The Storm (28 page)

Cornelius Jaeger. She knew he was there. When the house broke apart, her faculty of observation was aborted. As if events were trying to prevent themselves from happening. And after that, as she was flailing in the water, she had only looked at his face, then his hands. To actually heave her up onto the raft had not been necessary, and the boy wouldn’t have been able to do it anyway. She had crawled onto it by herself, just before a wave coming right up off the bottom had risen and taken the little nothing, the foolish chance repository that was her house and her sanctuary, up onto its back. Now, as she risked a quick glance around her and then back in the direction of the storm, she took stock of her situation. A few square feet of floating debris. On it, by way of company, in addition to Cornelius Jaeger, the Hockes, mother and son, an assemblage of shoulders, arms, eyes, trying to keep its seat.

It began to snow. Wet flakes flying past her face in a southerly direction. Everything jolting, wobbling, no purpose in life other than
to hang on. Lidy, without a roof over her head for the first time since she was born, was bent on survival. As the house broke apart, her exhaustion had transmuted itself instantaneously into terror, her terror into action, and action into the absolute determination to live through this maelstrom. Nothing would be able to shake her of this. She saw a whole mass of unidentifiable objects appear in front of her, caught on a post here, a tree there, and then she was shooting past it. She saw dead cows, a dead horse, a dead man, oil drums, and knew that right behind her on the raft was a whole little family. How could it be possible? The old woman was still wearing her gold. The farming women of Schouwen and Duiveland have every imaginable way of keeping their headdresses and their gold jewelry firmly pinned to their heads. Gerarda Hocke’s bonnet of white lace or finely starched linen had blown away, but under it she always wore a black crocheted undercap, which fitted tightly to the head and held the gold spirals so tightly that they could not be dislodged.

The snow was getting thicker. Five or six minutes had gone by since the small community in the attic had broken up. Even had Lidy wanted to, which was not the case, she would no longer have been able to see how her former companions were faring on the other raft. There were only two of them. Only Laurina and Nico van de Velde had been able to keep their grip on the other part of the floor, from which planks had started immediately to break off left and right. Now they were caught in an undertow, the raft tipped; they managed to pull themselves back up on it and stretch out on the wood before they disappeared forever into the driving snow with no one to witness them.

It was slowly getting too dark for anything to be visible, and moreover the screaming and howling of the hurricane discouraged any observation of their wider surroundings. In such conditions, what would be the point of trying to see anyway? Lidy kneeled there, hunched over, legs spread for balance, in the borrowed thick coat that was soaked through, and rough shoes, and clung to a plank that protruded a little above the others. What you see in such a position is mostly your hands. But her very blindness, or close to it, served only to sharpen her other senses. Some living force was coming at her, constantly shape-shifting, in curves, and wings, and foam, and spray:
it was the question that silenced all life’s other questions. Almighty God, merciful God …

Did she really still believe she could manage? Or was she sensing the road now opening to her at such speed? It doesn’t matter. Ignoring everything a rational person knows in principle, she held fast with all the skill she could muster, as if someone had just taught her the lesson of a lifetime. She knew her fingers had become very bony. A few minutes before, she’d seen that she’d lost her ring, her wedding ring with the little ruby. And she had actually thought, Oh, what a pity!

On February 1, European time, at 5 degrees latitude, the sun goes down at 17:27. And now she really couldn’t see her hand in front of her eyes. The cloud layer was so thick that even the moon couldn’t penetrate it.

Exactly a week after her father died, and three days after his funeral, Armanda awakened with the uncontrollable urge to tell anyone and everyone that her father had died not once but twice. It was a particularly beautiful autumn day, sunny, with a hint of sweetness in the misty air. An hour later, when she stood in the street and saw the men and women coming out of their houses to head for work—on bicycles, on foot, or, some of them, by car—she wasn’t sure whom to impose her urge on first. Everyone seemed absorbed in their own thoughts, and she wasn’t accustomed to striking up conversations with just anyone. The first time her father had died was over a year ago. A malignant tumor on the pancreas, a seven-hour operation, a partial recovery, but like everyone he had understood and accepted that the only use of his recovery was, quite properly, to hold his wife, his children, and his grandchildren close and take his leave of life. Emaciated, gentle to the point of formality, he lay on his deathbed, prayed with the minister, looked deeply into the eyes of each of his loved ones, thanked Nadine with “you were my whole world,” closed his eyes for three days, his pulse meantime almost imperceptible, and opened them again on day four. Blue, clear, focused.

