And one of them naturally pulled himself together sufficiently to say, “To the bride!”
Silence. Mother and daughter were each thinking their own thoughts. The sun meantime had moved on around until it was shining into the room through the curtain again. Now it was Armanda who checked the time. It was time to pick Nadja up from play school.
“Oh,” said her mother, getting to her feet and looking for her purse. “Bart is a sweetheart. He meant well.”
Armanda went downstairs ahead of her mother. The stairwell was dark except for a bright ceiling light that shone down onto the middle of the first step. At the very moment she was suddenly struck by the conviction that she and her mother had just been conducting a conversation that was totally mad on both their parts, Armanda saw two huge shadows swaying across the wall.
They said good-bye in the sun-flooded front doorway. Intending to finally tidy herself up and change her clothes, as Sjoerd would be home in an hour, Armanda was about to close the door behind her when she heard, “Wait! Wait! Armanda!”
Oh, please, she thought, no!
And, before she knew what was happening, she was back in the living room next to a panting Betsy, who had called out, “Only a moment, just to say hello,” but had now discovered the photos on the table and was bent over them, stirring them to life again.
Armanda followed. Still barefoot, she followed the glance of her friend, who quickly pulled out a photo of the adorable Nadja. The child had been a bridesmaid.
“Do you remember?” asked Betsy, glancing sideways surreptitiously, with a curious expression.
Of course. Armanda nodded in a slightly sleepy way, but she remembered everything. She relived the whole incident, seeing it more precisely now than she had the first time around. After the ceremony in the church there had been no reception, better not to, but a formal banquet in an old house on the Geldersekade, a property that could be rented with its own staff for private parties. After the main course, when everyone was swapping places or running around a little, and she, Armanda, was sitting under a palm tree adjusting something on her dress, Nadja came up to her newly married mother. Somewhere in the background an accordionist and two violinists were playing.
“How pretty she looks.” Betsy said.
Armanda cocked her head to one side and looked at the photo, slightly confused. Suddenly she felt the memory of herself with the little girl come flooding over her.
“Oh, my sweetie pie …” She stopped short.
Extremely elegant, as only a four-and-a-half-year-old bridesmaid can be, Nadja had walked all the way across the room, hopped and skipped a couple of times, never once blinking her large pale green eyes, till she jumped with outstretched little hands onto Armanda, smiling under her palm tree. A little game. Definitely. A little act of aggression, like a cat that forgets what it’s doing for a moment because it’s been blissfully stroked for too long. Suddenly a smack from the little hand landed unhappily on Armanda’s outstretched cheek, and little fingers clutched at the pearls on one of her earrings, which got torn off. Inadvertent, really not intended. Can happen. But the little girl in her white dress, with the copper-red hair, knew nothing, absolutely nothing about the fact that before her mother there had been another mother, as nobody in the first chaotic days had wanted to talk to her about it and afterward it just hadn’t happened; and the little girl stood there looking at the blood welling out of Armanda’s ear, as if this stream of red was the very thing she had wanted to see on this memorable day. Armanda had risen to her feet. She had bent down, taken Nadja by the hand, and pulled her along. And while several of the guests got onto their knees to search for the pearl, Armanda and Nadja spun round in a merry circle to one of the Viennese waltzes being played at top speed by the three musicians. Whenever her feet left the floor entirely, the little one crowed with laughter. At one moment Armanda felt a stab of a compulsion—which would only grow stronger between the time of the party and the session with the photos—both to hug her small dance partner and to join her in bursting into tears.
A little cough. Betsy was watching her discreetly out of the corner of her eye, as she could feel. Oh, Nadja, she thought. Oh, such a pitiable little creature, who first of all has no real mother, only a substitute, in a world in which you can expire in thunder and lightning like a heroine in a tragedy, but in which you can also be granted the freedom to live a totally banal life from one day to the next, with no greater mystery to struggle with than one you’ve inherited from someone else. Oh, poor little half-orphan!
