The Storm

by Margriet de Moor

  Then came the time she liked to provoke him with the question “Who am I?” and lay her hands over his eyes. Playful results, of course, and a suitable response from him that necessitated no compliments. Shortly before Allan was born, she said she wanted to move, and immediately. Bad evening. October, wind howling on the roof. They were building or hanging something up in the attic, doesn’t matter which, when she laid the hammer aside. After they had looked at each other for a moment, listening to the wind, and she had said, “It’s too Lidy-like for me,” he had snorted once in the way that was typical of him and then replied idly, “Oh—maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to look for somewhere on the ground floor.”

  “Not a bad idea,” she continued as she turned around heavily to go back to work. “And we’re not going to take a thing, not a single piece of furniture, from this house when we go.”

  Nadja thought it was terrific. An eleven-year-old girl—skinny as a beanpole, but with a red plait down her back as thick as your wrist, and absolutely no freckles—can happily say Yes! when told that her entire life is going to be stood on its head. When it took place, her little brother, Allan, was three years old. While her mother did a drastic clean-out of the attic, stuffing photos, letters, schoolbooks, and reports into garbage bags, Nadja was on her knees in the rectangle of light thrown by one of the attic windows, with a photo in her hands.

  “Hey, Mama!”

  Armanda went over and immediately recognized the family photograph that Jacomina Hocke, with whom she was no longer in contact, had sent her as a keepsake.

  “Who’s the child you’re sitting there with?”

  Armanda, without hesitating, her voice involuntarily outraged, said quietly, “That’s not me.”

  “Not you?”

  The astonished forefinger of a girl who has never been told a thing about an exchange of mothers. In the beginning her father and the whole family were in too much disarray; later, having accustomed themselves to the slightly edited family story, the new version with all the details that fit perfectly, had even been added to, they never got around to it. But in their hearts they surely must have known, didn’t they, that at some point they would have to tell Nadja everything.

  “Just a moment,” Armanda had said, reaching for a packing chest so that she could sit down. Bent over next to Nadja, she was better able to look at the picture, and did so, suppressing the first, instantaneous, strong impulse to tell her adopted daughter straight out, without the slightest psychological subtlety: “That’s your real mother.” She knew the corner from which the photo had been taken, the year before it had been snapped, she had after all been there herself. From the Winter Garden of the Hotel Kirke, you look into the reception room with the tables laid. There are draperies to either side of the staircase, and there’s a palm tree. Given the backdrop, you wonder what the two people in the foreground, in adjacent wicker chairs, have to celebrate in such a grand way: the little gap-toothed girl, laughing shyly, and the woman, Lidy, with eyes that look slightly tragic because of the lack of lighting, and a smile around the lips that you’d have to know in order to interpret as “All very nice, but tomorrow I’ll be home again.”

  “That’s your real mother,” said Armanda.

  “Goodness!” said Nadja.

  That is how it happened.

  In the fishing village of Bruinisse, on the Grevelingen, a complete working harbor had been built to block off three miles of water by means of a dam. It was late in the morning. Sjoerd Blaauw, like a tourist, politely stopped a workman in overalls and boots to ask if they were making good progress.

  “Let me through, friend!”

  Quite right. He took a step to one side and lost himself for a moment in contemplation of the phenomenon in gray and blue-white, the two in spectacular contrast to each other, and which he would have loved to have explained to him. Gray was the color of the quays (which were also loud and dusty), full of asphalt, steel cables, blocks and tackles, trucks, and machines that looked like military equipment, and gray was the color of the contours of the construction site a little farther off, in which a tide lock 450 feet long by 55 feet wide was already in operation, and also the portion of the dam that was slowly advancing from Flakkee. The row of caissons lying ready in the water next to the quay were also gray, a beautiful example of hydraulic engineering to instill respect, but naturally a joke, a child’s toys compared with the Phoenix-A-X caissons, as tall as high-rises, which would shortly be sunk directly at the edge of the sea in an opening several hundred yards wide by fifteen yards deep with a tidal range of eighteen feet. With a warm breeze in his face, Sjoerd looked up high. Blue-white (the quiet, independent, comfortable, tolerant blue-white that their national culture demands) was the color of the all-encompassing cloudy sky of the Dutch Masters above it.

