The Storm

1. On a Raw Morning They Said Good-bye

One of them, Lidy, stood at the window and looked out. It was one of those midwinter mornings when it’s just getting light and last night’s storm no longer makes you feel cozy indoors, it’s like a whine that gets on your nerves. She held her little daughter in her arms and her coat was already buttoned. In the process of leaving she hesitated for this one moment like someone who’s glad to be on her way, if that’s what comes next, but would be just as glad to stay home. That the whole plan wasn’t hers to begin with, but Armanda’s, was irrelevant. At this moment, all she was thinking was: I really want to drive a car again. Today and tomorrow, Armanda, you can take care of my daughter, and go with my husband to the party being given by your friend, who also happens to be his half sister. Tomorrow afternoon at the latest, I’ll be back.

The living room occupied the second and third floors of one of the imposing houses fronting a little park in a less imposing neighborhood. Lost in thought, she looked out over the treetops, bare and black against the rectangle of house façades. She didn’t see that diagonally opposite, the figure of a man was groping along a roof gutter until suddenly a flag flapped loose from his hands and immediately stood stiff and shivering in the northwest wind. It was the last day of January. If anyone had said to her that with Nadja held tight and safe in her arms she should take a good look all around because her farewell was a final one, she would have known deep in her heart that this was possible at any moment in life, but she wouldn’t have believed it. After all, she was only twenty-three.

So without turning around, she asked casually, “Do you think it’s going to snow?”

And Armanda, as she stood up from the table with a mug of coffee in her hand, answered, “Of course not, the wind’s too strong,” without the least pang of conscience in her voice. She began to pace up and down, slurping her coffee the way she always did. Not least because she’d taken off her shoes and was wearing a skirt and a knitted cardigan. She was the one who seemed at home here in the high space with the plaster rosette on the ceiling, not Lidy. There was hardly any light. In the back room the furniture was almost in darkness. The only things illuminated by a green standard lamp were a table pushed against the wall — on it a few objects, a teapot, a telephone, a briefcase with a protective band of tape around it — and the door to the hall and the stairs. The house had seen better days, like most of its big neighbors around the park, and the beautiful hardwood doors had been burnt for firewood during the war. But mostly in the rooms up on the third floor that smelled of beds and clothes and soap and cosmetics, it was still possible to recognize the original details of the house’s fin-de-siècle style. In the bedrooms, leaded panes of glass in the upper half of the windows filtered the light.

A squall of rain exploded against the panes and streamed downward. Lidy peered out through the drops. Okay, she decided, I’ll take the coast road. Once I’m past Rotterdam I won’t go over the Moer dike, I’ll head for Maassluis and take the ferry across the Nieuwe Waterweg. She still hadn’t really thought about the whole route, but she knew there were maps in the car. I’ll figure it out. Between another two squalls it was so silent for a moment that she heard the floorboards creak under Armanda’s feet, and as that sound also ceased, she knew that Armanda too was peering out at the foul weather.

“It’s funny really that I don’t know these people at all,” she said.

“It won’t matter to them,” said Armanda, now standing at the window by her side. “They haven’t seen me for a year either.” She sniggered. “Perfectly possible that when you go into the hotel, you know, the Hotel Kirke in the Verre Nieuwstraat, they’ll all make the same mistake and won’t realize right away that you’re not me, but, um, actually you.”

The same little irritated grin on both their faces.

They looked alike. Everyone thought so. They were tall girls with narrow, strong shoulders, always a little bent, which gave them a worried appearance that was quite misleading. And if they had turned round at that moment the double portrait would really have been striking: dark hair, almost chestnut-black, falling smoothly down their backs, exposing delicate little ears, and cut in a straight fringe that concealed the forehead completely. Nobody would ever see their foreheads. But everything could be read in the two pairs of eyes: merriment, sadness, mockery, indifference, passion, and also the speed of their shifting moods, yet what conveyed itself most clearly was that the two sisters appeared to see the world in exactly the same way, and to judge it.

Lidy set Nadja down on the floor and gave her a hug. Never mind the deceptive similarities, she was the mother here. “Mind she doesn’t catch cold,” she murmured, as she squatted down and pressed her nose against the child’s neck with a certain feeling of self-confidence born of the countless times she had brought the little girl into bed with her from baby days onward, while whispering to her husband to slide over a bit and maybe snore a little less loudly.

She stood up again. “Did you give me the car keys or not?” As she groped in her coat pocket, she looked around.

Both began to go through the room. They hunted all over the furniture till Armanda realized she’d left the key at home.

“Then I’ll get going,” said Lidy. “I’ll pick it up there.”

In the hall Armanda said, “Don’t forget their present,” and handed Lidy the package. They gave each other a fleeting kiss. As Armanda said, “Give them my best,” they both laughed.

Lidy clutched the umbrella to her chest, lifted the hem of her coat in one hand, and went down the stairs with her luggage. As she opened the front door, she wore a somewhat solemn expression and her forehead creased. As if she knew that she had to be serious about their exchange of roles, even if it was only for a day.

At the corner, by the street with the little shops and cafés that led to the market, she saw people with their shopping bags walking through the slanting sheets of rain: everyday lives, banal perhaps, but weighed down with work, she could identify with that, most of life got taken up with trivialities. So today she took an adventurous detour. She crossed the street. On the long side of the park, in front of number 77, her father’s car was parked in its usual place.

“Anyone home?”

She had used her key. Now she was crossing the marble-tiled hall to the stairs, where she trod carefully to muffle her footsteps, the way one does unconsciously in a house whose occupants seem to have left. Down below, the door to the waiting room stood open, and her father’s consulting room, as always, was closed. So where were they all? She supposed her father must be doing his rounds of the beds in the Binnengasthuis right now. And her mother must be shopping for food in town. As if she had all the time in the world, she went through the rooms on the first and second floors. In Armanda’s room, the one with the balcony that had once been hers, she wanted to take a customary quick look in the mirror, but the wall next to the window was suddenly empty, and refused to allow her any reflection of her face. After that for some reason she couldn’t resist a quick trip up to the attic. All dark, and what a hellish noise the wind was making against the roof. And of course there on his mattress under the low eaves she found her brother sleeping the way thirteen-year-olds can sleep, as if he were going to keep it up for all eternity. The little skylight was misted over. Daylight fell on the pillow. She looked at the pleading expression on the boy’s face and thought: Why wait any longer?

Eventually she found the car keys on the desk in the consulting room.

A few minutes later Lidy, in a black Citroën, left the district where she had been born and raised and drove down the Ceintuurbaan toward the Amstel. At first, unfamiliar with the car, she had to grope for the gearbox. She practiced giving it gas a few times, used the engine to brake, gave it gas again. There was the crossroads, with the dilapidated church on the corner, then turn right. This was all part of a concatenation of different circumstances that had been set in motion the previous Monday, the 26th, when Armanda, in the grip of one of her spontaneous whims, had called Lidy to make her a proposal.

At first Lidy had hesitated. Staring at her fingernails, she had said, “Well, I don’t really know …” to which Armanda pointed out that such an unexpected and comical excursion could really be fun. At that point there was silence for a moment as both of them recognized that the answer, given their relationship, was going to be yes. The younger could talk the elder so convincingly into something that what began as a tiny glimmer soon became an idea and the idea in turn became a wonderful idea.

“You can have Father’s car, I’ve already wangled it for you,” Armanda coaxed Lidy, who was always ready to be persuaded, and already seeing in her mind’s eye a map of the western Netherlands stretching to the great arms of the sea.

It had happened late at night. Lidy had gone to bed, but stayed awake until she heard her husband come home. He had undressed in the bedroom without turning on the light and immediately tucked himself in close beside her as he always did. Peace reigned all around them. There were no noises of traffic out on the street, and the trees in the park at the front of the house stood there as if they had never strained in a north or southwest wind. Nevertheless, at this very moment, thousands of miles away, a depression had been set in motion, a tiny area of low pressure. Forming above the Labrador Sea, it had moved quite rapidly in an easterly direction, picking up one or two other depressions as it advanced.

When Lidy took the highway toward The Hague, she was able to turn off the windshield wipers after fifteen minutes; it was dry. Nevertheless she felt herself being buffeted insanely. The wind, which during the night had torn across Scotland with hurricane force, uprooting entire forests, and cleared the east coast of England at around dawn, was for her no more than a constant pressure that forced her to keep steering against it slightly, to the right. It was something you got used to after five minutes and then didn’t think about again.

Shortly before she reached Maasshuis she stopped for gas. A young man in blue overalls filled her tank and washed her windows. Lidy followed him into the little office, which smelled of coffee and cigarettes. The news had just started on the radio.

“How do I get to the ferry?” she asked as the young man was closing the drawer of the cash register.

He indicated with his head for her to follow him and stood in the doorway to point the way. While Lidy nodded and took in the road that ran straight as a die until it finally curved slightly as it met a crossroads, the news announcer in the background began to read an announcement from the Flood Warning Service in a voice that projected no greater or lesser urgency than usual.

“… Very high water levels in the area of Rotterdam, Williamstad, Bergen op Zoom, and Gorinchem …”

Lidy thanked the man and stepped back out into the wind.

“You can’t miss it!” the gas station guy called after her.

And indeed she found her way quite easily. In no time at all she was at the harbor. She shielded her eyes with one hand. The water was very narrow. Nonetheless the far bank really was another bank, a gray line that seemed closer to being rubbed out than to holding firm. Her scarf tied round her head, she went to the pier, where there was a board with the ferry schedule on it. She read that the ferry coming from the other side wouldn’t dock for another half hour. There was a little hut, up a couple of steps, where she ordered coffee. Dim light, the radio again, she let herself slide into the general mood of passive waiting. Just sitting there, nothing more. Dozily she put a cigarette between her lips.

What am I doing here, for heaven’s sake? Who or what brought me here?

2. The Sisters

A quarter of an hour after she’d seen her sister alive for the last time, Armanda was walking across the market. She was pushing a stroller with a clear hood, and under the hood was Nadja. Because she was going to a party this evening, Armanda wanted to find a comb to wear in her hair. Because it was so windy and indeed the wind was picking up, many of the market people were packing up their goods and rolling up the awnings of their stalls. The pieces of cloth flapping around the poles contrasted with the anxious faces of the customers still peering inward in their winter coats gave Armanda the impression of a wild contagious abandon. She bought a comb and then added a couple of elastic hairbands decorated with tiny pearls. She pushed back the hood of the stroller and while the Syrian stallholder squatted down and held a mirror in front of the child, Armanda made two little ponytails on top of Nadja’s head and wound the hairbands around them so that they stood straight up; Nadja now looked like a little marmoset.

“Look how pretty you are….”

She loved the child. Nadja was something miraculous, the impudent trick Lidy had stunned her by pulling roughly two and a half years ago. Naked, in the room with the balcony, Lidy had poked herself gently in the belly with her forefinger. Armanda could still call up this image whenever she chose: tall, white Lidy, meeting her eyes in the mirror as she recounted how she’d been to the family doctor that afternoon, where she’d had to spread her knees embarrassingly wide over a pair of wretchedly hard stirrups.

“Oh, but …” Armanda had stammered after a pause. And then, “Didn’t you take precautions?”

Overcome by a strange, dejected feeling that she’d lost something forever, she had looked at Lidy in the mirror, as Lidy turned toward her with a motion that for Armanda was synonymous with hips, shoulders, soft upper arms, breasts: a woman far gone in a love affair. It had been the beginning of summer, the middle of May, and just as Armanda was working out that it must have happened at the beginning of March, the phone rang. She ran out into the hall. After the spacious brightness of the room, it was suddenly dark, like a tunnel. Suddenly uncertain, she stopped, facing the wall with the ringing telephone, then reached for the receiver and heard the voice of someone she knew well and consequently could immediately see right there in front of her but now suddenly as if for the first time: long-limbed, good-looking, blond, a strong face with a fascinatingly intelligent nose. I always liked to talk politics, money, and English literature with him, I always liked it when he kissed me in that seductive, dangerous way you see in French films, God, it was fine with me back then: he kissed my throat, made a funny snorting noise as he pounced on the nape of my neck, he breathed into my ears, and after he’d done all that, he looked into my face, and I saw that his eyes were terribly serious. Good. But when nothing happened in the days that followed, no letter, no phone call, nothing … why didn’t I wonder about it for a single moment?

