The Storm

V. Responsorium

“How’s it going?”

“Oh, I had a terrible scene with one of the nurses here, the woman wanted to stick me under the shower, but I hung onto the bathroom door with everything I’d got. It happens. Now everything’s quiet again. Out there, down below, the streetcar clanks by, you know, the number three, it goes to the Concertgebouw in one direction and Amsterdam East in the other. Just recently they moved me up to the top floor. The door to the corridor and the elevator is always locked, most of the people sitting here are too out of it to be able to give you their own names or write them down if you ask them. I think it’s still morning. We have ‘recreation’ this afternoon. The staff is absolutely obsessed with the expression.”

“You look a little shaky.”

“Not surprising if you’re spending twenty-four hours a day collecting your thoughts. I’m guessing what you’re doing right now is looking at the room I’m in, with its fresh paint, and two windows that look north, two cupboards, two chairs, a table, a bed, and a blue velour sofa, which they keep telling me, no idea why, is the sofa from home. From home, they said at the beginning every time they came in, and gave me pregnant looks. Go on, sit down on it. Okay, then, I will, but personally I don’t believe a word of it. When I took a sniff at the seat, I could smell old food and cigar butts, the smell of decline. Maybe it’s because of that smell, or maybe it’s also all the changes in the weather we’ve been having recently, or all the hours I spend sound asleep, but I sit on the couch without budging and regularly ask myself what life actually is.”

“Yeah. No one has the answer to that one.”

“All this sorrow, all these little worries, all these desires. When we go to the dining room at noon and we all sit down at those long tables, almost everyone keeps their heads down, we’re serious and quiet, the people next to me hardly say a thing, but when the food carts are brought in, we all look up like prisoners in a penal colony who’ve just been pardoned. I give an absentminded smile as I lift the lid off the food tray, divided up into compartments, when it’s set down in front of me. My mouth’s all dry, but it responds automatically, I don’t mind, my whole body says yes, but what’s the point? Where does it come from, this morbid appetite, maybe it’s just a desire to keep my footing on the very last step before I trip and fall into the grave?”

“You’re in a really grouchy mood, aren’t you?”

“Grouchy, grouchy, I sit, I look out the window, I eat. I grant you, I still love the smell of bread. I know it’s a treacherous feeling, but I do still find reality attractive. Down on the first floor, in the entrance hall, there’s a wooden bench along the wall next to the swing doors. When I sit there sometimes in the afternoon for a little bit, shoulder to shoulder with my fellow inmates and fellow sufferers, I feel as weary and as dull as the toothless old guys in a shady little square somewhere in Spain.”

“Sounds familiar. And that blue sofa stood for years in the room at the end of the little staircase to the mezzanine.”

“Really? Well, I guess that must be right.”

“Yes. And at the top of the back, there by the wall there was a lamp with two shades made of wavy orange-red frosted glass, that didn’t really go with it, but were perfect when you wanted to submerge yourself for hours in Russian and French novels, which we often did. Next to it were those low doors to the second, smaller, balcony at the back of our house, which we used to go out onto at night and listen to the nearby gunfire in the last winter of the war. You were twelve, I was fourteen, we were both incredibly skinny, and one night we slipped through the railing on the balcony like cats and dropped down into the garden, a pothole or two, a couple of hedges, and we were in a side alley. I’m certain that from the moment we climbed back up about an hour later, we were obsessed for days with the same question, though we never said it out loud to each other. You never ask anyone else the real questions. We’d found a man in a narrow street lined with high, straight houses, he’d been shot, he was lying on his back, and we decided to keep going. A city where the shops and buildings are half in ruins looks much softer at night than it does during the day. In the Eerste Sweelinckstraat there was a doorway and a couple necking in it. We could see that the man wanted more than the woman was willing to give. My God, the despair in the way he was clutching the girl to him with such force, you’d have thought he only had a matter of hours left in his life to do it. Is that, is that what our salvation depends on? We stood stock still and gaped at them like frogs, then headed back to bed in what pitiful starlight there was. You wanted to stick your half-frozen feet into the backs of my knees.”

“And was I allowed to?”

“Of course. You were also allowed to put your arms round me. Oh, what bags of bones we were back then. It was a miracle we ever got enough calories to keep our little body heats up to ninety-eight point six.”

“Okay, so that means life equals warmth, and the all-consuming struggle to keep one’s temperature up. The chief cook here seems to feel that’s best done with boiled and roasted potatoes and proper cutlets seasoned with thyme, and he gets money for it from the inmates. We also manage to get tulip bulb syrup from him. Excuse me for only asking now, but I promise you, it’s a question I’ve been asking myself forever: Are you cold?”

“You could say that, yes. Terribly, actually, but at a certain point it just stops mattering.”

“Really?”

