The Storm (12 page)

The red-faced man didn’t say why he had come, but held his cigarettes out to Sjoerd. As the latter said, “It wasn’t her,” the man nodded and suggested they go out into the fresh air. They talked for a while in front of the little building. Sjoerd indicated the gravestones with his head. “So that’s where you buried her.” The other man understood that he meant the woman who wasn’t Lidy.

“No. The mass grave here is full. And we always take the unknowns to the emergency burial ground farther away on the island.”

To their left, by the small truck, some workers from the body squad had begun to unload something. In the brief exchange that followed, Sjoerd said, “I don’t know how you can do this.”

The other man didn’t answer at first, and seemed to recognize that it didn’t matter whether he said anything or not. On Sunday he would preach an ingenious but truly comforting sermon on a text from Isaiah: “Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth” that came to him with mysterious ease after or even during the filthy work, but for now, all he could see was what the other man saw.

“Damn mud,” he said.

No reply.

Then, “To begin with, the only way we could get through it was with gin; man, we drank, sometimes we were completely loaded. But now we do it stone-cold sober.”

The emergency cemetery was not far from the harbor at Zijpe, close by the marshaling yards for the streetcars. Because the ferry to St. Philipsland wouldn’t leave for another hour, Sjoerd had had time to pay a brief visit. He got out and was immediately stunned by the panorama, which had the bleak power to bury the onlooker in memories of horror, whether the memories were real or not. In the foreground were two rows of hastily but professionally piled up mounds of earth with the approximate dimensions of a prone body, and slightly higher behind these the streetcar rails, in the curve a row of wet black freight cars, and behind them, in the distance, scarcely distinguishable from the sky, the line made by the bank of the Zijpe, where the afternoon mist was already lying low over the water. He walked down the row of grave mounds. Read the inscriptions on the tarred wooden crosses stuck at angles into the earth. Unknown man, number 121. Unknown girl, number 108. Unknown woman, number 77. He didn’t know whether he abhorred them or was grateful to them in his heart as he thought, From now on they’re her relatives, and imagined them waiting there, cold, wet, unidentifiable, until she joined them for good.

They crossed the Amstelveld. Children were playing between the parked cars. The sun had disappeared behind the houses, and Armanda did up the buttons on her coat. Sjoerd walked beside her, silent for some time now, and smoking, but she sensed that it wasn’t calming him. Where
is
he? she wondered. He’s wandering around somewhere where I can’t follow him, even with the best will in the world. Mourning my deeply loved, woefully missed sister.
She
would have known how to fathom his mood. If you know how a man is when he makes love, when he drops all restraint, can you also know how it is with his other passions? I think so.

Unable to change anything, she suddenly thought irritably: You look pale, brother-in-law, and hollow-eyed. And before she knew what she was doing, she began to scold. “Shouldn’t you start to let go
of her? She’s out there and she’s going to stay out there. You can’t reach her anymore—it’s impossible!”

Odd, the way her words found their own direction, took on their own force as they revealed something in her that had turned from gentle to angry. She felt Sjoerd look at her, stunned. As she was about to carry on in the same rough tone of voice, he cut her off.

“Don’t say that! They’re still working flat-out! Aside from this phone call about the pullover, I was also summoned to the police last week. The station at Kloveniersburgwal!”

He had picked up on her fiery tone. For some reason, this pleased her.

“They had received another photo for me to look at, God knows why,” he said.

He had stopped. She looked at him intransigently.

“And?”

