Joe Speedboat (16 page)

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 one 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.

The party was doing us a great honour with the Leader's visit. More than two hundred people had gathered in the pine-panelled Peace Hall, they came from far and wide to hear him speak. Mussert was a round man, actually kind of short. I guess maybe we felt a little disappointed at first when we saw this
man whose dark hair had receded to the back of his head, leaving only a tuft at the forehead that he combed to a jaunty quiff. But we were so mistaken! A voice shouted, ‘The Leader!' Then Mussert marched to the front out of a dark cloud of storm troopers and looked us over with his strikingly pale eyes. His body had moulded itself to the task history had laid on him: his chin jutting, his shoulders thrown back, like the first runner to cross the finish. When he raised his right arm, as though driven by a powerful spring, he kindled awe and pride in us, and we rose as one to return his salute. That is how we stood, facing each other. Then his arm dropped, pushing us as it were back into our seats, and he administered the following jolt of electricity.

‘Brothers of our nation!'

We shivered with an obedient kind of pleasure, with warmth and reverence. His right eye spit fire, but the rational left eye weighed each word that crossed his thin lips. In unbending earnest he spoke to us about the degeneration of the modern age. About the Red Menace. About the farcical regime of the anti-revolutionary Colijn.

‘We see the continuing decline of trade and industry, terrorization by an army of presumptuous civil servants, and impoverishment. We shall free the people from the yoke of the political parties! The farmers will pursue their calling again as of old; workers from high to low, from director to errand boy, will once again come to realize that they have a task to fulfil in harmony on behalf of their people! A new prosperity shall be established; strict, powerful, but loving . . . Our able-bodied folk will defend our soil, our fatherland, our empire with all of the strength at our command, against all those who would mar the lustre of our independence or our territory!'

This was no political will-o'-the-wisp, not the way his opponents
said, here stood a statesman. He was the one we would follow, he was the right man to lead us out of the Crisis to better days. Even the hearts of the doubters went out to him. His voice soared, the volume was raised.

‘The Netherlands shall be independent of all foreign powers, a bulwark of peace, prepared to defend itself against all attackers, prepared to help build a federation of European states between whom confidence has been restored, who will prove a worthy instrument for the preservation of European peace and European culture!'

Our applause rained down on him. He was visibly pleased to be the object of our cheers. He spoke for an hour, then someone else came up to instruct us in how we ourselves could contribute to the restoration of our nation. After that we sang ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God' and the national anthem, and then it was over. Buzzing with new hope we left the Peace Hall. Many of us bought copies of
Volk en Vaderland
. Far away, on the dyke, the red tail lights of Mussert's convoy disappeared into the night.

For Papa Africa, all the world's rivers were the same. They may have had different names, but all fed one and the same current. The Nile was the only river on earth, and at some point all the earth's waters flowed past his father's shipyard in Kom Ombo.

‘He doesn't really think this is the Nile, does he?' Engel asked.

‘Rhine, Nile, same-same,' Joe imitated his stepfather.

‘If you look at it philosophically, I guess,' Engel said.

‘Didn't he ever have geography at school?' Christof asked.

‘He can't point to Cairo in the atlas. He doesn't know exactly where he is right now. And I don't think he cares much, really.'

Silent with incomprehension, we looked at the phenomenon that was Papa Africa, pencil tucked behind his ear, plucking at his moustache as he walked the yard. The boat's hull had now been painted red right up to the waterline, the rest was white. The mast still had to be raised and he was waiting for the sail, which Regina was sewing from stretches of canvas. The maiden voyage would be held in late August, and Regina wanted to throw a party at the wharf that day. She had big plans; she wasn't going to let this chance for attention and admiration go to waste.