“Really. I move around under the surface of the water now, which is much more comfortable than being above the surface on some wretched raft. It’s crazy: as long as you’re hanging onto a piece of wood, you also keep hanging onto your questions about life, no matter how cold and insignificant they’ve become. Just let go, for God’s sake, and then you’ll also be free of the last issues too, and of the raging as well, of course, and roaring thunder all around you that really got on your nerves after two solid days, and in a sense is still roaring to this day. The storm has become part of me, its gusts are my memories. My entire self is rooted in the difference in pressure between a low over the North Sea and another west of Ireland. Experience has taught me: in the end you’re really not yourself anymore, you only consist of what’s around you. It’s ebb tide. The scale of the water level in the Oosterschelde is causing an incredible undertow in the direction of the North Sea. It’s quite unusual for me to find myself here in the vortex north of the Roggenplaat, while four or five of the other cases who ended up like me in the open sea beyond Ouwerkerk were washed ashore near Colijnsplaat on Noord-Beveland.”

“Can you see anything?”

“I’m tired and I’m old. No, stop shaking your head. I have wrinkles all over my body, my lips are cracked, my bones are plagued by the wet and the cold, I assume you can imagine this, have a sense of it. And moreover, if you’ve had an unusually intense life, you no longer need your eyes to perceive things. A ship’s horn sounds. They’ve seen one of my beloved companions floating facedown and they’re using a boat hook to neatly fish him out. Oh my love, just rest in peace, maybe you know I came only to visit, but then, as you can see, I stayed. The things we went through! In the blue twilight I can see the faces of my nearest and dearest, their teeth are chattering furiously, but apart from that they’re looking at me quite cheerfully. If we’d been granted the privilege to sit next to one another on a bench back then, we would certainly have done so.”

“Oh, Jesus!”

“What is it?”

“A stabbing pain in my side. I’ve been having all sorts of bodily complaints recently — that’s what they call the pains and the exhaustion here. And after meals I sometimes get nosebleeds without any warning at all.”

“They won’t kill you.”

“Yes they will! Just wait! I’m dying!”

“I can hear you trying not to laugh.”

“I wish. I’m rubbing my lower back with both hands, the life force is about to escape, it’s old and dark and wild as a boar. Well, I’ve really had enough of breathing. My lungs have done more than enough pumping. How I’ve envied my big sister these last years for her waterlogged lungs! And admired her fate! While I myself in the meantime have just been continuing the whole ceremony, created by God to live, rather than live through things, that heroic version of spending the time assigned to you. All the idiotic moves I made along the way, a sort of spastic dance now that I look back on it, all that walking, sitting, kneeling, bending, stretching, putting things down, picking them back up again, putting them down again, picking them up again. I think I was always more of an activities-oriented person than, for example, a good person, let alone a noble one. Now what I’d really like to be is light, as light and free as eternity. I’d even like not to comb my hair except when I really felt like it. I would also like to have the permission of the authorities to wear my support stockings, my skirt, and my wool jacket the whole time and never take them off. Come on, let’s have a glass of port. There are still days sometimes when I’m absolutely compulsive about needing to go somewhere, but as soon as the nurse on duty talks me out of it, I’m as quiet as a lamb.”

“How did you find him in bed?”

“Please!”

“Well?”

“Listen, I slept like a dog last night because someone was dying in the room next door. Running and thumping about on the other side of the wall, as if a fistfight was going on, I don’t understand why the party has to end like that. And now, when they’ve obviously removed the troublemaker and everything’s back to normal, you drop a bombshell like this. It’s a dark day, the weatherman pointed out little white clouds with snow and hail showers and told us they’re coming from Iceland. What do you think? My memory is obstinate these days, it doesn’t like releasing its load. It all comes out backward and at an angle. I wish you’d just leave me in peace. I still turn red when anyone mentions him. You know, I take it, that he left me?”

“Yes, who the hell would have thought it!”

“Not you, nobody would argue with that, but deep down I never trusted the whole thing for a second. He and Mrs. Blaauw the Third supposedly are back living here in the city again. An old married couple, and I imagine them living in retirement in some comfortable apartment on the other side of the Amstel. While we were still together, your husband and I, you could see his pleasure sometimes when he watched the sunset and the red glow of its rays as they spread across the houses. A man out of some myth, so tall, with those muscular arms and the tiny blond hairs on them. God, I was so happy with him! It began to happen frequently that he would come home later than I had expected. There would be this half hour or even an hour of anticipation, crowned with the sight of his car slowly cruising past the window looking for a parking spot, there he is! What? Oh yes, two, a son and a daughter. They’re doing well, but they don’t have much time to take care of me, they both live abroad. Children are the best thing, the most important thing in life, we’re part of the post-Enlightenment West but no different in this regard from someone still living in Stone Age Papua, who absolutely knows that his family will go on stamping and yelling in primeval fashion to let him keep sharing in their wonderful sheer existence even after his death. Yes, they call me regularly. When I hear my children’s voices, I think it’s wonderful, and when the conversation’s over, I think that’s just fine too. I keep listening to the dial tone in my ear for a moment, or I go to the window and look down to the street. I conclude that worry can make you heavyhearted, and so can its opposite.”

