Joe Speedboat (15 page)

Right before the fence Joe brought the plane to a halt.

The landing had taken an alarming number of metres more than liftoff.

When he killed the engine, Joe's body relaxed. The silence came pouring into my ears.

Two metres in front of us, Dirty Rinus was leaning against the fence, a rollup dangling from his lips and his index finger raised in minimalist greeting. Joe turned to me and gave me a purple-lipped grin.

‘That was a tight one,' he said.

The edges of his ski goggles were rimmed with ice.

Things are looking up. The washlands are almost dry, the willows bend over the pools left behind. Their lower branches are hung with flotsam, between them the coots paddle in search of nesting material. At dusk the bats come swarming out and at night, when you hear the first frogs, you know the weather will be getting better soon. Mahfouz could use some spring sun as well. Sometimes we sit on the quay together, soaking up a little warmth while he scans the sky to see what all that trumpeting could be about.

‘Nile goose,' he says.

Two Egyptian geese go squabbling low overhead. That's late March. Then comes April and the fist you made against winter unclenches. But too soon. In April the wind starts blowing like you'd forgotten it could ever blow. Your house shrinks beneath the hammering. Out on the street people shout to each other, ‘Weird, this wind, huh?!', meaning that it crawls into the cracks in your brain and drives you raving mad. It goes around yanking liked a spoiled kid on whatever it finds. You thought everything was battened down but the whole world is flapping and moaning. Including, of course, shutters, gutters and decorative elements. The wind changes pitch and volume all the time and you can hear church bells and children's voices in it. It feels to me like it's coming straight off the Russian tundra, a
filthy east wind that humps against the back of my house and makes it impossible for me to study.

The geography book I've buried my nose in speaks of permafrost and tundra landscapes (‘agriculturally, such soils are of no significance') that remain eternally frozen. Sometimes to a depth of hundreds of metres. Finals are in May, I have a 7.8 average for my exams but I've still got the jitters. I long for the moment when it's all over – it's not the thought of it but the longing that's so nice, that every day brings you closer to the moment when you stand on the banks and watch Jordan calmly roll by. My fervent longing is one I share with twenty others who, at this same moment, are all struggling with extracts, workbooks and low bacteriological activity in the tundra. We long collectively for
thereafter
. But when all this is behind us they will enter the promised land, and I will remain behind. I'm very much aware of that.

When the wind finally dies down it starts raining so hard that the streets foam. That goes on for days. But one morning you wake up with the feeling that something is missing – the noise is gone! The rain has stopped and the wind has blown over. Somewhere a wood pigeon is cooing. The branches outside are motionless, they drip and glimmer in the early sunlight. You hear jackdaws happily tumbling through the sky above the cemetery.

That is late April.

From down by the river comes the sound of handiwork.

I know now that it was a keel beam Joe and I saw Mahfouz dragging along the day we flew over the river. He's building a boat.

‘It's a felucca,' says Mahfouz, who's too busy to talk much these days.

Joe says the boat symbolizes the love between Mahfouz and
his mother. Other people have their own song, they have a boat. The first time they met, Mahfouz gave her a model boat, a felucca, which is now on the windowsill in her bedroom.

They have something with boats, those two. After they got married in Cairo they took a short cruise on the Nile. One night they stood on deck and looked up at an uncommonly clear sky full of stars, and that was when Regina had a vision. She saw a wooden ship being driven by bent-backed rowers; she and Mahfouz lay on a bed of pillows on the afterdeck while girls in white stroked the air above them with ostrich-feather fans. He was a prince of great beauty, she a lady from the highest ranks of society. Regina's eyes shone with tears when the vision faded. ‘We've done this before, Mahfouz,' she'd said. ‘This isn't our first life together.'

Joe shakes his head. ‘She married my father as a Hindu princess and Mahfouz as Nefertiti. She's the whole history of the world rolled into one.'

