“Then he used a dagger to cut loose the gas pouch attached to that person’s wrists, which then floated up against the giant quilt enveloping the town. As Thump-Drag continued moving from person to person, sound infiltrating the spaces between, their stories filled with fear and longing as they spoke. The vibrations from each voice pushed each person’s pouch upward, only to come down again from the weight of the tarp. Up and down, up and down, the pouches jumped.
“The approaching army demanded that whoever was speaking come forward or that they would burn the entire city down. The first townsperson Thump-Drag had approached crawled out from under the cloth. He was a young man with a lame arm who continued to tell his story, until his fellow townspeople heard his death scream.
“Upon hearing the scream, yet another person presented herself to the army—speaking of what she had known: the taste of cherries, the feel of a horse’s mane brushing the soft skin of her wrist. Others joined, a chorus of stories chronicling every human emotion and fault they knew. The army kept demanding that the speaker come forward, and as the townspeople heard the second, and then third death scream, they spoke even louder. Every voice that was silenced outside the tarp brought dozens of more voices from under the tarp forward. Each story pushed at the pouches levitating overhead.
“These stories sank into the soldiers’ ears, and with each swing of their swords yet another story emerged: it was as if the voices were multiplying with each attempt the soldiers made to silence them. This made the soldiers wonder if what they were doing was wrong and they became more and more confused, and more and more anxious.
“The townspeople, understanding that they were soon to die, started speaking in unison, their voices clapped together, their pouches rising higher becoming a force against the giant cloth Thump-Drag had made. Small pockets of the cloth rose, as if they were rising bubbles, and the whole cloth started to move and shimmy.
“The soldiers surrounded by the dead bodies were awestruck as they looked on. They heard an overlap of language that sounded like so many things, a creature at once foreign and familiar. They grew scared. They had awakened something awful, they realized, something beyond their abilities to destroy. They regretted what they had done and backed up from their prey, backed away from their leader’s orders, which had no purchase among this greater noise.
“The great army fled, having killed, having witnessed the sound of their killing, and having heard, still louder, the chorus of those stories when shared together. There was no denying the strength of such a thing, and no way to erase it from their being.
“From under the cloth this pulse echoed through every heartbeat, and whoever heard it understood that it is the little stories of our day that hold the only things of value in this world.
There once was a town where a nimble roof was raised by people telling their stories, powerful yet full of grace, set to the simple base rhythm of thump-drag, thump-drag, thump-drag.”
About the book
The Making of The Boat Runner
I believe you have to grasp onto a wide variety of experiences and embrace all aspects of your life to write the book you're meant to write. Novels are gifts from one person to an unknowable other. It is why I'm an awful critic. I have nothing bad to say about someone who attempted the form, who lived the life to tell the story. Since writing The Boat Runner, I understand exactly what Gustave Flaubert meant when describing his infamous character, Madame Bovary. "It's me," he said. "C'est moi." You put everything of yourself into a book.
When I poured everything of myself into The Boat Runner, I was surprised the story centered on a character who morphed into a well-intentioned Dutch smuggler. But then I really began going over the details of my own life and this character emerged and seemed inevitable.
My mother, who is an artist, was born in occupied Holland in 1942. At twenty-one she came to the United States as a nanny to the Dutch Consulate in San Francisco, where she met and married my American father, who is a philosophy professor. They moved around the country for years until I was born near Buffalo, New York, where I grew up feeling distanced from a sense of family history. This meant everything about both sides of my family, especially the Dutch side, was a source of mystery.
The most fascinating, shadowy figure from my maternal family was my Dutch grandfather, Hans Jonker, who passed when my mother was nineteen. Hans was a Renaissance man who played the violin, bred new strands of orchids, and painted in his spare time. For the majority of his career, however, he was a head electrical engineer at Phillips where he ran a radio tube lab. During WWII, he was forced into hiding to avoid conscription by the Germans who wanted all engineers and scientists for high-level military work. There were rumors that he'd sought refuge in a monastery, fled to England, or was killed. This meant my Oma, while caring for my mother and her three other daughters during wartime, would go out looking for her husband. This story sat latent in my mind for years.
While I was in my twenties and working at sea, feeling farther from my own family than ever before, I started calling home from pay phones around the world to ask my family direct questions. Why were we so transient? Who were my relatives? What was Hans Jonker really like? As it turned out, my mother had old letters, paintings, pictures, and haunting stories from her father and her own life that I'd never heard. My mother shared memories of GIs giving her chocolate in the streets of liberated Holland that fascinated me. Most importantly, I found out she has scar tissue on her ears from bombings near her home when she was an infant. The damage to her ears went undiagnosed her whole childhood, and she spent her school years having a hard time hearing in classrooms. Paying attention was a challenge, so she took to entertaining herself, drawing and creating art. My mother would go on to become a career artist who welded giant sculptures from discarded steel, and painted the most incredible images with pastels and acrylics that hung on the walls of our home. This inspired the need for art and creativity in the Koopman family.