‘Look,’ Christof says, ‘like a horse with all that foam on his lips.’
He laughs. Joe comes closer and takes my arm. With his left hand, because the right one is still a mess from that bomb.
‘What’s up, Frankie?’
Then his eyes open wide.
‘Jesus Christ, feel this, would you?’
Christof feels my arm.
‘He got concrete in there or something?’ he asks.
Christof raises his eyebrows, which makes him look like an owl. The way they go on about it seems a little exaggerated to me; it’s not that special. I’m turning a little red.
‘He’s blushing,’ Christof says.
‘You mind if I take a look?’ Joe asks.
He rolls my sleeve up over my bicep and whistles quietly.
‘What a monster.’
Christof gives him a strange look, he doesn’t really understand things like that. In fact, until now I hadn’t really noticed how big that arm was getting.
‘Especially with that body of his alongside it,’ Christof says.
He’s right; in the last few months all my growing seems to have gone into that one arm, it looks like the arm of a full-grown man with bumps and veins all over it. A humongous arm, if I may say so myself. Joe starts laughing and calls out like a ringmaster: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, in-tro-ducing. . Frank the Ar-m!’
Frank the Arm! Yeah! Christof shrugs, the demise of his own new name a bit too fresh in his memory. Sunlight glistens off the frame of his glasses and he squints a little. Who does he remind me of? I can’t put my finger on it. Someone from a history book maybe, but I’ve been reading so many of them lately that I can’t think which one. I’ll have to look it up.
‘Anyway, I think he’s following us around,’ Christof says.
As if I’m not free to go wherever I like.
‘He’s free to go wherever he likes,’ Joe says.
‘You following us, Frankie?’ Christof asks.
I shake my head hard.
‘See?’ Joe says. ‘No problem. See you around, Frankie.’
They return to their fishing rods and don’t look back. They cast out and then sit there again motionless on the basalt. I’m dying to know what they’re talking about. Or are they just sitting there, looking out over the water and saying nothing? Those are the kinds of things I want to know. It’s lonely up here.
An animal helps against loneliness. Not all animals, though. Rabbits, for example, are worthless, they’re no good to anyone, they’re too dopey. Dogs really irritate me too. What I wanted was a jackdaw, one of those little crows with a silvery neck and milky-blue eyes. Jackdaws are nice, and the noises they make, more than any crow or a rook, sound like human speech. Especially in the evening, when a whole colony of them would land in the chestnuts along Bleiburg and babble to each other, until it grew dark and all you heard was the occasional ka! when one of them fell off its branch. Besides, jackdaws are fairly tidy birds. You see them beside a puddle in the pasture sometimes, bending over to let the water run down their backs and wings for as long as it takes to get clean.
I knew where a couple of them were. Each spring they nested in a group of half-dead trees down by the scour-hole, a pond left behind after the dyke there collapsed a long time ago. In the olden days a broken dyke used to be a huge disaster, with people drowning by bunches. The water would come roaring in and scour out a deep hole at the spot where the dyke had collapsed. When the dyke was rebuilt it had to cut around a hole like that, which is why some of the old ones have such sharp bends in them.
The jackdaws liked to build their nests in the cracks and hollows of the trees around the pond, and late one Wednesday afternoon I got Sam to understand that I wanted him to pull a fledgling out of the nest for me.
‘OK,’ Sam said.
He walked behind me with one hand on the cart, talking non-stop about Sam-like idiocies. Sometimes I think he’s got brain damage.
I looked out over the washlands. The river water had retreated behind the summer dykes. The trees out this way had dark rings around the trunk that showed how high the water had come that winter. Circling above them I could see little black dots. I was kind of excited. Another reason I wanted a jackdaw is because they’re faithful; a jackdaw couple stays together forever, and when you’ve had a jackdaw from the time it was little it becomes attached to you in the same way. But you have to catch them young.
‘You really expect me to go down in there?’ Sam said once we were at the trees.
He muttered about for a bit, but finally clambered down the side of the dyke on hands and knees. Close to a tree with low branches he stopped and looked up, until he saw a jackdaw entering its nest. Then he started climbing. The birds flew nervously around the branches, in the perfect knowledge that this spelled bad news. I felt cold; winter was still floating between the warmer layers of spring air. It was starting to grow dark and you had to look hard to pick out objects in the distance. The trees around the scour-hole looked poisoned, as good as dead; the bark on some of them had started slipping off, leaving them cold and naked. Sam had reached a branch about a third of the way up and was still climbing clumsily. When they passed out the smarts and agility, he definitely wasn’t standing at the front of the queue. In fact, he has only one real trait, which is that he’s quite kind. . that is, if kindness is really a trait and not just the absence of that brand of cruelty that keeps people like Dirk up and running.
Sam was only an arm’s length below the nest when he suddenly stopped moving. I squinted, but couldn’t make out what was wrong. After a while he started shouting, shouts that had lots of fuckingsonofabitches in them. He was panicking. It was an awfully bad place to start panicking. Situations like this made me furious. There he was, hanging motionless halfway between heaven and earth, and here I was, nailed to the road: all I could do was roll myself back to the village for help and hope that he could stick it out up there till I got back. I went as fast as I could. Till I was a long way off I could still hear the alarmed cries of the jackdaws circling around poor Sam.
I took the route into the village that went down Achterom. Joe’s house was the first one in the street. The lights were on; in fact, the place was lit up like a greenhouse. I pounded on the door as hard as I could until India opened it. It was clear that she was surprised to see me. I’d never had much of a chance to take a real look at her before, but now that I did I could see that, young as she was, she was pretty good-looking. What I saw above all was that, at a certain age, she would be pretty in a very special way, and that until that day men would look at her impatiently, the way a farmer in spring eyes the tender green of his crops poking above the soil. India wasn’t built like her brother, she was a lot more slender, but she had those same limpid eyes.
‘What can I do for you?’ she asked at last.
I gulped back the thick slime that had collected in my mouth during the dash for the village and raised my head.
‘UH-UH-ZZZZJOOOOO,’ I brayed.
‘Joe?’ she asked. ‘You want to talk to Joe?’
‘UH-YAAEEAAAH.’
I sounded like Chewbacca, that hairball from Star Wars. India went into the house, leaving the door open behind her. It was as though they were smelting ore in there, so hot and bright it was inside. The house glowed like the electric coil heater in our bathroom. ‘Close the door!’ someone shouted, probably the one who paid the electric bills.
‘Joe! There’s someone here for you!’ India shouted.
Her parents had named her ‘India’ because that was where she was conceived, Joe told me once. Her middle name was Lakshmi. That was a goddess the Hindus said brought happiness and wisdom. I didn’t know anything about Hindus, only about samurais and a couple of things along those lines. Joe’s parents got married in India, he said, because they had a spiritual bond with that country. During the wedding ceremony they’d both had screaming dysentery. As a cloud of lotus blossoms descended on them, the diarrhoea was running down their legs. During the sitar concert for the bride and groom Regina Ratzinger had stayed in the toilet, emptying her bowels and weeping.