Right before the fence Joe brought the plane to a halt.
The landing had taken an alarming number of metres more than liftoff.
When he killed the engine, Joe’s body relaxed. The silence came pouring into my ears.
Two metres in front of us, Dirty Rinus was leaning against the fence, a rollup dangling from his lips and his index finger raised in minimalist greeting. Joe turned to me and gave me a purple-lipped grin.
‘That was a tight one,’ he said.
The edges of his ski goggles were rimmed with ice.
Things are looking up. The washlands are almost dry, the willows bend over the pools left behind. Their lower branches are hung with flotsam, between them the coots paddle in search of nesting material. At dusk the bats come swarming out and at night, when you hear the first frogs, you know the weather will be getting better soon. Mahfouz could use some spring sun as well. Sometimes we sit on the quay together, soaking up a little warmth while he scans the sky to see what all that trumpeting could be about.
‘Nile goose,’ he says.
Two Egyptian geese go squabbling low overhead. That’s late March. Then comes April and the fist you made against winter unclenches. But too soon. In April the wind starts blowing like you’d forgotten it could ever blow. Your house shrinks beneath the hammering. Out on the street people shout to each other, ‘Weird, this wind, huh?!’, meaning that it crawls into the cracks in your brain and drives you raving mad. It goes around yanking liked a spoiled kid on whatever it finds. You thought everything was battened down but the whole world is flapping and moaning. Including, of course, shutters, gutters and decorative elements. The wind changes pitch and volume all the time and you can hear church bells and children’s voices in it. It feels to me like it’s coming straight off the Russian tundra, a filthy east wind that humps against the back of my house and makes it impossible for me to study.
The geography book I’ve buried my nose in speaks of permafrost and tundra landscapes (‘agriculturally, such soils are of no significance’) that remain eternally frozen. Sometimes to a depth of hundreds of metres. Finals are in May, I have a 7.8 average for my exams but I’ve still got the jitters. I long for the moment when it’s all over — it’s not the thought of it but the longing that’s so nice, that every day brings you closer to the moment when you stand on the banks and watch Jordan calmly roll by. My fervent longing is one I share with twenty others who, at this same moment, are all struggling with extracts, workbooks and low bacteriological activity in the tundra. We long collectively for thereafter. But when all this is behind us they will enter the promised land, and I will remain behind. I’m very much aware of that.
When the wind finally dies down it starts raining so hard that the streets foam. That goes on for days. But one morning you wake up with the feeling that something is missing — the noise is gone! The rain has stopped and the wind has blown over. Somewhere a wood pigeon is cooing. The branches outside are motionless, they drip and glimmer in the early sunlight. You hear jackdaws happily tumbling through the sky above the cemetery.
That is late April.
From down by the river comes the sound of handiwork.
I know now that it was a keel beam Joe and I saw Mahfouz dragging along the day we flew over the river. He’s building a boat.
‘It’s a felucca,’ says Mahfouz, who’s too busy to talk much these days.
Joe says the boat symbolizes the love between Mahfouz and his mother. Other people have their own song, they have a boat. The first time they met, Mahfouz gave her a model boat, a felucca, which is now on the windowsill in her bedroom.
They have something with boats, those two. After they got married in Cairo they took a short cruise on the Nile. One night they stood on deck and looked up at an uncommonly clear sky full of stars, and that was when Regina had a vision. She saw a wooden ship being driven by bent-backed rowers; she and Mahfouz lay on a bed of pillows on the afterdeck while girls in white stroked the air above them with ostrich-feather fans. He was a prince of great beauty, she a lady from the highest ranks of society. Regina’s eyes shone with tears when the vision faded. ‘We’ve done this before, Mahfouz,’ she’d said. ‘This isn’t our first life together.’
Joe shakes his head. ‘She married my father as a Hindu princess and Mahfouz as Nefertiti. She’s the whole history of the world rolled into one.’
At the spot where the Demsté shipyard once stood — the firm went bankrupt in 1932, but when the water’s low you can see what’s left of the slips — Mahfouz has built a framework of planks in the form of a ship. It’s not very long, six metres or so, and it’s shaped differently from what you usually see around here. The frame is only the rough form of what the boat will be, but it looks broader than our sailboats. The front and back curve up only slightly, more like a cargo ship than a yacht. Here and there along the quay are sawhorses with planks laid across them, and weights to slowly bend the wood into shape.
Regina bikes down along the Lange Nek to bring Mahfouz tea, bread and cigarettes. She devours him with her eyes, her Nubian. The colour that our winter wiped from his face is gradually coming back. He’s building her a flagship, she lights his cigarettes and pours him tea with enough sugar in it to knock the enamel off your teeth. Reluctantly he lays aside his plane and sits down beside her. From her bag she produces sandwiches wrapped in silver foil. Ferryboat passengers stop and look at the shipyard’s small-scale resurrection. Mahfouz works amid the paintless sloops on their trailers with flat tyres and the green river buoys twice a man’s height, all waiting to be hauled away by Hermans & Sons. He works hard, he wants to launch the boat this very summer. The steam box he’s built to bend the stubborn rib beams consists of a length of pipe; he hangs the rib in the pipe, boils water on a small fire under it, and the steam disappears into the pipe and softens the wood.
‘Wow,’ Joe says as we watch him from the top of the landing, ‘he’s pretty good.’
‘He could make a living at that,’ Christof says.
Engel is thinking about it.
‘If it was me I’d paint it blue.’
In response to a mysterious kind of magnetism, Christof and I turn our heads at the same moment in the direction of Lomark and see P.J. coming along the Lange Nek. That kindles a flame in the two of us, but the company she’s in creates a cold counter-current: Joop Koeksnijder.
‘Dirty Nazi,’ Christof hisses.
That never dies out. Of course Look-at-how-cool-I-am Koeksnijder isn’t a Nazi, but his grandfather was, and that’s still the first thing that comes to mind when you see his grandson, especially when he’s with P.J. Eilander. The prick. We hate Jopie with a hatred fed by intense envy. And we hate that even more. He possesses the object of our dreams — look, she gives him a shove and he hops away, you can feel their obsession with each other all the way over here. Like disgruntled old men, we turn back to Mahfouz and his boat.
It takes forever for P.J. and Jopie to get six feet away from us, where they stop to view the activity down in the old shipyard. Koeksnijder nods to us, Engel and Joe return his greeting.