“How’s Nadja?”

“Wait a moment, I think …”

“What is it?”

“Oh, I thought there was a knock at the door. I thought someone was coming to vacuum or empty the wastepaper basket. There’s so much to do here. Every week a young man comes to clean the windows. He takes the flowerpots off the windowsill, they’re blue Alpine violets, and puts them on the table, where they immediately start to give off their scent. Odd, the way they refuse to do so normally. He’s a very nice young man. He cleans the windows and scrubs for me. Because he knows I see no reason for a conversation, he suggested recently that he just turn on the radio. He hadn’t even touched the thing before a loud male voice was filling my room with talk about how both his father and his grandfather had led strikes and the entire harbor was going to be idle next Tuesday. Yes, I thought, yes of course, life means action, and I watch the boy reach for the bucket with such an absurdly, movingly intelligent expression, in order to go to the bathroom and fill it with water. I kept my own face neutral. My eyes are turned inward. The stage is empty and the lighting terrible, but now and then a shocked figure appears. I look at it blankly. Nadja …”

“Yes?”

“Oh, you know, basically it’s always remained inexplicable. But inexplicable doesn’t mean, according to people who know that sort of thing, that it doesn’t happen quite often. The goal of life, which everyone makes such a big deal out of, seems to be totally irrelevant when it comes to the actual impetus that keeps the whole thing going — it must be some terrifying sort of egoism, pure willpower, that can occasionally dump the whole mess at your feet. Nadja asked for a glass of water, and someone, a lonely lady sitting on a bench with a book, so they told me, went into a pub and got it for her. She had no heart trouble, at least nothing pathological, the autopsy established that. Strange, yes. The local doctor, lacking her medical history, couldn’t issue a death certificate. Nadja had driven her car to the center of the village. No, not for a long time, although she quite often came to Amsterdam while Mother was still alive. Next to her on the front seat was a folded newspaper, half read. As the traffic barriers came down and she had to stop, she may have glanced at it, but I find it unthinkable that a list of performances and events for music, art, and film could be the cause of a sudden fatal heart attack, mors subita, no matter how sensitive the victim was. So, to cut a long story short, the barriers went up again and the traffic moved on at a moderate pace. Suddenly I find myself wondering what novel the lady may have been reading as Nadja got out shakily and everyone behind her began to honk their horns, because they were still stopped on the train tracks. This line runs right through the village, it’s a much-traveled stretch, at any moment the warning signal could sound again. And the lady was reading, undistracted, under her tree, completely transported, wonderful. You don’t have to act, yet you still experience everything, you don’t have to speak, yet you converse with amazingly intelligent partners on your own level, and if you don’t know how to love and to flirt, well, you know now. Oh dear old Lidy, the sea-green screen between us has become completely transparent meantime. With one of us pedaling the bike and the other on the carrier, we race along the canal in the watery dusk. There’s no wind, all the flags are hanging slack on their poles. Does it still matter who read which book? Who lent the other which pullover, who inherited a child and a husband from whom? In cases of sudden death, the assumption is that some emotional distress unconnected with the immediate surroundings simply stopped the muscles of the heart.” “Dear God, Manja, does such a thing really happen?” “Apparently yes. Inner factors sometimes succeed in completely hollowing out the psyche undetected, and then … you’re suddenly gone. Do you know how much the heart of an adult woman weighs?”

“Well?”

“They check it during the autopsy, they weigh the heart.”

“Heavens! The scales, the pans of the scale, the weighing of souls!”

“It weighed twelve ounces, which is normal. You know, don’t you, that Nadja, who was widowed, was in love again, and didn’t want to talk about it to anyone — nor was she allowed to. So I don’t need to tell you what was involved, of course: a secret, adultery, hopeless. There came a time when she started to look pale, but was not audibly or visibly suffering. God preserve us, she may have thought, from the person who spends so much time pitying themselves that the whole world has to know about it. What was noticeable, however, during this period was that she went almost every day to the long-term-care section of Tabitha House, yes, here, where I am now, to visit her grandma, our crumpled, demented little mother, now almost ninety-three. If you’ve been bound to silence, you can still use an incomprehensible oracle to have dialogues with. Once when I asked her — looking all sympathetic the way an insider does — how Grandma was, she reported: ‘Oh, fine, we listened to a Schubert sonata together.’ It must have been about two months after the death of our little mother, previously known as our mother, that Nadja also crossed over and pulled the drawbridge up after her.”

“She was so sweet.”

“Oh God, wasn’t she!”

