Joe climbed down the dyke, into the washlands, with the words ‘Need to think a bit, Frankie.’ The little clouds of smoke rising up above the sea of stalks and overgrown poppies told me where he was lying. Swallows swooped over him, and insects went whining low across the land in the face of an approaching low-pressure zone.
Flagpoles with book bags on them had been hung out in front of some of the houses in the village. One more year and it would be our turn. And then? Then they would go — Joe, Christof and Engel — to some other place. To study or to work, in any case to do something that didn’t require me. I had, it seemed, become a deeply embedded anchor that would always remain in place. My horizon was blank and I tried not to desire much, like an animal or a Buddhist.
Or like Joe.
I saw Christof on his bike, cycling toward me like a madman.
‘Seen Joe?’ he asked as he pulled up.
I pointed to the field, where the little rings of smoke he produced faded into nothingness as soon as they rose above the grass. Christof leaned his bike against a post and took the barbed wire along the dyke road gingerly between thumb and forefinger. He pushed it down carefully and stepped over, first his right leg, then the left. As he walked down the slope he shouted, ‘Joe! Hey, Joe!’
A hand stuck up out of the grass.
Christof waded over to him and was soon up to his thighs in green, as though sinking slowly. A gust of wind rolled through the grass, behind me the dry leaves rustled as they blew across the road. Not so long ago they had skated down below us there and made an airplane take off, now you could occasionally see an oystercatcher disappear into the breathing sea of grass and flowers, above which swallows performed their daredevil dives. After a while Joe sat up, a little irritated maybe at being disturbed while he was thinking. He got up and walked in my direction. Christof had no more business staying down there, and followed him.
‘So what did you see, Joe?!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t be such an asshole, man, I have a right to know, I helped too, remember. .’
Joe held down the barbed wire to let Christof step over. ‘I saw her,’ he then said slowly.
Christof almost exploded.
‘And what was she doing?’
He seemed to think that nudists did something, some kind of sexual rite or something.
‘There was nothing to see,’ Joe said. ‘There was hair all over it.’
It was like someone had turned down all the sound in the world without saying anything, that’s how quiet it was. You could see Joe thinking. I was disappointed by the announcement; I couldn’t imagine much of anything specific with all that hair, but the effort taken seemed way beyond the results achieved. I had been expecting more.
‘God damn it,’ Christof said. ‘I figured as much.’
Another long vacation was on its way. One of those that slowly melts you away and leaves you to baste in your own juices. The summer holidays were always a bad time for me. There wasn’t a whole lot to do if you weren’t messing around with mopeds and pimply girls. It’s true, I spent my summers in the short trousers and the loud Hawaiian shirts Ma bought for me, but that only drew even more attention. I would rather have bundled myself all up and pulled the gray leatherette plaid up around my neck, but in the summertime that gave me a terrible rash. So instead I sat there like a bump on a log and people looked at me like I was an imbecile. That’s the first thing they think, of course, when they see someone in a wheelchair, that he’s not playing with a full deck. I stopped trying to prove the contrary long ago.
What I liked most was sitting by the river with Mahfouz, to whom I didn’t have to explain a thing. The sun glanced off the water; the light was so bright that it lit up the inside of your head and everyone could look right in.
We sat there like that often, the Egyptian and I, drifting off into the soothing narcosis of daydreams that comes over you when you stare for a long time at waves or a fire. Piet came and Piet went, a car honked as it passed, and from the willows on the shore white fluff blew out across the river, settling on the water or floating to the other side. Housewives complained when the willows gave off their fluff, sometimes there was so much that it piled up in their doorways and blew into the house as soon as it got the chance. Mahfouz’s mind was somewhere completely different, maybe he was thinking about where he came from and the strange wind that had carried him here, to these basalt blocks in the company of Frank the Arm.
Out on the river there were lots of private boats, those floating fridges that illustrate to us how general prosperity and bad taste go together like salt and pepper. Sometimes an old-fashioned saloon boat would come by too, with people on board in sporty clothes with blue or aubergine-coloured stripes. They came from another world and drifted past ours with conspicuous lightness. There was a kind of yearning in the way the people looked from their boats at the shore, just as there was a kind of yearning in the way I looked back. They often waved.
I knew that boating enthusiasts liked to wave to each other and to people on the shore. Drivers and cyclists never waved to each other, but motorcyclists did. Because of that waving, boaters and motorcyclists enjoyed some secret connection. Once in a while Mahfouz would wave back, without interrupting his musings. Sometimes he also made muffled sounds, as though agreeing with himself in some inner conversation, and when he did the plucking at his moustache grew more rigorous. I could see why Regina was in love with him — he had lustrous black hair and deep, dark eyes with lots of white around them, like the Tuaregs in National Geographic with their blue scarves that leave only their eyes uncovered.
‘In Nuweiba there was a pelican,’ Mahfouz told me once. ‘Big, white. One day he came out of the water and never went back. Maybe he’d had enough of living at sea and decided that he wanted to live among people. He ate of our meat, our bread and our fish. Tourists came who wanted to have their pictures taken with him. Sometimes we would build a fire at night and he would float close by, so he could keep an eye on us.’
At this point in the story the Arab pulled out a ragged pack of Cleopatras and patted the filter against his left thumbnail. He lit it, then remembered that I was there too. We smoked. Some smokers exhale smoke like it’s coming from a plane, a straight, gray contrail, but I’d never seen anyone smoke the way the Arab did — he smoked, how shall I put it, to vanish. He took a dollop of smoke in his mouth and let it eddy up around his face the way clouds rise to hide a mountaintop from view. Is that the way they smoked where he came from? It was something to see. He seemed to have forgotten what he was saying about the pelican, in any case he’d squatted down again and was watching the boats with his face regularly eclipsed in cloud.
After some time had passed in that way, Mahfouz started talking again, about back when the tourists had avoided his country because of the situation in Israel, and how all of them grew a lot skinnier as they waited for better days.
‘Imagine you are a sailor,’ he said, ‘and suddenly the wind is gone. Your ship just lies there in the middle of the sea and all you can do is pray for wind. . That’s how it is with the merchant, too; he tightens his belt and looks on high until Allah remembers him. We waited like seeds in the desert for rain, for better times. And our pelican waited too. But we had to eat first. After all, he had the whole sea full of fish, no? But then he stopped waiting until he got something, and started stealing.’
Mahfouz looked at me sternly.
‘Dependency turns you into a thief. He had become an evil old thief. We chased him away but he kept coming back, maybe he had forgotten how to fish. One evening he committed a crime for which Allah punished him. Monsef Adel Aziz was roasting a chicken on the beach, and the pelican tore the chicken from the spit and swallowed it in one gulp. One hour later he was dead.’