Restless and impatient, she walked toward the Rijksmuseum, with a white cloud standing above it. The sunny city felt cold and unwelcoming. Looking around her, she wondered which of all these faces could be the one to talk to. Her father had died again the week
before, swollen and struggling. He didn’t want to go. And went when no one was there with him. She came to the underpass to the museum. Even before she entered it, she was assaulted by the sounds of the accordion player performing sentimental German pop songs. As she paused under the domed ceiling, the volume was overwhelming. She stood still, glanced around, and listened to the song. She was forty-nine years old, had renounced more than a few desires and suppressed others, as who hadn’t in this phase of their lives—but this one?

There must be some important exhibition, she thought. On the other side of the building, in front of the entrance, was a rather disheartening queue of people. She joined it next to a tanned, quite young guy with long blond hair and muscled arms, in a T-shirt, a sort of Viking type, and said to him: “Oh, oh, this is going to take a while, isn’t it!” After some desultory chitchat, she got onto the subject of the double death of her father, Jan Brouwer, seventy-six the second time around.

“Not a bad age,” said the Viking. They hadn’t advanced a single step.

“Maybe not,” she said, “and yet deep in my heart I count it as seventy-five for the first of his lives, and a year for the other.”

The Viking looked at her eagerly.

“Well,” she said. “Can you imagine it? Completely changed.”

“How—changed?”

In a tone that suggested she was having to explain the obvious, she said: “I mean that my father, a retired cardiologist, was a highly intelligent, rational, devoted man, focused on his work and his family. There’s a certain kind of person who’s born to live a happy life.”

“True.”

“So, after his first death, his character, his behavior, even his appearance, changed completely. I mean, he even started tying his shoelaces differently, making two bows first and only knotting them afterward.”

The Viking stared at her for a moment. Then made a face, a sort of grin of recognition.

With a hand shielding her eyes like a bridge, for the sun was climbing in the east, she said: “Father began to eat. After two months he
was a little, fat old gentleman, still very friendly, but friendly in a
different
way, restless, and his face got redder and he wore these funny checked shirts. And he started taking walks all on his own for hours at a time, and when he came home he wouldn’t say a word about them to my mother. If he’d been younger, you could have imagined—well, you know. Once …”

Suddenly the queue was moving. That always makes everyone start itching to cover the full distance right away. Conversations cease.

“Once,” Armanda finished her sentence, “I see him in the city, he’s walking ahead of me, quite fast, given the way he is, for Father was always someone who would step aside politely rather than get into a showdown about who-has-the-right-of-way-on-this-sidewalk, but now he’s making a path for himself across the Vijzelgracht by dint of staring grimly straight ahead, or so I guess, and he comes to the Rokin, then the dam, then he goes all the way down the Damrak as far as the main station, which he goes into by the front entrance, then out again on the other side, and then on the Ruijterkade, quite by chance, as far as I can tell, he meets a big, untidy-looking woman, who speaks to him, to Father’s initial embarrassment, I think, but then it’s as if she’s given him a password, she suddenly gets this really friendly smile out of him and they have a cheery conversation for a good ten minutes. So, after they shake hands and say good-bye, part of me wants to catch up with him and say, Hello, Father! but another part of me is inclined, given how arbitrary the whole story seems, to just watch where this suddenly new and resurrected father of mine goes on these private walks of his, so I follow him and see him, a minute later, pushing open the door—”

She had reached the ticket desk. The girl looked up. Armanda said over her left shoulder, searching for the Viking, who was nowhere to be seen: “—to the tavern, the one on the corner, you know, it’s all done up to look old, and they still scatter sand on the floor.”

The girl, hand ready on the till, asked: “For the exhibition or just for the museum?”

“Just
The Night Watch
.”

While the girl entered the price of the ticket, Armanda felt a surge of ugly obstinacy. It was as if the conversation she had had with her father shortly before his second death were now jabbing her in the
side. She had gone into De Laatste Stuiver. He had seen her at once, and although she too had immediately spotted him at the window, in front of a backdrop of gray houses (it was about to start raining), she looked around the room at first, as if hesitating. Fine, they were both soon sitting in front of a drink, and her father was telling her wasn’t it extraordinary, he’d just run into one of his old patients for the nth time, who was feeling great and had charmingly reminded him about the prescription he had written for her fifteen or twenty years before.