“You know,” she said to Betsy, “maybe you’ll think I’m crazy for saying this, and even crazier for saying it to you of all people, so please don’t take it badly, but in some way I feel like a half-orphan.”
They stared at each other for a moment, each of them unfathomable, and Armanda said quickly, “I mean, a half-orphan as regards my own life. Everyone has a past and a future, which sounds really banal, you’ll say, but I don’t care, that’s how it is.”
Betsy, up for more, kept quiet.
“Yes, really, everyone has a past, a run-up to the present, and that’s your youth, at least for normal mortals, in which you were already fully the creature that you are now, it wouldn’t be possible any other way, would it, but mostly it first took the form of a promise. I know, nice story, my run-up to today isn’t to be found in my past, it’s … tsch … it’s in my dead sister. So let’s …” She turned around, reached for the tea things, and stared crossly at the photos of the most beautiful day of her life. “Just call my past what it really is: a step-past.”
Betsy, who had promised only to stay a minute and didn’t want to offer the slightest excuse for more tea to be brewed, started making hasty, spur-of-the-moment remarks about starting a new life, which were meant to cheer her up. She, Armanda, she said, was herself, Armanda, and absolutely nothing could prevent her from choosing her own path through life and making it a great success. Finish your studies first, you hear me? Get your hair cut. Paint the doors and stairs in your house blue or green. Buy yourself a ficus tree….
But Armanda kept shaking her head thoughtfully as Betsy, all excited, came to the end of her long list with: “Love your husband!” And gave a merry look as she brought up the night at the school play; she and Lidy had got the giggles when the leading actor, who was seriously drunk, said, “If you’re on the planet, it’s a fact that you’ve got a no-account job in nowheresville.”
“Well, Betsy, don’t misunderstand me, but how does this sound? ‘If I’m on the planet, it’s a fact that strictly speaking I’m my elder sister.’”
Armanda chose a cookie, a café noir, Betsy did the same, and for a moment the two of them stood there nibbling, first with a grin, then expressionlessly, but quite peacefully; for their conjoint nibbling was actually an echo of Lidy and Armanda as sisters, since everyone always said they were exactly alike.
“Absolutely not,” Armanda suddenly said unexpectedly. “We distinguished between the two of us the way only sisters can. We knew it. If you live that close together, if you grow up minute by minute in a world that’s almost yours, but by a hair’s breadth not quite, then you register the tiniest things about each other that are different.”
Her face was animated now. Had she not at that moment heard the front door opening and closing downstairs, she would have been able to chatter with her beloved visitor. For however odd, even mad, her conversation with her mother had seemed a short while ago, she had felt that she was being completely rational in the other conversation that had just followed it. “Fundamentally different!” she had said again. “Brothers always want to be the opposite of brothers, and sisters of sisters. Oppositeness is at the root of the brother or sister relationship. I’m pretty certain that’s the case. So now that my past has been exchanged for hers, while her future has passed to me, there’s this veil of bottomless sadness, though naturally I try to ignore it.”
That is roughly the kind of thing she might have said, slightly breathlessl
y but in a heartfelt way, if she hadn’t heard someone coming up the stairs.
She blushed.
20
Sunny Day II
Sjoerd and Armanda Blaauw-Brouwer. Married couple.
They too took a brief look at the photographs together, why is not clear, for the two of them were focused on something else entirely; Sjoerd had just thrown the jacket of his beautiful light gray suit onto a chair. He was now in his late twenties, a tall, slender man with carefully combed blond hair and a face that was beginning to show the open, straightforward, intelligent qualities that are valued in the world of money and business. With an arm around Armanda’s hips, he bent loyally over the photos. It’s well known that when a newly married couple first sees their wedding portrait, the bride looks only at the bride and the bridegroom does the same. One could switch bridegrooms in the darkroom for fun, but never brides.
