The birth took ruthless precedence. It took precedence first over the darkness; the pains had started, quietly to begin with, in the early hours of the morning, but now they were serious and could no longer be concealed, and dawn was breaking. When the enormously pregnant woman had arrived in the attic, where the strangest atmosphere reigned — a combination of imminent rescue and the awareness that death was just around the corner — she had been helped by many hands to lie down on a mattress laid on a bed frame. They had covered her with a horse blanket. A woman, whose accent defined her as being a stranger to this area, had spread a heavy coat over the bed by way of addition, then laid herself down beside her, shoes and all: “Come close, it’ll warm you up!” The woman had obeyed. While the other one dropped off to sleep almost instantly, she — her name was Cathrien Padmos, born Clement — had felt the cold retreat and transform itself into a sensation that she was descending a stone staircase, step by step, into a comfortably warm cave. Then everything started again. Uncontrollable now, in its own rhythm that made no allowances for the weather.
It was coming up on 9 a.m. The attic stank of mud, wet clothes, animal dung, probably rat droppings too, and the bucket behind the door to the staircase. The temperature couldn’t have been much above freezing. The west window, one side of which was nailed shut with boards, admitted a first light of a leaden greenish tinge perfectly in keeping with the general aura of death and destruction. Everyone here, whether asleep or awake, dazed or fully conscious, felt the swaying of the house walls and knew that the undiminished power of the storm was close to tearing off the roof. In the bed, which had been pushed deep under the eaves to protect from drafts, forty-year-old Cathrien Padmos began to breathe heavily for the third time in her married life, or to put it more precisely, the cervix was in its last stages of dilation. To her left, a powerfully built man, Albert Zesgever, who had crawled in with the rest of them, seemed not to notice anything yet.
On the other hand, her bedmate on the right grasped the situation. Lidy raised her head. Where am I, she thought for a moment, then she saw, next to her, a sweat-drenched face that almost instantly took on the dull look that she remembered in herself, whether she had registered it or not at the time, with no choice or will of her own. “How often are they coming?” she asked, as she saw the face soften.
“One behind the other. There’s no pause now,” the other one said, before she threw herself onto her side.
“Oh, then you’re already quite far along!”
Humoring her with false cheer.
This one and that one were now awakening in the attic, and the most unbelievable proof of it was that the air began to smell gloriously of coffee. In a corner, on a sort of improvised dresser made of some cabin trunks with flat lids, the old lady had set up a single-burner camping stove and on it a percolator, a kind of pot with a spout, and a little glass dome that lets you see the coffee bubbling up inside. As she watched her son drive off in the storm the previous night, a tiny mound of humanity perched on enormous tires, Gerarda Hocke had made good use of her fear by carrying every possible thing upstairs. An intelligent old woman, certainly, who remembered one thing above all about a birth, which was that there had to be boiling water. She took the coffee off the flame and poured half of a four-quart milk can of tap water into an enamel pail. Everyday, ordinary actions that tamped down the extremes of the morning. In the daylight this randomly assembled collection of people, who had been as unprepared for the high spring flood as they would have been for war or plague, began to form themselves into a group. Utterly disoriented, they got up off the mattresses or off the floor. For the first time they could now see where they were and who were their companions. The dog, large and brown, his head on his paws and staring straight ahead of him, was giving a not unpleasant imitation of being at peace. Some of them were aware that the goose hadn’t left the heels of the farmer’s wife from the first moment on, others now noticed her, white, with brilliant orange feet, as she stood for a moment then hunkered down again. The first to take up his post by the window again was Cornelius Jaeger. Soon the rest of the grown men were standing there with him. Fundamentally it was the imminent birth that was imposing a certain order on this household.
And obviously it took priority over death and despair. Although Cathrien Padmos must know that her husband and her five-year-old daughter had already drowned, she wasn’t thinking of them. She could feel none of the terrible grief that must be there inside her, only a very particular pain that unlike all others is not the harbinger of death. Only now, as it announced itself again, did she remember it from eight years ago.
She had married early, a boy from the next village, when she was only sixteen. An intimation of this had come to her on July 3, 1930. As she was cycling that evening to Dreischor in the low last light of the glowing red sunset, she had suddenly had the unsettling thought that tonight, at the weekly choir practice of Soli Deo Gloria, she might meet her future husband. And indeed, as became apparent, there was a new voice among the baritones. Age: twenty. Profession: ordinary worker on the farm of Anthonie Hocke, Izak’s father. His name: Johan Padmos. Cathrien Clement was strongly built and dark blond (her hair the same color as the coats of the farm dogs around her) — a girl of the kind who knows what she wants — to get married and then get pregnant as soon as possible. When that didn’t happen, not after the first month of marriage, not after the first year and not after the second, third, or fourth, it became clear to her that she was facing the most important decision of her life. Unhappiness or happiness. The farm girl, who worked as a day laborer, determined to make happiness her calling in the most emphatic way, and was supported in it by her husband, even-tempered by nature, who identified totally with his work and his status on a famous farm where he soon succeeded in becoming one of the six permanent farmworkers. In August, when she rode into the farmyard at vespers on her bike, she saw her husband’s work team laboring under the black cloud of smoke of the colossal five-foot reaping-and-binding machine. They were stacking the sheaves in the German manner, crosswise by fours, and then putting three on top with the ears of the wheat pointing downward. Not a communicative man, her husband, but in the evenings, if the wind was blowing with unexpected force, he would say, “Not the faintest chance,” and she would know what he meant, and would have an image of the same landscape as he did. Black sky, a path with extensive meadows to either side, and farther down, the stubbled fields covered with the sheaves of wheat stacked in this fashion, laughing off the attacks of the strong-to-stormy northwest wind. To their mutual astonishment, after eight years with her husband, who had now risen to become foreman, she found herself pregnant. Seven years after that, pregnant again.
No, nobody was thinking of that anymore. But they were thinking about the boy sitting half-concealed behind one of the roof beams. Someone had put a pair of thick socks on his feet, and Hocke had squatted down once beside him to say something nice that ended with “lady apple,” did he want one from the basket where they were stored here in winter, but he shook his head and went to use the bucket for the second time. Adriaan Padmos had just turned eight. Such a child is sometimes quick to recognize what is familiar in strange things, and squats there with an unreadable expression, all hunched up, his knees under his chin, and looks at his socks.
Nobody, on the other hand, was paying attention to the van de Velde girl anymore. She was dead, and they had laid the little body in the space between two cupboards stuffed full of old clothes which were now coming in incredibly handy. Work gear made of napped cotton flannel underneath, summer skirt with flowers on it over the top. Better this way, yes? Last night the girl had been brought this far by the superhuman efforts of her parents, and bringing her any farther was beyond human capacity. For the moment there was nothing more to be done. The father, Nico van de Velde, stood with the others at the dirty window, outside which dirty things were happening. He and Zesgever were smoking, sharing one of the available cigarettes, which were being strictly rationed. The mother was attending the birth.
Lethargically, but like a night insect drawn to the light behind a kitchen windowpane, Laurina van de Velde had come closer, and was now looking apologetically, perhaps because she was trembling and making no attempt to stop it, at the mounded thing on the wide bed. She knew, had she been capable of thought, that she’d been through something similar, but the event, the actual image of it, where was it? For a moment she caught Lidy’s eye, as Lidy stretched her back against the headboard. Did Lidy want to say something? She had had her child, who would be her only one, at the age of twenty-one.
It had been in fall, a beautiful sunny fall day. They had sent word to Nico in the field at Hocke’s when things were that far along. He had left the Smythe, a chunky English mechanical sower with an unworkable operating width of six feet, standing. You boys keep going with the winter wheat. What you sow, you reap at the appointed time, I’m off. Nico was an agile, well-set man who was often able to rouse his wife, who was inclined to melancholy, with his abruptness. “Be a little more cheerful, kiddo,” he’d say when he got home, saw her looking absentminded, and took her face with the sky-blue eyes he’d fallen in love with in his hands, or again: “Stop thinking so much! Both feet on the floor, that’s it!”
“Where? Here? On this floor?” she once replied, more bewitched by him than convinced, and set her feet in their soft socks on top of his. She was a woman in a permanent state of disquiet, that was her normal mood. Uneasy because of the machines that her husband worked with, uneasy because of the horses that could kick out backward, uneasy because of the heavy backbreaking labor of pulling out the flax roots in mid-July, handwork he excelled at. In the last month he had joined the Reds and started talking about “comrades,” balling his fists or holding up a finger, which bothered her even more. What would happen when the farmer, Hocke, heard about this, and what would become of Dina and her other future children if their father was put out on the street?
So now she looked at the imminent birth and felt nothing, not even the slightest disquiet. She glanced at Cathrien Padmos’s face, which she had known since she was a child, saw how she was sweating, tried to hold her hand, accepted that she was pushed away by the other woman, perhaps because the latter needed to retch, and meantime was so desperately cold that she couldn’t make her mind function in any normal way at all. When Lidy asked, “Shouldn’t we find something we can wrap the baby in, the little child, in a minute?” she nodded.
“Good.”
She and Lidy went to one of the two cupboards.
“This?” asked Lidy, holding something woolly.
“Or this?” Laurina hesitated.
A few minutes later, the women gathered around the mother-to-be and Izak Hocke, who for some reason had been summoned to join them, were able to reassure her that they could already see the crown of the little head. It was eleven in the morning. Outside the window of the delivery room was a world that nobody could now imagine being anything other than it was. Murderous, a single surge of gray and brown. That the storm had still not begun to abate after more than twenty-four hours was, meteorologically speaking, to be considered a freak occurrence.
Cathrien Padmos was the type of woman who gives birth to children on her own. She had accepted having a piece of bedding rolled up and pushed against her back, but she wanted none of the hands, the looks, the help that were intended to be of assistance to her but actually worked as its express opposite. She was at the height of her battle with the pain, that invisible enemy, also an angel who numbs and transports one to a faraway place where one can cease thinking about one’s loved ones who are dead, or noticing and realizing it to be significant that the bed one is lying on is standing on a worryingly unstable, swaying attic floor. She raised her head and began to scream uninhibitedly.
The sound of a storm defies words. Or rather, the effect it has. The world makes noises. There isn’t a moment of peace in which it isn’t creaking or rustling or banging or talking and uttering every possible nuance of lament until sometimes it even sings. Some of these noises can wait a little, but others are absolutely urgent.
Up in the attic, everyone had gradually become oblivious to the wind. The incessant hammering on their instincts, the incessant demands on their imaginative powers to foresee what could happen if they didn’t figure out a way to get out of here, had dulled their minds.
Hocke, van de Velde, Zesgever, and Cornelius Jaeger stood at the window from which, if you laid your head against the glass and turned it all the way to the right, you could see Cau’s farm. Cau himself wasn’t standing with them. He was down on his heels by the now abandoned camping stove, seeing if maybe there was still a splash of coffee remaining in the pot. The wind had been rattling against the roof like artillery fire for some time now. Sometimes it was there, and you knew it, even relied on it to be there, then it would suddenly stop, and there would be a pause. Even Cau must then have heard the other noise from outside, and felt it go through his very bone marrow.
His house no longer had a façade. Hocke and Zesgever, quite detached, concerned only insofar as they had to wonder if their own home was going to hold, let their eyes wander over the exposed interior of the Gabriëllina’s attic as it still stood above the water. Oh, the stuff, the worn-out inner spring mattress, the cast-iron stove. The cupboard with long out-of-date and unusable cans, jars, preserving jars, horsehair sieves: it was all there in total conformity with the situation, as if the objects had just fled from downstairs to upstairs like the people. But not a trace of Simon Cau’s nephew, Marien. No sign of life in the attic across the way.
But that was made up for by the human cargo on rafts that were being swept past them, and other flotsam and jetsam. Under a bad spell, bemused, the little group of men stood at the window and heard the screams of terror and cries for help, and the curses.
“Bastards! Help us or drown!”
A chunk of a roof went whirling past.
“Vipers! You’re godforsaken!”
Most of its roof tiles were missing. It came, with at least eight people, perhaps an entire family, aboard, from the direction of Gabriëllina Farm and swept southward past the top floor where Hocke and his evacuees were sheltering. There wasn’t even any point in wrenching open the window and trying something with a rope. The family, about to be submerged, was seized almost at that very moment by the current that was pouring past the house and away at an angle toward the grayish horizon. The screaming man’s protests changed immediately, merging, as they could see from the house, with the last movements of people struggling with all their might to stay alive one more minute, one more second, and who knew, even in that last minute, the fullness of that last second — you could tell — that a child was still a child, a novice in conditions that were sometimes glaring and senseless, and that a parent was a parent. Don’t be afraid, just hold tight to me … two of the onlookers, van de Velde and Zesgever, squeezed their eyes as the roof capsized and they heard a sort of animal howl. Izak Hocke turned around. Another similar freight was coming at them from the right.
“I can’t look anymore!” he said, absolutely at his wit’s end, talking to his mother’s back as she wandered around in the half-darkness.
The only one left looking out into the storm now was Cornelius Jaeger. His head low, immersed in the din as if he had become its medium and was internalizing it, he stood at the window. Did he feel that at least one person had to bear witness that the high-pitched, multi-toned whistle was in the process of obliterating the communities of Dreischor, Ouwerkerk, Nieuwerkerk, and Oosterland? Midday had already passed. The tide was slowly beginning to rise again. Out on the great polder of Schouwen it crept forward insidiously across the ditches, because the sea dike that ran from the coast all the way to Zierikzee had been breached only at Schelphoek. But even on the heaving, drowning polders of Duiveland, the majority of the victims were still at this point alive. From attics, rooftops, and rafts, they did what victims who are still alive always do: they scream, and they wait for help.
Up in this particular attic, they were waiting for something that can be characterized, questionably perhaps but also not wrongly, as deliverance. The birth, almost upon them now, took precedence over the storm. The cervix was fully dilated, the head of the baby had emerged and was pointing down through the pelvic girdle. Lidy, among those surrounding the bed, was the one most involved in what was happening. Leaning far forward she watched as the little head, with its skull bones that, as she knew, were as flexible as the whalebones in a corset and could move over one another, pushed its way forward a tiny bit, then slid back again.
“It’s going fine!” she encouraged the not-so-young mother, who was looking around as if she were hoping to break out of an encirclement. She too, if she remembered correctly, had made quite a spectacle of herself during this last phase, but this woman chose from now on to let not a single sound escape her. So whether they wanted to or not, everyone could hear the screams coming from outside. Lidy looked at the red face, saw the arms that tried to cover it. With the clarity that comes with exhaustion, she registered that death cries and birth cries are similar, that they both resemble and illuminate one another.