“Aha, and?” she’d asked, as someone was already bringing them another round, and she was thinking: who knows, maybe the way he walks and looks and talks and thinks these days reflects his real self? So? Isn’t it time I recognize this second-class father as simply
my father?

He had said he’d finally worked out the meaning of a day in the life of a man.

“And what is it?” she had pushed him.

Like a bird, he took a sip from his glass with a movement that was rather extravagant for someone in his condition. When he looked up, he began evasively: “You know, this patient, who’s been following my orders to swallow a modest daily dose of twenty milligrams of dipyridamole for the last twelve years—”

She’d interrupted him.

“Father, you were going to say something else! Some definition of the core of daily life, something nice about how small it is, something logical about this horribly and yet pleasingly sticky coating on our everyday routine, and I really want to hear it from you!”

Then he had stared at the ceiling and started to talk about eating food out of the garbage, about using a black bolt gun to stun cows so that they collapse without making a sound, about sitting in a chair on rainy days watching the windows in the house across the road steam up….

Armanda stared at the cashier as if in a trance. The girl was holding out her ticket.

She said, “Absolute nonsense! Of course I knew it was Father Number Two talking!”

“What are you talking about?” asked the girl suspiciously. “Please pay. You’re holding up the entire queue.”

Short pause, in which nothing happened. Oh, that’s how traffic jams start, thought Armanda as she dug around in her purse for a two-and-a-half-guilder coin. Then she went up the stone staircase, followed a sign with an arrow, and soon was in front of the enormous canvas that took up the entire back wall of a rectangular room full of seventeenth-century masterpieces.

“Dear God!” she murmured, astounded by the scale of the painting.

Next to her was an old lady, small but dignified, with gray hair wound in plaits around her head and horn-rimmed glasses perched on her little mouse face. A former presser from one of the oldest cleaning establishments here in the city, as she learned, after they had struck up a conversation; she would have guessed an old baroness. Still possessed by the need to tell her story, she gave the other woman a pregnant look and then turned back to
The Night Watch
.

“Incredible figures, aren’t they?” she said. “Just look at the way they stand together so proudly and joyfully! In a moment they’re going to exercise and shoot. Isn’t it sickening what’s become of Amsterdammers since then?”

“Oh yes,” said the old lady in a voice like a little silver dinner bell. “There are moments that come over you like a cloud of hot steam and then vanish again, when you think, What kind of a city is this now, so devoid of really rebellious ideas or even a hint of class warfare.” She snapped her fingers and pushed her glasses higher up on her nose. “But this painting isn’t about Banning Cocq and his men, it’s about that little fleck of light, that bizarre child pushing
her
way up out of the darkness.”

“Shall we sit down for a moment?” Armanda proposed.

A few minutes later she and the old lady were on a blue velvet bench right in front of the enormous canvas, agreeing that there was nothing this city needed more than
The Night Watch
. And in the same breath Armanda had kept talking about what was weighing on her heart: “Twice! Imagine! And the second time, mind you, he was all pink and fat!”

They stared at each other searchingly. “For my mother,” Armanda continued a little less agitatedly, “it was much easier to keep seeing this resurrected husband as the same man she’d loved before. Maybe
because she’s a more generous person than I am, that could be, or maybe because she had been breathing together with him every night in the dark. That would have maintained some sort of relationship even if, let’s say, he’d turned into a dog. But I’m pretty sure of one thing: she felt as uneasy as I did. And this unease of hers, like mine, didn’t just spring directly from the change in all these externals, because when you look at it, the change wasn’t really that large. It didn’t come from him getting up at the crack of dawn, it didn’t come from his loud ‘good morning’ over an extended breakfast, or his new brand of aftershave, or his switch to paper handkerchiefs, or the way he turned up the corners of his lips when he laughed; he got fat so quickly, started buying dreadful new suits without consulting her, but he remained a very lovable man, really, and a well-meaning husband, bought flowers on Saturdays, went with her to visit relatives and friends, accompanied her to the theater, where he simply forgot that she was used to him helping her into her coat in the cloakroom.”