handsome jackdaw could be found. The feathers at his neck and on the back of his head were silvery-gray as graphite; when he walked the bobbing of his head lent him a certain consequence. Itâs not like with starlings, birds that seem to radiate a sort of lowliness. Starlings fly in spectacular eddies and shimmering spirals, thatâs true enough, but in such huge numbers that you canât help but be reminded of big cities where people hate and tread on each other, but strangely enough canât get along without the others.
Wednesday possessed an inner nobility that placed him above inferior garbage eaters like starlings and gulls. He would be able to see Mrs Eilander walking naked in her garden, but jackdaws werenât interested in things like that. I often tried to put myself in Wednesdayâs place as he flew over Lomark, to imagine what the world looked like from a birdâs-eye view. It was my dream of omniscience â nothing would ever be hidden from me again, I would be able to write the History of Everything.
We all looked at Joe, waiting to hear his thoughts. Joe looked at Wednesday as the screwdriver propellered faster and faster through his fingers. It was amazing how fast he could do that. When the screwdriver fell at last and all four of us, wakened from the spell, looked at the concrete floor where it had landed with a clear tinkle, Joe raised his eyebrows.
âItâs actually quite simple,â he said. âIf we want to see her naked, weâll need our own plane.â
The airplane was the crowbar that man needed to force his way into the air, the final element; thatâs what Joe had said that afternoon in the garage. But it wasnât until he came up with the idea of building his own plane that I realized what he meant; the plane would be the crowbar with which we would part the heavens between Mrs Eilanderâs legs. The plane would allow us a view of that
terra incognita
, and Joe was the engineer who would make it happen.
I watched the airplane grow, starting with the eighteen-inch moped wheels we found at the junkyard right up to and including the fine, varnished propeller Joe wangled from a nearby airfield.
They started work on the high-wing plane in a shed at the edge of the factory grounds, amid black mountains of broken asphalt scraped from old roads and dumped there for reuse. The big grinding machine had broken down years ago. Now it stood in slow collapse between chunks of unprocessed asphalt on one side and the pointy hills of a finer structure that it had spit out on the other.
In the mineral world of the asphalt plant, bulldozers trundled back and forth between piles of blue porphyry, red Scottish granite, bluish quartzite and sands of many varieties. The ground stone came in by ship from German mills along theUpper Rhine. A sharp eye might find among it pieces of mammoth bone and tusk, and the occasional fossilized sharkâs tooth. Christof had a sharp eye. Pointing at the piles of sand and gravel, he would speak of himself as the curator of a ragtag collection of prehistory, what he called the âMaandag Museumâ. And Christof was the bossâs son, so no one interfered; the three of them could do whatever they liked, as long as they didnât get in the way.
There came a day when the plane was a full eight metres long: a fuselage of steel wires, tubes, cables and crossbars, schematic as an articulated insectâs rump. Structural elements, Joe told me, were always arranged in the form of a triangle.
âGeometrically speaking, the triangle provides a solid construction,â he said. âA square will shift, change its shape. But the triangle is the basis of every solid construction.â
The thing remained wingless until the end. I could never really believe that the plane was actually meant to take off, especially after I found out that the gas and choke handles were made from the gearshifts of a racing bike. Had foreman
Wednesday possessed an inner nobility that placed him above inferior garbage eaters like starlings and gulls. He would be able to see Mrs Eilander walking naked in her garden, but jackdaws werenât interested in things like that. I often tried to put myself in Wednesdayâs place as he flew over Lomark, to imagine what the world looked like from a birdâs-eye view. It was my dream of omniscience â nothing would ever be hidden from me again, I would be able to write the History of Everything.
We all looked at Joe, waiting to hear his thoughts. Joe looked at Wednesday as the screwdriver propellered faster and faster through his fingers. It was amazing how fast he could do that. When the screwdriver fell at last and all four of us, wakened from the spell, looked at the concrete floor where it had landed with a clear tinkle, Joe raised his eyebrows.
âItâs actually quite simple,â he said. âIf we want to see her naked, weâll need our own plane.â
The airplane was the crowbar that man needed to force his way into the air, the final element; thatâs what Joe had said that afternoon in the garage. But it wasnât until he came up with the idea of building his own plane that I realized what he meant; the plane would be the crowbar with which we would part the heavens between Mrs Eilanderâs legs. The plane would allow us a view of that
terra incognita
, and Joe was the engineer who would make it happen.
I watched the airplane grow, starting with the eighteen-inch moped wheels we found at the junkyard right up to and including the fine, varnished propeller Joe wangled from a nearby airfield.
They started work on the high-wing plane in a shed at the edge of the factory grounds, amid black mountains of broken asphalt scraped from old roads and dumped there for reuse. The big grinding machine had broken down years ago. Now it stood in slow collapse between chunks of unprocessed asphalt on one side and the pointy hills of a finer structure that it had spit out on the other.
In the mineral world of the asphalt plant, bulldozers trundled back and forth between piles of blue porphyry, red Scottish granite, bluish quartzite and sands of many varieties. The ground stone came in by ship from German mills along theUpper Rhine. A sharp eye might find among it pieces of mammoth bone and tusk, and the occasional fossilized sharkâs tooth. Christof had a sharp eye. Pointing at the piles of sand and gravel, he would speak of himself as the curator of a ragtag collection of prehistory, what he called the âMaandag Museumâ. And Christof was the bossâs son, so no one interfered; the three of them could do whatever they liked, as long as they didnât get in the way.
There came a day when the plane was a full eight metres long: a fuselage of steel wires, tubes, cables and crossbars, schematic as an articulated insectâs rump. Structural elements, Joe told me, were always arranged in the form of a triangle.
âGeometrically speaking, the triangle provides a solid construction,â he said. âA square will shift, change its shape. But the triangle is the basis of every solid construction.â
The thing remained wingless until the end. I could never really believe that the plane was actually meant to take off, especially after I found out that the gas and choke handles were made from the gearshifts of a racing bike. Had foreman
Similar Books