It was Sjoerd Blaauw, a friend of hers who was now going out with Lidy. Still completely shaken, she greeted him with the first words that came into her head: “Sjoerd, while I’ve got you on the line, maybe you can tell me …”

Before she was able to ask whether the new Buñuel movie had opened at the Rialto, Lidy, in an unbuttoned checked dress, had snatched the receiver from her hands. There was a lot of breathless whispering, but Armanda was already out on the balcony, looking at the rear of the house on the Govert Flinkstraat, and it was dawning, dawning on her, as dawn it must, that she was already nineteen. A part of life she’d now missed out on, she thought. A shame, but don’t keep looking at it, that part has turned elsewhere.

Below her in the gardens and inner courtyards the afternoon sun shone on sandboxes, sheds, dogs, bicycles. And in the foreground, in the decking of the balcony, were Lidy’s freshly whitened tennis shoes, set out neatly to dry, and looking not white but orange in the reflection of the sun’s rays. The two of them wanted to fall in love, okay, they’ve gone and done it and not by half measures either. I’m not pretending to myself: I’m really truly shocked! She had fiddled with her skirt, stared up into the air, and followed an imaginary bird with an old-spinsterish look in her eyes. Meanwhile her very simple thought was: I still have my life ahead of me, while she felt an unease that declared in essence, okay, maybe there are still terrific things in my future, but indications are that I lack the talent to experience them, or even recognize them when they’re right in front of me.

Armanda went on studying English at university. Lidy broke off her degree in French language and literature to marry her hands-on lover, who already had a job with good prospects at Bank Mees & Hope. In the months that followed, there were no more comments about how much the two girls looked alike, because Lidy’s belly was starting to swell. And not just the belly: her arms and legs also transformed themselves into soft, rounded masses of flesh. Her face, in which her eyelids drooped mysteriously, took on a look of plump melancholy. For the first time they looked totally unalike.

Once they had a conversation about this.

“What does it actually mean,” said Lidy as she poured herself a glass of lemonade after taking a quick look at Armanda’s still-half-full glass of port, “what does it actually mean to look alike? That we have the same color eyes?”

“I think so.”

They took a short look at each other, as Lidy, in a way Armanda felt was significant, remarked, “Eme-rald-green.”

It was the end of an afternoon in November. From the living room on the street side of the park, where Lidy now lived with her husband, it was almost possible to see the house where she and her sister had grown up.

Armanda drained her glass. She said, “Everyone loves the idea of brotherhood and sisterhood. God, it’s lovely and all that but … I mean, why is it so lovely?”

“What do I know? Nesting instinct, some kind of memory of cuddling and being cuddled, and so on, being wise to all someone else’s tricks, even the most innocent ones, you know …”

“And maybe that we’re all going to die someday?”

“Oh God! Who knows — yes, that must be part of it too.”

Armanda glanced down at the old Persian carpet from home, with the blue birds and the garlands, which oddly enough seemed much more familiar to her here, and also much more beautiful. As she stared at the blue birds, she said to herself: Once upon a time there were two girls, who wore the same clothes when they were children, who went to the same school when they turned six, and to the same high school when they were twelve. She looked up and continued out loud. “The Vossius Academy. Because both of them were good at languages, they decided to make this their specialty, and the older sister’s textbooks could be passed straight on to the younger one two years later.”

Lidy stared at her for a moment, nonplussed. “Hah, bound together by fate,” she said, and poured Armanda’s glass so full that she had to stick her head forward quickly and lap a couple of mouthfuls.

“Damn.” Armanda had sat down again, her hands flat on the table on either side of her glass. “Your underlinings were still in them,” she said. “Words of wisdom in Goethe, revenge and curses in Shakespeare, everything so frightfully beautiful and true. So my eyes would keep wandering to the same things you’d seen a couple of years before, the very same lofty, grandiose things.”

She felt the alcohol going to her head.

A little hoarsely she went on: “Don’t think I read all those beautiful things the same way you did.”

The two of them were silent for a while. But the two of them had known each other so long that their observations and retorts continued unspoken.

With fat Lidy facing her like an idol, Armanda said rather sadly, “You can never feel what someone else feels.” And as Lidy only nodded absentmindedly, she went on in the same tone, “The movements that little monster makes in your stomach, do you feel them the same way you feel your tongue moving in your mouth, only bigger?”

“What nonsense!” Lidy shot to her feet so uncontrollably that she had to hold tight to the edge of the table.

“Careful!” said Armanda affectionately but without moving an inch.

Lidy trudged awkwardly out of the room.

When she came back a few minutes later, Armanda’s mood had changed. Taken aback, even deeply moved, she looked at Lidy’s body as she spread her legs and laid her hands on her belly to sit down again beside her.

She leaned forward. Quietly and emphatically, like someone who has known something for a long time but only just found the way to put it into words, she said, “You know, quite objectively, I really can’t stand myself.”

“What?”

“True. If I had the choice, I’d prefer not to have that much to do with myself.”

“Well, that’s your bad luck.”

“Don’t laugh, it’s true, even when I was a child I hadn’t the faintest sympathy for myself, not the faintest.”

Since she was a little drunk, she had trouble getting the words out, but her gesticulating hand spoke volumes.

“Those dresses with the smocking on the bodice never looked good on me.”

“Oh, stop it.”

“Forehead was too high for a child.”

“True. Mine was too.”

“Didn’t suit me.”

“Nonsense.” Lidy contradicted her without paying much attention, but Armanda kept going, that most people felt really tender toward themselves. Not her. Which was why it really wasn’t so bad, not bad at all, to have an older sister who was sitting here right now, right here opposite her with a body so much more voluminous than her own and so pleased with herself that it was totally infectious.

A sudden surge of love went through her that curiously she experienced first and foremost as love for herself.

“Not bad at all,” she repeated warmly, looking up at her sister, unembarrassed, with tears in her eyes.

Lidy turned her head to one side.

“Be quiet.”

Armanda also pricked up her ears. Downstairs the front door had opened and shut with a bang. She jumped to her feet. “Is it that late already?”

The staircase in this kind of house was narrow. If you hit the light switch with the automatic timer downstairs and started up, you could bet that the light would go out by the time you reached the half-landing. In the pitch darkness Armanda, still buttoning her coat, met Lidy’s husband on his way upstairs with a rustling newspaper. Both of them had to laugh. Armanda felt his breath on her face.

After she’d done her shopping, Armanda took Nadja in the stroller back to Lidy and Sjoerd’s house on the short side of the park. While she climbed the stairs one by one, holding the child by the hand, she was thinking about the evening to come, and the party, murmuring: After nine. He’s not allowed to pick me up before nine. This time she really wanted to arrive a little late. Betsy often gave parties in her loft on the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. At first Armanda had been unable to believe that Sjoerd was the brother of this friend, who was quite a bit older than she was, and whom she admired for her narrow, intelligent face and curly black hair. Then she discovered that they were stepbrother and- sister, with the same father but different mothers.

She reached the top panting, having carried the child up the second flight of stairs. Why, the question suddenly struck her as she took out the little decorative comb in the living room and looked at it again, why had she set her heart on going to this party? Although she had already committed herself to a visit to Zierikzee (her annual pilgrimage of love, which until now had always been such a joy and which meant she really couldn’t go to the party) on Monday evening she had gone out into the hall. Some decisions just make themselves. A firm plan — she wanted to wear the blue dress with the tight skirt — drew her to the phone and secured her sister on the other end of the line.

“Mrs. Blaauw.”

Very funny even now. She cleared her throat sarcastically.

“Hello, it’s me.”

Lidy hadn’t been able to get it at first and found it all a little strange: Armanda’s goddaughter was turning seven and was determined that her aunt and beloved godmother, who came to visit once a year, must make the long trip to the little provincial town, bringing ballet shoes as a birthday present. And now Armanda was asking her to go in her place? Oh. But why?

“All right, okay, I guess it sounds like a nice idea,” Lidy finally said after five minutes of to-and-fro.

It had been a sudden stirring, a blind impulse that had come to her the previous Monday from out of the blue, and which, just like that, she had allowed to take hold.

When Sjoerd came home shortly after midday, the table was covered with papers, and Armanda was hunched over her diploma thesis. She put down her pen and greeted him with a smile signifying that she and Nadja, who was at the head of the table with two fingers in her mouth, drawing a bear, had spent a wonderful morning together. She quickly poured him a cup of coffee; a plate of rolls sat on a dictionary between them. The mood was companionable as Sjoerd tried good-naturedly to report on the urgent meeting he’d had to have in the office this Saturday morning with a client involving a mortgage loan of many hundreds of thousands of guilders that would have to be converted in a flash on Monday into a 6 percent bond, but the thing didn’t interest her, and conversation soon moved on to Betsy’s party.

“Fine by me.” He stared at her for a moment, and then said with the same indifference, “I’ll pick you up at nine fifteen.”

The rain had stopped, but the wind was still raging.

“Seems to be getting worse,” he said, without turning to look at the window.

“Yes?”

Armanda observed his face, which was almost being erased by the background behind it: rattling panes of glass in the west-facing window, and behind them treetops swaying wildly in a chaos of branches. She was suddenly overcome by the feeling that everything was happening in almost farcical parallel with the story that had been occupying her for half the morning in her work, for the part she’d been working on involved a play in which a storm, conjured up by human powers, broke out and tore across an island. So — and why should that be impossible? By human powers? Out of revenge, out of holy outrage or some such? Now, as she thought back over it again, it didn’t strike her as not at all unthinkable. In earlier times — and we can be sure that the human race was no dumber back then than it is now, maybe it was even a little more intelligent — people believed absolutely it was possible, highly possible, that mental energy, the mad heart of pure invention, could trick an event into becoming real. God, in short, and why not? Who says that everything that is fated to happen must first be properly thought out? Thought out and, maybe, written down in the most convincing way possible? She closed her books. While she was thinking that an event, if it announces itself, discovers that a place has already been made for it and hence connects so familiarly with the imagination that those it touches, i.e., us, respond accordingly, she gathered up her sheets of paper. Dialogues, gestures, scenes, everything already predigested by a literary memory.

She made an unconscious movement. Her pen rolled onto the floor. He bent down faster than she did.

“Thank you.”

She saw something in his eyes as they flashed at her. What kind of marriage did the two of them have? she wondered, and at that moment something so wicked tightened around her heart that she didn’t even try consciously to understand it. She stood up and started pushing her things into her bag.

“Okay,” said Sjoerd, also getting to his feet.

Armanda bent down to fish her shoes out from under the table. She heard the house creak under the force of a squall. My God, she thought, with the detachment of the incurably candid, what a terrific, homely sound! Just think, the weather is going to get so much worse in the night that some of the ferry services will certainly get interrupted, and the captains can thumb their noses at the idea of working tomorrow, maybe even the day after tomorrow, maybe even till hell freezes over. Just think!

Looking distracted, she said good-bye.

As she and Sjoerd got out of the taxi that evening on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, Betsy’s front door was standing open. Sjoerd took the four narrow, almost vertical flights of stairs so fast that they had to pant at each other speechlessly for a moment when they reached the apartment door at the top. He took the coat from her shoulders. There was already a mountain of wet clothes hanging over the banisters. Betsy discovered them, called out a welcome, and led them into the attic room that once upon a time had served as a secret church; it had very high ceilings and was already filled with the din of voices. Armanda was in seventh heaven. It felt so good to walk in with a carefree Sjoerd in his old tweed jacket. And naturally there were any number of more casual acquaintances who did a double take when they first saw her.

“Armanda,” she had to say more than once. “I’m Armanda.”

3. Landscape?

For the first time today she was crossing water. The Nieuwe Waterweg is a deep but fairly narrow channel — the ferry only needs ten minutes to get from one side to the other — but the fare between the two landing stages is still a quarter guilder. Lidy saw a shockingly old peasant’s face loom up by her left-hand window. She understood, wound it down, and put the demanded coin in the ferryman’s paw. As all the windows in the car promptly steamed up, she got out and was startled by the wind, which seemed to her to be extremely strong out here on the water.

She looked around, and was amused to see a broad-shouldered man in a captain’s uniform up on the bridge, standing at the wheel and looking serious. I really am on a ship. Little waves all around, at an angle ahead of them an oceangoing steamer making course for the open sea, and over to the left the freighter RO8, headed toward the harbor in Rotterdam. Leaning against the car, she was standing in the blurry light of an imminent rain shower. Under the roof of the gangway, people with bicycles and people on foot. Her eye fell on a chest standing next to the railing, with Life Vests painted on it in white letters, as if to make absolutely clear to her once more that she really had left dry land. A few minutes later and the ship was already swinging round and coming to a stop. The loading ramp landed on the quay with a loud crash. And yet: as Lidy drove onto the island of Rozenburg, the crossing, regardless of how short it had been, had succeeded in placing a greater distance between her and home than she had expected or intended. This little outing was supposed to be only a fantasy, wasn’t it, a little exercise in tyranny on the part of her sister, Armanda, one that she herself had almost no part in?

