Anne-Gine Goemans

Gliding Flight

Translated from the Dutch by Nancy Forest-Flier

World Editions

breda 2015

Published in Great Britain in 2015 by World Editions Ltd., London

www.worldeditions.org

Copyright © Anne-Gine Goemans, 2011

English translation copyright © Nancy Forest-Flier and World Editions, 2015

Cover design Multitude

Cover credit © C.S. Neal

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published as Glijvlucht in the Netherlands in 2011 by De Geus bv, Post office box 1878, 4801 bw Breda

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

isbn 978-94-6238-010-3

This book was published with the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Phone: +31 (0)76 523 3533. Email: info@worldeditions.org.

For Lucy, Wester and Flint

With a dream in your heart you’re never alone.

− burt bacharach & hal david

It is easy to keep from walking;

the hard thing is to walk without touching the ground.

It is easy to cheat when you work for men,

but hard to cheat when you work for Heaven.

You have heard of flying with wings,

but you have never heard of flying without wings.

You have heard of the knowledge that knows,

but you have never heard of the knowledge that does not know.

Look into that closed room,

the empty chamber where brightness is born!

Fortune and blessing gather where there is stillness.

− The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

Translated by Burton Watson

1

Hello, Christian!

My name is Gieles. I saw you flying with your geese on an air show. I thought it was a magical spectacle. You were very high in the sky with your flying two-seater motorbike. My father says you were flying with geese barnacles, but I have certainty they were geese lesser white-fronted.

I apologise for my French. I have big problems with your language. I try to do good.

I am for years impassioned by the geese. I have fourteen years old. I have two brown geese, American Tufted Buff. They wear a tuft, very beautiful and very elegant.

Like you I am a goose explorer and I am training my geese for a project. My geese listen moderately average. They are not shy. Indeed, sometimes they are insolent. They resemble the children of Dolly, my neighbour lady. My neighbour lady is above average good-looking.

I do the training with a stick. The stick is not for violence but for obediencing. I always use different stick. When geese know my stick longer, the obediencing disappears. This is not desirable.

Your migrating varieties excel in listening. My compliments, also on behalf of your wife. Your geese regard you and your wife as an adoptive father. My geese regard me, I cry, as a cousin or brother to obtain tricks on. Just like the children of my neighbour lady on whom I babysit.

I live in the Netherlands, next to an airplane path. Geese next to an airplane path gives difficulties, you will observe! I am in great agreement. Fortunately my geese do not fly through the path. That comes, I cry, from my training (I have a small pride in this). Rest assured, my geese do not live in captivity. Captive birds are a scandal that should be terminated. My geese live in liberty on our campground. It is a campground for people who adore airplanes. They collect airplanes as if it was postage stamps.

You ask of course, why does the boy write? I do not write in order to fly in the two-seater motorbike with you, although for me that would really be spectacle. Being the same high height as the geese in the sky, together with the migrating varieties past the cumulus clouds! Unfortunately, your professional tourism is too expensive for me. I am writing you for a very different motive, for the content of our mutual training of the geese.

Gieles hesitated. How could he make contact with this man—this world famous goose specialist, meteorologist, pilot, filmmaker, ornithologist, photographer, writer, vegan and activist—and ask him the most important questions without revealing too much about his incredible scheme? It had to be kept secret. Gieles stood up from his desk and walked to the open attic skylight. Leaning out with his arms on the roof tiles, he gazed over at the runway. Less than sixty metres away was a straight black strip with lights embedded in it, as well as pastures and fields. In two minutes’ time Gieles could be out on that runway, causing chaos. He wouldn’t have to do a thing. Just standing there would be enough to get himself on every TV station in the country. But then his father could kiss his job as an airport bird controller goodbye.

Gieles looked over at the lights of a descending plane. The sky was calm. The only vibration of air that could be seen was around the wings. The roaring of the engines swelled steadily. He walked back to his laptop and filed the letter to the Frenchman Christian Moullec in a special folder. He had come up with just the right name for the folder: Expert Rescue Operation 3032.

In thirteen weeks and four days his mother would be coming home on flight 3032. Ellen had never been away so long before. Last week she had flown to Africa in the wake of a flock of wild geese. Geese migrated to survive. He understood that. But he didn’t understand why his mother had to migrate. She went to places where there was nothing to eat or drink. His mother was migrating backwards, going against the flow. The birds would have thought she was out of her mind.

He went downstairs to the kitchen where Uncle Fred was sitting at the table peeling apples. ‘Hey, Gieles,’ he said cheerfully. Uncle Fred was always in a good mood. ‘I’ve got peels for the geese.’

Gieles poured himself a glass of milk, swallowed it down in one gulp and wiped the moustache from his upper lip. The smoothness there irritated him. Not even a sign of peach fuzz.

His father and Uncle Fred were fraternal twins, but they didn’t look at all alike. Willem Bos hardly had any hair left, while Uncle Fred had way too much with his mass of salt-and-pepper curls. His father held himself as erect as a statue of a powerful statesman. Uncle Fred, on the other hand, had a slight build and a shuffling gait, the result of childhood polio. He rode around on a mobility scooter and walked with a crutch. He refused to use a cane. There was something about the crutch that suggested a temporary condition (not that his leg was ever going to heal).

The brothers’ personalities and hobbies were also different. His father was fond of birds and comic books. Uncle Fred liked cooking and literature. The only things they had in common were their height—almost two metres—and taking care of Gieles.

‘Don’t forget the goose poop,’ Uncle Fred said, handing him the peels wrapped in newspaper. ‘We have guests. A married couple.’ He sounded pleased.