At the spot where the Demsté shipyard once stood – the firm went bankrupt in 1932, but when the water's low you can see what's left of the slips – Mahfouz has built a framework of planks in the form of a ship. It's not very long, six metres or so, and it's shaped differently from what you usually see around here. The frame is only the rough form of what the boat will be, but it looks broader than our sailboats. The front and back curve up only slightly, more like a cargo ship than a yacht. Here and there along the quay are sawhorses with planks laid across them, and weights to slowly bend the wood into shape.

Regina bikes down along the Lange Nek to bring Mahfouz tea, bread and cigarettes. She devours him with her eyes, her Nubian. The colour that our winter wiped from his face is gradually coming back. He's building her a flagship, she lights his cigarettes and pours him tea with enough sugar in it to knock
the enamel off your teeth. Reluctantly he lays aside his plane and sits down beside her. From her bag she produces sandwiches wrapped in silver foil. Ferryboat passengers stop and look at the shipyard's small-scale resurrection. Mahfouz works amid the paintless sloops on their trailers with flat tyres and the green river buoys twice a man's height, all waiting to be hauled away by Hermans & Sons. He works hard, he wants to launch the boat this very summer. The steam box he's built to bend the stubborn rib beams consists of a length of pipe; he hangs the rib in the pipe, boils water on a small fire under it, and the steam disappears into the pipe and softens the wood.

‘Wow,' Joe says as we watch him from the top of the landing, ‘he's pretty good.'

‘He could make a living at that,' Christof says.

Engel is thinking about it.

‘If it was me I'd paint it blue.'

In response to a mysterious kind of magnetism, Christof and I turn our heads at the same moment in the direction of Lomark and see P.J. coming along the Lange Nek. That kindles a flame in the two of us, but the company she's in creates a cold counter-current: Joop Koeksnijder.

‘Dirty Nazi,' Christof hisses.

That never dies out. Of course Look-at-how-cool-I-am Koeksnijder isn't a Nazi, but his grandfather was, and that's still the first thing that comes to mind when you see his grandson, especially when he's with P.J. Eilander. The prick. We hate Jopie with a hatred fed by intense envy. And we hate that even more. He possesses the object of our dreams – look, she gives him a shove and he hops away, you can feel their obsession with each other all the way over here. Like disgruntled old men, we turn back to Mahfouz and his boat.

It takes forever for P.J. and Jopie to get six feet away from us,
where they stop to view the activity down in the old shipyard. Koeksnijder nods to us, Engel and Joe return his greeting.

‘He's building a
boat
,' I hear P.J. say in amazement.

Her Afrikaans has worn away to a faint accent.

‘Enough of those around, I'd say,' Koeksnijder says.

I don't look at P.J., because she can read my thoughts this way too.

‘Joe,' she asks, ‘isn't that your mother's husband? The man from Egypt?'

Joe nods.

‘Papa Africa,' he says, and that really makes her laugh.

Koeksnijder moves behind her and a little to one side, in the attitude of a man protecting something.

‘Papa Africa,' P.J. repeats. ‘So what does that make me?'

‘The daughter of the man who hurt me last week. Two cavities.'

Koeksnijder lays a hand on P.J.'s lower back, the way impatient husbands do on Saturday afternoon as they propel their wives past the shop windows.

‘We're going across the river,' P.J. announces. ‘Bye-bye!'

Christof mumbles something dull, Engel says, ‘Good luck with your finals.'

The gates of the ferry close behind them, we watch them go.

‘She likes you,' Engel says to Joe.

‘You're the one who deals with the women around here,' Joe says. ‘I'll stick to things that run on petrol.'

Engel, accustomed by now to his own electrifying effect on girls, shakes his head in disbelief.

‘She never looked at me even once . . .'

In preparation for their lives to come, Joe, Engel and Christof attend the orientation day for higher education. Joe comes home from the polytechnic looking disappointed.

‘Worthless,' he says, ‘I could teach myself that just as easily. That place smells of nothing.'

It's only when he goes along with Engel to the art academy, just for a lark, that he finds what he wants. The Applied Arts section has exactly what he was looking for: lathes and CO
₂
welders. The studio is full of mysterious constructions in various stages of development, and the walls are hung with the most minute working drawings.

‘The whole place smells like machine oil,' he says.

