She could hear that he was talking like a madman, but she too, as she realized, was listening to him like a madwoman as well, as he said, “I want to hold her tight again, hold her in my arms. Does that make sense?”
She looked at him unflinchingly.
“It makes absolute sense, Armanda. Think about it. Her and me. Our whole lives are still ahead of us!”
She turned away, confused. When he let go of her, there was an unpleasant tension between them. A barge appeared under the bridge. She watched as it traversed the crossing of the two canals, where trees and houses were reflected in the water, and continued toward the inner city. Was there any place he hadn’t been in the last months? she wondered. What had he seen? She knew any number of small things about him, the everyday routine, the rhythm of things in number 36 and number 77, but what about the big things? When he returned home from one of his trips, none of them at home knew how to deal with the combination of his grief and their own. Her mother would hastily lay another place at the table, her father would offer him a cigarette, and Jacob would steal glances at his face, lit up by the flame from the lighter. As far as they were concerned, words were unnecessary. “No.” A shake of the head. “Nothing.”
To break the ice between them, she said, “Listen, Sjoerd.” And asked him if she could maybe hear some more details about these journeys into hell. He looked at her for a moment, as if wondering where she found the courage to do that, then an odd weary look came into his eyes, as if he were getting ready to tell a story.
“Shall we go over the Amstelveld?” he suggested.
They were in warehouses, schools, the wholesale fish market in Yerseke. The morgues at the cemeteries were mostly too small for the number of dead who were recovered in the first two weeks. Because a large number of those drowned in Schouwen-Duiveland had been washed right across the Oosterschelde to Beveland, it made sense to at least take a look in the Great Church in Goes. There were things he’d had to get used to. He had been in a nursery school somewhere out on the Vierbannen polder where someone had lifted a cloth to show him the mortal remains of a young woman, still unidentified, underneath. The filth that was all that was left of a village, and the stinking horse lying on its side in the mud as if it had been poured into it, had prepared him for what he saw. It wasn’t her. Long, dark hair, age between twenty and thirty, teeth complete except for the two molars at the back: she would be identified during the course of the week by her husband, a tenant farmer in Capelle, by her clothing.
“You’ll receive word as soon as we hear anything new.”
So a day later he found himself in the church in Goes. A town that had survived unscathed, and a space dedicated to the Lord in which an immensely long row of corpses was laid out. Washed and wrapped in shrouds, they were awaiting identification and burial by their relatives. He arrived at around four o’clock. A buzz of voices; he was by no means the only one going round and searching. Shortly beforehand a Red Cross helper had shown him a national police report signed by the state attorney in Middelburg. Nails and toes well taken care of, he had read, skin color white, chin round, no calluses on hands. In consternation, he had nodded. Even the clothing seemed right, though he hesitated. Blue pullover, dark gray trousers with a zipper on the left-hand side, white underpants, white undershirt, pink shirt, gray men’s kneesocks. The Red Cross helper lifted a cloth from one of the tables that stood at the head of each bier. There lay the clothes and other objects as described to him. And when he said nothing, only nodded carefully, she pulled the cloth back farther so that he could see the face.
He screamed, “No!” and began to tremble violently.
Who has such a thing on their conscience?
Pointless question, which nonetheless kept running through his head as he made his way out of the nave by way of the transept that was dedicated to prayer but now was echoing with the stuttering cries of the eighteen-year-old girl who had recognized not just her parents but, totally unexpectedly, the boy she had been going out with, the murmuring of women with lists of names in their heads, the whispering of the man who had broken down at the sight of three blond children, in a row, their little muzzles completely eroded, and confirmed that yes, that was them, yes, yes, the three youngest of his four children. He had already pushed open the door of the vestibule when he heard, off to the right, the cheerful sound of men discussing a job. He looked over with something like relief. About eighteen or twenty feet away, through the open door, he saw a room, probably the presbytery, with a large number of coffins piled every which way on top of one another. On some of the coffins men were sitting in their work clothes, smoking and talking.
Out to the street! Cars, passersby, he looked upward. Was he trying to refer the nightmare to the heavens? He was more closely related to the men on the coffins, the excavators, the poachers, than he realized. For they were the ones who had been found by the health officials and the police to pull the bodies out from under the driftwood, fish them out of the water with pickaxes or their bare hands, and so it followed that they were also the ones who had pulled the woman he had viewed today out of the barbed wire. Nails and toes well taken care of. Once again, it hadn’t been her, no. But for a second, in the face with the empty eye sockets, he had seen Lidy’s features.
Weeks went by. Then there was a call from Zierikzee. The local body squad had found a woman, still young, whom the state identification team could describe only in the vaguest terms, clothing almost disintegrated, hair color no longer identifiable, left arm missing, feet approximately size nine. He borrowed a car from a friend and went to the cemetery. Hopeful, yes, as always. Come to look at the victim’s ring. Lidy had got married in a bright green silk suit; in the church on the Amstelveld he had slipped a ring with a little ruby onto her finger. Without paying attention to the graves, he went to the morgue, situated to the side of a path covered in tire tracks at the edge of a mudhole.