Muffled barks from the dog.
When a child is born without professional help, those present have to use their own good sense. Unwind the umbilical cord from round its neck. Rub the soaking wet little body till it’s dry. Wrap it up warmly. Clamp off the umbilical cord, cut it with something sharp. If the child is a bluish red because blood or slime is blocking its throat and windpipe, suck them out. Lidy, with a strange, salty taste in her mouth, heard the child whimper a little, then scream. Cathrien Padmos had given life to a healthy boy.
Moving heavily, weak at the knees, she went from the bed to the window, where the strange deformed boy took a step to one side to make room for her. She leaned her forehead against the window. Feeling light-headed, she sank back for a moment into what she had not forgotten, home, Nadja, Sjoerd, her sister, her brother. One could not describe it as coherent thought. It was more a knowledge, certain but as vague as fantasies of heaven and hell, that they were there, in some unimaginable place in safety. She forced her eyes open and craned her neck, for in the middle of the stream of debris that was sailing past her on the waves she saw a raft with a high rim around the edges, maybe the upturned roof of a hut or something like that, and on it was an animal, alone, motionless, it looked to her like a pig. Before she could wonder if it was still alive, she saw the animal lift itself a little on its front legs and then tread forward into the water in a way that looked intentional.
“My God!”
Now there wasn’t a human being or an animal to be seen anywhere. Not even a bird.
Utterly shocked, she turned away. The boy, right next to her, looked at her and she stared back into the eyes under the continuous line of the eyebrows, at the mouth, already with a hint of fuzz on the upper lip. Nadja? Sjoerd? Sarphati Park, number 36? A paradox of danger and safety: there had to have been a moment of clarity, a short leap between its onset and its end, that was a rude awakening for her. The world was under a flood, the universe was turning in the wind, and they in this attic were the only ones to have been spared.
One beautiful day in May 1962, in an Amsterdam bedroom, a man who could only describe himself as contented and happy both in his private and professional life awakened with the immortal words in his head: my wife doesn’t understand me. Nonplussed, he rolled onto his side. Armanda was still asleep, on her back, chin pointing up in the air, a position she’d taught herself to use, initially with playful light-heartedness, after reading a newspaper article about double chins. Where did these words come from? Heavy and awkward, they ran through his mind. He stretched out an arm; she was wearing a short nightgown she called a babydoll. He could see the beginnings of her responsive smile, because the unbleached linen curtains let a lot of light into the room.
“Yes, that’s better,” she’d decided when they were settling on the decoration of the new house. “Now maybe we’ll wake up early by ourselves as the children do.”
His hand slid over her sweet, soft belly. Since the birth of their youngest she hadn’t quite managed to get back to her old weight.
At breakfast half an hour later, the words were submerged but didn’t really disappear in all the busy activity of a family starting a new day with quite a lot of noise. On top of this the radio was on, to give them the news. French underground atomic test in the Sahara. He reached for the milk bottle — the first thing he did every morning was drink a glass of cold milk — and looked absentmindedly at Armanda in her blue mohair bathrobe as she cut a piece of buttered bread into little pieces for Allan, sitting beside her all big and plump in his high chair. Some men love their wives less when they’re sitting opposite in their bathrobes, unwashed and uncombed, but he had always liked the blurring of this line between table and bed. “Stop it!” she was saying to an angelic little blond girl as she took the tin of rusks away from her without even looking — his favorite, four-year-old Violet, who gave her father a smile as soon as she saw him looking at her, with such sparkling eyes that no movie star could have topped it.
“Open your mouth and close your eyes!”
It was Nadja, smelling strongly of eau de cologne. He obeyed. Last downstairs, Nadja laid her cheek against his and put a piece of nougat, her passion of the moment, into his mouth. Since the move, during which she had come across the photo of her mother in the Hotel Kirke, in a cardboard box full of old odds and ends, she had, amazingly, become demonstrably more loving and good-natured.
Heaven knows why, but he got to his feet to turn up the volume on the news. Chancellor Adenauer considers the conversations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union over the status of Berlin to have lost direction. Dutch troops dispatched to New Guinea on the frigate Zuiderkruis. The Upper Chamber, by a vote of 78 to 58, has passed a revision to the law permitting the sale of fresh bread to begin at 9:30 in the morning instead of 10 a.m.
He raised his head to observe an area of the wall above the radio: the building of a dam to control the Grevelingen at Schouwen-Duiveland has been resumed after an interruption. The Delta Commission expects this fourth major stage in the eventual closing of the sea arms of Zeeland and Zuid-Holland to be completed within two years.
“The weather …”
While he listened in the bright dining room — Armanda was going to have the wall broken through to the kitchen before fall — to the forecast about the cold front from the northwest that would envelop the country during the course of the day, he was seized by an impulsive fantasy masquerading as a totally rational decision. Quite strong winds in the coastal provinces, he heard, as he wiped his mouth and got to his feet. The Grevelingen was an easy drive if you took the highway through Noord-Brabant.
Shortly afterward he was in the car on the Rokin. He parked in front of the entrance to the bank and went to the room adjacent to his office on the second floor to give his secretary instructions for the day. A quarter of an hour later, en route to The Hague, he was hearing the words again that he had woken up with this morning. And the gentle, inviting, absolutely undramatic nostalgia that they contained. Sjoerd Blaauw and Armanda Brouwer had now been married for seven years. This was a fact. But when he, Sjoerd, thought consciously about himself as a married man, he automatically included in this a previous past, as free as a dream that he yearned for, the way you yearn for something that one day slipped between your fingers and is gone.
Armanda was lovable. She was damned difficult. She was an angel in bed. She stuck her head in the pillow and complained in a muffled voice that she had a headache. In the first years her eagerness when he came home was sometimes so blatant, and she let herself fall into the sofa with her arms outstretched in such open invitation that he actually felt more like having a simple conversation with her about, say, football. “Did you know they’re broadcasting a big match—mmm—tonight on the radio?” Baffled look from her, and he turns toward the living room table and goes on: “Starts at eight.” Six months after Violet was born, she was back to teaching three mornings a week, and the moment his mother-in-law came in to look after the baby, she disappeared to the Barlaeus school, in a rush, cheerfully, dressed appropriately in a tweed jacket that seemed made for a young English teacher.
Then came the time she liked to provoke him with the question “Who am I?” and lay her hands over his eyes. Playful results, of course, and a suitable response from him that necessitated no compliments. Shortly before Allan was born, she said she wanted to move, and immediately. Bad evening. October, wind howling on the roof. They were building or hanging something up in the attic, doesn’t matter which, when she laid the hammer aside. After they had looked at each other for a moment, listening to the wind, and she had said, “It’s too Lidy-like for me,” he had snorted once in the way that was typical of him and then replied idly, “Oh — maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to look for somewhere on the ground floor.”
“Not a bad idea,” she continued as she turned around heavily to go back to work. “And we’re not going to take a thing, not a single piece of furniture, from this house when we go.”
Nadja thought it was terrific. An eleven-year-old girl — skinny as a beanpole, but with a red plait down her back as thick as your wrist, and absolutely no freckles — can happily say Yes! when told that her entire life is going to be stood on its head. When it took place, her little brother, Allan, was three years old. While her mother did a drastic clean-out of the attic, stuffing photos, letters, schoolbooks, and reports into garbage bags, Nadja was on her knees in the rectangle of light thrown by one of the attic windows, with a photo in her hands.
“Hey, Mama!”
Armanda went over and immediately recognized the family photograph that Jacomina Hocke, with whom she was no longer in contact, had sent her as a keepsake.
“Who’s the child you’re sitting there with?”
Armanda, without hesitating, her voice involuntarily outraged, said quietly, “That’s not me.”
“Not you?”
The astonished forefinger of a girl who has never been told a thing about an exchange of mothers. In the beginning her father and the whole family were in too much disarray; later, having accustomed themselves to the slightly edited family story, the new version with all the details that fit perfectly, had even been added to, they never got around to it. But in their hearts they surely must have known, didn’t they, that at some point they would have to tell Nadja everything.
“Just a moment,” Armanda had said, reaching for a packing chest so that she could sit down. Bent over next to Nadja, she was better able to look at the picture, and did so, suppressing the first, instantaneous, strong impulse to tell her adopted daughter straight out, without the slightest psychological subtlety: “That’s your real mother.” She knew the corner from which the photo had been taken, the year before it had been snapped, she had after all been there herself. From the Winter Garden of the Hotel Kirke, you look into the reception room with the tables laid. There are draperies to either side of the staircase, and there’s a palm tree. Given the backdrop, you wonder what the two people in the foreground, in adjacent wicker chairs, have to celebrate in such a grand way: the little gap-toothed girl, laughing shyly, and the woman, Lidy, with eyes that look slightly tragic because of the lack of lighting, and a smile around the lips that you’d have to know in order to interpret as “All very nice, but tomorrow I’ll be home again.”
“That’s your real mother,” said Armanda.
“Goodness!” said Nadja.
That is how it happened.
In the fishing village of Bruinisse, on the Grevelingen, a complete working harbor had been built to block off three miles of water by means of a dam. It was late in the morning. Sjoerd Blaauw, like a tourist, politely stopped a workman in overalls and boots to ask if they were making good progress.
“Let me through, friend!”
Quite right. He took a step to one side and lost himself for a moment in contemplation of the phenomenon in gray and blue-white, the two in spectacular contrast to each other, and which he would have loved to have explained to him. Gray was the color of the quays (which were also loud and dusty), full of asphalt, steel cables, blocks and tackles, trucks, and machines that looked like military equipment, and gray was the color of the contours of the construction site a little farther off, in which a tide lock 450 feet long by 55 feet wide was already in operation, and also the portion of the dam that was slowly advancing from Flakkee. The row of caissons lying ready in the water next to the quay were also gray, a beautiful example of hydraulic engineering to instill respect, but naturally a joke, a child’s toys compared with the Phoenix-A-X caissons, as tall as high-rises, which would shortly be sunk directly at the edge of the sea in an opening several hundred yards wide by fifteen yards deep with a tidal range of eighteen feet. With a warm breeze in his face, Sjoerd looked up high. Blue-white (the quiet, independent, comfortable, tolerant blue-white that their national culture demands) was the color of the all-encompassing cloudy sky of the Dutch Masters above it.
A faint feeling of dizziness. His eyes moved down again. At an angle to the quay, with its bow toward the caissons, was a ship the color of red lead, a totally normal domestic ship with a cabin, named Klazina. Sjoerd turned to a man wearing a greenish leather jacket and tugged on his sleeve.
“No, back here,” the man answered in response to his question as to why the dangerous arm of the sea was not being blocked off directly at the shoreline.
“But why?”
The man adopted a more comfortable stance as he explained to Sjoerd about the separation of the floodplains of the Grevelingen and the Oosterschelde. And about the injection of millions of cubic yards of sand, the building of entire asphalt mixing plants on-site, a foreign cable railway in our polders and watery lands, and about piers and caissons and abutments and swing bridges and sluices in the Haringvliet, where enormous shields would be steered from seventy machine rooms…. “Oh, mister, have you ever thought that the nightmare of ’fifty-three, back then, was the beginning of a damn magnificent dream?”
“Dream?” Sjoerd’s face had taken on the well-known expression of schoolboys and students who want to learn the mandatory stuff for a test, while their hearts, otherwise occupied, do what hearts want to do: swell to bursting.
When did my wife doesn’t understand me begin to echo in his ear again, like the line of a poem? When his eyes turned away to look at the powerful little ship that was in process of taking one of the caissons in tow, a red ship with a deckhouse on top and a name that was the only female presence in this world of men—Klazina?
“So, would you like to come along?”
The man, about to say good-bye, had noticed what the other was looking at.
“Can I … could I really?”
“We’ll fix it.”
Not long afterward he was standing on the foredeck of the little tug. Sjoerd, on the water again where he’d been once before. Noticeably calmer, the water, noticeably bluer than it had been when it engraved itself in his memory. Close behind him they were busy with chains and winches, was he standing in the way? No, the crew paid no attention to the strange, tall, blond fellow staring at the expanse of water as if he were staring at a world that had long been denied him. All the same, a boy brought him milky coffee in a pale pink mug, said, “Please!” with quiet warmth, and let him alone again with the vibrations under his feet. He lit a cigarette. The water between Bruinisse and Oude Tonge glittered, reflections, shouted orders, echoes: everything, all of it, exactly mirrored — even if in a fashion one couldn’t have guessed — the words he had woken to this morning.
Lidy, look at me. Do you remember how we went to Ouderkerk? You were already weeks late with your period. View of the bend in the Amstel. Freeze-frame of Rembrandt, down on his knee, drawing this view. And you with your news. Do you remember how I got the fright of my life, and you turned around to pick some flowers and to murmur: “What I’d like is …”
“Yes?”
“Is for you to make the same face you made back then when you caught that pike.”
We sat down on a bench at the entrance to the Amstel park.
That evening Sjoerd went on a date and cheated on his wife for the first time, and it isn’t clear that the one thing — his experiences of the day — had anything directly to do with the other. It simply happened that as he sat down in Amsterdam in the wonderful evening air on the café-terrace of the Hotel Americain, he made eye contact with a woman who happened to be passing. Slender, wearing a green dress. Who next moment was coming to sit next to him at the round table. Large, shiny shopping bag on the ground between their chairs.
“Good?”
Sjoerd had ordered a glass of claret for her too. The weather had ignored the forecast on RNMI all day. It was warm and wonderfully sultry.
“Mmmm.”
Not the slightest awkwardness between them. What did you do today? His question to her, slightly narrowed eyes. Worked (in some institute), bought shoes (in the bag), talked to old friends on the phone (in Vienna). Like a woman letting her fantasy run at the first meeting, she didn’t look at him directly; instead her eyes seemed to go through him to someplace behind him, as if through a fog.
“And you?”
He began to talk about the construction in the delta as if he’d been waiting for this opportunity, his voice unusually emphatic and excited. And she listened, her arm next to his on the table, and twisted her wrist, because everything was already conspiring to have their hands end up on top of each other. (Later she would tell him she had fallen that evening for “the gleam” of his desire, his masculinity without even a trace of typical Dutch dullness in the way he looked at her or the way he spoke.)
“More than a billion cubic yards of seawater with every tide!” he almost shouted, telling her about the Oosterschelde. “They close it with a forty-foot-high dam smack up against the sea! Don’t think that’s easy, it involves an estuary with a mouth more than six miles wide! First they import enough sand to create three new islands, then in the channels the wild current forms as a result, they build thirteen gigantic towers on sills of steel and reinforced concrete cased in stone!”
