Free Joe Speedboat by Tommy Wieringa Page A

honest – his genius as well.
    Once he’d learned how to work the rudder, which took a couple of days with a three-axle steering system, they put the wings on it. After that there wasn’t much room to manoeuvre amid the piles of asphalt; the plane was now almost twelve metres wide.

    Then, sitting there on the dyke, it suddenly dawned on me – I saw at last what Joe had seen long ago: the solution to the lift-off problem. It was every bit as simple as it was stunning: Joe had been waiting for the freeze to set in – the ice was going to be his runway! It was brilliant, and I couldn’t help being amazed by his technical ingenuity. Once the plane left Ferry Island he could maybe park it somewhere else, somewhere in an abandoned shed or an underground bunker; in the presence of that great, calm soul who could plant bombs or build planes or do God knows what else without batting an eye, anything was possible. I mean, he was
fifteen
at the time, there was a whole world of unsettling ideas left for him to carry out with the unflappability of a bicycle repairman.
    It wasn’t even so much that Joe was an unusual kid: he was a force unleashed on the world. When he was around you couldn’t help but feel a tingle of expectation – energy coagulated in his hands, he juggled the making of bombs, the racing of mopeds and the building of airplanes like a merry magician. Never had I seen anyone for whom ideas led so naturally to their own implementation, a person on whom fear and convention had such a shaky grasp. He dared to think the impossible, and noticed nothing of the disapproval going on behind his back. There were, after all, were plenty of people who didn’t like Joe, because there was too much about him that defied understanding. Most people are average, some even downright substandard; all of them, however, are extremely sensitive to the higher concentration of energy or talent in the above-average person. If they have no access to that which makes you shine, they don’t want you to have it either. They have no talent for admiration, only slavishness and resentment. They steal the light.

Regina Ratzinger is in the front room showing us her pictures. She’s tanned and skinnier, even though it’s winter. She went on holiday to Egypt on her own – which is to say, with a group of people she didn’t know, led by a couple who acted as their guides. The pictures she made of the pyramids were taken at the hottest hour of the day; the clearest thing about them is the triangular shadows. Chefren, Cheops and Mykerinos are the names she rattles off, or is it Cheops, Chefren and Mykerinos? – she can’t remember.
    â€˜A whole stack of man-hours went into those,’ Joe says.
    She tells us about a man with a turban and tobacco-colour teeth who helped her up onto a dromedary, after which she went for a knee-knocking ride in the desert. Then they had to climb back into the bus; there was so much to see, Egypt had so much to offer that you simply couldn’t keep track of it all. On the west bank of the Nile, close to Luxor, the whole group was boosted onto donkeys and they rode through all kinds of ruins and necropolises and you never had to ask directions because, as the owner said, ‘donkey knows the way’. The animals stopped on cue in front of a little shop with brand-new antiquities, stopped again beside the ice-cream vendor in the shadow of a crumbling temple, then trotted the rest of the way home with the rattled tourists holding on for dear life. Donkey knows the way!

    There were adventures in the bus as well. Regina Ratzinger tells us about the man who turned green.
    He was a retired teacher from the southern Netherlands, travelling with his wife. They’d spent most of the time nodding off with their cheeks flattened against the window of the bus. Two weeks before they left Holland the man had started taking Imodium, to keep from getting diarrhoea.