The Storm

by Margriet de Moor

  “‘The people in The Hague could send us a plane, dammit!’ Nico van de Velde exploded at some point. And we looked up and saw an angry grumbler who was forgetting that the government doesn’t work on Sundays.

  “‘Or a …’ came the prompt riposte from the birthing bed, ‘or a …’ and we all turned round or to one side and saw—I can’t describe it any other way, the bliss of Cathrien Padmos. Her large eyes were sparkling as she stared at us, her face was flushed with the slight fever that every woman experiences on the day she has given birth. Ignoring the fact that everything was pointing to the imminent end of the world, she was in that state of rapture induced by her optimistic, death-defying hormones.

  “‘Or a helicopter …’

  “As we looked at her, she looked down, but then there was another smile: she was reassured to discover that the baby was already suckling energetically at her breast. Now all we need is a modern miracle like a helicopter, she must have thought, and we’ll all be saved. But quick!

  “That is how it was. An impossible situation that changed us all forever. I see us still sitting there in a sort of circle, marking off in the following order, if you imagine the hands of a clock: Cau, talking to himself, Zesgever, me, van de Velde, Hocke, his mother, Cornelius Jaeger, and Laurina van de Velde, who stood up from time to time to shuffle over to the godforsaken space between the two clothes cupboards, but nobody paid much attention. What is grief? Is it something that shows in a person’s face? Mrs. Hocke was the only other one I ever saw bending over that place, the others … didn’t want to? At least half of them almost certainly knew how things were with their own loved ones. So what were they supposed to do about this one death, such a tiny one, right next door?

  “But the old woman did. I would never have thought that gold can contain its own light, and yet it must have been so in the two spirals that hung down to the left and right of her forehead. How otherwise could I remember so clearly how she looked? Her jaw muscles clenched as she bent over the place where Dina lay. Did she ask herself, I think she did, where this poor invisible little thing that she would certainly call a soul had gone? She belonged to the ultraorthodox Zeeland sect, so don’t be too quick to say: ‘to heaven,’ please! The catastrophe was still unfolding, houses everywhere were collapsing, when sermons started being preached again two days later.

  “Imagine a barn, wet to saturation point, and a preacher on an upturned water barrel. When the congregation who have been standing shoulder to shoulder go their separate ways again, what they know is what they already knew. The flood—so says their dogma of guilt and punishment, and they deviate not one iota from it—is God’s spectacular but measured answer to our own provocations. I ask you seriously (Father, Mother, darlings, you’re both shaking your heads in exactly the same way), doesn’t this indicate an extraordinarily arrogant view of life? Punishment and guilt: the interaction of two great forces. And did you know, moreover, that brides from families who adhere to this sect wear black when they marry?

  “Yes,” she would have said, “there’s a wedding photo of young Gerarda with her bridegroom and both their families. From left to right in front, on chairs, sit Cornelia Hocke-Heijboer, cousin of the bridegroom and sister-in-law of the bride; Sara Heijboer-Bolijn, sister of the bride and sister-in-law twice over of the bridegroom; Anthonie Hocke, the bridegroom; Gerarda Hocke-Heijboer, the bride; then the mother of the bride, Lena Heijboer-Koopman, widow of the mussel fisherman Iman Heijboer, and next to her Anna Leendrina Bolijn, aunt of the bridegroom and cousin by marriage of the bride’s mother Lena Heijboer. Behind these six seated people stand four men, of whom all I know is that they were brothers, brothers-in-law, and brother-in-law’s brother of either the bride or the bridegroom. The weather is splendid. The wedding guests have positioned themselves in front of the façade of a house or a farmhouse, shadowed by a tree in full flower. All of them without exception are wearing black. The five women have their hands in their laps, but Anthonie Hocke, the bridegroom, sits between them with his legs spread, his shoes shined to a mirror finish, and his hands in their thick knitted gloves on his knees in a pose that radiates masculine energy. Gerarda too is wearing black gloves. Of all the women, she, the bride, is padded out in the most clothing, wearing a long coat with lapels, and underneath it a dress that goes all the way to the chin. It is only Sara Heijboer, whose Zuidbeveland traditional dress includes a shawl that covers the upper arms, who lends the photo an idea of soft welcoming female flesh.

