Joe Speedboat (23 page)

I was practicing the Body of a Rock on the day of the cyclomowers. I thought I had found the liberating gravity of which he spoke. The tractor approached, I remained in place. I should have known better; Musashi himself says that unripe strategy produces sorrow.

Now, these many years later, I read it all again but it seemed to say something very different.
The Book of Five Rings
was like a gobstopper that changed colour all the time. Now I could apply it to defeat arm wrestlers. Wherever it said ‘sword' I took the liberty of reading ‘arm'. That wasn't actually so far-fetched, for what is a sword if not a sharp and artfully styled extension of the arm? With ‘sword', Musashi himself probably meant other things as well, for he defeated his most daunting opponent, Sasaki Kojiro, with an oar. The whole point is the spirit of things, the word is merely a beast of burden with ever-changing meanings on its back.

Joe was taken with my fascination for the book. He walked
around the house as he read about Holding Down a Shadow or, better yet, Scolding Tut-TUT, and he kept saying how fantastic it was. The Scolding of Tut-Tut was, in fact, very special:

‘To scold' means that, when the enemy tries to counter-cut as you attack, you counter-cut again from below as if thrusting at him, trying to hold him down. With very quick timing you cut, scolding the enemy. Thrust up, ‘Tut!', and cut, ‘TUT!' This timing is encountered time and time again in the exchange of blows. The way to scold Tut-TUT is to time the cut simultaneously with raising your long sword as if to thrust at the enemy. You must learn this through repetitive practice.

‘Tut-TUT!' Joe said. ‘Tut-TUT!', and laughed himself silly.

The admonition to practice repetitively, he realized, meant that I needed opponents, for it made no sense to shout Tut-TUT at the dumbbells. I longed deeply for someone on whom I could unleash my growing strength and insight.

To make a long story short, Joe found Hennie.

Hennie Oosterloo was a dishwasher at the Little Red Rooster and had been in Lomark for as long as anyone could remember. He lived in one of those wooden houses you can buy for next to nothing at the garden store, at the back of the Little Red Rooster's parking lot. Hennie and I had more things in common than the garden houses we lived in: he was, second only to me, the most uncommunicative person in the village. He must have been in his fifties, but he seemed innocent as a baby. And even though he was strong as a bull, people said he wouldn't hurt a fly.

A few years earlier Hennie had been the talk of the town after he had let the waiting staff at the Little Red Rooster corral him into taking part in the July tractor-pull. These days there
was a photo on the wall of the restaurant showing Hennie holding a gift certificate and an engraved silver plate and wearing a tight-fitting sleeveless vest with the logo
CAFÉ REST. THE LITTLE RED ROOSTER LOMARK
. In the picture he was holding the gift certificate and plate the way a savage might hold a vacuum cleaner.

I don't know whether light ever penetrated into the brain of Hennie Oosterloo, whether he'd experienced pleasure at his victory or felt a gnawing dissatisfaction at wearing his life away in the washing-up room, but none of that was reflected in his face. He always wore the same, even-tempered expression, which was in fact no expression at all; his face, as it were, was always in neutral. He had a wispy beard and flabby lips, otherwise his face had no dents or bulges and his skin seemed stretched too tightly across his skull. Hennie was such a natural part of the landscape that I'd always looked past or through him, and now suddenly he walked into my life in a pair of blue jogging pants that looked like they were cut from terrycloth. His T-shirt read
HARD ROCK CAFÉ CAPE TOWN
, but I was sure he'd never been that far from home. He wormed his way through the door of my house.

‘Hennie, this is Frankie,' Joe said. ‘Frankie, Hennie.'

Hennie turned his head left and right. I was located somewhere halfway through that sliding gaze, but he seemed to draw no distinction between a transistor radio, a pile of newspapers and my head. Joe stood between us a bit uneasily; by now he'd grown used to one silent type but two such enigmas must have been social agony, even for him.

‘Let's get started, Hennie; if you'd just sit down here, opposite Frankie, that's right, here.'

Joe placed us straight across from other and pulled two identical pieces of wood from a plastic bag.

