‘The situation was explained to me by this gentleman. I’ve contacted the river police and reported missing a wooden sailboat, approximately six metres long, in the colours red and white. Is that correct?’
Regina and India nodded.
‘Good,’ Manting went on, ‘and on board is a certain Mr. .’
‘Mahfouz,’ India said promptly, ‘Mahfouz Husseini.’
‘Mr Husseini. And where is Mr Husseini from, if I may ask?’
‘He’s Egyptian.’
‘Does he speak Dutch?’
‘He understands it better than he speaks it.’
‘And did he provide any information concerning his destination, leave anything behind. .?’
Regina opened her mouth, her breathing came in fits and starts.
‘Mahfouz was just trying out his boat,’ she said. ‘That’s all. A little jaunt. Up and back, no more than that. So where is he now?’
She poked her finger accusingly at Manting.
‘So where is he now?’
‘My colleagues are looking for him, Mrs Ratzinger, at this point there’s nothing else we. .’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Now don’t get worked up, ma’am, my colleagues are combing the river for him right now.’
At those words something snapped. Regina turned and walked away, weeping for the first time that day, with the howling ups and downs of a chainsaw. With her eyes, Kathleen Eilander heaped flaming reproach on Sergeant Manting for his lack of tact and went after her. Manting climbed into the cruiser and backed away from the landing. As he made the turn, his headlights swept over a shape down at the waterfront. Joe.
That was how the day ended, with Regina choking on her tears as she leaned against the Bethlehem Asphalt amphibian and Joe coming up the boat ramp and stopping beside the table that still held enough food to sate Tamerlane’s hordes. He stuck a soggy rooster-biscuit in his mouth.
‘Donkey knows the way,’ he said quietly. ‘Donkey knows the way.’
October came and Papa Africa still hadn’t returned. In Regina Ratzinger’s eyes there smouldered a plaint against a world in which people lose the thing they love most. She became a woman people looked past in order not to have to see that.
Her first husband had a grave she could visit, the second hadn’t even left behind a body to which she could say goodbye. Once the sun had risen from the morning mist and was climbing quickly in pale and brighter light, Regina would walk along the Lange Nek to the river. There where the ship was launched she stood like the statue of the sailor’s wife looking out to sea. She lived with one foot in hope and the other in sorrow, without being able to give in fully to either of them. The sound of the telephone ringing was never the same to her again.
When you saw her standing there, your heart shrivelled like an old apple. You prayed with her that the drab dragon’s wing would come sailing around the bend any moment. That Papa Africa would moor his boat and say, ‘I am sorry, it was more far, and the wind was low.’
And Regina stank. Oh Jesus, she stank with sorrow. India did her best to care for her, but to provide care you need someone who wants to be cared for. Regina might as well have moved to a cave in a barren mountain range, she had reached a degree of self-denial that would have made saintly Anthony the Anchorite shake his head in pity. She ate only the minimum needed to keep the organism going, and she fell silent. After school India would cook copious meals, but her mother only scratched at the edges of her plate. Sounds of domestic tension were heard, of something that could break any moment.
They were completely overspent and condemned to each other. Sometimes, for no real reason, Regina would summon up childhood memories and then, for a moment, you might have thought you were seeing a mother and daughter living together on an even keel.
After his stepfather disappeared, Joe waited two weeks before leaving for the art academy; he had tried to comfort his mother. ‘Maybe he just sailed back to where he came from,’ he suggested, ‘out of homesickness.’ Regina’s resistance to that idea was bitter. To Joe she was an abandoned woman, to herself a widow all over again. She wouldn’t let anyone console her or change her mind; Joe had no reason to stay any longer. He put on his father’s old army rucksack and went to Engel, who had found a room in a working-class neighbourhood in Enschede. Engel had told him there was always room for him on the sofa. Joe left on the 6.45 bus, and I went with him to the station. He didn’t say much, nothing really. We were headed for an important moment in our friendship, which would reach its conclusion with Joe waving to me through the back window of the bus and me rolling home with a huge lump in my throat, convinced that an epoch was drawing to a close.
Somewhere in November, Joe came back to Lomark. At least, that was when I suddenly saw him standing at my window, grinning from ear to ear. I waved to him, he came in trailing cold air. He looked bigger, standing there in my room with his heavy army coat and his rain-drenched hair. I was happy as a pup to see him. I had also run out of cigarettes, and now he could roll me a bunch. He hung his coat over the chair and sat down across from me.
How’s it going? I wrote on my notepad, and he shook his head.
‘It was about time for me to come home.’
Things were not going well, his mother and India were both on the verge of exhaustion. I looked at him as he rolled my cigarettes and dropped them in the empty mustard pot. His hair was longer, but that wasn’t what gave me the feeling something had changed. I squinted hard and tried to take him in carefully, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Maybe I just wasn’t used to him anymore.
‘I was in Amsterdam for two weeks,’ he said.
He licked the cigarette paper and rolled it into place.
‘With P.J.’
I looked the other way. Jealousy’s as visible as a solar eclipse.
‘She’s got something going with a writer. A real nutcase.’
Joe gave me a rundown of the last few months, starting at the moment he’d left that morning on the bus.
They were going to be fellow artists there in Enschede, Engel and he. They were going to show people a thing or two. But one day in late autumn, Joe and his classmates went on an excursion to the Van Gogh Museum. During the ten minutes he stood there, the queue advanced only a few metres. Right in front of them was a busload of Japanese tourists, behind them a group of disgruntled day-trippers from Groningen who were doing their best to keep spirits high. Joe looked around. His feet were cold. Fuck this, he thought suddenly, stepped out of line without a word and disappeared in the direction of Museum Square.
And there he stood, far from home and with no reason to go back. He took a deep breath, looked around and decided to stay in Amsterdam for a while and see how things worked out.
Around dinnertime he started thinking about a place to stay. He knew only one person in the whole city: P.J. Eilander. He phoned P.J.’s mother, who gave him her daughter’s address on Tolstraat, just above a coffee shop. The coffee shop was called Babylon, if she remembered rightly.
Joe took the tram. He experienced giddying happiness — no one knew where he was, life could go any which way, there were as many possibilities as combinations on a fruit machine and every direction he chose was the right one, because it was time for the machine to pay out.
P.J. wasn’t home. Joe waited in Babylon Coffee Shop, sitting by the window where he might see her come by. Meanwhile, he had all the time in the world to feast his eyes on the economics of soft drugs. In Lomark it had been sport for a while to smoke a few quick joints and then cross the border into Germany — to come back with stories of a different planet. That was just for laughs, but smoking here was serious business. The users seemed to avoid daylight as much as possible, and applied themselves with cultish dedication to the rolling and routine firing up of huge bombers. It was truly something to see. A native from the jungle who was dropped here and saw this for the first time would think he was observing an official religious rite.