The Storm (20 page)

“Look, Uncle Leo’s in this one, nice.”

“Yes, and here he is again with Betsy.”

“If you ask me, the two of them really hit it off!”

Armanda felt her thoughts wander off, as often happened, even as she was talking. With some people you can have really interesting conversations, she’d noticed, but they stop your thoughts. Others, and her mother was one of them, leave your private self in peace and yet always manage to latch onto wherever your mind has landed up.

“Everyone was in a good mood, absolutely everyone,” said her mother at a certain point.

Armanda had been quiet for a while.

“Yes,” she murmured, stretching out her hand, and drank her now lukewarm tea at one go. The sun was now shining straight into the room. She stood up to partway close the curtain. “But Mother …”

Armanda saw her mother look up with an expression that can only be described as “knowing.” Knowing that her daughter’s high spirits had left her, and also knowing why.

“… but something about the day was, was … dreadful!”

The answer came at once. Fully formed, as if she’d already heard this remark before and had thought it through.

“Child, please don’t say that.” Her mother frowned for a moment. Then she glanced at her watch. In a moment, at four o’clock, she would collect Nadja from play school, as they had arranged, and take her to number 77, and only bring her back at bedtime. “And please don’t think it either.”

“Can I tell you something?” Armanda looked at her mother defiantly, and let her wait for a moment. “All day long what I was secretly thinking was: This isn’t my wedding!”

But her mother immediately shook her head. Oh no, don’t talk like that, you’re just imagining things!

And she was right. In reality, the entire day had run its course for Armanda in a kind of haze. The slight sense of strain to begin with, then the emotion, and then finally the happiness all around her had created a ringing in her ears like a confused blur of voices. Almost like an anesthetic. Now, by contrast, it broke up into clearly identifiable individual voices: this wonderful celebration is really a continuation of that other wonderful celebration, a little course correction between then and now. The bride is wearing a mask. By chance it’s her own face.

“Don’t spoil it for yourself in hindsight.”

Like a hand being stroked over her hair. An exercise of maternal influence that Armanda was glad to heed. She reached out and began to push the photographs together, but there was one thought she couldn’t suppress: Will I ever be able to remember who or what
I
was back then? One of the photos wouldn’t align itself and slipped out of the stack. Her mother set her finger on it.

“Ah!”

Armanda looked too. Her mother’s favorite brother.

“Uncle Bart,” she said briskly. And then, “My God, Mother!”

The crumpled-looking man with the gray buzz cut and spectacles perched on the end of his small nose had made a long speech at the
end of the wedding feast. Deep in his cups, breaking out repeatedly in tears, he had spoken to the guests about Lidy, whom they must never, never forget. Shortly before his voice broke, he had even managed to ask the company for a minute of silence.

“I spent the whole time staring at the napkin next to his plate,” said Armanda. “I could still draw you every little fold in it.”

Her mother nodded, as if to say, yes, maybe he shouldn’t have done it, but Bart is a good man, through and through.

The minute of silence was not entirely silent, naturally enough. Nonetheless each of them, a little dazed, a little painfully, had thought of Lidy, whose name today had been entered for exactly the past three weeks in the official Register of Deaths at the local government offices. The date and place of death were made up.

Died in the environs of Zierikzee on Schouwen-Duiveland on February 1, 1953.

Finally. Finally there had been someone—the minister of justice, in fact—with the legal authority to pronounce the death of Lidy Blaauw-Brouwer, along with more than eight hundred other victims of drowning. According to the rules of the state courts it had been a fairly quick process, completed already in July 1954, to expand the law originally written to cover only those deemed missing from the Second World War to those missing in the storm flood. Three months after January 13, 1955, the day when, following an enormous amount of work in the files, the mass listing had been officially published in the
Nederlandse Staatscourant
, the survivors were allowed to make applications to the various town halls. On April 13, at two thirty in the afternoon, Sjoerd drove in the first car he had ever owned, a used Skoda, to the town hall on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal. He was shown to a small office and handed a copy of the certificate, a rather unusual document even for the official who had prepared it.

“Please would you check to see that everything’s correct?” the man had asked.

