Armanda and Nadja, crossing the Oosterschelde.
It was half past one in the afternoon, and the winter sun was casting an almost colorless light on the water, which was still open, still a direct conduit to the North Sea. In two years’ time the work on the flood defenses in the estuary of this arm of the sea would finally be finished. Linked metal barriers of extraordinary dimensions could then be let down in those rare instances when the height of the water beyond exceeded the level on the depth gauge that triggered the alarm; this would protect the land, which needed the flow of the tides, and block it off briefly from the sea. Armanda and Nadja looked at the expanse of water shining glassily in a framework of nothingness. They were fascinated.
“Remember we should buy flowers in Zierikzee,” said Nadja. “We certainly won’t find any in Ouwerkerk.”
The bus stopped in the center of Zierikzee, where the shops were still closed for midday. Armanda and Nadja ate a snack in a café while keeping an eye on the plants in the shop window on the other side of the street.
“We’ll make it,” said Armanda.
They had agreed with the undertaker that they would be there at the cemetery when the hearse arrived at three o’clock with the coffin.
“Look, they’re opening,” said Nadja, and stopped eating.
There weren’t many fresh flowers in weather like this. Armanda and Nadja bought chrysanthemums and had some twigs of eucalyptus and sprays of evergreens tucked in with them, rather reminiscent of Christmas.
“Might we perhaps make a quick call for a taxi?” Armanda asked the shop owner.
They drove out of town in the back of the taxi, the flowers on their knees. Here too the fields stretched away, all at perfect right angles to the horizon. The trees lining the road were still small. They looked at them, dreaming of the truth and pondering what it meant. Armanda was conscious that Nadja, who was leaning against her, viewed the entire enterprise as a kind of serious farce, since she didn’t know who her mother was, but found this posthumous adoption of a dead farmer’s wife totally okay. She herself was holding tight to Lidy. So much so, in fact, that at a certain point the empty black and white countryside seemed to deliver its own proof: Far too much of you has accumulated in me, Lidy. Because of you, I could never become the person I was. The taxi turned left into the village, which was made up in its entirety of new, modern houses.
The entrance gates to the cemetery were a wrought-iron monstrosity between two pillars, each of which bore a sculpture of angels’ wings. Armanda recognized them from the ceremony of mourning years before, when the region had reburied all its flood victims in a single service. The graveyard in the plain, which was still open to the sea dike, looked very well tended now. Armanda and Nadja walked to the middle section of the burial ground with all the simple, identical graves that would never be moved because they had been declared a monument. They saw that the fifteen-by twenty-inch gray gravestone was already standing next to the mound of earth, covered with a thin layer of snow. It had already been explained to Armanda that nothing on it could be altered: her claiming of the bones was acceptable to the state, her putting of Lidy’s name to them was also acceptable in principle, but the stone, like the three others here, must remain blank. It wasn’t long before the hearse arrived. Armanda and Nadja walked back to the road.
“Can you open the lid again for a moment?” Armanda asked the undertaker, as soon as he and his assistant had pushed the full-sized coffin out of the car and set it on a bier on wheels.
And with a nod of her head, she showed him the photo of Lidy.
The undertaker took it out of her hand, looked from the laughing Lidy to Armanda, and then from under the brim of his black silk hat at the row of apartment buildings on the other side of the street.
“It’s totally against regulations,” he said in a tone that meant “Well, okay.”
The sun went in behind the low-hanging clouds as the little procession moved to the middle section of the graveyard. Once there, the undertaker used a flat chisel on the coffin to raise the lid a fraction, which happened quite easily. As Armanda pushed the photo inside, she managed a quick searching look, but all she saw was the soft, dark cloth that had been used to wrap the skull and the bones, so that they wouldn’t roll around. The coffin, light as a feather, was lowered skillfully into the grave with the help of straps. Armanda and Nadja each threw a shovelful of sand down onto it. Immediately afterward the grave of the anonymous woman was filled in.