Right, but in the hours that followed there was no pretense of a proper road to follow. A labyrinth of little side roads, locks, and bridges demanded her total attention. Impossible to think anything else in life more important, even for a moment, than the route, which seemed to have a will of its own and cared very little about the map spread out on the passenger seat. Near Nieuw-Beijerland she had to take another ferry, and a quarter of an hour later she reached the sea dike with a narrow asphalt road along the top. She stopped and ran in the wind to a faded street sign on which, luckily, she was able to decipher the name Numansdorp. That was where the harbor must be, at the Hollands Diep, which was the departure point for several ferries that made the crossing of the long arm of the sea.

The sea itself was not to be seen. But she had its unmistakable smell in her nose as she hit the gas again and put her face up close to the windshield, peering out at the landscape with the first stirrings of alarm. Landscape? In contrast to the huge arch of space above, the ground was almost erased. The solid rain cover had been shredded by the wind. Clouds with glistening edges were being pushed in front and behind one another like flats of scenery across the panorama on the other side of the windshield. To what extent were there any inhabitants in this panorama? She overtook only two disheveled cyclists with the wind at their backs, and once a farmer waiting on a side road with horse and cart waved when she honked at him. Tops of steeples, farmsteads, windmills with flying sails, a horse behind a fence — everything buried by the sky all the way to the dike, which wasn’t that high but still drew your eyes away from the sea. Ghostly, she thought. The harbor took forever to come into view. She wished she could see both land and sea at the same time. This was still the province of South Holland, a sort of betwixt-and-between area with bare black polders that was, however, familiar to her. Her plan was to get to the harbor in Numansdorp and take the ferry across to Zeeland, a province she had never set foot in, but whose shadow she had already been sensing all morning, because it was the goal of her journey. That her compass needle was pointing her toward a group of completely unknown people, a family in a little rural town that didn’t interest her, had never interested her, and doubtless never would, was something that she was gradually coming in the course of these few hours to find completely normal.

And when were they actually expecting this godmother?

It was now two o’clock. On the coast, the wind was strengthening to thirty knots, which corresponds to a full 7 on the Beaufort wind force scale, and from now on, was going to increase at the rate of another Beaufort number every hour. Lidy reached the port and drove into the town square. To her delight, she saw that she could continue her journey exactly as she had planned it that morning. Next to a couple of rocking freighters, the ferry, Den Bommel, was waiting at the quayside, and there was space to load her car. That part of the jetty was completely submerged didn’t strike her as being in any way out of the ordinary.

Nor indeed was it. Twice a month on average the water in the Hollands Diep rose to the level known as the boundary-depth gauge, and even regularly topped it. That brought with it the regular local flooding without anyone making a fuss about it. She got out. The way to the booth where the ferry tickets were sold was blocked by an uprooted tree. She clambered over it and made sure she worked her way into the lee of the wind by the harbor office. As she joined the queue, her face was as flushed as the faces of the other passengers for the Numansdorp-Zijpe ferry, all of them talking cheerily, even with relish, about the weather. We know what storms are. When it blows, it blows, it’s pretty strong today but we’ve seen worse!

Ten minutes later she reversed down a pretty steep ramp and over the metal plates in the hold, and got out of the car. An iron interior stairway led her up into the passenger lounge, which had a billiards table and a bar. The ferries were stable old tubs. Den Bommel registered 10,000 tons and had a 400-horsepower diesel engine that could power the ship at ten knots all the way to Schouwen-Duiveland in two hours. Bad weather, i.e., a storm out of the west or the northwest above gale force 9 in this treacherous area, demanded great skill from the pilot. Wind speeds of forty to sixty knots could transform the waters of Haringvliet, Volkerak, and Grevelingen into seas of steep, relentlessly oncoming waves. No boat should if at all possible present itself to them broadside.

Find a fixed point and keep looking at it. The feeling is worse than being drunk. Sitting at a table with a fried egg sandwich and a hot chocolate in front of her, it didn’t take her long to realize she’d be better off in the open air. The tilting floor and the heaving of the world outside the windows bore no relation to what she was perceiving with her eyes or any other of her senses. Deathly white, she hurried to the middle deck, where more passengers were standing in the shelter provided by the engine room and staring fixedly at the massive volumes of oncoming water.

Her sick feeling vanished in an instant. Then she became aware that she was being observed from the side. A passenger standing next to her was just opening his mouth to say something to her, but she pointedly kept her eyes fixed in the distance. Reading the map in her mind’s eye, she knew that what she was crossing right now was the junction of Haringvliet and Hollands Diep en route to the smaller arm of the Volkerak, but the tide was on the rise, and it was clear that the North Sea was now the master here. Genuinely beautiful. The surface of the water was coming at her in wave after wave of blue light, overlaid with such white streaks of foam that it was impossible to understand where the reflection was coming from.

Why can’t I see any shoreline, why aren’t there any steeples or roofs? Surely there’s land all round me?

“Just look at that!” a voice said next to her.

It was her fellow traveler. A bear of a man with a red face was pointing something out to her with an outstretched arm and a serious expression. She looked at where he was pointing and nodded thoughtfully as she was told that there was usually excellent rabbit hunting on the foreshore of the dike, but the whole thing was now underwater. Then, as if in answer to a question, the man told her his occupation. “Chief engineer with the Royal Hydraulic Engineering Authorities.”

What? Ah. Disinclined to diminish the spectacle of the sea with idle conversation, she nonetheless replied, “So that means this magnificent view is — your field of work?”

“Yes, exactly.”

The chief engineer bent closer to her. She got a strong whiff of alcohol. “What you’re looking at, miss, is a tide that will rise way above the depth gauges at a whole number of monitoring stations, I can tell you from experience.”

She said nothing and frowned.

Her companion was now looking at her intently. “What you’re seeing here,” he said slowly, emphatically, “is the rising sea level, nothing special in and of itself, since it occurs with every tide. Obviously you’re familiar with this. An affair of the sun and the moon, which exert a pull on the water.” He balled both hands and lifted them to demonstrate. “But sometimes, umm, the tide speaks the language of the wind, not of astronomy.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yes. Sometimes it’s the storm that gives the water here along the coast an additional brute of a shove and lifts it higher.”

She wasn’t looking away anymore. She turned halfway toward her interlocutor, which didn’t mean that the expanse of water that the ship had now left behind was ceasing to have an effect on her — on the contrary, she reached for her lingering sense of direction and transformed it into a kind of anesthetic, through which the voice of the chief engineer echoed with all the logic of a dream….

“My God,” she said.

“I take it that you’re ready for me to give you a few facts and figures. Or …?”

She nodded.

“Well …” The chief engineer glanced upward for a moment to focus his concentration. “This century has already seen quite a number of storm tides, and most of them were minor; we get a minor storm tide here almost every year, and things are underwater all over the place, you know. Medium storm tides, which is what we call them at the Hydraulic Authorities, pack a bigger wallop, they occur, let’s say, between once a decade and once every hundred years. Remember the winter of 1906, when a hurricane drove the North Sea near Vlissingen up almost fourteen feet above the Normal Amsterdam Water Level, causing enormous damage. I’m sorry? No, nobody drowned. Or maybe just one or two.”

The chief engineer massaged his hands. She saw that his face was changing, saw that minor and moderate storm floods were visibly giving way to something more drastic, and here it came: “The third category that we distinguish is the high storm flood. A frequent phenomenon? No. Occurs merely once every hundred to a thousand years. Good, I see you’re nodding. The Hydraulic Authorities have never actually measured one as such, let alone broken it down into accurate statistics.”

He paused for a moment. Then, with a kind of enthusiasm that mystified her, he explained that science did recognize a supreme category of storm tide, a four-star ranking, signifying a catastrophe that, however unlikely, could not be written off as impossible just because it might occur in this part of the world every ten thousand years.

He leaned forward with his head and mouthed something, but she didn’t understand.

“Sorry?” she asked, and the answer came in a roar.

“The extreme storm flood! Oh! Can you just imagine it? Have you never heard anything about the hellish catastrophes in the old days? The Saint Elisabeth’s flood in the fifteenth century, that swallowed up our entire province of South Holland? A century later: Saint Felix, even worse, a storm that felt called upon to restore all the mussels and crabs to the twenty villages around Reimerswaal in perpetuity. And then, darn it, forty years later, in the blink of an eye, statistically speaking, enter the All Saints Flood, and people are thinking all over again that it’s the end of the world!”

The chief engineer laughed for a moment. Then: “Nature’s fits of rage, every one of them responsible for enormous numbers of deaths!” Did she also grasp that this entire spectacle often ran its course with such extreme results not merely by force of nature but because of the shiftless maintenance of the dikes? Only a mountain contained its own mass unaided. Please would she believe him if he assured her — it was clear that he wanted to utter some unvarnished truth, the kind that makes your ears prick up — assured her as an insider, that the crests of the dikes even today failed to meet the norm?

He was looking at her with the peremptoriness of a man who knows the figures pretty damn well.

“Umm … you’re a nice young lady. Am I alarming you?”

Not at all, though now her eyes were fixed on something else. A little ship, tiny in fact. It was about sixty yards away, chugging along in the opposite direction. She squeezed her eyes shut. Sometimes it disappeared up to the wheelhouse in the waves, and then she would be able to see the black tarpaulin and read the name, Compassion, before it plunged back into the depths. Rays of light piercing down through the cloud formations gave the scene a theatrical air.

“I … think it’s really beautiful.”

“Indeed, it’s impressive,” the chief engineer admitted. Then, after a pause: “Cosmic and earthly powers from unimaginably distant regions are converging right in front of us.”

She gave a searching look into his slightly bloodshot eyes. He wasn’t grinning.

“Lofty words.”

“Am I boring you?”

“Absolutely not. Actually, this is my first time here.” And like someone who in a chance moment recognizes that the heavens are the eternal, everlasting, primeval landscape of our minds, she said, “Yes, we say it’s beautiful, but just think of everything that lies behind it all, you know?”

“True, true.”

Unanimity. Which the chief engineer took advantage of to turn the conversation to the jet stream, the great band of wind racing through the topmost layer of the troposphere. Six to eight miles up it sweeps across continents and is capable of compressing the atmosphere into a single area of unbroken low pressure, or pumping it into an area of high pressure, just like a balloon.

“Picture it like a gigantic bicycle pump.”

She did, but meanwhile kept peering at the horizon: for some time now they had been sailing parallel to dikes on which occasionally a little building was to be seen, and even a church steeple poking up here and there. On one of these she spotted a wildly fluttering flag. That’s already the second or third today, she thought, until it dawned on her that it was Princess Beatrix’s birthday. How old was she? Fourteen? Fifteen?

“And finally we get to the weather,” said the chief engineer. “Rain, wind, yeah. Weather is never-ending, isn’t it? Strictly speaking, weather and wind are the backdrop to our entire lives.”

“Odd thought.”

“Air, that does nothing but stream from an area of high pressure into an area of low pressure.”

She smiled at him over her shoulder almost companionably, but he curbed this immediately. In a tone that was suddenly almost authoritarian he said, “Umm, as you will feel, the force of the wind is picking up by the minute!”

Meantime the ship had clearly changed course, and was beginning to pitch and toss. She noticed that the shorelines in either direction were farther away again and that they were sailing straight into the wind. The voice of the chief engineer, almost impossible to understand now, was still delivering his fantastical nature lecture at her. When she didn’t react, he tapped her on the arm.

“And do you want to know about this racket? Believe me, if the monstrous eye of this storm is gathering itself over the North Sea and sucking everything up with all its force — do you get it? — that’s what it’ll take — that’s when we can look forward to a really major show.”

This seemed to end the conversation. Seemed to, for Lidy, who was actually thinking, God, fine, now how can I just get rid of this man, stood for several seconds staring back at him.

“Yes?” asked the chief engineer.

She shook her head and looked away.

As far as the eye could see, the oncoming flood tide. Both of them looked at it, until the chief engineer turned to her again. Emphatically, as if imparting a conclusion, he said, “Vlissingen. Hook of Holland.”

Yes?

Could she imagine that after a weekend like this he was going to be really dying to know what the monitoring stations over there were going to produce as today’s measurements?

Feeble laugh. Her back half turned to him, she didn’t say anything in reply. The chief engineer moved so that he was in front of her again. She clasped her hands, rubbed them, and blew on them. Now what?

“I think I’m going to lie down.”

