The Storm (7 page)

“Soon! It’ll soon be time for you to go upstairs and have a good sleep, but not yet!”

And in fact she herself was conscious that she had to shake off her sleepiness. She perked up and looked around the table: relatives and husbands and wives of relatives of the sleeping girl, friends, two younger brothers, who had crawled under the table. A godmother is also definitely a member of the family. At the head of the table, side by side, sat the maternal grandparents. They were the owners of this little hotel, whose main source of income was the parties given here, rather than the occasional commercial traveler or civil servant passing through for one night. It was a tradition that anytime a grandchild had a birthday, the whole family ate in the hotel and spent the night.

If someone beside you is inspecting your face, you can feel it.

“Yes?” she said, turning back to Jacomina Hocke.

“Oh, I know it all so well,” the latter said.

Taken together, the words and the look, focused on the child again, made it clear that since she was here as a representative and lacked the relevant shared past, she must listen as all the missing details were told to her. So, please, Lidy, here’s a memory for you, in three parts. To bind you for this evening to an earlier time that doesn’t actually belong to you. A summer holiday camp shortly after the war. And she, Jacomina, had been one of the leaders, despite the fact that she was pregnant. A little helper from Amsterdam, about fourteen years old, had followed her around for four weeks like a page.

Oh, of course, she thought.

“A sweet, shy child. Doctor’s daughter.”

After a few minutes she had almost ceased to listen. The meal was very heavy. When she looked up from her plate to see what was going on around her, she felt the way she often did when she was in company: lethargic, shortsighted, although her eyes were fine. The Winter
Garden creaked and groaned in the squalls, and each time one hit, the gently swaying hanging lamps dimmed, then flamed up again with a larger, brighter light. The people at the table were changing places more often, and there was also a lot of coming and going between the Winter Garden and the dining room. The news bulletins that reached them now and again from the town fit the party mood, for such an atmosphere has a natural affinity for the wilder dramas of real life. A chimney had come down in the Meelstraat; the water in the Old Harbor was already washing across the bluestone pavings; a fire had broken out in the Hage dairy; the streetcars were no longer running. However, she did also notice here and there in the dining room that people had risen to their feet, and hadn’t come back.

And the chair next to her at some point was no longer occupied. A tiny isolated space in the midst of the racket both indoors and out. At the other end of the table she saw Izak Hocke adjusting the lens of a camera. She hadn’t talked much with him, but had already talked about him. So she knew that he had a farm about eight miles from here. This was a man who hadn’t wanted to get married until he found a woman he could be sure would not concern herself either with the land or the business: both were the province of his mother, who lived with him. Jacomina had been a teacher until she married. He was ardent, jealous, and prudish, she’d told Lidy woman to woman. If he wanted to have sex during the day, first he checked the hall, then locked the bedroom door, and hung his shirt over the knob to cover the keyhole!

She saw him stand up. Chairs were pushed aside, the sleeping child was wakened, but before she and her two brothers were taken up to bed, a few more photos were in order.

Excellent. “And now one with you, Lidy …”

She laid her napkin on the table, went to the two armchairs in the Winter Garden that had been set out for the purpose, and sat down willingly, her hands in her lap. The godchild, beside her, was busy spreading her fingers and licking them. Then came the moment, and she smiled, taking care not to look directly into the lens but a few inches above it. She saw Hocke, the shutter cable in hand, staring from the viewfinder of the Ikoflex to her and the child from a distance
of about ten feet. He knit his eyebrows: black, bushy, overshadowing the roundest, heavy-lidded eyes, which gave the face a melancholy, introverted look.

He looked down into the camera again and then squeezed the cable.

Suddenly someone came up to him. She saw a man in a jacket, soaked to the skin and giving off the stench of mud, who seized the chair that Izak was offering him with a gesture, and yanked it out from the table. His back half turned to her, they began a conversation that she could overhear in part, though she was still posed for the photograph. The man was talking about a sluice in some inner dike, and the words he was using—“rust,” “garbage,” “criminal negligence”—couldn’t fail to have their effect.

Hocke nodded. He groped in his jacket pocket and handed the man his car keys.

