Gliding Flight. Anne-Gine Goemans

apples from the local farmers, and perhaps a chicken.

      ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ Akkie asked, looking at Sophia pointedly.

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘You know, just what I said. You’re not like us. Look at your hair, your hands, your face. Nothing on you is broken. Your face is crooked, but that’s all.’

      ‘I don’t have a crooked face,’ said Sophia defensively.

      ‘Yes, you do,’ said Akkie, and she rolled up her sleeve. ‘Look, that’s a burn.’ She pointed to a wrinkled spot on the inside of her forearm. ‘And this dent was once a whopper of a festering sore. It’s deep enough to drink out of now.’ Akkie pushed back some hair on the side of her head. ‘Smacked with a rake.’

      ‘How horrible,’ whispered Sophia. ‘Who would do such a thing?’

      ‘My brother,’ she said off-handedly. ‘He did such a thing.’

      As if that weren’t enough, she kicked off her old shoe and turned her foot toward Sophia. Two toes were missing.

      ‘When I was eight, my toes froze. My pa twisted the dead stumps off my feet with a pair of pliers.’

      Sophia said nothing, while Akkie kept on peeling and put her foot back in her shoe.

      ‘I wanted to be with Ide,’ said Sophia after a while. ‘That’s why I went with him. His mother was our housekeeper.’

      ‘Housekeeper?’ cried Akkie. ‘What was your pa then? Mayor? Minister? King? Ha! Get out of here!’

      The Frisian woman’s voice was hard. ‘Honey, find somebody else’s leg to pull. If you had a housekeeper, you wouldn’t be sitting here now with your ass in the mud.’

      Akkie stood up, shaking her head. She walked into the shanty and came back with a bottle of jenever.

      ‘I gotta do me some dancing,’ she said, taking a long pull from the bottle. ‘At home I danced my legs off. But here there’s not a damn thing to do.’

      ‘You and Hayo,’ asked Sophia, hoping that Akkie’s cynicism would disappear. ‘Was it love at first sight?’

      ‘Love?’ she said contemptuously. ‘Of course not. We were just drunk. And that’s where this came from.’ She thrust her belly forward and put the bottle to her mouth. ‘Here, take a swig. It kills the vexation.’

      Sophia became skilled in stealing food. Her greatest asset was her normal appearance. In no time at all, the grubby people of the polder began to develop a bad name. They stank, pilfered, drank, fought, screamed and begged. The local population avoided them like an outbreak of typhus.

      But not Sophia. She could go anywhere in the market without being shunned. She knew the art of keeping up a conversation while stashing a piece of bacon under her brocade shawl, a shawl that had offered shelter to eggs, beans, peas, pig’s trotters, buckwheat and parsnips.

      One day, as she was slipping in a piece of cheese, she looked out of the corner of her eye and saw the little girl whom the men had dumped on the ground like a gob of spit. Sophia recognised her own nightgown. Half of it had been torn away and the rest was encrusted with dirt. The child was rummaging around the stalls in bare feet and begging for food, her filthy little hand held aloft. Everyone looked at her with contempt and disgust. The little girl was the very image of misfortune that the populace hoped to keep outside their door. Poverty and disease were lurking everywhere and ready to pounce. Cholera, holy fire, scabies, syphilis, smallpox: the people were scared to death of them.

      Sophia followed the little girl through the market. When the child got to the fish stalls she was chased away with hisses. The pork seller tried to kick her, but his wooden shoe missed her head.

      Rage welled up in Sophia. It started in her belly, bubbled upwards and ended on her tongue. She planted herself in front of the pork seller, legs wide apart and hands on hips.

      ‘Your pigs have more decency than you’ll ever have. They should put you in that sty.’ Her voice was remarkably calm. Before the pork seller was able to utter a word in response, Sophia had turned her backside to him. She walked away with her nose in the air, close on the child’s heels. When they reached the linden tree she stopped her. Squatting down, she smiled at the little girl, who stared at her with vacant eyes.

      ‘Are you hungry?’

      Her eyes showed no sign of life. The only colour in her face was the yellow ooze in the whites of her eyes.

      ‘Is your mother here, too?’

      She smelled the pungent odour of excrement.

      ‘Can you talk?’

      There was a crust of snot and blood on her upper lip.

      ‘Come on, I have food for you.’

      The girl silently followed Sophia into the hollow tree. Sophia settled herself once again at eye level and motioned to the girl to come in through the opening in the bark. The girl obediently followed her instructions. She could easily stand up inside the tree. After looking all around her (prudence was in order), Sophie reached under her shawl, broke off a piece of cheese and put it in the little upraised hand.

      The child didn’t eat, she devoured the food like a famished beast—slobbering, gulping and smacking her lips. Insatiable, she kept holding out her little black claw while uttering bestial cries. She bolted down the entire chunk of cheese and one piece of sausage. When everything was gone, she followed Sophia around like a bitch in heat. Any more stealing that day was out of the question; Sophia was far too conspicuous with the stinking child in her wake. Together they returned to the shantytown. On the way back, the little girl stopped on the sandy path and vomited her guts out.

      -

      5

      Gieles read the story three times. Who were Ide and Sophia? Had this Super Waling written the story? Impossible. He was way too fat to write about certain things, about sex.

      On her hands and knees. Her bottom, sticky with sand. Impatiently pressing against his erection. Her tongue in his ears and nostrils.

      The tongue part was disgusting, Gieles thought, but it excited him.

      He put the story in his desk drawer. There amid all the junk he saw a crumpled up ticket. It was admission to the air show of Christian Moullec and his wife Paola that he had gone to the year before with his father and Uncle Fred. His mother had been spending two weeks in some bone-dry Sahel country at the time.

      Gieles picked up the ticket and looked at the photo of Moullec in his magical flying two-seater motorbike surrounded by the lesser white-fronted geese. Moullec had grey hair, just like Captain Sully. Gieles had been looking up with thousands of other spectators, but he felt as if he were the only one—as if Christian Moullec were putting on the show just for him. Music by Ennio Morricone swept across the grounds and a guy at a microphone was blaring a story about Moullec that Gieles already knew, but it didn’t bother him. He was enjoying the spectacle.

      When the guy bellowed through the loudspeakers that geese always return to the place where they had learned to fly, his father had said, ‘Let’s hope Ellen does the same.’ Uncle Fred said soothingly that quarrels were a fact of life.

      It was at that moment that Gieles first realised that things were not going well between his parents. He put the admission ticket on top of the story about Ide and Sophia Warrens and closed the drawer.

      He decided to skip the appointment he’d made with Super Waling (Gieles really didn’t want to be seen with a walrus like that) and turned his attention to the game board that was lying on the desk. Using white masking tape he had made a runway across the full width of the board, and had pasted a yellow and a blue goose on the runway. Then he had stuck pins in the cardboard that were topped with little coloured balls. The pins were the security cameras. Naturally he’d have to make sure that the cameras didn’t film him leading his geese onto the runway for Expert Rescue Operation 3032. That