He squatted down beside me. His face was close to mine, he didn’t blink, and I noticed that his left eye shone differently from the right one — the left eye was shooting fire, tempered in turn by the right one, which held a sort of compassion greater than I could grasp.
‘That arm of yours might take you places,’ he said. ‘Keep it in good shape, you never know.’
It was winter, the river left its banks. Around Ferry Island the current rose, and metre by metre the washlands disappeared beneath grim, sloshing water.
Then the Lange Nek went under, and before long only the traffic signs, lampposts and trees still stuck out above the water. Piet Honing brought the ferryboat to safety in a quiet inlet a ways north and ran the service between Lomark and Ferry Island with the amphibian that belonged to Bethlehem Asphalt.
Every morning and every evening the shivering asphalt men waited for him, the managers with their attaché cases and the workers with lunchboxes in hand. Most of the asphalt men were on bad-weather leave, though; once it was no longer possible to travel by regular means between Ferry Island and the shore, production had halted. Repairs and administrative work were all that went on. Piet Honing steered standing at the back of the amphibian and didn’t mind the cold — his face had that leathery texture that weathers but doesn’t wear out with the years.
In winter the inhabitants of Ferry Island, like Engel and his father, became real islanders. They did enough shopping in Lomark to last them a week, then locked themselves away in their restored isolation. The island used to be full of real anarchists, radical folk who drank potato moonshine and hunted hares with impunity, for the arm of the law wasn’t long enough to cross the water. They were notorious for smacking each other over the head at the slightest provocation. That’s all changed, though, people aren’t like that anymore. They’ve grown tame. Everyone can afford a bottle of store-bought gin, and when you see them out walking their dogs you wonder who’s been domesticating whom.
The river lapped against the winter dyke now, an expanse of water so vast it made our hometown look like Lomark-by-the-Sea. When darkness came along the drowned stretch of the Lange Nek, the streetlights would pop on and leave regular rings of light on all that hectic water bustling toward the sea.
Ferry Island had been cut loose from the rest of the world, but I was the one who felt adrift. I was outside the circle of light, missing the final construction work on the plane. Joe and Christof crossed with the amphibian, I patrolled the dyke like a nervous watchdog, looking out across the water from the winter dyke to the plant. Most of the time they stayed inside and out of sight. Wednesday perched on my shoulder. He stuck his beak in my ear.
A cold front was coming in, and before long even Piet Honing and his amphibian would be landlocked. Only the courageous would venture out onto the sea of ice then, two by two, roped together at the waist and carrying a pair of ice picks in case one of them went through. ‘Raise the water, add lots of ice and then shut the lid on it’: that’s what they say here when the wash-lands freeze over.
What I kept wondering, though, was how the plane was supposed to take off; you needed more or less the length of a football field for that, and it just wasn’t there.
The factory grounds were quiet, the bulldozers idle among the piles of gravel, the sky was sharp and clear. Finally I spotted movement on the other side. Looking through my telescope I saw Joe sliding open the doors of the shed. Christof and Engel pushed the sky-blue, wingless fuselage outside. Even knowing that the wings were coming later, it was hard to imagine the thing ever leaving the ground. For me, seeing it was like seeing the first airplane ever built. Over yonder, the pure desire to pull a fast one on gravity had materialized in the form of a long, kind of chunky box on wheels. There was a tailpiece, a propeller and an engine, and whether the thing ever left the ground or not I felt something for which I would find the right words only later, when reading about the history of cinema: the triumph of the will. Joe was the one who’d had the creative flash, Engel had stylized the idea into a sky-blue spacecraft. . and then you had Christof, who checked the oil. And me? I was the one who’d bent the ribbing into the right shape.
Wednesday polished his beak on my shoulder and I set my cart rolling.
After going home to warm up a little beside the fire, I came back. They still didn’t have the wings on it. Joe was driving the plane around the grounds with Engel and Christof running along behind. Over here on the dyke, I could almost hear their excitement.
Joe had said he needed a football field in order to take off. Now there was a plane, but still no runway. For the first time, seeing Joe driving around in circles in his watch cap and ski goggles, I began having doubts about his foresight and — let me be honest — his genius as well.
Once he’d learned how to work the rudder, which took a couple of days with a three-axle steering system, they put the wings on it. After that there wasn’t much room to manoeuvre amid the piles of asphalt; the plane was now almost twelve metres wide.
Then, sitting there on the dyke, it suddenly dawned on me — I saw at last what Joe had seen long ago: the solution to the lift-off problem. It was every bit as simple as it was stunning: Joe had been waiting for the freeze to set in — the ice was going to be his runway! It was brilliant, and I couldn’t help being amazed by his technical ingenuity. Once the plane left Ferry Island he could maybe park it somewhere else, somewhere in an abandoned shed or an underground bunker; in the presence of that great, calm soul who could plant bombs or build planes or do God knows what else without batting an eye, anything was possible. I mean, he was fifteen at the time, there was a whole world of unsettling ideas left for him to carry out with the unflappability of a bicycle repairman.
It wasn’t even so much that Joe was an unusual kid: he was a force unleashed on the world. When he was around you couldn’t help but feel a tingle of expectation — energy coagulated in his hands, he juggled the making of bombs, the racing of mopeds and the building of airplanes like a merry magician. Never had I seen anyone for whom ideas led so naturally to their own implementation, a person on whom fear and convention had such a shaky grasp. He dared to think the impossible, and noticed nothing of the disapproval going on behind his back. There were, after all, were plenty of people who didn’t like Joe, because there was too much about him that defied understanding. Most people are average, some even downright substandard; all of them, however, are extremely sensitive to the higher concentration of energy or talent in the above-average person. If they have no access to that which makes you shine, they don’t want you to have it either. They have no talent for admiration, only slavishness and resentment. They steal the light.
Regina Ratzinger is in the front room showing us her pictures. She’s tanned and skinnier, even though it’s winter. She went on holiday to Egypt on her own — which is to say, with a group of people she didn’t know, led by a couple who acted as their guides. The pictures she made of the pyramids were taken at the hottest hour of the day; the clearest thing about them is the triangular shadows. Chefren, Cheops and Mykerinos are the names she rattles off, or is it Cheops, Chefren and Mykerinos? — she can’t remember.
‘A whole stack of man-hours went into those,’ Joe says.
She tells us about a man with a turban and tobacco-colour teeth who helped her up onto a dromedary, after which she went for a knee-knocking ride in the desert. Then they had to climb back into the bus; there was so much to see, Egypt had so much to offer that you simply couldn’t keep track of it all. On the west bank of the Nile, close to Luxor, the whole group was boosted onto donkeys and they rode through all kinds of ruins and necropolises and you never had to ask directions because, as the owner said, ‘donkey knows the way’. The animals stopped on cue in front of a little shop with brand-new antiquities, stopped again beside the ice-cream vendor in the shadow of a crumbling temple, then trotted the rest of the way home with the rattled tourists holding on for dear life. Donkey knows the way!