“Lovely!”
The little group was standing next to the sideboard, where every imaginable kind of food was already set out. Armanda leaned to the side, took a little toast square with smoked salmon on it, the sort of thing that you can pop into your mouth whole in a perfectly genteel way, and noticed, as she was chewing it, that the others were still looking at her expectantly. She swallowed hastily.
“Lidy’s in Zeeland,” she said, out of breath.
“Why on earth?” asked Betsy.
“Oh … I think she wanted to get into the car and just go. Yes, she wanted to be behind the wheel again. You lose the knack so quickly, don’t you?”
She saw someone in the group nod.
“Actually I had something to do with it,” she went on. “I have a goddaughter out there, you didn’t know that, did you? A little treasure, today’s her seventh birthday, she set her heart on getting a pair of ballet shoes from her godmother.”
Betsy smiled as she eyed her, but she also raised an eyebrow. Meanwhile someone had turned up the volume on the music, a slow clarinet solo. Armanda raised her voice accordingly, but also because this time she’d be able to give the right answer to the question.
“But when we were talking on the phone, Lidy and I, at the beginning of the week and the subject of this little trip to Zeeland came up, she was immediately all fired up about it. Wouldn’t you really rather go to Betsy’s party, my beloved sister asked all casually, but I know her. First I just let her ask about how far it was, and the state of the roads, and the possibility of doing most of this magical journey on a boat, and then finally I gave way. Okay, fine, I said, then why don’t you go in my place.”
This was what Armanda said, and then looked past the others into the room in a slightly confused way, watching a few of the guests already slow-dancing a barely recognizable fox-trot to the lone clarinet; when she brought her gaze back to the group around her, she realized Sjoerd was watching her closely, with a rather ambiguous look. She looked right back at him, and immediately caught herself remembering the one time he had kissed her on the mouth, in black and white, a movie still. She quickly registered that his expression was softening.
I’m a little dizzy, she said to herself, but it feels good. Everything around me looks a bit blurred, it must be the cigarette smoke, all those blue rings and snaky white garlands going up to the ceiling in the heat of the candle flames. Besides which I feel hot. Is this life?
She had openly given him a very loving look.
The slow fox-trot was suddenly broken off with a scratching noise—someone had decided it was too early to set that mood—not to sound out again, even more mistily, until hours later, when everyone, as if at the wave of a wand, was ready to listen as the clarinet wove its tale of desire, consent, and the tenuous boundary that divides them. Armanda and Sjoerd sought each other out without hesitation and pressed themselves together. After spending the entire evening in such close proximity, it felt right to them, and everyone else, to dance cheek to cheek. Outside all was stormy night, and neither of them cared what anyone might think who saw that here, under the wood-beamed ceiling, a man was cradling the sister of his wife in his arms, his mouth pressed to her ear. The mood that held them both captive was unmistakable.
She descended the stairs behind him. He had called for a taxi, and as the stand was close by, they were already on their way downstairs. The front door was stuck. He reached past her in the hall and used force. Rain immediately stung her face. The taxi didn’t come. She kept taking quick peeks out from behind the half-closed door at the dark street and at a gaggle of dripping cyclists leaning against a lamppost. Apart from that, absolutely nothing was going on.
Ten minutes later, as they were running down the little side street, she was still holding his hand and they both laughed at the whole show. At the dam there wasn’t a taxi to be seen. They crossed the road fast and stood in the doorway of a clothing store, though it faced north and provided little protection. She was absolutely freezing, shivered as she raised her collar, but held herself a little apart from Sjoerd. As she peered across the square, she could barely recall the happy atmosphere at the party, full of promises of the sort that don’t necessarily raise expectations that they’re going to become reality.
“Here comes one,” she called, and ran with her shawl over her soaking wet hair, hanging down in rats’ tails.
The taxi driver, like all taxi drivers in this city, was a talker. Huddled close together again in the soft backseat of the car, Armanda and Sjoerd had to put up with being told that the situation of the traffic this evening was extremely precarious. At the Keizersgracht an uprooted tree had blocked the road from Raadhuisstraat all the way to Berenstraat; in Bos en Lommer the balcony of one of the apartment houses still under construction had been ripped off and came crashing down on the streetcar rails; and in the square in front of the main train station, the taxi driver said, keeping up a steady speed automatically, he had had to swerve to avoid a 200-foot crane that was swaying toward the water at the edge of the open harbor while firemen raced to and fro.
“Dangerous weather,” said the taxi driver expectantly, turning round to them for a long moment. As he kept them under observation in the rearview mirror, he told them all about a deadly accident on the Kattenburg earlier in the evening and was about to report on a traffic jam on the Wallen when he hit the brakes and went into a skid. The engine died, the driver snarled a curse, restarted it at once, and drove, craning his neck in curiosity, slowly past a crumpled motorbike with a sidecar lying in the middle of the pitch-dark Vijzelstraat.
“A Zündapp,” he said. “Beautiful machine.” And, as he shifted back into top gear, he went straight into his report about the state of traffic on the Wal, where the usual mob of drunks was letting vehicles pull up right in front of the doors of the bars, because they didn’t want to take a single step outdoors with all the roof tiles flying around loose in the narrow streets.