“Yes, thank you,” said Sjoerd, cleared his throat and began to read: “Article Two of the Law …” and then, after he’d read to the end, said, “Thank you” again.

The official looked at him with reddened eyes, as if he’d had a sleepless night.

“My deepest condolences, Mr. Blaauw.”

That was a Wednesday. On Friday, Armanda and Sjoerd posted the notice of their intended marriage.

A painful moment! While the bridal couple had intended to slip away quietly at this point, here was this uncle insisting on making a speech! The wedding guests had made faces like a group of miscreants who are perfectly aware of what they’re doing and aren’t really sorry about it.

And one of them naturally pulled himself together sufficiently to say, “To the bride!”

Silence. Mother and daughter were each thinking their own thoughts. The sun meantime had moved on around until it was shining into the room through the curtain again. Now it was Armanda who checked the time. It was time to pick Nadja up from play school.

“Oh,” said her mother, getting to her feet and looking for her purse. “Bart is a sweetheart. He meant well.”

Armanda went downstairs ahead of her mother. The stairwell was dark except for a bright ceiling light that shone down onto the middle of the first step. At the very moment she was suddenly struck by the conviction that she and her mother had just been conducting a conversation that was totally mad on both their parts, Armanda saw two huge shadows swaying across the wall.

They said good-bye in the sun-flooded front doorway. Intending to finally tidy herself up and change her clothes, as Sjoerd would be home in an hour, Armanda was about to close the door behind her when she heard, “Wait! Wait! Armanda!”

Oh, please, she thought, no!

And, before she knew what was happening, she was back in the living room next to a panting Betsy, who had called out, “Only a moment, just to say hello,” but had now discovered the photos on the table and was bent over them, stirring them to life again.

Armanda followed. Still barefoot, she followed the glance of her friend, who quickly pulled out a photo of the adorable Nadja. The child had been a bridesmaid.

“Do you remember?” asked Betsy, glancing sideways surreptitiously, with a curious expression.

Of course. Armanda nodded in a slightly sleepy way, but she remembered everything. She relived the whole incident, seeing it more precisely now than she had the first time around. After the ceremony in the church there had been no reception, better not to, but a formal banquet in an old house on the Geldersekade, a property that could be rented with its own staff for private parties. After the main course, when everyone was swapping places or running around a little, and she, Armanda, was sitting under a palm tree adjusting something on her dress, Nadja came up to her newly married mother. Somewhere in the background an accordionist and two violinists were playing.

“How pretty she looks.” Betsy said.

Armanda cocked her head to one side and looked at the photo, slightly confused. Suddenly she felt the memory of herself with the little girl come flooding over her.

“Oh, my sweetie pie …” She stopped short.

Extremely elegant, as only a four-and-a-half-year-old bridesmaid can be, Nadja had walked all the way across the room, hopped and skipped a couple of times, never once blinking her large pale green eyes, till she jumped with outstretched little hands onto Armanda, smiling under her palm tree. A little game. Definitely. A little act of aggression, like a cat that forgets what it’s doing for a moment because it’s been blissfully stroked for too long. Suddenly a smack from the little hand landed unhappily on Armanda’s outstretched cheek, and little fingers clutched at the pearls on one of her earrings, which got torn off. Inadvertent, really not intended. Can happen. But the little girl in her white dress, with the copper-red hair, knew nothing, absolutely nothing about the fact that before her mother there had been another mother, as nobody in the first chaotic days had wanted to talk to her about it and afterward it just hadn’t happened; and the little girl stood there looking at the blood welling out of Armanda’s ear, as if this stream of red was the very thing she had wanted to see on this memorable day. Armanda had risen to her feet. She had bent down, taken Nadja by the hand, and pulled her along.
And while several of the guests got onto their knees to search for the pearl, Armanda and Nadja spun round in a merry circle to one of the Viennese waltzes being played at top speed by the three musicians. Whenever her feet left the floor entirely, the little one crowed with laughter. At one moment Armanda felt a stab of a compulsion—which would only grow stronger between the time of the party and the session with the photos—both to hug her small dance partner and to join her in bursting into tears.

