The way it works is this: you need at least two people on the ground — enough people to outweigh the objects being lowered, or the objects would pull the people up instead — plus two more in the window space, with the net. These two wrap the net around the objects before lifting it into the gap the window’s left and passing the hook through its mesh so that the people on the ground can winch it slowly down. The net holds anything: boxes, tables, stereos, computers. The objects’ own weight makes it close up on them. If the objects are heavy then the people on the ground need to step away from the plumb line, widening the angle at which the rope’s tangent joins the apex of the wheel. If it’s light, they can stand more or less directly underneath. For Sasha’s huge desk they conscript two passing sailors and stand way wide, right out in the street, the four of them all hissing as they pass the rope out to a beat that one of the sailors calls out to them. People on the terrace watch. People queuing for the swinging-boat ride watch. The men in jackets on the far side of the square watch too. So do the two men by the metro. An old man with a stooped back pauses to look for a moment, then shuffles on towards a dry-cleaners two doors down from the Loosje. After each of the net’s cargoes has been safely landed, Nick and Sasha slide them into the transit van beside Joost’s paintings, while Han jerks the pulling end of the rope, sending the hook end back up towards Frankie on the third floor. Frankie lets the rope run upwards through his palms, stopping it when the hook’s come to him; then he unhooks the net and takes it inside the room so that he and Jessica can charge it up with a new load.
It all runs smoothly until Nick takes over from Han, who’s decided he wants another genever, to “find my strength back”. Nick and Sasha have landed a cardboard box of books which Sasha’s sliding into the transit van. Nick jerks the rope like he saw Han do each time — then realizes, as the hook end rises, that he hasn’t let Frankie know it’s coming at him. Frankie’s still inside the room, getting the next load ready; the hook shoots up straight past the window space, gathering speed in direct proportion to the speed at which the pulling end’s falling back down to the cobblestones. Instinctively, Nick tries to push it up again — before realizing that it’s no more possible to do this than it is to push a line of toothpaste back into its tube: the pulling end has to fall down for the simple reason that it now outweighs the hook end, whose yards of length are themselves fast becoming the pulling end as they hurtle up towards the wheel and shuttle round it then down again, the hook shooting up with them, right to the very top, where it’ll run around the wheel and …
“Shit!” Nick feels a jolt of terror: the hook’s going to pass round the wheel and fall back down. A metal hook, from four floors up, and the square full of people: sailors, passers-by, two children toddling from the bakery right beneath it holding macaroons, and there’s not even time to …
But it doesn’t fall. Instead, the hook jams between the wheel and the cross which encloses it. Maybe that’s why they put the cross there in the first place: a safety feature — or at least why they made the distance between the wheel’s rim and the cross too small for the hook to pass through. Frankie’s head’s come out of the window now; he looks down, then up, then swears. Sasha appears beside Nick:
“That was stupid. Now we’ve got to go up to the roof and send the hook down again.”
“I’ll do it,” Nick says. “It was my fault.”
“I don’t argue with you,” Sasha answers, tetchy. “What you must do is go up there, then lie down …”
“I saw you do that.”
“Right. Then pull the long side up over the wheel so the short side, the side with the hook, goes down again. You must use both hands, one on each side of the wheel. Continue until the hook goes down as far as Frankie. Then its weight will be enough to carry it down to here, as before.”
