The Storm (22 page)

When the child was finally picked up, the weather had changed and there was a cold drizzle. One of the fruit sellers from the Albert Cuyp market had seen her walking along the side of the river and over the Amstel dike, leading toward the Berlage bridge. It was around five, and almost dark already. He was on his delivery bike and had turned at the church and was headed for Van Ostadestraat, where he lived, when he saw her trudging along the opposite side past the soaring bulk of the
Generaal Praag
, a decommissioned coal ship that had been moored here for years. “She said she was on the way to Rotterdam,” the fruit seller reported to Armanda and Nadine sometime later; they were in no condition at that moment to wonder about it.

He had braked. Nadja was wearing a little white teddy-bear coat. The fruit seller, who would have bet his life that something wasn’t right, pushed his cap back on his head and crossed the street. Where are you off to? Nadja had had no objection to climbing up and sitting in there with the Jonathan apples to ride along with him for a bit with the rain and the wind in her face. Right around the corner was a street of dark tall houses with little shops at ground level, but mainly she was interested in the man who bent way down to the left or right each time he pushed on the pedals. In the little tin shed where the delivery bicycle was kept in its place between crates and sacks, Nadja confided in the fruit seller where she lived. “Number Thirty-six
and
Number Seventy-seven?” Calm nods from her. About ten minutes later,
Nadine Brouwer, anxiously keeping watch outside her front door, saw her granddaughter arrive perched on the bicycle carrier of an unknown individual. The picture this made seemed quite unreal to her, the more so perhaps because of the yellow lamplight shining down on the two of them and the wintry vegetation in the park.

Now something occurred that could best be described as a little competition between Nadja and her mother.

For Armanda too had seen her daughter sitting on the carrier. From the moment Nadja had refused to come out from behind her tree or whatever it was, she had been running around the park, calling and searching in between the bushes, and had gone out onto the Ceintuurbaan to ask everyone she met if they’d seen her. Now she was standing distraught by the drinking fountain at the north entrance to the park, diagonally opposite her parents’ house. Her cry sounded like a ghost crying in a dream even to her own ears, totally muffled, but the man on the bicycle heard it and set his foot on the ground. At this moment Betsy came waddling out of Tweede Jan Steenstraat, very fat, fatter than is normal in the seventh month of pregnancy, and saw Nadja running fast, and managing to evade Armanda as she leapt into her granny’s arms on the front steps of number 77.

“You’re really wrong,” said Betsy that evening to her husband. “It was dry all afternoon.”

Leo had told her he was astonished that Nadja and her playmates had been allowed out into the park in this weather. He jerked his head toward the rain and the third-floor window at the beginning of the almost pitch-dark Prinsengracht, bare elms, black ruffled water.

“Which wasn’t in the forecast,” Betsy continued, as she followed his glance from her position slumped on the sofa with her swollen feet up on a cushion. “It was supposed to be unsettled. Rain showers, cold air coming in from the east, possibility of snow. But the children were determined that it was dry and way above freezing.”

So they had wanted to go outdoors, right after the cake with its six little candles in a layer of frosting. But mother and aunt, who was acting as her assistant, proposed hide-and-seek. It must have been shortly before three when Armanda, standing under the bust of Samuel Sarphati with her hands over her face, began to count, eeny, meeny,
miny, mo, while Betsy, also gamely keeping her eyes shut, and wrapped in a warm coat on a park bench, listened and checked that the children had disappeared before the rhyme, a warning now, came to an end.

“I’m coming!”

It’s strange that they didn’t find each other quite quickly. To start with, Nadja was just crouching in a rhododendron bush behind the first gravel path. Soft earth under her feet, she looked down at it absentmindedly, completely focused on not being seen, and didn’t allow herself to notice until some time later that everyone was calling for her, which wasn’t part of the game.