They made a date for the next afternoon.
When Sjoerd came home at around eleven and went into the living room, Armanda stayed sitting close to him on the sofa and stared at the tips of her shoes with a tragic expression.
“What is it?”
He had called her that morning from Zeeland to say that that was where he was, and told her in good faith that he didn’t know yet when he’d be setting off back to Amsterdam.
So now this situation. Remorsefully Sjoerd sank down halfway onto the floor in front of her and looked into her face. Armanda, a little encouraged by this, immediately let loose a torrent of words, she’d spent the entire day imagining the whole area he’d felt compelled to go visit all of a sudden, just like that, the map, the layout of Schouwen-Duiveland closed in by its two sea arms.
“Her map,” she sobbed openly. “Forbidden territory for me!”
Sjoerd had put his arms around her hips and her bottom. Now he slid onto the sofa next to her, pressed his face into her neck, and whispered, “No, no, you’re crazy” so compliantly into her ear that she sat up, looked around her, all animated, and exclaimed, “And what do you say to this!”
Disconcerted but still remorseful, he followed her eyes.
“What’s all this except her new house, her seven rooms, her attic, her garden to the southeast, her shed, don’t pull such a dumb face, with brand-new furniture that’s all the stuff she chose?”
She turned to him. The brief, hostile look she gave him said: Give it a minute before we make peace. “Oh you haven’t a clue how often I’ve thought, This is her life that I … okay, this is all I’m going to say: these are her chocolate caramel bars I’m eating right now, I used only to like the plain ones, her extra pounds I’m trying to lose — she got slim again so damn quickly after Nadja was born — they’re her brochures for the latest vacuum cleaners I’m looking at, and when I choose one, it’ll be the one that’ll make the least noise in her tender little ears. Do you understand what I’m talking about? This is the sixties now, the Netherlands are becoming supermodern. Do you know what I sometimes still think? Lidy’s just gone for a day, and she’s relying on me to live her life for her, all organized and proper, and that’s exactly what I’m damn well doing.”
Sjoerd listened, surrendering to her because of what he was going to do the next day. He was about to interrupt her by way of a general answer, with a quick “Hey, why don’t we go to bed?” when she stiffened again.
“Do you get it? No? Okay, then I’m also going to tell you that sometimes, no, often I see every single one of our most personal memories, think of our Sunday-afternoon walks to Ouderkerk, think of our birthdays, our Christmas dinners, I see all of it as a sort of contrast stain, a measuring stick, against her water drama in God knows how many acts … you’re shaking your head.”
Sjoerd pulled her head toward him. Pushed his nose against her ear. She said some more sad things, then indicated she was ready to go to bed with him.
· · ·
Dark. The intimate world of a bed with soft covers and sheets. No caresses. Or?
Well, yes. Sjoerd, unscrupulous or perhaps full of scruples, saw no reason to pass up the cornucopia of aroused hormones, warmth, and tenderness of a wife who was back in a good mood again (“Oh, what does it matter, he doesn’t understand and he never will”). Afterward, like any real man, he immediately fell asleep. Armanda spent a little while thinking about the menu for Sunday, when the family would be together for lunch again, this time here in their house, and pictured her table. Father and Mother Brouwer, Betsy and Leo with their two boys, Jacob, now twenty-two, with a very fat but very pretty girl with milk-white skin, Letitia, and her family too.
Asparagus? wondered Armanda. With plain boiled potatoes, thick slices of ham, an egg, and hollandaise sauce? And with it some bottles of Gewürztraminer. Or better, maybe a Riesling?
“Well,” she would have said, “the whole time we were sitting there that Sunday at midday, eating, you have to imagine the insane noise of the storm. The way I’m talking to you now, in my normal voice, it wasn’t possible. So remember that during everything I’m telling you about, everyone was screaming the whole time at the top of their lungs. It just stormed all through the middle of that day without letup, I’m not going to keep repeating it.”
That is what she would have said if at that moment a boat from, say, the river patrol had appeared at the attic window, which is not completely unimaginable, and she could have given an account later on of her anxious hours. There is quite a difference between recounting an adventure to an interested audience after it’s over, embellished here and there with a couple of invented details and facts that came to light only afterward, and living one’s own mortal danger, which must remain unvarnished, unimproved, and, basta!
“You’re probably thinking,” she would have said, “how could you eat in such circumstances, but we could. The table was a chest with a cover over it, there was a knife and a breadboard. The farmer’s wife had carried everything possible up the night before, including a bag with precious things like eggs, butter, brandy, and a spice cake, because she’d been intending to go after church in Dreischor to visit a woman who’d just had a baby. How did we sit together? Imagine eleven poor devils, gray faces, a floor that everyone knows is swaying. Horribly cold, of course, and very dark, even at noon. Cathrien Padmos, in the bed with her baby. Soon the Padmoses’ boy Adriaan crawled over to be with his mother and baby brother. It had begun to snow. We saw the window gradually become coated with snowflakes, which didn’t bother any of us, because nobody wanted to keep looking out anymore. What could be done? It must still be ebb tide, but the water was barely going down at all. Though enough that over the road, at Cau’s house, some iron palings were sticking up out of the water, and trapped in them was the body of Marien Cau; you could see deep holes in the side of his head.
“So Gerarda Hocke fried eggs. She fried them on both sides, after breaking the yolks, tipped them out of the pan onto slices of bread, and said, “Zesgever?” Or “Laurina!” What? No — nobody betrayed obvious signs of anxiety. Where that came from, I have no idea, but that’s how it was. Probably the cold made it impossible. If your body is already trembling with cold, it can’t tremble with anything else. I know that Cornelius Jaeger checked the water level from time to time. He opened the attic door, peered down the stairs, then came back again. We looked at him, agog.
“‘So?’
“‘Roughly one step lower.’
“Maybe because I learned nothing else about him, I remember very clearly the way he looked. As if he had no substance, no past, no future, other than his appearance that day at noon. Aside from the hump on his back, it was his face that was the most distinctive thing; he had very prominent cheekbones, one of them closer to the eye socket than the other, his irises were almost black, and then he had this little precocious moustache, the child was twelve, a year younger than you were, Jacob. A body full of errors, like a very remarkable charcoal drawing.
“Most of us had already had a few mouthfuls of cognac. Two glasses made the rounds. It goes straight to your head, and everything starts to spin, if you’re in the kind of situation we were in back then. I think we all felt we were still part of the world, but it was like being on a mountaintop — we were also a long way out on the edge. I still see Izak Hocke rolling himself a minuscule cigarette, with a little piece torn off one end of a paper. One of his eyes was swollen shut, half his face was a violet-blue, yet he radiated some sense of salvation the entire time. Now in his gesture as he took a few drags on the roll-your-own and then passed it on to his foreman, van de Velde, I saw something that was not perhaps so unfounded in these circumstances, namely a kind of calm despair: life has its own time limit, we all know that, but as long as we’re here, we’re here.
“‘The people in The Hague could send us a plane, dammit!’ Nico van de Velde exploded at some point. And we looked up and saw an angry grumbler who was forgetting that the government doesn’t work on Sundays.
“‘Or a …’ came the prompt riposte from the birthing bed, ‘or a …’ and we all turned round or to one side and saw — I can’t describe it any other way, the bliss of Cathrien Padmos. Her large eyes were sparkling as she stared at us, her face was flushed with the slight fever that every woman experiences on the day she has given birth. Ignoring the fact that everything was pointing to the imminent end of the world, she was in that state of rapture induced by her optimistic, death-defying hormones.
“‘Or a helicopter …’
“As we looked at her, she looked down, but then there was another smile: she was reassured to discover that the baby was already suckling energetically at her breast. Now all we need is a modern miracle like a helicopter, she must have thought, and we’ll all be saved. But quick!
“That is how it was. An impossible situation that changed us all forever. I see us still sitting there in a sort of circle, marking off in the following order, if you imagine the hands of a clock: Cau, talking to himself, Zesgever, me, van de Velde, Hocke, his mother, Cornelius Jaeger, and Laurina van de Velde, who stood up from time to time to shuffle over to the godforsaken space between the two clothes cupboards, but nobody paid much attention. What is grief? Is it something that shows in a person’s face? Mrs. Hocke was the only other one I ever saw bending over that place, the others … didn’t want to? At least half of them almost certainly knew how things were with their own loved ones. So what were they supposed to do about this one death, such a tiny one, right next door?
“But the old woman did. I would never have thought that gold can contain its own light, and yet it must have been so in the two spirals that hung down to the left and right of her forehead. How otherwise could I remember so clearly how she looked? Her jaw muscles clenched as she bent over the place where Dina lay. Did she ask herself, I think she did, where this poor invisible little thing that she would certainly call a soul had gone? She belonged to the ultraorthodox Zeeland sect, so don’t be too quick to say: ‘to heaven,’ please! The catastrophe was still unfolding, houses everywhere were collapsing, when sermons started being preached again two days later.
“Imagine a barn, wet to saturation point, and a preacher on an upturned water barrel. When the congregation who have been standing shoulder to shoulder go their separate ways again, what they know is what they already knew. The flood — so says their dogma of guilt and punishment, and they deviate not one iota from it — is God’s spectacular but measured answer to our own provocations. I ask you seriously (Father, Mother, darlings, you’re both shaking your heads in exactly the same way), doesn’t this indicate an extraordinarily arrogant view of life? Punishment and guilt: the interaction of two great forces. And did you know, moreover, that brides from families who adhere to this sect wear black when they marry?
“Yes,” she would have said, “there’s a wedding photo of young Gerarda with her bridegroom and both their families. From left to right in front, on chairs, sit Cornelia Hocke-Heijboer, cousin of the bridegroom and sister-in-law of the bride; Sara Heijboer-Bolijn, sister of the bride and sister-in-law twice over of the bridegroom; Anthonie Hocke, the bridegroom; Gerarda Hocke-Heijboer, the bride; then the mother of the bride, Lena Heijboer-Koopman, widow of the mussel fisherman Iman Heijboer, and next to her Anna Leendrina Bolijn, aunt of the bridegroom and cousin by marriage of the bride’s mother Lena Heijboer. Behind these six seated people stand four men, of whom all I know is that they were brothers, brothers-in-law, and brother-in-law’s brother of either the bride or the bridegroom. The weather is splendid. The wedding guests have positioned themselves in front of the façade of a house or a farmhouse, shadowed by a tree in full flower. All of them without exception are wearing black. The five women have their hands in their laps, but Anthonie Hocke, the bridegroom, sits between them with his legs spread, his shoes shined to a mirror finish, and his hands in their thick knitted gloves on his knees in a pose that radiates masculine energy. Gerarda too is wearing black gloves. Of all the women, she, the bride, is padded out in the most clothing, wearing a long coat with lapels, and underneath it a dress that goes all the way to the chin. It is only Sara Heijboer, whose Zuidbeveland traditional dress includes a shawl that covers the upper arms, who lends the photo an idea of soft welcoming female flesh.
“Funereal? No, but serious. The scene isn’t funereal for starters because of the women’s snow-white caps, which separate the standing and seated wedding guests — four men and five women with the bridegroom in their midst — like a beam of light. With the exception of the Zuidbevelandish cap, in which the woman’s head and neck are framed like a shellfish in its opened shell, the caps stand away from the face, looking like bright starched veils made of floating snowflakes. How wonderful it must be to wear a crazy headdress like that! To hear everything grave and difficult in life discussed from inside the absolute privacy of such a white, translucently fine object cradling one’s head!
“Not all of them, no. Only the two young women, Sara Heijboer and the bride, wear the gold above their ears. And when I look at the only smile in the photo, on the face of the bride’s mother, and at the padded bride next to her, I know that the little ceremony has just taken place, in which the mother gives her daughter the precious head decorations like a dowry. She is to wear them, take care of them, and at the appointed time she is to give them to another young woman in the family.”
“As I already told you,” she would have said, “we all — every one of us — found ourselves in thrall to the situation. And the situation was the storm. And as we sat there the eye of the storm was, in some sense, us. Silent, empty, for one endless moment devoid of all character and devoid of all passion. How often do your eyes exist only because they’re looking, and your hands because they feel cold, and how often does the house you’re in exist all on its own, just because it’s still standing and will hopefully continue to do so, if God is good, until this terrible flood recedes again?
“But afterward … I know for sure that since that moment none of us is the same person we once were!
“And there were things to note about Simon Cau. Who was he? Was he a man of property, a dike sheriff, someone who attracts a circle of people wherever he goes? Extreme alterations in character seem to occur less frequently in reality than they do in books. But look at this! Simon Cau stands up, because he needs to use the bucket that’s behind the door to the entrance to the attic, with the sea splashing not even two steps below.
“He stands up, goes to the door, and closes it behind him, which it won’t do properly anymore because the frame is no longer aligned. It must be about four o’clock; the noon tide is very high again. When he comes back, he’s not looking down, as he did before, he’s glancing around searchingly, as if he’d forgotten where he’d been sitting. Then he strikes out. The bird, the goose, was just sitting where it had been sitting since the beginning, on a sort of hand-knotted Smyrna rug (Mother, we made one at home ourselves once, do you remember, that little runner of stiff white canvas and the strands of wool, about three inches long, that we threaded through it and tied off on the back?), but Cau kicks the creature away and makes for his chair as if he has a right to cut his own diagonal straight across the room. He sits down in exactly the same position he had before.
“Oh. What’s your guess? Fear? Losing a grip on himself? My own guess is that he thought the flood was his own doing. That he was absolutely reclaiming the responsibility for it himself. Not just for the water and, God help us, its effects, but also for the utterly unfamiliar meteorological conditions this weekend, including the astronomical forces associated with them, and the oceanology, because this water had come a very, very long distance.
“Grandiose? But fear can also occur on a grand scale. He arrived too late, basta, at this ramshackle section of the Grevelingen dike which, mind you, he had recently discussed one afternoon in the tavern De Galg with three technical engineers from the hydraulics department, venting his worry and frustration over the state of the embankment, the stone reinforcements, and pushing back against their doubts and fruitlessly pious hopes that all this was surely first and foremost the responsibility of the national authorities. So he reached the dike at a point when all was already lost. Can you imagine this? The wind that was blowing there wasn’t a force of nature, it was the force of his own bad decision, fool that he was, to ignore the classification of ‘dangerous’ that was being broadcast on the radio, put on his good suit, and head for the Hotel Kirke in Zierikzee with his neighbors.