  A faint feeling of dizziness. His eyes moved down again. At an angle to the quay, with its bow toward the caissons, was a ship the color of red lead, a totally normal domestic ship with a cabin, named Klazina. Sjoerd turned to a man wearing a greenish leather jacket and tugged on his sleeve.

  “No, back here,” the man answered in response to his question as to why the dangerous arm of the sea was not being blocked off directly at the shoreline.

  “But why?”

  The man adopted a more comfortable stance as he explained to Sjoerd about the separation of the floodplains of the Grevelingen and the Oosterschelde. And about the injection of millions of cubic yards of sand, the building of entire asphalt mixing plants on-site, a foreign cable railway in our polders and watery lands, and about piers and caissons and abutments and swing bridges and sluices in the Haringvliet, where enormous shields would be steered from seventy machine rooms…. “Oh, mister, have you ever thought that the nightmare of ’fifty-three, back then, was the beginning of a damn magnificent dream?”

  “Dream?” Sjoerd’s face had taken on the well-known expression of schoolboys and students who want to learn the mandatory stuff for a test, while their hearts, otherwise occupied, do what hearts want to do: swell to bursting.

  When did my wife doesn’t understand me begin to echo in his ear again, like the line of a poem? When his eyes turned away to look at the powerful little ship that was in process of taking one of the caissons in tow, a red ship with a deckhouse on top and a name that was the only female presence in this world of men—Klazina?

  “So, would you like to come along?”

  The man, about to say good-bye, had noticed what the other was looking at.

  “Can I … could I really?”

  “We’ll fix it.”

  Not long afterward he was standing on the foredeck of the little tug. Sjoerd, on the water again where he’d been once before. Noticeably calmer, the water, noticeably bluer than it had been when it engraved itself in his memory. Close behind him they were busy with chains and winches, was he standing in the way? No, the crew paid no attention to the strange, tall, blond fellow staring at the expanse of water as if he were staring at a world that had long been denied him. All the same, a boy brought him milky coffee in a pale pink mug, said, “Please!” with quiet warmth, and let him alone again with the vibrations under his feet. He lit a cigarette. The water between Bruinisse and Oude Tonge glittered, reflections, shouted orders, echoes: everything, all of it, exactly mirrored—even if in a fashion one couldn’t have guessed—the words he had woken to this morning.

  Lidy, look at me. Do you remember how we went to Ouderkerk? You were already weeks late with your period. View of the bend in the Amstel. Freeze-frame of Rembrandt, down on his knee, drawing this view. And you with your news. Do you remember how I got the fright of my life, and you turned around to pick some flowers and to murmur: “What I’d like is …”

  “Yes?”

  “Is for you to make the same face you made back then when you caught that pike.”

  We sat down on a bench at the entrance to the Amstel park.

  That evening Sjoerd went on a date and cheated on his wife for the firs
t time, and it isn’t clear that the one thing—his experiences of the day—had anything directly to do with the other. It simply happened that as he sat down in Amsterdam in the wonderful evening air on the café-terrace of the Hotel Americain, he made eye contact with a woman who happened to be passing. Slender, wearing a green dress. Who next moment was coming to sit next to him at the round table. Large, shiny shopping bag on the ground between their chairs.

  “Good?”

  Sjoerd had ordered a glass of claret for her too. The weather had ignored the forecast on RNMI all day. It was warm and wonderfully sultry.

  “Mmmm.”

  Not the slightest awkwardness between them. What did you do today? His question to her, slightly narrowed eyes. Worked (in some institute), bought shoes (in the bag), talked to old friends on the phone (in Vienna). Like a woman letting her fantasy run at the first meeting, she didn’t look at him directly; instead her eyes seemed to go through him to someplace behind him, as if through a fog.

