Joe Speedboat by Tommy Wieringa Read Free Book Online Page A

fairytales and nightmares, and there’s no demand for the stories of Frank the Arm. They’ll remain on the shelf until the day someone comes along to write the history of Lomark and recognizes them as a treasure trove that sheds a little light on the years behind us. Only then will my work be judged at its true value. Until then it’s just a pile of old news at the back of a shed.
    My diaries are lined up in bookcases against the back wall. I write every day. Historians and archaeologists dig things up from the depths of the past; I go around picking up the same things in the present. You could call what I do ‘horizontal history’. Historians look for things that are long past, that’s why they have to dig so deep: I call that ‘vertical history’. The comparison came to me one day during geography class, when we were talking about strip mining and underground mining. With strip mining, you don’t have to dig; the coal is close to the surface, all you really have to do is scrape it off the earth. But with underground mining you really have to go to great depths, which is why they dig tunnels into the earth.
    It seemed like a useful metaphor to me.
    To a certain extent, I make the historian’s work unnecessary. Should they ever find my diaries, they’ll take from them whatever they need, embellish on it a little and call it their own. Fancy-talking pickpockets is all they are, really, just like novelists. But what do I care as long as someday people know how it really went, all the things about Joe? The things I know, not the stuff Christof and his buddies try to claim. That’s not the truth: that’s lies and folklore.

International events rarely affect us directly here in Lomark. Sometimes, for example when the price of oil goes up, we know something’s going on in the Middle East, and when a layer of red dust covers the cars after a rain it means there’s probably been a storm in the Sahara; otherwise, most things in the world pass us right by. But when Lomark gets a new dentist, that pretty much has to be a direct result of global upheaval. In fact, we owe his arrival directly to the speech given by South Africa’s President Frederik Willem de Klerk on 2 February, 1990. That was the day De Klerk lifted the ban on the African National Congress. He also announced the release of Nelson Mandela, the leader and symbol of the struggle against apartheid. ‘He’s a man with a vision as wide as God’s eye,’ Mandela’s supporters say, and they put him on a par with the Great Soul of India.
    In 1990 Mandela walked out the prison gates, and a few hours later he was giving his first speech in twenty-seven years. An amusing detail is that he forgot his reading glasses in his cell, and had to make do with a pair he borrowed from his wife. Three years later Mandela and De Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 1994 Mandela succeeded De Klerk as president of South Africa.
    The country’s turnaround brought huge social tensions, andrivalry for both power and resources. Julius Jakob Eilander, dentist, and his wife Kathleen Swarth-Eilander were fourth-generation Afrikaners. They watched as their neighbours raised the walls around their villas and installed alarm systems so sensitive that a falling leaf or a rustling lizard made the sirens scream. The Eilanders didn’t wait to see the country transformed. They packed and left for Europe, back to ‘
die ou Holland
’ their ancestors had left behind in the nineteenth century.
    In January of 1993 they arrived at Schiphol Airport. After a few weeks with distant relatives and a few months in a holiday cottage amid pine trees and mobile homes, Julius Eilander took over the practice of Lomark’s only dentist, a man who had been rigging our mouths with fillings, crowns and bridges for as long as anyone could remember.
    Eilander’s office is on the first floor of the building people here