Armanda went on studying English at university. Lidy broke off her degree in French language and literature to marry her hands-on lover, who already had a job with good prospects at Bank Mees & Hope. In the months that followed, there were no more comments about how much the two girls looked alike, because Lidy’s belly was starting to swell. And not just the belly: her arms and legs also transformed themselves into soft, rounded masses of flesh. Her face, in which her eyelids drooped mysteriously, took on a look of plump melancholy. For the first time they looked totally unalike.
Once they had a conversation about this.
“What does it actually mean,” said Lidy as she poured herself a glass of lemonade after taking a quick look at Armanda’s still-half-full glass of port, “what does it actually mean to look alike? That we have the same color eyes?”
“I think so.”
They took a short look at each other, as Lidy, in a way Armanda felt was significant, remarked, “Eme-rald-green.”
It was the end of an afternoon in November. From the living room on the street side of the park, where Lidy now lived with her husband, it was almost possible to see the house where she and her sister had grown up.
Armanda drained her glass. She said, “Everyone loves the idea of brotherhood and sisterhood. God, it’s lovely and all that but … I mean, why is it so lovely?”
“What do I know? Nesting instinct, some kind of memory of cuddling and being cuddled, and so on, being wise to all someone else’s tricks, even the most innocent ones, you know …”
“And maybe that we’re all going to die someday?”
“Oh God! Who knows—yes, that must be part of it too.”
Armanda glanced down at the old Persian carpet from home, with the blue birds and the garlands, which oddly enough seemed much more familiar to her here, and also much more beautiful. As she stared at the blue birds, she said to herself: Once upon a time there were two girls, who wore the same clothes when they were children, who went to the same school when they turned six, and to the same high school when they were twelve. She looked up and continued out loud. “The Vossius Academy. Because both of them were good at languages, they decided to make this their specialty, and the older sister’s textbooks could be passed straight on to the younger one two years later.”
Lidy stared at her for a moment, nonplussed. “Hah, bound together by fate,” she said, and poured Armanda’s glass so full that she had to stick her head forward quickly and lap a couple of mouthfuls.
“Damn.” Armanda had sat down again, her hands flat on the table on either side of her glass. “Your underlinings were still in them,” she said. “Words of wisdom in Goethe, revenge and curses in Shakespeare, everything so frightfully beautiful and true. So my eyes would keep wandering to the same things you’d seen a couple of years before, the very same lofty, grandiose things.”
She felt the alcohol going to her head.
A little hoarsely she went on: “Don’t think I read all those beautiful things the same way you did.”
The two of them were silent for a while. But the two of them had known each other so long that their observations and retorts continued unspoken.
With fat Lidy facing her like an idol, Armanda said rather sadly, “You can never feel what someone else feels.” And as Lidy only nodded absentmindedly, she went on in the same tone, “The movements that little monster makes in your stomach, do you feel them the same way you feel your tongue moving in your mouth, only bigger?”
“What nonsense!” Lidy shot to her feet so uncontrollably that she had to hold tight to the edge of the table.
“Careful!” said Armanda affectionately but without moving an inch.
Lidy trudged awkwardly out of the room.
When she came back a few minutes later, Armanda’s mood had changed. Taken aback, even deeply moved, she looked at Lidy’s body as she spread her legs and laid her hands on her belly to sit down again beside her.
She leaned forward. Quietly and emphatically, like someone who has known something for a long time but only just found the way to put it into words, she said, “You know, quite objectively, I really can’t stand myself.”
“What?”
“True. If I had the choice, I’d prefer not to have that much to do with myself.”
“Well, that’s your bad luck.”
“Don’t laugh, it’s true, even when I was a child I hadn’t the faintest sympathy for myself, not the faintest.”
Since she was a little drunk, she had trouble getting the words out, but her gesticulating hand spoke volumes.
“Those dresses with the smocking on the bodice never looked good on me.”
“Oh, stop it.”
“Forehead was too high for a child.”
