only tables left standing, ticked the glasses together, poured one of them down my throat and knocked back the other one herself in two gulps.
‘Whore of the century,’ she said pensively, wiping her lips. ‘Whore of the century. Man oh man . . .’
Two weeks later P.J. gave birth to a son, that autumn they moved into the house where they still live. The little boy I saw for the first time as he was bicycling down Poolseweg beside Christof, an orange flag swaying from the back of his bike. Christof raised his hand in greeting, the fat little boy ploughed on. He didn’t look like Heinrich Himmler.
Joe Speedboat Page 27