“Beautiful,” murmured Sjoerd, without the faintest astonishment over the snow-white dress lifting away from the neck and the little hat, perched at an angle to set off the beloved little face, and the bouquet held up under the chin, that he must know from a previous photo, already glued into the album, in the same always-flattering three-quarter pose. His eyes were already elsewhere. He turned around purposefully and felt Armanda’s whole body respond immediately, as he had expected, with a yes! yes! During this afternoon’s meeting with the administrative department of the Capital Investment Committee of Mees & Hope, he had felt as miserable as a dog, almost ill with sheer repressed impatience to get home. It was his first week back at work after his ten-day honeymoon, the first three days of which had been extremely peculiar, because after so much hesitation, he and Armanda had felt no desire for each other at all.
Neither of them had been able to understand it.
The wedding banquet in the Geldersekade was still going on when they escaped at around five thirty. After they had changed clothes at number 36 and number 77 respectively, they put their luggage in the trunk of the Skoda and began their honeymoon journey to Normandy. First stopping point was a village near Rotterdam, a surprise for Armanda, just like the beautiful hotel there where Sjoerd had made reservations. They arrived at around eight. Along the way they had still been talking about the party at first, then, when the car left the main road, Armanda, showing her surprise, had gamely read out the place-names of the little towns they passed through, Alblasserdam, Ridderkerk, while the bright blue sky turned slowly to a deeper blue. She awoke on her husband’s shoulder in front of the hotel, it was still light, but there was a thin layer of mist over the flagstones and the surrounding area. They dealt with the formalities at reception, took the elevator, walked down a long, brilliantly lit corridor, and came to their room, outside which the porter was just lifting their suitcases off a gold-colored luggage cart.
It was idiotic, but the moment the door closed, neither of them knew how to deal with the sudden proximity of the other. Okay, go and stand close. Armanda was happy that he immediately threw his arms around her; she cuddled up to him, kissed him somewhere on the face, now I must be happy, she probably thought, and probably that’s what he thought too. Free at last! At last we can do and not do whatever we want! Meantime they avoided looking directly at each other, Armanda even kept her eyes closed and found herself thinking, whether she wanted to or not, about her suitcase with its tightly packed, freshly ironed clothes, some of which she ought to hang up right away. Sjoerd, over her shoulder, looked out of the window.
He left her standing there.
“Take a look, see what it’s like outside.”
Of course she followed him. “Beautiful,” she said as she slipped off her shoes and felt how small she was next to him on the soft carpet. They leaned side by side on the window bench. Dusk was falling, the sky turned yellow, and they were looking at a rolling countryside, meadows, trees, with a broad stream of water running through it, flat and pale in the mist, and on the other bank a row of eight or nine windmills. What was there to say about it? It was nature, the windmills included, as they stood there in a pensive row, their vanes motionless despite the weak to middling northwest wind, fixed, the sails rolled up. A few minutes later, when they were lying in each other’s arms in bed, cheek to cheek, Sjoerd still saw the windmills in his mind’s eye, and Armanda was realizing that there were two, three dresses and a blouse that she really had to hang up right away.
“Just a moment,” she said and rolled away from him.
Without paying any further attention to him, as if she were alone in the room, Armanda opened her suitcase and began carefully to unfold several pieces of clothing at the shoulders, to inspect them and then hang them up. Sjoerd listened to the hangers being pushed this way and that, heard bathwater running a little later, and dozed off in a scent of soap and perfume. The next thing that happened was a naked Armanda tiptoeing to the bed, and then an Armanda in a nightshirt tiptoeing to the bed again. To take a good, long look.
All he had taken off was his shirt, which she picked up off the floor. Then she began to fumble with his shoelaces. It is perfectly possible to undress a sleeping man without his noticing, but as soon as you pull down his pants, he will wake up for a moment unless he’s dead drunk. Sjoerd, without a moment’s thought, crawled under the covers and sank back happily into a deep sleep. Armanda went round the room switching off the lamps, then slipped into bed on her side. She dropped off to sleep too, a heavy, abandoned sleep, though with interruptions. The first time she awoke, she lay there, surrounded by a glowing warmth, in the pitch darkness, and began to actually pant when she realized that Sjoerd was starting to caress her the way he had once a long time before, in the bedroom at number 36, when an oh-so-unemphatic ring at the doorbell had interrupted them. To heighten her desire, she thought back to it in detail, to this postponement, intending, with superstitious naïveté, to have everything from back then happen all over again, this time with a happy ending. When she opened her eyes for the second time, she knew immediately that she was alone in bed. There was tobacco smoke in the room, and it was still dark, but not completely. As she allowed her mind to dawdle peacefully over the fact that what was supposed to happen had happened, she heard the wind, strong now and blowing from the west, whistle against the wall of the building, and she turned her head away.
