Joe Speedboat (10 page)

‘Happy New Year, Frankie!'

The next attempt was made on 4 January. They'd changed the angle of the flaps and adjusted the rudder. That didn't help either.

The weather was about to turn. By the weekend the cold front would make way for warmer air, and they worked non-stop; without the ice they would be lost. It was a race against the clock. January 10 arrived and with it the thaw; my tyres left wet tracks on the ice. For the umpteenth time Joe rolled out onto the frozen river, and now it was do or die. I joined Engel and Christof, watching tensely as the plane picked up speed in the distance. Faster and faster it went until, at top speed, it traced
a flat line between the town and the old factory grounds.

‘Pull the nose up, man!' Engel said breathlessly. ‘Pull that goddamn thing up!'

If ever there was a right moment, this was it – it was still early morning, the air was clear, cold and ‘thick', as Joe had called it, perfect for a takeoff. He went thundering across the ice; at this rate, unless he pulled up quickly, he would go crashing into the row of willows in the shallow ice of the washlands.

‘What the
hell
is he doing?!'

Joe was racing flat out toward the trees; he'd never pushed the plane this hard before, but he wasn't even trying to lift off – if he didn't turn fast or brake, he was a goner. I closed my eyes, then opened them right away and saw him pull back at last. The rear tyre was off the ice, the plane hung wonderfully level and kept bouncing up and down, any other plane would have been airborne by now . . . Oh my God, oh my God . . . There he went! He was off!

The plane shot up a few metres, fairly brushing the tops of the willows as it went. Joe could never have calculated that, he'd simply taken an idiotic chance and had enormous luck. Pure luck, I was sure of it. If the plane hadn't done exactly what he hoped at that point, he would be dead now. But he wasn't dead, he was flying . . .

‘Yeah! Yeah!' Engel was bellowing beside me.

Christof jumped up and down and threw his arms around Engel. Now the two of them were jumping up and down together, shouting at the top of their lungs. My own face was covered in tears. He had done it, he was flying away in a westerly direction, the throbbing of the engine fainter as he grew smaller on the horizon. He had performed the miracle of the Wright Brothers all over again. Nothing could stop him anymore.

*

If Mahfouz Husseini hadn't come back, Regina Ratzinger would probably have died of starvation. The way Mahfouz put it in his fractured English was: ‘In years of dryness, flowers are first to die.' At least that's what Joe made of it.

Regina had trouble getting the housekeeping back on its feet. Something had changed in her, a degree of world-weariness in her behaviour and appearance that never went away again. She seemed not to change her clothes as often, and the knitting purists of Lomark noted testily that tiny glitches had appeared in the patterns of her sweaters.

Mahfouz often did the cooking now, so dishes with lamb and coriander began appearing on the menu, prepared with a sharp red paste of hot peppers and spices that sowed confusion on your tongue.

‘Very tasty, Mahfouz,' Joe said.

Mahfouz looked up from his plate delightedly.

‘Tazty, no?'

Five times daily Mahfouz rolled out his rug on the sun porch of the house on Achterom to murmur prayers in the direction of Mecca. He was not overbearingly religious, and never bothered Joe and India with his beliefs. They considered his faith as harmless as another man's habit of eating a fixed number of bananas each day, or automatically knocking on wood to ward
off disaster. He took a correspondence course in Dutch, and after a few weeks he could ask the way to the train station or order a pound of beef and pork mince at the butcher's. Not that this was of any use to him; the village had no station, and no self-respecting Muslim would touch pork mince. But he felt at ease in Lomark, walked around the village a great deal and always greeted us politely.

Regina showed him off in public and seemed to glow softly in his presence.

‘Nubians are a very handsome people,' she said. ‘The handsomest in Egypt, they say. But as handsome as Mahfouz . . .'

‘Right, Mom,' India said, ‘we got you. Take it easy.'

Regina took her husband to the city: he returned with a linen suit and handmade leather shoes. He moved as easily in them as he had in the Indian off-the-rack goods he'd arrived in. Because he was in the habit of waxing his moustache, and because Regina dressed him as a tropical dandy, he was something of an anachronism in Lomark, a man lost in some strange corner of the world.