Gieles got a shovel and bucket from the barn. The deal he had made with his father was simple and straightforward: he could keep two geese as long as they didn’t fly. The minute they took to the sky, they’d have to go. He was also responsible for caring for the geese, which mainly meant shovelling shit. The geese crapped about once a minute.

Next to the old farm was a pasture, where Uncle Fred ran a campground. He had recently gotten the campground listed in a farm-camping guide, although it didn’t meet any of the criteria. No peace and quiet here. The planes took off and landed at about the same punishing tempo as the geese’s bowel habits. The guide said it was a niche campground, which was absolutely true. It wasn’t popular with families. The plane spotters who camped here were solitary figures by and large. The fact that the campground was not a success didn’t bother Uncle Fred in the least. Nothing bothered him. He looked at the grey film of jet fuel covering the wooden sign that said welcome to the hot spot and shrugged his shoulders.

The geese came toward him, greeting him with outstretched, swaying necks. Gieles patted the tufts on their heads and set the bucket of peels in the grass. They stuck their heads into the bucket with little enthusiasm, then began pecking at his thighs. The geese preferred the speculaas cookies that they were more or less addicted to. But Gieles only fed them speculaas during their training sessions, knowing that otherwise they wouldn’t listen to him at all.

Parked on the edge of the pasture was a trailer that looked like a spaceship. A woman was standing in front of it. She waved at him and motioned to him to come over. He planted his shovel in the ground like a flag pole and walked up to her with the geese at his heels, begging for food. The woman’s face was full of creases and cracks, like an antique painting, but her eyes were as clear as a girl’s. As if they had been restored somehow.

‘Hello, ma’am,’ he said politely. ‘Everything all right here?’

Gieles enjoyed being excessively polite to old people. There was something sad about them, he thought, because they were going to die soon.

‘Excellent,’ she said kindly. ‘What I wanted to ask you is that my husband and I want to barbecue tonight. Is that all right?’

‘No problem, ma’am. Just as long as you don’t build a campfire. That might confuse the pilots. And don’t fly any kites,’ he joked.

She smiled. ‘Silly boy.’

The door of the spaceship swung open and her husband came out. He was wearing a pair of aviator glasses and a body warmer with pockets stitched onto it. A pair of binoculars dangled from his neck. And the knobby knees and fossilised calves that stuck out from beneath his shorts looked like they were wasting away.

The man began rubbing the rounded curves of the spaceship with a handkerchief. Dispensing with all formalities he got right down to business. He didn’t even give Gieles a chance to say hello. ‘Look at that. Mirror finish, huh?’

Mirror was right. Gieles could see his reflection in the door, and he noticed that his hair was standing straight up. He ran his hand over his head.

‘The origin of the Airstream,’ said the man proudly, tucking his aviator glasses into one of the pockets, ‘lies in the American aerospace industry. The wings are missing, but otherwise …’

A descending Cityhopper drowned him out. They waited patiently until the sound died away.

‘Where was I?’ The man tugged at his white eyebrows. ‘What’s your favourite?’

‘My favourite what, sir?’

‘Plane,’ he said, sitting down in a lawn chair. Gieles didn’t have a favourite. The aviation industry left Gieles completely cold.

‘The Antonov 225, sir,’ he lied. The biggest plane in the world, number one for many spotters.

The man screwed up his face. ‘That Russian hulk? Let me tell you something. I once waited hours for an Antonov, and all for nothing. The Russians can have their Antonov.’

‘And the Boeing 747 400,’ said Gieles to oblige him. ‘They’re awesome too, sir.’ All plane spotters loved the 747 400.

He clapped his wrinkled hands. ‘That’s what I like to hear! One phenomenal looking plane, especially when it’s frozen. Wingspan?’

Gieles gave him a puzzled look.

‘What’s the wingspan?’ It was obvious from the way the old man asked the question that he already knew the answer. ‘Sixty-four-point-four metres,’ he said, looking at a plane through his binoculars. ‘An Airbus a321. My wife goes for the take-offs, I love the landings. You?’

Gieles couldn’t care less. A landing plane wasn’t even in the same league as a flock of descending geese. Suddenly appearing with all that cackle and flapping of wings. Then sweeping over the land like a wave that finally, slowly, disintegrates.

‘I love geese when they land,’ said Gieles, and he cast a glance at his geese, who were pulling up clumps of grass. ‘The racket they make when they come down. The last metres before they hit the ground. They’re really funny then. As if they can’t remember what they’re supposed to do.’

Gieles spread his arms and pretended to be losing his balance. ‘Once they’ve landed, they strut around like anything. That’s from pride. Sometimes they cover three thousand kilometres! They come all the way from the northernmost tip of Norway, and they all start shrieking together. “We’re back! We’re back!”’

The man and his wife looked at him in amazement.

‘Geese talk to each other all day long,’ Gieles went on. ‘Just like a bunch of women, my father says. And they’re never alone. They always fly together. The whole family.’

‘Goodness,’ said the woman with wide eyes. ‘I didn’t know that. But how do they know which way to go? The sky is so—how shall I put it?—so vast. It’s easy to take a wrong turn.’

Gieles crossed his arms self-confidently. Geese were his speciality.

‘The most important things are the sun and the stars.’ He spoke the words with an air of importance. ‘They’re migration signposts. And the little ones learn from their parents. Chicks straight from the egg don’t know anything at all. When they overwinter for the first time, they fly with their parents to learn the way. Sometimes it’s thousands of kilometres.’

