‘But how did it happen?’ Joe asked hoarsely. ‘Did they say?’
Eleveld shook his head.
‘I’m not so good with foreign languages. . from what I understood, a dog fell on Engel’s head. From the balcony of an apartment building. A dog.’
I couldn’t imagine that Eleveld really knew what he’d just said: a dog had landed on his son’s head, in Paris? It was so surreal that, if only for a moment, it opened up a hopeful prospect: what if it wasn’t true, what if Engel was alive and only scaring people with art? But looking at old Eleveld you knew that couldn’t be right; Engel might have laughed at our reactions, but he would never do that to his father. Two days from now they were going to bring him home, the insurance company had arranged for a funeral transport firm to pick him up from a cold store along the Seine.
We left Eleveld as day was dawning. The clock in Lomark struck five, birds were singing everywhere.
‘Engel discovered the law of gravity,’ Joe mumbled as he loaded me into the car.
But he shared my doubts; when we got to my house, he said: ‘I’ll believe it when I see him.’
On Tuesday morning, that is what happened. Engel’s viewing was held at Griffioen’s funeral home, I went there with Joe and Christof. An attendant closed the door quietly behind us, we were alone with the coffin in the middle of the cool, soundproof room. There were four big candles around it.
‘It’s really him,’ Joe said quietly.
I got up and had to lean on the back of my cart to see him, lying beneath a stretch of cheesecloth spread over the end of the coffin. Under his chin was a brace that kept his lower jaw in place, his lips were colourless, his cheeks sunken. His cheekbones protruded in saintly fashion. This was Engel, my first corpse. My arm started shaking, I had to sit down. The cooling element zooming away beneath the bier was a monotonous requiem to our friend’s absence. In a chair on the other side of the coffin, I could hear Christof weeping. I had never heard him cry before. It annoyed me. The noises he made came in phrases, to match the rhythm of his breathing. To me it felt like he was coopting Engel’s memory by making more noise than we were.
Suddenly I realized that Joe, Christof and I once again formed a triangular construction, just like when we were younger and I only knew Engel as my silent helper at the urinal.
Joe lifted the cheesecloth frame from the coffin and laid his damaged hand on Engel’s cheek. He stared in concentration at the face, which you could now see had been broken by the impact. We had no idea what kind of dog it was, only that the animal had fallen from the ninth floor of an apartment building in a Paris suburb, right onto the head of Lomark’s next-to-last Eleveld. There was something about that family and things falling from the sky, be it dogs or Allied thousand-pounders delivered to the wrong address. I’d gladly have given a finger for Engel’s last thoughts before fate struck him down in the form of Canis familiaris, man’s faithful servant for more than fifteen thousand years.
That afternoon Ma took me to Ter Staal’s to buy a suit. My arm had become too big for the sleeve — ‘My land, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen such a thing,’ Ma grumbled — and my misshapen undercarriage was going to be a true test of her inventiveness with the sewing machine. Matching shoes were out of the question; it would have to be the same old wooden blocks, only shined to a polish.
‘I suppose it’s for the Eleveld boy?’ the salesgirl asked.
I felt that the girl needed to mind her own business, but Ma joined in enthusiastically in the female choir that likes to sing of other people’s calamity.
‘Terrible, a thing like that,’ she said. ‘Some people just seem born for misfortune. Frankie spent a lot of time with him.’
‘And the father? I guess he’s all alone now? First his wife, now his son. .’
Ma raised her eyes devoutly.
‘The Lord moves in mysterious ways.’
‘He never came in here,’ the salesgirl said. ‘I think he bought his clothes in the city, at least that’s the way it looked.’
She tugged unpleasantly on the jacket, trying to get it off my shoulders, and I braced myself a little in the hope that she’d pull till it ripped. We left Ter Staal’s with a black polyester suit so inflammable it should have had a NO SMOKING sign on it.
On Wednesday Ma came in with the Weekly containing the funeral notice. For some strange reason, Eleveld had chosen ‘No need to struggle anymore, rest is yours’, which seemed more appropriate for an old person who had died after a lingering illness than for a young artist hit on the head by a falling dog.
‘The poor man is all confused,’ Ma said, two pins in her mouth as she went to work taking in my new trousers.
They were glorious spring days, the sap was flowing in the trees, the tinkling chirp of sparrows could be heard in the bushes between the house and the old cemetery.
‘Engel will be buried on Friday morning. He was fond of flowers.’
That was news to me as well, but on Friday morning his grave was indeed surrounded by piles of flowers in crackly cellophane bouquets. The service held beforehand was in true Nieuwenhuis style: the empty rhetoric of the resurrection and he-who-lives-on-in-our-thoughts. I couldn’t imagine that people still found comfort in phrases durable as linoleum tiles.
I sat on the aisle in the second row, beside P.J., with Joe and Christof on the other side of her. I had a hard time concentrating on Engel’s service. From one corner of my eye I saw that Joe and P.J. were holding hands, and I knew Christof couldn’t have missed that either. His reaction would be pretty similar to my own. All we could do was accept it, gritting our teeth all the while; within a friendship, rivalry like that takes place beneath the surface, where the hot beast of jealousy gnaws at the bars and poisons our souls with unsettling whispers. In Christof and me in equal measure. The only effective antidote was masturbation, but with the gradual return of energy after orgasm the jealousy returned in full force as well.
It cut me in two like a river. On the one shore, Joe was the one I loved like no other; on the other he was my opponent, because he had hijacked my fondest dream. I didn’t understand how those things could exist side by side and even trade places in the wink of an eye. How mistaken I had been: I had seen Christof as my greatest rival — and that was what Joe had become.
And P.J. grew only more beautiful. She wore a thin, light-gray woollen suit-dress, her black heels clicked on the paving stones as she walked out of the church in front of me. Beneath the waisted jacket her buttocks screamed to be caressed; above them, on her lower back, rested Joe’s hand, just as the uncallused hand of Lover Boy Writer had rested there not long before, and Jopie Koeksnijder’s before that. She had her mother’s high waist.
Girls were weeping around the grave. I knew a few of them from school, Harriët Galama and Ineke de Boer for example, even the horrendous Heleen van Paridon — who, for as long as I’d known her, had resembled a neurotic housewife with a dusting obsession — and many others I had never seen before. Engel’s fellow students. They wore mad outfits that probably passed at the art academy for expressions of highly individual taste; that they all looked pretty much the same in them was beside the point. One extremely tall girl in big yellow basketball shoes was taking photographs. Beneath her brown tweed jacket she wore an unnerving candy-pink skirt; the combination with her pretty face made my eyes hurt.
It was with such women that Engel had consorted since leaving Lomark — he had slept with them on mattresses on the floor, with background music by manic-depressive musicians with long hair and a death wish. After the deed they ate olives or chocolate and experienced a deep sense of uniqueness and irreproducibility. Now that Engel was dead, those girls came to Lomark and were amazed at his provincial roots and his father who looked like a bicycle racer from the days of black and white film. Eleveld stood in the inner circle and listened intently to Nieuwenhuis who, because it was Eastertide, read aloud from Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians. He again shared with us the mystery of eternal life: we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed. This was his outflanking manoeuvre, to assuage the pain and puzzlement of death. Diametrically opposed to this you had Musashi, upright and in full armour, for whom the Way of the samurai is the resolute acceptance of death. According to Nieuwenhuis, trumpets would sound before we were resurrected to immortality; Musashi says nothing of things of which he has no knowledge. What he does know is the way one should die: ‘. . when you lay down your life, you must make fullest use of your weaponry. It is false not to do so, and to die with a weapon yet undrawn.’