If that was okay with her. He said he was going to stretch out on one of the benches in the passenger area, the wedding he was coming from in Hoeksche Waard had gone on till dawn. There was nothing he liked better, he explained, than to sleep in storms and bad weather. So he was going to give himself a little foretaste of tonight. Hadn’t she had enough of the cold and the wind? Okay, he shook her hand and then in the same gesture threw his arm wide.

“Over there is England, that way at an angle is France, up there are the West Frisian Islands, and we’re in the middle. Imagine a sculpture made of water, an ocean mountain range, relatively low at the outlying foothills but rising to a monumental height in the middle, and then draw a vertical line from there to here!”

The chief engineer laughed as he headed for the stairs. His voice and the wind had been piercing in her ears.

Dusk. An afternoon in January. Lidy, on a ferry on the Krammer, knew roughly where she was. The Krammer is the southeastern part of the Grevelingen, and the Grevelingen is the arm of the North Sea that divides South Holland and Zeeland.

Known facts that could put up no fight whatever against what was playing out before her eyes, and not only before her eyes. Underneath her, in the depths, and behind her something was also in motion that could not be marked on a map or a chart. It did not even reveal itself to the eye. Huge and deafening, it seemed to survey its own surroundings, with intentions that no human being could put into words, for the simple reason that no human being had even the smallest role to play in what was going on. You could at best try to transcribe it as: a cold wind is blowing in off the sea — and leave it at that.

Birds were still flying. She watched the gray-black specks sail out from under the layer of clouds. They must have convincing reasons to fly even short distances in this witches’ cauldron. As she looked from the birds to the waves, which were piling yards high and yet somehow remained beneath her feet, she made the discovery that “under” and “over” no longer existed. And because it was getting darker by the minute, she was soon unable to make out any wider space anymore, nor any expanse of water, only streaks of foam. Whitish, azure green. Into which the ferry plunged in the circuslike glare of its floodlights, disappearing into them, then surging up again as it continued a journey that had lost all relation to time. All it had now was circumstances.

She gave a start and quickly began to think of home, for suddenly she had seen herself, bundled in her winter coat, on the middle deck. A strange, thoughtless young woman. Everything vital to her overtaken by the spectacle surrounding her. In such a place the thing to do is to blindfold oneself and think of home. Think where the chairs and tables are.

Which ones? She noticed that she was totally muddling up the furniture in number 77 and number 36. These carpets went here, the others went there, mustn’t mix them up. She began pro forma to picture Sjoerd’s bachelor apartment on Korsjespoortsteeg, where she had followed him one winter afternoon. Back then, after the first time they’d made love, she had lain in bed watching the curtains in front of the sliding windows wave softly to and fro in the draft, but now this was a soulless memory. Love had come quickly. She had met him only the week before at one of the tennis courts in the Apollo Hall, just reopened for the first time since the war. Beginning of February? In January there had been freezing weather seven days in a row, yet suddenly the very idea of going skating seemed over. She had sat with a little group on a sort of terrace at the side, watching a mixed-doubles match. Armanda and Sjoerd, Betsy’s half brother, against Betsy and some partner or other. When the game was over, Sjoerd had looked at the chair next to her, as if he’d known the whole time, and indeed kept an eye out, that it was free. And after that, the date. And Sjoerd, after a short stroll in the exceptionally mild winter weather that was supposed to last for weeks now according to the weather forecast, took her to his intimate little pad on the fourth floor and didn’t waste any time in making clear what he wanted. She had been ready for the taking, she still remembered, and she also knew that she always would be: the frankness of male sexuality. Horniness, flattery, and getting-to-know-you-better all in one. His hands had found their way under her skirt in the nicest way.

She held on tight. The ship suddenly tilted twenty degrees to port, if not more. An enormous sea towered up off the starboard bow and rolled without breaking in a dark green mass over the ship, which began to spew water like crazy from all the scuppers.

A cold wind is blowing in off the sea….

Of course it spoke to her. Thrillingly inhospitable world, thrillingly bad weather! What could be more irresistible? Particularly when it was a question of mother-love. Can one ever look in to check on one’s sleeping child more adoringly than when the wind is howling and the shutters are banging? Determined to counter the present uproar with something of her own, she thought: Nadja. She also thought: Since you arrived, everything has been more complete. But what she saw as she was thinking was that this was a photo, an unsuccessful snapshot, in which she is standing with the child against her neck, looking into the lens and staring back at herself with empty, blanked-out eyes.

Leave it alone. This air and this arm of the sea contain no trace of you. The young woman — you — who left home this morning must get hold of herself for a moment and take a long look at her own happiness. Her hands and face were stiff with cold. Then — the ship had swung around and, propelled by a squall, flew right toward the Zijpe dock on Schouwen-Duiveland — she was shocked out of her thoughts. Den Bommel had crashed against the fenders with a sound like an exploding mine.

No other ferry captain in the coming days would attempt to make the crossing.

4. So You Go

They left around 1 a.m. Although the party was nowhere near winding down, Armanda had said, “Shall we go?” to Sjoerd as she laid her fingers on the lapels of his jacket.

“Good idea,” he said in a way that suggested that he had just had the same idea himself, and the fact that as he said this he took hold of her for a moment, simply grabbed her by the hips, was nothing surprising, because they had got on incredibly well all evening to the point where they were feeling basically intimate.

Parties: parties underline life’s festiveness, as Armanda had felt from the very first minute this evening. The attic room was heated by a cylindrical oil stove with a pipe that ran clear through the entire space, and this alone — the contrast between the glowing warmth and the filthy weather outside — had immediately put her in the mood, relaxed, free from … what, she didn’t know. When their hostess came over after about twenty minutes to ask her and Sjoerd, “Hey, where’s Lidy?” Armanda had already greeted a lot of people and smiled and finished her first glass of wine.

“Lidy?” she repeated.

Through the voices and the soft jazz playing, Betsy asked again, “Why didn’t Lidy come with you?”

They were standing in a circle, Betsy, Sjoerd, two or three other guests, and her. Oddly, just as she was about to answer, she was distracted by the red velvet band that Betsy was wearing around her neck, and indeed by Betsy altogether. Her friend, ten years older, was extraordinarily pretty, she was struck by this all over again, a grown-up kind of pretty, and her dress with its tight bodice, fashionably up-to-the-minute, looked fantastic on her. Luckily she didn’t look too bad herself, for a moment she saw herself standing in the front of the mirror at home a few hours ago and then as she was here, now, in the candlelit attic room in her little cocktail dress, skirt three-quarters of an inch below the knee, rounded neckline, from a pattern she’d found in Marion. Sometimes people said she looked like Vivien Leigh, and this evening she thought there was maybe something to it. The faintest hint of the characteristics of someone else to enhance what one was already … a little bewitched by her own image of herself, she stretched out her hand toward Betsy and touched the red velvet band.

“Lovely!”

The little group was standing next to the sideboard, where every imaginable kind of food was already set out. Armanda leaned to the side, took a little toast square with smoked salmon on it, the sort of thing that you can pop into your mouth whole in a perfectly genteel way, and noticed, as she was chewing it, that the others were still looking at her expectantly. She swallowed hastily.

“Lidy’s in Zeeland,” she said, out of breath.

“Why on earth?” asked Betsy.

“Oh … I think she wanted to get into the car and just go. Yes, she wanted to be behind the wheel again. You lose the knack so quickly, don’t you?”

She saw someone in the group nod.

“Actually I had something to do with it,” she went on. “I have a goddaughter out there, you didn’t know that, did you? A little treasure, today’s her seventh birthday, she set her heart on getting a pair of ballet shoes from her godmother.”

Betsy smiled as she eyed her, but she also raised an eyebrow. Meanwhile someone had turned up the volume on the music, a slow clarinet solo. Armanda raised her voice accordingly, but also because this time she’d be able to give the right answer to the question.

“But when we were talking on the phone, Lidy and I, at the beginning of the week and the subject of this little trip to Zeeland came up, she was immediately all fired up about it. Wouldn’t you really rather go to Betsy’s party, my beloved sister asked all casually, but I know her. First I just let her ask about how far it was, and the state of the roads, and the possibility of doing most of this magical journey on a boat, and then finally I gave way. Okay, fine, I said, then why don’t you go in my place.”

This was what Armanda said, and then looked past the others into the room in a slightly confused way, watching a few of the guests already slow-dancing a barely recognizable fox-trot to the lone clarinet; when she brought her gaze back to the group around her, she realized Sjoerd was watching her closely, with a rather ambiguous look. She looked right back at him, and immediately caught herself remembering the one time he had kissed her on the mouth, in black and white, a movie still. She quickly registered that his expression was softening.

I’m a little dizzy, she said to herself, but it feels good. Everything around me looks a bit blurred, it must be the cigarette smoke, all those blue rings and snaky white garlands going up to the ceiling in the heat of the candle flames. Besides which I feel hot. Is this life?

She had openly given him a very loving look.

The slow fox-trot was suddenly broken off with a scratching noise — someone had decided it was too early to set that mood — not to sound out again, even more mistily, until hours later, when everyone, as if at the wave of a wand, was ready to listen as the clarinet wove its tale of desire, consent, and the tenuous boundary that divides them. Armanda and Sjoerd sought each other out without hesitation and pressed themselves together. After spending the entire evening in such close proximity, it felt right to them, and everyone else, to dance cheek to cheek. Outside all was stormy night, and neither of them cared what anyone might think who saw that here, under the wood-beamed ceiling, a man was cradling the sister of his wife in his arms, his mouth pressed to her ear. The mood that held them both captive was unmistakable.

She descended the stairs behind him. He had called for a taxi, and as the stand was close by, they were already on their way downstairs. The front door was stuck. He reached past her in the hall and used force. Rain immediately stung her face. The taxi didn’t come. She kept taking quick peeks out from behind the half-closed door at the dark street and at a gaggle of dripping cyclists leaning against a lamppost. Apart from that, absolutely nothing was going on.

Ten minutes later, as they were running down the little side street, she was still holding his hand and they both laughed at the whole show. At the dam there wasn’t a taxi to be seen. They crossed the road fast and stood in the doorway of a clothing store, though it faced north and provided little protection. She was absolutely freezing, shivered as she raised her collar, but held herself a little apart from Sjoerd. As she peered across the square, she could barely recall the happy atmosphere at the party, full of promises of the sort that don’t necessarily raise expectations that they’re going to become reality.

“Here comes one,” she called, and ran with her shawl over her soaking wet hair, hanging down in rats’ tails.

The taxi driver, like all taxi drivers in this city, was a talker. Huddled close together again in the soft backseat of the car, Armanda and Sjoerd had to put up with being told that the situation of the traffic this evening was extremely precarious. At the Keizersgracht an uprooted tree had blocked the road from Raadhuisstraat all the way to Berenstraat; in Bos en Lommer the balcony of one of the apartment houses still under construction had been ripped off and came crashing down on the streetcar rails; and in the square in front of the main train station, the taxi driver said, keeping up a steady speed automatically, he had had to swerve to avoid a 200-foot crane that was swaying toward the water at the edge of the open harbor while firemen raced to and fro.

“Dangerous weather,” said the taxi driver expectantly, turning round to them for a long moment. As he kept them under observation in the rearview mirror, he told them all about a deadly accident on the Kattenburg earlier in the evening and was about to report on a traffic jam on the Wallen when he hit the brakes and went into a skid. The engine died, the driver snarled a curse, restarted it at once, and drove, craning his neck in curiosity, slowly past a crumpled motorbike with a sidecar lying in the middle of the pitch-dark Vijzelstraat.

“A Zündapp,” he said. “Beautiful machine.” And, as he shifted back into top gear, he went straight into his report about the state of traffic on the Wal, where the usual mob of drunks was letting vehicles pull up right in front of the doors of the bars, because they didn’t want to take a single step outdoors with all the roof tiles flying around loose in the narrow streets.

“Typical drunk’s thinking,” said the taxi driver. “They totter smack into a canal without their brains sending out the slightest warning, but they have a real respect for roof tiles.”

Chunks of wood, shards of glass, bits of bicycles, branches, newspapers, umbrellas, cardboard boxes, everything lying in the rain, which had meantime slackened to a gentle patter. Armanda and Sjoerd, stunned, looked out over the front seat at the city, glistening in the headlights. The well-known bridges. A little circuitous path along the river. And there was De Pijp with its precise grid of streets. As they got out at the corner of the park, Armanda felt the street plan of her home city coil around her, life-threateningly, darkly, wetly, capturing numbers 77 and 36 in its grasp, the one on the long side of the park, the other on the short.

