B007P4V3G4 EBOK (44 page)

If I had nothing to do I would keep myself occupied in the loft
shattering the soft plaster on the wall, hacking at it with an axe. I
would become sad each time and, if I had my glass cutter on me, I
would try to scratch my name into a little window pane but this
failed most of the time; I would go outside again then.

In the street behind ours, in a house the back garden of which
bordered ours, a boy called Maarten Scheepmaker had come to
live. When he had been living there only a little while, I was busy
making a fire one afternoon. He approached and asked whether I
was allowed to. That was how we got to know one another. I
could visit him at his home.

He was the same age as I, but smaller and stouter. He went about
dressed very slovenly, and he didn't have his lank, greasy hair cut short
enough. He already had a thin moustache as well. He bore a strong
body odour which I ascribed to the fact that he went about as heavily
dressed indoors as he did in the street and kept his scarf knotted round
his neck too. I liked visiting him for he had strange, noteworthy habits.

In his little room facing the street crossbones hung from thin
wires at shoulder height, and beneath a glass bell-jar, on a tuft of
white cotton wool, lay the breasts struck off from a pink porcelain
woman's statue: its ruined remains were lying in a box beside it.
Around and above his bed, in the middle of the room, he had
made a canopy from cloths and carpets and the walls were pasted
with panoramas that had been cut out of magazines and picture
postcards of sunsets above mountain landscapes.

Except for the bed and a single chair there was no furniture in
the room because all the remaining space was taken up by junk
one had to pick one's way through: he liked to tinker and build.

I regarded him as an inventor. At a time when I'd only recently
known him, he told me one afternoon that it was possible to catch
a lot of fish in the ring canal by causing an explosion under water.
In my presence, he prepared a complicated machine consisting of
an old cocoa tin in which two nails he had magnetised had been
mounted; spanning the two tips was a chain of iron filings. An
electric wire had been connected to each of the nails which, well
insulated, left the tin in such a manner that there was no surrounding space remaining which water or air could penetrate. He had
first poured a thick layer of a potassium chloride and sugar mixture
on the bottom of the tin.

'That's one of the biggest exploders,' he said.

His intention, once he had submerged it in the water, was to
transmit electricity from a battery which had to set the iron filings
aglow after which the charge would ignite. We were ready with
our preparations when his mother came in.

She was a small, ugly woman with a tired face and drab,
shapeless hair. At first I had thought her dangerous but she was
amiable. She had heard us talk of our plan and she expressed her
concern over it. What am I to say at Elmer's when you have been
hauled off?' she asked. D'you know a number of people have been
shot for things like that7' She forbad the execution of the plan and
left the room again.

I could not understand her pronouncement but, repeating the
words to myself, I felt an oppressive gloom rising. I no longer
desired the plan to go ahead. We'd better do something else,' I
said. 'A club needs founding, for that matter, perhaps you know
that too. That's very important. Then we'll stay here and found it
at once.'

I spoke these sentences softly but hurriedly while looking
Maarten cautiously in the face. 'The chairman has to be someone
who's already made clubs before,' I said:'he'll appoint a maker at
once. That's someone who's good at building things. He makes all
kinds of things for the committee and the chairman, things they
can keep. He must also make a lamp that can't go out.' (I believed
it possible that such a thing existed.)

Maarten didn't appear to be listening. 'Perhaps you don't like a
club,' I said knowingly, 'but that was just the same with me, too.'
Without saying a word, Maarten inspected the tin. He declared he
wanted the explosion to go ahead.

At dusk we went to the water's edge with all the necessaries. When he connected the power, nothing happened however. Hauling it up, only the electric wires surfaced: the tin with all the
components had disappeared. I showed myself to be disappointed
and put forth my conclusion that the assembly had been poor so
that everything had worked loose before the power had been
connected. Maarten, however, asserted enthusiastically that the
explosion had most definitely occurred but had taken place at
great depth so that the gasses had condensed and dissolved before
they were able to reach the surface. He spattered as he spoke and
wiped saliva from his chin for he was dribbling with excitement.