Only then do I realize that his comment about the odour of nothingness at the polytechnic was meant literally. He follows his nose, and that's new to me.

Engel signs up for a major in illustration, Joe for the applied arts. In order to be admitted, they have to present work that demonstrates both their talent and their motivation. Engel shows up with a portfolio full of work that qualifies him immediately, Engel is a natural born artist if ever there was one. I've never thought of Joe as an artist, though, and as far as I know he never has either. He could just as easily become an instrument maker or a technical engineer. But although he admires engineers for giving the world its motor skills, when he thinks about it he finds himself better suited to a freer curriculum.

On the day of the entrance exam he unbolts the wings of his plane and lashes the whole thing onto a trailer. Dirty Rinus drives him to the academy; when they go in the porter says, ‘You're not allowed to smoke in here, sir,' effectively banishing the little farmer out of doors for the rest of the morning. Joe rolls the fuselage into the building and installs it in the room where the evaluation will be taking place. Once the wings are back on it, all the space is taken up. And does it really work? a professor asks. Joe climbs in and starts the engine. A tornado tears through the classroom. He's accepted.

*

But let's go, time is running short, next Monday will see the start of the big test to show who's ready for the world and who isn't.

There's cruelty in the fact that the exams take place on the loveliest day of the year. The fields are groaning with vigour, trees unfurl their leaves with the pleasure of a person stretching his limbs. Above it all shines a tingling spring sun that urges everything on to more, while we sit row by row in the assembly hall and have no part in it. We shuffle our feet restlessly, cough faintly and chew on government-issue biros. Cursed be the first to finish and turn in his exam with serene superiority. Cursed too the man on rubber soles who sneaks along the aisles. And completely cursed be P.J., with whom I share the same electives, leaving my mind eclipsed sevenfold by things other than anaerobic dissimilation and the pseudopodia of amoebae. Shame on her for the lustiness of such a body. It emits signals of nothing but plenty. I ogle the white flesh of her rounded upper arms like a starving cannibal, and feel little and evil at the deregulating message of her hips as she leaves the room while most of us are still hard at work. A few weeks later I will look first under the letter E on the list of candidates and see that she has passed with a 9 for biology, and nothing lower than an 8 for the other subjects. I myself prove to be a solid 7.8 man, but let me blame that on her presence.

Joe and Engel chose maths, chemistry and physics, which to me is like decoding a message from another planet. The only one who chose two full years of economics was Christof – in order, I believe, to learn the tenets of the entrepreneurship in store for him by birth.

All three of them pass their exams too, but Joe forbids his mother to hang out the book bag and flag. Even Quincy Hansen passes at last, albeit only after resits in Dutch and English.

And so you've finished school, and then this happens: ‘It's a solution,' Pa says, ‘a solution.'

‘We've talked about it a lot,' says Ma. ‘If it doesn't work out, we'll think of something else.'

‘Let him
try
it first. There's no harm in
having
to do something. You think we used to be able to do whatever we liked? Working hard every day, and you didn't ask yourself whether you liked it: you did as you were told.'

‘Frankie, you don't
have
to do anything. It's a start.'

‘A solution is what it is! Just the thing for him. The best for everyone.'

‘But don't you go thinking . . .'

‘He knows that already.'

‘That we want to make money off it, all we want is for you to be able to stand on your own two feet. When we're not around anymore.'

‘Is he asleep?'

‘From all that studying, sure, the boy's worn out.'

‘He never misses a night at Waanders' though. If he can do that, he can work too. I'm telling you, it's a solution.'

Pa removed the plastic tarp from the pile in the garden and stood there looking at it for a while. It resembled nothing so much as a tangled mountain of pickup sticks, and I saw doubt
creep into his movements. He pulled on a few loose ends and leaned a couple of parts up against my house. He avoided looking inside, he knew I was peering at him from the shadows. One hour later he had the pile sorted out: bars with bars and grids with grids. These he used to build a scaffolding against the side of the house. Left over now was a washing machine and what I knew by then was a press for making briquettes. That machine was to be the start of my career as a briquette presser. Paper briquettes, for the fireplace.