  “Funereal? No, but serious. The scene isn’t funereal for starters because of the women’s snow-white caps, which separate the standing and seated wedding guests—four men and five women with the bridegroom in their midst—like a beam of light. With the exception of the Zuidbevelandish cap, in which the woman’s head and neck are framed like a shellfish in its opened shell, the caps stand away from the face, looking like bright starched veils made of floating snowflakes. How wonderful it must be to wear a crazy headdress like that! To hear everything grave and difficult in life discussed from inside the absolute privacy of such a white, translucently fine object cradling one’s head!

  “Not all of them, no. Only the two young women, Sara Heijboer and the bride, wear the gold above their ears. And when I look at the only smile in the photo, on the face of the bride’s mother, and at the padded bride next to her, I know that the little ceremony has just taken place, in which the mother gives her daughter the precious head decorations like a dowry. She is to wear them, take care of them, and at the appointed time she is to give them to another young woman in the family.”

  “As I already told you,” she would have said, “we all—every one of us—found ourselves in thrall to the situation. And the situation was the storm. And as we sat there the eye of the storm was, in some sense, us. Silent, empty, for one endless moment devoid of all character and devoid of all passion. How often do your eyes exist only because they’re looking, and your hands because they feel cold, and how often does the house you’re in exist all on its own, just because it’s still standing and will hopefully continue to do so, if God is good, until this terrible flood recedes again?

  “But afterward … I know for sure that since that moment none of us is the same person we once were!

  “And there were things to note about Simon Cau. Who was he? Was he a man of property, a dike sheriff, someone who attracts a circle of people wherever he goes? Extreme alterations in character seem to occur less frequently in reality than they do in books. But look at this! Simon Cau stands up, because he needs to use the bucket that’s behind the door to the entrance to the attic, with the sea splashing not even two steps below.

  “He stands up, goes to the door, and closes it behind him, which it won’t do properly anymore because the frame is no longer aligned. It must be about four o’clock; the noon tide is very high again. When he comes back, he’s not looking down, as he did before, he’s glancing around searchingly, as if he’d forgotten where he’d been sitting. Then he strikes out. The bird, the goose, was just sitting where it had been sitting since the beginning, on a sort of hand-knotted Smyrna rug (Mother, we made one at home ourselves once, do you remember, that little runner of stiff white canvas and the strands of wool, about three inches long, that we threaded through it and tied off on the back?), but Cau kicks the creature away and makes for his chair as if he has a right to cut his own diagonal straight across the room. He sits down in exactly the same position he had before.

  “Oh. What’s your guess? Fear? Losing a grip on himself? My own guess is that he thought the flood was his own doing. That he was absolutely reclaiming the responsibility for it himself. Not just for the water and, God help us, its effects, but also for the utterly unfamiliar meteorological conditions this weekend, including the astronomical forces associated with them, and the oceanology, because this water had come a very, very long distance.

  “Grandiose? But fear can also occur on a grand scale. He arrived too late, basta, at this ramshackle section of the Gre
velingen dike which, mind you, he had recently discussed one afternoon in the tavern De Galg with three technical engineers from the hydraulics department, venting his worry and frustration over the state of the embankment, the stone reinforcements, and pushing back against their doubts and fruitlessly pious hopes that all this was surely first and foremost the responsibility of the national authorities. So he reached the dike at a point when all was already lost. Can you imagine this? The wind that was blowing there wasn’t a force of nature, it was the force of his own bad decision, fool that he was, to ignore the classification of ‘dangerous’ that was being broadcast on the radio, put on his good suit, and head for the Hotel Kirke in Zierikzee with his neighbors.