For a moment I began to doubt whether the machine had
ignited or not; again, however, I reached the conclusion that this
hadn't happened but I did not want to say it anew. I concerned
myself with the question whether Maarten believed his own
explanation. Whether or not this was the case I could not ascertain
but I understood that in either case there would have to be misery.

We retraced our steps; Maarten asked me to come inside with
him but I said goodbye. In the loft I began to draw up a document.
At the top of the paper I wrote: 'The new club Maarten must join.
He has to become a member'. I continued to sit there thinking but
couldn't think of anything else to write down. I folded the paper
up and put it in a flat cardboard box; I hid this under a roofing tile
next to one of the roof lights.

On another occasion, a Saturday afternoon, Maarten presented
me with the possibility of manufacturing a rocket. He still had a
little aircraft bomb made of wood lying about somewhere; it had
been painted silver and had four fins at the rear; it was a toy from
way back.

He drilled a hollow in the rear part into which he hammered a
tube. This he filled with the same mixture as had been used in the
previous experiment; to prevent-it running out, he sealed it by
sticking a paper disc to it through which he threaded cotton yam
soaked in methylated spirit.

'Does it go at once with a bang or does it first begin to hiss?' I
asked. 'Both,' he replied. 'It's bound to go some twenty-eight
metres or so into the sky, or even more.'

In the garden we built a pedestal from a few bricks; it ended up
on the paving behind the kitchen. He set the rocket down on its
tail fins, nose in the air, and put a little ball of paper underneath
which, with a serious face, he lit; then we stepped back circumspectly.

The flame reached the fuse and the charge, and fire began to
shoot from the tube, hissing. The rocket tipped over, continued to
hiss a moment and then fell silent. Some smoke spiralled up,
dispersing rapidly. 'It's empty,' I said. Maarten picked it up. A
grey-blue, white-edged scorch mark had appeared on the paving
stones.

'There was just enough force to make it fall over,' I said, but
Maarten didn't agree with this. 'It was caught on something,' he
declared with certainty. He maintained, and stuck to it, that both
when standing upright as well as when it had ended up lying
down, the bomb had been held back by something which had
prevented it from taking off. I did not believe this but I didn't wish
to say so.

'Let's fill it up once more and then set it off again,' I said, but he
rejected this proposal. 'I have to check everything properly first,'
he said self-importantly.'Besides, it has to cool down too. Or did
you think it didn't get hot inside?'

He had taken no precautions whatsoever to keep the experiment
a secret so that his father who had come to the backroom window
had seen everything. He didn't come outside however and didn't
even make a single gesture. He was a fat, heavy man with puffy
cheeks and bags under his eyes; he had short, bristly hair. I
thought he resembled an old mouse from a story book I still
possessed. He stared, dreamy and abstracted, into the gardens.

It was late in the afternoon and it was already getting dark. In
vain I tried to stave off the sadness that was approaching.

Maarten inspected the rear of the bomb and picked at it. I
longed to trip him up or to destroy something of his clothing: he
would then, so I thought, begin to cry in an almost soundless
manner.

With the announcement that I had to eat, I left and made my
way to the loft where I continued to hack at the wall with as little
noise as possible. I scraped the grit into a little mound; I began to
hack away with a purpose and made a hole which I excavated with
a piece of iron. Then I inscribed an old suitcase label with my name
and date and I stuck it, rolled up, into the opening. Finally, I
wanted to stuff the hole with an old newspaper. As I was tearing it
to pieces I ran into a death notice, some lines of which I read
mechanically. The final sentence, before the signatories, ran: 'He
has accomplished his long pilgrimage'. I had to think about this a
long time. Inwardly, I repeated the words slowly and began to sing the lines softly. I tore out the notice, chewed it up fine, and
pushed the wad into the gap in the wall. Then I looked for the
glass cutter but couldn't find it. While leaning my forehead against
one of the little windows and stirring my member, I listened
keenly to the sounds in the house. 'The day is full of signs,' I
repeated continually, inwardly. I considered inviting Maarten up to
the loft.

