The Storm (34 page)

“Well, it’s not important.”

“Weak. Your voice sounds weak, because you know, you absolutely know, that I spent that Monday evening pacing around my room, torturing myself with the desire to come clean about the damn kiss. One step, another step, then another, on and on. Till I’d reached the magic goal of my journey, my woman’s will, and, I have to add, the center of the person I am deep in my heart, in my own opinion. I went to the telephone in the upper hall. That was me. Don’t take it badly that I’m going into this with such detail, but really, I was the one who made the call and I’ve been horribly conscious of that my whole life long. It comes in moments that are like being jolted with a brief electric shock, and then before you can deal with them, they’re gone again. Maybe you couldn’t see my persuasive smile, but you could certainly hear it. You could understand my chatter and my whispers, on that Monday there wasn’t yet the slightest breath of a northwest wind to drown out anything. Wonderfully precocious little wife and mother,
just listen
, is what you heard? God, you really fought back. ‘Huh? What are you talking about? I don’t think I feel like it, thanks.’ I had to make a big effort to persuade young Mrs. Blaauw to flee the everyday grind for once. That’s what happened, and alas there’s no act of penance that can undo the basic maliciousness of the facts. The despicable plan crossed my path, I seized it on tiptoe, you have every right to be angry. Meantime I stand on the top floor of Tabitha House and look out like a ghost. There’s an old, bare elm in front of the house on the other side of the street, and in its branches is a whole swarm of parrots, there must be ten of them, they never stop talking. Strange. I think I’ll lie down now and have a doze.”

“No-o …”

·    ·    ·

“Are you still there?”

“Ye-es!”

“Your voice sounds so light, Lidy, and so interested, as if you really want to know how I’m faring here.”

“Yes, well, must be because I was dreaming that the two of us were taking a walk on Sunday to the water tower. There were botanic gardens for plant trials on the other side of the bridge back then, hidden behind a wall. The early sun was tinting the sky above them to a pinkish mother-of-pearl color like the inside of a seashell.”

“That isn’t a dream, that really happened. We were still little children. But
can
you dream while you’re drowning?”

“And how. In fact, it’s all you do. In the dream you’re calling life, we went through the grass past the houseboats, looked at the wall on the opposite bank, and felt a pleasant, eventful sort of homesick feeling. Homesickness mostly starts when you’re in the open, and then a wall is always really helpful. We got to talking about eternity, endlessness, and from there we automatically got into the God problem, you simply didn’t understand why the most rational people made such a song and dance about it. You stood still, to pull up one of your white kneesocks, which was all wet through—the grass was wet, it had been raining—you were thinking, and you murmured to yourself, why couldn’t there be some Being that spanned everything and guided it? Your little red patent-leather purse slipped down off your shoulder. ‘I don’t see why that should be so inconvenient,’ you said, and hung the purse, which had nothing in it, back round your shoulder. ‘Me neither,’ I said. You were quiet. I could see your nose and mouth tensing. ‘Why can’t I read
Netteke Takes a Cure?’
you asked finally, looking at me. ‘You know you’re not allowed,’ I replied, and named the name of a friend I hung around, not a real friend, a girl who granted me her dubious and always a little tormenting favors only during school hours. She had lent me the book under the most draconian conditions.

“‘Look,’ I said, to distract you, and pointed at the afterdeck of the
General Praag
right next to us, where a black bantam cock was getting ready to fly off the deck rail between some speckled hens that were waiting on the bank, frozen in a kind of primordial terror. The morning sun picked out the small male creature with its fiery-red
cockscomb, its rough plumage puffed out like an actor’s cloak. ‘He’s waiting for a drumroll from the orchestra,’ I said placatingly.

“You looked at me steadfastly. You said we had made a promise always to share everything. By way of an answer, I started talking about the two white mice, which was the stupidest thing I could have done. They belonged to you, you exclusively, which was the only thing that made my reminder relevant. You had hidden them in an empty aquarium, scattered a layer of wood shavings, and put our world atlas on top to make a lid. And yes, although you would actually have preferred that I not even look at your cuddly toys through the glass, I once lifted the atlas while you were gone to have a look from on top. Terrific, not a second later, they both suddenly got their necks broken as they were cunningly scaling the sides and got hit by the heavy book when their little mama’s sister dropped it in fright.