They were standing facing each other. Armanda yawned. Through a crack in the clouds, a ray of light from the hidden full moon fell onto her storm-ravaged face.

“I’m tired.”

“So go to sleep.”

Sjoerd, his arm round her shoulder, accompanied her to number 77, where the outside light was burning. She asked if he’d like to come to breakfast tomorrow. A nod, yes, maybe, but she shouldn’t count on him. Speaking of which, what time should he pick Nadja up? She groped in her coat pocket for the key. Oh, whenever it suited him.

He waited till she was inside and had closed the front door behind her.

How good it felt on a stormy night to slip into your bed in flannel pajamas! It didn’t take Armanda five minutes to get ready and then go into the next room to check on Nadja, who was sleeping stretched out like a kitten; now she was closing her eyes. First she cast her mind back for a moment to the party, conversations, images, then for the umpteenth time began to ask herself if her life wasn’t fundamentally colorless and bland, a pale reflection of something that certainly existed in her heart but clearly had no parallel in reality. What do I want my life to be?

Twenty-one already, she thought sleepily, but still no experience of life, and still a virgin, dammit, and I know a whole bunch of my fellow students who are no longer obliged to say the same. Then, as if riffling through a photo album, she saw the faces of friends and acquaintances merge, simply become details that gradually combined themselves into one anonymous face that she gazed at provocatively, brimming over with the sheer excitement of her own vital energy. You think I’m a fool, she thought in her dreams, just as she sometimes thought when she was wide awake. What, is that what it’s about? Are those the adventures that hide behind your secretive faces, that I’ve been avoiding for reasons I don’t understand myself? Doesn’t compare very well with the things that are going to happen and that I don’t actually know yet from direct experience but still I know are possible. She turned on her side. With a sleeper’s acumen she picked one face out of the array of those staring at her.

Lidy Blaauw-Brouwer. Who had given birth in the early onset of winter in 1950–51 to a little daughter, Nadine (“We’re going to call her Nadja”), thereby also giving herself an enchanting task that would last her the rest of her life.

She was now deeply asleep. As one ear continued to register the satisfying sounds of the storm, her brain was still lingering a little on Lidy, who had walked around her living room one winter evening with a nursing infant on her arm as if nothing, absolutely nothing in the world, could come close to equaling this experience. In the same room with her were two admirers: her husband and her younger sister, who had just realized that if things had gone a little, just a very little differently, this man could as easily have been loved by her, immoderately.

The sleeping girl lingered over this truth, which frightened her not at all; on the contrary, it left her in a state of private yearning as the hours slipped by unmarked. Toward dawn, she was rewarded with an erotic dream. She was startled awake, in a state of euphoria, only to plunge back into the dream’s continuation. It was dark, and Sjoerd was seizing her shoulders to turn her around. It wasn’t an embrace. Rather he was pushing her away from him by the shoulders, but this was made difficult for him because she refused to take a step back. This image was followed by a series of uninhibited details that jolted her mind as she woke up again, roused this time by a child’s solid little knee planted in her stomach. It was morning, and Nadja had climbed into bed with her aunt. Armanda pushed back the bedclothes and let the child snuggle up against her.

When she appeared for breakfast at around 10:30, everything still seemed perfectly normal, cozy, small-format. It was Sunday, and at home people listened to the national news on radio only on weekdays at 8 a.m. She said good morning to her mother, kissed her father, and laughed at Nadja, who was using both hands to push a rusk sprinkled with a crumbled lump of aniseed sugar up to her mouth. She sat down next to her father at the side of the table in the bay window on the second floor, which allowed a view of most of the street.

“Yes,” she said in reply to a remark of her father’s about the storm. “Just awful.” She followed his eyes to the broken branches on the cobblestones as she stretched out an arm to take the cup of tea her mother had poured for her.

It was a peaceful moment, despite the stormy weather. Armanda was wearing a blue bathrobe; her parents, smelling of shaving soap and eau de cologne, were already fully dressed. Jan Brouwer and Nadine Langjouw: people with fixed habits and habitual sunny dispositions, made even sunnier this morning by the presence of the little girl. Armanda couldn’t remember ever having heard her parents raise their voices to each other.

Shortly after eleven, they saw Sjoerd marching toward them through the swirling debris on the street, coattails flapping.

“In Zandvoort the sea’s lapping up over the boulevard,” he reported as he came in. Coffee was ready on the table. He sat down with them, saying that a friend had called to say why don’t we go and take a look at IJmuiden, the water’s lifted some of the ships right up onto the quay.

Armanda was wandering around restlessly, pouring coffee, sitting down again, running her fingers over the embroidery on the tablecloth, and when she looked up, she met the eyes of her mother, who asked, “So when’s Lidy getting back?” as if she was supposed to know.

“We didn’t settle on a specific time,” Sjoerd answered for her. And then, after stubbing out his cigarette and beginning to get to his feet: “Should I give her a call, maybe?”

Upon which the rest of a day began, which would fix itself permanently in Armanda’s mind as a series of household tasks whose simple familiarity concealed something utterly sinister.

Sjoerd came back into the living room from the hall. He hadn’t been able to get through to Schouwen-Duiveland.

“The line to the island is stone dead.”

At almost the same moment Armanda saw her father bent over in the corner, turning the knobs on the radio. The dial glowed green. She heard the voice of the announcer, heard him say that Army Central Command had ordered all military personnel on weekend leave to return to barracks at the same time as she waved hello to her brother, Jacob, who had finally slept himself out and was now in search of breakfast, still looking a little pale but already sufficiently awake to pay attention to the news.

“Oh, it’s war.” He took a roll.

Sjoerd left the house. Armanda went to get dressed and to tidy her room, in order to have something to do. While her hands were busy with the bed, the washbasin, and the wall cupboard, the radio was still on in the living room. The male voice calmly reported collapsed dikes, floods in the cities of Dordrecht and Willemstad, even danger to human life. At six o’clock, she and her mother began to make dinner. Darkness came early today. A Beechcraft from the military airfield at Gilze-Rijen had done a reconnaissance flight during the afternoon over West Brabant, Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, Walcheren, and Goeree. Everything was underwater.

As for Schouwen-Duiveland: no word.

She lay awake in the night; she was sick of the storm, which was still raging. Lidy hadn’t phoned once during the whole day. It would be good, she thought rather crossly, if you checked in tomorrow, Sister, surely you must realize we’re worried to death about you!

Near morning the newspaper thumped through the letterbox. She heard it and went downstairs. Switching on the lamp in the hall, she stared at the huge headline: ZEELAND WIPED OFF THE MAP, and then read a report that struck her as being no report but a complete fantasy.

“The Dakota flew low over the boiling waters of the Krammer in the direction of Schouwen-Duiveland. The island, battered and then overwhelmed, has ceased to exist. Entire villages lay strewn like driftwood along the broken dikes. Zierikzee was crying its death song. The spring tide has destroyed the harbor, and the North Sea has poured in from behind to attack the surrounding polders in a surprise rearguard pincer movement that has annihilated them.”

Shivering, she went up the stairs, had a brief thought of How was I to know … and then blocked it out. She crawled back into her warm bed, but stayed sitting upright. Her mind in a daze, suddenly aware of this one tiny point in time against the background of the endless roll call of place-names, she looked at the alarm clock on the night table beside her. Half past six. Eyes open and then squeezed tight shut, Armanda for the first time saw her sister as she would appear to her, pitilessly from now on. Tragic, even heroic, in front of a landscape reduced to a wasteland.

5. This Was Once a Town

As Lidy reached Schouwen-Duiveland in late afternoon, not tired at all, indeed wide awake, the flood tide had already passed the high-water mark, and the Flood Warning Service had immediately decided to put out one of their rare radio alerts. It spoke — in anticipation of the night to come — of a “dangerous high tide.”

She had taken the last ferry of the day to risk the crossing from Numansdorp to Zijpe. The entry into the harbor was so rough that it triggered a short-lived outbreak of screaming and running around on the decks. Nevertheless it wasn’t ten minutes before she was raising a hand in greeting to the boy who had lowered the ramp, and she drove unhesitatingly onto the island of her destiny.

The heavy cloud cover was breaking here and there. By the light of the hidden moon, she followed a little road that offered no resistance to the storm. During the war, the island had been flooded by the Germans, killing both trees and hedges. The drainage ditches to left and right were full to the brim. Wherever she looked, cold, wet, dark land stretched away in all directions, but this didn’t depress her. After all these hours, she accepted the howling wind, the cold, and the wet as part and parcel of her little odyssey. Even when she had to swerve as she rounded a bend to avoid at least ten hares racing along the road in the same direction as the car, she didn’t take this as a sign.

“Hares!” she said, nonplussed as she switched back into her lane, for she had taken the animals for huge cats at first glance.

To her right were streetcar rails. A distant bell made her aware that a streetcar was coming up behind her, then for a few minutes it was moving alongside. If she looked to the side she could see travelers buttoned up in their coats in the well-lit interior, playing cards and eating sandwiches. Then the streetcar overtook her, and shortly thereafter forced her to a halt when it stopped to let off a few passengers, who then crossed the road.

View of a village. A streetcar stop, a brand-new streetlamp, a row of low houses closed tight, and a bicycle against a wooden fence; a day later all this would be gone, vanished forever, but for now it was still a perfectly normal Saturday evening in winter, the nicest night of the week. Another twenty-four hours and the first house walls would be collapsing outward, the storm would continue unabated, snow would be falling, all this was inevitable. What was also inevitable was that Lidy accelerated again, passed the back of an instant coffee factory, left the built-up area behind her, and three miles farther on could see the little provincial town with its oversize late-Gothic church tower spread out in front of her.

She drove in through the Noordhaven Gate.

A sparsely lit backdrop. An inner harbor with quays, lined with splendid ancient houses, each with a flight of steps leading to the front door protected by a balustrade. Houseboats in the water. Here and there were pedestrians to be seen striding along purposefully in the wind or slowing down, if they were in a group, to have a discussion about something that involved lots of gesticulation. She drove slowly past the grand houses, some of which had subsided, their windows pitch-black, and turned at the end of the harbor into the first street she found. She knew she was supposed to be here in this town, no longer remembered quite why, and so followed her impulse to take a little tour first.

How narrow and dark it all is; she forced her eyes wide open. The town, like any town first seen by night, surprised her with its unfathomably mysterious outlines. Streets and alleys crisscrossed one another in a tight pattern of straight lines, but every time she thought, Now I’m stuck, now I really can’t see a thing anymore, the street plan made room for her and conjured up a magnificent church or a fish market or presented her with a sixteenth-century town hall.

She had had enough of driving. And she was hungry. As she was deciding to ask someone the way — there were enough people on the street — she saw a woman stop with her back to the houses, as if she knew she was needed.

“The Verre Nieuwstraat?”

The woman screamed the question back at her, to show that she had understood in spite of the wind.

The two of them looked at each other through the open window of the car. Lidy saw a round face not six inches from her own, wearing extravagant makeup; somehow it seemed to fit right in with the storm. She wasn’t at all surprised by the green eyelids and the tragic scarlet mouth, but was given an explanation nonetheless.

“We had dress rehearsal this afternoon. I’m the duke’s daughter!”

The woman advised her that the best way to go was along the new harbor.

That way lay danger, impossible not to see it. Lidy was offered a lively, almost entertaining view of this when she had to wait for a moment at the Hoofdpoortstraat before being able to make the turn onto the quay. Men were busy lifting the planks of a sort of wooden fence out of some concrete footings that had been positioned against the house walls on both sides of the street. One of them was nice enough to explain to the unknown girl who had climbed out of the car in the howling wind, clutching her hair with both hands, that the high tide would start retreating at any moment, should have done so already, actually, so they were taking down the fencing until the next high tide, later tonight. Give it a minute and she could be on her way again!

Distracted, her mind a muddle, Lidy stared into the man’s enthusiastic face, which seemed to be captured on film against a background of hell and damnation. Ink-black sky, a row of fragile little houses, and high above the quay a whole fleet of heaving ships.

“Wow,” she said to herself quietly a moment later, “people in this town keep working really late.”

She drove slowly behind an old Vauxhall along the quay, which was underwater, just like the one in Numansdorp. The whole atmosphere was like an autumn fair, she thought, the same sense of people caught up in every sort of activity in a cold, wet twilight.

