Gliding Flight. Anne-Gine Goemans

door of the spaceship swung open and her husband came out. He was wearing a pair of aviator glasses and a body warmer with pockets stitched onto it. A pair of binoculars dangled from his neck. And the knobby knees and fossilised calves that stuck out from beneath his shorts looked like they were wasting away.

      The man began rubbing the rounded curves of the spaceship with a handkerchief. Dispensing with all formalities he got right down to business. He didn’t even give Gieles a chance to say hello. ‘Look at that. Mirror finish, huh?’

      Mirror was right. Gieles could see his reflection in the door, and he noticed that his hair was standing straight up. He ran his hand over his head.

      ‘The origin of the Airstream,’ said the man proudly, tucking his aviator glasses into one of the pockets, ‘lies in the American aerospace industry. The wings are missing, but otherwise …’

      A descending Cityhopper drowned him out. They waited patiently until the sound died away.

      ‘Where was I?’ The man tugged at his white eyebrows. ‘What’s your favourite?’

      ‘My favourite what, sir?’

      ‘Plane,’ he said, sitting down in a lawn chair. Gieles didn’t have a favourite. The aviation industry left Gieles completely cold.

      ‘The Antonov 225, sir,’ he lied. The biggest plane in the world, number one for many spotters.

      The man screwed up his face. ‘That Russian hulk? Let me tell you something. I once waited hours for an Antonov, and all for nothing. The Russians can have their Antonov.’

      ‘And the Boeing 747 400,’ said Gieles to oblige him. ‘They’re awesome too, sir.’ All plane spotters loved the 747 400.

      He clapped his wrinkled hands. ‘That’s what I like to hear! One phenomenal looking plane, especially when it’s frozen. Wingspan?’

      Gieles gave him a puzzled look.

      ‘What’s the wingspan?’ It was obvious from the way the old man asked the question that he already knew the answer. ‘Sixty-four-point-four metres,’ he said, looking at a plane through his binoculars. ‘An Airbus A321. My wife goes for the take-offs, I love the landings. You?’

      Gieles couldn’t care less. A landing plane wasn’t even in the same league as a flock of descending geese. Suddenly appearing with all that cackle and flapping of wings. Then sweeping over the land like a wave that finally, slowly, disintegrates.

      ‘I love geese when they land,’ said Gieles, and he cast a glance at his geese, who were pulling up clumps of grass. ‘The racket they make when they come down. The last metres before they hit the ground. They’re really funny then. As if they can’t remember what they’re supposed to do.’

      Gieles spread his arms and pretended to be losing his balance. ‘Once they’ve landed, they strut around like anything. That’s from pride. Sometimes they cover three thousand kilometres! They come all the way from the northernmost tip of Norway, and they all start shrieking together. “We’re back! We’re back!”’

      The man and his wife looked at him in amazement.

      ‘Geese talk to each other all day long,’ Gieles went on. ‘Just like a bunch of women, my father says. And they’re never alone. They always fly together. The whole family.’

      ‘Goodness,’ said the woman with wide eyes. ‘I didn’t know that. But how do they know which way to go? The sky is so—how shall I put it?—so vast. It’s easy to take a wrong turn.’

      Gieles crossed his arms self-confidently. Geese were his speciality.

      ‘The most important things are the sun and the stars.’ He spoke the words with an air of importance. ‘They’re migration signposts. And the little ones learn from their parents. Chicks straight from the egg don’t know anything at all. When they overwinter for the first time, they fly with their parents to learn the way. Sometimes it’s thousands of kilometres.’

      The woman listened attentively to Gieles while her husband spotted the next plane.

      ‘And the chicks that have no parents? Who do they learn from?’

      ‘There’s always an aunt to take care of them,’ said Gieles. ‘Or a nice uncle.’

      ‘Oh, of course,’ she sighed, sitting down in the other lawn chair. ‘How many geese do you have?’

      ‘Two, ma’am. Just these two.’

      ‘But they shit for ten,’ said the old man disdainfully. ‘Better to have a dog. They don’t shit nearly as much.’

      They watched silently as another plane descended. One of the geese was foraging along the bank of the canal. In the four years he had had them, not once had the geese ever gone into that filthy water. They never even considered it.

      ‘Very dangerous, geese near a runway.’ The man squeezed the binoculars so hard that his knuckles turned white. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard of that emergency landing? On the river in New York?’

      Heard of it? Gieles’s eyes lit up like fireflies on a dark night. The emergency landing on the water—a ‘ditch’—had made a huge impression on him.

      ‘The Miracle of the Hudson, sir,’ Gieles exclaimed. The words rolled off his tongue in such an orderly fashion that it made him sound like a news presenter. ‘On January 15th, 2009, Captain Chesley Burnett Sullenberger of US Airways landed on the Hudson after a flock of Canada geese flew into his engines. He felt as if he had been hit by a gigantic bolt of lightning.’

      Gieles mimicked being struck by the lightning, his body jolting, and then continued. ‘Captain Sully—everybody calls him Sully, and that’s what’s printed on the T-shirts and mugs and underpants—Captain Sully saved all hundred fifty-five passengers of flight 1549.’

      ‘He checked the plane twice for stragglers,’ the man added excitedly—this was a boy he could talk to—‘before evacuating, the last man to leave the sinking ship. Which actually happened, because the landing had torn open the whole bottom of the aircraft.’

      ‘And then these little boats came sailing out from everywhere to pick up the passengers,’ continued Gieles happily. ‘But I’m sure you know that, sir.’

      ‘Hey,’ the man roared over the noise of a descending plane. ‘Cut it out with that “sir” stuff! Makes me nervous!’

      He waited for the sound to die down. ‘Johan and Judith.’ He pointed to his wife, who stood there staring at Gieles in silent amazement with her restored eyes. ‘Goodness, you sure do know a lot! This boy sure does know a lot, doesn’t he?’

      She placed a hand on her husband’s liver-spotted arm. ‘Johan knows everything about airplanes and crashes. He’s been collecting plane crashes in scrapbooks since 1972. With all the details. And if he can find photos he pastes them in, too. Other spotters call him a crash freak. Isn’t that right, Johan?’

      ‘Hmm.’ A Boeing was hanging heavily in the air a few kilometres away.

      ‘They’re very lovely scrapbooks,’ she declared. ‘It’s not the death and sensationalism that Johan is interested in, but the chain of events.’

      ‘I was sure I could do it,’ said Gieles in English.

      ‘Excuse me?’ said the woman.

      ‘That’s what Captain Sully said. After his act of heroism.’ Gieles tried to imitate his voice by relaxing his vocal cords. ‘I was sure I could do it.’

      The man followed the plane until the tail disappeared behind a row of birches. Then he said, rather severely, ‘So you know damn well how dangerous geese are for aviation.’

      ‘My geese can’t fly,’ Gieles lied. ‘They’ve lost the knack.’

      ‘Look,’ said the woman, delighted. ‘Kenya Airways. What cheerful colours.