“You recognize the image?”
“Absolutely! My flatmate was copying it. The one whose paintings Joost was preparing to show in …”
“Yes, of course. You lived with this man.”
“I watched him copy it. On and off. He spent days mixing up paint and varnishing these bits of wood and … How did you come to …”
“Joost sent it to me. He was writing me about it, then he sent it to me with this Ivan Maňásek’s own paintings. Do you like what I do with it?”
“Well, yes … But then, you have the original here? I mean, the one you made this image from?” Why isn’t it with Anton? Maňásek was making two copies; maybe the second one was for himself. But then why …
“Correct. At my flat. For me, it is significant of Joost. You understand? The way the rising man is entering this ellipsus shape. Do you believe in heaven?”
“No.”
“Me neither.” Han sets the poster down again. He’s wearing pince-nez glasses, but Nick can still see his eyes becoming red and pressured. He pinches his nose above the glasses’ bridge, looks around the workshop, asks something in Dutch to one of the assistants and, getting an answer, turns to Nick and says:
“I must be in the centre soon. You want to come with me? I go by boat.”
“Well … I’d like to, but I have my bike.”
“We put it on the boat. I get the engine and petroleum and oar. I can explain you more about the show while we are voyaging.”
The boat’s a chug-chug metal dinghy, blue with red seats through which older green paint peeps. Beneath these are wooden slats; beneath the slats, an impasto of leaves submerged in water. While Han scoops out the water with a bucket, Nick unlocks his bike — and, as he does this, notices a strange contraption at the back of the space centre. It’s a kind of giant tube, the shape of a car’s exhaust, running from the building itself to beside the canal, where it widens to perhaps fifteen feet in diameter and then, narrowing again, cuts back into the building. There’s a man in one of those old overalls up on a ladder beside it, reading a meter on its side.
“A wind tunnel,” Han says, looking up at him from the boat. “That’s why the street has this name: wind tunnel, Windtunnelkade.”
“What do they use it for?”
“To test cars, I think. The space age is passed by now, at least here in the Nederlands. I made a photograph in the wind tunnel one time, for a poster: there was a South African violinist, from the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra, with his hair blowing back.”
A Cape Town Symphony … Where’s this line coming from? A Cape in sympathy … Estania … Words bob on the canal just beside the boat where coots are fighting for scraps of bread drifting from the far side of a wooden houseboat. Did someone say this to him recently? Han’s clipped the silver outboard motor on and poured some petrol in; now he’s loosing the mooring ropes and holding his arms out for the bike. Nick passes it to him and climbs on board; Han levers them away from the bank with the oar. The motor catches at the third pull, and they head off wrinkling the water, pushing coots and ducks in front of them. They turn into a wider canal and pass an enormous barge onto the deck of which a JCB is loading sand. Tubes are hanging from the bank into the water, half-submerged: they look like intestines or spaghetti. They chug beneath a bridge, then turn onto an even wider canal. There are houseboats on both sides: big ones, sometimes double-deckers, funnels and chimneys poking through their roofs and porches at the back with plants and aviaries on them, cats lounging on chairs. Sometimes their owners too: it’s not that cold. The sky’s clear, scrawled over by vapour trails from high-flying aeroplanes. Lower, trail-less ones are banking to the northwest, tilting their noses towards Schiphol; others are rising, heading who knows where. Luchtvaart …
Another bridge, then it’s town proper, streets opening and closing to them as they pass, long rows of balconies and arms with hooks on at the top. Fire escapes spiral, DNA-like, from the roofs of schools and office buildings. Cranes tower up skeletal above them, their orange latticework blackening and flashing as they rotate through the sun, gramophone arms swinging into position above the grooved earth down below. There’s construction going on everywhere: large complexes being built among old streets; new, fresher rows of houses with those same arm-and-hook devices jutting from the top of their façades, wheels with crosses through them hanging from the hooks threaded with ropes that are winching sinks and bathtubs to the top floors. They pass more bridges. Each one attracts a congregation of wires: wires from street lights, telephones and tramlines criss-crossing, converging into clusters and then splitting as they rise to buildings’ corners, moor themselves to posts. Beside each bridge, control towers: ominous, squat buildings often standing on one stork-leg in the canal itself, their inner machinations hidden by reflective windows. Heidi’s purple glasses. There’s a bridge opening up right now ahead of them: looks like an Alexander Calder mobile, black blocks and red circles waltzing round each other as the arms pull the road up and pigeons spill from the green metal underside. A barge is ploughing through it, heading straight for them. Swans are running down the canal to escape it, treading on the water as they flap their wings. Jesus could but Joost couldn’t. They run for ages, stamping with their webbed feet, honking. When they finally get airborne they pick up outriders, seagulls and ducks flying around them like small press and military aeroplanes shadowing NASA shuttles as they glide in towards runways. Ruimtevaart. It’s always held a fascination for Nick, with the moon landing and his birth being the same year, same month, same week. He made Roger play that footage endlessly. As a child, he’d get up early to watch every shuttle launch; he was still doing it as a teenager when the Enterprise or Discovery or whatever it was called exploded, and stared in an almost sacred kind of horror at the two long fingers snaking out of cloud …
“We must go to the side.” Han pushes the motor from him like a tiller to send them towards the canal wall. They haven’t spoken up to now, just shared a kind of childlike satisfaction in the passing landscape. And besides, they’d have to shout above the motor’s noise — although that isn’t half as loud as this great black scow passing by them now, the Apollonia II. It’s got funnels billowing black smoke out and a car, a sleek BMW, parked on its deck beside the driver’s cabin. Its engines make the water bubble and seethe like some volcanic swamp; waves run at them from its hull, turning their dinghy into a bucking bronco for thirty-odd seconds. With the water chopped up like this, Nick can see its colour where the sun shines through its peaks: a kind of muddy, sewage brown. A wave breaks on the bow, jumps up and smacks across his cheek as Han sends them off onwards again. Droplets. There’s a weeping willow hanging silvery over the far bank, and two guys sitting beneath it, heads down, drawing something on their forearms or … oh no, they’re fixing: junkies, fixing right there in the street …
“Amsterdam,” Han shouts to him, eyebrows raised. Nick raises his eyebrows too. Nothing to say. Some people fall. The figures dwindle and are replaced by a small factory-like building with a strange metal dome on its roof from which a green tube curls; looks like Max Ernst’s war elephant. That painting has a scrap of burning fuselage falling from the sky. It was the Challenger. They’ve passed the Marnixstraat now, and are in the Jordaan. One houseboat’s got a silver moon floating above its porch, a half-moon helium-filled balloon. They turn into the Keisergracht and glide past large, grand rooms with stargazer lilies erupting out of vases set on polished tables. Tourists make their way past these towards Anne Frank’s house, further up beside the Rosengracht. Imagine tiptoeing round secret rooms behind fake walls: like occupying a whole other dimension. How strange Han’s got that painting. And Anton paying Maňásek so much to do it. Who could it have been who called the other day? It sounded so like Anton, but it wasn’t him. It was a hanging-up noise, not a being-cut-off one. Should he stay with Lucy or Sasha? If he moves on Lucy and she doesn’t want to get it on it’ll be tricky working with her afterwards. Even if she does …