The Storm (8 page)

She crossed the Ceintuurbaan with Lidy’s voice still in her head, singing the song that had always succeeded years ago in inducing a feeling of inexplicable sorrow in her younger sister. It was about a girl child, one who was “only” a boatman’s girl, and the song broadened and deepened the pathos of this with a melody that commanded Armanda’s most painful awareness. Even the first words naturally struck a nerve; “the winds they whirl, the winds they whirl,” sung in a hasty rhythm, put the child, who was only the boatman’s girl, in a fearsome storm. Wind and more wind, gust after gust. Then the song continued with an appeal to which no one in the world is immune:
“Come here …,” the last word sung emphatically by Lidy at her little sister, who was already melting away, and then followed by something that never failed to pierce her to the core. Her name. “Come here, Manja,” sang Lidy, substituting Armanda’s baby name for that of the girl in the song, so that she could end the line of the verse, now richer and more personal, with “you’re my sister, you’re my sister,” and then, with even greater emphasis than on the line about the wind, sing it all over again.

As Armanda entered the park, she stepped aside to avoid a wild-looking man who was coming toward her with his peddler’s tray of socks and eyeglass cases, but she felt as softhearted as a little lamb. For the first time in days, she saw her sister in an old familiar scenario, namely with brass polish in one hand and a yellow cloth in the other. As she polishes the faucet in the hall—very nice of her, there are bound to be visitors tonight—her voice rings out in the second verse of the boatman’s daughter song, which begins “O Hell’s spawn, O Hell’s spawn, my sister is gone,” then commands again, “Come here, Manja,” before turning suddenly in a way that still gives Armanda goose bumps, as it did then: “You’re not
her
, you’re not
her,”
sung to the same despairing waltz that had swirled around “you’re my sister,” but now with these words, seems to reveal its deepest intentions.

Lidy. When she was around twelve. Busy in the doctor’s house, polishing the brass faucet. As Armanda goes past her on her way upstairs, Lidy wails out the song all the way to the end at the top of her lungs, and casts a mock-despairing, cryptic glance at her that appears to signify that everything is going to end badly. As Armanda closes the door to the room with the balcony behind her, the final words of the song, “Yes, yes!” like an exclamation, echo in her ears, and her eyes fill with tears.

She put the front-door key into the lock. In the hall she cocked her ear for a few moments. At first she thought there was no sign of life in the house, then she heard her mother upstairs, talking to someone.

Nadine Brouwer-Langjouw and Betsy Blaauw were sitting in the back room at a low table along the side wall, lit by a shaded lamp in
the corner. In front of them tea was laid out. Cigarette smoke hung in the air. As Armanda appeared in the doorway, she saw them both look up without reacting, which is to say that Betsy, who was talking, continued rather formally, as if she were forcing herself not to leave anything out.

Armanda heard: “He told me that they sailed the boat around in the night and you just couldn’t imagine that the area had ever been inhabited. He saw the corpses of every kind of animal floating about, and tables and chairs and bales of straw, and most of all he saw the ship’s navigation lights shining on waves with big white crests that came rolling in between the remains of the farmhouses as if they belonged there.”

Armanda had come into the room, pulled up a chair, and now asked her mother firmly, by way of interrupting the conversation, “Is there any left?”

In the silence that followed, Nadine lifted the lid of the teapot, made an anxious face, and glanced up to see her daughter’s pleading look. Sjoerd, she explained, had called Betsy today to tell her he’d managed to get on board a lighter in Zierikzee with the help of a couple of students from Utrecht. Armanda nodded—she understood—but was shocked for the umpteenth time this week by the dreadful alienation in her mother’s eyes, a look that was quite foreign to her, and chilling, and the blue vein that was pulsing visibly in her temple.

Betsy, her face closed, waited for their conversation to end. Now she drew a deep breath. As she resumed her report on the report, slowly but without a single pause, Armanda felt it was as fantastical as the movie images she had just seen.