“Okay, if you think it’s necessary.”

The other man promised to bring the car back within the hour.

She went back to her place at the table. Someone new was now sitting beside her, a tall young man with intelligent eyes fringed by pale lashes, who opened the conversation by saying, “Nothing special!” She looked at him cheerfully and laughed, as a way of easing the conversation about the sea and how it was skipping the ebb tide this evening for a change.

“Excuse me,” she said after a while and leaned toward her new table companion to ask where his predecessor had gone. She was very sleepy again and had already wondered a couple of times when she could politely head for the room where she had changed from her traveling clothes into a dress hours before and laid out her pajamas ready on the bed.

“Where is he?”

“Simon Cau?”

“Yes.”

The young man looked around. Simon Cau, he said, was the dike sheriff or superintendent of one of the large polders here, and had certainly made a quick trip to the harbor to check the water. The six o’clock news on the radio had spoken of “dangerous high tides”
and that almost never happened. Dike superintendent, the highest authority on the dike, a noble office, some people took it seriously, others not at all.

“Yes,” he went on, “what kind of a person is each of us inside … hmm … you, me, all of us? Does any of us have a choice? But sometimes someone manages to be that person he wants to be deep in his heart.”

Lidy learned that Simon Cau was the last of three brothers, tenant farmers who had put their lifelong efforts into acquiring the beautiful eighteenth-century Gabriëllina Farm. Finally he had succeeded, and nobody even today had been able to work out how he had assembled the money. By saving, borrowing money, and loaning it out again, sharpening one knife against the other? Afterward he had succeeded in making it into one of the best-run businesses in the area, everything done in the most up-to-date way imaginable, except for the one instance in which he refused to go along with the times: he wouldn’t allow any tractor on the farm. He was doing mixed farming, and everything, even the binding of the corn, was done using horses. For Cau, as the young man explained, loved horses, horses were his god, and it didn’t matter what the neighbors thought, the new landowner, who had started out as a farm laborer, built a second stable right up against the house. And with a batch of old clinker he paved the area all the way from the barn doors to the road. And last: two new pedigreed mares who were given such a thick layer of straw in their stalls that after the day’s work they couldn’t resist the temptation to stretch out like dogs and lie on their sides to sleep. Even though they were heavy Belgian shire horses.

Lidy, who was listening with only half an ear, swallowed a yawn.

“Heavy horses,” she murmured, her eyes damp. “Belgian shire horses.”

And then, as if her words had conjured him back to the party, in the mirror next to the stairs that led to the upper floor, she suddenly saw Simon Cau cutting his way through the dining room. The light in the background made his figure stand out clearly: small and gray, hurrying, in an anthracite-colored coat with a cap on his head that people of his type usually take off only to hold in front of their faces while
praying. Someone seized him by the arm in order to ask him something. Cau stopped, listened restlessly like a man interrupted, and shook his head several times.

Lidy, who had been feeling for some time that she was no longer awake but dreaming, got to her feet. The godchild and her brothers had already disappeared from the stage. She excused herself charmingly from Jacomina and Izak Hocke, shook hands in thanks with the grandparents and an arbitrary assortment of people, and in less than fifteen minutes was lying flat in bed under the noise of a creaking ceiling.

Deep in her sleep, despite the roar of the hurricane or perhaps because of it, as the noise had been an integral part of events, she continued the party in the hotel Winter Garden in her dreams. But when she was jerked awake by a hammering at her door, she thought she was back at home. She groped three times but couldn’t find the light switch. She recognized the voice behind the door only when she opened it—“Ah, Jacomina”—and her eyes were immediately drawn to the two men standing behind her. Everything changed in that moment, and the day, decked out with the most alarming details, forced its way back into her memory.

She waited.

It was a few days later. Armanda put on her coat in the hall of her parents’ house, then her hood, fished in the basket that stood on the table under the mirror for a pair of mittens, and for a moment, out of habit, took a hard look at herself. A minute later the front door banged shut behind her. She crossed the street to the opposite sidewalk, which ran along the side of the park. Someone had told her that the newsreel in the cinema on the Ceintuurbaan was showing the most recent updates about the floods, and she wanted to see them.

