‘And if a sound barrier is built, as indicated in the plan before us,’ he said, ‘and the river rises, what then? We will be trapped like rats. There will be nowhere for us to go, the dyke road is flooded, our homes are filling with water and the only route of escape is hermetically sealed with a sound barrier.’
He paused to allow his words to sink in with the council and the public gallery.
‘My question then, Mr Chairman, is this: do you plan to equip each household with a rubber boat?’
Scornful laughter rose from the gallery.
‘Please stick to the facts at hand, Mr Potijk,’ the chairman said.
Potijk gave a servile nod, but that was a ruse.
‘And if you say that the water will never reach such heights, what do you know of climatic change around the world? Of the ecological imbalance now blamed on global warming? Of the melting icecaps?’
At this point in his speech he pointed dramatically at the wall, on the other side of which rivers churned and the earth hissed with heat.
‘Has it slipped your mind that the river this summer reached an all-time low, and that a few years back the water was higher than it has ever been before? Have you forgotten so soon? Even Mr Abelsen, a man known to you, now ninety-three years of age, has never in his life seen the water so high. There are forces at work about which we know nothing and which we cannot predict, so that we must take into account today what seems only a doomsday scenario in the distant future. .’
The committee’s proviso was clear as a belclass="underline" the motorway could be tolerated as a fait accompli, but not the lack of an exit and entrance ramp at Lomark. Lomark must be given its own exit and entrance, a windpipe, an asphalt smoker’s lung.
When Harry Potijk realized that there was little he could expect from the mediocre-minded town fathers, he piloted his supporters along a more radical tack: one Wednesday afternoon they left in a hired van from Van Paridon Rentals for the houses of parliament in The Hague. In their imaginations the demonstrators may have been preceded by the sound of fife and drum, but reality consisted of the cobblestones of the Binnenhof beneath a gray sky, and no one who listened. A few attempts were made at the yell they had practiced on the bus, but the war cries fell to the earth as mutely as insults in a foreign language. A man with a briefcase and umbrella passed by at one point and inquired politely about the purpose of their gathering.
‘An MP,’ whispered Mrs Harpenau, the librarian.
Harry Potijk rose to his full height and began rattling off the group’s mission statement, but was soon interrupted.
‘Oh, so this is about a highway? But then you’re in the wrong place, you should be at the Ministry of Transport. On Plesmanweg. It’s quite a way from here.’
Dazed, the group left the Binnenhof and headed for the address he’d mentioned, which was indeed a long walk. They stopped along the way for coffee and sandwiches, then it began growing dark. Mrs Harpenau and two of the others wanted to start home, because of the children. . and that was the end of the march on The Hague.
The photo that appeared in the Lomarker Weekly was taken from so far away that the signs were unreadable, and the huddle of protesters looked painfully small there on that huge square.
I’ve kept that photo. It shows how laughable we are, even in the pursuit of good.
The spring fair brought us something new: Mousetown. As an attraction it was fascinating, precisely because it was so dated. You passed through a black curtain and found yourself in a darkened, unpleasantly hot space where the bitter smell of mouse piss and sawdust snapped at your nostrils. What awaited you there was the rather static spectacle of a wooden castle, at eye level for children and wheeled pedestrians like myself. The castle itself was two stories high, lit from the inside by clumsily sunken lightbulbs. The streets around it were illuminated by Christmas lighting, with bright yellow sawdust scattered on the ground. The entire fortress covered about ten square metres and was surrounded by a moat, its water as opaque as that in the water bowl of the guinea pigs Dirk used to keep — all of whom, one by one, had died a death as hideous as it was mysterious.
The element of motion in Mousetown — a fair, after all, is the celebration of flying, spinning and/or swaying movement; little wonder, therefore, that Joe could be found there almost all the time — consisted of a few hundred mice. The visitors watched the rodents swarm with a kind of fascinated horror. The animals pissed, shit and screwed in what in the human world would be called public places, which produced a great deal of laughter. There was a drawbridge leading to an island in the moat which, along with the back wall, formed the edges of the mousy world. The city was rectangular, you could walk around it on three sides, and the back was a plywood barrier crudely painted with clouds and a sun. The city itself was well lit; the area around it, where the people stood and stared at the storybook plague of rodents, was dark as a haunted house.
Of course I saw Mousetown as a parable for Lomark, that stinking nest in which we were trapped in each other’s company, caught between the river on one side and the future sound barrier on the other. Harry Potijk’s committee, however, failed to underscore their arguments with that particular metaphor.
One day I saw Joe and P.J. at the fair. They were standing at the Spider, their backs to me. P.J. was waving to someone being flung around in one of those seats, and Joe was counting the money in his wallet. God, it had been a long time since I’d seen P.J. Had she lost weight? I looked at her golden blond curls and heard myself sigh like a melancholy hound.
After Joe had gone to Amsterdam he and P.J. had sort of become friends, and they saw each other whenever she was in Lomark. Which wasn’t very often. The last time had been at Christmas, but I hadn’t seen her then because I hadn’t felt like going to midnight mass. That made it almost nine months now — months during which my time had stood still and hers had sped up.
I rolled along behind them in the direction of Mousetown. The noise coming from all those rides grated on my eardrums. It was tough going on the flattened grass, the fair was probably the only time I left the asphalt and paving stones behind.
I didn’t want to be seen. I was suddenly furious at the thought that I didn’t live on my own two feet but could only look up at her, speechless and stunted. I had to force myself not to think about what I might have grown to be. . the height from which I might have looked in her eyes, the words I would have used to make her laugh, the way Joe did, the way that asshole of a writer made her laugh. (Since becoming aware of his existence I had run across his name a few times in the papers. When I did I mocked him and crumpled the paper into a ball. Somewhere, he had someone who hated him.) In P.J.’s presence my defects were aggravated, I became as crooked and little as I already was. There was no salvation from that.
In one of the most frank, most personal entries in my diary, the kind that simply has to be true because it’s about feelings (tears tell no lies, haha!), I talked about the nasty predicament in which I found myself.
. . allowed to dream, but don’t kid yourself into having any