“Fine.” Nick’s up the staircase, through his attic, out onto the roof. First time he’s been here; it’s a bit like when he looked out above the Leidsegracht from Art in Europe’s toilet window. This altitude gives him a sense of the whole city’s layout: the mere fact that it’s below him, not around him, gives him a flighty kick. The clock on the old people’s home’s higher than him, but the square, its stalls, queues, terraces and benches, the canals leading off from it in three directions — all these are way below, prostrated. By the Waag’s drawbridge-like door another man’s holding a dictaphone or radio up to his ear. Nick runs his eye past him, along the Geldersekade. Far out, beyond Centraal Station, he can see the ships’ masts crammed together. The revolving boat’s rocking below him, still in the first, gentle phase of its cycle. Nick drops to his hands and knees, crawls towards the edge, peers over. There’s the wheel. The hook’s wedged right into its apex, where the cross’s vertical line runs over its circumference. Lie down, Sasha said. Nick does this, his head poking out over the roof’s edge towards the wheel. He reaches out, takes the hook in his left hand and tries to unwedge it. This isn’t easy: the angle from which he’s coming at it makes it awkward. The wheel’s at more or less exactly the same height as him and he’s horizontal, his arm stretched out in front of him like Superman, and so he has to move his arm across and down at the same time. When the hook does come free he has to carry on pulling it down, lifting the other end upwards with his right hand simultaneously so that the combined movements feed the rope back over the wheel. It won’t go of its own accord: as soon as he stops pulling and lifting and just holds both sides the rope tugs at his hands, the thirty or so yards to the wheel’s right side longing to fall back down to the pavement, the hook to the left straining to shoot right back into the slot. Of course: that’s what Sasha meant: the hook won’t descend until the down portion of rope outweighs the up portion. Basic principles. Nick breathes in deeply and feeds the rope over — right up, left down — six inches at a time, hand by hand by … It seems that he’s been doing this for ages, and the hook’s only dropped three yards …
It can’t be more than five yards from him when his right arm locks up. It doesn’t lock up suddenly — just refuses to lift the rope any further. Without any recourse to the force of his main body, the arm’s been hauling the rope right up from the pavement, not just from in front of him, and it’s tired itself out, died. Nick lets it drop and hang against the building’s façade. His left hand’s still clenched round the other side, the hook side. Maybe if he … No chance: the one arm, alone, can’t possibly pull the rope round the wheel, can’t even make it move a millimetre. He’ll just have to let go and — no, he can’t do that: the hook would shoot back up again, slam right into his face. What to do? His whole body feels exhausted now, not just his arm. In the square below, on the terrace, Sasha and Han are sitting, chatting. Neither of them are looking up. Nick tries to call out to them, but the sound has barely left his chest before it’s absorbed by the breeze and carried off, dissolved. He’s getting frightened now. How is he ever going to … Perhaps if he lets go and then quickly wriggles back … There won’t be time: the hook would be up at him in less than a second. He calls out again. This time the sound’s even weaker, so weak he can hardly hear it himself …
Nick thinks: don’t panic. Someone’s bound to look up eventually and realize what’s happened; then they’ll be up with him in less than a minute, take this rope from his hand, pull him back. He’ll just have to try to concentrate on something till they do, like when he modelled back at AVU. The wheel, right by his head. From this strange angle it seems not round but slightly elongated, like the halo in that painting which must be down in the transit van right now. The wheel could be a halo to him, or a crown, proclaiming him king of this elevated, horizontal plane that he alone is occupying. The cross around it, viewed from this close, doesn’t seem like a cross any more — more like a set of geometric exercises, like the ones Maňásek was doing when he started copying the thing. Its two intersecting lines demarcate radii and segments. Behind them, the wheel’s spokes cut the sky behind them into smaller, secondary segments. That slice of lemon. Nick looks down. The table at which Sasha and Han are sitting is on a tangent that’s set off the diameter’s plumb line by an angle of perhaps thirty degrees. It, too, seems slightly elongated. Two coffee cups, Nick’s and Sasha’s, rest on saucers. Han’s genever glass is off-centre on its coaster. There’s his own empty Spa Rood glass beside it, minuscule from here, the lemon slice too small to see but certainly still in there. To be there now, at the table, in whatever conversation those two are engrossed in: if he could reinvent the world, copy it just like Maňásek copied the saint and the mountain and the buildings and the sea, he’d make everything almost exactly the same as it is now — only he’d tweak it just minutely, imperceptibly to the big scheme of things, so that he’d be down there on earth, his feet touching cobblestones, his nose sniffing cigarette smoke and cheese and herring and hot coffee and freshly baked macaroons, not up here breathing the sad, refined air of the abandoned cosmonaut.