Late afternoon. Dusk was falling, making the city look dirty, as cities so easily do in winter. But the broken branches and broken roof tiles had already been cleared away.

Vaguely disturbed, she walked past a bakery, a cobbler’s workshop, and a bridal outfitter. Her unease was connected to the fact that everything seemed to be so normal again that it made one begin to wonder if the whole tumult had been necessary. It was still blowing, but not exceptionally hard, and the wet snow had stopped falling today. But the sky was as dark as it had been the previous month, too dark for the time of year. Frequently it had been misty for days at a time. The weather bureau in De Bilt had registered only twenty-five hours of sunshine for the whole of January, a record low, for which one would have had to go back all the way to the records of 1902. In addition, it had been cold. The mercury, a perpetual four degrees
below normal, had signaled a winter freeze of a kind that people had forgotten in recent years.

She pushed open the door to the movie house and felt welcomed for a moment by the lights, the plush carpet, and the sense of hallucination. At the counter she asked if the show had already begun and held out a few quarter guilders. The cashier glanced sideways for a second, murmured, “In a moment,” and gave her a ticket for the parterre. An usherette led her into the darkness with a little cone of light. Just in time. The
World News
headline anthem sounded … and there it was, a single expanse of water, filling the screen. Unbuttoning her coat, she sank into a seat.

A drowned village, a section of broken dike, against a sound track of howling wind Armanda saw a handful of soldiers in long coats, with berets pulled down over their ears, shoveling sand into sacks. She looked at the water lapping at their boots in little waves, completely disconnected from the whistling wind in the film, and at the surface of the water with the roofs of the village poking up out of it, looking oddly calm; water that looked like a normal sea, except that one simply didn’t understand how it had got there. Soon the familiar newsreel announcer’s voice came out of the music accompanying the storm to tell her more authoritatively than any messenger in a play what she was seeing and what she was to make of it.

“Something that is more tragically familiar to our country than any other in the world.”

The picture showed groups of refugees being loaded onto buses, a herd of cows stampeding full tilt through a shopping street that had turned into a river, a cart pulled by a mournful-looking horse on which some women were sitting; the camera zoomed in so close that only one remained visible, filling the screen as she looked directly at Armanda out of another world, infinitely removed in space and time. The deaths didn’t number in the dozens, the newsreel voice continued; alas, the previous figures had to be revised, the tally was in the hundreds. This is Oude-Tonge and Overflakkee—a dirty gray picture appeared—where three hundred people lost their lives in the floods. This is ’s-Gravendeel in the Hoeksche Waard, where fifty-five people drowned. To the accompaniment of urgent music, a whole series of disaster zones now appeared, as abstract to Armanda as the names of
places in ancient stories where mythical events had unfolded. Dordrecht, Willemstad, West Brabant, the Hollands Diep, they carried a message that was far beyond her grasp as they collected around a white space in her heart: she and Lidy, and their roles in a drama that had taken on a life of its own.

Drops of sweat formed on her forehead and cheeks. It was very warm in the movie theater and both the music and the announcer’s voice kept getting louder. All around her she could sense the other moviegoers, packed tight, staring at the screen, which made no mention of Schouwen-Duiveland, not even once. So she slowly began to believe that Lidy had gone someplace that had absolutely nothing to do with these images shot through with flashes and wavy lines but was simply wandering around somewhere on solid ground with grass coming up between the paving stones, where people lived normally in houses, cows stood in the cowshed, and horses trotted around in green meadows.

“Helicopters with English, Belgian, and Dutch pilots buzzed around like huge wasps….” She stood up.

As she left the cinema, the wind from the movie was still howling in her ears, but when she got out onto the street, she realized that a song was going around and around in her head. It was a mournful, incomprehensible song, and the words “The winds they whirl, the winds they whirl all around the boatman’s girl …” came in a tragic voice that was Lidy’s voice. Lidy, who was the musical daughter in the family, who practiced on the grand piano with full pedal, but in certain moods let herself go in such pure schmaltz, singing along at the top of her voice, that the family couldn’t listen to her with straight faces.