He dug into the tobacco and pulled out a honey-coloured wisp. I scratched my chin and tried to imagine the route, but Europe’s outer boundaries were fairly vague in my mind.
‘Imagine it, all the way past Portugal to Gibraltar, it’s possible! If Thor Heyerdahl could cross the Atlantic on a papyrus raft, why not Papa Africa in a felucca all the way to Egypt? He was a good sailor, that’s for sure, and if you had a little luck with the weather, why not?’
I nodded, despite all my petty objections.
‘Think of all the things he must have seen once he was past Gibraltar. . Algiers, Tripoli, Tobruk, and then you turn right past Alexandria and sail straight into Egypt. I could see him doing that, really.’
Joe needed that faith, it was as hard for him to accept the loss of his stepfather as it was for his mother. But where she submerged herself in gray mourning, he created the heroics of an odyssey. He had thought the whole thing through, he seemed capable to me of making the journey himself just to prove that it could be done. And preposterous or not, it cheered me up, the possibility of a happy ending. If Joe thought it was possible, who was I to say it wasn’t? He was the can-do man. But if Papa Africa truly had tried to sail back, there was one thing Joe hadn’t mentioned.
Why? I wrote.
‘You remember her hiding his passport?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘There were other things, too,’ Joe said. ‘One incident I remember was after Ramadan, right before Christmas last year. Maybe it had nothing to do with it, I don’t know, but I’ve never forgotten it in any case. You know Papa Africa never ate pork, he seriously thought it would kill him, or at least give him hives. Things like that were haram. He had lots of things like that; if India had been his daughter, for example, he would have had her circumcised. Or he believed that the left hand belonged to the Devil, so you should never eat with it, because that was haram too. They used to argue about things like that, or at least my mother did, he never argued back. He was too calm for that, you remember how he was. “She has a hot head,” he would say, and leave it at that. The day before Christmas, though, my mother made lamb meatballs for dinner. The next day, on Christmas Day, she asked him how he was feeling. Fine, he said, why did she ask? You don’t feel sick or anything, she asked, no different than usual? He shook his head no, everything was fine. Then she hit him with it: “Because yesterday you ate pork. Not lamb, pork. You see, it doesn’t give you hives! Allah didn’t punish you!” And she went on like that, while we just sat there stunned.’
Joe licked the gummed edge on the final cigarette and wormed it into the mustard jar along with the others.
‘I mean, go figure. India was furious with her, but he didn’t say a word. Talk about a fucked-up Christmas.’
That Joe had come back to Lomark to stay was something I realized only in late November, when he found a job as a hod carrier. Every weekday morning at six he would be freezing his butt down off at the dyke, where the van came by to pick him up along with a couple of other guys. They took the back roads into Germany, where they worked on the construction of new apartment complexes and industrial estates. Illegal cross-border labour was nothing new, it had existed for centuries on both sides. Through a complex network of contractors and subcontractors, construction workers were funnelled through to Germany, where no taxes or social premiums had to be paid for them. They received their wages by the week and it was their tough luck if they fell from a scaffolding or if a U-beam landed on their foot. Joe had seen a man who had gone into a coma after being hit on the head by a concrete element that was swinging from a crane. His buddy went to the office to complain, but they told him it was the man’s own fault, ‘Man soll aufpassen an der Baustelle,’ et cetera, and the friend had grabbed the contractor and started strangling him with his own necktie. Stuff like that.
At the end of the week the Gastarbeiter drank potato schnapps in the van, went out to dinner at a dingy, steamy restaurant with gutbürgerliche Küche, and came home pissed as newts. When the frost settled in the work stopped, and that was the end of Joe’s construction career; when the new year came he got a job at Bethlehem.
He began driving bulldozers.
Now that the Ratzinger family had handed over a son to the asphalt plant as well, you might think they had become naturalized. But Lomark doesn’t open its arms that easily, things like that take generations around here. And even then. . But Joe was back on the grounds where he’d once built an airplane, working this time for Christof’s father, Egon Maandag. Production was still on hold because of the high water, but foreman Graad Huisman taught Joe what he needed to know. He received bulldozing lessons. Sometimes at coffee break Huisman would suddenly start weeping. The maintenance men sitting around the canteen didn’t even bat an eye, Joe said; since he’d been diagnosed with cancer of the knee, Huisman cried almost every day. The canteen smelled of oranges and tobacco smoke.
Joe was now one of the men in orange overalls, on the grounds themselves he had to wear a white hard hat. It had never occurred to me that someday he would have to work for a living like everyone else. When the water went down he walked to work; sometimes his mother walked with him, on her way to the river to see if Papa Africa had come back yet. They would say goodbye at the gates, Joe with lunchbox in hand and a lump in his coat pocket where he kept an apple or an orange. The day crew would gather in the canteen to run through the production schedules, then they all went to their posts. Joe climbed into the cab of the Liebherr, slid his butt back and forth in the seat until he was comfortable, then started the engine. The machine coughed thick, black smoke, Joe revelled in the way the engine throbbed. The heating and the radio he always turned all the way up. Radio, Joe said, is the opiate of the working man.
The grounds were dotted with hills of sand and gravel that had been brought in by barge. In accordance with the operator’s directions, it was Joe’s job to continually fill the dosers: huge, partitioned hoppers that held the ingredients for the asphalt. He drove back and forth between the dosers and the piles of minerals, which he bit off in chunks. From the dosers the material went by conveyor belt into the bowels of the asphalt machine.
Lunch was at twelve-thirty.
‘What’s up?’
‘Aw, nothing.’
‘Got in late last night, I guess.’
‘No, not this time either.’
‘Oh. So what else is up?’
‘Aw, nothing much.’
And so spring came. But east wind and spring storms came as well, to punish those who had rejoiced too soon. The trees in the cemetery drummed their wooden fingers against the back of my house. The windows were steamed, I read in the piles of newspapers that the E981 would almost definitely bypass Lomark completely. The municipal newsletter said that a committee had been set up to protest against the decision. The members feared that the village would be caught between the two transport arterials into Germany: the river on one side and the E981 on the other, especially if Lomark had no exit of its own. That was crucial. The only way to reach us then would be to get off at Westerveld and drive along the dyke to Lomark. It was a monstrous plan.
Signs appeared along the national highway in the pastures of farmers who sympathized with the protesters. LET LOMARK BREATHE was the most poetic one. It was the brainchild of Harry Potijk, chairman of the committee of the same name. Potijk compared the walling-in of Lomark with suffocation; this imagery had more impact than any subtle argumentation. Harry Potijk was the ideal spokesman, and this was to be his finest hour. For twenty years he had been chairman of the local historical society, and he could orate like the old-fashioned books he had digested during countless hours of autodidactic effort. With the arrival of the E981, his life — uneventful till then — took on the glow of an ideal. He was given the opportunity to advance the committee’s arguments during a Town Council meeting.