Was she cold, was Armanda’s first question, was she tired? And she had read in her mother’s face that Lidy for the moment had been nowhere to be found. After she had guided her into the warm sitting room, led her to the sofa, taken off her shoes, and waited till she had hugged Nadja and kissed her, Armanda stared at her inquiringly.
When nothing was forthcoming: “I’ve heard there’s looting down there, and people have already been shot.”
Her mother had looked around the room. “Where’s Jacob?”
She hadn’t answered. No one in these days was paying attention to the thirteen-year-old. She said: “An entire cowshed with all the cows still tied up inside is said to have been sucked out to sea on the ebb tide.”
Armanda saw her mother nod thoughtfully. “I read somewhere,” she said, not giving up, “that the atmosphere over some of the islands is so wet that the birds in the air are inhaling water and just drowning on the wing.”
To which Nadine replied that she hadn’t seen that, but she’d seen plenty else.
“In the Hollands Diep …” she began, but then broke off at the sound of the front door closing downstairs. While Jacob came up the stairs whistling a tune, she hastily told Armanda, as if wanting to be done with it as fast as possible, about the flotilla of ships in the snow that had spread out in two directions across the waters, still almost at peak levels.
“And it was so odd,” she said, “suddenly”—she turned her eyes to her son, who had just entered the room—“one of these boats climbed right out of the water and went up this really steep dike, and then drove away quite fast on wheels.”
“An amphibious vehicle” was Jacob’s calm response. “A Detroit United, made by the Americans.”
Later that evening, alone in her room, when she thought back to her mother’s return home, Armanda could make no connection, not even the beginnings of one, between her own days just past and those of her mother. Small-boned, in the gray roll-necked sweater that was soon too warm for her, her mother had sat on the sofa, right on the edge, as if she had to leave again at any moment, and had talked about seeing a ship near Moerdijk coming toward them from the opposite direction and then passing them, with hundreds of coffins piled on deck.
Downstairs in the hall Betsy put on her cap in front of the mirror.
“He also told us,” Armanda heard her say to her mother, “that they spent the night outside the dike. They were allowed to tie up the boat to a fishing smack from Hellevoetsluis that was anchored there with its bow toward the open sea. They were given permission to sleep in the galley, which they did, despite force ten winds, storm gusts, and showers of hail. But shortly after four, the smack tore itself loose as the tide reached its high point, and vanished at high speed, their boat behind it, somewhere on the pitch-dark waters of the Krammer.”
8
Missing
Three days later, early in the evening, the doorbell rang. Sjoerd.
“Give me your coat!” said Armanda, who had opened the door to him. But he didn’t want to, and upstairs, where the family was already sitting down to dinner, he declined good-naturedly but firmly, when his father-in-law, who had also returned home that afternoon, invited him to stay.
“Sit down, man!”
“Go with him for a little bit, Armanda,” said Nadine, when she realized that Sjoerd, after three disturbing days, evidently wanted to have his little daughter back home with him. By which she meant, take bread, fresh milk, cookies, and a decent portion of the casserole that’s still in the oven, because of course there won’t be anything in the house over there.
Number 36 was dark and cold. But Armanda didn’t mind, quite the contrary. It was actually really nice, while Sjoerd lit the oil stove and switched on the lamps, to warm the food, button Nadja into an extra cardigan, take a neatly ironed cornflower-blue cloth out of the cupboard, and lay the table.
After dinner, while Sjoerd was putting Nadja to bed, she sat smoking with her feet up on a stool, looking out of the darkened window. Kindly, with a feeling of being a simple, gentle woman, she thought, No, no coffee for me, I’d rather have something stronger. Yet all through dinner, she and Sjoerd had kept giving each other brief, faintly embarrassed looks, in which each recognized the other’s sense of guilt. Perhaps it couldn’t have been otherwise, with Lidy in the background the whole time. What had happened to her, where was she? And so they had eaten well and played with the little girl. Would you like something more? Should I heat up a little more of the meat? And of course without really daring to think about it clearly, Armanda from second to second was replaying the party of a full week ago now, and them dancing, and the fact that he had been turned on by her. She liked it that men’s bodies responded so openly and spontaneously, despite themselves. And she liked herself for being so sensible, and not having gone home with him to number 36 for a quick drink.
When Sjoerd came back downstairs, Armanda asked, “Is she asleep?” Sjoerd said, “Yes,” and next moment they were both sitting on the sofa by the stove, each in a corner, drinking cognac out of shot glasses. Sjoerd began to recount everything he’d seen and done. He took his time and spoke straight ahead, as if he were giving a slide show in a darkened room.
“It was the Raampartse Dike,” he said. “A dry stretch of road that was still high enough out of the water. When we tied up, there were at least a hundred freezing people standing there, more were lying on the ground soaked to the skin, you have to imagine that they’d been washed up there for days and the storm was still blowing. And don’t think that there was much we could do at this point. The army had arrived at the same time as we did; in those practical amphibious machines they call DUKWs. I stood on the dike and heard a British, a Dutch, and an American officer consulting. It was the American, a short little major, totally calm, who had hit upon the idea of taking the DUKWs and had come chugging up from the Rhineland in short order with an entire collection of emergency assistance teams. And the teams were made up of Germans, former German soldiers, and in less than a minute they were scaling the dikes.”