“Cause and effect. They are the Furies, Siamese twins…. This would not have happened, if … But enough of Cau. I stopped watching him, decided that what I wanted was a mouthful of cognac, but there was none left.
“‘Here,’ I heard. It was Albert Zesgever, passing me the tail end of a cigarette that I could still manage to puff on two or three times if I held my fingertips right up to my lips.
“I looked at him, full of sympathy. Tall man, maybe forty. Red face, dark hair that seemed to grow up out of his neck like tarpaper. He was a very coarse man, a poacher, but also someone who could apply artificial fertilizer so finely and evenly by hand that Hocke, for this reason alone, had not yet acquired a mechanical spreader. I am guessing that Zesgever for the rest of his life became someone other than the man who messed around with his wife, which everyone knew, just as they knew how things had got totally out of control the night before.”
“Oh, you mean, the night before, when …”
“Yes,” she would have said. “As the wind reached hurricane speed. You need to know, before I tell you how things went when it hit force eight in the night of January thirty-first to February first, that Zesgever was a drunk, and when he had been drinking, he beat up his wife, Janna Maria. There are always things that set a man off, Albert Zesgever was that way too, and when he was loaded, he always knew whom to blame.
“That evening Janna Maria was sitting at home with her elbow on the table. A kerosene lamp that was turned way down illuminated her face and, to either side, her hands, along with a piece of clothing she had been altering. Outside the window one of those storms was howling that occur every year. It was close to eleven at night, the two children were asleep in clean, ironed pajamas, Zesgever was out somewhere. Because she knew that her marriage was the part of her life that often ended in a thrashing, and because she also knew that this could sometimes be avoided if she appeared to be asleep in the dark, she decided to pick up the lamp and climb the ladder. But suddenly, he was there. A length of the roof guttering was rattling, so she hadn’t heard the front door scraping across the floor. She half turned toward him and saw from the game bag hanging slack across his shoulder that his drunken state was that of a man whose gun hadn’t brought him any luck. The salt marshes behind the dike along the Zuidlangeweg were underwater. What Zesgever, for his part, saw as he came out of his haze was a creature who was radiating fear.
“He was well aware that the whole world, which is to say this little hamlet, saw and judged his abusive conduct harshly. He himself could no longer understand his own rage once he sobered up and came back to his senses. But then he had to endure for days, sometimes even weeks, that Janna Maria’s black eye and split lip made his neighbors and acquaintances lower their voices whenever he was in earshot.
“So tomorrow — Sunday — his father-in-law was supposed to come pay them a visit. Zesgever was terrified of this man, a dike worker and excavator at a nearby freight harbor, thoughtful and friendly to one and all, and he was always at his humblest when they encountered each other. But for now it was still Saturday. The wind is blowing almost relentlessly, but aside from that, everything is quiet. Zesgever takes a few steps, asks something, Janna Maria’s answer is not to the point, and also inaudible over the howling and thundering of the storm. Zesgever immediately focuses on Janna Maria’s white, damp face, and something inside him erupts.
“This time it lasts longer than usual, and is more ferocious, perhaps in tandem with the violent weather. Blows can be delivered with a hand or with a fist. When he stops to catch his breath, she can no longer stand. Then she begins to vomit, lying on her back.
“At first, when he crawls into bed under the eaves still fully dressed, he’s cheered by the rising force of the storm. Janna Maria, dragged upstairs, is lying beside him absolutely motionless, but still warm — isn’t that how it was? Yes, that’s how it was, he knows it, and imagines that for the rest of his life he will know that her head is so close to his ear that in more normal weather he would have heard her breathing. He stretches out and begins to sleep off the booze. What is the happy thought that sticks in his head just before his legs start to turn heavy? “It’s not hard to guess: the old man won’t be coming. In weather like this, the old man absolutely won’t be able to leave his harbor!”
“And you?”
“What do you mean, ‘and you?’”
“Well, how have you changed since then?”
And then she would have looked away from Armanda for a moment (for it would have been Armanda asking these questions) and into the sunny dining room. Next to the window, a vase of purple tulips from the garden. A sleeping tomcat, a fat red thing, lying among the toys on the floor. The smell of freshly brewed coffee wafting in from the kitchen.
“Oh.” She would have reached for the cigarette just lit by her husband. “God, I’ve no idea.”
But Armanda would have kept looking at her, interested. Until, a little light-headed from the Riesling in the middle of the day, she would have come up with an improvised, but honest, answer.
“If I think about it — in every way. In all the hundreds and thousands of shitty little things that make up life and that you feel, since that time, are actually part of something else entirely. Something terrible, that involves only you, and that you can’t talk to anyone about, because you were the only one there back then.”
And she and her sister, suddenly overcome with emotion, would have fallen into each other’s arms.
The present had other demands. Four thirty on the dot. Dusk was falling, it was high tide again, and the weather forecast for this Sunday was the opposite of mild. In De Bilt, the national meteorological office was warning all regions of the country, once again, about a severe storm coming from the west-northwest. What this meant for the attic in Hocke’s farmhouse was as follows. A blow struck the house without any forewarning. There had been no particularly powerful gust of wind, but the blow unleashed such a huge wave of pressure that they all could feel it in their eardrums. The first thing they became aware of, in almost the same moment, was four or five gray projectiles suddenly shooting at random around the room. Nobody had time to realize that these were bats, abandoning their winter hibernation spots under the roof beams: what everyone saw was a network of cracks spreading across both side walls. The glass in the window exploded. The roof was torn upward, part of it disappearing to make way for a pile of black clouds. The house twisted and came off its foundations.
Coffee cup in hand, Armanda sat at the table between the living room and the winter garden, which was lit at that moment by a ray of the morning sun. It was eleven o’clock. She was wearing thin blue trousers, cut wide, and a red blouse with rolled-up sleeves. As she was getting ready she had taken the scissors to her hair, still loose on her shoulders, to trim the ends and her fringe, in a routine intended to preserve this look for the rest of her life. The color would also remain the same: a medium chestnut brown, according to the description on the package.
On the table were a letter and a newspaper, both still unread. After her children had left for school, she had picked both up off the mat, and her eye had been caught, for a moment, unavoidably, by the large headline. Wednesday, 11 August 1972, seven people had died in a wind funnel the previous day that had struck a camping ground in Ameland. Uh, uh, uh, she had thought vaguely as she looked at the envelope with Nadja’s writing on it, and decided to leave it unopened for the moment. News that one hasn’t yet read hasn’t yet happened, in a way, just as truths set down on paper in heaven knows what frame of mind have flowed out of one heart but have not yet reached the other. Armanda stared into her lush, unkempt garden. She hadn’t seen Nadja for weeks.
It was her day off. While she hung out the laundry on the drying frame in the stairwell, she let her thoughts wander to her odd fate and that of her daughter Nadja. Nadja was a lively girl with a luxuriant mane of red hair, who was studying history at the University of Amsterdam, more or less diligently but not with any great urgency. The remarkable thing that Armanda was thinking about was the fact that Nadja, although she was her stepchild, was closer to her heart than Violet, a delightful teenager, and Allan, who since the divorce had so clung to his mother that when he went off to school, he always knocked one last time on the window from outdoors to wave at her and be sure she noticed.
Armanda shook the folds out of a pillowcase, remembering the day when Nadja had lain on her stomach on her bed, sobbing with fury, while she sat next to her discreetly on a chair in the dim light. It must have been in November, after school, it was already getting dark. While Nadja was telling her in all its miserable details (his bed was in the same room as the Bechstein grand) that it was all over with the piano teacher, she had really had to struggle to suppress the feeling, as she stood to stroke Nadja’s hair, that her hand was not part of her body but belonged to the doppelgänger who had remained sitting on the chair in the half-darkness to watch how she was getting on with this growing daughter.
Good, Nadja had soon got up again to switch on the light and wash her face and tell her lightly that given her lack of genius she’d prefer to switch from piano to history. “Wait, take a look at this.” She had turned round to look for something.
A picture, a beautiful but terrible picture, torn out of a book and drawn by Rembrandt, of an eighteen-year-old girl, executed by strangulation by the City of Amsterdam for having killed her landlady by hitting her over the head with an axe. She and Nadja had looked together at the little body bound with ropes. The mood in the room was one of Crisis Over — Life Goes On. In a tone that sounded like an explanation of something, Nadja said, “One of the jurors at her trial before the sentence was carried out was named Blaauw.”
The doorbell rang. Armanda set down the basket with the rest of the laundry and went downstairs to open up. Jan Brouwer was on his morning walk.
“You need to get something done,” said the old man, right in the middle of the sidewalk, pointing up at the façade. The white climbing rose, which had come loose in yesterday’s bad weather along with its trellis, was hanging over forward, baring a house wall that needed replastering.
“I know, Father,” said Armanda, pressing a kiss onto the freshly shaved cheek. As she went back inside she made a mental note to call the builder that afternoon. Sjoerd and she had been apart for almost three and a half years now. Exterior work on the house had always been part of his responsibility.
Now for the letter! she thought, as she chatted to her father about the weather, now back to normal (warm; weak wind from the southwest, stronger along the coast). She glanced from the envelope on the table to her father, who simply by being there miraculously transformed whatever might be contained in the room into a moment of present calm: two cups of coffee, a bowl of cookies, and a great streak of sunlight across the floor that was targeting a male leg dressed in gray lightweight flannel. Months before, she and Nadja had had a conversation in which Nadja announced she was going to move in with a man in Bijlmer, a Surinamese, and there had been a big scene.
“There’s a letter from Nadja. Should I read it out?”
Oh, Grandpa Brouwer’s open, benevolent look! He settled himself comfortably, ready to hear how things were going with his beloved eldest grandchild.
Dear Mama,
It’s three in the morning. I’m sitting at the table wearing the winter coat he left behind, over my pajamas. I can’t sleep. You were right, I think, he’s left me. I didn’t know it, but the early morning bus trip last week through the Bijlmer was our good-bye. It looks absolutely awful there, Mama, unfinished apartment houses and otherwise nothing but sand, though at least you see corn poppies and stuff growing on it. He leaned over to me, all confidential. I’ll never say it out loud, he murmured in my ear, but the Netherlands are beautiful. I find the Netherlands beautiful. We were on our way to the University Hospital.
I was going along to keep him company, and then continuing on to my lecture. You know, or actually you don’t know, so I’m going to tell you, he’s a senior male nurse in Paramaribo, and came here for a specific time to work at the U.H. in the intensive care unit. For further training. How was I to know that the time was up?
So I’ve been absolutely flattened for the last six days, and I’ve done nothing but think about him, it’s unbearable but he’s still mine and he’s black as black can be. (Once we were walking down the Warmoesstraat when someone in a group of guys from the Antilles or Surinam yelled something at him, some curse word I couldn’t understand. Sranan, he said, when I asked him what sort of language it was in, and he burst out laughing when he told me what it meant: horribly black!) Once when we were in bed, I made some sentimental remark about this black/white contrast thing in our relationship. While I stuck out my leg ostentatiously and held it next to his, I was carrying on about “isn’t that beautiful” … and at the same time I was thinking secretly that blackness isn’t something external, it’s inside him, he lives in his blackness. And in the same moment I felt I was flying across hundreds of years of West Africa’s past, that I was sailing across the ocean in the blink of an eye, to land in Fort Zeelandia in Surinam, our colony of traders in coffee, cotton, sugar, and slaves in our fine Dutch seventeenth century, where our souls would meet.
That thoughts are thoughts and words are words is something you can figure out just by looking at the idiotic difference in the speed at which they move, you know? The only thing I said about all this wonderfulness was “isn’t that beautiful?” Nothing more. And Mama, the words were barely out of my mouth when I looked sideways and you know, he was absolutely furious. Suddenly I was looking at this man on the pillow and the sheets who was very angry, angry up to here, even his shoulders were rigid. Am I your first nigger? he asked.
I told you we first met on a sightseeing boat. It’s the best student job anyone can have. You stand with the microphone in your hand and your back to the captain, canals, bridges, to your right that’s a mug of coffee, and for the rest of it you simply tell whatever comes into your head. He was sitting right at the back. He looked from the merchants’ houses to me, from the drawbridges to me, from the whole labyrinth of waterways and water lanes that winds through old Amsterdam in all its alarmingly crumbling glory when seen from this side, and eventually empties into the IJ — from all of that he looked at me to watch (or so I thought) the words coming out of my mouth. Next day he was sitting there again. By chance I was in really good form and babbled on about our great trading city, the jewel of our blessed little Republic, that once set the tone for the entire world economy: first, as I explained superenthusiastically, thanks to the Dutch sailors who so loved going to sea that they didn’t care about being paid; second, thanks to the windmills, such clever technical doodads that could be harnessed to saw wood, grind corn, pump out polders, you name it, they could do it; and third, I said briefly, because what did I know about this stuff, thanks to slavery. On the third day, when he looked at me, I looked back at him. And I could feel that he didn’t understand a word of my set text or even guess what any of it was about, he was just looking at my mouth.
Mama, have I ever told you that I almost never felt attracted to any of the boys at school, and I don’t really feel attracted to any of the guys in my study group at university either? Too much like pals or brothers. I never once felt my heart go thump! After our third trip on the Queen Juliana, he and I went into town, ate at a little table, and took the bus to the apartment he’d rented from friends for the duration of his stay in the Netherlands. Oh, I know, you just won’t get it. I was out of my mind with love. So where did my wedding night take place? In an apartment in a new block, with a fancy roofline that makes it look as if it’s standing up at an angle on the flat polder like a boat that’s sinking.
When he’d gone to sleep, I leaned over him. Is it true that the first thing you fall in love with is a face? But can that be something other than the eyes and the mouth? I think it was already quite clear to me as he lay there, sleeping sweetly, that he had an expression of his, you have to say it out loud in an earthy but friendly way, but that he really did try to reach for my face through my words. And I can visualize them, all in a row, the young guide’s words, out of which all you needed was some intelligence and goodwill and you could conjure a complete merchant fleet sailing laboriously against the wind, and the harbor of Hoorn in bad weather, and Amsterdam harbor half frozen in winter in the eighteenth century, and the storehouses, packed full of produce from the colonies, the churches, the grand houses on the canals with their blazing reception rooms and their women always standing at a window and reading a letter. Luxury, calm, and lots of tea, in mid-May you could watch all of Amsterdam boarding lighters to sail to the tea pavilions and summerhouses on the Vecht and all the way to Haarlem, returning in the fall. I mean it when I say that it was all streaming through me like a dancing river, and now through him as well.