He was standing at the window with his back to her. Ground mist, mist on the water, and a row of water mills, their lower parts invisible, their vanes with the white starched sails spinning madly, joyously, in circles. What effect does such an image have on a young woman who has just woken up? If she saw the tip of his cigarette glow from time to time and then disappear again, she was lucky.
For three days they felt almost no desire for each other, and Armanda found herself ugly. Then she noticed that whether the moment was suitable or not, her eyes would linger whenever she looked at him.
“Come with me,” he said on the fourth day, when for a moment she found herself unable to utter another word. They were already in a hotel in the Strandboulevard in Houlgate and had made love on all three nights.
She came to his side, he took her hand, and they climbed the path through the dunes and up to their room.
How is that possible, she wondered some time later.
The bedroom revealed a certain customary disorder in the middle of the afternoon, and through the window you could hear the sea. She liked hearing her husband snoring on her shoulder with an innocent face. How is it possible? she thought, by which she meant: Three days, it’s only three days, two days before yesterday, the day before yesterday, then yesterday, I’ve never heard or read anywhere that as time elapses, it exposes each of us to its manipulations and its unmistakable side effects, though we have no idea where these come from and how they work. The way we kissed first! Then took off our clothes so uninhibitedly, so fast, so urgently!
On the floor a man’s shirt, a top-quality pair of light gray trousers, men’s shoes—no, no women’s shoes—and a pair of panties, obviously toe-kicked right ov
er into the corner behind the vanity, where they would have to be searched for later; the long shadow of a tree outside in the inner courtyard; inside, another piece of clothing, a worn checked dress that carried some vague memory, but one that wasn’t damaging to anybody. In bed the pair of lovers who belonged to these belongings.
Armanda: for the first time in her life as a married woman, experiencing the long pang of what is also known as la petite mort.
21
By Chance, a Low High Tide
Years later, when Lidy had been long dead, the experts were united about one thing: it could have been worse. Had the moon, for example, been close to the earth, as it had been two weeks earlier on January 18, then the astronomical high tide could have used its pull to rise almost another two feet. An absolutely exceptional spring tide would then have been a possibility.
The possibility that did occur during this night was the following. A farm, between Zierikzee and Dreischor. The sea, that had risen to within three feet of the attic floor. Moonlight, ear-deadening noise, a wind now blowing in short blasts, that seemed to temper the movement of the waves in the deeper water over the fields even as it reinforced the speed of the current coming over the road. The great mass of the water pounded against the sides and back of the trailer, which miraculously had not yet cracked to pieces. Inside the house, Cau, Lidy, and Gerarda Hocke were asking themselves if it might be possible for these people to ferry themselves across using a door to one of the stalls that was floating around as a makeshift raft.
And indeed, something seemed to be separating itself from the wagon. Ignoring the rumbling of the furniture down below them, they watched the little load approach. It was managing to keep on course with the help of the rope slung around a roof beam at this end and attached to something else at the other. It didn’t take that long. Dragged in over the windowsill dripping wet, three of the four passengers stood there for a long minute, gasping for air. Lidy noticed that they brought with them a heavy stench of putrefaction. And somewhat later, as she and Gerarda Hocke stripped off their sodden clothes, wiped away the greasy mud as best they could, and offered them bedding and safety on the ice-cold floor, she had a sudden image of them as a gaggle of newborn babies. The trio consisted of a tall man with a thick shock of hair, an extremely pregnant woman, not his wife, as was later established, and a little boy of about eight, her son. Number four had stayed behind on the raft.
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