“So unselfaware. Once I went with her to a place that sold children’s clothes, where she was to try on a winter coat with teddy bears embroidered on it. She could already stand by then. The saleswoman sat her up on a chest of drawers, all jammed up in the thick, stiff coat that made her arms stand out like a penguin’s, and she gave me a blank look of such force that it silenced every piece of nonsense in my head. That winter she caught pseudo-croup, and Sjoerd and I were sure she was going to die, because she couldn’t inhale anymore.”

“I think you’re wrong. It wasn’t that winter, it was two or three winters later. But it’s true, we were scared to death. In those days in Amsterdam if you called a doctor in the middle of the night in a panic, he actually came, those were men—”

“They certainly were.”

“—who didn’t just keep the phone within reach of the bed but their shoes and socks too. ‘Of course she won’t die.’ He picked up the little girl, the favorite of my children forever, took her into the bathroom, and ordered us to turn on the hot tap. And I’m telling you, the steam made the swelling in her throat go down immediately, her air passages were open again, and in a flash she was back to breathing normally. Sjoerd and I lay next to each other in the darkness afterward, deeply impressed by how narrow the dividing line is between helplessness and a wonderful, warm bed. I stretched out my hand. My sister’s husband, I could feel it, isn’t going to be able to go to sleep yet, maybe he’s thinking about God and marveling at the compositional gift that He exercises when He sets life and death not one behind the other but side by side. In the morning, when I woke up, he was way over on the other side of the bed.”

“We always slept in each other’s arms.”

“Oh, mostly we did too.”

“Oh, oh, oh, we were so in love with each other! Love at first sight, colon, with this one, quote unquote. No power in the world could have aroused me like that for any other reason. Oh, that mad, grand, heathen ‘yes!’ That bow to nature, pure and simple!”

“Yes, and its trump card at a most particular moment is the indivisible First Person Plural. He was a horny man, wasn’t he? Always ready, even when the circumstances, physically speaking, weren’t exactly ideal. Advanced pregnancy, raging hangover, once the two of us had a real flu …”

“Well, speaking for myself, I had good experiences with the flu. There’s no better aphrodisiac than one or two degrees of fever, damp sheets, and a red-hot pillow. ‘I’ve brought thyme syrup and a bottle of champagne,’ he said once, when I’d spent quite a while in bed waiting for a solicitous husband, and he crawled in with me under the covers, shivering slightly, with aching joints, swollen membranes, and a raw throat.”

“The sun shone through the bedroom window, the top half of which was made of lead glass and colored everything around us cinnabar red. Free-hanging tendrils of black ivy swayed in the breeze outside the windowpanes.”

“But the craziest thing I remember is when he had his traffic accident. Right-of-way ignored when turning left from the Amstel to the Berlage Bridge. ‘Come here, lie down close for a moment, I’m so cold from the sheer fright.’ He pushed back the covers and I couldn’t understand how he had managed all three flights of stairs on his own or how the ambulance crew from Onze Lieve Vrouwe Gasthuis could have let him go. I took off my clothes and lay down, being careful of the blue-purple bruises on his hips; there was a big, white, unbelievably imposing bandage round his knee. It makes you feel quite instinctively guilty. And why wasn’t I at home when he was delivered by a taxi, so wounded and pathetic, and rang his own front doorbell? Soon my hand wasn’t the only thing that disappeared under the covers — my head did too. I wanted to do something, anything at all. That’s just the way it is, isn’t it? Something, blindly, no matter what, it’s our way of rebelling against the outrage of our human powerlessness. I kissed all his grazed and swollen places and reached out my hand—”

“The way every woman does automatically.”

“—for that particular living swelling in the middle, to check the state of my husband’s faith in the world. So, I was holding my husband’s rudder and we were already heading for the sluice, when at a certain point I became uneasy. Shouldn’t I look to see what the patient’s moans were signifying? I slid back out, and his eyes lit up. ‘I know what you like best is you underneath and me on top,’ his eyes said. My eyes answered: ‘That’s right.’ He: ‘But you can see that’s not going to work right now.’ What, Armanda? Oh. What then? That his half-closed eyes actually flashed, from the bottom of his heart: ‘You’re the only desirable woman in the world, and I’m not going to change my opinion for the rest of my life, even if they put me on the rack?’ Also good. So, in brief, I made the well-known bridge over him. In the spell of some secret, guilty delight, I began to pleasure him in the most exquisite way, using the muscles inside me. Oh God, that was love! If I shut my eyes, all I saw was flashes of light, and if I opened them again I saw him lying there keeping hold of himself, and I realized there was no distinction between his pain, his enjoyment, and my bliss. I was shocked by my feelings for him. Sjoerd was a man it was usually very easy to satisfy.”

“You don’t need to tell me! For example, if you put a wonderful dish on the table, cod, slices of potato, rice, dill, and mustard, he would look at you with a surprised look that said ‘How did you guess what I’ve been wanting all day?’”