Mama, something’s weighing on me. I think it’s dreadful, but one time I had a really hard time suppressing a pang of pity for him. We were coming home after a late movie. Did I feel like having a late-night supper? He’s already pirouetting toward the kitchen. How about oysters? Of course. And he comes back with a glass full of vinegary pickled mussels, gray blobs of crap in a glass that he holds up like a trophy. My king of the primeval forest. Poor sweet guy. Then he puts a bottle of white wine on the table that’s been standing next to the heater for hours, switches on the main light, and goes to work with a corkscrew. At that moment I would have given anything not to have remembered that a few nights before, in the dark, he’d said to me: You touch the blackness in me. And how blissfully happy I’d been, and had thought: how great, there’s this naturalness between us, and we don’t know each other’s weaknesses, though they certainly exist, and we can just leave it alone, leave it alone! Oh Mama, don’t be surprised by this letter, it’s night, and I’m very alone, I was so captivated by this man!
At this point Armanda raised her head and met the eyes of her father. He was crushed, but still benevolent.
“Shall I pour us a quick cup of tea?” she asked gently, thinking of her father’s prudery, and how he was so stiff-necked in his rejection of all modern developments.
“Oh, finish dear Nadja’s letter.”
His voice, unsure as it always was when his feelings became confused without any prior warning, led her for a moment to her own love life. It was good that a lover was no longer called “lover” these days, but, more modestly, “friend.” Her father liked the disheveled mathematics teacher, one of her colleagues, whom she had brought with her to number 77 on several Sundays now.
“All right.” She picked up the sheets of paper again, hunted for a moment, then resumed her reading. “Now I must tell you something that you couldn’t know back then, but your rage probably picked up on already: he’s married back home.”
Without looking up, she saw her father stretch out his arms, and she knew how shocked he must be.
“Oh, my little one!”
She read out the rest of the letter.
· · ·
And I want to tell you, there’s something else, something strange, that I went through with him. There was a party in the garage in our apartment building. He asked if I was coming. This party was going to be a winti-pre’, an African idol celebration. Do you believe in them? I asked him straight out. He gave me a warning look. Believe? Do you mean believe? You don’t, do you? He began to laugh, poked me in the stomach with his finger, and went to the light switch to demonstrate something to me. Okay, the ceiling fixture in this room uses three bulbs, two of which are burned out, but I could see, couldn’t I, that the light switch itself was working. Don’t ask how … he said maliciously, already dragging me toward the elevator. Basement.
So where are the cars, I thought, as we entered the concrete cavern that took up the entire space under the building. Larger than ten churches. Entrance and exit ramps, pillars, neon lighting, painted numbers identifying the parking spots, everything very orderly, yes, but not a car to be seen. What there was instead, somewhere in these catacombs, was an enormous but invisible drumming; we really didn’t need to ask the way. The Bijlmer, Mama, is terrific, it shows a real vision. Until the last ten years, more or less, there was just a village here on a sandy road between Weesp and Amsterdam. Then along came the architects and drew some enchanting apartment buildings like honeycombs, with garages underneath, in a paradise of meadows and poplars and new stretches of lawn. God, how beautiful, it was supposed to become a city where living, working, and enjoying the fresh air on weekends are separated by nothing more than a few crosshatched pen strokes. But you’ve no idea: right now almost the entire middle class of Amsterdam is sitting on the waiting list for houses with gardens in Purmerend. And I’m looking at people here, striding out to the sound of the drums with towering headdresses….
So, we went to where the party was in the garage. There were around a hundred people, all of them black of course. Excitement and drumming and a lot of jumping around by a band called Boeing 737. Very appropriate, it seems to me now, because basically what they were doing was picking up somebody’s ancestors from the primeval forest and transporting them at warp speed to a polder southeast of Amsterdam. We moved into the middle of the crowd. My beloved was already doing little steps forward and back. Winti, he said, when I asked him afterward, means: a spirit of your ancestors who moves as fast as the wind. Very simple.
It was next day before I got any more details about these spirits, all perfectly normal according to my guy, one huge family according to him, that also included Voodoo. Oh, but aren’t they really dangerous, I asked. What? he said, the Voodoo wintis.? And he told me how back home on his farm an iguana with revolving yellow eyes had sat in a tree for weeks, and there would have been no point in chasing him away. But there are also lots of examples of well-intentioned spirits, he said, and named some water sprite. When such a watra takes up residence in a person during a party, he or she always asks right away for a bottle of rum and a box of cigars. At the end you must banish him or her, because water sprites love social gatherings. I know, the whole thing’s madness, but it interested me, because I thought: it’s all him.
So, I wanted to tell you about the party. Everyone in the place was dancing. And did it get hot! Then the thing everyone had been waiting for happened. Crazed yelling. A boy, not even ten years old, I think. Began stepping backward, tried to say something: um, um, as if there was a name he couldn’t remember. Then this child asks for something in a booming voice, really overwhelming, sounds very heavy — and he gets it. When will I ever see a child glug down a glass of beer that size again, his hands already reaching for another which also goes down at one go? It was one of those watras, it really was, Mama; he came, he said in this huge voice, from Alkmaar, no, no, not our nice little town near Amsterdam, this Alkmaar was once a sugarcane plantation, a vast stretch of land on the banks of the Commewijne. People were passing on in whispers everything he said, as translated by an interpreter, because the boy, who was possessed, was speaking in an African language he himself didn’t understand. Never knew that what we call the factual is such an elastic concept. The ancestral spirit first complained at the top of his voice about the neighbors around the coffee plantation at Nijd-en-Spijt, then cheered up a bit, looked around, said hello to his family, and asked them how things were going.
I couldn’t tell you how the party ended and whether the spirit really did leave. I needed air. This watra also gave off a particular smell, formalin, you know, the smell of new schoolbags. And what was I thinking as I stood there all on my own in the grass all covered in the evening dew? Absolutely nothing! I believe the way we’re supposed to use rational connections when we think is completely overvalued. It hardly ever happens. I, for one, don’t like it and I only do it when I have to write something for one of my study groups at the university. I just stood there in the cool and looked.
My neck hurts. My fingers hurt. I’m crushed by this dreadful unhappiness. Am I empty enough to go to bed now?
I give you a hug. Don’t be angry anymore.
Nadja
P.S. It’s late morning, the day is bright. I was thinking about my mother, Mama. Where she actually is. Became a spirit far too early. And I didn’t just think about her, to tell you the truth, I … called her. I whispered mother! mother!
For a time they were side by side, being propelled forward at an insane speed. Like two boats that have cast off and started a race. She lay flat on her stomach, her head in her arms, hands clamped on the edge. It had happened unbelievably fast. When a house comes off its foundations and the roof is torn off, the entire fabric gives way. It described a little curve on the water, then the wind knocked away the walls. The floors were ripped away in sections by the current. There was no panic. She had heard no screams. Nor seen any in eyes or faces.
There had even been a kind of farewell. She saw Izak Hocke look at his mother and Cathrien Padmos look at her baby and Laurina and Nico van de Velde look at each other and Zesgever at little Adriaan and Gerarda Hocke, the heavy goose clutched to her breast, look at the failing roof of her house. She registered. It all happened in a fraction of this one second of terror. This old woman knows she’s old, and close to death. She sees the floor of the attic of her house break in two, and the furniture suddenly fly into the air. An enormous force pushes the objects to the surface. Cupboards, tables, she knows every one of them piece by piece, knows what has been in them or on them. It doesn’t require conscious thought. Just before a wave riding from the bottom lifted both parts of the floor and hurled them forward more than thirty feet in a single blow, the old woman saw the beds, water jugs, and the pathetically sodden featherbeds from all three bedrooms on the second floor come swirling up in front of her feet. The house was half afloat. The cellar and storerooms had already parted company with it. An inhuman situation: an old woman surviving her own home?
Only Simon Cau in his last moments, thinking of nothing and no one. He didn’t even wait. Lidy, who needed all her strength to seize some outstretched hands and hold on tight, still saw him throw himself into the water. A gray silhouette bending forward, then streaks of foam.
Now, painfully, she eased her grip on the edge of the wood that was not swimming on the surface of the water but about four inches beneath it. She lifted herself a little. The raft was being propelled by a powerful current. Beneath her only yesterday, there had been a sandy road called the Captain’s Road, which led, by way of many twists and turns, over the Melk dike to the main road to Zierikzee and finally to the Oosterschelde. Inching her way backward, seeing almost nothing, she became aware of the identity of her companion on this slab of flooring, on which until a moment ago an entire life had played out, as if on another planet, with its own time and laws, a life complete and full of significance, to which she now had been compelled to say adieu.
Cornelius Jaeger. She knew he was there. When the house broke apart, her faculty of observation was aborted. As if events were trying to prevent themselves from happening. And after that, as she was flailing in the water, she had only looked at his face, then his hands. To actually heave her up onto the raft had not been necessary, and the boy wouldn’t have been able to do it anyway. She had crawled onto it by herself, just before a wave coming right up off the bottom had risen and taken the little nothing, the foolish chance repository that was her house and her sanctuary, up onto its back. Now, as she risked a quick glance around her and then back in the direction of the storm, she took stock of her situation. A few square feet of floating debris. On it, by way of company, in addition to Cornelius Jaeger, the Hockes, mother and son, an assemblage of shoulders, arms, eyes, trying to keep its seat.
It began to snow. Wet flakes flying past her face in a southerly direction. Everything jolting, wobbling, no purpose in life other than to hang on. Lidy, without a roof over her head for the first time since she was born, was bent on survival. As the house broke apart, her exhaustion had transmuted itself instantaneously into terror, her terror into action, and action into the absolute determination to live through this maelstrom. Nothing would be able to shake her of this. She saw a whole mass of unidentifiable objects appear in front of her, caught on a post here, a tree there, and then she was shooting past it. She saw dead cows, a dead horse, a dead man, oil drums, and knew that right behind her on the raft was a whole little family. How could it be possible? The old woman was still wearing her gold. The farming women of Schouwen and Duiveland have every imaginable way of keeping their headdresses and their gold jewelry firmly pinned to their heads. Gerarda Hocke’s bonnet of white lace or finely starched linen had blown away, but under it she always wore a black crocheted undercap, which fitted tightly to the head and held the gold spirals so tightly that they could not be dislodged.
The snow was getting thicker. Five or six minutes had gone by since the small community in the attic had broken up. Even had Lidy wanted to, which was not the case, she would no longer have been able to see how her former companions were faring on the other raft. There were only two of them. Only Laurina and Nico van de Velde had been able to keep their grip on the other part of the floor, from which planks had started immediately to break off left and right. Now they were caught in an undertow, the raft tipped; they managed to pull themselves back up on it and stretch out on the wood before they disappeared forever into the driving snow with no one to witness them.
It was slowly getting too dark for anything to be visible, and moreover the screaming and howling of the hurricane discouraged any observation of their wider surroundings. In such conditions, what would be the point of trying to see anyway? Lidy kneeled there, hunched over, legs spread for balance, in the borrowed thick coat that was soaked through, and rough shoes, and clung to a plank that protruded a little above the others. What you see in such a position is mostly your hands. But her very blindness, or close to it, served only to sharpen her other senses. Some living force was coming at her, constantly shape-shifting, in curves, and wings, and foam, and spray: it was the question that silenced all life’s other questions. Almighty God, merciful God …
Did she really still believe she could manage? Or was she sensing the road now opening to her at such speed? It doesn’t matter. Ignoring everything a rational person knows in principle, she held fast with all the skill she could muster, as if someone had just taught her the lesson of a lifetime. She knew her fingers had become very bony. A few minutes before, she’d seen that she’d lost her ring, her wedding ring with the little ruby. And she had actually thought, Oh, what a pity!
On February 1, European time, at 5 degrees latitude, the sun goes down at 17:27. And now she really couldn’t see her hand in front of her eyes. The cloud layer was so thick that even the moon couldn’t penetrate it.
Exactly a week after her father died, and three days after his funeral, Armanda awakened with the uncontrollable urge to tell anyone and everyone that her father had died not once but twice. It was a particularly beautiful autumn day, sunny, with a hint of sweetness in the misty air. An hour later, when she stood in the street and saw the men and women coming out of their houses to head for work — on bicycles, on foot, or, some of them, by car — she wasn’t sure whom to impose her urge on first. Everyone seemed absorbed in their own thoughts, and she wasn’t accustomed to striking up conversations with just anyone. The first time her father had died was over a year ago. A malignant tumor on the pancreas, a seven-hour operation, a partial recovery, but like everyone he had understood and accepted that the only use of his recovery was, quite properly, to hold his wife, his children, and his grandchildren close and take his leave of life. Emaciated, gentle to the point of formality, he lay on his deathbed, prayed with the minister, looked deeply into the eyes of each of his loved ones, thanked Nadine with “you were my whole world,” closed his eyes for three days, his pulse meantime almost imperceptible, and opened them again on day four. Blue, clear, focused.
Restless and impatient, she walked toward the Rijksmuseum, with a white cloud standing above it. The sunny city felt cold and unwelcoming. Looking around her, she wondered which of all these faces could be the one to talk to. Her father had died again the week before, swollen and struggling. He didn’t want to go. And went when no one was there with him. She came to the underpass to the museum. Even before she entered it, she was assaulted by the sounds of the accordion player performing sentimental German pop songs. As she paused under the domed ceiling, the volume was overwhelming. She stood still, glanced around, and listened to the song. She was forty-nine years old, had renounced more than a few desires and suppressed others, as who hadn’t in this phase of their lives — but this one?
There must be some important exhibition, she thought. On the other side of the building, in front of the entrance, was a rather disheartening queue of people. She joined it next to a tanned, quite young guy with long blond hair and muscled arms, in a T-shirt, a sort of Viking type, and said to him: “Oh, oh, this is going to take a while, isn’t it!” After some desultory chitchat, she got onto the subject of the double death of her father, Jan Brouwer, seventy-six the second time around.
“Not a bad age,” said the Viking. They hadn’t advanced a single step.
“Maybe not,” she said, “and yet deep in my heart I count it as seventy-five for the first of his lives, and a year for the other.”
The Viking looked at her eagerly.
“Well,” she said. “Can you imagine it? Completely changed.”
“How — changed?”
In a tone that suggested she was having to explain the obvious, she said: “I mean that my father, a retired cardiologist, was a highly intelligent, rational, devoted man, focused on his work and his family. There’s a certain kind of person who’s born to live a happy life.”
“True.”
