Joe Speedboat (29 page)

Joe wanted to go home right away. I would rather have stayed in the hotel, to let them refill the minibar so I could keep
drinking it dry until the world recovered its old shape, but a little later we were driving wordlessly through the night. The radium dials on the dash spread their greenish glow, never before had I so felt the lack of a voice with which to speak hollow words of dismay.

All we knew was that Engel had been killed in an accident. I thought banal thoughts, about how his things would have to be brought home, how the price of his work would now go up, and about how long it would take before the remains would stop looking like Engel. It was a disappointment to discover that a friend's death produced no finer thoughts. At four in the morning we drove into Lomark. Light spots in the sky announced the new day, we drove down the Lange Nek to the Ferry Head, to Engel's parental home, where the lights were still on. Joe cursed, and I think it was only then that we realized what Engel's death must mean for his father.

‘Come on, let's go in.'

Joe pushed me along the flagstone path at the side of the house. In the front room, under the lamp above the table, we saw a form hunched over. We both wished right then that we could turn around and leave. Nets were hanging in the backyard, the eels would start migrating soon, and the outboard motor was clamped to the edge of an oil drum. Joe knocked on the door to the pantry. We heard someone stumbling about, then the light went on and Eleveld opened the door. It didn't look like he had been to bed yet.

‘Boys.'

Joe shuffled his feet hesitantly.

‘Mr Eleveld, we were in Germany . . . we came right away. Is it true? About Engel . . .'

‘It's terrible, boys. Terrible.'

He led us through the pantry, his head bowed. I'd never seen
anything that broke my heart like that. Engel's racing skates were hanging from a nail, on the floor was the row of shoes he used to wear, arranged neatly pair by pair.

We sat down at the living-room table. Eleveld was alone, he had heard the news that afternoon when a policeman called from Paris.

‘Whether I was Engel's father, the man asked, and he gave his description. “Yes, sir,” I said. “That's my son.” Then he told me he had bad news.'

Eleveld turned away from us. Lying on the table were prospectuses from Griffioen's Funeral Services. I pulled them over and, not knowing what else to do, began flipping through the booklet entitled
Ideas for Funeral Arrangements
. The suggested illustrations for mourning cards consisted of weeping willows, ships at sea, Christian pictograms, and doves carrying a wreath. At the back I found examples of texts beside which Eleveld had put an X:

6. Until we meet again

10. Words are not enough

19. No need to struggle anymore, rest is yours

21. A fine memory is so dear that only flowers can speak of it

A glance at the prospectus ‘Recommended Price List Accompanying the Book
Ideas for Funeral Arrangements
' made it clear to me how Griffioen paid for his Mercedes S600.

‘But how did it happen?' Joe asked hoarsely. ‘Did they say?'

Eleveld shook his head.

‘I'm not so good with foreign languages . . . from what I understood, a dog fell on Engel's head. From the balcony of an apartment building. A dog.'

I couldn't imagine that Eleveld really knew what he'd just
said: a dog had landed on his son's head, in Paris? It was so surreal that, if only for a moment, it opened up a hopeful prospect: what if it wasn't true, what if Engel was alive and only scaring people with
art
? But looking at old Eleveld you knew that couldn't be right; Engel might have laughed at our reactions, but he would never do that to his father. Two days from now they were going to bring him home, the insurance company had arranged for a funeral transport firm to pick him up from a cold store along the Seine.

We left Eleveld as day was dawning. The clock in Lomark struck five, birds were singing everywhere.

‘Engel discovered the law of gravity,' Joe mumbled as he loaded me into the car.

But he shared my doubts; when we got to my house, he said: ‘I'll believe it when I see him.'

On Tuesday morning, that is what happened. Engel's viewing was held at Griffioen's funeral home, I went there with Joe and Christof. An attendant closed the door quietly behind us, we were alone with the coffin in the middle of the cool, soundproof room. There were four big candles around it.

‘It's really him,' Joe said quietly.