“But this time, I don’t know, he wanted some absolutely special effort from me, and believe me, I gave him that pleasure. Movements can take seconds, then minutes to build toward something that you know is coming with absolute certainty. The question, in which you want to the best of your capacity to retain the upper hand, is quite simple: when? When my husband and yours reached that point on this particular day, I was glad that our bedroom was up on the top floor of the house, in the soundproof attic; the roof didn’t touch the neighbors’, because they were hipped roofs and each sloped up into a cone.”

“How old are you now?”

“Me? Not that old, I think. Don’t ask me to tell you exactly. You know, in some people, the decline sets in quite early. Years ago, I was walking down the street and I looked at my feet. I saw them quite clearly, one little boot in front of the other, making their way along a pavement of rectangular flagstones, yet I had absolutely no awareness that I was going anywhere. That’s it, I thought, I have no sense of speed anymore, the needle’s on zero, the world is going backward exactly as fast as I’m trying to go forward. That evening I called my children and asked them to tell me straight when they began to notice I was in the process of going senile. They promised, because what I was saying, implicitly, was that when that happened, I would take my own measures.”

“But they didn’t.”

“Of course not. Telling you straight is only okay when there’s no reason yet to have to do it. Otherwise it would be so heartless, wouldn’t it, and so hateful? Looking a little confused now and then, forgetting a name here and there, it happens to everybody. But start laughing to yourself when you’re alone and refusing to explain why, pretend you’re hard of hearing, lock yourself in, fail to turn off the gas, go wandering through town in your pajamas and dressing gown and be unable to find your way home again, and your children will most certainly stop saying, ‘Mama, we think it’s reached that point.’”

“Oh, what does it matter!”

“That’s what I think too. Nicely locked up in a warm building, and unable to go forward anymore, I look back. I am Armanda, the sister of a woman who was very young when she drove away one morning from a happy home and sadly never came back. Since that time she lives inside me. Do you believe that I soon gave up my favorite licorice and started eating cream fondants? Good, so, when I was twenty-eight and then thirty, I enlarged my sister’s family, which had consisted until then of a husband, a wife, and a little daughter, with an additional daughter and a son. When the marriage collapsed, the world, to my astonishment, continued to follow its set habits. Action, place of action, dialogue, and protagonists remained in the absolute control of my sister. To give you an example, Lidy, take the lovers who surfaced from time to time after my divorce. As regards my sainted sister, and considering that she would have known how much more easygoing life in the Netherlands had become, would they have been accepted by her? The true nature of the sister of my sister remained: her. I maintain that the only person who ever really knew me was Sjoerd, and you, Lidy, have the absolute right to feel offended that he drew a line at our ménage-à-trois. I’m sorry, but I obviously didn’t manage your husband very well.”

“Oh, sweetheart, we’re both only human. I don’t blame you for anything. But why do you keep yawning?”

“Because I prefer to spend the day like a sleepless night. The waking hours of someone who’s constitutionally sleepy are dreamless and dull, like the back side of the moon. Nevertheless my mythic sister still manages to come floating through in the guise of three dead cows or something. Hello, Lidy. How did you get into this sodden chaos again? I know there are mean tricks that can never be put right again.”

“I was just wild about the idea of driving a car again, you don’t forget how so easily.”

“Liar.”

“No-o.”

“Ye-es. Oh, you don’t have to tell me about memory. Just when you’ve lost it is when you recognize how astonishing it is. The memory of someone who at some point allowed themselves to play a joke that went completely wrong works completely differently from the memory of some lucky devil who managed always to be good and behave well. I know how to treasure your magnanimous thoughts. It’s a performance I’ve been giving for a long time now. Oh, how you wanted to go on that weekend expedition, which was supposed to be an invitation to me — except you didn’t. The most important tool of memory is the ability to forget. Remember a phone conversation, even remember part of the actual dialogue, but to keep things simple, forget who proposed what and who in a whisper begged, ‘Oh, please!’ The thing about forgetting that’s piquant is that nine times out of ten it’s not forgetting at all, simply a cut that allows you to insert something. Who in God’s name wants to get lost time back, uncut? I’m old. My eyes are bad, my ears too, I stand absolutely helpless in the flow of time. But at the very last moment a motive I’d forgotten all about reenters the story. It was a kiss, Lidy, no more than that, but on pain of death, no less than that either. A hot, open kiss, a feeling of fire that I’d never encountered before in all my nineteen years, has reappeared in front of my eyes, through the thicket of years, out of the oblivion in which it had been buried. The scene was the wall under the fire escape of the Nausicaä, a dismal, dilapidated student dormitory in the Zwarte Handsteeg, where a party was going on. The time was night. The protagonists were Sjoerd, in an exceptionally resolute role — he must have worked out the whole kiss and had it ready — and your sister, Armanda, who lost the plot just at the moment when her opposite number wanted to get under her skirt, because an angry-looking guy appeared in this garbage-strewn, film-noirish inner courtyard, walking his dog. I wanted to get the kiss back, Lidy, I wanted to have it forever, in my heart….”