“True. Mine was too.”
“Didn’t suit me.”
“Nonsense.” Lidy contradicted her without paying much attention, but Armanda kept going, that most people felt really tender toward themselves. Not her. Which was why it really wasn’t so bad, not bad at all, to have an older sister who was sitting here right now, right here opposite her with a body so much more voluminous than her own and so pleased with herself that it was totally infectious.
A sudden surge of love went through her that curiously she experienced first and foremost as love for herself.
“Not bad at all,” she repeated warmly, looking up at her sister, unembarrassed, with tears in her eyes.
Lidy turned her head to one side.
“Be quiet.”
Armanda also pricked up her ears. Downstairs the front door had opened and shut with a bang. She jumped to her feet. “Is it that late already?”
The staircase in this kind of house was narrow. If you hit the light switch with the automatic timer downstairs and started up, you could bet that the light would go out by the time you reached the half-landing. In the pitch darkness Armanda, still buttoning her coat, met Lidy’s husband on his way upstairs with a rustling newspaper. Both of them had to laugh. Armanda felt his breath on her face.
After she’d done her shopping, Armanda took Nadja in the stroller back to Lidy and Sjoerd’s house on the short side of the park. While she climbed the stairs one by one, holding the child by the hand, she was thinking about the evening to come, and the party, murmuring: After nine. He’s not allowed to pick me up before nine. This time she really wanted to arrive a little late. Betsy often gave parties in her loft on the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. At first Armanda had been unable to believe that Sjoerd was the brother of this friend, who was quite a bit older than she was, and whom she admired for her narrow, intelligent face and curly black hair. Then she discovered that they were stepbrother and- sister, with the same father but different mothers.
She reached the top panting, having carried the child up the second flight of stairs. Why, the question suddenly struck her as she took out the little decorative comb in the living room and looked at it again, why had she set her heart on going to this party? Although she had already committed herself to a visit to Zierikzee (her annual pilgrimage of love, which until now had always been such a joy and which meant she really couldn’t go to the party) on Monday evening she had gone out into the hall. Some decisions just make themselves. A firm plan—she wanted to wear the blue dress with the tight skirt—drew her to the phone and secured her sister on the other end of the line.
“Mrs. Blaauw.”
Very funny even now. She cleared her throat sarcastically.
“Hello, it’s me.”
Lidy hadn’t been able to get it at first and found it all a little strange: Armanda’s goddaughter was turning seven and was determined that her aunt and beloved godmother, who came to visit once a year, must make the long trip to the little provincial town, bringing ballet shoes as a birthday present. And now Armanda was asking her to go in her place? Oh. But why?
“All right, okay, I guess it sounds like a nice idea,” Lidy finally said after five minutes of to-and-fro.
It had been a sudden stirring,
a blind impulse that had come to her the previous Monday from out of the blue, and which, just like that, she had allowed to take hold.
When Sjoerd came home shortly after midday, the table was covered with papers, and Armanda was hunched over her diploma thesis. She put down her pen and greeted him with a smile signifying that she and Nadja, who was at the head of the table with two fingers in her mouth, drawing a bear, had spent a wonderful morning together. She quickly poured him a cup of coffee; a plate of rolls sat on a dictionary between them. The mood was companionable as Sjoerd tried good-naturedly to report on the urgent meeting he’d had to have in the office this Saturday morning with a client involving a mortgage loan of many hundreds of thousands of guilders that would have to be converted in a flash on Monday into a 6 percent bond, but the thing didn’t interest her, and conversation soon moved on to Betsy’s party.
“Fine by me.” He stared at her for a moment, and then said with the same indifference, “I’ll pick you up at nine fifteen.”
The rain had stopped, but the wind was still raging.
“Seems to be getting worse,” he said, without turning to look at the window.
“Yes?”