The woman listened attentively to Gieles while her husband spotted the next plane.

‘And the chicks that have no parents? Who do they learn from?’

‘There’s always an aunt to take care of them,’ said Gieles. ‘Or a nice uncle.’

‘Oh, of course,’ she sighed, sitting down in the other lawn chair. ‘How many geese do you have?’

‘Two, ma’am. Just these two.’

‘But they shit for ten,’ said the old man disdainfully. ‘Better to have a dog. They don’t shit nearly as much.’

They watched silently as another plane descended. One of the geese was foraging along the bank of the canal. In the four years he had had them, not once had the geese ever gone into that filthy water. They never even considered it.

‘Very dangerous, geese near a runway.’ The man squeezed the binoculars so hard that his knuckles turned white. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard of that emergency landing? On the river in New York?’

Heard of it? Gieles’s eyes lit up like fireflies on a dark night. The emergency landing on the water—a ‘ditch’—had made a huge impression on him.

‘The Miracle of the Hudson, sir,’ Gieles exclaimed. The words rolled off his tongue in such an orderly fashion that it made him sound like a news presenter. ‘On January 15th, 2009, Captain Chesley Burnett Sullenberger of US Airways landed on the Hudson after a flock of Canada geese flew into his engines. He felt as if he had been hit by a gigantic bolt of lightning.’

Gieles mimicked being struck by the lightning, his body jolting, and then continued. ‘Captain Sully—everybody calls him Sully, and that’s what’s printed on the T-shirts and mugs and underpants—Captain Sully saved all hundred fifty-five passengers of flight 1549.’

‘He checked the plane twice for stragglers,’ the man added excitedly—this was a boy he could talk to—‘before evacuating, the last man to leave the sinking ship. Which actually happened, because the landing had torn open the whole bottom of the aircraft.’

‘And then these little boats came sailing out from everywhere to pick up the passengers,’ continued Gieles happily. ‘But I’m sure you know that, sir.’

‘Hey,’ the man roared over the noise of a descending plane. ‘Cut it out with that “sir” stuff! Makes me nervous!’

He waited for the sound to die down. ‘Johan and Judith.’ He pointed to his wife, who stood there staring at Gieles in silent amazement with her restored eyes. ‘Goodness, you sure do know a lot! This boy sure does know a lot, doesn’t he?’

She placed a hand on her husband’s liver-spotted arm. ‘Johan knows everything about airplanes and crashes. He’s been collecting plane crashes in scrapbooks since 1972. With all the details. And if he can find photos he pastes them in, too. Other spotters call him a crash freak. Isn’t that right, Johan?’

‘Hmm.’ A Boeing was hanging heavily in the air a few kilometres away.

‘They’re very lovely scrapbooks,’ she declared. ‘It’s not the death and sensationalism that Johan is interested in, but the chain of events.’

‘I was sure I could do it,’ said Gieles in English.

‘Excuse me?’ said the woman.

‘That’s what Captain Sully said. After his act of heroism.’ Gieles tried to imitate his voice by relaxing his vocal cords. ‘I was sure I could do it.’

The man followed the plane until the tail disappeared behind a row of birches. Then he said, rather severely, ‘So you know damn well how dangerous geese are for aviation.’

‘My geese can’t fly,’ Gieles lied. ‘They’ve lost the knack.’

‘Look,’ said the woman, delighted. ‘Kenya Airways. What cheerful colours. It looks just like the tail of a tropical parrot. I adore parrots. They make me think of fireworks.’

‘Next time we come here,’ said Johan, ‘I’ll bring my scrapbooks along. Then I’ll show you that even a couple of geese in the engine can do a lot of damage. A whole lot of damage.’

‘What a wonderful place to live,’ his wife interrupted, inhaling deeply. ‘Right near the airplanes, yet out in the country.’

‘Tremendously beautiful spot,’ nodded Johan in approval. ‘That’s all I can say.’

She turned halfway around in her chair and pointed to a little wooded area further up on the other side of the road.

‘I wonder who planted those trees there. Such young trees right out in the polder … It’s like a fairy tale.’

‘Environmentalists,’ said Gieles.

‘What a terribly nice gesture.’

‘Why?’ asked Johan suspiciously, putting his aviator glasses back on.

‘They didn’t want a runway to be built here. So they bought a piece of land from our neighbour and planted trees on it. But the court said the trees had to go, so they moved the trees over there.’ He pointed to the woods. ‘My mother calls it “the woods in exile.”’

For Gieles, the summer with the environmentalists was the best he’d ever had. Suddenly there they were. They came chugging along in a smelly diesel bus, and Gieles couldn’t see how the bus could hold so many people and so much stuff. He watched as they unloaded their tents, generators, duffle bags, sleeping bags, kerosene lamps and pans. In one afternoon, Gieles’s boring view of the polder turned into a non-stop circus performance. Dozens of dome tents were pitched around a trailer that was painted in rainbow colours. The environmentalists tied hammocks to wooden poles and their children hung paper streamers in the branches. It looked gorgeous, thought Gieles, who didn’t dare go out to size up the situation until the end of the afternoon. His friend Tony went first.

The activists were very nice. They gave them lemonade and cookies and asked them all kinds of questions: how often Tony and Gieles played in the woods, what they thought of the airport, whether they were often sick or found themselves coughing a lot. Gieles chuckled when the environmentalists talked about the importance of ‘their woods,’ when what they meant was the scrawny little clump of trees in the middle of a wasteland. Everywhere there were piles of grey sand with bulldozers and dump trucks driving through them. It was one big sandbox, where men in orange overalls walked around with notebooks. The construction of the new runway was in full swing. Now it was a matter of waiting for the court ruling.