The hearse left.
Armanda and Nadja stood for a few minutes in the silence. They looked out over the stone and the chrysanthemums to the land, bordered in the distance by the sea dike, and then they too left. Armanda had wondered briefly if it was possible when the wind was in the right direction to hear the sea from here. The temperature was already dropping again. A moderate frost was forecast for tonight, but an area of low pressure over Scotland, starting tomorrow, would bring milder air, with rain and wind.
V
Responsorium
As the storm drives the clouds
Where the sea has no coasts that remain
And the heavens have consumed all their stars
The wind of my thoughts
Blows through the empty cavern of my soul.
They encounter no further resistance,
They crowd and they pile—then they are gone.
—J. J. Slauerhoff
“How’s it going?”
“Oh, I had a terrible scene with one of the nurses here, the woman wanted to stick me under the shower, but I hung onto the bathroom door with everything I’d got. It happens. Now everything’s quiet again. Out there, down below, the streetcar clanks by, you know, the number three, it goes to the Concertgebouw in one direction and Amsterdam East in the other. Just recently they moved me up to the top floor. The door to the corridor and the elevator is always locked, most of the people sitting here are too out of it to be able to give you their own names or write them down if you ask them. I think it’s still morning. We have ‘recreation’ this afternoon. The staff is absolutely obsessed with the expression.”
“You look a little shaky.”
“Not surprising if you’re spending twenty-four hours a day collecting your thoughts. I’m guessing what you’re doing right now is looking at the room I’m in, with its fresh paint, and two windows that look north, two cupboards, two chairs, a table, a bed, and a blue velour sofa, which they keep telling me, no idea why, is the sofa from home. From home, they said at the beginning every time they came in, and gave me pregnant looks. Go on, sit down on it. Okay, then, I will, but personally I don’t believe a word of it. When I took a sniff at the seat, I could smell old food and cigar butts, the smell of decline. Maybe it’s because of that smell, or maybe it’s also all the changes in the weather we’ve been having recently, or all the hours I spend sound asleep, but I sit on the couch without budging and regularly ask myself what life actually is.”
“Yeah. No one has the answer to that one.”
“All this sorrow, all these little worries, all these desires. When we go to the dining room at noon and we all sit down at those long tables, almost everyone keeps their heads down, we’re serious and quiet, the people next to me hardly say a thing, but when the food carts are brought in, we all look up like prisoners in a penal colony who’ve just been pardoned. I give an absentminded smile as I lift the lid off the food tray, divided up into compartments, when it’s set down in front of me. My mouth’s all dry, but it responds automatically, I don’t mind, my whole body says yes, but what’s the point? Where does it come from, this morbid appetite, maybe it’s just a desire to keep my footing on the very last step before I trip and fall into the grave?”
“You’re in a really grouchy mood, aren’t you?”
“Grouchy, grouchy, I sit, I look out the window, I eat. I grant you, I still love the smell of bread. I know it’s a treacherous feeling, but I do still find reality attractive. Down on the first floor, in the entrance ha
ll, there’s a wooden bench along the wall next to the swing doors. When I sit there sometimes in the afternoon for a little bit, shoulder to shoulder with my fellow inmates and fellow sufferers, I feel as weary and as dull as the toothless old guys in a shady little square somewhere in Spain.”
“Sounds familiar. And that blue sofa stood for years in the room at the end of the little staircase to the mezzanine.”
“Really? Well, I guess that must be right.”
