*
Fall arrived, the tournament was drawing near. Sometimes I felt unbeatable, at other times I thought we should never have started. In late October we drove to Liège. Along the state highway, a few kilometres outside Lomark, I caught a portent of things to come. Standing in the field were men wearing fluorescent orange vests over their dress clothes: surveyors. Joe slowed. The men shouted to each other from the far sides of the field, then bent back to the theodolite. The land was being divided along invisible lines, somewhere a map had been spread out on which our future was traced like a dress pattern in a ladies’ magazine.
‘There’s no stopping it,’ Joe said. ‘I’ve only started to understand since I’ve had my own car. In fact, I think that if you don’t have a car you can’t understand it at all. Holland has picked up a kind of momentum that only makes it go faster and faster, like a wagon crashing down a hill. Standing still is losing ground, that kind of thinking. Everywhere, really everywhere you go, highways, suburbs and industrial estates are spreading like a cancer. This country can only change that quickly because it barely stops to think about itself, or because it thinks badly of itself, that’s why it’s in such a hurry to look like something that could be anywhere. A soul like a coin: folklore on one side and opportunism on the other. Folklore, that’s the cock of Lomark, being proud of an imaginary past. And opportunism, that’s the enthusiasm with which people accept a motorway like the E981, because they think they’re going to profit from it. You don’t hear anyone protesting about that, except Potijk’s clique, but that’s a kind of folklore in itself. Hopeless, this place is completely hopeless.’
It was the first time I’d ever heard him talk like that — like an outsider. Of course I hated the scrawny boiling-fowl on the Lomark arms just as badly as he did. It was the cookie cutter from which every Lomarker was stamped, predestined to weakness and a whole lot of cackling. We knew that when the Vikings came the bird had crowed in fear, not because it was brave. But hearing Joe talking so aloofly about Lomark made me feel uneasy, as though it was no longer the two of us who were condemned to this village and could laugh out loud at its backwardness, but that suddenly he was criticizing things from the outside while I was still stuck in the midst of it. Maybe, before long, he would start seeing me the same way. . how long would it take then before he judged me to be a hopeless case, a clodhopper covered in red river clay? Why was he suddenly acting like an outsider when, in my thoughts at least, I had always come to his defence when people in Lomark spoke mockingly of ‘foreign elements’ like him and his family? If he suddenly started wearing his outsidership like a medal, all that did was confirm the kind of Blut-und-Boden mentality I despised so much: the mentality that meant newcomers always remained outsiders, mistrusted and mocked behind closed doors. Didn’t he realize how fragile the whole structure was, and that by doing this he was making it even shakier? That he and his family were the harbingers of something new, a point of departure from the age-old bitterness and a history you could only be ashamed of? When he put himself on a higher plane like this, it only proved them right — how could I explain that to him?
We moved onto the highway. I stared out the side window: this was the road we used to take when Ma brought me to Dr Meerman. What I remember best was the temperature of the metal objects with which Meerman tapped and probed me: as if he kept them in the fridge just for me. Of our journeys home I remembered the panicky optimism with which Ma passed Meerman’s words along to me: keep at it, don’t give up, do lots of exercises, don’t fret — on and on like that, until I felt like opening the door of the speeding car and rolling out.
Joe punched a few buttons on the car radio but couldn’t find anything, which was fine by me, I was equally content to listen to the engine’s soothing hum. I longed for the end of the day, when my matches would be over and I would know my place in the hierarchy. Joe had printed up a list of the forty strongest arm wrestlers in the lightweight category (a clutter of names, dates of birth and kilos), but what really mattered of course was the Top Ten, and within that the man who was Number One. I can still remember exactly when I’d heard his name for the first time. Joe had stabbed his finger at the list, as though pointing to a coveted enemy stronghold on a map.
‘Islam Mansur,’ he said. ‘That’s our man, the ab-so-lute king of arm wrestling. Only one metre seventy-seven tall, but oh what a monster. What do you think, might that be something for Frank the Arm, just by way of something to shoot for?’
We both laughed in relief at that: from Hennie Oosterloo to Big King Mansur, that was a good one. I couldn’t wait to see him in action, though: Islam Mansur, the Libyan who beat heavyweights with ease. During our training period Joe had regularly come up with tidbits of information about him: he was said to have been born in a tent in the Sahara, but the date and year were unclear. He had discovered arm wrestling in the Foreign Legion, while stationed in Djibouti. In cafés he had sometimes won from four men all at once. After his second tour of duty he left the Legion and started bodybuilding in Europe. Arm wrestling was something he did just for fun, on the side, and it was with the same nonchalance that he became world champion. Mansur was a hero in his own country, but these days he lived in a Marseille suburb. It excited me just to hear his name; I associated him of course with Musashi: Islam Mansur was the Arm Saint who, just like the Sword Saint, had never lost a contest.
We stopped at a Shell station. The Oldsmobile was a guzzler, so we’d be pulling into plenty of gas stations before this trip was over. In the outside mirror I saw Joe put the nozzle in the tank and turn his head to watch the digits roll around on the pump. A couple of minutes later he stuck his head in the window.
‘You want something to drink, Frankie, or a Mars bar or something?’
I watched him as he went into the station. Again I felt that empty melancholy I’d been having lately, whiny feelings, as though something bad had happened. Like now, when my eyes suddenly started smarting at the sight of Joe’s jeans sliding off his hips. His trousers were always loaded down with all the things he had in his pockets, so full they almost fell off, but at that given moment, when the sliding doors opened and he passed through between the cut flowers and the windscreen fluid, I couldn’t help being moved. There was a connection with the Strategy of Becoming Stone. Strangely enough, since I had started trying to achieve greater distance from P.J. things, I actually felt moved much more often. Sometimes I experienced things as though they were already in the past, and then I got this way. The rest of the time, though, I was like stone. Or tried to be. Which was hard work.
Joe came back and climbed in.
‘If you need to piss, just tell me, OK?’
The Oldsmobile’s lazy motor made a deep thrumming that worked its way up through your tailbone. We only braked again when we got to Maastricht, because for some crazy reason the motorway there was interrupted by stoplights — after that there were signs saying that Liège was only twenty-seven kilometres. I was having trouble keeping my foot still.
‘You need to go to the toilet?’
I shook my head. Neither of us said anything for a bit.
‘It’s only a game,’ he said then. ‘All a game. If we come home with a good story, that’s plenty.’
We looked at each other and smiled the way old people do at a shared memory. The only thing I wondered was: what made something a good story? Going down in disgrace in Liège was definitely not one of them. There was more at stake here. Something that had to do with believing, about whether we could turn an idea into flesh and blood, whether we were slaves or masters, even about ‘fighting for survival, discovering the meaning of life and death, learning the Way of the Sword’, as the kensei says.