“So, after his first death, his character, his behavior, even his appearance, changed completely. I mean, he even started tying his shoelaces differently, making two bows first and only knotting them afterward.”
The Viking stared at her for a moment. Then made a face, a sort of grin of recognition.
With a hand shielding her eyes like a bridge, for the sun was climbing in the east, she said: “Father began to eat. After two months he was a little, fat old gentleman, still very friendly, but friendly in a different way, restless, and his face got redder and he wore these funny checked shirts. And he started taking walks all on his own for hours at a time, and when he came home he wouldn’t say a word about them to my mother. If he’d been younger, you could have imagined — well, you know. Once …”
Suddenly the queue was moving. That always makes everyone start itching to cover the full distance right away. Conversations cease.
“Once,” Armanda finished her sentence, “I see him in the city, he’s walking ahead of me, quite fast, given the way he is, for Father was always someone who would step aside politely rather than get into a showdown about who-has-the-right-of-way-on-this-sidewalk, but now he’s making a path for himself across the Vijzelgracht by dint of staring grimly straight ahead, or so I guess, and he comes to the Rokin, then the dam, then he goes all the way down the Damrak as far as the main station, which he goes into by the front entrance, then out again on the other side, and then on the Ruijterkade, quite by chance, as far as I can tell, he meets a big, untidy-looking woman, who speaks to him, to Father’s initial embarrassment, I think, but then it’s as if she’s given him a password, she suddenly gets this really friendly smile out of him and they have a cheery conversation for a good ten minutes. So, after they shake hands and say good-bye, part of me wants to catch up with him and say, Hello, Father! but another part of me is inclined, given how arbitrary the whole story seems, to just watch where this suddenly new and resurrected father of mine goes on these private walks of his, so I follow him and see him, a minute later, pushing open the door—”
She had reached the ticket desk. The girl looked up. Armanda said over her left shoulder, searching for the Viking, who was nowhere to be seen: “—to the tavern, the one on the corner, you know, it’s all done up to look old, and they still scatter sand on the floor.”
The girl, hand ready on the till, asked: “For the exhibition or just for the museum?”
“Just The Night Watch.”
While the girl entered the price of the ticket, Armanda felt a surge of ugly obstinacy. It was as if the conversation she had had with her father shortly before his second death were now jabbing her in the side. She had gone into De Laatste Stuiver. He had seen her at once, and although she too had immediately spotted him at the window, in front of a backdrop of gray houses (it was about to start raining), she looked around the room at first, as if hesitating. Fine, they were both soon sitting in front of a drink, and her father was telling her wasn’t it extraordinary, he’d just run into one of his old patients for the nth time, who was feeling great and had charmingly reminded him about the prescription he had written for her fifteen or twenty years before.
“Aha, and?” she’d asked, as someone was already bringing them another round, and she was thinking: who knows, maybe the way he walks and looks and talks and thinks these days reflects his real self? So? Isn’t it time I recognize this second-class father as simply my father?
He had said he’d finally worked out the meaning of a day in the life of a man.
“And what is it?” she had pushed him.
Like a bird, he took a sip from his glass with a movement that was rather extravagant for someone in his condition. When he looked up, he began evasively: “You know, this patient, who’s been following my orders to swallow a modest daily dose of twenty milligrams of dipyridamole for the last twelve years—”
She’d interrupted him.
“Father, you were going to say something else! Some definition of the core of daily life, something nice about how small it is, something logical about this horribly and yet pleasingly sticky coating on our everyday routine, and I really want to hear it from you!”
Then he had stared at the ceiling and started to talk about eating food out of the garbage, about using a black bolt gun to stun cows so that they collapse without making a sound, about sitting in a chair on rainy days watching the windows in the house across the road steam up….
Armanda stared at the cashier as if in a trance. The girl was holding out her ticket.
She said, “Absolute nonsense! Of course I knew it was Father Number Two talking!”
“What are you talking about?” asked the girl suspiciously. “Please pay. You’re holding up the entire queue.”
Short pause, in which nothing happened. Oh, that’s how traffic jams start, thought Armanda as she dug around in her purse for a two-and-a-half-guilder coin. Then she went up the stone staircase, followed a sign with an arrow, and soon was in front of the enormous canvas that took up the entire back wall of a rectangular room full of seventeenth-century masterpieces.
“Dear God!” she murmured, astounded by the scale of the painting.
Next to her was an old lady, small but dignified, with gray hair wound in plaits around her head and horn-rimmed glasses perched on her little mouse face. A former presser from one of the oldest cleaning establishments here in the city, as she learned, after they had struck up a conversation; she would have guessed an old baroness. Still possessed by the need to tell her story, she gave the other woman a pregnant look and then turned back to The Night Watch.
“Incredible figures, aren’t they?” she said. “Just look at the way they stand together so proudly and joyfully! In a moment they’re going to exercise and shoot. Isn’t it sickening what’s become of Amsterdammers since then?”
“Oh yes,” said the old lady in a voice like a little silver dinner bell. “There are moments that come over you like a cloud of hot steam and then vanish again, when you think, What kind of a city is this now, so devoid of really rebellious ideas or even a hint of class warfare.” She snapped her fingers and pushed her glasses higher up on her nose. “But this painting isn’t about Banning Cocq and his men, it’s about that little fleck of light, that bizarre child pushing her way up out of the darkness.”
“Shall we sit down for a moment?” Armanda proposed.
A few minutes later she and the old lady were on a blue velvet bench right in front of the enormous canvas, agreeing that there was nothing this city needed more than The Night Watch. And in the same breath Armanda had kept talking about what was weighing on her heart: “Twice! Imagine! And the second time, mind you, he was all pink and fat!”
They stared at each other searchingly. “For my mother,” Armanda continued a little less agitatedly, “it was much easier to keep seeing this resurrected husband as the same man she’d loved before. Maybe because she’s a more generous person than I am, that could be, or maybe because she had been breathing together with him every night in the dark. That would have maintained some sort of relationship even if, let’s say, he’d turned into a dog. But I’m pretty sure of one thing: she felt as uneasy as I did. And this unease of hers, like mine, didn’t just spring directly from the change in all these externals, because when you look at it, the change wasn’t really that large. It didn’t come from him getting up at the crack of dawn, it didn’t come from his loud ‘good morning’ over an extended breakfast, or his new brand of aftershave, or his switch to paper handkerchiefs, or the way he turned up the corners of his lips when he laughed; he got fat so quickly, started buying dreadful new suits without consulting her, but he remained a very lovable man, really, and a well-meaning husband, bought flowers on Saturdays, went with her to visit relatives and friends, accompanied her to the theater, where he simply forgot that she was used to him helping her into her coat in the cloakroom.”
The old lady cleared her throat and stood up, smiling politely. Armanda stayed sitting.
“Oh God, no! All that wouldn’t have bothered us at all. But how can I explain to you, it was his godforsaken uninvolvement in everything. Sitting in the corner full of energy and all alert, arms and legs spread, his hiking shoes still on his feet, while Mother and I were in the same room and hadn’t the slightest connection to whatever was going on inside him!”
Unbothered by the fact that the lady had left, Armanda stared at The Night Watch. She and the great canvas, it seemed to her, were both on the same level. But after a quarter of an hour she’d had enough. I’ll buy a couple of pretty postcards, she thought, feeling idiotic because what she really meant was: I’ve got lots more to tell!
In the museum shop she saw a familiar figure.
“Betsy!”
Why should she doubt the one real reason why her friend and ex-sister-in-law had come? Betsy turned round, holding the card she had just taken out of the rack. (The Jewish Bride, Armanda saw at once, flashing on the unconnected thought that Betsy was named Rebecca after her grandmother Vaz Dias.) They greeted each other affectionately. “Shall we do something?” “Do you have time?”
The museum cafeteria was a space as large as a church, and at this time of day no sunlight came through the painted glass windows. They ordered coffee and began to talk, what about was irrelevant, they knew almost everything about each other. Betsy and Leo’s twin sons, Wim and Stijn, were students and thank God they still came home with bags of dirty laundry at age twenty-three. The mathematics teacher, Cees, was still in Armanda’s life, but she didn’t want this fair-weather friend to move in with her. Sjoerd had got married again in 1978, he was working in a high-level job with Labouchère in Paris and was always on the phone to his beloved half sister about this or that. Violet was doing an internship at a bank in London; Allan, who lived in an extremely comfortable squat, was getting more simple-minded by the day, and Nadja had been living for years now with a sculptor.
That left the real end of Father Brouwer.
If Jacob had been at home more often, Betsy and Armanda wondered, would he have seen that Father, who was now refusing medical supervision, was going downhill again despite how well he looked? Perhaps, but Jacob, the doctor without borders, as the family called him, had been sitting in some godforsaken corner of the world for almost a year, and barely made it to the funeral. Okay, Armanda said now, but shouldn’t she have seen it as a warning that in the last weeks he kept calling her Lidy?
She lowered her head in thought, and wondered, “As if the person he really wanted to remind was himself …”
“Dammit,” said Betsy, “he’d forgotten her, the first time he died.”
“Yes, as if in his heart she’d ceased to exist for him who knows how long ago. None of us noticed at the time. It was all so peaceful. I can remember thinking: How lovely to end your innings that way, so friendly, so nice, so serious. And a last heartfelt word for each of us. But yes, one name was explicitly left out….”
Armanda and Betsy looked sadly and quietly at the cups on the table in front of them. There had been nobody at the next one, at deathbed number two. So it was inevitable that everyone would start imagining all sorts of things, whether they were applicable or not.
And it hadn’t been a deathbed but a half-worn-out Bukhara rug on a herringbone parquet floor. Jan Brouwer was lying next to his desk, in the undisturbed consulting room on the first floor, when his wife found him, after calling and searching, at around four o’clock on the twentieth of October, 1980. The light in his eyes was already gone, but because of the bizarre course of events in the last year, she couldn’t believe it without further checking. She telephoned Doctor Goudriaan at once, couldn’t reach him, and called Armanda. Armanda had knelt down and was looking at the worried expression on her father’s face, with its eyes still open, making him look as if he were objecting to something, when the doctor on call came into the room. His rapid examination was no more than a ritual, an answer for wife and daughter.
“God, we were in such a state,” said Armanda. “I remember the two of us kept asking in unison: So? What do you think? Shouldn’t you call an ambulance? Shouldn’t we lift him onto the sofa? Couldn’t you do CPR right now?”
The mat of reeds sailed on. Hocke lay pressed tight against her back and hips. He had wrapped his left arm over her body and stretched his right arm next to hers and up over her head. She had let go of the stalks to twine her fingers into his. Lovers lie like that. The heavy black sleeve of her coat was pushed up a bit. The storm raged on unchanged, with wind gusts of seventy-five miles an hour over the water; it was simply shifting a little from northwest to northeast. The moon had reappeared with a bluish cast that negates all sense of depth and volume and gives everything a particular visibility, so that space itself acquires a perspective all its own, in defiance of all normally accepted theories. Lidy’s wrist, as bony as a child’s, trailed in a witch’s cauldron of sheer brute force. She had forgotten what a house is, or a marriage, or a family — that kind of thing is quick to go.
Lying in a reed bed engenders a sense of earth, of land, even despite the wetness. But this part of the landscape was moving, and moving with some speed, in a southeasterly direction, which didn’t mean much to Lidy anymore, as she had lost all idea of land. For the space in which she found herself alive, depleted and exhausted, but nonetheless alive, was an enormous unknown. The whole system — focal point, outlines, verticals — was heaving and surging in the uproar. Moon, clouds, and stars, which she had always believed belonged in the firmament, came up at strange angles out of what had become a wild waterscape to right or left. Yet her heart beat on, without anything she could have described as a fear of death. Her fingers held tight to Hocke’s. She had not forgotten what it is to want to live.
An hour passed in this fashion. Dusk. From time to time another squall of snow. About three feet away from her, another figure was lying in the flattened reeds. Gerarda Hocke. Lidy wasn’t clear, nor was she even wondering, if the old woman was still among the living.
The hunchbacked boy had been gone from them for quite a while now. When they lost him, it had been pitch dark. The section of floorboards they had been sitting on found itself above the dead-end street of Paardeweg near Nieuwekerl, a village in the process at that very moment of crumbling street by street. The floor planks went shooting over a flooded network of ditches, eddies, and little bridges, which together were causing an angular momentum, not that powerful in and of itself but wide-reaching. The shaking of the raft doubled and redoubled, because there was no letup. Visibility was almost zero. Yet as Cornelius Jaeger rolled off the raft, Lidy saw it, and saw for the first time that the child was in fear. Eyes are fine lenses, they don’t just capture light, they also emit it. As the boy lost his grip on the planks, he sent up a wordless plea for help with every ounce of will left in him. Lidy saw a pair of shiny green eyes, little facets, flat not curved, that contained nothing in the world that could be described as a look or an expression, just simply a signal that read Mayday, help … and indeed she literally flung herself forward.
Save him? Her? Action? To weigh this in a fraction of a second, in the belief that she was responsible for the suffering of the little hunchback? Not a moment later, she herself was thrown from the saddle.
Half water, half land. A hybrid of coastal vegetation that came from a bay on the north side of the polder of Sirjansland, part of which bordered the Grevelingen. The mat of reeds had already come an unimaginably long way. Lifted up and then helpfully supported by the flood, this mere line in the air had traveled ten miles to give three drowning people, Hocke, his mother, and Lidy, the feeling that they were crawling onto land. There is no need to remind anyone half drowned what that is. Land means territory, something in principle you can stretch out on. Even when it is saturated with sea and river water and the ever-thinning layer of silt. Formed by the North Sea, really no longer being held together by the roots underneath, you can drag yourself onto it, using your knees to work your way up, and feel you have reached dry ground. The old woman was more or less thrown onto it by a wave. Hocke and Lidy had to search for each other amid the floating wreckage of the storm, clutching then losing each other again among the cartons, branches, chests, sacks of potatoes, clothes, corpses, and bottles and finally just hoping for the best. The false island of reeds was still roughly seven feet by ten as it continued its journey. Lidy, very sleepy now, closed her eyes. The wind roared in her eardrums, the snow tasted of salt. Barely conscious, she knew that she and Hocke, wrapped in thick wet layers of fabric, made a single body. God, they were saved!