“Whaaat?”
“Yes. And you can bet that the poor half-drowned devils on the dike were happy to see the enemy come marching along in their big boots.”
Armanda sank back a little and tucked her legs up under her. Gradually she felt herself slipping into the tentative, trusting frame of mind that she often felt with Lidy when they were talking as if they were both caught up in a dream. It was just like that now, although Sjoerd was the one talking while she only listened, more or less uncomprehendingly, a fact that bothered her as little as it would in such a dream, in which recognition doesn’t follow the usual logical patterns. The room was getting warm. Armanda listened to Sjoerd saying how bad it had been when the sky, after the third day of pointless activity, had turned absolutely black again. Nodded sympathetically. And at the same time heard a kind of interior running commentary rubbing her nose in the fact that all the while she had been at home taking care of an adorable two-year-old, reveling in her little fat hands, a doll with her book made of cardboard to read aloud from, and that she had gone shopping and done a little cooking: the usual rhythm of her own usual days. Everything else, everything dramatic, everything large-scale, was as far distant from her as could be, and even as part of the country disappeared from the map, she could almost have been working away peacefully on her diploma thesis, so that she’d be able to hand it in on time in the upcoming week….
And so, as her mind wandered in Now and Back Then, Here and Back There, she suddenly saw herself with utter precision sitting at home in the corner, surrounded by books and notebooks. She had in fact been doing exactly that: on Wednesday evening, full of cheer, Armanda had finished her paper on Plot in Shakespeare’s Early Plays. Somewhere around midnight she had rubbed her eyes, listened to the wind for a moment, and gone into the bathroom. The water from both taps began to fill the bath rapidly. She had undressed.
Sjoerd stood up. She watched him, trying to work out what he
wanted.
“Okay,” she said sweetly as he held up the bottle questioningly.
He filled her glass right up, then turned a little farther away from her as he sat down than he had been before.
“Yes?” she said.
A confusing muddle of images. Dream images, but they were real. Trying to find a support, she fixed her eyes on his mouth, which was still talking about their common theme, Lidy; she wanted to know what there was to know. Impressed by the gravity of things, but happy that Sjoerd was talking to her so gently and seriously, she tried to picture Lidy out in the flooded provinces. She could barely manage it. What had to happen, happened, but the evening hour meant that what took absolute priority was her perception of someone else, i.e., herself, Armanda. She, who at midnight last Wednesday had slid into the warm water without so much as a thought for her lost sister, leaving the taps still running, till the bath was full right up to her chin. So as not to veil the sight of her own body with blobs of foam, she didn’t lather herself with soap. I think it’s really good now, she said to herself. Appreciatively, still caught up in the spell of her own cleverness in finishing her work, she had contemplated her white body as it floated almost weightlessly under the surface of the water in the deep enameled bath.
Sjoerd looked sideways. He was eyeing her in a way that indicated that he was expecting a reaction from her to what he had just reported. Still absorbed in her memories, which were engendering the feeling in her that he must be sharing them, she leaned toward him, radiating warmth.
“Next day I went to a Red Cross station, right behind the streetcar stop. There was a woman there behind a table buried in paper, to talk and answer questions; she was dog tired and her patience was such as to kill all hope.”
“And?” said Armanda, while what she was thinking was: Please why don’t you move a little closer? Everything imaginable has happened, everything imaginable has gone wrong. Why don’t we just embrace each other?
“Yes,” he said. And after a little pause that produced a small shift in the mood: “She asked me for Lidy’s personal details.”
“Lidy’s personal details …” Armanda began, and stopped, suddenly overwhelmed by the significance of everything around her, pictures lined up together like pictures in a rebus puzzle of which the solution wasn’t a word but something far worse. The sofa, the lamp, Sjoerd’s body, fragments of dikes, wisps of water, ink-black sky, her own body, absolutely flat, if she was to be honest about it, and—mixed in with it all—Lidy’s body, whose details the Red Cross Information lady had noted down precisely on a form.
She sat up and listened now, frowning in concentration.
Sjoerd described how the woman at the table had first entered Lidy’s date of birth and similar details, and had then asked about her hair color.
“Deep chestnut brown,” Armanda answered promptly. “Long.” She thought for a moment. “Probably in a ponytail.”
Sjoerd nodded. “Eyes.”
“Emerald green.”
“Height.”
“Five foot ten.”
“Yeah, and then she wanted to know the state of her teeth. I couldn’t help her there.”
“Well, better than mine. A few fillings, nothing more. But we can check with the dentist.”
“She wanted to know if she’d ever broken a leg or anything like that.”
“No, never.”
“Scars, birthmarks.”
