The Storm

by Margriet de Moor

  She interrupted him. “How …”

  He waited while she bent down to scratch a bone in her foot, then stared up at him, motionless.

  “How is that possible?”

  “You’re right,” he’d replied. “On the face of it, it’s impossible.” He seemed to be searching for the facts. “Totally impossible, so I’ve heard.”

  She leaned over the edge of the table, as if taking a first step toward this barely credible possibility, and waited. A backhoe was the first detail that she could get hold of, and then she had a mental image of the practical little Bobcat which a skilled operator can maneuver with real speed and agility. It had been in the middle of the previous month, one afternoon around five. But isn’t it dark by then? It had been getting dark. And the skull that had been dug up had been stained very dark by the earth it had been in, all that silt and heavy clay and peat, too.

  Her sister, if indeed it was her sister, must …

  She made a gesture. A moment please.

  “At five o’clock there’s nobody still working on a building site, surely?”

  The plainclothes policeman had looked at her thoughtfully, brought up short by her question, then he’d gone back to talking about the back hoe operator. Who had summoned a coworker still running around on the mudflats, the eerie area at the mouth of the Oosterschelde, dug up and dug over for years now as they tried first one method, then another, to effectively block the arm of the sea. They used scoops to collect a few skeletal fragments, which they laid out together in the open air. Their workday was over, but they managed to find a construction foreman still in a trailer with a telephone. Shortly before total darkness fell, the national police came and put all the parts in a plastic sack and took them away, including a small, eroded piece of metal, some kind of hinge or spiral, possibly a clue, which had evidently, as was visible in the flashlit photo, been lying there too.

  Yes. Exactly. Pause. Mutual appraisal. Then Armanda watched as the policeman removed a piece of paper from the little portfolio he had set down on the table as soon as he arrived. He unfolded it and pushed it between them in such a way that both of them could have read it if they so chose. The attorney general, Armanda understood, twisting her head sideways to stare at the sheet, which appeared to be a form letter, a typed report or some such, had given his authorization for the transportation of the body parts. Authorization, aha. Her eyes fixed on the paragraphs of type, she withdrew herself somewhat from a situation that on the one hand spoke of an end to a great and apparently insoluble riddle—whatever confusion might accompany it—and, on the other, phrases like “the judicial laboratory in Rijswijk, that usually requested Leiden’s help in the business of attempting to make reliable identifications.” She didn’t look up again till her visitor said something that seemed to connect with the known world.

  “Your sister, if it is indeed your sister, must have been buried in a layer of mud very quickly after she was washed ashore.”

  “Yes?”

  Then came explanations to clarify that not one single person missing from 1953 had been found in the last ten, no, twenty years. “It’s a real miracle, lady,” hard to imagine just how fast a body disintegrates in water, particularly seawater, till there’s absolute nothing left. “Five, six months at the most,” depending on the factors involved. Armanda, who was maintaining an air of great interest but couldn’t keep up with the dizzying speed with which thirty years were reduced to zero in a single blow, heard phrases like “low or high water temperatures,” “polluted water,” “crabs and crayfish,” and “ships’ propellers.” There was no doubt that it was thanks to the mud and its capacity for preservation that so much of “your sister, possibly” had survived.

  But not enough.

  “Can you give me a photo of her to take with me?”

  The policeman asked this after he had made a dome of his fingers before setting his hand down over the paper on the desk. Based entirely on the long bones and the pelvis, the hand went on, Leiden had decided that what was involved here was a female, twenty to twenty-five years old, height approximately five foot ten, probable date of death, 1953, since the cartilage had stopped thickening. Armanda was on her feet. Yes, just a moment, please … yes, a photo! A photo they could lay on those dark, cold long bones and that pelvis that are such good indicators of probable age! And wasn’t it high time she should offer her guest a cup of tea?

  She was already at the door when the policeman gave her one more instruction. It had to be a photo of Lidy laughing.

  “Laughing,” she said. “Yes, of course!”

  Then she thought, Why?

  The train was approaching Rotterdam. Nadja and Armanda got up, like most of the other passengers, put on their coats and gloves, and waited with their bags on their laps until the rattling over the points had ceased. On the platform, they were surprised all over again by the cold. They went to the departures board and saw that the express train to Vlissingen must already be standing at platform 10.

  “So they couldn’t say for sure,” Nadja began, after they’d found an empty compartment at the back of the train and shut the door.

  Words. Which gave them a certain sense of looking-things-straight-in-the-eye. The dubious identity of this dead person of theirs. Which not even the teeth in the photo of the young woman with the radiant laugh could change.

  “So what did he actually say yesterday?” asked Nadja.

  “The day before yesterday,” said Armanda. Nadja nodded. “The day before yesterday, I went to”—she hesitated—“to collect the photo, for today.”

  This could be true. She saw Nadja nod again and nodded herself. She had gone to the police laboratory in Rijswijk to collect the photo that she was going to put secretly, even illegally in the eyes of officialdom, into the coffin with Lidy’s bones or the bones of some twenty-to twenty-five-year-old farmer’s wife from Zeeland. What a terrific idea, she thought, if she got the opportunity! In reality, she had done nothing two days ago other than speak to the pathologist. Why? Because. His expert report, even after seeing the photo, had remained on balance that “we cannot come to any definite conclusion.”