That had been an hour ago. But what is an hour when one is humbly embarked on the road to infinity? From now on, time, an element that is supposed to “pass,” would be absolutely worthless to both of them. A pair of lovers. Enclosed by sky and sea. Two beautiful people, in fact. Each potentially widowed from the first moment they met. As a boy, Izak Hocke had always assumed that when the time came he would marry his great love. Thereafter he remained a bachelor for years. Was there such a girl anywhere? Lidy, on the other hand, had been madly in love two or three times, when her impatience — and, naturally, her ovulation — made a decision one day at the end of February 1950. What are they doing here, body against body? Lidy, a tall white child of the city underneath her dark clothes, and Hocke, a farmer?
They don’t sleep, they’re at least half-awake. He lies there, his nose in the hair of the last woman of his life. The wind is like a sword slicing over their heads, there is no question of any caresses between them. But does that imply the most cold and cynical way a man and a woman can be with each other, with a total lack of “I love you”? Their bed of reeds is beginning to calve dangerously, particularly on Hocke’s side. Another moment or two, and they will interrupt their sentimental journey without much ceremony and go their separate ways. Lidy felt him from time to time pressed close against her back, and then for a time she wouldn’t feel him at all. Holding fast to his will to live, nourishing herself on it, continuing to do so whether the end of days had arrived or not. Lidy kept her fingers interlaced with his; cramped with cold, there was nothing else she could do.
They should have stayed like that. As if someone had set a glass bell over the two of them and arranged things so that ordinary time ceased to exist underneath. The two bodies bedded in the reeds no longer looked like those of ordinary mortals. Rather, they resembled sleepers in a fairy tale, in suspended animation, sleeping on in their muddy, ooze-filled clothes, dreaming on, existing in a tempo all their own. Later, weary of this pathos that seemed already carved on a tombstone, they would stumble into time again. Or would they?
Meanwhile, time itself was not going to be stopped. Where there’s time, there are tides; it was almost ten o’clock and this one was already moving fast. That the mat of reeds came apart, and the section that Izak Hocke was lying on was too fragile to stay afloat in the power of the undertow, was attributable, first and foremost, to the moon, which dictates a timetable of six hours of rising water and six hours of sinking. Hocke loosed his fingers from hers. He needed them in order to cling onto something else. It’s ebb tide. Low water, a good thing, one would think, but in this case not. The water begins to try to find its way back to the sea through the opening in the dike. The flood turns and twists but is caught by the storm, which isn’t running out of time, and keeps on blowing with a relentlessness unknown to anyone who has lived here even since childhood; the water goes on being replenished from the north and continues to pile up.
The small portion of the mat of reeds broke off and sank. Hocke drowned. He swam a few strokes, but very rapidly his muscles became too cold.
She didn’t notice. As the reed island began to rock like crazy, she had thrown herself about and rolled away, because her inner command to herself was: Survive. She was caught and held by a soft figure crouched down like a hare, but still recognizable in the faint moonlight: the old woman. Who was looking over Lidy’s shoulder with terrible concentration in her eyes. Oh God, had she now risen again as one star in another constellation of two? Each incomplete without the other. Daughter, look, over there in front of that backdrop of hell, your mother. Sunday evening, a quarter past eleven: Gerarda Hocke and Lidy Blaauw found themselves in a swirling current moving toward something that would later be called “the hole of Ouwerkerk,” one of the largest breaches in what was originally the eighteen-foot-high dike of Oosterschelde.
They both felt it. Their mat was breaking up and more water was coming through on every side. As they were lifted on the crest of a wave and banged against a V-shaped double pylon reinforced by a crossbeam, the two women were immediately of one mind as to tactics. Up on their knees, they threw their arms around the rock-solid structure. In that moment, as the wave retreated again, they were able to pull themselves onto the crossbeam, where they could sit, suddenly a good three feet above the grip of the water. Thin cords whipped their faces. In the last moonlight that would shine through tonight, they saw that these were made of wire, torn telephone or electric cables. Lidy grabbed for them, wound them round the old woman’s waist and shoulders, and tied her fast. The next hours reduced her to a creature that could only fight against sleep, struggling to keep her eyes open regardless of the utter darkness all around them.
Did she go to sleep? Or simply remove herself for a moment from the uncertainties of the present as a way of making the best of her situation? Without being able to remember them, she was completely in the spell of the hours that passed, filled with snatches of the howling songs of the wind. Until, suddenly coming back to life, she felt the water slopping over her knees. The tide and the weather were running their course and the next one was coming in.
Lidy managed to untie the old woman in the dark. Standing on the crossbeam, they both felt the water, with a temperature of 36 to 37 degrees Fahrenheit, come creeping up over their knees and hips. Lidy wasn’t sure whether the high-pitched, mad singing that came from her right from time to time was real. The melodies, some familiar, some not, seemed intended to fix certain facts in her mind: the torso in her arms was going slack. Gerarda Hocke had lost the power to fight. But before she slid downward, she did manage to push two small objects into the other woman’s hand. Lidy’s fingers recognized the gold headdress clips. She shoved them into a coat pocket and realized that the old woman was no longer there. It would have been around three thirty in the morning when among all the flotsam and jetsam a door came sweeping past, within reach. Lidy was standing up to her shoulders in water, and she had to jump. In the attic of a farmhouse about to collapse, about a hundred yards away, a large family was still singing with all their might.
Lidy had not been particularly religiously brought up, but she loved songs, the more melancholy the better. So she carried the melodies of the psalms quite well in her head, and the words too, even if in fragments, and these words, as is often the case with songs too, when combined with the notes, come across as totally real, indeed believable. The family in the farmhouse had been singing psalms for hours, loudly, and intent on getting the words absolutely right. They were doomed, they probably knew as much, but were clinging to something beautiful, which might or might not be meaningless, but which they had built into their lives as a Given, to prevent themselves from being reduced to common clay. Lidy had managed to keep holding the dying old woman tight for a long time. During this interval, appropriately, given what was happening to the two of them, what had been echoing over in their direction, perversely but comfortingly, was “For he saves thee from the bird catcher’s net…. The days of man are but grass … take up Thy shield and Thy weapons….” The psalms of David, in the rhyming translations sanctioned in the eighteenth century by the ministers of Friesland, Gelderland, Zuid-Holland, Nord-Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Overijssel, and Drenthe.
So now she was on the door. A heavy, precious front door carried her along stretched out on her stomach. Monday had arrived some time ago. Monday morning, the second of February, 1953, between half past three and half past five. She kept her eyes open. She felt clear headed, focused, and full of memories. What does “forever” mean? Lidy remembered and would for the rest of her life remember the place where she was suddenly left totally to her own devices: an invisible place, although one with a faint blue glow circled by snatches of music that rose above the wind and came to her with the texts that had been sung so often in the course of time that they had become independent entities conveying no more than the quintessence of eternal longing.
It isn’t far from the area around Ouwerkerk to the Oosterschelde. Nonetheless it took Lidy about an hour. The raft kept bumping into things, spun around, was carried westward, then east, or came up against some passing object, a chunk of a barn, a sluicekeeper’s hut, a telephone pole, that came out of the black nothingness and disappeared back into it again. None of it bothered her. She seemed quite patient as she went into the last part of the night.
Thus it was that everything she still experienced was accompanied by the texts and nourished by them, as they echoed and reechoed in her head. “Take up Thy shield and Thy weapons …” Defiantly, shrilly sung verses that in no way decreased the howling of the wind, God knows, but acted as a commentary on it. A projectile slammed into her leg, she flinched in shock, but it didn’t really hurt. Once she got a brief but absolutely clear look at the overpowered landscape around her, the dikes heaved this way and that, the remains of farmhouses from which loud cries for help still came here and there. Then she had to reach wildly for whatever was at hand.
She was there. A kind of waterfall was pulling the door downward, but miracle of miracles, she didn’t fall underneath. The breach in the dike at Ouwerkerk was so huge that it could no longer be called a breach, there was simply no dike left. Half past six. The flood tide was still high, and the storm was still relentlessly driving the water from the north. Lidy lay half on her left side, her face on one arm, her legs spread, her feet turned to the side. Her little boat, with neither engine nor oars, obeying the current and the wind, was on direct course for the Oosterschelde, which leads straight into the North Sea. She was trembling uncontrollably, long past the point now where she could ask herself who she was, but still saying softly in her heart: “Here. I’m here!”
It was one of those suddenly very cold December mornings that transport a country into a state of excitement, disbelief, good feelings. The weather reports for the beginning of the week had used words like “dry,” “overcast,” “mild,” and had spoken of a moderate wind out of the southeast. The idea that the day begins with frozen water pipes and ice blooming on the windows of your car, which refuses to start, is therefore pretty far-fetched. Nadja and Armanda were in the train going from Amsterdam to Goes by way of Rotterdam and Bergen op Zoom. The rush hour was over, and the carriage wasn’t that full. They sat in facing window seats, looking out at the patches of white and the quiet sky, an optical phenomenon that struck them both as having a remarkable affinity with the purpose of their journey. A funeral, but not of anything that could be understood as a dead person or even a dead body. After more than thirty years in silt, what remains of a human body is little more than some bones, two jaws, a skull. Armanda and Nadja stared out at the thin, fresh layer of snow, the result of a trough of pressure that had moved southward over the North Sea during the night, and let their conversation lapse for a while. Since Monday of the previous week they had known that Lidy — maybe — had been found.
Their shocking return to her trail, long abandoned, totally lost, had begun a month before. On the aforementioned Monday afternoon, Armanda had received a call from a representative of the local police, who asked her if he was speaking to Mrs. Brouwer. Within the hour a man in street clothes, with soft gray eyes and a sailor’s beard, was sitting at her table. He informed her, wanted at least to give her the information, that they had first gone looking for Mr. Blaauw, then for the Brouwer family, who had once lived on Sarphati Park, but then quickly switched to the question that was burning in her eyes. Lidy Blaauw-Brouwer. Indeed. You would like me to tell you where?
A short silence. Another glance. In the mud near the Schelphoek, the construction site behind the secondary dike on the northwest bank of the Oosterschelde, right near where one of the three great river channels, the Hammen, drains into the estuary and where they’ve been building the gigantic flood barriers for years now—
She interrupted him. “How …”
He waited while she bent down to scratch a bone in her foot, then stared up at him, motionless.
“How is that possible?”
“You’re right,” he’d replied. “On the face of it, it’s impossible.” He seemed to be searching for the facts. “Totally impossible, so I’ve heard.”
She leaned over the edge of the table, as if taking a first step toward this barely credible possibility, and waited. A backhoe was the first detail that she could get hold of, and then she had a mental image of the practical little Bobcat which a skilled operator can maneuver with real speed and agility. It had been in the middle of the previous month, one afternoon around five. But isn’t it dark by then? It had been getting dark. And the skull that had been dug up had been stained very dark by the earth it had been in, all that silt and heavy clay and peat, too.
Her sister, if indeed it was her sister, must …
She made a gesture. A moment please.
“At five o’clock there’s nobody still working on a building site, surely?”
The plainclothes policeman had looked at her thoughtfully, brought up short by her question, then he’d gone back to talking about the back hoe operator. Who had summoned a coworker still running around on the mudflats, the eerie area at the mouth of the Oosterschelde, dug up and dug over for years now as they tried first one method, then another, to effectively block the arm of the sea. They used scoops to collect a few skeletal fragments, which they laid out together in the open air. Their workday was over, but they managed to find a construction foreman still in a trailer with a telephone. Shortly before total darkness fell, the national police came and put all the parts in a plastic sack and took them away, including a small, eroded piece of metal, some kind of hinge or spiral, possibly a clue, which had evidently, as was visible in the flashlit photo, been lying there too.
Yes. Exactly. Pause. Mutual appraisal. Then Armanda watched as the policeman removed a piece of paper from the little portfolio he had set down on the table as soon as he arrived. He unfolded it and pushed it between them in such a way that both of them could have read it if they so chose. The attorney general, Armanda understood, twisting her head sideways to stare at the sheet, which appeared to be a form letter, a typed report or some such, had given his authorization for the transportation of the body parts. Authorization, aha. Her eyes fixed on the paragraphs of type, she withdrew herself somewhat from a situation that on the one hand spoke of an end to a great and apparently insoluble riddle — whatever confusion might accompany it — and, on the other, phrases like “the judicial laboratory in Rijswijk, that usually requested Leiden’s help in the business of attempting to make reliable identifications.” She didn’t look up again till her visitor said something that seemed to connect with the known world.
“Your sister, if it is indeed your sister, must have been buried in a layer of mud very quickly after she was washed ashore.”
“Yes?”
Then came explanations to clarify that not one single person missing from 1953 had been found in the last ten, no, twenty years. “It’s a real miracle, lady,” hard to imagine just how fast a body disintegrates in water, particularly seawater, till there’s absolute nothing left. “Five, six months at the most,” depending on the factors involved. Armanda, who was maintaining an air of great interest but couldn’t keep up with the dizzying speed with which thirty years were reduced to zero in a single blow, heard phrases like “low or high water temperatures,” “polluted water,” “crabs and crayfish,” and “ships’ propellers.” There was no doubt that it was thanks to the mud and its capacity for preservation that so much of “your sister, possibly” had survived.
But not enough.
“Can you give me a photo of her to take with me?”
The policeman asked this after he had made a dome of his fingers before setting his hand down over the paper on the desk. Based entirely on the long bones and the pelvis, the hand went on, Leiden had decided that what was involved here was a female, twenty to twenty-five years old, height approximately five foot ten, probable date of death, 1953, since the cartilage had stopped thickening. Armanda was on her feet. Yes, just a moment, please … yes, a photo! A photo they could lay on those dark, cold long bones and that pelvis that are such good indicators of probable age! And wasn’t it high time she should offer her guest a cup of tea?
She was already at the door when the policeman gave her one more instruction. It had to be a photo of Lidy laughing.
“Laughing,” she said. “Yes, of course!”
Then she thought, Why?
The train was approaching Rotterdam. Nadja and Armanda got up, like most of the other passengers, put on their coats and gloves, and waited with their bags on their laps until the rattling over the points had ceased. On the platform, they were surprised all over again by the cold. They went to the departures board and saw that the express train to Vlissingen must already be standing at platform 10.
“So they couldn’t say for sure,” Nadja began, after they’d found an empty compartment at the back of the train and shut the door.
Words. Which gave them a certain sense of looking-things-straight-in-the-eye. The dubious identity of this dead person of theirs. Which not even the teeth in the photo of the young woman with the radiant laugh could change.
“So what did he actually say yesterday?” asked Nadja.
“The day before yesterday,” said Armanda. Nadja nodded. “The day before yesterday, I went to”—she hesitated—“to collect the photo, for today.”