A little cough. Betsy was watching her discreetly out of the corner of her eye, as she could feel. Oh, Nadja, she thought. Oh, such a pitiable little creature, who first of all has no real mother, only a substitute, in a world in which you can expire in thunder and lightning like a heroine in a tragedy, but in which you can also be granted the freedom to live a totally banal life from one day to the next, with no greater mystery to struggle with than one you’ve inherited from someone else. Oh, poor little half-orphan!

“You know,” she said to Betsy, “maybe you’ll think I’m crazy for saying this, and even crazier for saying it to you of all people, so please don’t take it badly, but in some way I feel like a half-orphan.”

They stared at each other for a moment, each of them unfathomable, and Armanda said quickly, “I mean, a half-orphan as regards my own life. Everyone has a past and a future, which sounds really banal, you’ll say, but I don’t care, that’s how it is.”

Betsy, up for more, kept quiet.

“Yes, really, everyone has a past, a run-up to the present, and that’s your youth, at least for normal mortals, in which you were already fully the creature that you are now, it wouldn’t be possible any other way, would it, but mostly it first took the form of a promise. I know, nice story, my run-up to today isn’t to be found in my past, it’s …
tsch …
it’s in my dead sister. So let’s …” She turned around, reached for the tea things, and stared crossly at the photos of the most beautiful day of her life. “Just call my past what it really is: a step-past.”

Betsy, who had promised only to stay a minute and didn’t want to offer the slightest excuse for more tea to be brewed, started making hasty, spur-of-the-moment remarks about starting a new life, which were meant to cheer her up. She, Armanda, she said, was herself, Armanda, and absolutely nothing could prevent her from choosing
her own path through life and making it a great success. Finish your studies first, you hear me? Get your hair cut. Paint the doors and stairs in your house blue or green. Buy yourself a ficus tree….

But Armanda kept shaking her head thoughtfully as Betsy, all excited, came to the end of her long list with: “Love your husband!” And gave a merry look as she brought up the night at the school play; she and Lidy had got the giggles when the leading actor, who was seriously drunk, said,
“If
you’re on the planet, it’s a fact that you’ve got a no-account job in nowheresville.”

“Well, Betsy, don’t misunderstand me, but how does this sound?
‘If
I’m on the planet, it’s a fact that strictly speaking I’m my elder sister.’”

Armanda chose a cookie, a café noir, Betsy did the same, and for a moment the two of them stood there nibbling, first with a grin, then expressionlessly, but quite peacefully; for their conjoint nibbling was actually an echo of Lidy and Armanda as sisters, since everyone always said they were exactly alike.

“Absolutely not,” Armanda suddenly said unexpectedly. “We distinguished between the two of us the way only sisters can. We knew it. If you live that close together, if you grow up minute by minute in a world that’s almost yours, but by a hair’s breadth not quite, then you register the tiniest things about each other that are different.”

Her face was animated now. Had she not at that moment heard the front door opening and closing downstairs, she would have been able to chatter with her beloved visitor. For however odd, even mad, her conversation with her mother had seemed a short while ago, she had felt that she was being completely rational in the other conversation that had just followed it. “Fundamentally different!” she had said again. “Brothers always want to be the opposite of brothers, and sisters of sisters. Oppositeness is at the root of the brother or sister relationship. I’m pretty certain that’s the case. So now that my past has been exchanged for hers, while her future has passed to me, there’s this veil of bottomless sadness, though naturally I try to ignore it.”

That is roughly the kind of thing she might have said, slightly breathlessly but in a heartfelt way, if she hadn’t heard someone coming up the stairs.

She blushed.

Sjoerd and Armanda Blaauw-Brouwer. Married couple.

They too took a brief look at the photographs together, why is not clear, for the two of them were focused on something else entirely; Sjoerd had just thrown the jacket of his beautiful light gray suit onto a chair. He was now in his late twenties, a tall, slender man with carefully combed blond hair and a face that was beginning to show the open, straightforward, intelligent qualities that are valued in the world of money and business. With an arm around Armanda’s hips, he bent loyally over the photos. It’s well known that when a newly married couple first sees their wedding portrait, the bride looks only at the bride and the bridegroom does the same. One could switch bridegrooms in the darkroom for fun, but never brides.