The Storm

by Margriet de Moor

  “Yes?”

  “Oh, you know, basically it’s always remained inexplicable. But inexplicable doesn’t mean, according to people who know that sort of thing, that it doesn’t happen quite often. The goal of life, which everyone makes such a big deal out of, seems to be totally irrelevant when it comes to the actual impetus that keeps the whole thing going—it must be some terrifying sort of egoism, pure willpower, that can occasionally dump the whole mess at your feet. Nadja asked for a glass of water, and someone, a lonely lady sitting on a bench with a book, so they told me, went into a pub and got it for her. She had no heart trouble, at least nothing pathological, the autopsy established that. Strange, yes. The local doctor, lacking her medical history, couldn’t issue a death certificate. Nadja had driven her car to the center of the village. No, not for a long time, although she quite often came to Amsterdam while Mother was still alive. Next to her on the front seat was a folded newspaper, half read. As the traffic barriers came down and she had to stop, she may have glanced at it, but I find it unthinkable that a list of performances and events for music, art, and film could be the cause of a sudden fatal heart attack, mors subita, no matter how sensitive the victim was. So, to cut a long story short, the barriers went up again and the traffic moved on at a moderate pace. Suddenly I find myself wondering what novel the lady may have been reading as Nadja got out shakily and everyone behind her began to honk their horns, because they were still stopped on the train tracks. This line runs right through the village, it’s a much-traveled stretch, at any moment the warning signal could sound again. And the lady was reading, undistracted, under her tree, completely transported, wonderful. You don’t have to act, yet you still experience everything, you don’t have to speak, yet you converse with amazingly intelligent partners on your own level, and if you don’t know how to love and to flirt, well, you know now. Oh dear old Lidy, the sea-green screen between us has become completely transparent meantime. With one of us pedaling the bike and the other on the carrier, we race along the canal in the watery dusk. There’s no wind, all the flags are hanging slack on their poles. Does it still matter who read which book? Who lent the other which pullover, who inherited a child and a husband from whom? In cases of sudden death, the assumption is that some emotional distress unconnected with the immediate surroundings simply stopped the muscles of the heart.” “Dear God, Manja, does such a thing really happen?” “Apparently yes. Inner factors sometimes succeed in completely hollowing out the psyche undetected, and then … you’re suddenly gone. Do you know how much the heart of an adult woman weighs?”

  “Well?”

  “They check it during the autopsy, they weigh the heart.”

  “Heavens! The scales, the pans of the scale, the weighing of souls!”

  “It weighed twelve ounces, which is normal. You know, don’t you, that Nadja, who was widowed, was in love again, and didn’t want to talk about it to anyone—nor was she allowed to. So I don’t need to tell you what was involved, of course: a secret, adultery, hopeless. There came a time when she started to look pale, but was not audibly or visibly suffering. God preserve us, she may have thought, from the person who spends so much time pitying themselves that the whole world has to know about it. What was noticeable, however, during this period was that she went almost every day to the long-term-care section of Tabitha House, yes, here, where I am now, to visit her grandma, our crumpled, demented little mother, now almost ninety-three. If you’ve been bound to silence, you can still use an incomprehensible oracle to have dialogues with. Once when I asked her—looking all sympathetic the way an insider does—how Grandma was, she reported: ‘Oh, fine, we listened to a Schubert sonata together.’ It must have been about two months after the death of our little mother, previously known as our mother, that Nadja also crossed over and pulled the drawbridge up after her.”

  “She was so sweet.”

  “Oh God, wasn’t she!”

  “So unselfaware. Once I went with her to a place that sold children’s clothes, where she was to try on a winter coat with teddy bears embroidered on it. She could already stand by then. The saleswoman sat her up on a chest of drawers, all jammed up in the thick, stiff coat that made her arms stand out like a penguin’s, and she gave me a blank look of such force that it silenced every piece of nonsense in my head. That winter she caught pseudo-croup, and Sjoerd and I were sure she was going to die, because she couldn’t inhale anymore.”

  “I think you’re wrong. It wasn’t that winter, it was two or three winters later. But it’s true, we were scared to death. In those days in Amsterdam if you called a doctor in the middle of the night in a panic, he actually came, those were men—”

  “They certainly were.”

