The Storm (26 page)

“Oh. What’s your guess? Fear? Losing a grip on himself? My own guess is that he thought the flood was his own doing. That he was absolutely reclaiming the responsibility for it himself. Not just for the water and, God help us, its effects, but also for the utterly unfamiliar meteorological conditions this weekend, including the astronomical forces associated with them, and the oceanology, because this water had come a very, very long distance.

“Grandiose? But fear
can
also occur on a grand scale. He arrived too late,
basta
, at this ramshackle section of the Grevelingen dike which, mind you, he had recently discussed one afternoon in the tavern De Galg with three technical engineers from the hydraulics department, venting his worry and frustration over the state of the
embankment, the stone reinforcements, and pushing back against their doubts and fruitlessly pious hopes that all this was surely first and foremost the responsibility of the national authorities. So he reached the dike at a point when all was already lost. Can you imagine this? The wind that was blowing there wasn’t a force of nature, it was the force of his own bad decision, fool that he was, to ignore the classification of ‘dangerous’ that was being broadcast on the radio, put on his good suit, and head for the Hotel Kirke in Zierikzee with his neighbors.

“Cause and effect. They are the Furies, Siamese twins…. This would not have happened,
if …
But enough of Cau. I stopped watching him, decided that what I wanted was a mouthful of cognac, but there was none left.

“‘Here,’ I heard. It was Albert Zesgever, passing me the tail end of a cigarette that I could still manage to puff on two or three times if I held my fingertips right up to my lips.

“I looked at him, full of sympathy. Tall man, maybe forty. Red face, dark hair that seemed to grow up out of his neck like tarpaper. He was a very coarse man, a poacher, but also someone who could apply artificial fertilizer so finely and evenly by hand that Hocke, for this reason alone, had not yet acquired a mechanical spreader. I am guessing that Zesgever for the rest of his life became someone other than the man who messed around with his wife, which everyone knew, just as they knew how things had got totally out of control the night before.”

“Oh, you mean, the night before, when …”

“Yes,” she would have said. “As the wind reached hurricane speed. You need to know, before I tell you how things went when it hit force eight in the night of January thirty-first to February first, that Zesgever was a drunk, and when he had been drinking, he beat up his wife, Janna Maria. There are always things that set a man off, Albert Zesgever was that way too, and when he was loaded, he always knew whom to blame.

“That evening Janna Maria was sitting at home with her elbow on the table. A kerosene lamp that was turned way down illuminated her face and, to either side, her hands, along with a piece of clothing she had been altering. Outside the window one of those storms was howling that occur every year. It was close to eleven at night, the two
children were asleep in clean, ironed pajamas, Zesgever was out somewhere. Because she knew that her marriage was the part of her life that often ended in a thrashing, and because she also knew that this could sometimes be avoided if she appeared to be asleep in the dark, she decided to pick up the lamp and climb the ladder. But suddenly, he was there. A length of the roof guttering was rattling, so she hadn’t heard the front door scraping across the floor. She half turned toward him and saw from the game bag hanging slack across his shoulder that his drunken state was that of a man whose gun hadn’t brought him any luck. The salt marshes behind the dike along the Zuidlangeweg were underwater. What Zesgever, for his part, saw as he came out of his haze was a creature who was radiating fear.

“He was well aware that the whole world, which is to say this little hamlet, saw and judged his abusive conduct harshly. He himself could no longer understand his own rage once he sobered up and came back to his senses. But then he had to endure for days, sometimes even weeks, that Janna Maria’s black eye and split lip made his neighbors and acquaintances lower their voices whenever he was in earshot.

“So tomorrow—Sunday—his father-in-law was supposed to come pay them a visit. Zesgever was terrified of this man, a dike worker and excavator at a nearby freight harbor, thoughtful and friendly to one and all, and he was always at his humblest when they encountered each other. But for now it was still Saturday. The wind is blowing almost relentlessly, but aside from that, everything is quiet. Zesgever takes a few steps, asks something, Janna Maria’s answer is not to the point, and also inaudible over the howling and thundering of the storm. Zesgever immediately focuses on Janna Maria’s white, damp face, and something inside him erupts.

“This time it lasts longer than usual, and is more ferocious, perhaps in tandem with the violent weather. Blows can be delivered with a hand or with a fist. When he stops to catch his breath, she can no longer stand. Then she begins to vomit, lying on her back.