Indeed, a lot was going on here on the south side of town, where the tidal basin with its moorings for regular ships, cutters, and the direct daily service to Rotterdam had access to the Oosterschelde by way of a canal. At this hour on a Saturday the pubs were full of customers. Excited by the storm, many of them were raising their glasses toward the windows, outside which things were raging most impressively in the dark sky. In front of the houses a little farther down, figures were to be seen kneeling and crouching. Inhabitants of the wharves, who had erected the wooden flood barriers in front of their doorsteps a few hours before, inspected them again, smeared them with handfuls of clay, and then straightened up again, to have conversations with one another about whether the windows, which the Flood of 1906 had almost reached, might not be able to use a board or two this evening as well. Diagonally opposite, under the lamp with its yellow light, which looked lost against the huge soaring bulk of the corn mill with its fixed sails behind it and to one side, stood a little group of fishermen watching the boats. They were worried, understandably, but not excessively so, since the wind, thank God, was pushing the boats away from the quay. And now the harbormaster appeared, downstage right. He was holding his hands in front of his mouth like a megaphone. Although everyone already knew this, nobody took it amiss that they were getting another official announcement that according to the depth gauge, the water this evening was going to remain high, instead of turning into an ebb tide.

Bizarre, but it was common knowledge that according to fishermen’s physics it was true more often than not that when there is no ebb tide, no high tide will follow, either. So who could have guessed that at two thirty in the morning the newly reinserted boards along the Hoofdpoortstraat and the other side streets leading off from the quay would burst open like folding doors, that a wall of black water crested with ash-gray foam would come crashing down and sweep away the modest houses, and that fifteen inhabitants, sound asleep in their beds on the first floor, would be drowned, to their great surprise? Still, the Royal Hydraulic Engineering Authorities had already calculated that if there were a confluence of all possible negative factors — spring tide, wind direction, wind force, duration of wind force, and water levels in the major rivers — the sea would not be held back by a single one of the dikes in this region, and certainly not by some puny board fence…. They could all have figured it out. But this was the place where they had not only been born but had lived their lives untroubled until today.

She had reached the end of the quay. There was only one way to go now, left into a street that sloped away steeply. Making her way down from the level of the dike to the level of the polder, she drove into the town again and at six fifteen finally found her way to the Verre Nieuwstraat. Like all the other streets, it was not completely empty of people, but it was still very dark. As she drove carefully behind a couple of pedestrians, she found a building halfway along the closed fronts of the houses that had three rows of brightly lit windows, one above the other. A sign hanging outside said Hotel Kirke.

As Lidy went into the hotel that was the agreed venue for the party on Saturday the thirty-first of January, 1953, she had the feeling that although her journey had merely taken a day, she had been on the road for weeks. She entered through a revolving door and went past the empty reception desk with her purse and a little suitcase. The hotel had a large, warm lobby, and it was bustling. The wooden ceiling bounced back both the light of an old matte copper chandelier and sounds of laughter and conversation. The warmth, the voices, and the smells of food all suddenly triggered a yearning in her for a few words of personal greeting, which she had certainly earned after such an epic journey. She peeked from the reception area into the jammed and noisy rooms that all opened off the lobby, then, as she heard someone call the familiar name “Armanda!” she turned around, relieved.

“Yes!”

She quickly set down her suitcase.

6. The Godmother

If being happy means being in the right place, surrounded by people you want to belong with, then this evening she was happy.

The table was in the Winter Garden and had been set with a blue cloth, a flowered dinner service, and old, slightly battered family silver. The company around it numbered twelve, all of them in the best of spirits: this was a celebration. And in their midst: her. “Shall I refill your glass, Lidy?” said the sixty-or sixty-five-year-old man with the gray cap and the gray eyes, whom she’d come to sit beside. She immediately nodded, full of sympathy as she looked at her table companion’s emaciated face. Everyone had accustomed themselves by now to the fact that her name was Lidy. She’d explained things right after her arrival and admitted who she was, whereupon each of them had repeated the name most warmly and then passed it on. A young man jokingly identified her as a secret agent.

Candle flames flickered restlessly. She looked over into the dining room. People were all shouting at the same time, salvos of laughter erupted, there was singing. This was the island’s evening off. “I feel like a million dollars,” she said to Jacomina Hocke, the godchild’s mother, who was sitting one chair down. The woman, freckled, round-faced, and curly-haired, promptly leaned over toward her and told her, smiling, to look where she was looking. Between them, at the right-hand corner of the table, two armchairs had been pushed together and a thin child in a stiff little white skirt was lying on them, asleep, with ballet shoes on her feet. Despite the lack of incisors, the open mouth suggested the little muzzle of a cat. At such a moment, a nice guest smiles along with the mother. Lidy, so preoccupied by the details of her adventure that she had blocked out all other memories of her previous life, felt dizzy for a moment. As she yawned, the other woman stretched out her arm and took hold of her wrist.

“Soon! It’ll soon be time for you to go upstairs and have a good sleep, but not yet!”

And in fact she herself was conscious that she had to shake off her sleepiness. She perked up and looked around the table: relatives and husbands and wives of relatives of the sleeping girl, friends, two younger brothers, who had crawled under the table. A godmother is also definitely a member of the family. At the head of the table, side by side, sat the maternal grandparents. They were the owners of this little hotel, whose main source of income was the parties given here, rather than the occasional commercial traveler or civil servant passing through for one night. It was a tradition that anytime a grandchild had a birthday, the whole family ate in the hotel and spent the night.

If someone beside you is inspecting your face, you can feel it.

“Yes?” she said, turning back to Jacomina Hocke.

“Oh, I know it all so well,” the latter said.

Taken together, the words and the look, focused on the child again, made it clear that since she was here as a representative and lacked the relevant shared past, she must listen as all the missing details were told to her. So, please, Lidy, here’s a memory for you, in three parts. To bind you for this evening to an earlier time that doesn’t actually belong to you. A summer holiday camp shortly after the war. And she, Jacomina, had been one of the leaders, despite the fact that she was pregnant. A little helper from Amsterdam, about fourteen years old, had followed her around for four weeks like a page.

Oh, of course, she thought.

“A sweet, shy child. Doctor’s daughter.”

After a few minutes she had almost ceased to listen. The meal was very heavy. When she looked up from her plate to see what was going on around her, she felt the way she often did when she was in company: lethargic, shortsighted, although her eyes were fine. The Winter Garden creaked and groaned in the squalls, and each time one hit, the gently swaying hanging lamps dimmed, then flamed up again with a larger, brighter light. The people at the table were changing places more often, and there was also a lot of coming and going between the Winter Garden and the dining room. The news bulletins that reached them now and again from the town fit the party mood, for such an atmosphere has a natural affinity for the wilder dramas of real life. A chimney had come down in the Meelstraat; the water in the Old Harbor was already washing across the bluestone pavings; a fire had broken out in the Hage dairy; the streetcars were no longer running. However, she did also notice here and there in the dining room that people had risen to their feet, and hadn’t come back.

And the chair next to her at some point was no longer occupied. A tiny isolated space in the midst of the racket both indoors and out. At the other end of the table she saw Izak Hocke adjusting the lens of a camera. She hadn’t talked much with him, but had already talked about him. So she knew that he had a farm about eight miles from here. This was a man who hadn’t wanted to get married until he found a woman he could be sure would not concern herself either with the land or the business: both were the province of his mother, who lived with him. Jacomina had been a teacher until she married. He was ardent, jealous, and prudish, she’d told Lidy woman to woman. If he wanted to have sex during the day, first he checked the hall, then locked the bedroom door, and hung his shirt over the knob to cover the keyhole!

She saw him stand up. Chairs were pushed aside, the sleeping child was wakened, but before she and her two brothers were taken up to bed, a few more photos were in order.

Excellent. “And now one with you, Lidy …”

She laid her napkin on the table, went to the two armchairs in the Winter Garden that had been set out for the purpose, and sat down willingly, her hands in her lap. The godchild, beside her, was busy spreading her fingers and licking them. Then came the moment, and she smiled, taking care not to look directly into the lens but a few inches above it. She saw Hocke, the shutter cable in hand, staring from the viewfinder of the Ikoflex to her and the child from a distance of about ten feet. He knit his eyebrows: black, bushy, overshadowing the roundest, heavy-lidded eyes, which gave the face a melancholy, introverted look.

He looked down into the camera again and then squeezed the cable.

Suddenly someone came up to him. She saw a man in a jacket, soaked to the skin and giving off the stench of mud, who seized the chair that Izak was offering him with a gesture, and yanked it out from the table. His back half turned to her, they began a conversation that she could overhear in part, though she was still posed for the photograph. The man was talking about a sluice in some inner dike, and the words he was using—“rust,” “garbage,” “criminal negligence”—couldn’t fail to have their effect.

Hocke nodded. He groped in his jacket pocket and handed the man his car keys.

“Okay, if you think it’s necessary.”

The other man promised to bring the car back within the hour.

She went back to her place at the table. Someone new was now sitting beside her, a tall young man with intelligent eyes fringed by pale lashes, who opened the conversation by saying, “Nothing special!” She looked at him cheerfully and laughed, as a way of easing the conversation about the sea and how it was skipping the ebb tide this evening for a change.

“Excuse me,” she said after a while and leaned toward her new table companion to ask where his predecessor had gone. She was very sleepy again and had already wondered a couple of times when she could politely head for the room where she had changed from her traveling clothes into a dress hours before and laid out her pajamas ready on the bed.

“Where is he?”

“Simon Cau?”

“Yes.”

The young man looked around. Simon Cau, he said, was the dike sheriff or superintendent of one of the large polders here, and had certainly made a quick trip to the harbor to check the water. The six o’clock news on the radio had spoken of “dangerous high tides” and that almost never happened. Dike superintendent, the highest authority on the dike, a noble office, some people took it seriously, others not at all.

“Yes,” he went on, “what kind of a person is each of us inside … hmm … you, me, all of us? Does any of us have a choice? But sometimes someone manages to be that person he wants to be deep in his heart.”

Lidy learned that Simon Cau was the last of three brothers, tenant farmers who had put their lifelong efforts into acquiring the beautiful eighteenth-century Gabriëllina Farm. Finally he had succeeded, and nobody even today had been able to work out how he had assembled the money. By saving, borrowing money, and loaning it out again, sharpening one knife against the other? Afterward he had succeeded in making it into one of the best-run businesses in the area, everything done in the most up-to-date way imaginable, except for the one instance in which he refused to go along with the times: he wouldn’t allow any tractor on the farm. He was doing mixed farming, and everything, even the binding of the corn, was done using horses. For Cau, as the young man explained, loved horses, horses were his god, and it didn’t matter what the neighbors thought, the new landowner, who had started out as a farm laborer, built a second stable right up against the house. And with a batch of old clinker he paved the area all the way from the barn doors to the road. And last: two new pedigreed mares who were given such a thick layer of straw in their stalls that after the day’s work they couldn’t resist the temptation to stretch out like dogs and lie on their sides to sleep. Even though they were heavy Belgian shire horses.

Lidy, who was listening with only half an ear, swallowed a yawn.

“Heavy horses,” she murmured, her eyes damp. “Belgian shire horses.”

And then, as if her words had conjured him back to the party, in the mirror next to the stairs that led to the upper floor, she suddenly saw Simon Cau cutting his way through the dining room. The light in the background made his figure stand out clearly: small and gray, hurrying, in an anthracite-colored coat with a cap on his head that people of his type usually take off only to hold in front of their faces while praying. Someone seized him by the arm in order to ask him something. Cau stopped, listened restlessly like a man interrupted, and shook his head several times.

Lidy, who had been feeling for some time that she was no longer awake but dreaming, got to her feet. The godchild and her brothers had already disappeared from the stage. She excused herself charmingly from Jacomina and Izak Hocke, shook hands in thanks with the grandparents and an arbitrary assortment of people, and in less than fifteen minutes was lying flat in bed under the noise of a creaking ceiling.

Deep in her sleep, despite the roar of the hurricane or perhaps because of it, as the noise had been an integral part of events, she continued the party in the hotel Winter Garden in her dreams. But when she was jerked awake by a hammering at her door, she thought she was back at home. She groped three times but couldn’t find the light switch. She recognized the voice behind the door only when she opened it—“Ah, Jacomina”—and her eyes were immediately drawn to the two men standing behind her. Everything changed in that moment, and the day, decked out with the most alarming details, forced its way back into her memory.

She waited.

7. You’re Not Her

It was a few days later. Armanda put on her coat in the hall of her parents’ house, then her hood, fished in the basket that stood on the table under the mirror for a pair of mittens, and for a moment, out of habit, took a hard look at herself. A minute later the front door banged shut behind her. She crossed the street to the opposite sidewalk, which ran along the side of the park. Someone had told her that the newsreel in the cinema on the Ceintuurbaan was showing the most recent updates about the floods, and she wanted to see them.

