Tommy Wieringa - Joe Speedboat

Before I continue, it might be useful to explain that when you’re arm wrestling you feel a continuous flux of muscle tension, ranging from the very slight to the extremely pronounced, and it’s important to pay close attention to such changes in pressure. You can feel them, like the dying down or rising up of the wind. Musashi writes that in a duel we must make sure that our opponent changes position, and that we must profit from his irregular rhythm.

It was a joy to feel the soot-and-oil man’s power increase, he wanted to beat me quickly. At the moment his pressure crested I yielded just a tad, only a couple of degrees, just enough to cause a minimal modification, and that was the One Right Moment: I threw everything I had into it and pressed him past deadlock at a single go. He groaned in dismay but there was no stopping it, his hand smacked down on the table.

The crowd bellowed indignantly, from one corner of my eye I saw Joe drop back in his chair in relief. The soot-and-oil man grimaced at his supporters, a crowd of gold-bedecked caravan dwellers who made noises that sounded like they were rounding up a herd of bison.

We assumed our positions for the third and decisive round. I looked at him from a kind of inner distance, and saw something I had never seen before in someone I had beaten: humiliation. You could see it around his nose and mouth, little twitches that spoke of a wounded ego. I knew now that he would go for the full offensive, he would show his fellow caravanners that the second match had been nothing but a stupid mistake and, with a total blitz, erase his defeat.

Then I did something that startled him; I brought my lips down to my upper arm and seized the sleeve of my sweater between my teeth. I snapped at it four times to raise the cuff up above my bicep, then put my arm in the box. The twitching of his face had grown worse, he had completely lost the composure of our first match. It had been only veneer, glued on from the outside, not enlightened from within. I was seeing ‘Knowing Collapse’. All things can collapse, Kensei noted in the final weeks before he died. ‘Houses, bodies and enemies collapse when their rhythm is disrupted.’ His advice then, when one sees the Collapsing happen, is to pursue the opponent without mercy. ‘Focus your gaze on the enemy’s collapse, chase him, so that you do not let him recover.’ And he adds: ‘The chasing attack is with a strong spirit, you must utterly cut the enemy down so that he does not recover his position.’

Thank you, Kensei.

We attacked at the same time. He tossed his head to the side and his upper body shot forward wildly. It was the charge of a bull. I closed my eyes, the Glow rolled in like a dark sea, completely at my service. I knew that this was the same rage that had possessed my ancestor Hend Hermans before they smashed his brains out with a crowbar. It ran in the family, the way some people have red hair or stubby fingers. In Dirk and me it had blossomed in full.

I began wrenching my arm back and forth, the way you rock a heavy cart to get it over a hump, to and fro, tut-TUT, to and fro. We shot past perpendicular and back again like a poplar in the wind, I toyed with him until I had enough room for the final push, and on TUT! he went down. Broken at the base, as it were. When I let go, I fell off my stool as well.

For the first time that day I felt a rush of well-being. Joe jumped up from his chair and gave me a powerful hug.

I had tasted blood.

I would go looking for more. I had penetrated to the ecstasy at the core of human existence: struggle and conquest.

All Joe could do was shake his head and say, ‘Super, ab-solutely super,’ and I floated to the ceiling, warm and light as a feather. We had reached the finals, the top two. .

‘Here, man, have another beer’, Joe said. ‘You’re shaking like a leaf.’

For the first time, I heard someone place a bet on me. Money was changing hands like lightning, someone said it was a ridiculous long shot, there was no way I could win from the last man standing, Mehmet Koç, a prizefighter par excellence . I’d already seen him at work against a black powerlifter from Portsmouth, and it had stunned me a bit. Koç was a kind of Turkish wrestler with chest hair that seemed to grow out of his shirt like an upside-down beard.

‘So, what do you think?’ Joe asked in hushed earnest.

I pursed my lips to show that I was less than confident.

The announcer called Koç’s name, then mine, I heard shouts of dismissal and encouragement. Even though the aficionados all agreed that I didn’t stand a chance, in the course of the last few matches I had won an ambiguous kind of favour.

About what happened next I can — no, I want to — be brief: I was blown right off the table twice by a Turkish Hulk. After having been mistaken during the rest of the tournament, this time the aficionados had it right. There was no strategy one could bring to bear against Mehmet Koç, he was simply much too strong. I put up all the resistance of a bicycle pump. It was even sort of exciting to be crushed the way the Turk did it, it was the power and beauty of a wave that crashes down on you and leaves you tumbling underwater.

So I needed to become stronger. To practice repetitively. To never let up. But I’d won my very first second prize! After we’d changed the money at the border, Joe split the take with a big casino grin. Five thousand down the middle: I’d never had so much money in my life.

When we got home the briquette installation had been removed without a trace, leaving only the dark spots on the tiles where the washing machine and press had stood. The racks against the walls of my house were gone too, all of it taken away. Without a word. Good, excellent. Fine by me, let’s pretend it never happened.

The burning pain that arose in my forearm thirty-six hours after the tournament was nothing but muscle soreness that would last a few days; more serious and longer-lasting was the inflammation of the biceps tendon. I sat at home immobilized, unable to move myself in any direction. Even the tiniest effort brought on agonies like the paralyzing stabs of pain one felt during the growth spurt of adolescence.

‘That can’t be good for you,’ Ma said, ‘just look at you.’

I made her even more worried when I slid ten hundreds across the table.

‘What is that ?’ she said severely. ‘I don’t want your money, you’re my child, I would never. .’

I slapped my hand down on the table. Then I wrote: Take. It’s nothing.

‘A thousand! That’s not nothing! I’ll put it in your savings, otherwise someone we know will spend it all on God-knows-what.’

Mother, it’s for you. That’s the way I want it.

She looked at me long and hard, I looked back coaxingly, mixed with a kind of anger. She nodded, folded the notes one by one, made a bundle of them and said she hoped it wasn’t ‘bad money’. She slipped the bundle into her apron pocket.

Joe came by during his lunch break to see how things were going. He massaged my arm and rubbed it with Tiger Balm. Then, after filling the mustard glass with rollups, he went back to work.

Sun and clouds came and went in a restless pattern that made the house light at times, dark at others, a phenomenon that had made me feel sombre even as a child. At a quarter-past five, Joe returned.

‘Man, this place is like a haunted house. Have you been outside today?’

A little later he was pushing me along the dyke. The sky was the colour of zinc, heavy clouds were squeezing all the light out of the washlands. A final, pale crack of sunlight stood ajar on the horizon. A swarm of starlings was searching for a place to roost, gulls argued above the dark fields, and far in the distance veils of rain brushed against the greyness. The prospect of another winter weighed on me.