“Yes. And at the top of the back, there by the wall there was a lamp with two shades made of wavy orange-red frosted glass, that didn’t really go with it, but were perfect when you wanted to submerge yourself for hours in Russian and French novels, which we often did. Next to it were those low doors to the second, smaller, balcony at the back of our house, which we used to go out onto at night and listen to the nearby gunfire in the last winter of the war. You were twelve, I was fourteen, we were both incredibly skinny, and one night we slipped through the railing on the balcony like cats and dropped down into the garden, a pothole or two, a couple of hedges, and we were in a side alley. I’m certain that from the moment we climbed back up about an hour later, we were obsessed for days with the same question, though we never said it out loud to each other. You never ask anyone else the real questions. We’d found a man in a narrow street lined with high, straight houses, he’d been shot, he was lying on his back, and we decided to keep going. A city where the shops and buildings are half in ruins looks much softer at night than it does during the day. In the Eerste Sweelinckstraat there was a doorway and a couple necking in it. We could see that the man wanted more than the woman was willing to give. My God, the despair in the way he was clutching the girl to him with such force, you’d have thought he only had a matter of hours left in his life to do it. Is that, is that what our salvation depends on? We stood stock still and gaped at them like frogs, then headed back to bed in what pitiful starlight there was. You wanted to stick your half-frozen feet into the backs of my knees.”
“And was I allowed to?”
“Of course. You were also allowed to put your arms round me. Oh, what bags of bones we were back then. It was a miracle we ever got enough calories to keep our little body heats up to ninety-eight point six.”
“Okay, so that means life equals warmth, and the all-consuming struggle to keep one’s temperature up. The chief cook here seems to feel that’s best done with boiled and roasted potatoes and proper cutlets seasoned with thyme, and he gets money for it from the inmates. We also manage to get tulip bulb syrup from him. Excuse me for only asking now, but I promise you, it’s a question I’ve been asking myself forever: Are you cold?”
“You could say that, yes. Terribly, actually, but at a certain point it just stops mattering.”
“Really?”
“Really. I move around under the surface of the water now, which is much more comfortable than being above the surface on some wretched raft. It’s crazy: as long as you’re hanging onto a piece of wood, you also keep hanging onto your questions about life, no matter how cold and insignificant they’ve become. Just let go, for God’s sake, and then you’ll also be free of the last issues too, and of the raging as well, of course, and roaring thunder all around you that really got on your nerves after two solid days, and in a sense is still roaring to this day. The storm has become part of me, its gusts are my memories. My entire self is rooted in the difference in pressure between a low over the North Sea and another west of Ireland. Experience has taught me: in the end you’re really not yourself anymore, you only consist of what’s around you. It’s ebb tide. The scale of the water level in the Oosterschelde is causing an incredible undertow in the direction of the North Sea. It’s quite unusual for me to find myself here in the vortex north of the Roggenplaat, while four or five of the other cases who ended up like me in the open sea beyond Ouwerkerk were washed ashore near Colijnsplaat on Noord-Beveland.”
“Can you see anything?”
“I’m tired and I’m old. No, stop shaking your head. I have wrinkles all over my body, my lips are cracked, my bones are plagued by the wet and the cold, I assume you can imagine this, have a sense of it. And moreover, if you’ve had an unusually intense life, you no longer need your eyes to perceive things. A ship’s horn sounds. They’ve seen one of my beloved companions floating facedown and they’re using a boat hook to neatly fish him out. Oh my love, just rest in peace, maybe you know I came only to visit, but then, as you can see, I stayed. The things we went through! In the blue twilight I can see the faces of my nearest and dearest, their teeth are chattering furiously, but apart from that they’re looking at me quite cheerfully. If we’d been granted the privilege to sit next to one another on a bench back then, we would certainly have done so.”
“Oh, Jesus!”
“What is it?”
“A stabbing pain in my side. I’ve been having all sorts of bodily complaints recently—that’s what they call the pains and the exhaustion here. And after meals I sometimes get nosebleeds without any warning at all.”
“They won’t kill you.”
“Yes they will! Just wait! I’m dying!”
“I can hear you trying not to laugh.”
