He came here to give a speech, Anton Mussert, born beside the big river just like us. He was there for us, for the shopkeeper and the market gardener still reeling from the Crisis, who never got a penny of government support. He was a former head engineer with the Utrecht Province Department of Roads and Waterways, a man of the delta. We, who wanted nothing but a return to the old certainties, applauded loudest for the man who promised to restore Faith in God, Allegiance to People and Fatherland and the Love of Work. The meeting was held in the Ferry House down by the river. It was a winter evening, and they arrived from Utrecht in a couple of cars, they drove there along the Lange Nek. It was a small army of men in hats and long overcoats who climbed out and lined up beside the entrance, in the weak light shed by the lamp above the door. As though on cue they raised their right arms in the fascist salute and shouted a powerful ‘Hou Zee!’ You could see their breath steaming, when they went into the Ferry House they were silent and disciplined.
The party was doing us a great honour with the Leader’s visit. More than two hundred people had gathered in the pine-panelled Peace Hall, they came from far and wide to hear him speak. Mussert was a round man, actually kind of short. I guess maybe we felt a little disappointed at first when we saw this man whose dark hair had receded to the back of his head, leaving only a tuft at the forehead that he combed to a jaunty quiff. But we were so mistaken! A voice shouted, ‘The Leader!’ Then Mussert marched to the front out of a dark cloud of storm troopers and looked us over with his strikingly pale eyes. His body had moulded itself to the task history had laid on him: his chin jutting, his shoulders thrown back, like the first runner to cross the finish. When he raised his right arm, as though driven by a powerful spring, he kindled awe and pride in us, and we rose as one to return his salute. That is how we stood, facing each other. Then his arm dropped, pushing us as it were back into our seats, and he administered the following jolt of electricity.
‘Brothers of our nation!’
We shivered with an obedient kind of pleasure, with warmth and reverence. His right eye spit fire, but the rational left eye weighed each word that crossed his thin lips. In unbending earnest he spoke to us about the degeneration of the modern age. About the Red Menace. About the farcical regime of the anti-revolutionary Colijn.
‘We see the continuing decline of trade and industry, terrorization by an army of presumptuous civil servants, and impoverishment. We shall free the people from the yoke of the political parties! The farmers will pursue their calling again as of old; workers from high to low, from director to errand boy, will once again come to realize that they have a task to fulfil in harmony on behalf of their people! A new prosperity shall be established; strict, powerful, but loving. . Our able-bodied folk will defend our soil, our fatherland, our empire with all of the strength at our command, against all those who would mar the lustre of our independence or our territory!’
This was no political will-o’-the-wisp, not the way his opponents said, here stood a statesman. He was the one we would follow, he was the right man to lead us out of the Crisis to better days. Even the hearts of the doubters went out to him. His voice soared, the volume was raised.
‘The Netherlands shall be independent of all foreign powers, a bulwark of peace, prepared to defend itself against all attackers, prepared to help build a federation of European states between whom confidence has been restored, who will prove a worthy instrument for the preservation of European peace and European culture!’
Our applause rained down on him. He was visibly pleased to be the object of our cheers. He spoke for an hour, then someone else came up to instruct us in how we ourselves could contribute to the restoration of our nation. After that we sang ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’ and the national anthem, and then it was over. Buzzing with new hope we left the Peace Hall. Many of us bought copies of Volk en Vaderland. Far away, on the dyke, the red tail lights of Mussert’s convoy disappeared into the night.
For Papa Africa, all the world’s rivers were the same. They may have had different names, but all fed one and the same current. The Nile was the only river on earth, and at some point all the earth’s waters flowed past his father’s shipyard in Kom Ombo.
‘He doesn’t really think this is the Nile, does he?’ Engel asked.
‘Rhine, Nile, same-same,’ Joe imitated his stepfather.
‘If you look at it philosophically, I guess,’ Engel said.
‘Didn’t he ever have geography at school?’ Christof asked.
‘He can’t point to Cairo in the atlas. He doesn’t know exactly where he is right now. And I don’t think he cares much, really.’
Silent with incomprehension, we looked at the phenomenon that was Papa Africa, pencil tucked behind his ear, plucking at his moustache as he walked the yard. The boat’s hull had now been painted red right up to the waterline, the rest was white. The mast still had to be raised and he was waiting for the sail, which Regina was sewing from stretches of canvas. The maiden voyage would be held in late August, and Regina wanted to throw a party at the wharf that day. She had big plans; she wasn’t going to let this chance for attention and admiration go to waste.
The day itself was coming up fast, but I had a bad feeling about the whole thing. After that weekend Joe, Engel and Christof would be leaving, classes started in September and I would remain behind in the realm of the dead. With a briquette press. I had truly been giving that thing hell, pressing far more briquettes than the drying racks could hold.
‘With so many of them the price will go down,’ Pa said.
Ma heard him say that. She pursed her lips, her arms folded across her chest.
‘Twenty-five is what I’ll give him from now on,’ Pa said, apologetic but determined. ‘Twenty-five is still a good price. When you’ve got overproduction, the price goes down, that’s the way it is everywhere.’
‘You have to keep your word,’ Ma said.
‘Well then he shouldn’t make so many of them. If you don’t have a lot of something you pay more for it, and if you’ve got a lot you pay less. Ask anyone.’
‘He’s your son.’
‘He just spends it all at Waanders’ anyway.’
Whatever the case, from that day on I got twenty-five for fifty briquettes and Ma made up the difference from her housekeeping money. And indeed, most of it I brought to Waanders’. Waanders’ roadhouse had the advantage of being along the national highway, outside the village, which made a difference in both clientele and atmosphere. It was better than the Sun, where the mood was often, how shall I put it, testy, the sleeping dogs there sometimes woke up and busted right out of the kennel. The Little Red Rooster, on the other hand, was more like a bingo parlour for old people, you only went there for wedding parties or to get in out of the rain. Waanders’ was the best. Trucks and cars stopped there with people I’d never seen before, which gave me hope, the way a certain kind of woman derives hope from an influx of enemy soldiers.
An example.
‘What will it be for the gentlemen?’ the barwoman asks a truck driver who comes in spreading the smell of warm asphalt.
He has his little boy with him, his son who’s allowed to ride along in the cab today.
‘What do you want?’ the man asks the boy in a voice you wouldn’t expect from him. He’s wearing mules with white socks.