Every day, new people came to visit the encampment. According to Uncle Fred they were celebrities, which must have been true because there were photographers and journalists there as well. The celebrities shouted that they were opposed to the runway. But once the runway was built, you never heard them say another word about it. They never came back. Now the celebrities were flying over the roofs of the houses of Gieles and his neighbours.

Gieles’s house was on television countless times that summer. Reporters kept asking Uncle Fred what he thought of the idea of airplanes landing in his backyard.

‘You can’t stop it,’ he declared. And actually it wasn’t even his backyard. Uncle Fred had been bought out. His own house was located right on the future runway; it had to go. That’s why he moved in with the family of his twin brother. It had been a practical decision, too. When Ellen was flying, Fred could take care of Gieles and do the housework.

Gieles knew that Uncle Fred never answered the journalists’ questions. Uncle Fred was never for or against anything. He never identified with any particular side, as if the matter didn’t concern him. He took everything in stride. Be a river, not a mountain: that was his motto. The river was friendly to the activists. He brought them homemade fennel soup and sausage rolls, and let them take showers at the farm. When the guy ropes of the sprawling encampment got all tangled up, he offered them the pasture as an additional place to pitch their tents. That’s what inspired him to start a spotters’ campground.

The river was friendly to the activists’ enemies, too. When the military police appeared in the farmyard to go over some questions of public safety, he gave them a bag of cherries. And when the airport people came over to talk about sound insulation, he served them coffee and apple pie.

Gieles fervently hoped that the environmentalists would never go away. And he wasn’t the only one. All the neighbourhood children spent more time in the woods that summer than they did at home. They played hide-and-seek and danced wildly to the music from Rinky Dink, an environmentally-friendly sound installation driven by bicycle power. A man with a braided red beard taught Gieles how to make a tent with bamboo sticks. He painted wooden leaves that were suspended from the branches of a metal tree. Sometimes Gieles ate with them from big pans of beans that had been cooked to death. They ate at long tables, and often the discussions became so heated that Gieles thought they were going to start fighting. He heard words he hadn’t heard before, such as ‘free state,’ ‘mafia,’ ‘court order,’ ‘occupation.’ And he learned how to curse for the first time. ‘Prick’ and ‘asshole’ were already familiar to him, but ‘twat,’ ‘cunt,’ ‘motherfucker’ and ‘cocksucker’ were new. His friend Tony couldn’t get enough of the curse words.

When his mother came back from abroad she would go take a look at the camp, sometimes still in her uniform. The environmentalists were nice to Ellen. No one paid any attention to her stewardess outfit. Gieles even suspected that the men of the camp were flirting with her.

In the evening, Gieles would stare at the encampment through his attic window as long as he could keep his eyes open. Some of the activists sat around the campfire, others lay entwined in hammocks. Someone played the guitar. Flashlights blinked on and off in the dome tents and made the woods look magical. One man hauled a bucket of dishwashing water out of the canal he’d just just pissed into. Once Gieles saw a bare bottom sticking out of a hammock. Whether there was one person or two in the hammock was impossible for him to tell.

On the day the woods were cleared by court order, the environmentalists got ready to resist to the bitter end. They promised a raging battle, a guerrilla war. Gieles was on the environmentalists’ side, of course. He and Tony made a slingshot out of wood and a rubber band.

But the battle never materialised. When two policemen closed off the road so the camp could no longer receive supplies, the tents were taken down in silence. The only reminder of the environmentalists was the metal tree with its wooden leaves, but even that disappeared within a couple of days. The airport had won.

Since the runway’s completion, the short distance between it and the farm had been drawing Gieles like a magnet. The first time he and Tony had tried to bridge the few forbidden metres was with a blowpipe and paper. They shot spitballs at the runway from his attic window until the ink from the paper made them nauseous. This led to a game with a slingshot and a whole series of variations that became increasingly less innocent.

The shootings ended for good when a homemade paint bomb exploded against the flank of a Cityhopper. The idea for a paint bomb had come from a squatter who lived next-door to Tony and his family. The house had stood empty since the opening of the runway. No one wanted to live there any more, except the squatter. He was the one who taught Tony and Gieles how to make the bombs, a procedure that involved dipping balloons in candle wax at least forty times. That, said the squatter, would produce a bomb that could smash a double-glazed window. Gieles and Tony didn’t want to smash any double-glazed windows, so they only dipped the balloons twenty times. The very first shot was a direct hit. For a moment the pilot was under the impression that a big bird had crashed against the cockpit, but there was something suspicious about the blue colour. From the attic window Tony and Gieles could see the flashing lights of the military police. Terrified, Gieles grabbed one of the balloons and squeezed it so hard that the paint squirted all over his bedroom. There was no point in denying that they were the culprits.

Gieles emptied his glass of cola, and when the woman offered him another syrup waffle he accepted it. Her husband had fallen asleep. His chin was hanging loosely over his body warmer. The binoculars rested on his lanky legs. Gieles thanked her and went back to cleaning up the goose shit.

His father had called the environmentalists a bunch of boneheads. Leaving without resistance: that, according to him, made you a bonehead. But for Gieles the environmentalists were heroes, and since that summer he had felt a deep longing to be a hero himself. He had done the occasional heroic thing, but that didn’t make him a hero. Two years before he had rescued a German shepherd from the canal. The dog hadn’t been able to scramble up onto the bank himself. Gieles pulled him out by his collar and the dog ran away. No one had seen his act of heroism, so it didn’t count.