The first thing that not being seen involves, as everyone knows, is not looking, either. Nadja moved backward, her head down against her chest, tripped over a small twig, rolled down a sand hill for several yards, and at some point found a new hiding place in a shallow hollow. Next to it was an old oak tree. That’s where the decision was finally made that had been coming for some time, and the argument that clinched it began with
B
as in beetle or
F
as in fly or
M
as in moth. She didn’t bother to work out which forms of life were now twinkling like a giant handful of precious stones at her feet and moving in some mysterious way. The winter had been mild up till now. Last night De Bilt had recorded the warmest temperature of the century: fifty-two degrees. In any case, it had been raining for days. The enormous insect nest and the bit of the hollow tree it had been in could have fallen down only in the last few months, for the overwintering beetles, flies, bees, and moths had just decided they needed to move on, crawling cautiously at first, then hopping wildly or flying. Oh, marvelous! Astonished, Nadja followed the rainbow-colored creatures, blue, green, some of them even fire red, which were suddenly disappearing as if by magic. Some of them flew up on their transparent tiny wings and hovered in the air so close to her nose that she could see their glittering eyes, and then suddenly—gone. Others crawled around with mysterious single-mindedness, not panicked, quite comfortably, showing her their powerful back legs, their faces elongated into little snouts, their hard, smooth bodies, some of them with stingers, and then suddenly … oh, where did they go? Darkness had already fallen when Nadja, at peace with her decision, went up
the Van Woustraat and then down again, and then turned right at the corner where the green neon light was, toward the Amstel dike.

“I just don’t understand,” said Sjoerd that evening after the visitors had gone. Grandpa Brouwer and Uncle Jacob had given the birthday girl a last surprise with a set of tiddlywinks and a Little Black Sambo doll before she went to bed, and Grandma Brouwer, who had already been there during the day, had come back with them for a short moment, to drink a toast to the little monkey. “Absolutely not!” Leaning back from the dining room table balanced on the two back legs of his chair, he looked at Armanda pacing up and down the room with a glass of rosé in her hand. When the child had been missing for more than an hour and a half, she had called him in the office. Pale, his hair standing up every which way, he was in the car turning in to their street when he too saw Nadja jump off the bike, flinch away from her mother, and run. And then leap into the arms of Grandma Nadine, who had squatted down to catch her.

Nadja must have seen herself surrounded by a ring of wet, distraught faces. And from all sides, a slew of questions, which she answered with a smile. It had turned very cold. Everything pointed to a lot more rain or even snow.

The birth took ruthless precedence. It took precedence first over the darkness; the pains had started, quietly to begin with, in the early hours of the morning, but now they were serious and could no longer be concealed, and dawn was breaking. When the enormously pregnant woman had arrived in the attic, where the strangest atmosphere reigned—a combination of imminent rescue and the awareness that death was just around the corner—she had been helped by many hands to lie down on a mattress laid on a bed frame. They had covered her with a horse blanket. A woman, whose accent defined her as being a stranger to this area, had spread a heavy coat over the bed by way of addition, then laid herself down beside her, shoes and all: “Come close, it’ll warm you up!” The woman had obeyed. While the other one dropped off to sleep almost instantly, she—her name was Cathrien Padmos, born Clement—had felt the cold retreat and transform itself into a sensation that she was descending a stone staircase, step by step, into a comfortably warm cave. Then everything started again. Uncontrollable now, in its own rhythm that made no allowances for the weather.

It was coming up on 9 a.m. The attic stank of mud, wet clothes, animal dung, probably rat droppings too, and the bucket behind the door to the staircase. The temperature couldn’t have been much above freezing. The west window, one side of which was nailed shut with boards, admitted a first light of a leaden greenish tinge perfectly
in keeping with the general aura of death and destruction. Everyone here, whether asleep or awake, dazed or fully conscious, felt the swaying of the house walls and knew that the undiminished power of the storm was close to tearing off the roof. In the bed, which had been pushed deep under the eaves to protect from drafts, forty-year-old Cathrien Padmos began to breathe heavily for the third time in her married life, or to put it more precisely, the cervix was in its last stages of dilation. To her left, a powerfully built man, Albert Zesgever, who had crawled in with the rest of them, seemed not to notice anything yet.

