Prompt!

The first prompt was the Sunday silence. No sound from the neighbors, no mopeds, no cars, the absence of motorcycles. People walked to church or stayed home and slept in.

Elly pressed her forehead against the kitchen window. Outside, the street looked like a museum: a row of sleeping cars, mostly Opels and Volkswagen Beetles, their headlights looking like dead eyes. Car-free Sunday. The oil crisis; two years later, the government was still ordering these quiet days. It didn't matter much to her. She was never allowed to do much on Sundays anyway. Sunday was a day of rest.

"Don't stare out the window like that," said her mother, folding a newspaper. "Go outside. Before your father remembers that the gutters still need cleaning."

Elly didn't need a second prompt. She snatched her small toolbox, a tin box, from the kitchen table and slipped out the door. The air smelled of trees.

She had a plan and had taught herself how to fix broken things. While other girls her age were learning to knit or memorizing song lyrics, she was learning what her father never had time for. He was a foreman at the Opel factory, but he never showed her anything or explained anything. He was always tired and barely spoke a word to her. She learned by figuring things out and doing it herself. Curiosity was her teacher. She had taken apart a broken transistor radio and put it back together more than twice. The first time, it remained dead. The second time, it played static for three seconds before dying again. She did not let herself be discouraged and never gave up.

Even every failure was a prompt, a question. Her head was always full of questions. Why no power? Why that grinding sound? Why, why, why?

She answered every prompt herself by going on a discovery mission with her screwdriver, a roll of tape, or whatever she could find. Her patience seemed endless.

Today, her target was a bicycle. Not just any bike, but a dark green Gazelle chained to a lamppost by the bakery on the corner. The bike had been there for ten days, ever since a teenager had thrown it against the post while cursing about the stupid gears. She had seen him walk away and counted the days.

She sat down beside it. It started to drizzle again. She opened her toolbox. Inside lay, among other things, a screwdriver, a bent pair of pliers, a blunt candle, and the tiny magnet she had fished out of a dead loudspeaker. It was all hers. She saved what she found and what others threw away.

The bike's chain wasn't broken, it had just jumped off the front chainring. Easy. But the rear derailleur was frozen solid. She saw rust. So, don't force anything. She had learned that a prompt that is too loud goes unanswered. She touched the pivot point with the tip of the screwdriver and put some sewing machine oil on it from the perfume sample bottle she had found.

She waited. That was her self-taught rule: Give oil time to creep and do its work.

A boy appeared. A few years older than she. He wore a scarf and had a mustard stain on his corduroy trousers.

"That isn't yours," he remarked.

"That belongs to no one," Elly said without looking up. "It is a patient."

"A what?"

She didn't answer. She promptly gave the derailleur arm another gentle push. The spring moved. Then it clicked into place. She put the chain back on the middle sprocket, turned the pedal with her hand, and the rear wheel started to spin. A perfect sound.

The boy's mouth fell open.

Elly stood up. She took the chain lock off the lamppost faster than the boy had ever seen anyone do.

The Gazelle was heavy. She stood there, one hand on the torn saddle, as if listening. Car-free Sunday. No cars, no Opels. No Beetles. No trucks or even a single motorcycle. Only the drizzle of rain.

Her mother had been prompt that morning in another sense: "Breakfast in five minutes, and then you have to get out of my sight. I want my rest." But Elly preferred the slower prompt of a broken thing waiting to be repaired. She had taught herself to wait and to heal the "patients."

She swung her leg over the frame and pedaled through the street standing on the pedals. The bike was hers, the streets were hers. The world lay open before her. She smiled. An old woman on a bench waved at her. The bicycle chain had its own prompt: Go, go, go.

And Elly, just seven years old, as handy as any bicycle mechanic in the village, cycled on with a broad smile on her face.

Je voelt je lekkerder op een Gazelle

_{Prompt: see title
5-5-2026
The photo is mine since I couldn't find the photo of the Gazelle Factory back a pic of an Union bike.}