It was not unexpected that conversation at a certain point should turn to the uncompromising and generous Dutch people who found themselves, so to speak, in a war again.
“Over here!” a young uncle had called to Betsy, who was following Armanda with a bowl of cookies. He raised his eyebrows, stretched out a hand, looked at Betsy emphatically, and continued to make his remarks to nobody in particular.
“Ships’ warehouses full! And there are about half a million people living in this area. They reckon you could clothe eight million people from head to foot with what’s there!”
Armanda saw that Betsy didn’t yet understand what this was about, but she herself did. In the disaster zone of Zeeland and South Holland, people had already been driven mad with the sheer quantity of clothing in the first weeks, donated by a nation possessed. With a knowing look she glanced from Uncle Leo, her mother’s youngest brother, to Uncle Bart, also a Langjouw, sitting next to him, and jumped into the conversation.
“There were evening capes in there, and swimsuits, and streetcar conductor’s uniforms.”
Her eyes slid past them, and as she moved on she said, “Wilder-vank sent a whole batch of chef’s hats.”
As she and Betsy handed round the coffee and cookies, always the boring bit at such a party, she heard the uncles continue.
“Be quiet,” said Bart.
“I swear it.” Leo had been the envoy-on-the-spot of the City of Amsterdam, which had taken on special responsibility for Schouwen-Duiveland. “Shoes lying everywhere. In the square in front of the church, in the streets, all of them in the mud. There was barely a living soul left to be seen in the village, everyone had been evacuated, it all looked absolutely tragic.”
“Really,” said Bart.
“Yes. One of those donations. Thousands and thousands of pairs of shoes. Out of sheer despair, because every warehouse on the island was already overflowing with clothes, so they threw them at the first fishing village they came to.”
The other man snorted.
“In Bruinisse the stuff was stacked to the ceiling in a school with big high windows, there was so much of it not a single ray of light could get through. I saw how people can get drunk on the sheer availability of a huge quantity of stuff, it doesn’t matter what the stuff is. The ones who came to find something didn’t just take what they needed, they began to carry on like voles or crazed moles, tunnelling through it all. Honest. Do you know that the Red Cross is being almost bankrupted by the storage costs? Someone told me that recently they had a hundred thousand cubic yards of clothing that they didn’t even distribute, just shunted it down the line like that, free gratis and for nothing.”
“How about a cigar?”
On the living room table diagonally opposite them was an opened box of Sumatras.
“Yes, give me one. Some of it went to the rag merchants, and some of it to all our faithful Indonesian immigrants.”
A few minutes later, when Armanda came back to sit with them again, the conversation had become more general. She followed it with a cup of coffee in her hand and a plate with a slice of pie on her lap, but didn’t join in. In the circle across from her sat her father and her mother. With the forbearing, slightly astonished expressions that were so typical of both of them and sometimes made them in some remarkable way the spitting image of each other, they listened to these anecdotes that were circulating through every Dutch living room right now, and which their guests were telling one another the way people tell jokes. In Zieriksee the entire population had been forcibly evacuated by the authorities. Nobody wanted to leave, everyone had to. And as a result the workers, yes, it’s true, who had the necessary knowledge to work on the dikes, were suddenly sitting parceled out with host families in Arnhem, Hilversum, Aerdenhout, and so on, and most of them had never even been away from home before. But because the work still had to be done, every single road worker and anyone who could hold a shovel were herded together by the officials of all the city engineering departments across the country and billeted in emergency barracks behind the Stone Dike.
Armanda saw her father’s fingers tapping quietly on the arms of his chair. Uneasily, she felt the impulse to go sit on one of the arms and put her hand in his. All men, the conversation went on, young unmarried men and fathers of households with withdrawal symptoms, basically they were expected to wait. But it wasn’t for long. A holiday bus from Leiden swept festively into the old marketplace, where it disgorged its passengers in front of a well-known small hotel. It was almost evening. The entire waterfront street was full as the girls, roughly twenty of them, climbed out, laughing and waving at the men, to get rooms.
Smiles all round. A very strange atmosphere, Armanda remembered later, without a single drop of anything high-proof doing the rounds. A cousin, the daughter of a certain Aunt Noor, had burst out laughing loudly, but then checked her laughter to tell a quick story about her fiancé, who had spent the summer with a colleague from the national police in one of these half-drowned villages. The girl, a rather brainless creature, gave some totally tactless details about her fiancé’s summer. Beautiful weather. At high tide you could sail through an opening in the sea dike to the highest point of the village, where it rose up out of the water, and you could moor behind the pastor’s house. Residence permits were almost never granted to the actual inhabitants of the village, not even if someone’s house was still standing and they absolutely wanted to return. The only people there were a rescue team, a tavernkeeper with an ancient mother on whom they, the fiancé and his colleague, could unload entire boxes full of cats they’d fished up, and a few boys who collected the machinery from the farms and set it out to dry in the sun. The two policemen had their hands full. Even late at night they would sometimes be awakened by the approaching buzzing of a motorboat with a troop of merry thieves on board, who assumed the village was totally abandoned. All in all, a terrific time: driving around, hilarious evenings in the tavern, fish to catch by the pound just by lowering a net in front of the opening by the dike, idiotic games with a pig that was running around, the Handelsblad sent a crate of oranges, and naturally going swimming, jumping into the water, which they did right from …
The cousin, a little uncertain now, had begun to pull at her lip.
