Tommy Wieringa - Joe Speedboat

‘Flaps out!’ Joe shouted.

He popped the handbrake and we leapt forward. I grabbed him around the waist and we shot ahead with a deafening din. I felt his body working the pedals and the joystick, which he pulled all the way back when we reached full speed.

We were off. The ground disappeared beneath us, I screamed. The plane shivered, the wings swept left and right but we were already twice as high as the tallest poplar, with nothing more to worry about. There was a cheerful tingling in my scrotum. Behind and off to one side I saw the river and the washlands. Joe turned ninety degrees to the right and flew parallel to the river, heading for Lomark. The icy cold wind made my eyes and nose run and paralyzed my lips, but I ignored it. The plane stank of petrol.

From the looks of it we were going to hold at this altitude. It was hard to say how far up that really was. Below us the world reeled past like a slapstick film. Every rise and every hill that usually cost me so much effort was now nothing but a bump. My entire biotope, including all the things ordinarily hidden behind houses, hedges, ridges and dykes, was laughably flat and obvious from here. At this height there were no more secrets, and that was sad and lovely.

Every once in a while Joe looked back over his shoulder and shouted something unintelligible. The plane shuddered across the blue-golden sky and I was reminded of those old monster movies where Godzilla and all kinds of other dinosaurs moved just as unnaturally and jerkily as we did in mid-air.

In the milky distance I saw the electrical plant blowing its vertical plume of smoke. Joe pointed down. We were above Lomark. In the depths lay the cemetery, where Louise Maandag’s funeral seemed to be over. I tried to trace the road to Het Karrewiel where the funeral guests should now be eating their sandwiches. I found the restaurant, in the parking lot I saw the last few people in black on their way to the big dining room for coffee and sandwiches with salami and cheese, with no idea that we were up above them.

Joe shoved the joystick to the left, the left wing plunged down and the right one came up as he banked toward the river, back where we’d started. In my stomach I felt the jubilant sensation of falling. We were going to put the plane down before they had to saw us out of the cockpit like two frozen primeval hunters. The plane levelled out. I picked out the ferry landing and the old shipyard and then a wee little man who looked like he was dragging something much bigger than he was. Joe saw him too.

‘Mahfouz!’ he screamed over his shoulder.

The river gleamed and the cars’ roofs glistened along the dyke. I tried to take it all in at one go in order never to forget.

When I saw Rinus’s farm coming up fast, I was stunned — the landing! I didn’t want to think about the landing, I’d never watched Joe make a landing before, the landing was the hardest thing of all about flying! I thought about death, about how, together, Joe and I. . and suddenly I wasn’t so afraid of it anymore. We passed over the farm and now I saw Dirty Rinus’s Opel parked in the yard. The plane turned and lost altitude fast. The pasture was right in front of us and Joe was starting his approach. He was going to try to be as close as possible to the ground when he got to the field, I felt his body go tense, the wings shivered nervously and we were still going way too fast. . Pull up! Pull up, man! But he headed on in, with the pasture looming like a wall. Joe pushed the throttle all the way in and pulled the flaps all the way out, the noise dimmed but the earth was still coming up at us like a fist. Then the wheels smacked the ground. The plane hopped and came back down again, we raced across the field and I saw chunks of dirt flying up. We were losing speed fast.

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.’