Late afternoon. Dusk was falling, making the city look dirty, as cities so easily do in winter. But the broken branches and broken roof tiles had already been cleared away.

Vaguely disturbed, she walked past a bakery, a cobbler’s workshop, and a bridal outfitter. Her unease was connected to the fact that everything seemed to be so normal again that it made one begin to wonder if the whole tumult had been necessary. It was still blowing, but not exceptionally hard, and the wet snow had stopped falling today. But the sky was as dark as it had been the previous month, too dark for the time of year. Frequently it had been misty for days at a time. The weather bureau in De Bilt had registered only twenty-five hours of sunshine for the whole of January, a record low, for which one would have had to go back all the way to the records of 1902. In addition, it had been cold. The mercury, a perpetual four degrees below normal, had signaled a winter freeze of a kind that people had forgotten in recent years.

She pushed open the door to the movie house and felt welcomed for a moment by the lights, the plush carpet, and the sense of hallucination. At the counter she asked if the show had already begun and held out a few quarter guilders. The cashier glanced sideways for a second, murmured, “In a moment,” and gave her a ticket for the parterre. An usherette led her into the darkness with a little cone of light. Just in time. The World News headline anthem sounded … and there it was, a single expanse of water, filling the screen. Unbuttoning her coat, she sank into a seat.

A drowned village, a section of broken dike, against a sound track of howling wind Armanda saw a handful of soldiers in long coats, with berets pulled down over their ears, shoveling sand into sacks. She looked at the water lapping at their boots in little waves, completely disconnected from the whistling wind in the film, and at the surface of the water with the roofs of the village poking up out of it, looking oddly calm; water that looked like a normal sea, except that one simply didn’t understand how it had got there. Soon the familiar newsreel announcer’s voice came out of the music accompanying the storm to tell her more authoritatively than any messenger in a play what she was seeing and what she was to make of it.

“Something that is more tragically familiar to our country than any other in the world.”

The picture showed groups of refugees being loaded onto buses, a herd of cows stampeding full tilt through a shopping street that had turned into a river, a cart pulled by a mournful-looking horse on which some women were sitting; the camera zoomed in so close that only one remained visible, filling the screen as she looked directly at Armanda out of another world, infinitely removed in space and time. The deaths didn’t number in the dozens, the newsreel voice continued; alas, the previous figures had to be revised, the tally was in the hundreds. This is Oude-Tonge and Overflakkee — a dirty gray picture appeared — where three hundred people lost their lives in the floods. This is ’s-Gravendeel in the Hoeksche Waard, where fifty-five people drowned. To the accompaniment of urgent music, a whole series of disaster zones now appeared, as abstract to Armanda as the names of places in ancient stories where mythical events had unfolded. Dordrecht, Willemstad, West Brabant, the Hollands Diep, they carried a message that was far beyond her grasp as they collected around a white space in her heart: she and Lidy, and their roles in a drama that had taken on a life of its own.

Drops of sweat formed on her forehead and cheeks. It was very warm in the movie theater and both the music and the announcer’s voice kept getting louder. All around her she could sense the other moviegoers, packed tight, staring at the screen, which made no mention of Schouwen-Duiveland, not even once. So she slowly began to believe that Lidy had gone someplace that had absolutely nothing to do with these images shot through with flashes and wavy lines but was simply wandering around somewhere on solid ground with grass coming up between the paving stones, where people lived normally in houses, cows stood in the cowshed, and horses trotted around in green meadows.

“Helicopters with English, Belgian, and Dutch pilots buzzed around like huge wasps….” She stood up.

As she left the cinema, the wind from the movie was still howling in her ears, but when she got out onto the street, she realized that a song was going around and around in her head. It was a mournful, incomprehensible song, and the words “The winds they whirl, the winds they whirl all around the boatman’s girl …” came in a tragic voice that was Lidy’s voice. Lidy, who was the musical daughter in the family, who practiced on the grand piano with full pedal, but in certain moods let herself go in such pure schmaltz, singing along at the top of her voice, that the family couldn’t listen to her with straight faces.

She crossed the Ceintuurbaan with Lidy’s voice still in her head, singing the song that had always succeeded years ago in inducing a feeling of inexplicable sorrow in her younger sister. It was about a girl child, one who was “only” a boatman’s girl, and the song broadened and deepened the pathos of this with a melody that commanded Armanda’s most painful awareness. Even the first words naturally struck a nerve; “the winds they whirl, the winds they whirl,” sung in a hasty rhythm, put the child, who was only the boatman’s girl, in a fearsome storm. Wind and more wind, gust after gust. Then the song continued with an appeal to which no one in the world is immune: “Come here …,” the last word sung emphatically by Lidy at her little sister, who was already melting away, and then followed by something that never failed to pierce her to the core. Her name. “Come here, Manja,” sang Lidy, substituting Armanda’s baby name for that of the girl in the song, so that she could end the line of the verse, now richer and more personal, with “you’re my sister, you’re my sister,” and then, with even greater emphasis than on the line about the wind, sing it all over again.

As Armanda entered the park, she stepped aside to avoid a wild-looking man who was coming toward her with his peddler’s tray of socks and eyeglass cases, but she felt as softhearted as a little lamb. For the first time in days, she saw her sister in an old familiar scenario, namely with brass polish in one hand and a yellow cloth in the other. As she polishes the faucet in the hall — very nice of her, there are bound to be visitors tonight — her voice rings out in the second verse of the boatman’s daughter song, which begins “O Hell’s spawn, O Hell’s spawn, my sister is gone,” then commands again, “Come here, Manja,” before turning suddenly in a way that still gives Armanda goose bumps, as it did then: “You’re not her, you’re not her,” sung to the same despairing waltz that had swirled around “you’re my sister,” but now with these words, seems to reveal its deepest intentions.

Lidy. When she was around twelve. Busy in the doctor’s house, polishing the brass faucet. As Armanda goes past her on her way upstairs, Lidy wails out the song all the way to the end at the top of her lungs, and casts a mock-despairing, cryptic glance at her that appears to signify that everything is going to end badly. As Armanda closes the door to the room with the balcony behind her, the final words of the song, “Yes, yes!” like an exclamation, echo in her ears, and her eyes fill with tears.

She put the front-door key into the lock. In the hall she cocked her ear for a few moments. At first she thought there was no sign of life in the house, then she heard her mother upstairs, talking to someone.

Nadine Brouwer-Langjouw and Betsy Blaauw were sitting in the back room at a low table along the side wall, lit by a shaded lamp in the corner. In front of them tea was laid out. Cigarette smoke hung in the air. As Armanda appeared in the doorway, she saw them both look up without reacting, which is to say that Betsy, who was talking, continued rather formally, as if she were forcing herself not to leave anything out.

Armanda heard: “He told me that they sailed the boat around in the night and you just couldn’t imagine that the area had ever been inhabited. He saw the corpses of every kind of animal floating about, and tables and chairs and bales of straw, and most of all he saw the ship’s navigation lights shining on waves with big white crests that came rolling in between the remains of the farmhouses as if they belonged there.”

Armanda had come into the room, pulled up a chair, and now asked her mother firmly, by way of interrupting the conversation, “Is there any left?”

In the silence that followed, Nadine lifted the lid of the teapot, made an anxious face, and glanced up to see her daughter’s pleading look. Sjoerd, she explained, had called Betsy today to tell her he’d managed to get on board a lighter in Zierikzee with the help of a couple of students from Utrecht. Armanda nodded — she understood — but was shocked for the umpteenth time this week by the dreadful alienation in her mother’s eyes, a look that was quite foreign to her, and chilling, and the blue vein that was pulsing visibly in her temple.

Betsy, her face closed, waited for their conversation to end. Now she drew a deep breath. As she resumed her report on the report, slowly but without a single pause, Armanda felt it was as fantastical as the movie images she had just seen.

“They used the ship’s horn. They surveyed all the attic floors and rooftops so that they could steer for them if there were any signs of life. He said they took a total of eight people on board in the course of the night, which was hellishly hard to do, given all the floating debris crashing against the hull, and the current, but they were all completely apathetic and didn’t even understand what he was talking about when he asked about Lidy or where Izak Hocke’s farm was, which Lidy had gone to on Saturday night. Meantime he and the students had not the faintest idea anymore where they were on the polder. They took the people on the lighter to a fifty-foot cutter skippered by a mussel fisherman from Yerseke, who had sailed it through a hole in the dike and anchored there. Day dawned. The wind began to blow from the east and everything on board turned white with frost. He said the cold was so intense that they couldn’t think, all they could do was act. They sailed farther into the polder on the off chance of finding something, and came up against the gutters of houses that were in the process of falling apart, with walls that were sometimes thirty or forty degrees out of true. Don’t think, said Sjoerd to me, that we were the only ones out on the water that morning. In amongst the oddest small boats there was even a punt from Giethoorn. The skipper, like everyone else, seemed to be aware of a general plan that all these ghost-drivers were following: the little boats gave over their catch to the bigger, mostly fishing, boats, which made sure they either got into harbor or out to the open sea, because the tide was going out. He said you could watch the water go down from one half hour to the next.”

Armanda made to open her mouth.

“Of course,” Betsy continued hastily, “he kept on asking, no matter what. He told me that he pointlessly questioned a farmer’s wife whom he and the students had had the greatest difficulty in persuading to leave her attic. Clutching two jars of preserves, she was sitting under the roof. She only agreed to put her legs over the windowsill after he, Sjoerd, had looked at the roasted rib cuts under their thick layer of fat and told her they could come too. While the students steered toward the outline of a church tower, the woman shook her head in answer to his interrogation, she thought about it carefully but no, said Sjoerd, she’d never in her life heard of anyone named Lidy. So they headed for the tower. Two helicopters were in the process of rescuing some people who had crowded onto the parapet of the hollow circular structure, which was so narrow that you couldn’t imagine how there could be a staircase inside. Its sides were full of holes and it could collapse at any moment. Nothing of the church itself remained except the tips of wreckage of wood and brick in a sea that stretched all the way to the horizon. They heaved to and followed the rescue operation. A man, a rescuer in yellow oilskins and a life vest, was calmly — or so it seemed, said Sjoerd — attaching a steel cable that came snaking down from the helicopter to people who lined up one after the other, some of them wearing local costume, and then rose into the air like saints. After the machines had made a sharp dip to the side and flown away, three of the remaining people had decided they would rather board the boat than wait for the pilots to return. This was successfully achieved through a small window halfway up the tower. The most striking thing about these people, said Sjoerd, was their complete lack of fear. They sat disheveled in the deckhouse, breathing a little heavily, but didn’t say a word. In the moment when they were saved and the boat was pulling away, and he asked about Lidy, Lidy Blaauw, they apparently looked at him as if he weren’t quite right in the head. Finally one of them had opened his mouth. ‘Just take us to the Raampartse Dike.’”

Betsy broke off and her face went slack, as if the report had suddenly led her to something else. She turned to Nadine and said unsteadily, “Oh, Mrs. Brouwer …”

The latter looked astonished, then showed her understanding of the moment: the silent, awkward turmoil of someone trying to express empathy. She bent forward and closed her hand round the visitor’s wrist.

Three. There were three people in the room, plus an animal that hadn’t yet been heard from, a neutered yellow tomcat that was sitting on the windowseat looking out. Of the three of them, one had a mouth that had suddenly gone dry, eyes that were suddenly swimming and who felt she was a ghost, lucky to be able to see anything at all. Armanda got to her feet, picked up the teapot, and went into the kitchen to brew a fresh supply.

When she returned with it on a tray that also had a plate of open sandwiches with smoked mackerel and mustard, Betsy was saying something that sounded very like a closing remark.

“By the end of the afternoon, there was nothing more they could do.”

“Why?” cried Armanda, coming to a halt in the middle of the room, her voice rising in distress. “Why was there nothing more they could do?”

Betsy stubbed out her cigarette in the full ashtray. It took her some time.

“Because everyone was either saved or drowned.”

For a moment it was still. Then Betsy, with an almost placating look at Armanda, said, “Sjoerd said that the professionals have now taken over. The army and the Red Cross.”

Armanda set the tray down on the table with the greatest care. “The army,” she repeated. “The Red Cross.”

She didn’t sit down with the other two again. Her hands wrapped around a cup of tea, she walked slowly up and down in the front room as she often did when she was thinking or, as now, pulling back into herself because the world gave her little other choice.

Meanwhile the streetlamps had come on, and Betsy made a move to say good-bye to the lady of the house. She had told almost all there was to tell. In three days her brother would take up the continuation of his report himself. At the same, always semimagical hour of the dusk, he would ring the doorbell of number 77. And Armanda, guessing at once it would be him, would run downstairs and open up.