“I wish. I’m rubbing my lower back with both hands, the life force is about to escape, it’s old and dark and wild as a boar. Well, I’ve really had enough of breathing. My lungs have done more than enough pumping. How I’ve envied my big sister these last years for her waterlogged lungs! And admired her fate! While I myself in the meantime have just been continuing the whole ceremony, created by God to live, rather than live through things, that heroic version of spending the time assigned to you. All the idiotic moves I made along the way, a sort of spastic dance now that I look back on it, all that walking, sitting, kneeling, bending, stretching, putting things down, picking them back up again, putting them down again, picking them up again. I think I was always more of an activities-oriented person than, for example, a good person, let alone a noble one. Now what I’d really like to be is light, as light and free as eternity. I’d even like not to comb my hair except when I really felt like it. I would also like to have the permission of the authorities to wear my support stockings, my skirt, and my wool jacket the whole time and never take them off. Come on, let’s have a glass of port. There are still days sometimes when I’m absolutely compulsive about needing to go somewhere, but as soon as the nurse on duty talks me out of it, I’m as quiet as a lamb.”
“How did you find him in bed?”
“Please!”
“Well?”
“Listen, I slept like a dog last night because someone was dying in the room next door. Running and thumping about on the other side of the wall, as if a fistfight was going on, I don’t understand why the party has to end like that. And now, when they’ve obviously removed the troublemaker and everything’s back to normal, you drop a bombshell like this. It’s a dark day, the weatherman pointed out little white clouds with snow and hail showers and told us they’re coming from Iceland. What do you think? My memory is obstinate these days, it doesn’t like releasing its load. It all comes out backward and at an angle. I wish you’d just leave me in peace. I still turn red when anyone mentions him. You know, I take it, that he left me?”
“Yes, who the hell would have thought it!”
“Not you, nobody would argue with that, but deep down I never trusted the whole thing for a second. He and Mrs. Blaauw the Third supposedly are back living here in the city again. An old married couple, and I imagine them living in retirement in some comfortable apartment on the other side of the Amstel. While we were still together, your husband and I, you could see his pleasure sometimes when he watched the sunset and the red glow of its rays as they spread across the houses. A man out of some myth, so tall, with those muscular arms and the tiny blond hairs on them. God, I was so happy with him! It began to happen frequently that he would come home later than I had expected. There would be this half hour or even an hour of anticipation, crowned with t
he sight of his car slowly cruising past the window looking for a parking spot, there he is! What? Oh yes, two, a son and a daughter. They’re doing well, but they don’t have much time to take care of me, they both live abroad. Children are the best thing, the most important thing in life, we’re part of the post-Enlightenment West but no different in this regard from someone still living in Stone Age Papua, who absolutely knows that his family will go on stamping and yelling in primeval fashion to let him keep sharing in their wonderful sheer existence even after his death. Yes, they call me regularly. When I hear my children’s voices, I think it’s wonderful, and when the conversation’s over, I think that’s just fine too. I keep listening to the dial tone in my ear for a moment, or I go to the window and look down to the street. I conclude that worry can make you heavyhearted, and so can its opposite.”
“How’s Nadja?”
“Wait a moment, I think …”
“What is it?”
“Oh, I thought there was a knock at the door. I thought someone was coming to vacuum or empty the wastepaper basket. There’s so much to do here. Every week a young man comes to clean the windows. He takes the flowerpots off the windowsill, they’re blue Alpine violets, and puts them on the table, where they immediately start to give off their scent. Odd, the way they refuse to do so normally. He’s a very nice young man. He cleans the windows and scrubs for me. Because he knows I see no reason for a conversation, he suggested recently that he just turn on the radio. He hadn’t even touched the thing before a loud male voice was filling my room with talk about how both his father and his grandfather had led strikes and the entire harbor was going to be idle next Tuesday. Yes, I thought, yes of course, life means action, and I watch the boy reach for the bucket with such an absurdly, movingly intelligent expression, in order to go to the bathroom and fill it with water. I kept my own face neutral. My eyes are turned inward. The stage is empty and the lighting terrible, but now and then a shocked figure appears. I look at it blankly. Nadja …”
The Storm Page 25