‘These are handgrips,' he said. ‘Is it OK if I screw them to the table? I want to show you what the real competition setup is like. These things are to keep you from using your weight unfairly.'

He put the grips, which were attached to two metal brackets with two holes each, upright on the table between Hennie and myself. From the plastic bag he then produced a cordless drill and ran four screws right through the tabletop. I slid up in my chair and, using my good hand, seized the spastic sparrow claw. I had to pry open the clenched fingers one by one and wrap them around the peg. Tight as a vice. The elbow of the other arm I placed in the middle of the table, and opened my hand.

‘Just one more thing, wait a minute.'

With a big piece of chalk Joe drew a square around our arms.

‘That's the box,' he said. ‘You have to stay inside it. If your arm moves over the line, you forfeit the match. OK, Hennie, if you'd just . . . that's right, yeah. And then put your other arm down, just like Frankie . . . thanks.'

Hennie's right forearm came down like a railroad barrier, somewhere in the middle of the box our hands locked. Both of us clutched the pegs with our other hand, producing a compact, symmetrical whole. It was a strange and intimate sensation to be holding the warm, dry hand of someone I barely knew.

‘Go,' Joe said.

He pushed the chronograph button on his watch. Our hands clenched: I made sure mine was on top of Hennie's right away, so he had to bend his wrist back; being on top gave you a big psychological advantage. The question, though, was whether psychology had any impact at all on Hennie Oosterloo's tortoise brain. He kept his arm where it was, unmoving, in the middle of the table. That meant he had chosen the strategy of biding his time, letting me attack and awaiting his chance. I
made sure I kept the pressure on, not to be caught out in an unguarded moment, and thought about Becoming the Enemy (‘In large-scale strategy, people are always under the impression that the enemy is strong, and so tend to become cautious'). But what was Hennie's point in doing nothing? Did it mean something? I mustn't think too much, I mustn't place myself too much in the enemy's shoes – attack him like a stone from a sling. The table creaked and I felt him give a little. Maybe my attack had encouraged him somehow; he rounded his shoulders and applied a kind of offensive counterpressure. It started slowly, but I felt it mounting like bad weather. I heard myself groan with a kind of comic-book sound and lost the Stance of Strategy (‘Your forehead and the space between your eyes should not be wrinkled. Do not roll your eyes nor allow them to blink, but slightly narrow them'). Slowly, as though melting, I lost ground.

‘Hey, Frankie!'

Oh, I didn't want to disappoint him, not him, not in my first match . . . I squeezed my eyes shut and, rising up out of the defeatism, I felt a blood-cloud of rage, the same as when I'd tried to strangle that roofer: a hot, red glow behind my closed eyes.

‘And . . . three minutes are up!'

We both let go at the same time, my first round was over. Matches end after three minutes if neither opponent goes down. Arm wrestling is always about the best of three rounds. If your hand is even a fraction above your opponent's, you've won. Hennie Oosterloo and I had ended our first struggle in a draw, that's how I saw it. But even though Joe tried not to let it show, I sensed he'd been hoping for better.

‘OK?' he asked. ‘Ready to go again?'

I nodded.

‘How about you, Hennie?'

Hennie grabbed the peg and planted his elbow on the table. I shook the fatigue out of my arm and resumed my position. This time I abandoned the Stance of Strategy right away and closed my eyes – I had the impression that actually
seeing
my opponent cost me strength. I went straight into the offensive with the Fire and Stones Cut, striking with everything you have in you. I felt my arm and shoulder shake from the power being released, the raging red glow spread at the back of my eyes like ink in water. From my deepest parts there unrolled a stifled, pained cry. It sounded like Tut-TUT!, and when I opened my eyes again I saw Hennie's torso leaning at a strange angle. My hand pressed his to the tabletop. From that bent, defeated position, Hennie looked up at me impassively with his dull, watercolour eyes.

‘Jesus,' Joe said.

I let go, and Hennie's upper body swayed back into place.

This was my second match. I had beaten a man who had at least forty kilos on me. Joe pounded me on the shoulders in delight.

‘Fantastic, man, fan-tas-tic!'

When I smiled Hennie started smiling too, without knowing why. The leaden cloud that had hung over my house ever since the disaster with the paper briquettes made way for light and air.