On the other hand, her bedmate on the right grasped the situation. Lidy raised her head. Where am I, she thought for a moment, then she saw, next to her, a sweat-drenched face that almost instantly took on the dull look that she remembered in herself, whether she had registered it or not at the time, with no choice or will of her own. “How often are they coming?” she asked, as she saw the face soften.

“One behind the other. There’s no pause now,” the other one said, before she threw herself onto her side.

“Oh, then you’re already quite far along!”

Humoring her with false cheer.

This one and that one were now awakening in the attic, and the most unbelievable proof of it was that the air began to smell gloriously of coffee. In a corner, on a sort of improvised dresser made of some cabin trunks with flat lids, the old lady had set up a single-burner camping stove and on it a percolator, a kind of pot with a spout, and a little glass dome that lets you see the coffee bubbling up inside. As she watched her son drive off in the storm the previous night, a tiny mound of humanity perched on enormous tires, Gerarda Hocke had made good use of her fear by carrying every possible thing upstairs. An intelligent old woman, certainly, who remembered one thing above all about a birth, which was that there had to be boiling water. She took the coffee off the flame and poured half of a four-quart milk can of tap water into an enamel pail. Everyday, ordinary actions that tamped down the extremes of the morning. In the daylight this randomly assembled collection of people, who had been as unprepared for the high spring flood as they would have been for war or plague, began to form themselves into a group. Utterly disoriented,
they got up off the mattresses or off the floor. For the first time they could now see where they were and who were their companions. The dog, large and brown, his head on his paws and staring straight ahead of him, was giving a not unpleasant imitation of being at peace. Some of them were aware that the goose hadn’t left the heels of the farmer’s wife from the first moment on, others now noticed her, white, with brilliant orange feet, as she stood for a moment then hunkered down again. The first to take up his post by the window again was Cornelius Jaeger. Soon the rest of the grown men were standing there with him. Fundamentally it was the imminent birth that was imposing a certain order on this household.

And obviously it took priority over death and despair. Although Cathrien Padmos must know that her husband and her five-year-old daughter had already drowned, she wasn’t thinking of them. She could feel none of the terrible grief that must be there inside her, only a very particular pain that unlike all others is not the harbinger of death. Only now, as it announced itself again, did she remember it from eight years ago.

She had married early, a boy from the next village, when she was only sixteen. An intimation of this had come to her on July 3, 1930. As she was cycling that evening to Dreischor in the low last light of the glowing red sunset, she had suddenly had the unsettling thought that tonight, at the weekly choir practice of Soli Deo Gloria, she might meet her future husband. And indeed, as became apparent, there was a new voice among the baritones. Age: twenty. Profession: ordinary worker on the farm of Anthonie Hocke, Izak’s father. His name: Johan Padmos. Cathrien Clement was strongly built and dark blond (her hair the same color as the coats of the farm dogs around her)—a girl of the kind who knows what she wants—to get married and then get pregnant as soon as possible. When that didn’t happen, not after the first month of marriage, not after the first year and not after the second, third, or fourth, it became clear to her that she was facing the most important decision of her life. Unhappiness or happiness. The farm girl, who worked as a day laborer, determined to make happiness her calling in the most emphatic way, and was supported in it by her husband, even-tempered by nature, who identified totally with his work and his status on a famous farm where he soon succeeded
in becoming one of the six permanent farmworkers. In August, when she rode into the farmyard at vespers on her bike, she saw her husband’s work team laboring under the black cloud of smoke of the colossal five-foot reaping-and-binding machine. They were stacking the sheaves in the German manner, crosswise by fours, and then putting three on top with the ears of the wheat pointing downward. Not a communicative man, her husband, but in the evenings, if the wind was blowing with unexpected force, he would say, “Not the faintest chance,” and she would know what he meant, and would have an image of the same landscape as he did. Black sky, a path with extensive meadows to either side, and farther down, the stubbled fields covered with the sheaves of wheat stacked in this fashion, laughing off the attacks of the strong-to-stormy northwest wind. To their mutual astonishment, after eight years with her husband, who had now risen to become foreman, she found herself pregnant. Seven years after that, pregnant again.