The first time Mahfouz Husseini saw me he leaned over and looked me deep in the eye, to see if I had all my marbles. I didn't try to stop him. When he'd had a good look, Husseini straightened up and laughed; apparently he'd seen something there. Then he said a few words in Arabic and moved around to the back of my cart. Hey, tenthead! Let go, I need to train that arm! I'm not your old auntie! But he seized the handles without asking and started pushing me around the village exactly like an old lady. I was embarrassed. It was all a bit too much. I sat in my chair glowering, with no idea where he was taking me. In one fell swoop he had shattered my carefully cultivated isolation. People were looking at us. At the dinner table that night they'd say, ‘Did you know Frankie Hermans has a nurse with
a moustache?' We looked like jerks together, Husseini and I.

But unless I was mistaken, we were heading for the Lange Nek. The Arab hummed little snatches of some tune and was really putting them down, his soles creaked on the asphalt. I could smell the river from a long way off, the water had a smell I couldn't describe but that made me calm down. Maybe it was all the impressions he'd undergone on his way here.

‘There is Piet,' Husseini said.

The water had gone down again, Piet Honing's ferry service was running as usual. The boat was in midstream and coming our way. Piet was tearing off ticket stubs and handing them in through open car windows; the change he received in return went into the pouch around his waist. Then he went into the pilothouse and reversed the engines. Two cars and a cyclist came on shore. I didn't look at them. Piet came over to us.

‘So, buddy, I haven't seen you for a while.'

I grunted.

‘Lots has happened, nothing's changed – you know what they say. Had some damage this winter, though, the river took a whole bunch with it. But we're back in business, aren't we, Mahfouz? Am I right?'

He gave Mahfouz a shy little slap on the shoulder and went back on board. Mahfouz pushed me to the edge of the quay, I pulled hard on the brakes. The Arab squatted down, the elbow of his left arm resting on his knee, the fingers of the other hand plucking at his moustache.

From that day on, Mahfouz and I sat together pretty often at the Ferry Head. I enjoyed having him around; he would talk and I would listen. Whenever Piet was having mechanical problems, Mahfouz jumped right in the thick of it. At his father's shipyard in El-Biara, a little place just outside Kom Ombo, he had learned how to take apart an engine and put it
back together again. He was the youngest of six brothers and three sisters. His father owned a yard on the banks of the Nile, and at a bend in that river Mahfouz had learned how to build a felucca, the characteristic ship of the Nile. His father had groomed him to work in the family business, but with so many siblings Mahfouz decided to seek his fortune in the tourist industry instead. Far from home, in the village of Nuweiba on the east coast of the Sinai, he had opened a little shop fifty metres from the beach. He sold rugs, Bedouin silver and pharaonic statuettes that could pass for antique if the buyer was blind and retarded; because so many tourists met those criteria, business was brisk. His shop was in a long row of others selling exactly the same items. Above the door was the print of a hand in dried goat's blood: the hand of Fatima, devout daughter of the Prophet. Each morning Mahfouz hung the rugs and cotton clothing outside his shop, and flapped the dust off them each evening.

Nuweiba consisted of three loosely connected districts: most tourists went to Tarabin, a burgeoning strip along the beach full of hotels, restaurants and shops. A few kilometres to the south lay Nuweiba Port, where the ferries left for Jordan. In Tarabin Mahfouz had led an uneventful life. He slept about ten hours a day and spent the rest of the time in his shop or with friends. They played backgammon beneath the fluorescent lights, a waiter from the nearby restaurant brought them countless trays of tea.

Husseini felt strong, and believed that his diet of fish and rice and the sea air he breathed improved his blood. In his opinion, a person's soul was in the blood. Blood travelled all around the body and infused with spirit the framework of flesh and bones that called itself Mahfouz Husseini.

Sometimes he would fall asleep in a beach chair and wake
the next morning just as the sun rose above the mountains on the far shore. He lived with his face to the sea and his back to the desert, free of the great desires that make life a living hell. After someone told him that the Sinai was sliding away from the Arab Peninsula across the way at the rate of a centimetre and a half each year, he thought he could see the distance widening.