  “And you?”

  He began to talk about the construction in the delta as if he’d been waiting for this opportunity, his voice unusually emphatic and excited. And she listened, her arm next to his on the table, and twisted her wrist, because everything was already conspiring to have their hands end up on top of each other. (Later she would tell him she had fallen that evening for “the gleam” of his desire, his masculinity without even a trace of typical Dutch dullness in the way he looked at her or the way he spoke.)

  “More than a billion cubic yards of seawater with every tide!” he almost shouted, telling her about the Oosterschelde. “They close it with a forty-foot-high dam smack up against the sea! Don’t think that’s easy, it involves an estuary with a mouth more than six miles wide! First they import enough sand to create three new islands, then in the channels the wild current forms as a result, they build thirteen gigantic towers on sills of steel and reinforced concrete cased in stone!”

  They made a date for the next afternoon.

  When Sjoerd came home at around eleven and went into the living room, Armanda stayed sitting close to him on the sofa and stared at the tips of her shoes with a tragic expression.

  “What is it?”

  He had called her that morning from Zeeland to say that that was where he was, and told her in good faith that he didn’t know yet when he’d be setting off back to Amsterdam.

  So now this situation. Remorsefully Sjoerd sank down halfway onto the floor in front of her and looked into her face. Armanda, a little encouraged by this, immediately let loose a torrent of words, she’d spent the entire day imagining the whole area he’d felt compelled to go visit all of a sudden, just like that, the map, the layout of Schouwen-Duiveland closed in by its two sea arms.

  “Her map,” she sobbed openly. “Forbidden territory for me!”

  Sjoerd had put his arms around her hips and her bottom. Now he slid onto the sofa next to her, pressed his face into her neck, and whispered, “No, no, you’re crazy” so compliantly into her ear that she sat up, looked around her, all animated, and exclaimed, “And what do you say to this!”

  Disconcerted but still remorseful, he followed her eyes.

  “What’s all this except her new house, her seven rooms, her attic, her garden to the southeast, her shed, don’t pull such a dumb face, with brand-new furniture that’s all the stuff she chose?”

  She turned to him. The brief, hostile look she gave him said: Give it a minute before we make peace. “Oh you haven’t a clue how often I’ve thought, This is her life that I … okay, this is all I’m going to say: these are her chocolate caramel bars I’m eating right now, I used only to like the plain ones, her extra pounds I’m trying to lose—she got slim again so damn quickly after Nadja was born—they’re her brochures for the latest vacuum cleaners I’m looking at, and when I choose one, it’ll be the one that’ll make the least noise in her tender little ears. Do you understand what I’m talking about? This is the sixties now, the Netherlands are becoming supermodern. Do you know what I sometimes still think? Lidy’s just gone for a day, and she’s relying on me to live her life for her, all organized and proper, and that’s exactly what I’m damn well doing.”

  Sjoerd listened, surrendering to her because of what he was going to do the next day. He was about to interrupt her by way of a general answer, with a quick “Hey, why don’t we go to bed?” when she stiffened again.

  “Do you get it? No? Okay, then I’m also going to tell you that sometimes, no, often I see every single one of our most personal memories, think of our Sunday-afternoon walks to Ouderkerk, think of our birthdays, our Christmas dinners, I see all of it as a sort of contrast stain, a measuring stick, against her water drama in God knows how many acts … you’re shaking your head.”

  Sjoerd pulled her head toward him. Pushed his nose against her ear. She said some more sad things, then indicated she was ready to go to bed with him.

  · · ·

  Dark. The intimate world of a bed with soft covers and sheets. No caresses. Or?

  Well, yes. Sjoerd, unscrupulous or perhaps full of scruples, saw no reason to pass up the cornucopia of aroused hormones, warmth, and tenderness of a wife who was back in a good mood again (“Oh, what does it matter, he doesn’t understand and he never will”). Afterward, like any real man, he immediately fell asleep. Armanda spent a little while thinking about the menu for Sunday, when the family would be together for lunch again, this time here in their house, and pictured her table. Father and Mother Brouwer, Betsy and Leo with their two boys, Jacob, now twenty-two, with a very fat but very pretty girl with milk-white skin, Letitia, and her family too.