  “Cause and effect. They are the Furies, Siamese twins…. This would not have happened, if … But enough of Cau. I stopped watching him, decided that what I wanted was a mouthful of cognac, but there was none left.

  “‘Here,’ I heard. It was Albert Zesgever, passing me the tail end of a cigarette that I could still manage to puff on two or three times if I held my fingertips right up to my lips.

  “I looked at him, full of sympathy. Tall man, maybe forty. Red face, dark hair that seemed to grow up out of his neck like tarpaper. He was a very coarse man, a poacher, but also someone who could apply artificial fertilizer so finely and evenly by hand that Hocke, for this reason alone, had not yet acquired a mechanical spreader. I am guessing that Zesgever for the rest of his life became someone other than the man who messed around with his wife, which everyone knew, just as they knew how things had got totally out of control the night before.”

  “Oh, you mean, the night before, when …”

  “Yes,” she would have said. “As the wind reached hurricane speed. You need to know, before I tell you how things went when it hit force eight in the night of January thirty-first to February first, that Zesgever was a drunk, and when he had been drinking, he beat up his wife, Janna Maria. There are always things that set a man off, Albert Zesgever was that way too, and when he was loaded, he always knew whom to blame.

  “That evening Janna Maria was sitting at home with her elbow on the table. A kerosene lamp that was turned way down illuminated her face and, to either side, her hands, along with a piece of clothing she had been altering. Outside the window one of those storms was howling that occur every year. It was close to eleven at night, the two children were asleep in clean, ironed pajamas, Zesgever was out somewhere. Because she knew that her marriage was the part of her life that often ended in a thrashing, and because she also knew that this could sometimes be avoided if she appeared to be asleep in the dark, she decided to pick up the lamp and climb the ladder. But suddenly, he was there. A length of the roof guttering was rattling, so she hadn’t heard the front door scraping across the floor. She half turned toward him and saw from the game bag hanging slack across his shoulder that his drunken state was that of a man whose gun hadn’t brought him any luck. The salt marshes behind the dike along the Zuidlangeweg were underwater. What Zesgever, for his part, saw as he came out of his haze was a creature who was radiating fear.

  “He was well aware that the whole world, which is to say this little hamlet, saw and judged his abusive conduct harshly. He himself could no longer understand his own rage once he sobered up and came back to his senses. But then he had to endure for days, sometimes even weeks, that Janna Maria’s black eye and split lip made his neighbors and acquaintances lower their voices whenever he was in earshot.

  “So tomorrow—Sunday—his father-in-law was supposed to come pay them a visit. Zesgever was terrified of this man, a dike worker and excavator at a nearby freight harbor, thoughtful and friendly to one and all, and he was always at his humblest when they encountered each other. But for now it was still Saturday. The wind is blowing almost relentlessly, but aside from that, everything is quiet. Zesgever takes a few steps, asks something, Janna Maria’s answer is not to the point, and also inaudible over the howling and thundering of the storm. Zesgever immediately focuses on Janna Maria’s white, damp face, and something inside him erupts.

  “This time it lasts longer than usual, and is more ferocious, perhaps in tandem with the violent weather. Blows can be delivered with a hand or with a fist. When he stops to catch his breath, she can no longer stand. Then she begins to vomit, lying on her back.

  “At first, when he crawls into bed under the eaves still fully dressed, he’s cheered by the rising force of the storm. Janna Maria, dragged upstairs, is lying beside him absolutely motionless, but still warm—isn’t that how it was? Yes, that’s how it was, he knows it, and imagines that for the rest of his life he will know that her head is so close to his ear that in more normal weather he would have heard her breathing. He stretches out and begins to sleep off the booze. What is the happy thought that sticks in his head just before his legs start to turn heavy? “It’s not hard to guess: the old man won’t be coming. In weather like this, the old man absolutely won’t be able to leave his harbor!”

  “And you?”

  “What do you mean, ‘and you?’”

  “Well, how have you changed since then?”

