Tommy Wieringa - Joe Speedboat

The ice was fantastic. The light on the horizon grew steadily brighter, and I was going where I had never been before. All around me was glassy blue light, the turquoise heart of a glacier. So smooth and so vast, why hadn’t I tried this a long time ago?

Jet-black ice was sliding by beneath my wheels now, my sights were set on the extreme northerly point of Ferry Island.

But allow me, if you will, to withdraw the earlier image of the glacier’s heart: what I was in was the heart of a winter-wonderland paperweight, one of those fluid-filled plastic universes that start snowing after you turn them upside-down. We had one on top of the dresser at home, it contained a rearing unicorn against a royal-blue background. Whenever you shook it it snowed all around the unicorn, whose mouth was open in a whinny.

Beneath the ice floor were the fields of summer and the winding road to the riverside. Down there the grass swayed in the slow current.

I was steaming like a workhorse; somewhere an engine coughed and roared. My ice palace fell into tinkling shards.

I turned and saw the plane moving across the ice. It was still more night than day, and from this distance the airplane looked like a sinister vehicle from the workshop of darkness. Two shadows that could only have been Christof and Engel ran out onto the ice. The plane had stopped and they were talking to Joe, whose head was all I could see above the fuselage. They slid the plane around until its nose was pointed at the village. Once the two of them had retreated a respectful distance from the prop, Joe revved it. I loved that sound, which grew higher and angrier the harder the engine was torqued. Joe shot off across the ice. As soon as he hit top speed he tried to lift the nose into the air. Every time he pulled up, the plane would leave the ice for a moment, then bounce back down. And again. Barely rising each time, then falling back. Like it was skipping.

Just short of the winter dyke Joe braked, swung around and came back in our direction. Now I was only a couple of yards from Engel and Christof, who stood riveted to the ice, watching every move Joe made. The airplane barrelled across the frozen flats, it was a joy to behold. There he was, coming straight at us, doing eighty or ninety now. Christof murmured, ‘Come on, man,’ and Engel flicked away a cigarette butt that sparked once and died. Behind us the curtain of dawn slid open further and further, lighting the sky in an orange and purple glow.

It must have been ten below zero that morning, but I don’t remember the cold. Right before he got to us Joe swerved to the left, eased back on the throttle and cut the engine. The silence felt good. Engel and Christof ran to the plane, where Joe was shaking his head and peering at the controls; the hand throttle, the brake, the oil pressure, the fuel gauge and the thermostat. He still had the joystick clenched between his knees.

‘It won’t nose up,’ he said when they got there. It was hard to make out exactly what he was saying, though, his lips had turned blue.

‘I think I need more flaps, I’m not getting enough lift.’

Wearing those ski goggles and that old-fashioned red-white-and-blue-striped skater’s cap, Joe looked like some kind of insect. Placing his hands on both sides of the cockpit, he wriggled his way up out of the plane’s embrace. Before jumping onto the ice he squatted for a moment on the edge of the fuselage. On his back I could see a dark, wet spot about the size of a bicycle seat. The sweat had gone right through his layer of sweaters and his coat. Joe was too cold to stand up straight, all he could do was ask for a cigarette. Engel handed him his smokes and a lighter and they talked about what the problem might be. All three of them had been working toward this moment for so long, and now it wasn’t happening. Engel walked around the plane, cursing quietly. Joe puffed on his cigarette like an old-fashioned flying ace on some remote north African air strip. Then he spit on the ice and climbed onto the wing and back into the plane, the cigarette still dangling from his lips. The engine fired, the prop began to spin, and an icy cold wind hit us in the face. Joe turned the plane around and taxied back to the shed. He saw me, and grinned.

‘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.