  “Oh, it was all so complicated. He said the process of ossification of the bone …”

  They looked up—what did it mean? The door opened. New passengers were looking for seats, even though the train had been moving for some minutes. One was a little gray lady who sat down in the corner by the aisle, after slipping out from under the arm of the other person, a tall man who was loud in more ways than one.

  “So, people,” he said, rubbing his hands, after hanging up his coat, “the only problem we have left is when are they going to come round with the coffee?”

  The gregariousness of a train trip in winter. The soft seats, and everything outside white, gray, cold. The little woman in the corner stared straight ahead like a resigned animal, but her companion was a man of alarming charisma. Within a quarter of an hour, before Dordrecht, even, Nadja and Armanda knew that he was an expert in hydrodynamics, that he worked with the authorities in “delta services,” that he was getting out at Rilland-Bath, and all this interested them in a certain sense. Up to Zeeland, in the beat of the rattling click-clack of the train. Nothing there, none of it, is the way it was before the flood, said the hydrodynamics expert, take a good look as soon as we pass Bergen op Zoom. Were you there this summer? No. Oh, the whole country has made incredible profits from it in the last years. Acre after acre of landholdings, all looking exactly the same, all the way to the horizon, yes, dammit, and in the middle of each a brand-new farm, freestanding barns, drainage ditches in the distance straight as a die, roads surfaced with asphalt even out on the polders, a system of canals that reaches into every corner, and none of it has cost the province more than a cent. Pigs in the built-up area? Not one to be seen anymore!

  He stopped talking and glanced at the little old woman in the corner, as if by accident, but she sat up and reacted.

  “There once were beautiful o
ld mulberry trees on Schouwen.”

  Spoken quietly, but with a remarkable solemnity that irritated the hydrodynamics man.

  “Oh, be quiet! Nature, is it? Do you think people have no eyes to see, these days?” And he started talking about how wonderful the delta works were, and their beauty, the guts it had taken to build them, and all the money it had cost.

  Armanda, seeing that Nadja was maintaining eye contact with the man, turned back to the window. A pale sun was standing twenty degrees above the southeastern horizon, with the train cutting through the winter landscape on a parallel track. Barns standing out against the snow. Branches trimmed. Shrouded in the typical frosty air that seemed to come streaming right into the compartment. Her mind was so clear that the conversation between Nadja and the hydrodynamics expert transmitted itself directly into her thoughts without troubling her. After about twenty minutes the rails curved westward at an almost ninety-degree angle. The train passed the Schelde-Rhein canal bridge and entered the land where Lidy had disappeared. A cold storage locker, a mortuary.

  “Caissons with steel bars in all three sluice openings, cost per caisson eight hundred forty million guilders, construction time four years!”

  “Wow.”

  “Then the commission had another thought about putting barriers in the Roompot eddy, and quays that the water can wash right over and feed into the Schaar and the Hammen. Cost: a billion!”

  Yes, Armanda thought, at the end of the day, everything in this country is now linked forever to Lidy’s epic.

  The poor heroine. And dear God, is it actually her, finally, in the rosewood coffin Nadja and I ordered, in which—we felt it was the right thing—we also had them put that little metal thing that was brought up into the light of day along with the bones. When they examined it, it turned out to have been plated originally with twenty-four-carat gold. Does it belong? or … It could just have been lying in the earth there by total chance, with no connection, she’d asked them this in Rijswijk. Right, who could know such a thing? And the pin, which was part of the traditional costume of Noord-Beveland or Schouwen, remained, in a formal sense, an element in the Lidy Problem: to be identified or not to be identified? If only the teeth had been—

  “… twenty-six gigantic buttresses filled with an average of eight thousand cubic yards of cement. You should be thinking the Egyptian pyramids!”

  —more complete!

  Now she was staring out of the window the same way she’d once, when she was young, stared into the mirror. The goal of her journey was no longer visible. The landscape, Lidy’s property, spread out and came closer and closer until it no longer consisted of anything but a gray background. Perfect for the illusion or vision that had haunted her regularly for half her life now: Lidy conscientiously unscrewing the cap on a little bottle of whitener and using the brush attached to the underside of the cap to whiten her tennis shoes, that are standing on a newspaper on the table in front of the high window. Location of the action is some grand house with flowering plasterwork on the ceiling, not number 77 and not number 36 but very similar. There’s a dog sitting on the floor. It’s snowing on the other side of the window. She herself, Armanda, is also present, though only in the form of a sense of unease, an extreme anxiety that now, at this moment of her journey, was so intense that as everything outside the window reverted to normal and became visible again, the horizon with its red misty glow, the telephone poles, the fences and chimneys, all looked to her like parts of some formula that she need only simplify in order to arrive at zero. Some things had never taken place. An entire family history really could correct itself if she only made the effort. She’s the one, not Lidy, who begs her father for the car and sets off on a journey to Zierikzee … logical, fate’s original intention. Why tease this beast so dangerously with a little plan, a little prank? The engine was slowing. A bell rang somewhere.