The Frenchman Christian Moullec was a hero. In his flying two-seater motorbike he saved lesser white-fronted geese by showing them the way to their winter quarters.

His mother was a hero. At the risk of her own life she travelled from one dried out place to another (for reasons that were incomprehensible to him) to teach poor Africans to cook on solar-powered stoves.

Captain Sully was the biggest hero of them all. Without a doubt. I was sure I could do it. Americans adored him. They drank coffee from i ♥ sully mugs. They wore T-shirts with thank you captain sully, sully is my homeboy, old pilots never die on them. His name was on pillows, mouse pads, bumper stickers, calendars and dog shirts. Women wore panties bearing the words true hero flt 1549. He was sexier than Johnny Depp, greater than Jesus. Jesus could walk on water, but Captain Chesley Sullenberger could land on water and bring a hundred fifty-five people to safety.

Another hero of immense proportions: Jan-Ove Waldner. The best table tennis player ever. Also called the Mozart of table tennis. Gieles had no idea why, but it sounded good.

His father was a kind of hero. He drove birds from the runways to keep the passengers safe. Gieles suspected him of driving the birds away to save them from the airplane engines. Obstinate birds were shot, but not by Willem Bos. He never shot. Except at pigeons. His father despised pigeons.

Gieles went to the barn, shovel and bucket in hand. In just a few more months he’d be a hero himself. He would personally see to it that his mother never wanted to go back to Africa again. Everyone would be hugely impressed.

In the barn he picked up the bamboo stick and the tin of speculaas. When he shook the tin the geese came running. He gave them a couple of cookies and put the tin in his backpack. Then he prodded their feathery backsides with the stick.

Strutting with pride, their tufts held jauntily in the air, the geese crossed the road. When they got to the environmentalists’ woods they began to graze in the grass. Gieles looked up at the camera that was mounted to a lamppost.

The airport tolerated the geese because his father had told them they were flightless farm chickens that had never flown a metre in their lives. His father had authority.

If only they knew.

Idiots.

They passed a derelict house whose garden was overrun by wild blackberry bushes that were creeping up the outer walls. Gieles noticed that part of one bush was growing in through a broken window, as if the house were being devoured. Behind the uninhabited ruin was a grassy path leading to the shed. He pushed open the corrugated metal door. The shed was empty, except for a couple of aluminium boats and a disassembled tractor. The geese waddled in, their tails wagging. They were eager to get started.

‘Stay,’ he said to the geese, articulating distinctly. He held up his hands as if he were pronouncing a blessing.

‘Stay.’

Slowly Gieles started walking backward, repeating the command. The geese stayed where they were but became restless. They wiggled up and down and began cheeping. At a distance of less than twenty metres Gieles again called out ‘stay!’, but this time they took a running start and flapped up to him awkwardly, flopping down at his feet and cackling with wild abandon.

‘Damn!’ said Gieles in frustration. ‘You guys are supposed to wait till I give the sign! With my stick!’ They pecked at his pants’ leg. Gieles pushed the geese away. ‘First listen. Then cookies.’

He began walking backward once more. ‘Sit! Stay!’

2

At the end of the afternoon they watched scenes of an earthquake on television. A woman stood wailing in front of a mountain of rubble that until very recently had been a house.

‘Good thing Ellen isn’t there,’ said Uncle Fred, opening the newspaper. They were sitting side by side on the threadbare couch with the English tea rose pattern.

Gieles tried to imagine what it was like for the earth to shake. A shaking roof was normal for him. When the heavy cargo jets took off at night, the roof pounded like an old washing machine.

Gieles zapped from the earthquake to Animal Planet. A grooming bonobo and her baby were sitting under a tree. Gieles’s friend Tony had a lot in common with monkeys. He was muscular in a stocky sort of way and there was something threatening about his body language. He had a habit of scratching the zits on his chin and putting the pus in his mouth. It was revolting. Even so, Gieles still hung out with him. After the runway had been built almost everyone in the neighbourhood had moved away.

One of the males grabbed the female from behind.

‘Bonobos spend almost the entire day delighting in each other’s company,’ said a voice.

Uncle Fred glanced up from his newspaper. Gieles quickly zapped to another station. Recently it was impossible for Tony to carry on a conversation without talking about screwing, as if he had already done it a gazillion times and Gieles was doomed to be a virgin for the rest of his life. It’s true that he was too much of a chicken to talk to girls, which was why he spent so much of his time on the internet. He had met someone on a website. She called herself Gravitation. He had logged in as Captain Sully. The e-mail correspondence between them had been fairly vague.

His father’s airport service car came into the yard. It was a bright yellow jeep with transmitters and sound equipment on the roof. The equipment was meant to keep birds off the runways. He had recordings of dying birds that sent ice cold shivers down your spine. The screeching of a terrified seagull was especially effective at keeping other seagulls away.

His father got out of the jeep with his phone to his ear. He looked grave. Gieles zapped to soccer. A little while later his father came into the living room with a beer in his hand.

‘Hey, guys,’ he said, dropping onto a dark grey sofa that had once matched the rest of the interior. When Uncle Fred had moved his own furniture into the living room—the English tea rose couch, a mahogany sideboard and a glass tea table—unity of design went out the window.

‘How’d it go?’ Uncle Fred asked his twin brother.

‘A close shave,’ said Willem Bos, never a man of many words. Whenever he did speak, he got it over with as quickly as possible. Occupational disability, he called it. He had adjusted the rhythm of his sentences to the take-off and landing of the airplanes.