Armanda observed his face, which was almost being erased by the background behind it: rattling panes of glass in the west-facing window, and behind them treetops swaying wildly in a chaos of branches. She was suddenly overcome by the feeling that everything was happening in almost farcical parallel with the story that had been occupying her for half the morning in her work, for the part she’d been working on involved a play in which a storm, conjured up by human powers, broke out and tore across an island. So—and why should that be impossible? By human powers? Out of revenge, out of holy outrage or some such? Now, as she thought back over it again, it didn’t strike her as not at all unthinkable. In earlier times—and we can be sure that the human race was no dumber back then than it is now, maybe it was even a little more intelligent—people believed absolutely it was possible, highly possible, that mental energy, the mad heart of pure invention, could trick an event into becoming real. God, in short, and why not? Who says that everything that is fated to happen must first be properly thought out? Thought out and, maybe, written down in the most convincing way possible? She closed her books. While she was thinking that an event, if it announces itself, discovers that a place has already been made for it and hence connects so familiarly with the imagination that those it touches, i.e., us, respond accordingly, she gathered up her sheets of paper. Dialogues, gestures, scenes, everything already predigested by a literary memory.
She made an unconscious movement. Her pen rolled onto the floor. He bent down faster than she did.
“Thank you.”
She saw something in his eyes as they flashed at her. What kind of marriage did the two of them have? she wondered, and at that moment something so wicked tightened around her heart that she didn’t even try consciously to understand it. She stood up and started pushing her things into her bag.
“Okay,” said Sjoerd, also getting to his feet.
Armanda bent down to fish her shoes out from under the table. She heard the house creak under the force of a squall. My God, she thought, with the detachment of the incurably candid, what a terrific, homely sound! Just think, the weather is going to get so much worse in the night that some of the ferry services will certainly get interrupted, and the captains can thumb their noses at the idea of working tomorrow, maybe even the day after tomorrow, maybe even till hell freezes over. Just think!
Looking distracted, she said good-bye.
As she and Sjoerd got out of the taxi that evening on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, Betsy’s front door was standing open. Sjoerd took the four narrow, almost vertical flights of stairs so fast that they had to pant at each other speechlessly for a moment when they reached the apartment door at the top. He took the coat from her shoulders. There was already a mountain of wet clothes hanging over the banisters. Betsy discovered them, called out a welcome, and led them into the attic room that once upon a time had served as a secret church; it had very high ceilings and was already filled with the din of voices. Armanda was in seventh heaven. It felt so good to walk in with a carefree Sjoerd in his old tweed jacket. And naturally there were any number of more casual acquaintances who did a double take when they first saw her.
“Armanda,” she had to say more than once. “I’m Armanda.”
3
Landscape?
For the first time today she was crossing water. The Nieuwe Waterweg is a deep but fairly narrow channel—the ferry only needs ten minutes to get from one side to the other—but the fare between the two landing stages is still a quarter guilder. Lidy saw a shockingly old peasant’s face loom up by her left-hand window. She understood, wound it down, and put the demanded coin in the ferryman’s paw. As all the windows in the car promptly steamed up, she got out and was startled by the wind, which seemed to her to be extremely strong out here on the water.
She looked around, and was amused to see a broad-shouldered man in a captain’s uniform up on the bridge, standing at the wheel and looking serious. I really am on a ship. Little waves all around, at an angle ahead of them an oceangoing steamer making course for the open sea, and over to the left the freighter RO8, headed toward the harbor in Rotterdam. Leaning against the car, she was standing in the blurry light of an imminent rain shower. Under the roof of the gangway, people with bicycles and people on foot. Her eye fell on a chest standing next to the railing, with Life Vests painted on it in white letters, as if to make absolutely clear to her once more that she really had left dry land. A few minutes later and the ship was already swinging round and coming to a stop. The loading ramp landed on the quay with a loud crash. And yet: as Lidy drove onto the island of Rozenburg, the crossing, regardless of how short it had been, had succeeded in placing a greater distance between her and home than she had expected or intended. This little outing was supposed to be only a fantasy, wasn’t it, a little exercise in tyranny on the part of her sister, Armanda, one that she herself had almost no part in?
