Not long afterwards I was staring at Vitali’s neck muscles, which bulged like the roots of a great tree. I liked arm wrestling so much, I guess, because of the cheerful stupidity of the whole thing. There were no hidden agendas or intentions. No words were spoken, yet still it involved an intense primary contact. Nazarovitch had a workingman’s strength, unlike the body-builder’s strength which pops like a balloon if you put too much pressure on it.
The first match went nowhere. We used up the entire three minutes and ended in a draw. During the pause I noticed Nazarovitch looking at P.J. Not furtively, not with a pseudo-accidental glance, no, openly and self-confidently. I didn’t dare to look whether she was responding to his flirting.
Until that moment the Russian and I had shared a symmetrical rhythm. Now that was shattered. Just before the big push a flash of light went off in my mind, a bolt of lightning. I came out of the corner with such force that I was afraid for a moment that my muscles would tear from their ligaments. The Russian groaned as he hit the table. Hurrah for creatine.
Joe gave me the thumbs-up. The Russian shook his head in the direction of two of his buddies. I wanted him to toss and turn on his cot that night, trying with all his might to deal with a defeat he couldn’t understand, I wanted him to be too disgusted to even masturbate. In his dreams he would relive his childhood fears, the next day he would be tired and irritable.
At the start of the third round Nazarovitch stuck his jaw out aggressively, but I had gauged his strength by now: he couldn’t beat me. A draw was the best he could hope for. In that knowledge, I attacked.
‘. . with your spirit calm, attack with a feeling of constantly crushing the enemy, from first to last. The spirit is to win in the depths of the enemy. This is Ken No Sen.’
And that was the end of the third round. The Russian could slink back on board his filthy steamer. He wouldn’t forget me for a while.
‘You moved way up on him,’ Joe said. ‘I’ve never seen you go way out like that. It did the trick. Be careful you don’t shoot out of the box, though, watch your balance.’
Number three was a Czech truck driver in leather clogs. His breath stank like water that had been left standing in a vase, which wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t been in the habit of exhaling forcefully as he wrestled. I heard a German behind me say that I had ‘the body of a child, but the arm of a heavyweight’. I could live with that.
The Czech bit it in two rounds.
Around me there grew a kind of admiration, fuelled by puzzlement and awe. One of the heavyweights, a 120-kilo giant, came over unannounced and shook my hand. He said something to Joe, we thought it was Polish.
‘I think he said something nice,’ P.J. said after he was gone. ‘He didn’t seem angry, I don’t think.’
Suddenly we felt a bit out of place in the Hafenrestaurant, amid that crowd from the fringe, from a world that seemed realer — because harder — than our own. We smiled at each other encouragingly and resolved to remember it down to the smallest detail.
There was some fantastic wrestling going on, and the smell of garlic and beer-breath grew ever stronger. Joe fetched three sausage sandwiches and two half-litres for P.J. and himself, a bottle of Rostocker for me. I preferred the bottle whenever possible. And no one, except Ma, knew my peculiarities the way Joe did. He almost never had to ask, most of what he knew about me was a result of his own attentiveness. That’s the way it had been ever since he blew up that substation that supplied the fair with electricity: no fair for Frankie, no fair for anyone.
The crowd in Rostock had more confidence in me than the one in Liège, where only a few people had bet on me. Here things went much better, money flitted back and forth each time the announcer called out the name they had given me: ‘das Ungeheuer’, the Creature. This was the next-to-last match: if I won this one, I’d be in the finals.
I found myself seated across from a stoic. Stoics were what I feared most. ‘If you think, “Here is a master of the Way, who knows the principles of strategy,” then you will surely lose.’
He was a stocky Asian, not very tall but with impressive shoulders. I was particularly on guard, of course, because I assumed that Asians by nature were closer to the Strategy of the samurai.
He had an iron grip, but I attacked just a little faster, putting my hand on top. His counteroffensive threw me completely off balance. He pushed with everything he had in him, groaning like he was shitting rocks.
‘Come on, Frankie!’ P.J. shouted, sounding rattled.
There was no way I could keep this up, I was losing horribly. All he used was the Fire and Stones Cut, pounding as hard as he could in hope of a sudden victory — and that’s what he was getting. Until a miracle happened — a miracle, and nothing less than a miracle: I felt a violent shiver pass through his arm into mine. The Asian gave a sharp little cry and suddenly relaxed all his muscles, bringing us back to perpendicular. He yanked his hand away and grabbed at his forearm with the other one, making sounds of pain quite different from ours: the sort of high-pitched, wailing cries that ninjas make in cartoons. Joe was beside me in a flash. ‘What happened?!’ After a few minutes my suspicion was borne out: with the force of his own attack, the Asian had torn a tendon in his forearm.
I had passed through the eye of the needle.
‘How lucky can you get?’ Joe said.
‘I thought I was going to die,’ P.J. said, squeezing my good shoulder. ‘He looked so. . mean, as if there was no difference between this and murdering someone.’
The final was going to be between me and someone called Horst, last name unknown. But first we watched the heavyweight semi-finals, in which the same Pole who had shaken my hand pulverized his opponent. It was a real tour de force, the alpha silverbacks at their best. It bothered me to know that I had to follow an act like that. The audience had come here to be entertained, to spend a few hours void of thought. So when it was my turn, I — for the first time in my life — laid on my handicaps a little thick. Horst, looking like a Viking with his blond beard, was a bit taken aback to find himself sitting across from some Quasimodo. The audience did what it needed to do: they lapped it up. I looked around the crowd. The mood was tense, something could happen any moment. A little man screamed at me, flecks of foam flying from his mouth. Horst took up his position. My hand disappeared in his.
‘Ready. . Go!’
Without blinking an eyelid, Horst pushed me past the critical forty-five-degree limit. I heard a muffled shriek from P.J. and tried with all my might to get out of my predicament. I tapped into reserves I had never touched before and made it back almost to perpendicular, at which point Horst simply attacked anew. I never left the defensive and Horst won the round, but he seemed disappointed at not having slammed me against the table.
I flexed my wrist back and forth. Fixedness means a dead hand. We started all over again.
‘Tut-TUT!’ Joe shouted.
‘With very quick timing you cut, scolding the enemy.’
Come on then, you blond bastard. But my attack was neutralized by his. The Nazi swine. I realized that I had only one chance: to bend his wrist, which meant I had to pull him toward me a little in order to get past dead centre. Pliability is a living hand. I looked at Joe, who glanced quickly at his stopwatch.