Gliding Flight. Anne-Gine Goemans

time we come here,’ said Johan, ‘I’ll bring my scrapbooks along. Then I’ll show you that even a couple of geese in the engine can do a lot of damage. A whole lot of damage.’

      ‘What a wonderful place to live,’ his wife interrupted, inhaling deeply. ‘Right near the airplanes, yet out in the country.’

      ‘Tremendously beautiful spot,’ nodded Johan in approval. ‘That’s all I can say.’

      She turned halfway around in her chair and pointed to a little wooded area further up on the other side of the road.

      ‘I wonder who planted those trees there. Such young trees right out in the polder … It’s like a fairy tale.’

      ‘Environmentalists,’ said Gieles.

      ‘What a terribly nice gesture.’

      ‘Why?’ asked Johan suspiciously, putting his aviator glasses back on.

      ‘They didn’t want a runway to be built here. So they bought a piece of land from our neighbour and planted trees on it. But the court said the trees had to go, so they moved the trees over there.’ He pointed to the woods. ‘My mother calls it “the woods in exile.”’

      For Gieles, the summer with the environmentalists was the best he’d ever had. Suddenly there they were. They came chugging along in a smelly diesel bus, and Gieles couldn’t see how the bus could hold so many people and so much stuff. He watched as they unloaded their tents, generators, duffle bags, sleeping bags, kerosene lamps and pans. In one afternoon, Gieles’s boring view of the polder turned into a non-stop circus performance. Dozens of dome tents were pitched around a trailer that was painted in rainbow colours. The environmentalists tied hammocks to wooden poles and their children hung paper streamers in the branches. It looked gorgeous, thought Gieles, who didn’t dare go out to size up the situation until the end of the afternoon. His friend Tony went first.

      The activists were very nice. They gave them lemonade and cookies and asked them all kinds of questions: how often Tony and Gieles played in the woods, what they thought of the airport, whether they were often sick or found themselves coughing a lot. Gieles chuckled when the environmentalists talked about the importance of ‘their woods,’ when what they meant was the scrawny little clump of trees in the middle of a wasteland. Everywhere there were piles of grey sand with bulldozers and dump trucks driving through them. It was one big sandbox, where men in orange overalls walked around with notebooks. The construction of the new runway was in full swing. Now it was a matter of waiting for the court ruling.

      Every day, new people came to visit the encampment. According to Uncle Fred they were celebrities, which must have been true because there were photographers and journalists there as well. The celebrities shouted that they were opposed to the runway. But once the runway was built, you never heard them say another word about it. They never came back. Now the celebrities were flying over the roofs of the houses of Gieles and his neighbours.

      Gieles’s house was on television countless times that summer. Reporters kept asking Uncle Fred what he thought of the idea of airplanes landing in his backyard.

      ‘You can’t stop it,’ he declared. And actually it wasn’t even his backyard. Uncle Fred had been bought out. His own house was located right on the future runway; it had to go. That’s why he moved in with the family of his twin brother. It had been a practical decision, too. When Ellen was flying, Fred could take care of Gieles and do the housework.

      Gieles knew that Uncle Fred never answered the journalists’ questions. Uncle Fred was never for or against anything. He never identified with any particular side, as if the matter didn’t concern him. He took everything in stride. Be a river, not a mountain: that was his motto. The river was friendly to the activists. He brought them homemade fennel soup and sausage rolls, and let them take showers at the farm. When the guy ropes of the sprawling encampment got all tangled up, he offered them the pasture as an additional place to pitch their tents. That’s what inspired him to start a spotters’ campground.

      The river was friendly to the activists’ enemies, too. When the military police appeared in the farmyard to go over some questions of public safety, he gave them a bag of cherries. And when the airport people came over to talk about sound insulation, he served them coffee and apple pie.

      Gieles fervently hoped that the environmentalists would never go away. And he wasn’t the only one. All the neighbourhood children spent more time in the woods that summer than they did at home. They played hide-and-seek and danced wildly to the music from Rinky Dink, an environmentally-friendly sound installation driven by bicycle power. A man with a braided red beard taught Gieles how to make a tent with bamboo sticks. He painted wooden leaves that were suspended from the branches of a metal tree. Sometimes Gieles ate with them from big pans of beans that had been cooked to death. They ate at long tables, and often the discussions became so heated that Gieles thought they were going to start fighting. He heard words he hadn’t heard before, such as ‘free state,’ ‘mafia,’ ‘court order,’ ‘occupation.’ And he learned how to curse for the first time. ‘Prick’ and ‘asshole’ were already familiar to him, but ‘twat,’ ‘cunt,’ ‘motherfucker’ and ‘cocksucker’ were new. His friend Tony couldn’t get enough of the curse words.

      When his mother came back from abroad she would go take a look at the camp, sometimes still in her uniform. The environmentalists were nice to Ellen. No one paid any attention to her stewardess outfit. Gieles even suspected that the men of the camp were flirting with her.

      In the evening, Gieles would stare at the encampment through his attic window as long as he could keep his eyes open. Some of the activists sat around the campfire, others lay entwined in hammocks. Someone played the guitar. Flashlights blinked on and off in the dome tents and made the woods look magical. One man hauled a bucket of dishwashing water out of the canal he’d just pissed into. Once Gieles saw a bare bottom sticking out of a hammock. Whether there was one person or two in the hammock was impossible for him to tell.

      On the day the woods were cleared by court order, the environmentalists got ready to resist to the bitter end. They promised a raging battle, a guerrilla war. Gieles was on the environmentalists’ side, of course. He and Tony made a slingshot out of wood and a rubber band.

      But the battle never materialised. When two policemen closed off the road so the camp could no longer receive supplies, the tents were taken down in silence. The only reminder of the environmentalists was the metal tree with its wooden leaves, but even that disappeared within a couple of days. The airport had won.

      Since the runway’s completion, the short distance between it and the farm had been drawing Gieles like a magnet. The first time he and Tony had tried to bridge the few forbidden metres was with a blowpipe and paper. They shot spitballs at the runway from his attic window until the ink from the paper made them nauseous. This led to a game with a slingshot and a whole series of variations that became increasingly less innocent.

      The shootings ended for good when a homemade paint bomb exploded against the flank of a Cityhopper. The idea for a paint bomb had come from a squatter who lived next-door to Tony and his family. The house had stood empty since the opening of the runway. No one wanted to live there any more, except the squatter. He was the one who taught Tony and Gieles how to make the bombs, a procedure that involved dipping balloons in candle wax at least forty times. That, said the squatter, would produce a bomb that could smash a double-glazed window. Gieles and Tony didn’t want to smash any double-glazed windows, so they only dipped the balloons twenty times. The very first shot was a direct hit. For a moment the pilot was under the impression that a big bird had crashed against the cockpit, but there was something suspicious about the blue colour. From the attic window Tony and Gieles could see the flashing lights of the military police. Terrified, Gieles grabbed one of the balloons and squeezed it so hard that the paint squirted all over his bedroom. There was no point in denying that they were the culprits.

      Gieles emptied his glass of cola, and when the woman offered him another syrup waffle he accepted it. Her husband had fallen asleep. His chin was hanging loosely over his body warmer. The binoculars rested on his lanky legs. Gieles thanked her and went back to cleaning up the goose shit.