Tommy Wieringa - Joe Speedboat

The hard wind turned the people out on the street into children, all wild and excited, with glistening eyes and not a worry in the world. That’s what struck me most, that they didn’t seem to worry about a thing, even when tiles came whipping off the roofs and their cars were damaged by flying branches. That day the ferry stuck to its moorings. The river writhed and tossed up wild, gray waves.

On 28 October, the storm was over. Then came the chainsaws.

And after I showed you that particular entry, I would take my notepad and write: Cash please .

But people don’t care about things like that. They’re not interested in what really happened. They’d rather stick to their own fairytales and nightmares, and there’s no demand for the stories of Frank the Arm. They’ll remain on the shelf until the day someone comes along to write the history of Lomark and recognizes them as a treasure trove that sheds a little light on the years behind us. Only then will my work be judged at its true value. Until then it’s just a pile of old news at the back of a shed.

My diaries are lined up in bookcases against the back wall. I write every day. Historians and archaeologists dig things up from the depths of the past; I go around picking up the same things in the present. You could call what I do ‘horizontal history’. Historians look for things that are long past, that’s why they have to dig so deep: I call that ‘vertical history’. The comparison came to me one day during geography class, when we were talking about strip mining and underground mining. With strip mining, you don’t have to dig; the coal is close to the surface, all you really have to do is scrape it off the earth. But with underground mining you really have to go to great depths, which is why they dig tunnels into the earth.

It seemed like a useful metaphor to me.

To a certain extent, I make the historian’s work unnecessary. Should they ever find my diaries, they’ll take from them whatever they need, embellish on it a little and call it their own. Fancy-talking pickpockets is all they are, really, just like novelists. But what do I care as long as someday people know how it really went, all the things about Joe? The things I know, not the stuff Christof and his buddies try to claim. That’s not the truth: that’s lies and folklore.

International events rarely affect us directly here in Lomark. Sometimes, for example when the price of oil goes up, we know something’s going on in the Middle East, and when a layer of red dust covers the cars after a rain it means there’s probably been a storm in the Sahara; otherwise, most things in the world pass us right by. But when Lomark gets a new dentist, that pretty much has to be a direct result of global upheaval. In fact, we owe his arrival directly to the speech given by South Africa’s President Frederik Willem de Klerk on 2 February, 1990. That was the day De Klerk lifted the ban on the African National Congress. He also announced the release of Nelson Mandela, the leader and symbol of the struggle against apartheid. ‘He’s a man with a vision as wide as God’s eye,’ Mandela’s supporters say, and they put him on a par with the Great Soul of India.

In 1990 Mandela walked out the prison gates, and a few hours later he was giving his first speech in twenty-seven years. An amusing detail is that he forgot his reading glasses in his cell, and had to make do with a pair he borrowed from his wife. Three years later Mandela and De Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 1994 Mandela succeeded De Klerk as president of South Africa.

The country’s turnaround brought huge social tensions, and rivalry for both power and resources. Julius Jakob Eilander, dentist, and his wife Kathleen Swarth-Eilander were fourth-generation Afrikaners. They watched as their neighbours raised the walls around their villas and installed alarm systems so sensitive that a falling leaf or a rustling lizard made the sirens scream. The Eilanders didn’t wait to see the country transformed. They packed and left for Europe, back to ‘ die ou Holland ’ their ancestors had left behind in the nineteenth century.

In January of 1993 they arrived at Schiphol Airport. After a few weeks with distant relatives and a few months in a holiday cottage amid pine trees and mobile homes, Julius Eilander took over the practice of Lomark’s only dentist, a man who had been rigging our mouths with fillings, crowns and bridges for as long as anyone could remember.

Eilander’s office is on the first floor of the building people here call the ‘the White House’, but which the plaque on the façade calls ‘Quatres Bras’. And Julius and Kathleen have a daughter, Picolien Jane: P.J. for short. After Joe and India, she’s the third exotic import at our school.

We can’t believe our eyes. She wears a crown of boisterous blond curls that fall dazzlingly to her shoulders. All I can think of are oceans and foam, my diaries are full of her. Her skin is pale, her face broad, with slightly sloping blue eyes the likes of which I’ve never seen. Between classes the girls throng around her, running their hands over the corkscrew curls that bounce back like elastic when you tug at them. The girls all want to be P.J.’s friend. The way she talks gives everyone a thrill. Afrikaans, so close yet still so mysterious, makes you swing back and forth between hilarity and the chill that lovely language brings.

She comes, we are told, from Durban. A name that will become as magical as Nineveh or Isfahan. The sky over Durban is crisp, the salt on your skin tastes like liquorice. I think about P.J. walking through Durban; in my diary, the cockatoo cries and the monkey fiddles with his nuts. The sky there is definitely not like our own; P.J.’s eyes reflect horizons beyond ours, and secrets that truly signify something, not the fainthearted ruses we bore ourselves with. Real secrets, ones that have more to do with light than with the darkness in which we brood on festering sins with no hope of absolution, because the priest is deaf and can’t hear our whispered confessions. P.J. was born of a fusion of light, her skin is as pale as potato feelers in the cellar, she seems transparent, but her hair is all flaming wheat. .

There is a clear boom in presentations on South Africa.

She says, ‘ Wat kyk jullie so vir my? ’ and that just has to be something special, for otherwise why would it make us all melt?

While our parents sit flinching in pain and fear beneath her father’s lamp, as he wrenches, pounds and drills away in their mouths, we sit breathless in the light of P.J.’s countenance. Come on, say something else, make us shiver, don’t hold out on us.

It was in those days that Joe first had his hair buzzed. He sat on an old engine block in the garage behind his house while Christof ran the clippers in swathes across his scalp. The thick hair floated to the ground, leaving only a shadow of itself with pale scars shining through. Now, with those slightly slanted eyes of his, he looked completely like a nomadic horseman of the steppes, an Uighur or a Hun: Joe the Hun on his tireless Mongol pony, a slab of raw meat tucked under the saddle. People sometimes asked him whether a Negro had ever played an active role in his family, or an Asian perhaps, for Joe’s features were a confusing convergence of specific racial traits. Joe was all things to all men, but what I saw most of all in that strange face of his was a horseman of the steppes.

The duo Joe & Christof was expanded to include Engel Eleveld, my endearing piss mate. It started the day Joe and Engel went fishing together in a scour-hole. Joe caught a pike; there are lots of them in those pools. Engel said his father had told him that you could see Our Lord’s suffering in the head of the pike. The fish’s skull contains bones in the shape of a hammer, nails and a cross. They tore open the skull but couldn’t find anything like that. Joe and Engel were friends ever after.