  “—who didn’t just keep the phone within reach of the bed but their shoes and socks too. ‘Of course she won’t die.’ He picked up the little girl, the favorite of my children forever, took her into the bathroom, and ordered us to turn on the hot tap. And I’m telling you, the steam made the swelling in her throat go down immediately, her air passages were open again, and in a flash she was back to breathing normally. Sjoerd and I lay next to each other in the darkness afterward, deeply impressed by how narrow the dividing line is between helplessness and a wonderful, warm bed. I stretched out my hand. My sister’s husband, I could feel it, isn’t going to be able to go to sleep yet, maybe he’s thinking about God and marveling at the compositional gift that He exercises when He sets life and death not one behind the other but side by side. In the morning, when I woke up, he was way over on the other side of the bed.”

  “We always slept in each other’s arms.”

  “Oh, mostly we did too.”

  “Oh, oh, oh, we were so in love with each other! Love at first sight, colon, with this one, quote unquote. No power in the world could have aroused me like that for any other reason. Oh, that mad, grand, heathen ‘yes!’ That bow to nature, pure and simple!”

  “Yes, and its trump card at a most particular moment is the indivisible First Person Plural. He was a horny man, wasn’t he? Always ready, even when the circumstances, physically speaking, weren’t exactly ideal. Advanced pregnancy, raging hangover, once the two of us had a real flu …”

  “Well, speaking for myself, I had good experiences with the flu. There’s no better aphrodisiac than one or two degrees of fever, damp sheets, and a red-hot pillow. ‘I’ve brought thyme syrup and a bottle of champagne,’ he said once, when I’d spent quite a while in bed waiting for a solicitous husband, and he crawled in with me under the covers, shivering slightly, with aching joints, swollen membranes, and a raw throat.”

  “The sun shone through the bedroom window, the top half of which was made of lead glass and colored everything around us cinnabar red. Free-hanging tendrils of black ivy swayed in the breeze outside the windowpanes.”

  “But the craziest thing I remember is when he had his traffic accident. Right-of-way ignored when turning left from the Amstel to the Berlage Bridge. ‘Come here, lie down close for a moment, I’m so cold from the sheer fright.’ He pushed back the covers and I couldn’t understand how he had managed all three flights of stairs on his own or how the ambulance crew from Onze Lieve Vrouwe Gasthuis could have let him go. I took off my clothes and lay down, being careful of the blue-purple bruises on his hips; there was a big, white, unbelievably imposing bandage round his knee. It makes you feel quite instinctively guilty. And why wasn’t I at home when he was delivered by a taxi, so wounded and pathetic, and rang his own front doorbell? Soon my hand wasn’t the only thing that disappeared under the covers—my head did too. I wanted to do something, anything at all. That’s just the way it is, isn’t it? Something, blindly, no matter what, it’s our way of rebelling against the outrage of our human powerlessness. I kissed all his grazed and swollen places and reached out my hand—”

  “The way every woman does automatically.”

  “—for that particular living swelling in the middle, to check the state of my husband’s faith in t
he world. So, I was holding my husband’s rudder and we were already heading for the sluice, when at a certain point I became uneasy. Shouldn’t I look to see what the patient’s moans were signifying? I slid back out, and his eyes lit up. ‘I know what you like best is you underneath and me on top,’ his eyes said. My eyes answered: ‘That’s right.’ He: ‘But you can see that’s not going to work right now.’ What, Armanda? Oh. What then? That his half-closed eyes actually flashed, from the bottom of his heart: ‘You’re the only desirable woman in the world, and I’m not going to change my opinion for the rest of my life, even if they put me on the rack?’ Also good. So, in brief, I made the well-known bridge over him. In the spell of some secret, guilty delight, I began to pleasure him in the most exquisite way, using the muscles inside me. Oh God, that was love! If I shut my eyes, all I saw was flashes of light, and if I opened them again I saw him lying there keeping hold of himself, and I realized there was no distinction between his pain, his enjoyment, and my bliss. I was shocked by my feelings for him. Sjoerd was a man it was usually very easy to satisfy.”