A third match followed, which I lost because I was still caught up in the violent rush of victory from the second. In the next weeks, many followed; Hennie received two-fifty a match and each time we wrestled I learned more about ‘Knowing Collapse' and the ‘Release Four Hands', as well as the principle that released a jolt of adrenaline at the mere thought of it: the ‘Spirit of Crushing'.

*

Fall arrived, the tournament was drawing near. Sometimes I felt unbeatable, at other times I thought we should never have started. In late October we drove to Liège. Along the state highway, a few kilometres outside Lomark, I caught a portent of things to come. Standing in the field were men wearing fluorescent orange vests over their dress clothes: surveyors. Joe slowed. The men shouted to each other from the far sides of the field, then bent back to the theodolite. The land was being divided along invisible lines, somewhere a map had been spread out on which our future was traced like a dress pattern in a ladies' magazine.

‘There's no stopping it,' Joe said. ‘I've only started to understand since I've had my own car. In fact, I think that if you don't have a car you can't understand it at all. Holland has picked up a kind of momentum that only makes it go faster and faster, like a wagon crashing down a hill. Standing still is losing ground, that kind of thinking. Everywhere, really everywhere you go, highways, suburbs and industrial estates are spreading like a cancer. This country can only change that quickly because it barely stops to think about itself, or because it thinks badly of itself, that's why it's in such a hurry to look like something that could be anywhere. A soul like a coin: folklore on one side and opportunism on the other. Folklore, that's the cock of Lomark, being proud of an imaginary past. And opportunism, that's the enthusiasm with which people accept a motorway like the E981, because they think they're going to profit from it. You don't hear anyone protesting about that, except Potijk's clique, but that's a kind of folklore in itself. Hopeless, this place is completely hopeless.'

It was the first time I'd ever heard him talk like that – like an outsider. Of course I hated the scrawny boiling-fowl on the Lomark arms just as badly as he did. It was the cookie cutter
from which every Lomarker was stamped, predestined to weakness and a whole lot of cackling. We knew that when the Vikings came the bird had crowed in fear, not because it was brave. But hearing Joe talking so aloofly about Lomark made me feel uneasy, as though it was no longer the two of us who were condemned to this village and could laugh out loud at its backwardness, but that suddenly he was criticizing things from the outside while I was still stuck in the midst of it. Maybe, before long, he would start seeing me the same way . . . how long would it take then before he judged me to be a hopeless case, a clodhopper covered in red river clay? Why was he suddenly acting like an outsider when, in my thoughts at least, I had always come to his defence when people in Lomark spoke mockingly of ‘foreign elements' like him and his family? If he suddenly started wearing his outsidership like a medal, all that did was confirm the kind of
Blut-und-Boden
mentality I despised so much: the mentality that meant newcomers always remained outsiders, mistrusted and mocked behind closed doors. Didn't he realize how fragile the whole structure was, and that by doing this he was making it even shakier? That he and his family were the harbingers of something new, a point of departure from the age-old bitterness and a history you could only be ashamed of? When he put himself on a higher plane like this, it only proved them right – how could I explain that to him?

We moved onto the highway. I stared out the side window: this was the road we used to take when Ma brought me to Dr Meerman. What I remember best was the temperature of the metal objects with which Meerman tapped and probed me: as if he kept them in the fridge just for me. Of our journeys home I remembered the panicky optimism with which Ma passed Meerman's words along to me: keep at it, don't
give up, do lots of exercises, don't fret – on and on like that, until I felt like opening the door of the speeding car and rolling out.

Joe punched a few buttons on the car radio but couldn't find anything, which was fine by me, I was equally content to listen to the engine's soothing hum. I longed for the end of the day, when my matches would be over and I would know my place in the hierarchy. Joe had printed up a list of the forty strongest arm wrestlers in the lightweight category (a clutter of names, dates of birth and kilos), but what really mattered of course was the Top Ten, and within that the man who was Number One. I can still remember exactly when I'd heard his name for the first time. Joe had stabbed his finger at the list, as though pointing to a coveted enemy stronghold on a map.