Free Joe Speedboat by Tommy Wieringa Page B

Every guidebook you came across talked about the country’s poor hygiene, and he didn’t want to run the risk of having his holiday ruined by dysentery. After the bus had been on the road for about a week, dark spots began appearing faintly on his cheeks and around his mouth. He grew restless, started carrying on non-stop monologues and pacing the aisle. The dark spots broke through to the surface, a sort of moss began growing on his face – a fibrous, dark-green mould that turned to powder when he touched it. It had been three weeks since he’d had a bowel movement. The moss soon covered his neck as well and seemed determined, in some primitive, single-celled fashion, to spread right down into his shirt. His fellow travellers were concerned. Nothing to worry about, the teacher said, it would go away at some point, he’d probably just eaten something that didn’t agree with him. By this time he had turned completely green and apathetic, all he did was loll in his seat and let the Aswan Dam and the temples of Abu Simbel pass him by. By the time they had crossed the Eastern Desert and reached the Red Sea the teacher could no longer stand upright. As three men carried him off the bus at Hurghada, his wife flitting nervously around them, all he did was smile benevolently. The fungus had now taken root on his tongue as well, making it look as though he’d been sucking on a green jawbreaker. The other travellers who saw his swollen belly said it looked like the bloated stomach of a drowned man.

    At Hurghada’s general hospital they gave him the maximum allowable dose of laxatives: he almost exploded. Three and a half weeks’ worth of food had collected in his stomach and intestines, kilos of half-digested clay had piled up before a port hermetically sealed with Imodium. During the ensuing stampede of old shit, his anus and part of his rectum ripped open. ‘Mr Brouwer has given birth to a golem,’ someone in the group whispered, and they hadn’t laughed so hard in ages.
    â€˜What’s a golem?’ Christof asks, but Regina Ratzinger has already moved on to the next stack of photographs.
    Mr Brouwer remained behind in Hurghada while the rest of the group crossed the Sinai to the Gulf of Aqaba. In the village of Nuweiba, the last stop before flying home from Cairo, they stayed at the Domina, a luxury hotel with a swimming pool, a disco and a 130-kilo pianist in the lounge.
    In Regina’s photos we see a dark man with a moustache like a guinea pig. His skin is the colour of potting soil. Three pictures later we see him puffing on a water pipe and grinning through the clouds of smoke. A little later he’s standing fully dressed beside Regina in a bikini on the beach.
    â€˜Who’s the moustache?’ Joe asks.
    His mother slides the next photo over that one, but this one’s got the moustache in it as well, standing now beside a campfire on the beach, against a dark sky with a few stripes of sunset in it.
    â€˜What’s the moustache grinning about?’ asks Joe, but his mother says nothing.
    Joe gets up, Engel and Christof follow him. Regina stares at the photo.
    â€˜You can tell me some other time,’ Joe says. ‘OK?’
    After Joe’s father, not many people were buried in the old graveyard along Kruisweg, which runs behind our gardenhouse – my current residence. On nice days, when the windows were open at our place, we always used to hear the funerals. Father Nieuwenhuis’s voice through the loudspeakers, a member of the family coming up to the microphone to read a letter to the dearly departed, and finally the funeral director thanking everyone on behalf of the family and calling their attention to the buffet afterwards at ‘Het Karrewiel’ restaurant: right at the end of the street, the second left and all the way down, parking at the back.
    For years I listened to this depressing business. More perhaps than Death itself,