“Well, it’s not important.”

“Weak. Your voice sounds weak, because you know, you absolutely know, that I spent that Monday evening pacing around my room, torturing myself with the desire to come clean about the damn kiss. One step, another step, then another, on and on. Till I’d reached the magic goal of my journey, my woman’s will, and, I have to add, the center of the person I am deep in my heart, in my own opinion. I went to the telephone in the upper hall. That was me. Don’t take it badly that I’m going into this with such detail, but really, I was the one who made the call and I’ve been horribly conscious of that my whole life long. It comes in moments that are like being jolted with a brief electric shock, and then before you can deal with them, they’re gone again. Maybe you couldn’t see my persuasive smile, but you could certainly hear it. You could understand my chatter and my whispers, on that Monday there wasn’t yet the slightest breath of a northwest wind to drown out anything. Wonderfully precocious little wife and mother, just listen, is what you heard? God, you really fought back. ‘Huh? What are you talking about? I don’t think I feel like it, thanks.’ I had to make a big effort to persuade young Mrs. Blaauw to flee the everyday grind for once. That’s what happened, and alas there’s no act of penance that can undo the basic maliciousness of the facts. The despicable plan crossed my path, I seized it on tiptoe, you have every right to be angry. Meantime I stand on the top floor of Tabitha House and look out like a ghost. There’s an old, bare elm in front of the house on the other side of the street, and in its branches is a whole swarm of parrots, there must be ten of them, they never stop talking. Strange. I think I’ll lie down now and have a doze.”

“No-o …”

· · ·

“Are you still there?”

“Ye-es!”

“Your voice sounds so light, Lidy, and so interested, as if you really want to know how I’m faring here.”

“Yes, well, must be because I was dreaming that the two of us were taking a walk on Sunday to the water tower. There were botanic gardens for plant trials on the other side of the bridge back then, hidden behind a wall. The early sun was tinting the sky above them to a pinkish mother-of-pearl color like the inside of a seashell.”

“That isn’t a dream, that really happened. We were still little children. But can you dream while you’re drowning?”

“And how. In fact, it’s all you do. In the dream you’re calling life, we went through the grass past the houseboats, looked at the wall on the opposite bank, and felt a pleasant, eventful sort of homesick feeling. Homesickness mostly starts when you’re in the open, and then a wall is always really helpful. We got to talking about eternity, endlessness, and from there we automatically got into the God problem, you simply didn’t understand why the most rational people made such a song and dance about it. You stood still, to pull up one of your white kneesocks, which was all wet through — the grass was wet, it had been raining — you were thinking, and you murmured to yourself, why couldn’t there be some Being that spanned everything and guided it? Your little red patent-leather purse slipped down off your shoulder. ‘I don’t see why that should be so inconvenient,’ you said, and hung the purse, which had nothing in it, back round your shoulder. ‘Me neither,’ I said. You were quiet. I could see your nose and mouth tensing. ‘Why can’t I read Netteke Takes a Cure?’ you asked finally, looking at me. ‘You know you’re not allowed,’ I replied, and named the name of a friend I hung around, not a real friend, a girl who granted me her dubious and always a little tormenting favors only during school hours. She had lent me the book under the most draconian conditions.

“‘Look,’ I said, to distract you, and pointed at the afterdeck of the General Praag right next to us, where a black bantam cock was getting ready to fly off the deck rail between some speckled hens that were waiting on the bank, frozen in a kind of primordial terror. The morning sun picked out the small male creature with its fiery-red cockscomb, its rough plumage puffed out like an actor’s cloak. ‘He’s waiting for a drumroll from the orchestra,’ I said placatingly.

“You looked at me steadfastly. You said we had made a promise always to share everything. By way of an answer, I started talking about the two white mice, which was the stupidest thing I could have done. They belonged to you, you exclusively, which was the only thing that made my reminder relevant. You had hidden them in an empty aquarium, scattered a layer of wood shavings, and put our world atlas on top to make a lid. And yes, although you would actually have preferred that I not even look at your cuddly toys through the glass, I once lifted the atlas while you were gone to have a look from on top. Terrific, not a second later, they both suddenly got their necks broken as they were cunningly scaling the sides and got hit by the heavy book when their little mama’s sister dropped it in fright.

“‘What is it?’ I asked, for I couldn’t read your expression properly. Somehow it seemed you were listening to the scuffling next to the General Praag, the bantam cock had landed. Somehow I should have known: you had picked up on my mistake, of course you had.

“‘Dumb creatures,’ you said.

“I nodded and indicated with my eyes the poultry sex going on in the grass, but you shook your head. A bit irritated, or so it seemed to me, at my simplemindedness, you began to express your loathing of white mice, those little snouts, those little teeth, those little eyes, all of it dumber than dumb, and the peak of dumbness was naturally to keep the pair in an aquarium.