This could be true. She saw Nadja nod again and nodded herself. She had gone to the police laboratory in Rijswijk to collect the photo that she was going to put secretly, even illegally in the eyes of officialdom, into the coffin with Lidy’s bones or the bones of some twenty-to twenty-five-year-old farmer’s wife from Zeeland. What a terrific idea, she thought, if she got the opportunity! In reality, she had done nothing two days ago other than speak to the pathologist. Why? Because. His expert report, even after seeing the photo, had remained on balance that “we cannot come to any definite conclusion.”
“Oh, it was all so complicated. He said the process of ossification of the bone …”
They looked up — what did it mean? The door opened. New passengers were looking for seats, even though the train had been moving for some minutes. One was a little gray lady who sat down in the corner by the aisle, after slipping out from under the arm of the other person, a tall man who was loud in more ways than one.
“So, people,” he said, rubbing his hands, after hanging up his coat, “the only problem we have left is when are they going to come round with the coffee?”
The gregariousness of a train trip in winter. The soft seats, and everything outside white, gray, cold. The little woman in the corner stared straight ahead like a resigned animal, but her companion was a man of alarming charisma. Within a quarter of an hour, before Dordrecht, even, Nadja and Armanda knew that he was an expert in hydrodynamics, that he worked with the authorities in “delta services,” that he was getting out at Rilland-Bath, and all this interested them in a certain sense. Up to Zeeland, in the beat of the rattling click-clack of the train. Nothing there, none of it, is the way it was before the flood, said the hydrodynamics expert, take a good look as soon as we pass Bergen op Zoom. Were you there this summer? No. Oh, the whole country has made incredible profits from it in the last years. Acre after acre of landholdings, all looking exactly the same, all the way to the horizon, yes, dammit, and in the middle of each a brand-new farm, freestanding barns, drainage ditches in the distance straight as a die, roads surfaced with asphalt even out on the polders, a system of canals that reaches into every corner, and none of it has cost the province more than a cent. Pigs in the built-up area? Not one to be seen anymore!
He stopped talking and glanced at the little old woman in the corner, as if by accident, but she sat up and reacted.
“There once were beautiful old mulberry trees on Schouwen.”
Spoken quietly, but with a remarkable solemnity that irritated the hydrodynamics man.
“Oh, be quiet! Nature, is it? Do you think people have no eyes to see, these days?” And he started talking about how wonderful the delta works were, and their beauty, the guts it had taken to build them, and all the money it had cost.
Armanda, seeing that Nadja was maintaining eye contact with the man, turned back to the window. A pale sun was standing twenty degrees above the southeastern horizon, with the train cutting through the winter landscape on a parallel track. Barns standing out against the snow. Branches trimmed. Shrouded in the typical frosty air that seemed to come streaming right into the compartment. Her mind was so clear that the conversation between Nadja and the hydrodynamics expert transmitted itself directly into her thoughts without troubling her. After about twenty minutes the rails curved westward at an almost ninety-degree angle. The train passed the Schelde-Rhein canal bridge and entered the land where Lidy had disappeared. A cold storage locker, a mortuary.
“Caissons with steel bars in all three sluice openings, cost per caisson eight hundred forty million guilders, construction time four years!”
“Wow.”
“Then the commission had another thought about putting barriers in the Roompot eddy, and quays that the water can wash right over and feed into the Schaar and the Hammen. Cost: a billion!”
Yes, Armanda thought, at the end of the day, everything in this country is now linked forever to Lidy’s epic.
The poor heroine. And dear God, is it actually her, finally, in the rosewood coffin Nadja and I ordered, in which — we felt it was the right thing — we also had them put that little metal thing that was brought up into the light of day along with the bones. When they examined it, it turned out to have been plated originally with twenty-four-carat gold. Does it belong? or … It could just have been lying in the earth there by total chance, with no connection, she’d asked them this in Rijswijk. Right, who could know such a thing? And the pin, which was part of the traditional costume of Noord-Beveland or Schouwen, remained, in a formal sense, an element in the Lidy Problem: to be identified or not to be identified? If only the teeth had been—
“… twenty-six gigantic buttresses filled with an average of eight thousand cubic yards of cement. You should be thinking the Egyptian pyramids!”
— more complete!
Now she was staring out of the window the same way she’d once, when she was young, stared into the mirror. The goal of her journey was no longer visible. The landscape, Lidy’s property, spread out and came closer and closer until it no longer consisted of anything but a gray background. Perfect for the illusion or vision that had haunted her regularly for half her life now: Lidy conscientiously unscrewing the cap on a little bottle of whitener and using the brush attached to the underside of the cap to whiten her tennis shoes, that are standing on a newspaper on the table in front of the high window. Location of the action is some grand house with flowering plasterwork on the ceiling, not number 77 and not number 36 but very similar. There’s a dog sitting on the floor. It’s snowing on the other side of the window. She herself, Armanda, is also present, though only in the form of a sense of unease, an extreme anxiety that now, at this moment of her journey, was so intense that as everything outside the window reverted to normal and became visible again, the horizon with its red misty glow, the telephone poles, the fences and chimneys, all looked to her like parts of some formula that she need only simplify in order to arrive at zero. Some things had never taken place. An entire family history really could correct itself if she only made the effort. She’s the one, not Lidy, who begs her father for the car and sets off on a journey to Zierikzee … logical, fate’s original intention. Why tease this beast so dangerously with a little plan, a little prank? The engine was slowing. A bell rang somewhere.
The hydrodynamics expert was already buttoning his coat. He stretched out his sturdy arms, took his traveling bag from the rack, and said good-bye. The door to the compartment banged shut, then was immediately pushed open again.
“The sluice here in the canal near Bath. On your way back, get off the train for a few minutes. The water falls freely, there’s no pump involved, fantastic sight. No time? Why? Why? Well, as you wish!”
Armanda said good-bye to him again. Nadja rested her head on her folded arms on the little table by the window, eyes closed. Five minutes later the train stopped in Kruiningen, and even the little woman left her corner of the compartment.
The train continued slowly on its way.
Then, in a velvet stillness caused by a frozen overhead cable, it came to a halt in the middle of what were either meadows or fields. Armanda and Nadja, who’d lit up cigarettes, stared at each other. Pray God we get there in time. How much longer is it going to take? Then they talked about the state of Lidy’s teeth. Twelve fillings. Amalgam. Single surface, two surfaces, and one with three surfaces in first molar, upper left, and another in first molar, upper right. An average set of teeth, very well taken care of, no X-rays ever required.
“Terrible shame,” said Armanda. “He said X-rays would have been the one thing that would have made it still possible to …” She looked rather helplessly at Nadja.
“A classification,” said Nadja, remembering the word from a phone conversation she’d had with Armanda a few days previously. The forensic anthropologist had tried to effect a classification, which is to say, a scientifically provable relation between the bodily remains found in the mud, which were identified for now only with a number, and a real person with a first and last name. The latter was already supplied with a whole series of distinguishing characteristics: sex, approximate age, anatomical build, all investigated meantime and had light shed on them. The approximate date of death together with the location of the remains had naturally led automatically to the Red Cross list of thirty years ago, which still showed the names of 839 missing persons.
“Mama,” said Nadja.
“Yes?”
“Do you really think it’s her?”
Armanda, suddenly deeply upset, looked at her wrist, then at her watch.
“I’ve dreamed about it for two nights now,” Nadja went on, “very intense, very insistent dreams, that it’s the other one, that missing farmer’s wife from … from?”
“Burgh,” said Armanda, in a murmur, because Burgh no longer seemed relevant to her. Having received the same details from the Red Cross, the family there had refused to accept the corpse, rejecting it on the grounds of inadequate facts and in particular because of the jewelry, which had never been part of their traditional costume.
“But it could have turned up in the ground there totally by chance, with no other connection!” Armanda had held this up as a possibility once again on her visit to Rijswijk, eliciting a rather pleading look from the pathologist who was talking to her and answering her questions.
A man of about fifty. Sitting at a desk, tree outside the window. He acknowledged her with a smile, and then stayed with the results of the expert report. The unknown woman and the missing woman could be one and the same; but with certainty — no. Absolutely not.
Armanda had looked down to see the photo of Lidy laughing ante-mortem on the desk. She had reached out her hand and asked what they’d hoped to achieve with the picture. A definitive conclusion, she was told, to the accompaniment of a look that was shattering in its warmheartedness and was maintained for the duration of the discussion that followed. The unknown victim’s teeth were, as he believed she knew, very incomplete, but the alveoli had shown how the teeth had originally been positioned.
She had propped an elbow on the desk and stared at the doctor with her fist against her nose.
“If for example the photo had shown that there was a space between her front teeth, we would have been able to say for sure it isn’t her.”
At this point she’d had a coughing fit, and the doctor had fetched her a glass of water. From this moment on, his appearance merged in her memory with that of the policeman who had come to her house, honest gray eyes, sailor’s beard trimmed short. When she stopped coughing, she had asked, possibly with the help of the tears in her eyes, how drowning actually happens, and how bad it is. She learned in the course of a very long conversation that there are different ways of drowning, in some of which inhaling water is involved, but certainly not always, that if water is inhaled, it doesn’t mean there’s difficulty breathing, because, for example, the victim may already be unconscious, and most important, when there is severe loss of body heat, which is to be assumed in this case, actual death is preceded by suspended animation, a form of slumber that can last for some time and in the course of which the process of metabolism in the brain slows down almost to zero.
So, Armanda asked, is it a peaceful death?
“Yes. Absolutely peaceful.”
The bus that went to Zierikzee by way of the mile-long Zeeland Bridge carried only a handful of passengers. Up front was a group of lounging youths who had left school early, and at the back were the two women who had got in at the train station at Goes, on their way to a burial in Ouwerkerk that had required them to get a special dispensation from the attorney general. Human remains, if discovered in Westerschouwen, must also be buried in Westerschouwen in the absence of verifiable relatives. It’s a requirement of the law regarding burials, because such cases make the local mayor responsible for the costs. The two women sat close together and silent, looking out of the window. They were each wearing a dark coat with a colorful shawl. Despite the first signs of plumpness, the elder of the two, with her loose dark brown hair and a fringe, still looked quite young. The age difference between her and the other one, red-haired, fine-boned, and very pale, didn’t seem that great. Yet the two of them were surrounded with the aura of indefinable calm of a mother and daughter who knew that their lives, in whatever fashion, are intertwined.
Armanda and Nadja, crossing the Oosterschelde.
It was half past one in the afternoon, and the winter sun was casting an almost colorless light on the water, which was still open, still a direct conduit to the North Sea. In two years’ time the work on the flood defenses in the estuary of this arm of the sea would finally be finished. Linked metal barriers of extraordinary dimensions could then be let down in those rare instances when the height of the water beyond exceeded the level on the depth gauge that triggered the alarm; this would protect the land, which needed the flow of the tides, and block it off briefly from the sea. Armanda and Nadja looked at the expanse of water shining glassily in a framework of nothingness. They were fascinated.
“Remember we should buy flowers in Zierikzee,” said Nadja. “We certainly won’t find any in Ouwerkerk.”
The bus stopped in the center of Zierikzee, where the shops were still closed for midday. Armanda and Nadja ate a snack in a café while keeping an eye on the plants in the shop window on the other side of the street.
“We’ll make it,” said Armanda.
They had agreed with the undertaker that they would be there at the cemetery when the hearse arrived at three o’clock with the coffin.
“Look, they’re opening,” said Nadja, and stopped eating.
There weren’t many fresh flowers in weather like this. Armanda and Nadja bought chrysanthemums and had some twigs of eucalyptus and sprays of evergreens tucked in with them, rather reminiscent of Christmas.
“Might we perhaps make a quick call for a taxi?” Armanda asked the shop owner.
They drove out of town in the back of the taxi, the flowers on their knees. Here too the fields stretched away, all at perfect right angles to the horizon. The trees lining the road were still small. They looked at them, dreaming of the truth and pondering what it meant. Armanda was conscious that Nadja, who was leaning against her, viewed the entire enterprise as a kind of serious farce, since she didn’t know who her mother was, but found this posthumous adoption of a dead farmer’s wife totally okay. She herself was holding tight to Lidy. So much so, in fact, that at a certain point the empty black and white countryside seemed to deliver its own proof: Far too much of you has accumulated in me, Lidy. Because of you, I could never become the person I was. The taxi turned left into the village, which was made up in its entirety of new, modern houses.
The entrance gates to the cemetery were a wrought-iron monstrosity between two pillars, each of which bore a sculpture of angels’ wings. Armanda recognized them from the ceremony of mourning years before, when the region had reburied all its flood victims in a single service. The graveyard in the plain, which was still open to the sea dike, looked very well tended now. Armanda and Nadja walked to the middle section of the burial ground with all the simple, identical graves that would never be moved because they had been declared a monument. They saw that the fifteen-by twenty-inch gray gravestone was already standing next to the mound of earth, covered with a thin layer of snow. It had already been explained to Armanda that nothing on it could be altered: her claiming of the bones was acceptable to the state, her putting of Lidy’s name to them was also acceptable in principle, but the stone, like the three others here, must remain blank. It wasn’t long before the hearse arrived. Armanda and Nadja walked back to the road.
“Can you open the lid again for a moment?” Armanda asked the undertaker, as soon as he and his assistant had pushed the full-sized coffin out of the car and set it on a bier on wheels.
And with a nod of her head, she showed him the photo of Lidy.
The undertaker took it out of her hand, looked from the laughing Lidy to Armanda, and then from under the brim of his black silk hat at the row of apartment buildings on the other side of the street.
“It’s totally against regulations,” he said in a tone that meant “Well, okay.”
The sun went in behind the low-hanging clouds as the little procession moved to the middle section of the graveyard. Once there, the undertaker used a flat chisel on the coffin to raise the lid a fraction, which happened quite easily. As Armanda pushed the photo inside, she managed a quick searching look, but all she saw was the soft, dark cloth that had been used to wrap the skull and the bones, so that they wouldn’t roll around. The coffin, light as a feather, was lowered skillfully into the grave with the help of straps. Armanda and Nadja each threw a shovelful of sand down onto it. Immediately afterward the grave of the anonymous woman was filled in.
The hearse left.
Armanda and Nadja stood for a few minutes in the silence. They looked out over the stone and the chrysanthemums to the land, bordered in the distance by the sea dike, and then they too left. Armanda had wondered briefly if it was possible when the wind was in the right direction to hear the sea from here. The temperature was already dropping again. A moderate frost was forecast for tonight, but an area of low pressure over Scotland, starting tomorrow, would bring milder air, with rain and wind.