“They used the ship’s horn. They surveyed all the attic floors and rooftops so that they could steer for them if there were any signs of life. He said they took a total of eight people on board in the course of the night, which was hellishly hard to do, given all the floating debris crashing against the hull, and the current, but they were all completely apathetic and didn’t even understand what he was talking about when he asked about Lidy or where Izak Hocke’s farm was, which Lidy had gone to on Saturday night. Meantime he and the students had not the faintest idea anymore where they were on the polder. They took the people on the lighter to a fifty-foot cutter skippered
by a mussel fisherman from Yerseke, who had sailed it through a hole in the dike and anchored there. Day dawned. The wind began to blow from the east and everything on board turned white with frost. He said the cold was so intense that they couldn’t think, all they could do was act. They sailed farther into the polder on the off chance of finding something, and came up against the gutters of houses that were in the process of falling apart, with walls that were sometimes thirty or forty degrees out of true. Don’t think, said Sjoerd to me, that we were the only ones out on the water that morning. In amongst the oddest small boats there was even a punt from Giethoorn. The skipper, like everyone else, seemed to be aware of a general plan that all these ghost-drivers were following: the little boats gave over their catch to the bigger, mostly fishing, boats, which made sure they either got into harbor or out to the open sea, because the tide was going out. He said you could watch the water go down from one half hour to the next.”

Armanda made to open her mouth.

“Of course,” Betsy continued hastily, “he kept on asking, no matter what. He told me that he pointlessly questioned a farmer’s wife whom he and the students had had the greatest difficulty in persuading to leave her attic. Clutching two jars of preserves, she was sitting under the roof. She only agreed to put her legs over the windowsill after he, Sjoerd, had looked at the roasted rib cuts under their thick layer of fat and told her they could come too. While the students steered toward the outline of a church tower, the woman shook her head in answer to his interrogation, she thought about it carefully but no, said Sjoerd, she’d never in her life heard of anyone named Lidy. So they headed for the tower. Two helicopters were in the process of rescuing some people who had crowded onto the parapet of the hollow circular structure, which was so narrow that you couldn’t imagine how there could be a staircase inside. Its sides were full of holes and it could collapse at any moment. Nothing of the church itself remained except the tips of wreckage of wood and brick in a sea that stretched all the way to the horizon. They heaved to and followed the rescue operation. A man, a rescuer in yellow oilskins and a life vest, was calmly—or so it seemed, said Sjoerd—attaching a steel cable that came snaking down from the helicopter to people who lined up one after
the other, some of them wearing local costume, and then rose into the air like saints. After the machines had made a sharp dip to the side and flown away, three of the remaining people had decided they would rather board the boat than wait for the pilots to return. This was successfully achieved through a small window halfway up the tower. The most striking thing about these people, said Sjoerd, was their complete lack of fear. They sat disheveled in the deckhouse, breathing a little heavily, but didn’t say a word. In the moment when they were saved and the boat was pulling away, and he asked about Lidy, Lidy Blaauw, they apparently looked at him as if he weren’t quite right in the head. Finally one of them had opened his mouth. ‘Just take us to the Raampartse Dike.’”

Betsy broke off and her face went slack, as if the report had suddenly led her to something else. She turned to Nadine and said unsteadily, “Oh, Mrs. Brouwer …”

The latter looked astonished, then showed her understanding of the moment: the silent, awkward turmoil of someone trying to express empathy. She bent forward and closed her hand round the visitor’s wrist.

Three. There were three people in the room, plus an animal that hadn’t yet been heard from, a neutered yellow tomcat that was sitting on the windowseat looking out. Of the three of them, one had a mouth that had suddenly gone dry, eyes that were suddenly swimming and who felt she was a ghost, lucky to be able to see anything at all. Armanda got to her feet, picked up the teapot, and went into the kitchen to brew a fresh supply.

When she returned with it on a tray that also had a plate of open sandwiches with smoked mackerel and mustard, Betsy was saying something that sounded very like a closing remark.

“By the end of the afternoon, there was nothing more they could do.”

“Why?” cried Armanda, coming to a halt in the middle of the room, her voice rising in distress. “Why was there nothing more they could do?”

Betsy stubbed out her cigarette in the full ashtray. It took her some time.

“Because everyone was either saved or drowned.”