“Quelle idée!’ you said, in Mother’s tone of voice, and crossed your feet in a way that meant you either needed to go really badly, or that you had come clean about something and now you were ready to fantasize a little. Oh, you were such a golden, magnanimous child! You were wearing a checked, pleated skirt that morning, a blindingly white blouse, and a striped knit jacket that had previously belonged to me. Children like you often love to theorize, completely uninhibitedly. ‘People have so little fantasy,’ you burst out plaintively. ‘It’s okay that there’s a primary color we don’t know, but it’s just pathetic and sad that we can’t imagine it.’ Beyond that, I can no longer remember exactly who took which part in our dreamy, faltering dialogues.

“‘Eternity,’ you said, or maybe I said, ‘is that we have to live the lives of everyone who ever lived or will ever live, from beginning to end.’

“Mmmm, yes, and so interesting, isn’t it? Even down to the details?”

“Even down to the details, without the slightest deviation from the facts.

“We slid around ice rinks on shoes with leather soles. We licked the metal railings on the Mageren Bridge. The Amstel froze over.”

“No, it was summer. We lay in our bathing suits on the beach at Langevelder Slag.”

“We put on our skates with double runners and went slicing through the flocks of gulls that happened to be so numerous that year and had flown from the IJ, which was all iced over, into the city.”

“I can remember to this day our sense of pleasure — space, not a movement in the sky, our warm bodies, and the even greater warmth of the sand — as we looked over at the hazy outlines of a gray ship that stood out against the furthest rim of the sea.”

“Cyclists were also crossing the river.”

“We thought about the bottomless chasm there must be right behind the horizon where the ship was. An aunt of our maid had killed herself the week before, and they’d only just told us, so we were in a very solemn mood.”

“We’d heard that there was such a terrible cold front approaching from Siberia that within a day or so the North Sea was going to freeze over. The question that interested us was whether we’d get absorbed into the Arctic Circle just like Canada and Nova Semlya, which would mean we’d get to see the Northern Lights — yes, it was definitely winter.”

“If you say so.”

“Why are you lying in bed?”

“I’m lying in bed because I’m dying.”

“Armanda, you can really be pathetic.”

“No, no. It’s really true. The children have been here twice already to say their good-byes. They plumped up my pillow, gave me a glass of water, held my hand. Oh, darlings, I said, I’m making such a lot of trouble and worries for you, do me a favor, go into town and get something to eat. I’ll be awake for a bit yet.”

“Ha, that reminds me that you had to go to bed half an hour earlier than I did at home, and I never allowed you to go to sleep till I’d crawled into bed too. To control this, I used to run upstairs sometimes during the half hour and bend over you in the dark, and if I smelled from your breath that you were asleep, I’d hiss in your ear reproachfully: ‘You’re asleep!’ You were incredibly well trained, trained against me, and you were able to say ‘Am not!’ so convincingly out of a deep sleep that although I knew perfectly well you were lying, I had to put up with it.”

“God, yes, I remember that.”

“So the young ones are in town now. Take advantage, I’d say, seize the opportunity to exit in peace, on your own. You’re alone.”

“Yes, insofar as anyone who has another person who’s taken up residence inside them can be said to be alone.”

“What? I didn’t quite understand you. Another person?”

“Someone who’s spent my whole life looking and listening with me. In some way, a great advantage. So my sister who lives hidden inside me is older than I am, but still a lot less forgetful. Beautiful moments that I’ve lived, even if they’ve faded, shine on a little longer through her. Did you come, I ask her now, to say good-bye or to fetch me? That well-known look of till-death-us-do-part meets mine, even if it’s a little frostier than it used to be. The face is blue, which occurs when the oxygen content of the blood drops below the critical point and death is very close. As it happens, I’m an expert on this. All the same, oddly, as long as I live, I automatically keep her, my moribund other, alive.”

“Classic thought, sympathetic too! Tell me, are you lying comfortably?”

“Very comfortably. Now that I’m nothing but skin and bone, they’ve laid a sheepskin on my mattress. It’s delightfully warm in the room. I’m very tired already, and I just peek out through the slits in my eyelids. I have almost no eyelashes left, which means that though I’m half hallucinating, I’m spared spiders and beetles. I think about whatever comes into my head: a conversation from years back about your last moments. How they may have looked. The Dutch Institute of Forensic Medicine was still in Rijswijk then. No idea why, but I feel more comforted now by my gravity and my grief back then than I did at the time. A pathologist like that knows a great deal. A great sense of peace emanated from him while he explained to me quite calmly the actual process of your drowning. He had gray eyes with such heavy lids and a lethargic twinkle, but you imagined that already. On the table between us, the photo with your face and your absurd laugh. Surprisingly, he couldn’t answer my first questions, namely whether you had gone on shivering underwater, since your body temperature had already dropped so hellishly, and whether your teeth went on chattering, the way a body always does instinctively to generate a last bit of warmth. I know it was crazy and pointless to ask, but he didn’t know.”