Late morning. He had already spent a short time with Jacomina Hocke, who was still living in her parents’ hotel with the three children. In the lounge, packed to bursting with officials, soldiers, and journalists, he had sat opposite a woman about whom all he knew was that she had lost her husband, which didn’t interest him. After a brief conversation she had fetched Lidy’s little suitcase from upstairs and set it on the table in front of him. Oddly shy, he had searched for the lock with his fingers and then looked up at Jacomina for a moment as if to ask for her blessing. Then: a moment of overwhelming, ignominious happiness. There were her clothes! No possible doubt. Her tight skirt, her petticoat with the narrow straps, her nylon stockings, her shoes, size nine, that she called “Queenies,” her good-little-girl pajamas made of pink and blue striped flannel. What else is there to do at such a moment than to take a very deep breath?
The scent of L’Air du Temps had stayed with him all the way through the accursed town and along the path between the gravestones till he entered the Lysol-saturated morgue, where a very young girl showed him a bucket with a couple of pathetic objects floating in it.
“Knitted woolen undershirt,” the child read out from a piece of paper. “Knitted pullover, color no longer identifiable.”
Then she showed him a box with some smaller objects in it, standing ready on the table.
“Ring with red stone.”
He bent down over it. Half dreaming, distracted, he stared for a while at the touching piece of jewelry. Sweet, he thought, small, for a narrow fine finger. And then, his mind clouded by the chemical stench in the room: dammit, now can I finally find out what happened before all this?!
As he turned round, he found himself looking straight into the eyes of a man who had just that minute walked in. Powerfully built, red-faced, he wore overalls, a green slicker, and rubber boots. A farmer, Sjoerd assumed, and looked at him for a long second in wild supplication.
It was the leader of the body squad, a preacher, who had just driven a small truck full of new human remains onto the grounds. They were pulling out two, at most t
hree, new corpses a day, using the engineers’ boats, always with someone from one of the old shipbuilding families on board, because they knew the places to look. If they spotted a screaming flock of seagulls somewhere fluttering over the brown water rising and falling with the tide, then they didn’t need anyone to point it out to them, they already knew themselves what it meant. The trips with the corpses became fewer over time, but grislier. Some of the watchers on the Steinernen Dike, where the boats moored, spread unsparing descriptions of the bodily remains that were brought onto land, they couldn’t leave it alone, and said they would never eat eels again as long as they lived.
The red-faced man didn’t say why he had come, but held his cigarettes out to Sjoerd. As the latter said, “It wasn’t her,” the man nodded and suggested they go out into the fresh air. They talked for a while in front of the little building. Sjoerd indicated the gravestones with his head. “So that’s where you buried her.” The other man understood that he meant the woman who wasn’t Lidy.
“No. The mass grave here is full. And we always take the unknowns to the emergency burial ground farther away on the island.”
To their left, by the small truck, some workers from the body squad had begun to unload something. In the brief exchange that followed, Sjoerd said, “I don’t know how you can do this.”
The other man didn’t answer at first, and seemed to recognize that it didn’t matter whether he said anything or not. On Sunday he would preach an ingenious but truly comforting sermon on a text from Isaiah: “Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth” that came to him with mysterious ease after or even during the filthy work, but for now, all he could see was what the other man saw.
“Damn mud,” he said.
No reply.
Then, “To begin with, the only way we could get through it was with gin; man, we drank, sometimes we were completely loaded. But now we do it stone-cold sober.”
The emergency cemetery was not far from the harbor at Zijpe, close by the marshaling yards for the streetcars. Because the ferry to St. Philipsland wouldn’t leave for another hour, Sjoerd had had time to pay a brief visit. He got out and was immediately stunned by the panorama, which had the bleak power to bury the onlooker in memories of horror, whether the memories were real or not. In the foreground were two rows of hastily but professionally piled up mounds of earth with the approximate dimensions of a prone body, and slightly higher behind these the streetcar rails, in the curve a row of wet black freight cars, and behind them, in the distance, scarcely distinguishable from the sky, the line made by the bank of the Zijpe, where the afternoon mist was already lying low over the water. He walked down the row of grave mounds. Read the inscriptions on the tarred wooden crosses stuck at angles into the earth. Unknown man, number 121. Unknown girl, number 108. Unknown woman, number 77. He didn’t know whether he abhorred them or was grateful to them in his heart as he thought, From now on they’re her relatives, and imagined them waiting there, cold, wet, unidentifiable, until she joined them for good.
They crossed the Amstelveld. Children were playing between the parked cars. The sun had disappeared behind the houses, and Armanda did up the buttons on her coat. Sjoerd walked beside her, silent for some time now, and smoking, but she sensed that it wasn’t calming him. Where is he? she wondered. He’s wandering around somewhere where I can’t follow him, even with the best will in the world. Mourning my deeply loved, woefully missed sister. She would have known how to fathom his mood. If you know how a man is when he makes love, when he drops all restraint, can you also know how it is with his other passions? I think so.
Unable to change anything, she suddenly thought irritably: You look pale, brother-in-law, and hollow-eyed. And before she knew what she was doing, she began to scold. “Shouldn’t you start to let go of her? She’s out there and she’s going to stay out there. You can’t reach her anymore—it’s impossible!”
