VA Wölfl: Rolf, it’s capsizing

It was the second attempt. Rolf had built a sailing boat. He was always building things, all kinds of things. Now a sailing boat, which didn’t work, whose centreboard was too short, and filled with water, and sank. And at the crucial moment, was filled with weeds and sludge from the river Ruhr – very slimy and incapable of swimming at that moment we heaved it out of the Ruhr. So it landed up on the roof of the Peugeot 404, the sun roof. Highly awkward, but we held on to it tightly during the trip from the swimming pool to Rolf’s studio in the garden of the former Werden orphanage. There we decided on the boat’s future, which meant its sale, this thing which couldn’t swim. My friend Alfred was the buyer, wanting to show us how this wooden thing could be helped to sail the Ruhr. His fourth floor Dortmund flat was apparently the optimal workshop space.

So we set out again, the 404 with the boat and us, to Dortmund. The entrance proved the first barrier. The hallway was too low, too narrow, no way through. Determined, we charged headlong round to the back of the building with the boat, no further discussion as to whether this enterprise might fail, while Rolf fetched the pulley (!) from his 404 and attached it to the railings on the balcony outside Alfred’s flat. The target we had our sights on was the door to the kitchen, the only possible entry point for a boat that size. The boat made its way skywards, and with some effort, the door in its sights, it finally reached the kitchen, diagonal to the table and parallel to Alfred’s furious wife, at the stove. It hung like an enormous, distorted lampshade above the kitchen table. The children looked up, and carried on eating beneath it. And the huge shadow of the boat fell over the room.