I got up and had to lean on the back of my cart to see him, lying beneath a stretch of cheesecloth spread over the end of the coffin. Under his chin was a brace that kept his lower jaw in place, his lips were colourless, his cheeks sunken. His cheekbones protruded in saintly fashion. This was Engel, my first corpse. My arm started shaking, I had to sit down. The cooling element zooming away beneath the bier was a monotonous requiem to our friend's absence. In a chair on the other side of the coffin, I could hear Christof weeping. I had never heard him cry before. It annoyed me. The noises he made came in phrases, to match the rhythm of his breathing. To me it felt like he was coopting
Engel's memory by making more noise than we were.

Suddenly I realized that Joe, Christof and I once again formed a triangular construction, just like when we were younger and I only knew Engel as my silent helper at the urinal.

Joe lifted the cheesecloth frame from the coffin and laid his damaged hand on Engel's cheek. He stared in concentration at the face, which you could now see had been broken by the impact. We had no idea what kind of dog it was, only that the animal had fallen from the ninth floor of an apartment building in a Paris suburb, right onto the head of Lomark's next-to-last Eleveld. There was something about that family and things falling from the sky, be it dogs or Allied thousand-pounders delivered to the wrong address. I'd gladly have given a finger for Engel's last thoughts before fate struck him down in the form of
Canis familiaris
, man's faithful servant for more than fifteen thousand years.

That afternoon Ma took me to Ter Staal's to buy a suit. My arm had become too big for the sleeve – ‘My land, it's the first time I've ever seen such a thing,' Ma grumbled – and my misshapen undercarriage was going to be a true test of her inventiveness with the sewing machine. Matching shoes were out of the question; it would have to be the same old wooden blocks, only shined to a polish.

‘I suppose it's for the Eleveld boy?' the salesgirl asked.

I felt that the girl needed to mind her own business, but Ma joined in enthusiastically in the female choir that likes to sing of other people's calamity.

‘Terrible, a thing like that,' she said. ‘Some people just seem born for misfortune. Frankie spent a lot of time with him.'

‘And the father? I guess he's all alone now? First his wife, now his son . . .'

Ma raised her eyes devoutly.

‘The Lord moves in mysterious ways.'

‘He never came in here,' the salesgirl said. ‘I think he bought his clothes in the city, at least that's the way it looked.'

She tugged unpleasantly on the jacket, trying to get it off my shoulders, and I braced myself a little in the hope that she'd pull till it ripped. We left Ter Staal's with a black polyester suit so inflammable it should have had a
NO SMOKING
sign on it.

On Wednesday Ma came in with the
Weekly
containing the funeral notice. For some strange reason, Eleveld had chosen ‘No need to struggle anymore, rest is yours', which seemed more appropriate for an old person who had died after a lingering illness than for a young artist hit on the head by a falling dog.

‘The poor man is all confused,' Ma said, two pins in her mouth as she went to work taking in my new trousers.

They were glorious spring days, the sap was flowing in the trees, the tinkling chirp of sparrows could be heard in the bushes between the house and the old cemetery.

‘Engel will be buried on Friday morning. He was fond of flowers.'

That was news to me as well, but on Friday morning his grave was indeed surrounded by piles of flowers in crackly cellophane bouquets. The service held beforehand was in true Nieuwenhuis style: the empty rhetoric of the resurrection and he-who-lives-on-in-our-thoughts. I couldn't imagine that people still found comfort in phrases durable as linoleum tiles.

I sat on the aisle in the second row, beside P.J., with Joe and Christof on the other side of her. I had a hard time concentrating on Engel's service. From one corner of my eye I saw that Joe and P.J. were holding hands, and I knew Christof couldn't have missed that either. His reaction would be pretty similar to my
own. All we could do was accept it, gritting our teeth all the while; within a friendship, rivalry like that takes place beneath the surface, where the hot beast of jealousy gnaws at the bars and poisons our souls with unsettling whispers. In Christof and me in equal measure. The only effective antidote was masturbation, but with the gradual return of energy after orgasm the jealousy returned in full force as well.

It cut me in two like a river. On the one shore, Joe was the one I loved like no other; on the other he was my opponent, because he had hijacked my fondest dream. I didn't understand how those things could exist side by side and even trade places in the wink of an eye. How mistaken I had been: I had seen Christof as my greatest rival – and that was what Joe had become.