Odd, the way her words found their own direction, took on their own force as they revealed something in her that had turned from gentle to angry. She felt Sjoerd look at her, stunned. As she was about to carry on in the same rough tone of voice, he cut her off.
“Don’t say that! They’re still working flat-out! Aside from this phone call about the pullover, I was also summoned to the police last week. The station at Kloveniersburgwal!”
He had picked up on her fiery tone. For some reason, this pleased her.
“They had received another photo for me to look at, God knows why,” he said.
He had stopped. She looked at him intransigently.
“And?”
“It was the face of a middle-aged woman,” he said. “You know, a motherly type with dark curly hair, all stuck together, and a double chin. You could see that they’d set her on a ladder when they found her, as a sort of stretcher, and that’s how they photographed her, with her head against the rungs. She looked nothing like Lidy, nothing at all, but as I stood there with the photo in my hand and it looked back at me for a while, I don’t know, every face of Lidy’s that I knew was gone, I couldn’t recall any of them, I didn’t even try. I liked the woman. Her head seemed to me to be caught a little between the rungs, but the expression on the face was peaceful, although one cheek was very creased and much more bloated than the other. The eyes weren’t quite closed, her little pupils stared brokenly but kindly into the distance, dead. So I stood there holding the photo, which was as foreign to me as it was familiar, while the policeman behind his desk waited for me to be finally ready to say yes or no. I think I must have tried his patience. You’ll probably find this strange, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to hand him back the woman’s face, which didn’t really look like Lidy’s but still was her, at least a little bit.”
He threw his cigarette butt into the canal.
“Of course you won’t understand.”
I understand very well, thought Armanda, and lowered her eyes. The red paving stones were cracked and old. She ran her foot over them. A moment devoid of rational thought, a moment when her mind stood still. But she had pictures in her head. Fragments, faces, all signaling death. As if knotted on a rope, they told their story, one that was made up, as every story is, of its gaps and dark holes. Holy God, thought Armanda, and envisioned a last photo in the police station at the Kloveniersburgwal, that was neither of Lidy nor of the poor woman on the ladder. It was a friendly image of death itself, which may have different expressions in each individual snapshot, but the subject is always the same.
She stood for a moment, lost in her own broodings, but was distracted when Sjoerd seized her arm again, and her light-headedness changed to a chaos of emotions.
He was staring at her.
“Please don’t look so angry!” he begged. “Don’t clench your lips like that.”
As she obeyed, he took hold of her hair with an innocent, absent-minded movement of his hand, played with it for a moment, then let it go again.
11
At the Harbor
Ten minutes later. Simon Cau’s destination, to which he had been hurrying them with increased urgency, was suddenly reached. The road ended. The car stopped next to a pitiful little crane on wheels, overturned, the wooden cabin smashed to pieces. They got out. She, Lidy, was a mere figment of herself, but Cau too, who seemed to have forgotten altogether that she was there, looked in the soft violet light of the moon as though he no longer belonged among the living.
About sixty feet away stood a small group of people, lost in the thundering surroundings of the dike embankment, the sky, the ragged clouds, and the black land at their backs. It was icy cold, the temperature around zero. The northwest wind was blowing straight at the bay and at the little arbitrary jumble of people, villagers, dike workers, six in all, who had thought it better to leave their beds to check on the water. You had to know there was a tiny harbor here at all, a mere mooring-place for the flat-bottomed barges that came and went in fall during the beet harvest. It was invisible, because both the quay and the landi
ng stage were under water, and the opening in the dike through which one normally gained access to the quay was blocked off by a kind of barricade up to shoulder height. They both looked at it as they headed down across the sand. Even Lidy knew instinctively that the first thing they had to check was the five old beams, one above the other, pushed into two slots to build a sort of plank fence, and only after that to look at what was behind it. In this she was behaving in exactly the same way as everyone else here.
As night fell, the structure of the flood planks had been put in place by two workmen—Simon Cau was now hurrying guiltily in their direction—with much cursing and groaning. With the dike sheriff nowhere to be seen, they had come here on their own initiative with a tractor and a cartful of sand. It had been a struggle, and during all their trudging and messing around the dowels—there must have been forty-nine of them—had regurgitated themselves as they dragged the things out of the shed for the last time, nor was there any remaining trace of the chalk marks that had been left on them the previous time.
Simon Cau greeted the two men with a nod, as they stood crouched over behind the flood planks and smoked.
“So?” asked Cau.
The men didn’t answer. What was the point? Because the concrete roadbed leading to the quay had no slots in it, never had, they had laid some sandbags against the lowest beam, but the sea was already spraying a little water through them again.
“Very high,” said Cau, pointing with his chin toward the water. “I’ve never seen it so high here in my life.”
The two workmen nodded, but they weren’t pulling long faces the way the dike sheriff was; they took a brief look at the young woman who had fetched up here, didn’t recognize her, and then straightened up to look over the timbers of the barrier at the unholy blue-tinged expanse behind. High. That was certainly the word for it. The sea, never in their experience so far inland, looked to them like a maddened beast penned in behind their shoulders.
The Storm Page 9