  “You don’t need to tell me! For example, if you put a wonderful dish on the table, cod, slices of potato, rice, dill, and mustard, he would look at you with a surprised look that said ‘How did you guess what I’ve been wanting all day?’”

  “But this time, I don’t know, he wanted some absolutely special effort from me, and believe me, I gave him that pleasure. Movements can take seconds, then minutes to build toward something that you know is coming with absolute certainty. The question, in which you want to the best of your capacity to retain the upper hand, is quite simple: when? When my husband and yours reached that point on this particular day, I was glad that our bedroom was up on the top floor of the house, in the soundproof attic; the roof didn’t touch the neighbors’, because they were hipped roofs and each sloped up into a cone.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Me? Not that old, I think. Don’t ask me to tell you exactly. You know, in some people, the decline sets in quite early. Years ago, I was walking down the street and I looked at my feet. I saw them quite clearly, one little boot in front of the other, making their way along a pavement of rectangular flagstones, yet I had absolutely no awareness that I was going anywhere. That’s it, I thought, I have no sense of speed anymore, the needle’s on zero, the world is going backward exactly as fast as I’m trying to go forward. That evening I called my children and asked them to tell me straight when they began to notice I was in the process of going senile. They promised, because what I was saying, implicitly, was that when that happened, I would take my own measures.”

  “But they didn’t.”

  “Of course not. Telling you straight is only okay when there’s no reason yet to have to do it. Otherwise it would be so heartless, wouldn’t it, and so hateful? Looking a little confused now and then, forgetting a name here and there, it happens to everybody. But start laughing to yourself when you’re alone and refusing to explain why, pretend you’re hard of hearing, lock yourself in, fail to turn off the gas, go wandering through town in your pajamas and dressing gown and be unable to find your way home again, and your children will most certainly stop saying, ‘Mama, we think it’s reached that point.’”

  “Oh, what does it matter!”

  “That’s what I think too. Nicely locked up in a warm building, and unable to go forward anymore, I look back. I am Armanda, the sister of a woman who was very young when she drove away one morning from a happy home and sadly never came back. Since that time she lives inside me. Do you believe that I soon gave up my favorite licorice and started eating cream fondants? Good, so, when I was twenty-eight and then thirty, I enlarged my sister’s family, which had consisted until then of a husband, a wife, and a little daughter, with an additional daughter and a son. When the marriage collapsed, the world, to my astonishment, continued to follow its set habits. Action, place of action, dialogue, and protagonists remained in the absolute control of my sister. To give you an example, Lidy, take the lovers who surfaced from time to time after my divorce. As regards my sainted sister, and considering that she would have known how much more easygoing life in the Netherlands had become, would they have been accepted by her? The true nature of the sister of my sister remained: her. I maintain that the only person who ever really knew me was Sjoerd, and you, Lidy, have the absolute right to feel offended that he drew a line at our ménage-à-trois. I’m sorry, but I obviously didn’t manage your husband very well.”

  “Oh, sweetheart, we’re both only human. I don’t blame you for anything. But why do you keep yawning?”

  “Because I prefer to spend the day like a sleepless night. The waking hours of someone who’s constitutionally sleepy are dreamless and dull, like the back side of the moon. Nevertheless my mythic sister still manages to come floating through in the guise of three dead cows or something. Hello, Lidy. How did you get into this sodden chaos again? I know there are mean tricks that can never be put right again.”

  “I was just wild about the idea of driving a car again, you don’t forget how so easily.”

  “Liar.”

  “No-o.”