  And then she would have looked away from Armanda for a moment (for it would have been Armanda asking these questions) and into the sunny dining room. Next to the window, a vase of purple tulips from the garden. A sleeping tomcat, a fat red thing, lying among the toys on the floor. The smell of freshly brewed coffee wafting in from the kitchen.

  “Oh.” She would have reached for the cigarette just lit by her husband. “God, I’ve no idea.”

  But Armanda would have kept looking at her, interested. Until, a little light-headed from the Riesling in the middle of the day, she would have come up with an improvised, but honest, answer.

  “If I think about it—in every way. In all the hundreds and thousands of shitty little things that make up life and that you feel, since that time, are actually part of something else entirely. Something terrible, that involves only you, and that you can’t talk to anyone about, because you were the only one there back then.”

  And she and her sister, suddenly overcome with emotion, would have fallen into each other’s arms.

  The present had other demands. Four thirty on the dot. Dusk was falling, it was high tide again, and the weather forecast for this Sunday was the opposite of mild. In De Bilt, the national meteorological office was warning all regions of the country, once again, about a severe storm coming from the west-northwest. What this meant for the attic in Hocke’s farmhouse was as follows. A blow struck the house without any forewarning. There had been no particularly powerful gust of wind, but the blow unleashed such a huge wave of pressure that they all could feel it in their eardrums. The first thing they became aware of, in almost the same moment, was four or five gray projectiles suddenly shooting at random around the room. Nobody had time to realize that these were bats, abandoning their winter hibernation spots under the roof beams: what everyone saw was a network of cracks spreading across both side walls. The glass in the window exploded. The roof was torn upward, part of it disappearing to make way for a pile of black clouds. The house twisted and came off its foundations.

  26

  About Nadja Blaauw

  Coffee cup in hand, Armanda sat at the table between the living room and the winter garden, which was lit at that moment by a ray of the morning sun. It was eleven o’clock. She was wearing thin blue trousers, cut wide, and a red blouse with rolled-up sleeves. As she was getting ready she had taken the scissors to her hair, still loose on her shoulders, to trim the ends and her fringe, in a routine intended to preserve this look for the rest of her life. The color would also remain the same: a medium chestnut brown, according to the description on the package.

  On the table were a letter and a newspaper, both still unread. After her children had left for school, she had picked both up off the mat, and her eye had been caught, for a moment, unavoidably, by the large headline. Wednesday, 11 August 1972, seven people had died in a wind funnel the previ
ous day that had struck a camping ground in Ameland. Uh, uh, uh, she had thought vaguely as she looked at the envelope with Nadja’s writing on it, and decided to leave it unopened for the moment. News that one hasn’t yet read hasn’t yet happened, in a way, just as truths set down on paper in heaven knows what frame of mind have flowed out of one heart but have not yet reached the other. Armanda stared into her lush, unkempt garden. She hadn’t seen Nadja for weeks.

  It was her day off. While she hung out the laundry on the drying frame in the stairwell, she let her thoughts wander to her odd fate and that of her daughter Nadja. Nadja was a lively girl with a luxuriant mane of red hair, who was studying history at the University of Amsterdam, more or less diligently but not with any great urgency. The remarkable thing that Armanda was thinking about was the fact that Nadja, although she was her stepchild, was closer to her heart than Violet, a delightful teenager, and Allan, who since the divorce had so clung to his mother that when he went off to school, he always knocked one last time on the window from outdoors to wave at her and be sure she noticed.

  Armanda shook the folds out of a pillowcase, remembering the day when Nadja had lain on her stomach on her bed, sobbing with fury, while she sat next to her discreetly on a chair in the dim light. It must have been in November, after school, it was already getting dark. While Nadja was telling her in all its miserable details (his bed was in the same room as the Bechstein grand) that it was all over with the piano teacher, she had really had to struggle to suppress the feeling, as she stood to stroke Nadja’s hair, that her hand was not part of her body but belonged to the doppelgänger who had remained sitting on the chair in the half-darkness to watch how she was getting on with this growing daughter.