On another Saturday afternoon, we were sitting in his room.
We hit on the plan to go and catch ducks in the park on the
watercourse running alongside the cemetery. Few people went
there in autumn and winter. Maarten turned out to have an air gun
with which we could shoot darts or lead pellets but though they
penetrated with ease a cardboard box we were firing at in practice,
the weapon had no great reach. Maarten, however, was convinced
that we could strike birds, other animals and even people with it,
mortally so. 'You thought you couldn't shoot someone dead with
this, did you?' he asked. 'It's not even that difficult. It just depends
where you hit them.'

There were, he asserted, eight spots on the human body where
a shot had a fatal outcome. I asked him which these were but he
gave no answer to this. 'You can certainly aim a hundred metres
off,' he said, 'and then it still has force.' We went to shoot an
apple; the darts and pellets didn't pass right through the fruit but
disappeared, barely damaging the peel, into the core where they
were hard to find. I doubted the power of the weapon.

To gain some idea of the gun's possibilities we then began to
shoot at each other according to rules we had agreed. Each
standing on opposite sides of the room, we would aim at one
another beneath the canopy: thus it was impossible to hit each
other in the face. We used darts. By drawing lots, it fell to Maarten
to fire the first shot.

He hit me in the middle of my chest. The dart, having pierced
my clothes undamaged, struck a small, perfectly round speck in my
flesh. It hardly bled and barely hurt at all. It brought me to anger,
but I hid this.

I myself took a long time to aim but I knew that the shot would
fail. I struck Maarten on the right half of his chest but even his skin
had not been touched. When I walked up to him to investigate the
result, the little projectile turned out to have been arrested by a
pack of papers in his inside pocket. It had pierced almost all the
pages. I gained the desire to take these papers from him and make him plead for their return, for I believed they contained secrets. I
didn't touch them however.

In the evening, after dinner time, when darkness had fallen, we
went on our way. I was allowed to bear the gun and wore it next
to my bare skin.

The park, which wasn't surrounded by fences, lay before us,
deserted. Because it had only been laid out a few years previous
nothing had grown tall yet: we had an overview of the clumps of
shrubs and low trees. It was drizzling.

We left the cinder path and walked across the edge of grass so
our footsteps became almost inaudible.

Soon we reached a spot where scores of ducks were sitting
hunched together on the shore. I cocked the gun and shot into the
gathering. A few ducks were startled by the sound and made a few
steps in the direction of the water but nothing else happened. I
loaded a second dart and gave the gun to Maarten. At his shot all
the birds fled quacking into the air. We searched on but there
wasn't another duck anywhere. In the end we roamed around a bit
to see whether something of interest might be found anywhere in
the park but we didn't run into a thing.

'You can't shoot through a layer of feathers,' I said. I declared
the undertaking, though pleasurable, to be useless. Maarten fought
my arguments emphatically. He maintained that my shot had
missed but that his had struck a duck in the chest at which little
feathers had flown about. 'You saw it, didn't you?' he asked. 'That
those feathers burst loose and flew up?' 'I didn't see it all that well,'
I replied feebly; I knew it couldn't be true.

He now added to this that the stricken animal couldn't continue
flying but would have to come down slowly, to bleed to death.
Doubtless we would be able to find it next day, so his expectation
ran. We walked back in silence.

I went along with him to his place. His parents were out. In his
little room he didn't connect up the electric lamp but lit a candle.
Then he took the fitting from the ceiling and connected an
instrument to a lead that crackled and made blue sparks. He had
brought it out from a chest. The moment it worked he blew out
the candle after which we continued to watch in silence.

There were two meccano arms with carbon rods from an old
battery at their ends; the rods had been brought close together; in
between hovered a blue, rustling little flame. The whole thing had
been mounted on a plank which Maarten set on the ground. He invited me to come and sit next to him on the edge of the bed to
watch. We pushed the cloths of the canopy aside.