‘Thousands of migrating starlings flew over the runway and down into the fields. Close shave.’

He said it at the end of every workday. Close shave. Uncle Fred and Gieles didn’t even hear it any more, nor did Willem Bos expect a response. Swallows, seagulls, geese, bats, owls, starlings, lapwings, oystercatchers, buzzards, swans: hundreds of thousands of birds made a stopover at the airport. The sky was a tangle of migratory routes, invisible to most people but not to his father. When Willem shut his eyes he could see all the bird highways take shape before him. His job was to keep the birds at a safe distance, an overwhelming task when you considered what was involved.

Willem Bos took a sip of beer and settled down to watch the game.

Uncle Fred hoisted himself up with his crutch. ‘Supper’s almost ready.’ He click-clacked into the kitchen.

Gieles set the table and sat down to eat. They only sat in the same seats when his mother was away. He had a view of their narrow backyard, the canal and the runway. The black water glistened in the evening sun. The nose of a plane appeared in the kitchen window and came to a halt. The crew and passengers couldn’t see them. His mother had once had to wait in a plane that was idling in front of their house. All she could see when she looked in the windows was the reflection of the plane itself.

‘Thursday evening we’re experimenting with a robot bird,’ said Willem. He ate his macaroni in big bites. Everything about his father was big: his mouth, his ears, his nose, his hands. His movements. Women found him handsome in an exciting sort of way. They stole glances at him but didn’t dare strike up a conversation. Sometimes women from Uncle Fred’s book clubs came over, and they would suddenly get all theatrical if his father happened to walk into the room.

Willem Bos looked at his son. ‘Maybe you’d like to come along? To see the robot bird, I mean.’

‘I think I have time,’ said Gieles.

His father pushed the empty plate away and let his hands rest on the table.

Gieles wanted to take hold of that powerful hand, but he was afraid it would seem childish. He looked at his own hands. They were baby hands compared to his dad’s. They hadn’t done anything yet. He’d never even laid a finger on a girl’s body, let alone in a girl’s body. In kindergarten he’d rooted around in a girl’s backside with his finger, but it might just as well have been her nose. There had been a practical reason for it. They had been playing that the felt-tip pen was a thermometer, and the top got stuck inside her. Gieles wanted to get the top out. The teacher got mad if they didn’t put the tops back on the felt-tips. She was afraid they would dry out. (She was also afraid of lice, sour milk, mud in the construction corner, scraped knees and lots of other things.)

After supper Gieles went to his room. He had half an hour before he had to leave. He turned on the fan and the laptop and wiped his forehead. It was early May but it was stifling in his room. The airport had had the roof insulated with thick mattresses that were supposed to muffle the noise of the planes, but they turned his room into a pressure cooker. The worst thing was that the sound insulation made his hair stand on end. He was always walking around with a permanent static charge.

Gieles wanted to do some more work on the letter to Christian Moullec, but he noticed there was an e-mail from his mother. It was the second message she’d sent since she left. Gravitation was also online. He quickly read the last sentences of his mother’s mail.

‘And I can’t take off the burka either, even though it’s forty degrees. I miss you and think about you, and I hope you spend just a teensy bit of time thinking about all those people living in such terrible poverty here. Love, Ellen.’

Gieles didn’t want to think about all those people, so he closed the mail. Africans made him feel so incredibly depressed. He’d rather think about the virtual girl. Gravitation. He wondered why she called herself that. It was as if she wanted to imply that she was fat, but she didn’t look fat in the little photos. She had pitch black dreadlocks and a pale, oval face. It said in her profile that she had fourteen piercings. Gieles wondered where they were. He could only see one, in her eyebrow. He couldn’t get a clear picture of Gravitation because of the dreadlocks and the black make-up. Her green eyes were beautiful, he thought. They were the same colour as the scum on the fish bowl when it hadn’t been cleaned for weeks.

He could start with her eyes, but that was corny. Keep it simple.

Captain Sully: ‘Hi, what are you up to?’

Gravitation: ‘Nothing. Playing with my rabbit and listening to music.’

Captain Sully: ‘What you listening to?’

Gravitation: ‘Fever Ray. You probably don’t know her. Fever Ray is this Swedish woman. She changes every day. Just like me. This morning I dyed my hair.’

Captain Sully: ‘What colour?’

Gravitation: ‘Violet.’

Weirdo. Violet dreadlocks.

Captain Sully: ‘Did you dye your rabbit, too?’

Gravitation: ‘Fuck off.’

Captain Sully: ‘I have rabbits, too. Hundreds.’

Gravitation: ‘You live at a petting zoo?’

Captain Sully: ‘Ha ha. No, I live on a dead-end street next to an airport runway. There are lots of rabbits near the runway. And hares.’

Gravitation: ‘Cool.’

Captain Sully: ‘There are lots of birds and foxes and stuff near the runway, too. My father calls it a wildlife area. I have two geese.’

Gravitation: ‘Geese are great!’

She’s pulling my chain. Nobody thinks geese are great.

Gravitation: ‘What are their names?’

The geese had no names, but that might sound like he didn’t care enough about them. He scanned his room in search of suitable names. On his bookshelf he spotted the rows of comic books that had belonged to his father.

Captain Sully: ‘Asterix and Obelix. And your rabbit?’

Gravitation: ‘Just plain rabbit.’

Captain Sully: ‘How old is he?’

Gravitation: ‘Five. And you?’

Captain Sully: ‘About four.’

Gravitation: ‘No. You!’

She has to be older than fourteen.