The day a bus from Piramid Tours came rolling into Nuweiba, he was sitting in his armchair outside the shop. Later that afternoon the first tourists from this new bunch appeared in his street: three women. Dutch. Mahfouz could tell right away. It was possible at times to mistake Dutch people for Germans, but the latter tended to have a kind of belaboured modesty, as though they could be arrested any minute. Germans also
did
talk louder than the Dutch, it's true, but they didn't walk around as though the world belonged to them. Dutch people moved with a heavily self-confident tread, as though they knew their way everywhere.

Mahfouz's colleague, Monsef Adel Aziz, shouted, ‘Lookie-lookie-no-obigation' at the women, the sign for the others to approach them as well, rubbing their hands and preening their feathers. Mahfouz saw a tired smile cross the face of the youngest woman. One of the older women, he could tell, had come to his country in search of physical love; one developed an eye for such things. Women like that had something hungry in their gaze, something insatiable. More and more of them had started coming each year; sometimes you saw white grandmothers with amazing lavender hair walking hand in hand with young boys. The story had it that these women had been abandoned by their husbands in their own country, or that they had come to Egypt because their husband was ill and could no longer fulfil his conjugal obligations. Monsef Adel
Aziz consorted with such women and was none the poorer for it. The young men of the village didn't care whether the women were old, young, fat or pretty. Mahfouz himself had had an affair with an American woman; when her vacation was over she had asked him to go home with her, but in his eyes a house in Iowa was no better than a shop in Nuweiba. Catherine O'Day had therefore started spending a few weeks each year in Nuweiba. It had been a few years, however, since he'd seen her. He'd received a postcard from her once, with greetings from America. The postcard hung on the back wall of Husseini's shop, half covering a photo of him with his arm around the popular actress Athar el-Hakim, who had once come to Nuweiba for a day to shoot some scenes on the beach.

The women were coming toward his shop. Concerning the oldest, the one Mahfouz had recognized as sexually needy, he heard later that week that she had started a torrid affair with a bellboy at the Hotel Domina; an attractive young man who, in response to her elaborate praise for the ease with which he had carried her luggage, had immediately dropped his trousers to show his sizeable dong. Mahfouz took a good look at the youngest of the three – there was shadow around her. He felt the need to comfort her.

‘Hotchachaandoolalabathingbeautywithoutabra!' Monsef Abdel Aziz shouted after them, knowing full well that he had lost the battle for their attention.

The women had almost reached Mahfouz's shop. Stroking his moustache in one fluid motion with the back of his index finger, he said with his most winning smile, ‘Welcome, welcome . . .'

The women had run his clothing through their hands, each of them had tried on a few rings bearing semiprecious gems and bought a few postcards. Then they walked on. But anyone
travelling down the road in a southerly direction had to pass back that way again. When they reached the end of the shopping street the women turned, the woman with the shadow walking on the inside now. Mahfouz ran into his shop, grabbed a souvenir and flew back outside, where he was just in time to hand his present to the woman with ash-blond hair. She took it, confused, not knowing whether it was a present or whether he wanted money for it, and tried to give it back.

‘It's a gift, for you,' Mahfouz said.

It was a little model boat, a felucca with an alabaster hull and a sail with the Eye of Horus painted on it in blue and gold. The woman thanked him awkwardly and walked on.

Nuweiba was little more than a hamlet. It was certain that Mahfouz Husseini and Regina Ratzinger would meet again.

The next day they saw each other beside the swimming pool at the Hotel Domina. He had delivered a box of leather wallets to the hotel's souvenir shop and was about to walk back down the beach to Tarabin when he saw her.

‘Ah, the beautiful lady,' he said, bowing his head slightly.

‘Wait,' she said. ‘I wanted to . . . a little something . . . for that lovely present.'

She went back to her recliner at the poolside, wrapped a sarong around her body and tied it with a knot between her breasts, bent over and took a couple of Egyptian pounds from her bag. She walked back to the man and said, ‘Here, for you.'

Mahfouz shook his head and smiled sadly.

‘I understand,' he said. ‘You don't want my gift. I am sorry.'