“It was the face of a middle-aged woman,” he said. “You know, a motherly type with dark curly hair, all stuck together, and a double chin. You could see that they’d set her on a ladder when they found her, as a sort of stretcher, and that’s how they photographed her, with her head against the rungs. She looked nothing like Lidy, nothing at all, but as I stood there with the photo in my hand and it looked back at me for a while, I don’t know, every face of Lidy’s that I knew was gone, I couldn’t recall any of them, I didn’t even try. I liked the woman. Her head seemed to me to be caught a little between the rungs, but the expression on the face was peaceful, although one cheek was very creased and much more bloated than the other. The eyes weren’t quite closed, her little pupils stared brokenly but kindly into the distance, dead. So I stood there holding the photo, which was as foreign to me as it was familiar, while the policeman behind his desk waited for me to be finally ready to say yes or no. I think I must have tried his patience. You’ll probably find this strange, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to hand him back the woman’s face, which didn’t really look like Lidy’s but still was her, at least a little bit.”

He threw his cigarette butt into the canal.

“Of course you won’t understand.”

I understand very well, thought Armanda, and lowered her eyes. The red paving stones were cracked and old. She ran her foot over
them. A moment devoid of rational thought, a moment when her mind stood still. But she had pictures in her head. Fragments, faces, all signaling death. As if knotted on a rope, they told their story, one that was made up, as every story is, of its gaps and dark holes. Holy God, thought Armanda, and envisioned a last photo in the police station at the Kloveniersburgwal, that was neither of Lidy nor of the poor woman on the ladder. It was a friendly image of death itself, which may have different expressions in each individual snapshot, but the subject is always the same.

She stood for a moment, lost in her own broodings, but was distracted when Sjoerd seized her arm again, and her light-headedness changed to a chaos of emotions.

He was staring at her.

“Please don’t look so angry!” he begged. “Don’t clench your lips like that.”

As she obeyed, he took hold of her hair with an innocent, absent-minded movement of his hand, played with it for a moment, then let it go again.

Ten minutes later. Simon Cau’s destination, to which he had been hurrying them with increased urgency, was suddenly reached. The road ended. The car stopped next to a pitiful little crane on wheels, overturned, the wooden cabin smashed to pieces. They got out. She, Lidy, was a mere figment of herself, but Cau too, who seemed to have forgotten altogether that she was there, looked in the soft violet light of the moon as though he no longer belonged among the living.

About sixty feet away stood a small group of people, lost in the thundering surroundings of the dike embankment, the sky, the ragged clouds, and the black land at their backs. It was icy cold, the temperature around zero. The northwest wind was blowing straight at the bay and at the little arbitrary jumble of people, villagers, dike workers, six in all, who had thought it better to leave their beds to check on the water. You had to know there was a tiny harbor here at all, a mere mooring-place for the flat-bottomed barges that came and went in fall during the beet harvest. It was invisible, because both the quay and the landing stage were under water, and the opening in the dike through which one normally gained access to the quay was blocked off by a kind of barricade up to shoulder height. They both looked at it as they headed down across the sand. Even Lidy knew instinctively that the first thing they had to check was the five old beams, one above the other, pushed into two slots to build a sort of plank fence,
and only after that to look at what was behind it. In this she was behaving in exactly the same way as everyone else here.

As night fell, the structure of the flood planks had been put in place by two workmen—Simon Cau was now hurrying guiltily in their direction—with much cursing and groaning. With the dike sheriff nowhere to be seen, they had come here on their own initiative with a tractor and a cartful of sand. It had been a struggle, and during all their trudging and messing around the dowels—there must have been forty-nine of them—had regurgitated themselves as they dragged the things out of the shed for the last time, nor was there any remaining trace of the chalk marks that had been left on them the previous time.

Simon Cau greeted the two men with a nod, as they stood crouched over behind the flood planks and smoked.

“So?” asked Cau.

The men didn’t answer. What was the point? Because the concrete roadbed leading to the quay had no slots in it, never had, they had laid some sandbags against the lowest beam, but the sea was already spraying a little water through them again.

“Very high,” said Cau, pointing with his chin toward the water. “I’ve never seen it so high here in my life.”

The two workmen nodded, but they weren’t pulling long faces the way the dike sheriff was; they took a brief look at the young woman who had fetched up here, didn’t recognize her, and then straightened up to look over the timbers of the barrier at the unholy blue-tinged expanse behind. High. That was certainly the word for it. The sea, never in their experience so far inland, looked to them like a maddened beast penned in behind their shoulders.