  The hydrodynamics expert was already buttoning his coat. He stretched out his sturdy arms, took his traveling bag from the rack, and said good-bye. The door to the compartment banged shut, then was immediately pushed open again.

  “The sluice here in the canal near Bath. On your way back, get off the train for a few minutes. The water falls freely, there’s no pump involved, fantastic sight. No time? Why? Why? Well, as you wish!”

  Armanda said good-bye to him again. Nadja rested her head on her folded arms on the little table by the window, eyes closed. Five minutes later the train stopped in Kruiningen, and even the little woman left her corner of the compartment.

  The train continued slowly on its way.

  Then, in a velvet stillness caused by a frozen overhead cable, it came to a halt in the middle of what were either meadows or fields. Armanda and Nadja, who’d lit up cigarettes, stared at each other. Pray God we get there in time. How much longer is it going to take? Then they talked about the state of Lidy’s teeth. Twelve fillings. Amalgam. Single surface, two surfaces, and one with three surfaces in first molar, upper left, and another in first molar, upper right. An average set of teeth, very well taken care of, no X-rays ever required.

  “Terrible shame,” said Armanda. “He said X-rays would have been the one thing that would have made it still possible to …” She looked rather helplessly at Nadja.

  “A classification,” said Nadja, remembering the word from a phone conversation she’d had with Armanda a few days previously. The forensic anthropologist had tried to effect a classification, which is to say, a scientifically provable relation between the bodily remains found in the mud, which were identified for now only with a number, and a real person with a first and last name. The latter was already supplied with a whole series of distinguishing characteristics: sex, approximate age, anatomical build, all investigated meantime and had light shed on them. The approximate date of death together with the location of the remains had naturally led automatically to the Red Cross list of thirty years ago, which still showed the names of 839 missing persons.

  “Mama,” said Nadja.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you really think it’s her?”

  Armanda, suddenly deeply upset, looked at her wrist, then at her watch.

  “I’ve dreamed about it for two nights now,” Nadja went on, “very intense, very insistent dreams, that it’s the other one, that missing farmer’s wife from … from?”

  “Burgh,” said Armanda, in a murmur, because Burgh no longer seemed relevant to her. Having received the same details from the Red Cross, the family there had refused to accept the corpse, rejecting it on the grounds of inadequate facts and in particular because of the jewelry, which had never been part of their traditional costume.

  “But it could have turned up in the ground there totally by chance, with no other connection!” Armanda had held this up as a possibility once again on her visit to Rijswijk, eliciting a rather pleading look from the pathologist who was talking to her and answering her questions.

  A man of about fifty. Sitting at a desk, tree outside the window. He acknowledged her with a smile, and then stayed with the results of the expert report. The unknown woman and the missing woman could be one and the same; but with certainty—no. Absolutely not.

  Armanda had looked down to see the photo of Lidy laughing ante-mortem on the desk. She had reached out her hand and asked what they’d hoped to achieve with the picture. A definitive conclusion, she was told, to the accompaniment of a look that was shattering in its warmheartedness and was maintained for the duration of the discussion that followed. The unknown victim’s teeth were, as he believed she knew, very incomplete, but the alveoli had shown how the teeth had originally been positioned.

  She had propped an elbow on the desk and stared at the doctor with her fist against her nose.

  “If for example the photo had shown that there was a space between her front teeth, we would have been able to say for sure it isn’t her.”

  At this point she’d had a coughing fit, and the doctor had fetched her a glass of water. From this moment on, his appearance
merged in her memory with that of the policeman who had come to her house, honest gray eyes, sailor’s beard trimmed short. When she stopped coughing, she had asked, possibly with the help of the tears in her eyes, how drowning actually happens, and how bad it is. She learned in the course of a very long conversation that there are different ways of drowning, in some of which inhaling water is involved, but certainly not always, that if water is inhaled, it doesn’t mean there’s difficulty breathing, because, for example, the victim may already be unconscious, and most important, when there is severe loss of body heat, which is to be assumed in this case, actual death is preceded by suspended animation, a form of slumber that can last for some time and in the course of which the process of metabolism in the brain slows down almost to zero.

  So, Armanda asked, is it a peaceful death?

  “Yes. Absolutely peaceful.”

  The bus that went to Zierikzee by way of the mile-long Zeeland Bridge carried only a handful of passengers. Up front was a group of lounging youths who had left school early, and at the back were the two women who had got in at the train station at Goes, on their way to a burial in Ouwerkerk that had required them to get a special dispensation from the attorney general. Human remains, if discovered in Westerschouwen, must also be buried in Westerschouwen in the absence of verifiable relatives. It’s a requirement of the law regarding burials, because such cases make the local mayor responsible for the costs. The two women sat close together and silent, looking out of the window. They were each wearing a dark coat with a colorful shawl. Despite the first signs of plumpness, the elder of the two, with her loose dark brown hair and a fringe, still looked quite young. The age difference between her and the other one, red-haired, fine-boned, and very pale, didn’t seem that great. Yet the two of them were surrounded with the aura of indefinable calm of a mother and daughter who knew that their lives, in whatever fashion, are intertwined.