And P.J. grew only more beautiful. She wore a thin, light-gray woollen suit-dress, her black heels clicked on the paving stones as she walked out of the church in front of me. Beneath the waisted jacket her buttocks screamed to be caressed; above them, on her lower back, rested Joe's hand, just as the uncallused hand of Lover Boy Writer had rested there not long before, and Jopie Koeksnijder's before that. She had her mother's high waist.

Girls were weeping around the grave. I knew a few of them from school, Harriët Galama and Ineke de Boer for example, even the horrendous Heleen van Paridon – who, for as long as I'd known her, had resembled a neurotic housewife with a dusting obsession – and many others I had never seen before. Engel's fellow students. They wore mad outfits that probably passed at the art academy for expressions of highly individual taste; that they all looked pretty much the same in them was beside the point. One extremely tall girl in big yellow basketball shoes was taking photographs. Beneath her brown tweed
jacket she wore an unnerving candy-pink skirt; the combination with her pretty face made my eyes hurt.

It was with such women that Engel had consorted since leaving Lomark – he had slept with them on mattresses on the floor, with background music by manic-depressive musicians with long hair and a death wish. After the deed they ate olives or chocolate and experienced a deep sense of uniqueness and irreproducibility. Now that Engel was dead, those girls came to Lomark and were amazed at his provincial roots and his father who looked like a bicycle racer from the days of black and white film. Eleveld stood in the inner circle and listened intently to Nieuwenhuis who, because it was Eastertide, read aloud from Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians. He again shared with us the mystery of eternal life: we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed. This was his outflanking manoeuvre, to assuage the pain and puzzlement of death. Diametrically opposed to this you had Musashi, upright and in full armour, for whom the Way of the samurai is the resolute acceptance of death. According to Nieuwenhuis, trumpets would sound before we were resurrected to immortality; Musashi says nothing of things of which he has no knowledge. What he does know is the way one should die: ‘ . . . when you lay down your life, you must make fullest use of your weaponry. It is false not to do so, and to die with a weapon yet undrawn.'

What we do find, in the final section, ‘The Void', is this: ‘What is called the spirit of the void is where there is nothing. Man's knowledge cannot fathom this.' Musashi offers us one way out of ignorance: ‘By knowing things that exist, you can know that which does not exist. That is the void.' That was precisely why Nieuwenhuis and the Apostle Paul rolled off me like water off a duck's back: they didn't start their reasoning with things that exist, but with a nutty kind of messianism.

I heard jackdaws flying over, by reflex I looked up to see if I could spot Wednesday. A fire of longing roared in my chest.

‘But thanks be to God,' Nieuwenhuis said with a dying fall, ‘which giveth us the victory, through Jesus Christ, Our Lord.'

Meanwhile, Engel was still dead, and the bottomless realization began to dawn that I would never, ever see him again.

At Het Karrewiel they were serving white buns with ham or cheese. There is comfort in the hunger we feel when we have lowered a loved one into the grave; hunger is unmistakably a sign that you're alive. The eating of white buns distinguishes us from those to whom we have said farewell; we eat, we live – they are eaten, they are dead. With white buns in Het Karrewiel we return with a feeling of relief from the gates of Hades; our time has not yet come.

I had hoped we would stick together that afternoon, but everyone went their separate ways. Joe walked P.J. back to the White House, Christof took off with grooves of bitterness at the corners of his mouth – he wasn't yet accustomed to this unusual rivalry at the heart of the friendship. I sat at home in that stupid suit and knew that the world had changed beyond recovery. And this wasn't the end, there was a great deal yet to come. With Engel's death, a crucial stabilizing force had disappeared from our social construct; I had a strong sense of more decay on its way, not much farther down the line.

At six o'clock I opened a can of frankfurters and shook them onto a plate, which I put in the microwave. Before eating them I dragged them through the mustard, because the taste of frankfurters always makes me think of morbidly deformed chickens in the death camps of the factory farms. Schnitzel or frying sausage produces the same disturbing awareness, with one phrase in particular haunting my mind: ‘pig pain'. As I ate I
listened distractedly to that art program on Channel 1, the one where the interviewers are primarily interested in the life of the artist and almost never probe into his work. The girls I had seen today around Engel's grave, I suspected, would end up someday on programs like that, reflecting with the earnestness of a child staring at its first turd in the potty. On the radio you almost never heard anyone talk about things like arm wrestling or bulldozers, those were worlds hidden to them.