  Asparagus? wondered Armanda. With plain boiled potatoes, thick slices of ham, an egg, and hollandaise sauce? And with it some bottles of Gewürztraminer. Or better, maybe a Riesling?

  25

  The Last Lunch

  “Well,” she would have said, “the whole time we were sitting there that Sunday at midday, eating, you have to imagine the insane noise of the storm. The way I’m talking to you now, in my normal voice, it wasn’t possible. So remember that during everything I’m telling you about, everyone was screaming the whole time at the top of their lungs. It just stormed all through the middle of that day without letup, I’m not going to keep repeating it.”

  That is what she would have said if at that moment a boat from, say, the river patrol had appeared at the attic window, which is not completely unimaginable, and she could have given an account later on of her anxious hours. There is quite a difference between recounting an adventure to an interested audience after it’s over, embellished here and there with a couple of invented details and facts that came to light only afterward, and living one’s own mortal danger, which must remain unvarnished, unimproved, and, basta!

  “You’re probably thinking,” she would have said, “how could you eat in such circumstances, but we could. The table was a chest with a cover over it, there was a knife and a breadboard. The farmer’s wife had carried everything possible up the night before, including a bag with precious things like eggs, butter, brandy, and a spice cake, because she’d been intending to go after church in Dreischor to visit a woman who’d just had a baby. How did we sit together? Imagine eleven poor devils, gray faces, a floor that everyone knows is swaying. Horribly cold, of course, and very dark, even at noon. Cathrien Padmos, in the bed with her baby. Soon the Padmoses’ boy Adriaan crawled over to be with his mother and baby brother. It had begun to snow. We saw the window gradually become coated with snowflakes, which didn’t bother any of us, because nobody wanted to keep looking out anymore. What could be done? It must still be ebb tide, but the water was barely going down at all. Though enough that over the road, at Cau’s house, some iron palings were sticking up out of the water, and trapped in them was the body of Marien Cau; you could see deep holes in the side of his head.

  “So Gerarda Hocke fried eggs. She fried them on both sides, after breaking the yolks, tipped them out of the pan onto slices of
bread, and said, “Zesgever?” Or “Laurina!” What? No—nobody betrayed obvious signs of anxiety. Where that came from, I have no idea, but that’s how it was. Probably the cold made it impossible. If your body is already trembling with cold, it can’t tremble with anything else. I know that Cornelius Jaeger checked the water level from time to time. He opened the attic door, peered down the stairs, then came back again. We looked at him, agog.

  “‘So?’

  “‘Roughly one step lower.’

  “Maybe because I learned nothing else about him, I remember very clearly the way he looked. As if he had no substance, no past, no future, other than his appearance that day at noon. Aside from the hump on his back, it was his face that was the most distinctive thing; he had very prominent cheekbones, one of them closer to the eye socket than the other, his irises were almost black, and then he had this little precocious moustache, the child was twelve, a year younger than you were, Jacob. A body full of errors, like a very remarkable charcoal drawing.

  “Most of us had already had a few mouthfuls of cognac. Two glasses made the rounds. It goes straight to your head, and everything starts to spin, if you’re in the kind of situation we were in back then. I think we all felt we were still part of the world, but it was like being on a mountaintop—we were also a long way out on the edge. I still see Izak Hocke rolling himself a minuscule cigarette, with a little piece torn off one end of a paper. One of his eyes was swollen shut, half his face was a violet-blue, yet he radiated some sense of salvation the entire time. Now in his gesture as he took a few drags on the roll-your-own and then passed it on to his foreman, van de Velde, I saw something that was not perhaps so unfounded in these circumstances, namely a kind of calm despair: life has its own time limit, we all know that, but as long as we’re here, we’re here.