Right, but in the hours that followed there was no pretense of a proper road to follow. A labyrinth of little side roads, locks, and bridges demanded her total attention. Impossible to think anything else in life more important, even for a moment, than the route, which seemed to have a will of its own and cared very little about the map spread out on the passenger seat. Near Nieuw-Beijerland she had to take another ferry, and a quarter of an hour later she reached the sea dike with a narrow asphalt road along the top. She stopped and ran in the wind to a faded street sign on which, luckily, she was able to decipher the name Numansdorp. That was where the harbor must be, at the Hollands Diep, which was the departure point for several ferries that made the crossing of the long arm of the sea.
The sea itself was not to be seen. But she had its unmistakable smell in her nose as she hit the gas again and put her face up close to the windshield, peering out at the landscape with the first stirrings of alarm. Landscape? In contrast to the huge arch of space above, the ground was almost erased. The solid rain cover had been shredded by the wind. Clouds with glistening edges were being pushed in front and behind one another like flats of scenery across the panorama on the other side of the windshield. To what extent were there any inhabitants in this panorama? She overtook only two disheveled cyclists with the wind at their backs, and once a farmer waiting on a side road with horse and cart waved when she honked at him. Tops of steeples, farmsteads, windmills with flying sails, a horse behind a fence—everything buried by the sky all the way to the dike, which wasn’t that high but still drew your eyes away from the sea. Ghostly, she thought. The harbor took forever to come into view. She wished she could see both land and sea at the same time. This was still the province of South Holland, a sort of betwixt-and-between area with bare black polders that was, however, familiar to her. Her plan was to get to the harbor in Numansdorp and take the ferry across to Zeeland, a province she had never set foot in,
but whose shadow she had already been sensing all morning, because it was the goal of her journey. That her compass needle was pointing her toward a group of completely unknown people, a family in a little rural town that didn’t interest her, had never interested her, and doubtless never would, was something that she was gradually coming in the course of these few hours to find completely normal.
And when were they actually expecting this godmother?
It was now two o’clock. On the coast, the wind was strengthening to thirty knots, which corresponds to a full 7 on the Beaufort wind force scale, and from now on, was going to increase at the rate of another Beaufort number every hour. Lidy reached the port and drove into the town square. To her delight, she saw that she could continue her journey exactly as she had planned it that morning. Next to a couple of rocking freighters, the ferry, Den Bommel, was waiting at the quayside, and there was space to load her car. That part of the jetty was completely submerged didn’t strike her as being in any way out of the ordinary.
Nor indeed was it. Twice a month on average the water in the Hollands Diep rose to the level known as the boundary-depth gauge, and even regularly topped it. That brought with it the regular local flooding without anyone making a fuss about it. She got out. The way to the booth where the ferry tickets were sold was blocked by an uprooted tree. She clambered over it and made sure she worked her way into the lee of the wind by the harbor office. As she joined the queue, her face was as flushed as the faces of the other passengers for the Numansdorp-Zijpe ferry, all of them talking cheerily, even with relish, about the weather. We know what storms are. When it blows, it blows, it’s pretty strong today but we’ve seen worse!
Ten minutes later she reversed down a pretty steep ramp and over the metal plates in the hold, and got out of the car. An iron interior stairway led her up into the passenger lounge, which had a billiards table and a bar. The ferries were stable old tubs. Den Bommel registered 10,000 tons and had a 400-horsepower diesel engine that could power the ship at ten knots all the way to Schouwen-Duiveland in two hours. Bad weather, i.e., a storm out of the west or the northwest above gale force 9 in this treacherous area, demanded great skill from the pilot. Wind speeds of forty to sixty knots could transform the waters of Haringvliet, Volkerak, and Grevelingen into seas of steep, relentlessly oncoming waves. No boat should if at all possible present itself to them broadside.
The Storm Page 2