“Umm, that little patch on her stomach, you know the one, just below her navel.”
“Her clothes. That ash-gray winter coat, as far as I know.”
“Yes, the one with the glass buttons.”
“Shoes.”
“Size nine.”
“She was probably wearing that pale blue sweater, I thought. And dark blue trousers with cuffs.”
“The sweater belongs to me. Turquoise, angora. It needs to be hand-washed and dried flat on a towel.”
“She asked about underwear. Cotton? Silk?”
“Could be either.”
“And the make of her bra. I never paid any attention.”
“Maidenform.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“Really?”
“We … we once bought an expensive one, by Triumph.”
“Would you like a drink? A little water?”
“I think I’m going to go now.”
II
This Is What They Call Sleep
9
Against a Background of Moonlight, Icy Cold, Night
Squalls of snow battered the windshield, which the wipers could barely keep clear. They had left the town behind them. Izak Hocke had just taken over the driver’s seat; Lidy was beside him and Simon Cau in the back. Lidy looked with interest but absolute ignorance out at the pitch-dark road and the overflowing black drainage ditches to either side, which had nothing to do with her.
They were driving northeast.
She had reached her decision without hesitation. When she had been inspired within a couple of seconds to say, “Hang on, I’m coming with you,” it was only a confirmation of her previous decision to embark on this little excursion, which had at first simply attracted her and now had become an essential condition of her life.
She had thrown on her clothes in the blink of an eye. Trousers, the angora sweater that had originally been Armanda’s and that she’d worn all day on the way here. Izak Hocke and Simon Cau had waited for her downstairs in the entrance hall by the reception desk. With their heavy coats and headgear—Hocke was wearing a woolen cap—they looked quite different from the way they’d looked at the family gathering, during which she had immediately and quite naturally addressed both Hocke and Jacomina using the familiar form, whereas she had spoken to the charming landowner who was her dinner partner using the more formal turn of phrase. Now both men were standing waiting at reception, their faces expressionless. But she didn’t feel awkward in any way.
Why had she wanted to go along too? Why hadn’t she just handed over the car keys instead of getting into her winter coat, dark rings under her eyes, and marching after them as if it were the only thing to do?
They had needed a means of transport. The two men, friends and neighbors, had come to the party in Hocke’s car, but Hocke had then lent it instead of holding on to it. What Jacomina had told Lidy in a rush at the bedroom door was that Simon had had an urgent call and needed to get to a dike on the other side of the island and Izak Hocke should have been back home with his old mother long since in this terrible weather. Whereupon she had offered them the Citroën. With the greatest pleasure, of course. And when she said—just like that, because it seemed self-evident to her—that she would drive, the two men accepted with distant politeness. Only Jacomina still asked, “Do you really want to do this?”
“Yes.”
“Not go back to your nice warm bed?”
“No.” And with the bedroom door still open, she was already unbuttoning her pajama jacket.
So this was her situation. Straightforward, nice, and it was fine with the Hockes and Simon Cau. Which of them could have known what was coming at them? The land was used to storms and bad omens. And besides, Lidy was a girl with a taste for adventure, for whom finding a second bed out in the polder tonight was not an alarming thought in the least. As she stepped out onto the deserted street behind the men, all she felt, fleetingly, was that her father’s car, there at the curb, stuck out as very much something from home.
“Nice car,” said Hocke.
“Yes,” she replied, “but it’s hard to start.”
But she knew how to do it; the first time the engine turned over you gave it a little gas, and the second time you immediately gave it more. The wind was making so much noise that she had to do it by feel this time, not by ear. It worked on the second try. The lights went on, and the three of them drove off. The windshield was steamed up; Hocke wiped it clear and gave her directions.
“Turn right at the end. Now there’s a sharp curve
. The Nobelpoort is just past the corner. Why don’t you switch on the windshield wipers?”
It was around 2 a.m. The town was asleep, and elsewhere on the island, which lay far below sea level, most people were asleep too, the way they sleep when the wind sweeps over the roof on a Saturday night. Just here and there, things were beginning to happen. A few people in a house near the New Harbor had got up to make themselves a cup of tea, because even the wallpaper on the walls was moving. And at the flood fence that blocked the access road to the quay, the mayor, wrapped in his fur coat, was looking in amazement at the waters of the harbor on the other side, which had almost reached the topmost plank and therefore were simply going to overflow it. Someone in his entourage had immediately signaled that something had to be done, and at lightning speed: namely, go fetch the carpenter who lived a hundred yards down the street. At the very moment when the latter, screaming into the wind, was beginning to explain that the ramshackle props couldn’t take one more nail, even a decorative one, the Citroën, with Lidy still at the wheel, was clearing the Korte Nobelstraat on its way to the town gate at the other end.
And afterward, it was absolute madness for anyone who had no experience to be trying to hold a car on the road. Once you were out beyond the houses, it really came home to you what a force-11 gale actually was. But before Lidy could panic, Izak Hocke turned to her and said calmly in her ear, “Pull over.”
The Storm Page 7