  “Ye-es. Oh, you don’t have to tell me about memory. Just when you’ve lost it is when you recognize how astonishing it is. The memory of someone who at some point allowed themselves to play a joke that went completely wrong works completely differently from the memory of some lucky devil who managed always to be good and behave well. I know how to treasure your magnanimous thoughts. It’s a performance I’ve been giving for a long time now. Oh, how you wanted to go on that weekend expedition, which was supposed to be an invitation to me—except you didn’t. The most important tool of memory is the ability to forget. Remember a phone conversation, even remember part of the actual dialogue, but to keep things simple, forget who proposed what and who in a whisper begged, ‘Oh, please!’ The thing about forgetting that’s piquant is that nine times out of ten it’s not forgetting at all, simply a cut that allows you to insert something. Who in God’s name wants to get lost time back, uncut? I’m old. My eyes are bad, my ears too, I stand absolutely helpless in the flow of time. But at the very last moment a motive I’d forgotten all about reenters the story. It was a kiss, Lidy, no more than that, but on pain of death, no less than that either. A hot, open kiss, a feeling of fire that I’d never encountered before in all my nineteen years, has reappeared in front of my eyes, through the thicket of years, out of the oblivion in which it had been buried. The scene was the wall under the fire escape of the Nausicaä, a dismal, dilapidated student dormitory in the Zwarte Handsteeg, where a party was going on. The time was night. The protagonists were Sjoerd, in an exceptionally resolute role—he must have worked out the whole kiss and had it ready—and your sister, Armanda, who lost the plot just at the moment when her opposite number wanted to get under her skirt, because an angry-looking guy appeared in this garbage-strewn, film-noirish inner courtyard, walking his dog. I wanted to get the kiss back, Lidy, I wanted to have it forever, in my heart….”

  “Well, it’s not important.”

  “Weak. Your voice sounds weak, because you know, you absolutely know, that I spent that Monday evening pacing around my room, torturing myself with the desire to come clean about the damn kiss. One step, another step, then another, on and on. Till I’d reached the magic goal of my journey, my woman’s will, and, I have to add, the center of the person I am deep in my heart, in my own opinion. I went to the telephone in the upper hall. That was me. Don’t take it badly that I’m going into this with such detail, but really, I was the one who made the call and I’ve been horribly conscious of that my whole life long. It comes in moments that are like being jolted with a brief electric shock, and then before you can deal with them, they’re gone again. Maybe you couldn’t see my persuasive smile, but you could certainly hear it. You could understand my chatter and my whispers, on that Monday there wasn’t yet the slightest breath of a northwest wind to drown out anything. Wonderfully precoci
ous little wife and mother, just listen, is what you heard? God, you really fought back. ‘Huh? What are you talking about? I don’t think I feel like it, thanks.’ I had to make a big effort to persuade young Mrs. Blaauw to flee the everyday grind for once. That’s what happened, and alas there’s no act of penance that can undo the basic maliciousness of the facts. The despicable plan crossed my path, I seized it on tiptoe, you have every right to be angry. Meantime I stand on the top floor of Tabitha House and look out like a ghost. There’s an old, bare elm in front of the house on the other side of the street, and in its branches is a whole swarm of parrots, there must be ten of them, they never stop talking. Strange. I think I’ll lie down now and have a doze.”

  “No-o …”

  · · ·

  “Are you still there?”

  “Ye-es!”

  “Your voice sounds so light, Lidy, and so interested, as if you really want to know how I’m faring here.”

  “Yes, well, must be because I was dreaming that the two of us were taking a walk on Sunday to the water tower. There were botanic gardens for plant trials on the other side of the bridge back then, hidden behind a wall. The early sun was tinting the sky above them to a pinkish mother-of-pearl color like the inside of a seashell.”

  “That isn’t a dream, that really happened. We were still little children. But can you dream while you’re drowning?”

  “And how. In fact, it’s all you do. In the dream you’re calling life, we went through the grass past the houseboats, looked at the wall on the opposite bank, and felt a pleasant, eventful sort of homesick feeling. Homesickness mostly starts when you’re in the open, and then a wall is always really helpful. We got to talking about eternity, endlessness, and from there we automatically got into the God problem, you simply didn’t understand why the most rational people made such a song and dance about it. You stood still, to pull up one of your white kneesocks, which was all wet through—the grass was wet, it had been raining—you were thinking, and you murmured to yourself, why couldn’t there be some Being that spanned everything and guided it? Your little red patent-leather purse slipped down off your shoulder. ‘I don’t see why that should be so inconvenient,’ you said, and hung the purse, which had nothing in it, back round your shoulder. ‘Me neither,’ I said. You were quiet. I could see your nose and mouth tensing. ‘Why can’t I read Netteke Takes a Cure?’ you asked finally, looking at me. ‘You know you’re not allowed,’ I replied, and named the name of a friend I hung around, not a real friend, a girl who granted me her dubious and always a little tormenting favors only during school hours. She had lent me the book under the most draconian conditions.