Captain Sully: ‘Sixteen. And you?’

Gravitation: ‘Almost seventeen.’

She’s almost three years older than me! That means I pretty much don’t even exist for her!

Gravitation: ‘I’m moving out as soon as I can. I hate my parents.’

Shit, I have to be at Dolly’s in ten minutes.

Captain Sully: ‘I’ve got to go to work.’

Gravitation: ‘Where?’

Babysitting wasn’t cool, Gieles decided, so he thought of the part-time job Tony had in his father’s shop. His father was a butcher.

Captain Sully: ‘In a butcher shop.’

Gravitation: ‘I’m a vegetarian.’

3

Dolly lived with her three little sons at the bend in the runway. The house was wedged in between two abandoned houses that looked just as dilapidated as hers. Empty houses were cancerous growths, Dolly said, that should be cut out immediately. But that didn’t happen. There she was, stuck in the most nauseating place in the universe. On rainy days, when the polder was dull and grey and the only thing that shone was the asphalt, she repeated her theory over and over again like a mantra.

Gieles didn’t know whether she was right or wrong. But over a year ago her husband had died of a heart attack. One morning she found him dead in their bed. It was a mystery, said the doctor, but not according to Dolly. She was convinced that it had to do with the airport and the empty houses. The noise of the airplanes ate away at him the way fungus hollows out a tree. She could feel the cancer demons beaming their rays right through the walls. Since then, Dolly cursed the house, the neighbourhood and her life, but she never managed to get away. A FOR SALE sign had been hanging in the front yard since her husband’s death. Not a single person had come to look.

Dolly opened the door. She already had her jacket on and her face was carefully made up. She smiled. ‘Hello,’ he said, and put his backpack with the laptop under the hat rack. Gieles was eager to get back online.

Gieles thought Dolly was sexy, but sometimes she was scary, too. She could light into her children like a crazy lady. His father and mother never yelled or hit. Gieles had gotten a smack on the head, but just once. That was after the incident with the paint bomb and the Cityhopper. His father pulled him out from under the bed, where he had been hiding. He was covered with blue paint. That was the one time his father had hit him.

Dolly could get a certain expression on her face that made you want to look the other way. She never did it with him, but she did with his mother sometimes. If his mother was at a birthday party, for example, and she started talking about African children with chopped off limbs and smashed skulls, Dolly’s eyes would narrow. He realised that her expression had something to do with disapproval.

He walked into the living room and was met by Skiq and Onno, Dolly’s two oldest children, who jumped all over him, whooping loudly. Dolly went to the dining room table, where there was a suitcase containing bottles of vitamins. Two evenings a week she sold the vitamins at living room gatherings. During the day she worked in her own beauty parlour. Gieles wondered if she took the pills herself. She always looked so tired.

‘Jonas is already asleep,’ Dolly told him as she shut the lid and pulled the suitcase off the table.

‘I’ll carry it,’ said Gieles. He shook Skiq off his back and dragged himself up to her. (Onno had wrapped his arms around Gieles’s leg and was trailing along behind him.)

‘Cut it out, Onno,’ she snarled. Then she went outside, high heels clicking. Gieles put the suitcase on the back seat of the worn-out old Nissan. The inside of the car smelled of her perfume.

‘You’re an angel,’ she told him.

She had called him that before. ‘I don’t understand why your mother leaves such an angel alone,’ she had said.

Dolly stroked his static hair and laughed. ‘Try a wooden comb. That helps. There’s one in the bathroom—or in my bedroom. On the window sill, I think.’

She gave a quick wave to the boys, who were standing at the window. A plant fell from the window sill and both of them saw it. It was the ficus.

‘Goddamn it,’ cursed Dolly.

‘I’ll clean it up,’ he said.

She got in her car and opened the window. ‘Don’t forget their medicine!’

Inside the boys were fighting over the ficus. The pot lay on the floor in three pieces. The soil was all dried up, and everywhere there were brown leaves covered with a layer of dust. Dolly hardly did any cleaning since the death of her husband. Not very smart, Gieles thought. She’d never find a buyer that way. On the other hand, he didn’t like the idea of Dolly and the children leaving.

Gieles put the plant in the dish pan and turned on the water, which was soaked up by the ball of soil around the roots. On the counter was a ten euro note for babysitting.

‘I need glue,’ said Gieles. ‘If you guys stop screaming, you can help.’

They both ran to the hall closet and came back with their hands filled with tubes of glue.

‘I only need one.’ He placed the shards on the table. The boys spread glue on the broken pottery.

‘Put your hands on the cracks and push.’

He thought of his mother. She had scars on her arms from a car accident in Zambia. Or was it Malawi? He didn’t remember. When Gieles asked what the long, thin stripes were on her arms, she answered, ‘Glue joints. I fell apart, and they glued me back together.’

After a couple of minutes Gieles said they could pull their hands away.

‘Nice,’ said Onno. ‘Now Mom won’t be mad.’

Skiq lined the tubes up in front of him and began to count. ‘There are eighteen,’ he said.

‘Why do you have so much glue here?’ asked Gieles.

The boy shrugged his shoulders. ‘I think because lots of things break.’

Gieles picked up his laptop. ‘Go watch TV.’

The brothers stretched out on the couch, zapping, while Gieles installed himself at the table. Fuck. No Gravitation. He read the mail from his mother.