For a moment it was still. Then Betsy, with an almost placating look at Armanda, said, “Sjoerd said that the professionals have now taken over. The army and the Red Cross.”

Armanda set the tray down on the table with the greatest care. “The army,” she repeated. “The Red Cross.”

She didn’t sit down with the other two again. Her hands wrapped around a cup of tea, she walked slowly up and down in the front room as she often did when she was thinking or, as now, pulling back into herself because the world gave her little other choice.

Meanwhile the streetlamps had come on, and Betsy made a move to say good-bye to the lady of the house. She had told almost all there was to tell. In three days her brother would take up the continuation of his report himself. At the same, always semimagical hour of the dusk, he would ring the doorbell of number 77. And Armanda, guessing at once it would be him, would run downstairs and open up.

But for the moment things weren’t that far along. For the moment Armanda stood in the darkened front room, almost absent from the other two women, stroking the cat, and thought, as she climbed the first step toward a capacity for empathy, about Lidy. A distant and strange state of being, annotated by the newspaper, presented by the newsreel, and commandeered by the army and the Red Cross. The craziest circumstances, which everyone understood how to report on—except her.

For Nadine and Jan Brouwer had also gone to the southwest this week to search for their daughter. They had managed to reach Schouwen-Duiveland on the boat of a fisherman from what had once been the island of Urk, had learned in the dreadfully damaged little regional capital that their daughter hadn’t remained there on the night of the calamity, also learned that everyone without exception who had been rescued from the polders had been evacuated to terra firma, and by afternoon they were on a lugger from Scheveningen overladen with other refugees on their way to Dordrecht and Rotterdam. Jan Brouwer had already started to take medical care of the people crammed into the hold while they were still in the harbor. Then, barely a few miles out from the canal, the ship steered toward the
bank again, from which a sloop had set sail. Fifteen minutes later Nadine saw her husband, a small gray figure on the afterdeck, disappear from view in the churning white wake. It was snowing. Aside from a row of pollarded willows, she could see nothing in the pale distance that suggested a village in which the field hospital was supposed to be, which had appealed for a doctor over the radio.

She reached Dordrecht in the early evening. Failing to find any trace of Lidy among the evacuees in schools and churches, she spent the night on the floor of a post office and went on next morning to the Ahoy Halls in Rotterdam. There too she searched for Lidy for hours in the throng of people that seemed to have adapted itself noisily to a world roofed in glass and steel, with row upon row of stretchers on the concrete floors, coverlets, cushions, cardboard boxes tied up with string, prehistoric suitcases, the occasional well-behaved dog, and an army of helpers, mostly extremely nice women of the sort who always knew what to do no matter what the circumstances, making the rounds with coffee and open-face sandwiches. When she came home around dusk, she was too exhausted to speak. But Armanda, who had barely reached the front door herself, because she had been taking care of Nadja, hadn’t been able to wait, and wanted to know what her mother had seen.

Was she cold, was Armanda’s first question, was she tired? And she had read in her mother’s face that Lidy for the moment had been nowhere to be found. After she had guided her into the warm sitting room, led her to the sofa, taken off her shoes, and waited till she had hugged Nadja and kissed her, Armanda stared at her inquiringly.

When nothing was forthcoming: “I’ve heard there’s looting down there, and people have already been shot.”

Her mother had looked around the room. “Where’s Jacob?”

She hadn’t answered. No one in these days was paying attention to the thirteen-year-old. She said: “An entire cowshed with all the cows still tied up inside is said to have been sucked out to sea on the ebb tide.”

Armanda saw her mother nod thoughtfully. “I read somewhere,” she said, not giving up, “that the atmosphere over some of the islands is so wet that the birds in the air are inhaling water and just drowning on the wing.”

To which Nadine replied that she hadn’t seen that, but she’d seen plenty else.

“In the Hollands Diep …” she began, but then broke off at the sound of the front door closing downstairs. While Jacob came up the stairs whistling a tune, she hastily told Armanda, as if wanting to be done with it as fast as possible, about the flotilla of ships in the snow that had spread out in two directions across the waters, still almost at peak levels.