Tommy Wieringa - Joe Speedboat

At Hurghada’s general hospital they gave him the maximum allowable dose of laxatives: he almost exploded. Three and a half weeks’ worth of food had collected in his stomach and intestines, kilos of half-digested clay had piled up before a port hermetically sealed with Imodium. During the ensuing stampede of old shit, his anus and part of his rectum ripped open. ‘Mr Brouwer has given birth to a golem,’ someone in the group whispered, and they hadn’t laughed so hard in ages.

‘What’s a golem?’ Christof asks, but Regina Ratzinger has already moved on to the next stack of photographs.

Mr Brouwer remained behind in Hurghada while the rest of the group crossed the Sinai to the Gulf of Aqaba. In the village of Nuweiba, the last stop before flying home from Cairo, they stayed at the Domina, a luxury hotel with a swimming pool, a disco and a 130-kilo pianist in the lounge.

In Regina’s photos we see a dark man with a moustache like a guinea pig. His skin is the colour of potting soil. Three pictures later we see him puffing on a water pipe and grinning through the clouds of smoke. A little later he’s standing fully dressed beside Regina in a bikini on the beach.

‘Who’s the moustache?’ Joe asks.

His mother slides the next photo over that one, but this one’s got the moustache in it as well, standing now beside a campfire on the beach, against a dark sky with a few stripes of sunset in it.

‘What’s the moustache grinning about?’ asks Joe, but his mother says nothing.

Joe gets up, Engel and Christof follow him. Regina stares at the photo.

‘You can tell me some other time,’ Joe says. ‘OK?’

After Joe’s father, not many people were buried in the old graveyard along Kruisweg, which runs behind our garden house — my current residence. On nice days, when the windows were open at our place, we always used to hear the funerals. Father Nieuwenhuis’s voice through the loudspeakers, a member of the family coming up to the microphone to read a letter to the dearly departed, and finally the funeral director thanking everyone on behalf of the family and calling their attention to the buffet afterwards at ‘Het Karrewiel’ restaurant: right at the end of the street, the second left and all the way down, parking at the back.

For years I listened to this depressing business. More perhaps than Death itself, Father Nieuwenhuis’s bland little talks made all men equal. No matter who you were, whether you’d climbed the highest mountains, brought twelve children into the world or set up a successful contracting firm, the apostles John, Paul and Nieuwenhuis were the Great Equalizers. The immutable dead earnest tone, the same meaningful silences, the searching gaze sweeping over the heads of the flock — it was almost enough to make you swear off dying altogether.

One Bible text still stands out clearly in my mind, and that’s because of the time of year at which our windows opened for the first time — Easter. Along with the hum of bumblebees and the downy warmth of early spring, it was Nieuwenhuis’s favourite reading that always came through those open windows, from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:

Behold, I show you a mystery;

We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,

at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound,

and the dead shall be raised incorruptible,

and we shall be changed.

For this corruptible must put on incorruption,

and this mortal must put on immortality.

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption,

and this mortal shall have put on immortality,

then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written,

Death is swallowed up in victory.

O death, where is thy sting?

O grave, where is thy victory?

The sting of death is sin;

and the strength of sin is the law.

But thanks be to God,

which giveth us the victory

through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen.

When the new cemetery opened, the old one behind our house became run-down. It was a gradual decline, in the end the municipal workers only came by for the most crucial of maintenance work. I wondered how long it would take before they dug the whole thing up.

Most people buy burial rights for ten years. That gives you at least ten years of peace and quiet, there where you and eternity meet. After that all you can do is hope they won’t be too stingy to pitch in for another ten years, otherwise you’ll be exhumed. Not that it really matters, but still; hardly a pleasant idea, is it, an eternity that lasts only ten years. .?

Then again, how long does your memory still cause others to grieve? Two years? Three? Four or five at most if you’re very well loved, but mourning rarely lasts longer than that. All that comes after is remembrance. Remembrance has its emotional moments, to be sure, but not the raw grief of those first few days and weeks. You begin to wear away, my friend. You’re slowly eroded right out of them. There are moments when they can no longer remember your face, or how you kissed, your smell, the sound of your voice. . Then it’s pretty much over and done with. And one day someone else comes along and takes your place. That’s a bitter pill, of course, but then you were the one who dropped out of the game, remember?

There she lies, your wife, beside someone else, the pleasure radiates all the way down to her toes, she can’t remembering ever having. .

Well, all right, there are other differences between you and him. . The fact, for example, that he’s as black as my shoe. She had him brought in from Egypt and paid for his ticket, and now he’s lying on your side of the bed, looking at the gray light falling through a crack in the curtains. Maybe the new man is thinking about you right now as well, about the one who went before him. He knows the spot beside her in bed has been cold for a long time — he didn’t exactly wrest that spot from you, no, but he is making the best of your worst-case scenario, and he wonders whether he would ever have had a chance if you were still—

He turns brusquely to this woman in love, the link between the dead man and the living, eyeing each other distrustfully in the shadows.

Here’s what went before:

‘What are we supposed to call him?’ India asked when her mother said she was going back to Egypt to retrieve her lover for his first visit to the Netherlands.

‘Mahfouz, that’s all, that’s his name,’ Regina said.

‘I’ll call him “Papa” if you want.’

‘Why would I want that?’

‘Because it can be very difficult for a woman when her children don’t accept her new husband. The mother may feel torn between loyalties, and that can sometimes prove a divisive element with the family.’

‘Where on earth did you ever come up with that?’ Regina said.

Regina Ratzinger went to Egypt to marry Mahfouz Husseini, out of love, but also to provide him with the documents needed to visit the Netherlands. In Cairo she met with a swarm of lawyers, the hours spent in the waiting rooms of blistering hot administration buildings were a torment, but by the end of the week they were man and wife.

They took a two-day cruise on the Nile, then caught a plane to Holland. It was 10 December; the sky, gray as a pigeon’s wing, hung low over our heads.

When the Egyptian climbed out of the taxi on Achterom, the first thing he did was sniff the air like an animal. Did he smell the comfort of the delta? Of washlands that flooded at set times, as the Nile once had? His little suitcase contained a Koran bound in gazelle skin, a carton of Marlboros for Joe and India, a picture of his father taken in his shipyard and another one showing the whole family. For the rest a few clothes, but not many.