“‘What is it?’ I asked, for I couldn’t read your expression properly. Somehow it seemed you were listening to the scuffling next to the
General Praag
, the bantam cock had landed. Somehow I should have known: you had picked up on my mistake, of course you had.

“‘Dumb creatures,’ you said.

“I nodded and indicated with my eyes the poultry sex going on in the grass, but you shook your head. A bit irritated, or so it seemed to me, at my simplemindedness, you began to express your loathing of white mice, those little snouts, those little teeth, those little eyes, all of it dumber than dumb, and the peak of dumbness was naturally to keep the pair in an aquarium.

“
Quelle idée!’
you said, in Mother’s tone of voice, and crossed your feet in a way that meant you either needed to go really badly, or that you had come clean about something and now you were ready to fantasize a little. Oh, you were such a golden, magnanimous child! You were wearing a checked, pleated skirt that morning, a blindingly white blouse, and a striped knit jacket that had previously belonged to me. Children like you often love to theorize, completely uninhibitedly. ‘People have so little fantasy,’ you burst out plaintively. ‘It’s okay that there’s a primary color we don’t know, but it’s just pathetic and sad that we can’t imagine it.’ Beyond that, I can no longer remember exactly who took which part in our dreamy, faltering dialogues.

“‘Eternity,’ you said, or maybe I said, ‘is that we have to live the
lives of everyone who ever lived or will ever live, from beginning to end.’

“Mmmm, yes, and so interesting, isn’t it? Even down to the details?”

“Even down to the details, without the slightest deviation from the facts.

“We slid around ice rinks on shoes with leather soles. We licked the metal railings on the Mageren Bridge. The Amstel froze over.”

“No, it was summer. We lay in our bathing suits on the beach at Langevelder Slag.”

“We put on our skates with double runners and went slicing through the flocks of gulls that happened to be so numerous that year and had flown from the IJ, which was all iced over, into the city.”

“I can remember to this day our sense of pleasure—space, not a movement in the sky, our warm bodies, and the even greater warmth of the sand—as we looked over at the hazy outlines of a gray ship that stood out against the furthest rim of the sea.”

“Cyclists were also crossing the river.”

“We thought about the bottomless chasm there must be right behind the horizon where the ship was. An aunt of our maid had killed herself the week before, and they’d only just told us, so we were in a very solemn mood.”

“We’d heard that there was such a terrible cold front approaching from Siberia that within a day or so the North Sea was going to freeze over. The question that interested us was whether we’d get absorbed into the Arctic Circle just like Canada and Nova Semlya, which would mean we’d get to see the Northern Lights—yes, it was definitely winter.”

“If you say so.”

“Why are you lying in bed?”

“I’m lying in bed because I’m dying.”

“Armanda, you can really be pathetic.”

“No, no. It’s really true. The children have been here twice already to say their good-byes. They plumped up my pillow, gave me a glass of water, held my hand. Oh, darlings, I said, I’m making such a lot of
trouble and worries for you, do me a favor, go into town and get something to eat. I’ll be awake for a bit yet.”

“Ha, that reminds me that you had to go to bed half an hour earlier than I did at home, and I never allowed you to go to sleep till I’d crawled into bed too. To control this, I used to run upstairs sometimes during the half hour and bend over you in the dark, and if I smelled from your breath that you were asleep, I’d hiss in your ear reproachfully: ‘You’re asleep!’ You were incredibly well trained, trained against me, and you were able to say ‘Am not!’ so convincingly out of a deep sleep that although I knew perfectly well you were lying, I had to put up with it.”

“God, yes, I remember that.”

“So the young ones are in town now. Take advantage, I’d say, seize the opportunity to exit in peace, on your own. You’re alone.”

“Yes, insofar as anyone who has another person who’s taken up residence inside them can be said to be alone.”

“What? I didn’t quite understand you. Another person?”