‘Sunshine,’ she wrote. His mother had been calling him that for as long as he could remember. ‘I’m writing you in the classroom of a little school in Budunbuto. It’s a poor village without running water but with eight brand-new computers donated by a Dutch company. A heart-warming initiative. Unfortunately, seven of the computers broke down because of all the airborne sand. Tomorrow I’m giving the women of the village a cooking demonstration. They’re used to cooking on wood, but there’s not a tree to be found in the whole area. Compared with Budunbuto our polder is an overgrown jungle. Fortunately I can spend today resting from the journey. It took almost a week to get here. I’m used to inaccessible places and bandits, but my guide really beat them all. He chewed khat non-stop. Munched down entire bushes of the stuff like a goat, so that he totally lost touch with reality. He actually thought I was a female hyena and he was the male counterpart. I’ll spare you the details. I’m glad I’m here, although sometimes the dust drives me nuts. It gets on and into everything. There’s nothing I’d rather have than a cold shower, but the water is being rationed. And I can’t take off the burka either, even though it’s forty degrees.’

He had already read the bit about the burka.

‘There’s nothing good on TV,’ said Skiq, grabbing his black Michael Jackson hat.

‘Can I show you the moonwalk?’ The hat was hanging low over his eyes.

Gieles slammed the computer screen shut and walked over to the cabinet where the CD player was stored. All the CDs were scrambled up together, none of them in boxes.

‘Number four!’ shouted Skiq. ‘“Billie Jean”, it’s already in it.’

Skiq stood in the middle of the living room with his hat tilted at an angle over his face. He held the brim with one hand. The music started and Skiq began shaking his narrow hips. Then he made punching movements. His little brother imitated him from the couch. While snapping up the heel of one foot he pushed the other foot back.

‘You do it better than Michael Jackson,’ said Gieles.

Onno jumped down from the couch, right on top of his brother. They began fighting.

‘Time for bed,’ said Gieles, pulling the boys apart. They continued their quarrel in the bathroom, first fighting over toothbrushes, then over their medicine. All three children had asthma. Dolly blamed their illness on the airport, too.

‘If you guys put your inhalers in your mouth now, I’ll let you ride in Uncle Fred’s scooter the next time.’

They both inhaled their medicine and went out to the hallway.

‘You can’t come in my room,’ Skiq told Gieles.

He stood in the doorway, blocking the entrance.

‘Skiq still wets the bed. He has a piss alarm,’ teased Onno.

‘I DON’T WET THE BED, YOU STUPID PRICK!’ screamed Skiq, punching his brother in the stomach. Onno fell against the wall and began to cry.

The youngest boy woke up and started bawling, too.

‘We’re not gonna start beating each other up,’ said Gieles, pulling them apart once more. It took half an hour to calm the boys down. Gieles went into Skiq’s bedroom last. Skiq was lying with his back to the door. Next to his head was a little black box attached to a cord. The cord disappeared under the duvet.

‘Is that the alarm?’ asked Gieles.

The boy said nothing. His angular shoulders protruded from the duvet. Skiq was a boy of delicate build. When Gieles horsed around with him he could feel the bones right through his skin. He made Gieles think of a grasshopper. Dolly had named Skiq after an English hardcore band. Gieles was afraid that Skiq would never become hardcore.

‘I wet the bed sometimes, too,’ Gieles lied, but he immediately regretted saying it. Later Skiq would tell Dolly.

Totally unconvinced, the boy turned around. ‘Really?’

‘Joke. But Tony does,’ said Gieles. ‘And Tony is sixteen already and you just turned nine.’

Skiq looked relieved.

‘And Tony drives a motorbike.’

‘Don’t tell anybody. Promise?’

‘Promise.’

‘Gieles?’ the boy asked.

‘Yes?’

‘Are we ever gonna play table tennis again?’

‘Sure.’

He walked past Dolly’s bedroom. The door was open. It was a mess, clothes lying and hanging everywhere. The ironing board was about to collapse under a mountain of laundry. Gieles went in. He looked on the window sill behind the closed room-darkening curtains, but there was no wooden comb to be seen among all the pots of desiccated cactuses. He sat down on the unmade double bed. The room was suddenly ablaze with lights from a descending plane. Gieles squeezed his eyes shut. It felt like stadium lights were penetrating the curtains and shining right on him. The plane landed and taxied past the house. For a moment it was dark, but just a few minutes later the room was bathed in light again. Gieles stretched out on the bed. On the nightstand was a framed photo. He saw Dolly in a white wedding dress. Her dead husband had his arms wrapped around her waist. Gieles thought they looked happy. The light flared up again, blinking, and then ebbed away.

Gieles’s parents were not married. His mother thought marriage was nonsense. Whenever she got all agitated about the state of the world, his father would joke, ‘Will you marry me?’ That made her laugh. But for the past year his father had stopped making those jokes.

Gieles turned over on his stomach and smelled the same sweet fragrance he had smelled in the car. Yawning, he threw his arms around the pillow. His hands encountered a strip of pills and a small piece of velvet. In the airplane light he saw that it was some kind of Zorro mask.

He thought about Gravitation and her green eyes. She liked Swedish music and animals. The next time he’d tell her everything about the behaviour of his geese.

He thought about table tennis. He’d spent trillions of hours playing table tennis with Tony, but ever since Tony had started getting zits and acting irritating they didn’t play any more. He daydreamed about Dolly. Did she sleep naked? That was a thought that made the lower part of his body come to life.

A high, shrill noise brought him back to reality. It sounded like a fire alarm. Stumbling over the clothes, he ran out into the hall. He expected to see metre-high flames shooting up the stairwell, but he saw and smelled nothing. The sound came from Skiq’s room, from the little black box. The boy didn’t even wake up.