“Another four inches,” said one of them, turning back again, “and it’s going to be coming over.”

Simon Cau looked at the other man silently, glanced sideways again as if trying to persuade himself that the half-rotted wood, already bowing forward under the pressure from the other side, would certainly hold, and said, “Going to be like this for another two hours. Won’t be high tide till then.”

He had spoken in a formal way, unsure of himself in his role as officer-very-late-arriving-on-duty, but the men both signaled their
solidarity in a way that implied “Right.” And one of them said, “Not much we can do, is there?”

A couple of the other bystanders joined them. Slightly in disarray thanks to the howling of the wind and the interruption of their sleep, they chimed in with their own ideas of what could happen next. The sea dike here at the harbor suddenly dipped more than six feet below its height farther away. No one paid much attention to Lidy; the circumstances were too unusual, and the very fact that she was here at this impossible time of night made her one of them, half-awake, half-asleep, half-focused, half-calm, with the sly cunning of the mad who know that reality is what it is, and must be accommodated.

So she was freezing now. Scarf pulled down over her forehead. Hands deep in the pockets of a dark gray winter coat. As she looked over at Cau and heard him pronounce that it was impossible for things to come out well, he struck her as sounding sharp, indeed very suspicious. And, far from being capable of seeing the despair that in some people resembles pugnacity, far from being capable of registering the shame, the appalling remorse of a man who knows he has committed the misjudgment of a lifetime, the error that will define him until his death, she didn’t understand him anymore. His cheeks made two deep vertical furrows on either side of his mouth.

“What does the bürgermeister say?” he barked, after a pause.

Alert, very dependable. One would have to know him well to know that his loyalty was rooted in a single passion that had long been concealed from the outside world. A man can love a farm every bit as much as he loves a woman.

On June 14, 1947, at the open auction for the Gabriëllina property, when Simon Cau had learned that his was the highest bid, his knuckles went white. More than a year before, he had buried his wife, a farm wife, who had understood the force of his will over the years and had only occasionally, on sleepless nights, reminded him that
this
was his life and there was no point waiting for another one, she hadn’t given him children. The latter argument was no argument at all. With or without heirs, Simon Cau signed on the dotted line, and the business, which he and his now dead brothers had leased twenty-five years before, became his property for the contractual sum of 37,000
guilders. And yes, a different life, with the same summers, winters, meadows, fields, drainage ditches, and weather reports, began! It makes quite a difference whether one is a farmer’s tenant or the big farmer oneself. When he received the letter with the request from the polder authorities, he was not surprised. No one else knew more about the drainage on the polders than he did.

He wrote his reply that same evening with great seriousness. “I would like to accept this appointment and I promise you to engage all my skills in the care of the dike and the polder.” So it was that from then on, when there were storms, he sometimes went to the dike and sometimes not, depending on when it crossed his mind, to check whether flood timbers needed to be brought or sand required; in such matters the dike sheriff is his own authority. And at the meetings of the dike association he was always a most amiable leader of the company, and soon came to terms with the fact that no matter how one pleaded or haggled with the royal authorities or the local ones, there was no money for the dikes so soon after the war, though everyone knew that they were a joke with regard to a storm that was certainly in the general calculations but that unfortunately came too soon.

Snowflakes stuck to her cheeks. The wind sometimes brought moonlight with it, and sometimes icy precipitation. So there she stood on this winter night on a muddy landing stage, a sliver of ground by the Grevelingen, which was an arm of the North Sea piling toward land under the force of tempest and spring tides but held back by five ancient timbers in a fence, and she felt no fear. Of course she saw the danger, she wasn’t crazy, like all the others she could see very well that no power on earth could hold back the biblical flood, but it still seemed a beautiful thing to her that one could have such a close-up view of the situation and know that one had done everything that could be done.