“Oh, well, I still shiver like crazy, even though I’m unconscious.”

“The doctor, who saw I was fighting back tears, reassured me that you can have suffered only for a minute or two. The specific weight of a human body is higher than the specific weight of water, but not much, a little movement and the person keeps swimming. A small reserve of air in the lungs is not bad, of course, screaming and calling out aren’t sensible, and I assume you didn’t do it anyway out of sheer exhaustion. A great disadvantage was apparently that there was no more air between you and your sodden clothes, so I assume that you sank immediately.”

“True.”

“How hopeless water is! It siphons off your body heat twenty-six times faster than air at the same temperature. Twenty-six times! So is it realistic to demand that your heart keep beating normally when you’re in water that’s thirty-six to thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit? That your brain keep thinking normally when it’s cooling down at that speed? After ninety seconds, even your most rational reflexes are completely disrupted. What are you supposed to do with your nose and mouth underwater, breathe or not breathe? That was your only moment of despair. In the grip of a great lack of oxygen, your instinct finally said yes. A large gulp of water met the opening of your respiratory tract.”

“That’s right, and the respiratory tract rejected it. I can tell you, Armanda, that if your friend the pathologist were to open up my poor drowned body, he wouldn’t find a single drop of seawater in my lungs. Sometimes the larynx is so shocked by the passage of water over the vocal cords that it angrily contracts all the muscles to block it. That’s what happened with me. For a moment I was panicked. Shame, shame, shame, I thought, I really wanted to try that recipe for pancakes with the little bits of ginger stirred in under the batter. I felt a hellish pain, as if my head were being squeezed together by a muscular hand, and wanted to cry out, which of course I couldn’t do. Yes, yes, so where are they, the sun-flooded fields of tulips at the end of the tunnel you always hear about in connection with drowning, I thought furiously, and I hadn’t even finished the thought when I noticed that the pain was gone. I opened my eyes. You cannot imagine, child, how beautiful the colder, more temperate sea under the surface of the water is! It’s a well-worn cliché that what you think of as you’re dying is flying away, upward, but in my opinion, heading downward is a lot easier. You weigh so little, at the end, don’t you? At this moment my poor body, head downward, is spiraling toward the bottom of the Oosterschelde. My heart has already stopped beating, there’s no more pulse, but deep in my brain there’s still life. If your doctor were to thrust a thermometer through the top of my skull, he’d establish the temperature in there was still at least eighty-two degrees Fahrenheit.

“Suspended animation. You dream, your thinking has become totally insane. And yet, if someone were to fish you out right away and really get you warm again, you could still make it. Cold, which works so that your organs need a minimum of oxygen, like a hibernating polar bear’s, is a real advantage when considered from the standpoint of a rescue.”

“God forbid! If you could see what I see…. I had already read in the Seegeranie Foundation’s quarterly that the underwater area around Schelphoek in front of the coast of Schouwen could stand comparison with any tropical aquarium. I have to say the editors were right. Whole forests of pale blue sea anemones, lilac, and yellow trumpets and red and yellow tubiflora waved to and fro like curtains in the undertow between the streams and the sandbanks. Most of us, Armanda, think that fish just swim. In the position I find myself occupying, I see dozens of speckled examples with teeth and horns, staring fixedly, and doing exactly that. But right in front of me are two enormous lumpsuckers with upstretched yellow chins, kissing. Incredible creatures! Meanwhile I’m moving slowly across the seabed. A powerful undertow will pull me into the silt there, which in turn will deliver me the following week to the marshy bottom behind the remains of the destroyed dike, where my body will find a resting place for at least thirty years. I think about my family. Odd, that I can only see their faces in such a blurred way.

“A few men, a few women, a few children, farewell! Whether I chose you or whether you were assigned to me, I somehow felt I was in the right place. At this moment I discover, quite soberly, that it’s actually true what writers and prophets have been saying for thousands of years: in that other world, so close that all you need to do is stretch out a finger, you will find those again whom you want to find again, and moreover they will be — because otherwise what would be the point, you know? — remarkably well disposed toward you. Now that my soul is leaving my mouth in the form of a butterfly, just the way we saw it in the Allard Pierson Museum on one of those red-figured Greek vases, I recognize your face. Oval, with a round chin. Your smile confirms my hope that we’re going to start telling each other stories right away.”

“Oh, yes!”

“It turns out better than expected, huh?”

“Yes, no big job.”

“No. Quite easy, actually.”

“Or?”

“Mmmm.”

“Oh, you’re asleep!”

“Am not!”

“Really?”

“Ab-so-lutely not!”