‘He’s building a boat,’ I hear P.J. say in amazement.
Her Afrikaans has worn away to a faint accent.
‘Enough of those around, I’d say,’ Koeksnijder says.
I don’t look at P.J., because she can read my thoughts this way too.
‘Joe,’ she asks, ‘isn’t that your mother’s husband? The man from Egypt?’
Joe nods.
‘Papa Africa,’ he says, and that really makes her laugh.
Koeksnijder moves behind her and a little to one side, in the attitude of a man protecting something.
‘Papa Africa,’ P.J. repeats. ‘So what does that make me?’
‘The daughter of the man who hurt me last week. Two cavities.’
Koeksnijder lays a hand on P.J.’s lower back, the way impatient husbands do on Saturday afternoon as they propel their wives past the shop windows.
‘We’re going across the river,’ P.J. announces. ‘Bye-bye!’
Christof mumbles something dull, Engel says, ‘Good luck with your finals.’
The gates of the ferry close behind them, we watch them go.
‘She likes you,’ Engel says to Joe.
‘You’re the one who deals with the women around here,’ Joe says. ‘I’ll stick to things that run on petrol.’
Engel, accustomed by now to his own electrifying effect on girls, shakes his head in disbelief.
‘She never looked at me even once. .’
In preparation for their lives to come, Joe, Engel and Christof attend the orientation day for higher education. Joe comes home from the polytechnic looking disappointed.
‘Worthless,’ he says, ‘I could teach myself that just as easily. That place smells of nothing.’
It’s only when he goes along with Engel to the art academy, just for a lark, that he finds what he wants. The Applied Arts section has exactly what he was looking for: lathes and CO2 welders. The studio is full of mysterious constructions in various stages of development, and the walls are hung with the most minute working drawings.
‘The whole place smells like machine oil,’ he says.
Only then do I realize that his comment about the odour of nothingness at the polytechnic was meant literally. He follows his nose, and that’s new to me.
Engel signs up for a major in illustration, Joe for the applied arts. In order to be admitted, they have to present work that demonstrates both their talent and their motivation. Engel shows up with a portfolio full of work that qualifies him immediately, Engel is a natural born artist if ever there was one. I’ve never thought of Joe as an artist, though, and as far as I know he never has either. He could just as easily become an instrument maker or a technical engineer. But although he admires engineers for giving the world its motor skills, when he thinks about it he finds himself better suited to a freer curriculum.
On the day of the entrance exam he unbolts the wings of his plane and lashes the whole thing onto a trailer. Dirty Rinus drives him to the academy; when they go in the porter says, ‘You’re not allowed to smoke in here, sir,’ effectively banishing the little farmer out of doors for the rest of the morning. Joe rolls the fuselage into the building and installs it in the room where the evaluation will be taking place. Once the wings are back on it, all the space is taken up. And does it really work? a professor asks. Joe climbs in and starts the engine. A tornado tears through the classroom. He’s accepted.
*
But let’s go, time is running short, next Monday will see the start of the big test to show who’s ready for the world and who isn’t.
There’s cruelty in the fact that the exams take place on the loveliest day of the year. The fields are groaning with vigour, trees unfurl their leaves with the pleasure of a person stretching his limbs. Above it all shines a tingling spring sun that urges everything on to more, while we sit row by row in the assembly hall and have no part in it. We shuffle our feet restlessly, cough faintly and chew on government-issue biros. Cursed be the first to finish and turn in his exam with serene superiority. Cursed too the man on rubber soles who sneaks along the aisles. And completely cursed be P.J., with whom I share the same electives, leaving my mind eclipsed sevenfold by things other than anaerobic dissimilation and the pseudopodia of amoebae. Shame on her for the lustiness of such a body. It emits signals of nothing but plenty. I ogle the white flesh of her rounded upper arms like a starving cannibal, and feel little and evil at the deregulating message of her hips as she leaves the room while most of us are still hard at work. A few weeks later I will look first under the letter E on the list of candidates and see that she has passed with a 9 for biology, and nothing lower than an 8 for the other subjects. I myself prove to be a solid 7.8 man, but let me blame that on her presence.
Joe and Engel chose maths, chemistry and physics, which to me is like decoding a message from another planet. The only one who chose two full years of economics was Christof — in order, I believe, to learn the tenets of the entrepreneurship in store for him by birth.
All three of them pass their exams too, but Joe forbids his mother to hang out the book bag and flag. Even Quincy Hansen passes at last, albeit only after resits in Dutch and English.
And so you’ve finished school, and then this happens: ‘It’s a solution,’ Pa says, ‘a solution.’
‘We’ve talked about it a lot,’ says Ma. ‘If it doesn’t work out, we’ll think of something else.’
‘Let him try it first. There’s no harm in having to do something. You think we used to be able to do whatever we liked? Working hard every day, and you didn’t ask yourself whether you liked it: you did as you were told.’
‘Frankie, you don’t have to do anything. It’s a start.’
‘A solution is what it is! Just the thing for him. The best for everyone.’
‘But don’t you go thinking. .’
‘He knows that already.’
‘That we want to make money off it, all we want is for you to be able to stand on your own two feet. When we’re not around anymore.’
‘Is he asleep?’
‘From all that studying, sure, the boy’s worn out.’
‘He never misses a night at Waanders’ though. If he can do that, he can work too. I’m telling you, it’s a solution.’
Pa removed the plastic tarp from the pile in the garden and stood there looking at it for a while. It resembled nothing so much as a tangled mountain of pickup sticks, and I saw doubt creep into his movements. He pulled on a few loose ends and leaned a couple of parts up against my house. He avoided looking inside, he knew I was peering at him from the shadows. One hour later he had the pile sorted out: bars with bars and grids with grids. These he used to build a scaffolding against the side of the house. Left over now was a washing machine and what I knew by then was a press for making briquettes. That machine was to be the start of my career as a briquette presser. Paper briquettes, for the fireplace.
Here’s how Pa figured it: I would go door to door collecting old newspapers, and because I was a charitable cause in and of myself, people would be pleased to help out and we would have loads of paper from which to press briquettes.
The garden had now become a workshop. The paper was rinsed and pulverized in the washing machine, after which I scooped it into the press. On the side of the press was a handle I used to press the metal lid down onto the paper pulp, squeezing the water out of it. Then I laid the moist briquettes on the scaffolding against the wall. Pa would take the dried lumps to the wrecking yard, where he would sell them to customers in wintertime, or use them to heat the canteen, don’t ask me. ‘I tell you, it’s a solution. .’