‘Hey, Frankie, take it easy, man!’
When they laughed, it was in annoyance at the struggle against what was always an untimely end to all things good and easy.
It was a bad winter for Mahfouz. He’d taken on the tint of unvarnished garden furniture. ‘It’s my blood,’ he complained. ‘It’s not good.’
He was wearing three sweaters and a ski jacket and had a wool cap pulled down far over his ears. All you could see was his moustache and a pair of rheumy eyes.
He wasn’t the only one who’d been feeling poorly. Christof’s grandmother had died, even though she must have expected to see the daffodils come up one last time. But March arrived too late for her, and she remained behind in February. February is a real bastard.
The day they put old Louise Maandag in the ground the heating in the church was turned up high; the east wind cut through your clothes like a scythe. The people actually kept their coats on inside to save up a little heat for the procession to the grave. The church was filled to the rafters. A dead Maandag always receives a lot of attention, because so many people are dependent on them in one way or another. Nieuwenhuis gave it everything he had, he sprinkled his water and swayed his incense with the holiest of holies he had in him.
I was parked in the aisle, Joe was sitting beside me at the inside end of the pew. Beside him was Engel, his legs crossed in godless elegance. Two rows up ahead I saw the blond curls belonging to P.J., who was sitting ridiculously close to Joop Koeksnijder. Old Look-at-how-cool-I-am Koeksnijder, finished school two years ago and the proud owner of a Volkswagen Golf. Outside you could hear a truck backing up; my eyes traced the contours of P.J.’s shoulders. She had the broad, straight shoulders of a swimmer.
Sometimes the sight of her would suddenly enrage me. I’d never had that with Harriët Galma or Ineke de Boer, who had been the very first in our class to bear fruit and already went bowed beneath their weight. Sometimes I stared at P.J. for the longest time, just to see whether there was something not quite right there, something ugly or weird to make it hurt less, and sometimes I drove my cart along right behind her to see if she stank. But she didn’t stink. Then I would grow furious and feel like crushing something. But the angry flame always leapt to the inside.
Up at the front of the church, Nieuwenhuis was blaring, ‘And when You call us to You, we bow to Your majesty!’
Joe leaned over to me.
‘So you finally get around to being dead and you have to god-damn bow all over again!’
He leaned back in the pew, then thought better of it.
‘If He’d wanted us to do so much bowing, why didn’t He make us with a hinge at the back?’
I burst out laughing. A lot of people looked around, I simulated a spasm. Joe sat there, keeping a straight face. Christof stood up stiffly from a pew at the front and walked to the coffin with his grandmother in it. A couple of nieces and nephews followed him, they all put a rose on the lid. Men came to lift the coffin onto their shoulders and carry it up the aisle and outside, and with that the whole thing was pretty much over. The visitors crowded out behind the bearers. Piet Honing gave me a friendly nod.
It was hard for me, having Piet be so nice all the time. I could never have been that nice back, simply because I didn’t have enough of it in me. It would always be a transaction in which I found myself short of change, and that left me feeling guilty.
I was the last in line and rolled down the little ramp at the side entrance. There were a few people standing around out there, lighting cigarettes and commenting on the service, the rest were walking behind the hearse. We were bathed in the light of a limitless blue sky. I watched the tail of the procession disappear and had to take a shit. I went home.
There was no one out on the street, and the shops, usually filled at that hour with housewives with little children, were empty. I turned right on Poolseweg and heard footsteps behind me. Joe passed me, he was running toward his house. He waggled his eyebrows at me as he went by. At the bottom of Poolseweg he suddenly stopped and turned around.
‘Hey, Frankie, how much do you weigh anyway?’ he asked when I got up to him.
A year earlier I had weighed a little over fifty kilos, and I hadn’t put on much weight since. I held up five fingers and saw his lips moving along with his thoughts. He seemed to be calculating something.
‘Fifty kilos, right?’ he said. ‘How much difference can it make? You feel like taking a little spin in the plane?’
My eyes grew big in horror. And I still had to shit real bad. It made my stomach hurt.
‘Not a long ride,’ Joe said. ‘Just a little spin, to get the feel of it.’
Between that moment on Poolseweg and the moment when he climbed into the cockpit in front of me, all swaddled up like a samurai, a little more than sixty minutes went by. I could have used each of them to change my mind. Like when he took me home first, where sunlight fell through the windows like fire, and stood at the back window for a while looking out at the dishevelled General Cemetery where his father was buried — all that time I could have said no.
I hoisted myself out of the cart and grabbed the edge of the table. Like a drugged chimp with one short leg I lumbered across the room, holding onto chairs, tables and cabinets. Joe turned around and looked at me in dumb amazement.
‘Hey, man, you can walk?’
If walking was what you’d call it. I crossed from the dresser to the toilet door and disappeared behind. I pulled the door closed hard after me and sat down on the pot with my trousers still fastened. I had to go so bad that I broke out in a sweat. I clenched my teeth and wormed my way madly out of my trousers while my intestines did their best to rid themselves of their freight. Sometimes you have to go so bad and you can still keep it up for a long time, but as soon as you get close to a toilet you need superhuman willpower to keep it all in. It seems like intestines know when there’s a toilet around.
Just in time. I couldn’t do anything to muffle the dull, heavy farts.
‘Well, well!’ Joe said from the other side of the door.
That door was nothing more than a framework of slats with lily-covered wallpaper, so the voice of my intestines was as clear to him as it was to me. A second wave came rolling out.
‘Man-oh-man!’
I felt like dying. Just like with Engel and that urinal. Maybe that’s the way women feel at the gynaecologist’s, butt up in the air and legs wide while a cold ice-cream scoop grubs around inside them.
When I came back into the room, I didn’t look at him. The light lifted the ramshackle objects in my house and examined them from all sides — wear, poverty and age had nowhere to hide. I gimped my way over to the dresser beside the bed to wrap myself up for the flight.
‘If I had a dog that smelled like that,’ Joe muttered, ‘I’d take it out and shoot it.’
We went to his house to fetch a bike and, for better or worse, lugged my suddenly-six-times bulkier corpus onto the baggage carrier.
‘OK,’ Joe panted, ‘and now don’t move.’
He seized the handlebars and tossed his left leg over the crossbar. Standing with his right foot on the pedal he used his full weight to get us rolling. At the end of the street Joe stood on the pedals and accelerated, but made it only three-quarters of the way up the long slope to the dyke before he had to hop off. I almost flew off the baggage carrier.