I thought about my own form of propulsion, which I owed to wheel, rubber and asphalt. I, half man, half vehicle, saw myself for a moment as a tiny link in Joe’s view of world history; my wheels rolled across the surface of the earth and contributed to making the world go round.
‘OK,’ Joe said. ‘So air was the final element they had to force their way into.’ The airplane was the crowbar they needed. In the late nineteenth century, the first person to really fly was an engineer too: Otto Lilienthal. He just kept picking himself up and dusting himself off, until finally he flew with a pair of wings on his back that he’d copied from the birds. That was the mistake they all made, every single person who tried to fly; imitating the birds is ridiculous of course — in proportion to its body, a bird’s wing muscles are so huge that you could never reproduce that with your arms, no matter how strong you were. That mistake in their thinking kept people on the ground much longer than necessary. But Otto flew fifteen metres, which is incredible! Within a couple of years the first zeppelin was floating in the sky, silent and beautiful, but also a flying bomb. No, the real potential lay in the marriage of the combustion engine with a pair of wings. The first time the two kissed was in America, when one of the Wright Brothers flew thirty-six metres: more than twice as far as Lilienthal — a revolution of twenty-one metres! After that it was wide open; aviators started popping up everywhere, breaking one record after another. A one-kilometre flight above Paris — world news! Crossing the Channel in a monoplane — England went bonkers. Anthony Fokker flying above Haarlem — the end of days!
When he got excited like that, Joe seemed more and more like some nutty sorcerer’s apprentice.
‘It’s weird to think that, at the same time atomic science was being developed, planes didn’t amount to much more than a little bamboo, ash wood and canvas.’
‘No, that’s normal,’ said Engel, lighting a gold-rimmed cigarette. ‘The mind always has a head start on the invention. An idea is weightless; it floats out in front of matter. We can think up all kinds of things, but try carrying them out. That’s the bitch.’
‘Engineers are patient, though,’ Joe said solemnly.
‘Did you guys know that P.J.’s mother is a nudist?’ Christof broke the train of thought.
‘P.J.?’ Joe asked.
‘Picolien Jane,’ Engel said. ‘New girl? Blond pin-curls? South Africa?’
Joe shrugged. Christof hopped up onto the engine block.
‘You mean you’ve never seen her? I don’t believe you!’
‘I probably have,’ Joe said, just to calm him down.
How did we find out that P.J.’s mother, Kathleen Eilander, was a nudist? Perhaps it was the postman who delivered Athena, the club magazine of the naturists’ association of the same name, to a ‘Mrs K. Eilander-Swarth’ every three months? Or was it a barge captain from Lomark who claimed to have seen her naked on one of the beaches between the breakwaters? Or then again maybe it was only a rumour, a bit of gossip congealing into such solid factuality that one day Kathleen Eilander felt the irresistible and hitherto unknown urge to go down to the river, take off all her clothes and go skinny-dipping. However it happened, we knew. Never in our lives had we seen a nudist. But the term smacked of very serious nudity indeed, and of things for which we had been waiting for a long time.
Engel looked at me. His eyes were the same colour as the ink in my favourite fountain pen. He knew how much I liked those afternoons when Joe climbed onto his soapbox and pronounced theories with their feet on the ground and their head in the clouds.
Bright and early each morning, Christof claimed, Mrs Eilander jogged down to the river to go bathing. He also said she walked around naked in the garden behind the White House. Her legs, Christof said, were long and kind of strange, but legs hardly played the leading role in my fantasies about the nudist. No, I saw other things. Things that took my breath away. She was a mother, and therefore an old lady, but after hearing the news about her nudism I noticed she was transformed into a sexual creature with a secret to which we just happened to be privy, and which filled our heads with burning questions and our guts with melted sugar.
Reluctantly, Joe descended to the subject of Mrs Eilander’s legs.
‘Can we get a look?’ he asked, but Christof shook his head.
‘Wall around the garden,’ he said, ‘and it’s still dark when she goes swimming.’
Joe toyed pensively with a screwdriver, twirling it in the fingers of his good hand like a majorette. Wednesday was dozing on my shoulder. The wrinkly membranes were pulled down over his beady eyes. He had become a beauty of a bird, a jaunty, proud creature trained to come back whenever I whistled. Joe had made a lucky pick, I don’t think a more handsome jackdaw could be found. The feathers at his neck and on the back of his head were silvery-gray as graphite; when he walked the bobbing of his head lent him a certain consequence. It’s not like with starlings, birds that seem to radiate a sort of lowliness. Starlings fly in spectacular eddies and shimmering spirals, that’s true enough, but in such huge numbers that you can’t help but be reminded of big cities where people hate and tread on each other, but strangely enough can’t get along without the others.
Wednesday possessed an inner nobility that placed him above inferior garbage eaters like starlings and gulls. He would be able to see Mrs Eilander walking naked in her garden, but jackdaws weren’t interested in things like that. I often tried to put myself in Wednesday’s place as he flew over Lomark, to imagine what the world looked like from a bird’s-eye view. It was my dream of omniscience — nothing would ever be hidden from me again, I would be able to write the History of Everything.
We all looked at Joe, waiting to hear his thoughts. Joe looked at Wednesday as the screwdriver propellered faster and faster through his fingers. It was amazing how fast he could do that. When the screwdriver fell at last and all four of us, wakened from the spell, looked at the concrete floor where it had landed with a clear tinkle, Joe raised his eyebrows.
‘It’s actually quite simple,’ he said. ‘If we want to see her naked, we’ll need our own plane.’
The airplane was the crowbar that man needed to force his way into the air, the final element; that’s what Joe had said that afternoon in the garage. But it wasn’t until he came up with the idea of building his own plane that I realized what he meant; the plane would be the crowbar with which we would part the heavens between Mrs Eilander’s legs. The plane would allow us a view of that terra incognita, and Joe was the engineer who would make it happen.
I watched the airplane grow, starting with the eighteen-inch moped wheels we found at the junkyard right up to and including the fine, varnished propeller Joe wangled from a nearby airfield.
They started work on the high-wing plane in a shed at the edge of the factory grounds, amid black mountains of broken asphalt scraped from old roads and dumped there for reuse. The big grinding machine had broken down years ago. Now it stood in slow collapse between chunks of unprocessed asphalt on one side and the pointy hills of a finer structure that it had spit out on the other.