“At first, when he crawls into bed under the eaves still fully dressed, he’s cheered by the rising force of the storm. Janna Maria, dragged upstairs, is lying beside him absolutely motionless, but still warm—isn’t that how it was? Yes, that’s how it was, he knows it, and imagines that for the rest of his life he will know that her head is so close to his
ear that in more normal weather he would have heard her breathing. He stretches out and begins to sleep off the booze. What is the happy thought that sticks in his head just before his legs start to turn heavy? “It’s not hard to guess: the old man won’t be coming. In weather like this, the old man absolutely won’t be able to leave his harbor!”

“And you?”

“What do you mean, ‘and you?’”

“Well, how
have you
changed since then?”

And then she would have looked away from Armanda for a moment (for it would have been Armanda asking these questions) and into the sunny dining room. Next to the window, a vase of purple tulips from the garden. A sleeping tomcat, a fat red thing, lying among the toys on the floor. The smell of freshly brewed coffee wafting in from the kitchen.

“Oh.” She would have reached for the cigarette just lit by her husband. “God, I’ve no idea.”

But Armanda would have kept looking at her, interested. Until, a little light-headed from the Riesling in the middle of the day, she would have come up with an improvised, but honest, answer.

“If I think about it—in every way. In all the hundreds and thousands of shitty little things that make up life and that you feel, since that time, are actually part of something else entirely. Something terrible, that involves only you, and that you can’t talk to anyone about, because you were the only one there back then.”

And she and her sister, suddenly overcome with emotion, would have fallen into each other’s arms.

The present had other demands. Four thirty on the dot. Dusk was falling, it was high tide again, and the weather forecast for this Sunday was the opposite of mild. In De Bilt, the national meteorological office was warning all regions of the country, once again, about a severe storm coming from the west-northwest. What this meant for the attic in Hocke’s farmhouse was as follows. A blow struck the house without any forewarning. There had been no particularly powerful
gust of wind, but the blow unleashed such a huge wave of pressure that they all could feel it in their eardrums. The first thing they became aware of, in almost the same moment, was four or five gray projectiles suddenly shooting at random around the room. Nobody had time to realize that these were bats, abandoning their winter hibernation spots under the roof beams: what everyone saw was a network of cracks spreading across both side walls. The glass in the window exploded. The roof was torn upward, part of it disappearing to make way for a pile of black clouds. The house twisted and came off its foundations.

Coffee cup in hand, Armanda sat at the table between the living room and the winter garden, which was lit at that moment by a ray of the morning sun. It was eleven o’clock. She was wearing thin blue trousers, cut wide, and a red blouse with rolled-up sleeves. As she was getting ready she had taken the scissors to her hair, still loose on her shoulders, to trim the ends and her fringe, in a routine intended to preserve this look for the rest of her life. The color would also remain the same: a medium chestnut brown, according to the description on the package.

On the table were a letter and a newspaper, both still unread. After her children had left for school, she had picked both up off the mat, and her eye had been caught, for a moment, unavoidably, by the large headline. Wednesday, 11 August 1972, seven people had died in a wind funnel the previous day that had struck a camping ground in Ameland. Uh, uh, uh, she had thought vaguely as she looked at the envelope with Nadja’s writing on it, and decided to leave it unopened for the moment. News that one hasn’t yet read hasn’t yet happened, in a way, just as truths set down on paper in heaven knows what frame of mind have flowed out of one heart but have not yet reached the other. Armanda stared into her lush, unkempt garden. She hadn’t seen Nadja for weeks.

It was her day off. While she hung out the laundry on the drying frame in the stairwell, she let her thoughts wander to her odd fate and
that of her daughter Nadja. Nadja was a lively girl with a luxuriant mane of red hair, who was studying history at the University of Amsterdam, more or less diligently but not with any great urgency. The remarkable thing that Armanda was thinking about was the fact that Nadja, although she was her stepchild, was closer to her heart than Violet, a delightful teenager, and Allan, who since the divorce had so clung to his mother that when he went off to school, he always knocked one last time on the window from outdoors to wave at her and be sure she noticed.

