‘It’s so beautiful,’ Joe says that evening on TV, ‘when you come out of the dark and suddenly see that dome of light against the sky where the oasis is. Just punch it and head home through the date palms. You have to stay focused for so long; at the end of the day, for example, you can ask any driver you choose whether he saw that tire along the way, or a pair of shoes lying in the road, and he’ll tell you. Everyone is so incredibly homed in all day on the tiniest deviation in that narrow strip of vision.’
On Tuesday morning the caravan starts crossing that part of the desert they call the Great Sand Sea, with dunes a hundred metres high. Joe’s out of sorts, someone installed a generator behind his tent and the droning kept him awake all night. Around noon they enter the White Desert, a hallucinatory landscape of limestone and blinding white sand. Close to Dakhla they come down off the plateau to the oasis. Tomorrow they return to civilization. Almost one hundred drivers have already been eliminated in the desert, a few more will be added to that; only three out of every ten participants will actually make it to Sharm el-Sheikh.
On the fourteenth day Joe reaches the Nile. He crosses the river at Luxor and heads out the next morning into the Eastern Desert. The route bends north, the next-to-last encampment is at Abu Rish on the road connecting Beni Suef on the Nile with the Gulf of Suez. On the sixteenth and final day comes the longest stage in the whole rally: about four hundred kilometres on asphalt, by way of Suez to Abu Zenima on the coast of the Gulf of Suez, where they then go off-road again for another four hundred kilometres through the Sinai range and the sizzling heat. After crossing the Sinai, they come out at Wadi Watir. At the village of Nuweiba on the Gulf of Aqaba they will go back onto the road for the final kilometres south, to Sharm el-Sheikh.
*
The news that Joe had dropped out of sight in the rally a few kilometres before Nuweiba came as no surprise to me. He was last seen in the mountains close to the coast, and only noted as missing that evening when he failed to make it in under the time limit. That night on ‘Speedboat in the Sand’ the interviewer is on camera for the first time and reports in dramatic tones about the disappearance of Joe Speedboat and his race-dozer.
I die laughing; with Joe there’s never a dull moment.
It’s late January by the time Joe finally shows up in Lomark. Without the bulldozer. He chuckles a bit about all the commotion. He’s as skinny as a rail, his hair is bleached by the sun. His face and forearms are a reddish brown.
First he went to Amsterdam for a few days to see P.J., now he’s come back to put his mother’s mind at ease.
‘So how’s things, Frankie? Anything happen around here?’
His standard question whenever he’s been away for a while. My throat is tight, visions of doom dance through my head. I write: Watched lots of RTL 5.
‘Yeah, that was funny. I don’t think old Santing sold any more paint because of it, but at least he was on camera.’
What did you do with the bulldozer?
He laughs slyly.
‘Left it there.’
With whom, pray tell? Papa Africa?
‘Let’s just say that he can start his own earthmoving comp — any now. Or something.’
Joe clasps his hands behind his neck and sinks back in his chair contentedly. Suddenly I see it in a flash, an extremely clear insight is what it is: he will always come out on top. The treachery of lesser gods won’t cause him to topple. He will suffer for us, he will chop down a forest and change the course of a river to help against the pain, but he will emerge unbroken. That realization makes me feel like digging a hole in the ground and disappearing into it forever.
Joe is going to see Christof this evening, on Monday he has to start work. He pats his pockets, takes his lighter off the table and smiles.
‘All right,’ he says, ‘I guess I’ll be moving.’
and then
This is later, many years later. A lot has happened, and finally I have come to understand the profound truth of the things-aren’t-what-they-used-to-be men on their bench by the river: things are, indeed, not what they used to be. Even the dismay at that fact isn’t what it used to be. You learn to live with such findings, like bleached bones.
After Joe came back from Dakar, Christof asked him straight out if it would be OK for him to invite P.J. to his fraternity’s annual gala. He couldn’t find another date. ‘You’ll have to ask P.J. about that,’ Joe said, ‘not me.’
And so P.J. went to the gala of the Utrecht Student Union in a close-fitting silver-gray dress, and no one could figure out how Christof had hit upon such a beauty.
That night he lost his virginity. All three of us had now converged in her loins.
The next summer, at a pavement café in Utrecht, Christof told Joe that he was having a relationship with P.J. too, and that she had chosen definitively for him, Christof. And that she didn’t want to see Joe anymore, which is what it boiled down to. She had no liking for the ragged, painful nerve endings at the end of a relationship.
Joe didn’t punch Christof in the mouth, nor did he break his neck; he hopped in his car and, just outside Oosterbeek, blew up the engine. He walked the rest of the way home, packed his backpack that night and left a note on the table saying he’d call, and that’s all we know. People say he was seen in a bulldozer working on the E981, and that he had a black beard, so it could just as easily have been someone else.
Does it surprise anyone to hear that Christof got P.J. in the end? Not me, not really; he too was to have his chance, and when it came along he seized it. Christof could offer P.J. one thing her other lovers could not: order and certainty — throughout the centuries, the only demand placed by the citizenry on its authorities. That might have played less of a role, of course, if he had not made her pregnant. Christof’s family moved heaven and earth to persuade her not to have an abortion, and not long afterwards a bulldozer (not a Caterpillar, but a Liebherr: Joe would have been horrified) began clearing the plot of land between Lomark and Westerveld where Christof and P.J.’s new house would stand.
Christof went into an accelerated program to get his law degree, and took a job at Bethlehem Asphalt. P.J. never finished college.
I have at last also discovered who it is that Christof resembles, the question that had become a sort of eternal obsession for me. I found him in the book Hitler’s Helpers: he is the spitting image of Heinrich Himmler, I swear. That book had been on my parents’ shelf for a hundred years. During a medical examination at the Lüneburg prisoner of war camp, Himmler, when asked to open his mouth, bit down on a cyanide capsule. The photograph was taken shortly afterwards. In the top left corner you see the shiny tip of a boot, Himmler is still wearing his glasses and lies wrapped in a blanket on the concrete floor. Christof all over, the way he’s lying there.
I rediscovered that book the night after Ma’s funeral. She died after coming down with a rampant cancer of the lymph system. We had buried her and were sitting in the living room with relatives when I saw Hitler’s Helpers on the shelf. I flipped through it and found the section with photographs. Dirk was looking over my shoulder.
‘Looks just like that buddy o’ yours,’ he said.
There is one thing I still think back on with the greatest of delight, and that is the day Christof and P.J. married. The wedding was held in the church and P.J.’s dress was groaning at the seams from the child she would bear soon afterwards. Nieuwenhuis was all smarmy with Love, I was sitting in the aisle. When they left the church, P.J. glanced at me. The newlyweds drove off in a hired Bentley. The reception was held that afternoon at old man Maandag’s place, the villa he’d had built outside the village after the Scania had destroyed the house with the gables on Bridge Street. It was a blazing summer afternoon, with plenty of poppies and cornflowers still in bloom. Christof was king for a day; his father gave a speech about princes on white chargers, the final words of which were ‘Who shall buy her a white charger?’ At that moment Christof came around from the back of the house leading a white mare, his wedding present for P.J. I have to give it to him, that was real class.