But for the moment things weren’t that far along. For the moment Armanda stood in the darkened front room, almost absent from the other two women, stroking the cat, and thought, as she climbed the first step toward a capacity for empathy, about Lidy. A distant and strange state of being, annotated by the newspaper, presented by the newsreel, and commandeered by the army and the Red Cross. The craziest circumstances, which everyone understood how to report on — except her.

For Nadine and Jan Brouwer had also gone to the southwest this week to search for their daughter. They had managed to reach Schouwen-Duiveland on the boat of a fisherman from what had once been the island of Urk, had learned in the dreadfully damaged little regional capital that their daughter hadn’t remained there on the night of the calamity, also learned that everyone without exception who had been rescued from the polders had been evacuated to terra firma, and by afternoon they were on a lugger from Scheveningen overladen with other refugees on their way to Dordrecht and Rotterdam. Jan Brouwer had already started to take medical care of the people crammed into the hold while they were still in the harbor. Then, barely a few miles out from the canal, the ship steered toward the bank again, from which a sloop had set sail. Fifteen minutes later Nadine saw her husband, a small gray figure on the afterdeck, disappear from view in the churning white wake. It was snowing. Aside from a row of pollarded willows, she could see nothing in the pale distance that suggested a village in which the field hospital was supposed to be, which had appealed for a doctor over the radio.

She reached Dordrecht in the early evening. Failing to find any trace of Lidy among the evacuees in schools and churches, she spent the night on the floor of a post office and went on next morning to the Ahoy Halls in Rotterdam. There too she searched for Lidy for hours in the throng of people that seemed to have adapted itself noisily to a world roofed in glass and steel, with row upon row of stretchers on the concrete floors, coverlets, cushions, cardboard boxes tied up with string, prehistoric suitcases, the occasional well-behaved dog, and an army of helpers, mostly extremely nice women of the sort who always knew what to do no matter what the circumstances, making the rounds with coffee and open-face sandwiches. When she came home around dusk, she was too exhausted to speak. But Armanda, who had barely reached the front door herself, because she had been taking care of Nadja, hadn’t been able to wait, and wanted to know what her mother had seen.

Was she cold, was Armanda’s first question, was she tired? And she had read in her mother’s face that Lidy for the moment had been nowhere to be found. After she had guided her into the warm sitting room, led her to the sofa, taken off her shoes, and waited till she had hugged Nadja and kissed her, Armanda stared at her inquiringly.

When nothing was forthcoming: “I’ve heard there’s looting down there, and people have already been shot.”

Her mother had looked around the room. “Where’s Jacob?”

She hadn’t answered. No one in these days was paying attention to the thirteen-year-old. She said: “An entire cowshed with all the cows still tied up inside is said to have been sucked out to sea on the ebb tide.”

Armanda saw her mother nod thoughtfully. “I read somewhere,” she said, not giving up, “that the atmosphere over some of the islands is so wet that the birds in the air are inhaling water and just drowning on the wing.”

To which Nadine replied that she hadn’t seen that, but she’d seen plenty else.

“In the Hollands Diep …” she began, but then broke off at the sound of the front door closing downstairs. While Jacob came up the stairs whistling a tune, she hastily told Armanda, as if wanting to be done with it as fast as possible, about the flotilla of ships in the snow that had spread out in two directions across the waters, still almost at peak levels.

“And it was so odd,” she said, “suddenly”—she turned her eyes to her son, who had just entered the room—“one of these boats climbed right out of the water and went up this really steep dike, and then drove away quite fast on wheels.”

“An amphibious vehicle” was Jacob’s calm response. “A Detroit United, made by the Americans.”

Later that evening, alone in her room, when she thought back to her mother’s return home, Armanda could make no connection, not even the beginnings of one, between her own days just past and those of her mother. Small-boned, in the gray roll-necked sweater that was soon too warm for her, her mother had sat on the sofa, right on the edge, as if she had to leave again at any moment, and had talked about seeing a ship near Moerdijk coming toward them from the opposite direction and then passing them, with hundreds of coffins piled on deck.

Downstairs in the hall Betsy put on her cap in front of the mirror.

“He also told us,” Armanda heard her say to her mother, “that they spent the night outside the dike. They were allowed to tie up the boat to a fishing smack from Hellevoetsluis that was anchored there with its bow toward the open sea. They were given permission to sleep in the galley, which they did, despite force ten winds, storm gusts, and showers of hail. But shortly after four, the smack tore itself loose as the tide reached its high point, and vanished at high speed, their boat behind it, somewhere on the pitch-dark waters of the Krammer.”

8. Missing

Three days later, early in the evening, the doorbell rang. Sjoerd.

“Give me your coat!” said Armanda, who had opened the door to him. But he didn’t want to, and upstairs, where the family was already sitting down to dinner, he declined good-naturedly but firmly, when his father-in-law, who had also returned home that afternoon, invited him to stay.

“Sit down, man!”

“Go with him for a little bit, Armanda,” said Nadine, when she realized that Sjoerd, after three disturbing days, evidently wanted to have his little daughter back home with him. By which she meant, take bread, fresh milk, cookies, and a decent portion of the casserole that’s still in the oven, because of course there won’t be anything in the house over there.

Number 36 was dark and cold. But Armanda didn’t mind, quite the contrary. It was actually really nice, while Sjoerd lit the oil stove and switched on the lamps, to warm the food, button Nadja into an extra cardigan, take a neatly ironed cornflower-blue cloth out of the cupboard, and lay the table.

After dinner, while Sjoerd was putting Nadja to bed, she sat smoking with her feet up on a stool, looking out of the darkened window. Kindly, with a feeling of being a simple, gentle woman, she thought, No, no coffee for me, I’d rather have something stronger. Yet all through dinner, she and Sjoerd had kept giving each other brief, faintly embarrassed looks, in which each recognized the other’s sense of guilt. Perhaps it couldn’t have been otherwise, with Lidy in the background the whole time. What had happened to her, where was she? And so they had eaten well and played with the little girl. Would you like something more? Should I heat up a little more of the meat? And of course without really daring to think about it clearly, Armanda from second to second was replaying the party of a full week ago now, and them dancing, and the fact that he had been turned on by her. She liked it that men’s bodies responded so openly and spontaneously, despite themselves. And she liked herself for being so sensible, and not having gone home with him to number 36 for a quick drink.

When Sjoerd came back downstairs, Armanda asked, “Is she asleep?” Sjoerd said, “Yes,” and next moment they were both sitting on the sofa by the stove, each in a corner, drinking cognac out of shot glasses. Sjoerd began to recount everything he’d seen and done. He took his time and spoke straight ahead, as if he were giving a slide show in a darkened room.

“It was the Raampartse Dike,” he said. “A dry stretch of road that was still high enough out of the water. When we tied up, there were at least a hundred freezing people standing there, more were lying on the ground soaked to the skin, you have to imagine that they’d been washed up there for days and the storm was still blowing. And don’t think that there was much we could do at this point. The army had arrived at the same time as we did; in those practical amphibious machines they call DUKWs. I stood on the dike and heard a British, a Dutch, and an American officer consulting. It was the American, a short little major, totally calm, who had hit upon the idea of taking the DUKWs and had come chugging up from the Rhineland in short order with an entire collection of emergency assistance teams. And the teams were made up of Germans, former German soldiers, and in less than a minute they were scaling the dikes.”

“Whaaat?”

“Yes. And you can bet that the poor half-drowned devils on the dike were happy to see the enemy come marching along in their big boots.”

Armanda sank back a little and tucked her legs up under her. Gradually she felt herself slipping into the tentative, trusting frame of mind that she often felt with Lidy when they were talking as if they were both caught up in a dream. It was just like that now, although Sjoerd was the one talking while she only listened, more or less uncomprehendingly, a fact that bothered her as little as it would in such a dream, in which recognition doesn’t follow the usual logical patterns. The room was getting warm. Armanda listened to Sjoerd saying how bad it had been when the sky, after the third day of pointless activity, had turned absolutely black again. Nodded sympathetically. And at the same time heard a kind of interior running commentary rubbing her nose in the fact that all the while she had been at home taking care of an adorable two-year-old, reveling in her little fat hands, a doll with her book made of cardboard to read aloud from, and that she had gone shopping and done a little cooking: the usual rhythm of her own usual days. Everything else, everything dramatic, everything large-scale, was as far distant from her as could be, and even as part of the country disappeared from the map, she could almost have been working away peacefully on her diploma thesis, so that she’d be able to hand it in on time in the upcoming week….

And so, as her mind wandered in Now and Back Then, Here and Back There, she suddenly saw herself with utter precision sitting at home in the corner, surrounded by books and notebooks. She had in fact been doing exactly that: on Wednesday evening, full of cheer, Armanda had finished her paper on Plot in Shakespeare’s Early Plays. Somewhere around midnight she had rubbed her eyes, listened to the wind for a moment, and gone into the bathroom. The water from both taps began to fill the bath rapidly. She had undressed.

Sjoerd stood up. She watched him, trying to work out what he wanted.

“Okay,” she said sweetly as he held up the bottle questioningly.

He filled her glass right up, then turned a little farther away from her as he sat down than he had been before.

“Yes?” she said.

A confusing muddle of images. Dream images, but they were real. Trying to find a support, she fixed her eyes on his mouth, which was still talking about their common theme, Lidy; she wanted to know what there was to know. Impressed by the gravity of things, but happy that Sjoerd was talking to her so gently and seriously, she tried to picture Lidy out in the flooded provinces. She could barely manage it. What had to happen, happened, but the evening hour meant that what took absolute priority was her perception of someone else, i.e., herself, Armanda. She, who at midnight last Wednesday had slid into the warm water without so much as a thought for her lost sister, leaving the taps still running, till the bath was full right up to her chin. So as not to veil the sight of her own body with blobs of foam, she didn’t lather herself with soap. I think it’s really good now, she said to herself. Appreciatively, still caught up in the spell of her own cleverness in finishing her work, she had contemplated her white body as it floated almost weightlessly under the surface of the water in the deep enameled bath.

Sjoerd looked sideways. He was eyeing her in a way that indicated that he was expecting a reaction from her to what he had just reported. Still absorbed in her memories, which were engendering the feeling in her that he must be sharing them, she leaned toward him, radiating warmth.

“Next day I went to a Red Cross station, right behind the streetcar stop. There was a woman there behind a table buried in paper, to talk and answer questions; she was dog tired and her patience was such as to kill all hope.”

“And?” said Armanda, while what she was thinking was: Please why don’t you move a little closer? Everything imaginable has happened, everything imaginable has gone wrong. Why don’t we just embrace each other?

“Yes,” he said. And after a little pause that produced a small shift in the mood: “She asked me for Lidy’s personal details.”

“Lidy’s personal details …” Armanda began, and stopped, suddenly overwhelmed by the significance of everything around her, pictures lined up together like pictures in a rebus puzzle of which the solution wasn’t a word but something far worse. The sofa, the lamp, Sjoerd’s body, fragments of dikes, wisps of water, ink-black sky, her own body, absolutely flat, if she was to be honest about it, and — mixed in with it all — Lidy’s body, whose details the Red Cross Information lady had noted down precisely on a form.

She sat up and listened now, frowning in concentration.

Sjoerd described how the woman at the table had first entered Lidy’s date of birth and similar details, and had then asked about her hair color.

“Deep chestnut brown,” Armanda answered promptly. “Long.” She thought for a moment. “Probably in a ponytail.”

Sjoerd nodded. “Eyes.”

“Emerald green.”

“Height.”

“Five foot ten.”

“Yeah, and then she wanted to know the state of her teeth. I couldn’t help her there.”

“Well, better than mine. A few fillings, nothing more. But we can check with the dentist.”

“She wanted to know if she’d ever broken a leg or anything like that.”

“No, never.”

“Scars, birthmarks.”

“Umm, that little patch on her stomach, you know the one, just below her navel.”

“Her clothes. That ash-gray winter coat, as far as I know.”

“Yes, the one with the glass buttons.”

“Shoes.”

“Size nine.”

“She was probably wearing that pale blue sweater, I thought. And dark blue trousers with cuffs.”

“The sweater belongs to me. Turquoise, angora. It needs to be hand-washed and dried flat on a towel.”

“She asked about underwear. Cotton? Silk?”

“Could be either.”

“And the make of her bra. I never paid any attention.”

“Maidenform.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Really?”

“We … we once bought an expensive one, by Triumph.”

“Would you like a drink? A little water?”

“I think I’m going to go now.”