“Someone who’s spent my whole life looking and listening with me. In some way, a great advantage. So my sister who lives hidden inside me is older than I am, but still a lot less forgetful. Beautiful moments that I’ve lived, even if they’ve faded, shine on a little longer through her. Did you come, I ask her now, to say good-bye or to fetch me? That well-known look of till-death-us-do-part meets mine, even if it’s a little frostier than it used to be. The face is blue, which occurs when the oxygen content of the blood drops below the critical point and death is very close. As it happens, I’m an expert on this. All the same, oddly, as long as
I
live, I automatically keep her, my moribund other, alive.”

“Classic thought, sympathetic too! Tell me, are you lying comfortably?”

“Very comfortably. Now that I’m nothing but skin and bone, they’ve laid a sheepskin on my mattress. It’s delightfully warm in the room. I’m very tired already, and I just peek out through the slits in my eyelids. I have almost no eyelashes left, which means that though I’m half hallucinating, I’m spared spiders and beetles. I think about whatever comes into my head: a conversation from years back about your last moments. How they may have looked. The Dutch Institute
of Forensic Medicine was still in Rijswijk then. No idea why, but I feel more comforted now by my gravity and my grief back then than I did at the time. A pathologist like that knows a great deal. A great sense of peace emanated from him while he explained to me quite calmly the actual process of your drowning. He had gray eyes with such heavy lids and a lethargic twinkle, but you imagined that already. On the table between us, the photo with your face and your absurd laugh. Surprisingly, he couldn’t answer my first questions, namely whether you had gone on shivering underwater, since your body temperature had already dropped so hellishly, and whether your teeth went on chattering, the way a body always does instinctively to generate a last bit of warmth. I know it was crazy and pointless to ask, but he didn’t know.”

“Oh, well, I still shiver like crazy, even though I’m unconscious.”

“The doctor, who saw I was fighting back tears, reassured me that you can have suffered only for a minute or two. The specific weight of a human body is higher than the specific weight of water, but not much, a little movement and the person keeps swimming. A small reserve of air in the lungs is not bad, of course, screaming and calling out aren’t sensible, and I assume you didn’t do it anyway out of sheer exhaustion. A great disadvantage was apparently that there was no more air between you and your sodden clothes, so I assume that you sank immediately.”

“True.”

“How hopeless water is! It siphons off your body heat twenty-six times faster than air at the same temperature. Twenty-six times! So is it realistic to demand that your heart keep beating normally when you’re in water that’s thirty-six to thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit? That your brain keep thinking normally when it’s cooling down at that speed? After ninety seconds, even your most rational reflexes are completely disrupted. What are you supposed to do with your nose and mouth underwater, breathe or not breathe? That was your only moment of despair. In the grip of a great lack of oxygen, your instinct finally said yes. A large gulp of water met the opening of your respiratory tract.”

“That’s right, and the respiratory tract rejected it. I can tell you, Armanda, that if your friend the pathologist were to open up my poor
drowned body, he wouldn’t find a single drop of seawater in my lungs. Sometimes the larynx is so shocked by the passage of water over the vocal cords that it angrily contracts all the muscles to block it. That’s what happened with me. For a moment I was panicked. Shame, shame, shame, I thought, I really wanted to try that recipe for pancakes with the little bits of ginger stirred in under the batter. I felt a hellish pain, as if my head were being squeezed together by a muscular hand, and wanted to cry out, which of course I couldn’t do. Yes, yes, so where are they, the sun-flooded fields of tulips at the end of the tunnel you always hear about in connection with drowning, I thought furiously, and I hadn’t even finished the thought when I noticed that the pain was gone. I opened my eyes. You cannot imagine, child, how beautiful the colder, more temperate sea under the surface of the water is! It’s a well-worn cliché that what you think of as you’re dying is flying away, upward, but in my opinion, heading downward is a lot easier. You weigh so little, at the end, don’t you? At this moment my poor body, head downward, is spiraling toward the bottom of the Oosterschelde. My heart has already stopped beating, there’s no more pulse, but deep in my brain there’s still life. If your doctor were to thrust a thermometer through the top of my skull, he’d establish the temperature in there was still at least eighty-two degrees Fahrenheit.

“Suspended animation. You dream, your thinking has become totally insane. And yet, if someone were to fish you out right away and really get you warm again, you could still make it. Cold, which works so that your organs need a minimum of oxygen, like a hibernating polar bear’s, is a real advantage when considered from the standpoint of a rescue.”