“Typical drunk’s thinking,” said the taxi driver. “They totter smack into a canal without their brains sending out the slightest warning, but they have a real respect for roof tiles.”
Chunks of wood, shards of glass, bits of bicycles, branches, newspapers, umbrellas, cardboard boxes, everything lying in the rain, which had meantime slackened to a gentle patter. Armanda and Sjoerd, stunned, looked out over the front seat at the city, glistening in the headlights. The well-known bridges. A little circuitous path along the river. And there was De Pijp with its precise grid of streets. As they got out at the corner of the park, Armanda felt the street plan of her home city coil around her, life-threateningly, darkly, wetly, capturing numbers 77 and 36 in its grasp, the one on the long side of the park, the other on the short.
They were standing facing each other. Armanda yawned. Through a crack in the clouds, a ray of light from the hidden full moon fell onto her storm-ravaged face.
“I’m tired.”
“So go to sleep.”
Sjoerd, his arm round her shoulder, accompanied her to number 77, where the outside light was burning. She asked if he’d like to come to breakfast tomorrow. A nod, yes, maybe, but she shouldn’t count on him. Speaking of which, what time should he pick Nadja up? She groped in her coat pocket for the key. Oh, whenever it suited him.
He waited till she was inside and had closed the front door behind her.
How good it felt on a stormy night to slip into your bed in flannel pajamas! It didn’t take Armanda five minutes to get ready and then go into the next room to check on Nadja, who was sleeping stretched out like a kitten; now she was closing her eyes. First she cast her mind back for a moment to the party, conversations, images, then for the umpteenth time began to ask herself if her life wasn’t fundamentally colorless and bland, a pale reflection of something that certainly existed in her heart but clearly had no parallel in reality. What do I want my life to be?
Twenty-one already, she thought sleepily, but still no experience of life, and still a virgin, damm
it, and I know a whole bunch of my fellow students who are no longer obliged to say the same. Then, as if riffling through a photo album, she saw the faces of friends and acquaintances merge, simply become details that gradually combined themselves into one anonymous face that she gazed at provocatively, brimming over with the sheer excitement of her own vital energy. You think I’m a fool, she thought in her dreams, just as she sometimes thought when she was wide awake. What, is that what it’s about? Are those the adventures that hide behind your secretive faces, that I’ve been avoiding for reasons I don’t understand myself? Doesn’t compare very well with the things that are going to happen and that I don’t actually know yet from direct experience but still I know are possible. She turned on her side. With a sleeper’s acumen she picked one face out of the array of those staring at her.
Lidy Blaauw-Brouwer. Who had given birth in the early onset of winter in 1950–51 to a little daughter, Nadine (“We’re going to call her Nadja”), thereby also giving herself an enchanting task that would last her the rest of her life.
She was now deeply asleep. As one ear continued to register the satisfying sounds of the storm, her brain was still lingering a little on Lidy, who had walked around her living room one winter evening with a nursing infant on her arm as if nothing, absolutely nothing in the world, could come close to equaling this experience. In the same room with her were two admirers: her husband and her younger sister, who had just realized that if things had gone a little, just a very little differently, this man could as easily have been loved by her, immoderately.
The sleeping girl lingered over this truth, which frightened her not at all; on the contrary, it left her in a state of private yearning as the hours slipped by unmarked. Toward dawn, she was rewarded with an erotic dream. She was startled awake, in a state of euphoria, only to plunge back into the dream’s continuation. It was dark, and Sjoerd was seizing her shoulders to turn her around. It wasn’t an embrace. Rather he was pushing her away from him by the shoulders, but this was made difficult for him because she refused to take a step back. This image was followed by a series of uninhibited details that jolted her mind as she woke up again, roused this time by a child’s solid little knee planted in her stomach. It was morning, and Nadja had climbed into bed with her aunt. Armanda pushed back the bedclothes and let the child snuggle up against her.
When she appeared for breakfast at around 10:30, everything still seemed perfectly normal, cozy, small-format. It was Sunday, and at home people listened to the national news on radio only on weekdays at 8 a.m. She said good morning to her mother, kissed her father, and laughed at Nadja, who was using both hands to push a rusk sprinkled with a crumbled lump of aniseed sugar up to her mouth. She sat down next to her father at the side of the table in the bay window on the second floor, which allowed a view of most of the street.
“Yes,” she said in reply to a remark of her father’s about the storm. “Just awful.” She followed his eyes to the broken branches on the cobblestones as she stretched out an arm to take the cup of tea her mother had poured for her.
It was a peaceful moment, despite the stormy weather. Armanda was wearing a blue bathrobe; her parents, smelling of shaving soap and eau de cologne, were already fully dressed. Jan Brouwer and Nadine Langjouw: people with fixed habits and habitual sunny dispositions, made even sunnier this morning by the presence of the little girl. Armanda couldn’t remember ever having heard her parents raise their voices to each other.