Armanda shook the folds out of a pillowcase, remembering the day when Nadja had lain on her stomach on her bed, sobbing with fury, while she sat next to her discreetly on a chair in the dim light. It must have been in November, after school, it was already getting dark. While Nadja was telling her in all its miserable details (his bed was in the same room as the Bechstein grand) that it was all over with the piano teacher, she had really had to struggle to suppress the feeling, as she stood to stroke Nadja’s hair, that her hand was not part of her body but belonged to the doppelgänger who had remained sitting on the chair in the half-darkness to watch how she was getting on with this growing daughter.

Good, Nadja had soon got up again to switch on the light and wash her face and tell her lightly that given her lack of genius she’d prefer to switch from piano to history. “Wait, take a look at this.” She had turned round to look for something.

A picture, a beautiful but terrible picture, torn out of a book and drawn by Rembrandt, of an eighteen-year-old girl, executed by strangulation by the City of Amsterdam for having killed her landlady by hitting her over the head with an axe. She and Nadja had looked together at the little body bound with ropes. The mood in the room was one of Crisis Over—Life Goes On. In a tone that sounded like an explanation of something, Nadja said, “One of the jurors at her trial before the sentence was carried out was named Blaauw.”

The doorbell rang. Armanda set down the basket with the rest of the laundry and went downstairs to open up. Jan Brouwer was on his morning walk.

“You need to get something done,” said the old man, right in the middle of the sidewalk, pointing up at the façade. The white climbing
rose, which had come loose in yesterday’s bad weather along with its trellis, was hanging over forward, baring a house wall that needed replastering.

“I know, Father,” said Armanda, pressing a kiss onto the freshly shaved cheek. As she went back inside she made a mental note to call the builder that afternoon. Sjoerd and she had been apart for almost three and a half years now. Exterior work on the house had always been part of his responsibility.

Now for the letter! she thought, as she chatted to her father about the weather, now back to normal (warm; weak wind from the southwest, stronger along the coast). She glanced from the envelope on the table to her father, who simply by being there miraculously transformed whatever might be contained in the room into a moment of present calm: two cups of coffee, a bowl of cookies, and a great streak of sunlight across the floor that was targeting a male leg dressed in gray lightweight flannel. Months before, she and Nadja had had a conversation in which Nadja announced she was going to move in with a man in Bijlmer, a Surinamese, and there had been a big scene.

“There’s a letter from Nadja. Should I read it out?”

Oh, Grandpa Brouwer’s open, benevolent look! He settled himself comfortably, ready to hear how things were going with his beloved eldest grandchild.

Dear Mama
,

It’s three in the morning. I’m sitting at the table wearing the winter coat he left behind, over my pajamas. I can’t sleep. You were right, I think, he’s left me. I didn’t know it, but the early morning bus trip last week through the Bijlmer was our good-bye. It looks absolutely awful there, Mama, unfinished apartment houses and otherwise nothing but sand, though at least you see corn poppies and stuff growing on it. He leaned over to me, all confidential. I’ll never say it out loud, he murmured in my ear, but the Netherlands are beautiful. I find the Netherlands beautiful. We were on our way to the University Hospital
.

I was going along to keep him company, and then continuing on to my lecture. You know, or actually you don’t know, so I’m going to tell you, he’s a senior male nurse in Paramaribo, and came here for a specific time to work
at the U.H. in the intensive care unit. For further training. How was I to know that the time was up?

So I’ve been absolutely flattened for the last six days, and I’ve done nothing but think about him, it’s unbearable but he’s still mine and he’s black as black can be. (Once we were walking down the Warmoesstraat when someone in a group of guys from the Antilles or Surinam yelled something at him, some curse word I couldn’t understand
. Sranan,
he said, when I asked him what sort of language it was in, and he burst out laughing when he told me what it meant: horribly black!) Once when we were in bed, I made some sentimental remark about this black/white contrast thing in our relationship. While I stuck out my leg ostentatiously and held it next to his, I was carrying on about “isn’t that beautiful” … and at the same time I was thinking secretly that blackness isn’t something external, it’s inside him, he lives in
his
blackness. And in the same moment I felt I was flying across hundreds of years of West Africa’s past, that I was sailing across the ocean in the blink of an eye, to land in Fort Zeelandia in Surinam, our colony of traders in coffee, cotton, sugar, and slaves in our fine Dutch seventeenth century, where our souls would meet
.