‘Jesus,’ said Joost. ‘Jesus Christ Almighty… Anything else?’
‘No.’
‘Beer. A very large pilsener. It just goes to show, Pol, we haven’t seen each other for far too long.’
‘You’re right, Tuur. And one more thing. That girlfriend of André’s, that Ludmilla, is the spitting image of Laura.’
-
VI
I gazed at the short blond hair of Marga Sap in front of me. A gold chain glittered through it. She was wearing a tight black sweater and I had to restrain myself not to stroke her neck with one finger.
It was the end of August 1978, Gerrie Knetemann had just become world champion, and Karel Giesma the maths teacher was talking about p-adic numbers. I tried to make myself invisible in order to avoid questions. The dark universe in which he moved was not mine.
Next to me, Joost was adding moustaches and glasses to the pop musicians in his diary—most of them already had moustaches anyway. He also drew in text balloons. He was bored, and Giesma couldn’t tell him anything new. Joost was one of those people for whom the logic of numbers and lines held no secrets. He read Pythagoras Magazine.
He stopped drawing and nudged me.
‘Someone winds a thread round the earth,’ he whispered. ‘And so does someone else, only he doesn’t lay the thread on the ground but hangs it one metre high. Yes?’
I nodded with as little interest as possible.
‘Right. Now the question is: how much more string does the second man need than the first?’
‘No idea. It’s impossible. What do they do with the oceans?’
‘What matters is the principle. This is an experiment in thinking. Well?’
‘Ten thousand kilometres.’
‘Oh no. A little over six metres!’
‘It’s impossible.’
‘One man needs a length of 2 π r and the other one of 2 π r plus 1 metre. That makes 2 π metres. Say about six metres. Nice, isn’t it? Now we’ll do the same with the circumference of your prick.’
Marga Sap turned round. She didn’t understand a thing about maths either.
‘The circumference of my prick?’
‘That’s different from the length, dickhead. Someone winds a string round it, and someone else does the same, but at a distance of one metre. How much more string does he need?’
‘Christ, Joost, shut up for a minute.’
‘Also 2 π metres,’ he said triumphantly, and wrote something in the text balloon above the head of Freddie Mercury. Freddie already had a pipe in his mouth.
‘I want to fuck Marga Sap,’ said Freddie Mercury.
‘Hoffman, stop that stupid laughing,’ warned Giesma. He was chalking secret codes on the board.
I was wearing my black Levis and the Michigan State T-shirt my cousin had sent me. It was Thursday, and after maths I had to dash to the music school for my organ lesson, for which, as usual, I hadn’t practised.
Everything happens simultaneously; time is no more than an ordering, an illusion. Joost says that time doesn’t exist, André has a painting on the wall about movement that is stasis, while I’m trying to make time stand still. Our friend Peter had to knock on the door of the love cabins on his father’s brothel boat when time was up. There were men who only came when he knocked. One of his poems is called ‘Love is Time’.
I hummed ‘You’re The One That I Want’ softly in Marga’s ear. The nape of her neck went slightly red. I’ll just run my finger along Marga’s chain, play a little with her blond hair, blow on her neck for a moment—and who knows but she might fall in love with me.
Then there was a loud bang on the door of the classroom. Giesma dropped the chalk in shock. Marga turned round with a questioning look in her eyes, as if she could feel what I was planning.
‘Open ze door!’ yelled André from the back of the class. Joost dropped forward laughing, with his face in his arms. Giesma went to the door and, for a second, checked that his bow tie was straight. Berghout, the principal, peered into the classroom, the strands of hair falling across his balding head, and grinned with satisfaction at the effect of his sledgehammer blow.
Next to him stood a black boy.
‘Come in,’ said Giesma.
Berghout went over to the spot behind the teacher’s desk, followed by the black boy, who was wearing a shiny light-blue shirt and trousers with wide legs that had a slight sheen and a red stripe down the side. He swung his hips loosely.
‘Boney M,’ whispered Joost.
The boy seemed shy, yet at the same time exuded self-confidence.
Marga turned round to me again. Her beautiful lips formed three excited words: ‘He’s black!’
‘No, he’s an Eskimo,’ I whispered back.
The headmaster looked at the class and said nothing, obviously wanting to give us time to absorb this historic moment.
‘Class,’ said Berkhout, I’d like to introduce you to David Castelen. He’s from Paramaribo and recently came to live here. From today David will be a member of your class. I’m counting on you to show him the ropes and make sure he soon feels at home in our school. Anyone got any questions?’
No questions.
‘David, any questions?’
‘No, I don’t have any questions.’
‘Good. Then Mr Giesma will assign you a seat and you can quickly brush up your knowledge of Dutch mathematics.’
‘I hope it isn’t as hard as the Surinamese kind.’ There was laughter. Giesma pointed him to the empty spot next to André, at the back of the class. David walked over to it like Elvis Presley going on stage, with swinging hips.
Joost looked at me and made significant movements with his eyebrows. ‘Seems okay,’ he whispered.
I nodded. ‘What do you think, is he gay?’
‘Blacks are never gay, didn’t you know that? They’re far too big to be gay. The other gays can’t take it.’
I saw a new red blush in the nape of Marga Sap’s neck—obviously she hadn’t known that before either.
David’s father had a small travel agency in the Lange Hofstraat, the East-West Travel Agency. Castelen Senior himself had a deep-seated dislike of travelling, including holidays. He had come to the Netherlands because of the future of his children and, in so doing, he had used up all his wanderlust for the rest of his life.
The family home was above the travel agency, so that the life of father Castelen, who had the whole world on offer to his customers, was confined largely to an area of ten by ten by five metres.
‘I can’t understand those people,’ he said. ‘What’s the point of going to a lousy country like that? You catch diseases, the food is terrible, your daughter is attacked, and there’s nothing better to do than slump in a deckchair on the beach. It would be going too far to advise people to stay at home, I’ve got to get by but I can’t make head or tail of it. East, west, home is best, I always say.’ He thought the name of his travel agency was a good joke.
David had inherited his father’s lack of desire for displacement. A year after they had arrived, you could say with certainty that they would never leave, and that in three hundred years’ time, the tenth generation of Castelens would still be living quite contentedly in the town.
When David was 17, he worked out that it was time