“Oh, I’m boring you.”
“Not at all! Which they did right from … yes?”
Armanda had already stopped looking at the storyteller some time ago, but as the account began to pull her in, she had turned her eyes toward her father, her mother, and her brother. She saw her father pick up a matchbox and examine it carefully, while her mother bent forward with a lifeless smile to pour some cream into Jacob’s coffee. In the meantime she heard, as did her parents, how the cousin’s fiancé and his colleague had jumped right off the makeshift landing behind the pastor’s house to go for a swim. Of course, only when the water was as clear as glass, and with their eyes open, because as her fiancé had said, man, you had no idea what was floating around down there!
At that very moment everyone looked up, laughing and saying hello. Sjoerd had come in, a little late, he’d had some things to do in the city after dinner. Armanda, who had hardly been able to move for the last fifteen minutes, felt a surge of relief go through her. With a sense of everything’s-okay-now she got to her feet to take the empty coffee cups into the kitchen, knowing that Sjoerd would take up his duties as son-in-law at the sideboard in the back room where the bottles and glasses were standing ready. As the two of them did the rounds shortly afterward with wine, vermouth, egg liqueur, and gin, most of the guests barely detected any difference between this and earlier parties here in the house, and after the first glasses nobody saw any difference at all.
Shortly after eleven the door to the living room opened. A little barefoot creature with dark sleepy eyes came toddling in: Nadja. The entire assembled company immediately stopped all conversations, looked at the child, laughed and cooed, and in general presented a picture that would make anyone wonder what kind of s
pooky effect it would have on a stone-sober almost-three-year-old. But—at this moment the little one discovered the face of her mother and steered for a pair of open arms.
Nothing special. Armanda, who had been called Mama by Nadja for so long already that she’d forgotten it had ever been otherwise, kissed the copper-red curls on the head of the toddler now sitting on her lap. Then, contented, as she looked around the room, where conversation had started up again, she realized that Betsy was trying to meet her eyes, and looking acutely interested. It was the look of a friend from a far corner of the room, but so penetrating that her inner ear could pick up the whispered arguments that came with it.
“Sweetheart, fate has certainly intervened in your life, hasn’t it?”
Calm, persuasive. Armanda stared back.
“A little effort on your part, and my brother, shall we say, gets his wife, whom he misses, back again. But à propos, do tell me why you behaved so impossibly to him after the movies last week.”
Without dropping her gaze, Armanda had carefully picked up her glass from the occasional table and taken a sip. Then, with Nadja’s hot little head resting against her neck, she had telegraphed back: “Dear Betsy, I do understand—you want to see your half brother and his family settled with a competent woman to run the house again. I myself am conscious of certain powers that sometimes encourage this, and sometimes suddenly rule it out altogether. When the three of us went to the Rialto last week to see La Città Dolente, to begin with I liked it that you arranged things so that Sjoerd sat in the middle and I could feel his shoulder against mine as soon as the lights went down. When afterward you wanted to excuse yourself quickly so that Sjoerd and I could spend a few minutes in the rosy dimness of the foyer talking a little about the really moving story of the man who got left at the North Pole, I was already ahead of you. Two quick kisses for each of you, then I beat it. And now you want an explanation. All I’m going to say is that because of the short that ran before the main film, I didn’t register a single thing about the North Pole business. It was about Schouwen-Duiveland. Do you remember? The weekly newsreel once again was delivering the most heroic report, and in the most heroic voice: all forces had been deployed to close the last breach in the dike in Zeeland, near Ouwerkerk. Why this had to be done in night and fog was a mystery, but here were the pictures: the black expanse of water, sections of the dike, cranes, and on the foredeck of a ship the queen, a beret on her head, standing among the workers chewing her lip, because this job has already been done once, and failed miserably. But this time it works. Incredibly impressive, all these lights at night! The gap in the dike at Ouwerkerk is enormous, and four huge concrete caissons have to be pulled into it by tugs and then lowered. Three of the things are already in place, tonight it’s the turn of number four. The tugs have brought it into position as the tide goes out, and now, one and a half hours later, it comes to rest on the sea bottom, precisely placed to the inch. How diligent we are today. From now on, no more tides turning right there between the houses. All over the island, which I’ve long thought of as Lidy’s island now, bells begin to ring out in the night. Major celebrations. I kept hearing them, Betsy, in fragments, all through the other film about that man at the North Pole.”
They had both laughed out loud. Betsy had stuck out a knee and filched a cigarette from the glass on the table.