Shortly after eleven, they saw Sjoerd marching toward them through the swirling debris on the street, coattails flapping.
“In Zandvoort the sea’s lapping up over the boulevard,” he reported as he came in. Coffee was ready on the table. He sat down with them, saying that a friend had called to say why don’t we go and take a look at IJmuiden, the water’s lifted some of the ships right up onto the quay.
Armanda was wandering around restlessly, pouring coffee, sitting down again, running her fingers over the embroidery on the tablecloth, and when she looked up, she met the eyes of her mother, who asked, “So when’s Lidy getting back?” as if she was supposed to know.
“We didn’t settle on a specific time,” Sjoerd answered for her. And then, after stubbing out his cigarette and beginning to get to his feet: “Should I give her a call, maybe?”
Upon which the rest of a day began, which would fix itself permanently in Armanda’s mind as a series of household tasks whose simple familiarity concealed something utterly sinister.
Sjoerd came back into the living room from the hall. He hadn’t been able to get through to Schouwen-Duiveland.
“The line to the island is stone dead.”
At almost the same moment Armanda saw her father bent over in the corner, turning the knobs on the radio. The dial glowed green. She heard the voice of the announcer, heard him say that Army Central Command had ordered all military personnel on weekend leave to return to barracks at the same time as she waved hello to her brother, Jacob, who had finally slept himself out and was now in search of breakfast, still looking a little pale but already sufficiently awake to pay attention to the news.
“Oh, it’s war.” He took a roll.
Sjoerd left the house. Armanda went to get dressed and to tidy her room, in order to have something to do. While her hands were busy with the bed, the washbasin, and the wall cupboard, the radio was still on in the living room. The male voice calmly reported collapsed dikes, floods in the cities of Dordrecht and Willemstad, even danger to human life. At six o’clock, she and her mother began to make dinner. Darkness came early today. A Beechcraft from the military airfield at Gilze-Rijen had done a reconnaissance flight during the afternoon over West Brabant, Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, Walcheren, and Goeree. Everything was underwater.
As for Schouwen-Duiveland: no word.
She lay awake in the night; she was sick of the storm, which was still raging. Lidy hadn’t phoned once during the whole day. It would be good, she thought rather crossly, if you checked in tomorrow, Sister, surely you must realize we’re worried to death about you!
Near morning the newspaper thumped through the letterbox. She heard it and went downstairs. Switching on the lamp in the hall, she stared at the huge headline: ZEELAND WIPED OFF THE MAP, and then read a report that struck her as being no report but a complete fantasy.
“The Dakota flew low over the boiling waters of the Krammer in the direction of Schouwen-Duiveland. The island, battered and then overwhelmed, has ceased to exist. Entire villages lay strewn like driftwood along the broken dikes. Zierikzee was crying its death song. The spring tide has destroyed the harbor, and the North Sea has poured in from behind to attack the surrounding polders in a surprise rearguard pincer movement that has annihilated them.”
Shivering, she went up the stairs, had a brief thought of How was I to know … and then blocked it out. She crawled back into her warm bed, but stayed sitting upright. Her mind in a daze, suddenly aware of this one tiny point in time against the background of the endless roll call of place-names, she looked at the alarm clock on the night table beside her. Half past six. Eyes open and then squeezed tight shut, Armanda for the first time saw her sister as she would appear to her, pitilessly from now on. Tragic, even heroic, in front of a landscape reduced to a wasteland.
5
This Was Once a Town
As Lidy reached Schouwen-Duiveland in late afternoon, not tired at all, indeed wide awake, the flood tide had already passed the high-water mark, and the Flood Warning Service had immediately decided to put out one of their rare radio alerts. It spoke—in anticipation of the night to come—of a “dangerous high tide.”
She had taken the last ferry of the day to risk the crossing from Numansdorp to Zijpe. The entry into the harbor was so rough that it triggered a short-lived outbreak of screaming and running around on the decks. Nevertheless it wasn’t ten minutes before she was raising a hand in greeting to the boy who had lowered the ramp, and she drove unhesitatingly onto the island of her destiny.
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The heavy cloud cover was breaking here and there. By the light of the hidden moon, she followed a little road that offered no resistance to the storm. During the war, the island had been flooded by the Germans, killing both trees and hedges. The drainage ditches to left and right were full to the brim. Wherever she looked, cold, wet, dark land stretched away in all directions, but this didn’t depress her. After all these hours, she accepted the howling wind, the cold, and the wet as part and parcel of her little odyssey. Even when she had to swerve as she rounded a bend to avoid at least ten hares racing along the road in the same direction as the car, she didn’t take this as a sign.
“Hares!” she said, nonplussed as she switched back into her lane, for she had taken the animals for huge cats at first glance.
To her right were streetcar rails. A distant bell made her aware that a streetcar was coming up behind her, then for a few minutes it was moving alongside. If she looked to the side she could see travelers buttoned up in their coats in the well-lit interior, playing cards and eating sandwiches. Then the streetcar overtook her, and shortly thereafter forced her to a halt when it stopped to let off a few passengers, who then crossed the road.
The Storm Page 4