13
Let’s Crawl Under the Covers
When she was finished at the hairdresser, Armanda took care of a couple of errands, then went home. Surgery hours were still in progress on the first floor, her father’s patients came and went, but upstairs she bumped into no one. So I’ll just pop over to number 36, she thought with the feeling of happy relief that she had come to associate with this idea. She liked going to Lidy’s house. She really loved to keep it running in apple pie order.
When she got there, there were a couple of letters lying on the mat. As she picked them up and checked to whom they were addressed and who had sent them, her raincoat dragged on the floor. “Mrs. L. Blaauw,” she murmured on the stairs, realized it sounded strange, got a lump in her throat, and went, as soon as she got upstairs, to the garbage can that lived in a deep cupboard next to the kitchen. A short time later the unopened mailing from the perfumery to its customers was buried under the chrysanthemums that had been there all week. She also emptied the ashtrays.
The light was already fading as she looked around the living room. No need to dust today. So I’ll iron a couple of shirts. A few minutes later she was doing this, one flight up. The ironing board had its allotted place in the hall, with a lamp above it, and she spread out the ironed shirts on the bed in the master bedroom next door.
Inhaling the smell of steam and almost singed cotton that Lidy always said made her feel faint, she was just getting a dress iron out of the cupboard when she heard the front door close downstairs. She jumped, and looked at the time. He’s early today, she thought, and then did something that just came over her. She hurried to the dressing table set at an angle in the corner, ran a brush through her hair, and pulled her sweater nice and tight over her breasts. Then she switched off the overhead light, and lit a floor lamp, cast a glance at the curtains but decided to leave them open so that Sjoerd, whom she could already hear on the third tread of the stair, would find her bathed in ocher light, very much to her advantage, with a mysterious reflection in the window behind her.
He stood in the doorway. Pausing for a moment to take in the situation, he came over to her with the same decisiveness, she realized in a flash, with which he must have stopped work half an hour before. And they started to kiss, immediately, greedily. Moving one arm behind her back, he had already succeeded in closing the curtains.
It was not their first embrace, far from it. For more than a year now, Armanda had been going around the house at the oddest hours for a woman. And Sjoerd had quite often reached out in the dark hallways or by the stove in the kitchen to pull her close. But contrary to what might be assumed, the more time went on, the more she began to be coy, pushing him away from her when he pressed her against a wall, his desire for her declaring itself openly as he went hard against her stomach. One time she had interrupted their playful wrestling and said, “I won’t do it till I’ve seen my sister’s dead body.”
Did those words come out of my mouth? she had thought immediately, and was relieved when he reacted so casually, even quite heartlessly.
“Anyone who still surfaces these days is put straight into a closed coffin. You’ll never get to see it now.”
So today it looked as if Armanda had pushed her reservations aside. When Sjoerd said, “Be my wife,” whispering, as if someone could hear him, she found it wonderful that his fingers, which never had a problem anyway, had already located the hooks on her bra.
Armanda returned his embrace, pulled her sweater over her head, let him undo the zipper on her skirt, climbed out of it eagerly, and searched at once for his warm mouth again. Then she simply couldn’t find anything amiss in her behavior, as she fell back with him onto the bed covered in carefully ironed shirts, first she was on top, then he was. In that moment Armanda was already far away in her head. The only signal her thoughts gave off was in a certain look, yearning, utterly honest, that a man would recognize as declaring that she was his love, and yes, she was willing.
Then, at a moment that was totally inconvenient, erotically speaking, Armanda, who was still a virgin—this requires saying, because these things are relevant—started a conversation. And its opening theme was the undeniable fact that legally speaking, Lidy was still alive.
“Ridiculous,” said Sjoerd in the same tone of voice he had just used to whisper something sweet in her ear. “You know as well as I do.”
“Maybe,” she said, and told him right to his stunned face that in this moment she could feel not only her sister’s ghostly eyes on her but, to tell him the truth, his as well. Together they were watching to see if she did everything the right, well-tested way. “Am I right, or not?�
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“No.”
“And while I remember it, why did you just say ‘be my wife’ and not, for example, ‘be my love’ or, just as good, ‘let’s crawl under the covers’?”
He began to laugh. Before she knew what was happening to her, he slid out of bed, switched off the lamp, and took her in his arms again in the pitch darkness.
“Nobody can watch you now,” he said in the same sweet whisper, but then his voice changed. As if he found himself in a discussion with her at a point where only the most powerful arguments could hope to prevail, Sjoerd told Armanda how much he loved her and how beautiful she was. Not a night went by, he said, in which he didn’t spend time thinking about her—and she should know that thinking meant more than just thinking—as he saw her face and her perfect round mouth and emerald green eyes always in front of him, no different from now, along with her long dark brown hair, and the most magnificent naked breasts that a lonely man could imagine, and if it came to that, would be able to recognize at once and prefer to a thousand other pairs of breasts!
At this point his voice sank again, as Armanda buried him in kisses. And everything would have run its normal course if the front doorbell had not rung at that very moment.
Armanda flinched, horrified.
“There’s someone at the door. Someone wants to come in!”
The Storm Page 11