Margriet de Moor - The Storm

“Back soon, back soon!”

As the Citroën drove on, nothing in the atmosphere inside suggested an intention to make for home and bed as soon as possible. The car heading for the unloading docks was being driven by a man who was feverishly preoccupied with practical things. Beside him was a young woman who, once again, had no role here. However, even she felt the strange — or perhaps not so much strange as concentrated — aura of danger in which people know that something has to be done. After about five minutes the dike appeared, a hunchbacked silhouette against the moonlight. Turn right here and a half mile farther on you came to the loading docks, which were no more than a mooring place where, in accordance with regulations, the passage through the dike to the quay had to be closed at high tide with flood fencing.

But the car braked and stopped right here. After a moment, Simon Cau bent over and ran for the dike, to try to climb it on hands and knees. An unreal sight. What was he trying to do, grabbing onto the weeds to pull himself up the pitiful structure, which had been built as steep as possible to save money? Sinking down continually into the waterlogged mole tunnels that riddled the entire edifice, he reached the crown. It was impossible to stand upright on this arched crest, barely twenty inches across, in the teeth of the hurricane. Cau pressed his stomach to the ground, held on to his cap with both hands, and lifted his head, drenched with flying water, a fraction. What are visions of terror? Unreal things against an unreal backdrop? Simon Cau drew in his breath with a loud gasp. What he was looking at, almost at eye level, was an oncoming mass of water that had no end.

Lidy too got out for a moment. She stood there beside the embankment, which was echoing from inside with a sonorous, throbbing roar audible through the wind. She listened without knowing what was causing the throbbing: a mountain of sand coated with a thin layer of clay, which after years of seawater washing over it was useless. On the very narrow crown, a few little walls erected here and there after the flood of 1906, with spaces to let the sheep through. The inner side was already so cracked even back then that it is a miracle that it had held until tonight before crumbling in the space of an hour and a half under the enormous hydraulic pressure on the outer side, foundering into the ditch of the inner dike. The outer side, undermined, will withstand the sea for a further fifteen minutes before finally collapsing.

Lidy tugged her feet out of the mud and ran back to the car. Even on the reinforced road, the ground was shaking perceptibly.

April had begun with rain, but since yesterday you could smell spring. Armanda was taking a stroll along the Kloveniersburgwal, after spending the entire afternoon in lectures. The sun was shining in her face, and she’d unbuttoned her coat. The weather report in De Bilt had forecast a moderate west wind, but instead it turned from northeast to southeast and slackened to the point where the flags outside the Hotel de L’Europe hung down limp.

From the Amstel bridge she saw Sjoerd coming from the direction of the Muntplein, which was no surprise, since the bank he worked in was on the Rokin. She raised her arm, saw that he spotted her, and waited. Nothing was more logical than that they should walk home together. It was Monday. During the week, Sjoerd Blaauw ate dinner with the Brouwers, his in-laws, who had also taken in his two-year-old daughter, full of affection for her and totally understanding that she would spend weekends at home with her father. Armanda, the way things worked out, also tended to spend some time there too.

She watched him approach with long strides, looking toward her without even the hint of a smile. Her books in a bag pressed against her hip, she stood still as other people walked on past her to either side; there was a lot of traffic at this hour. Without an idea of how they would or should behave toward each other, she waited for her brother-in-law at the corner of the bridge. She would just let things happen. What was the alternative? For some time now things had been awkward between her and Sjoerd. Would there be the same iciness between them today as there had been yesterday?

She thought about how suddenly his mood had changed as he stared into her face in a way that wasn’t pleasant. And she had stared back. Widower … the word pushed its way up into her mind without her being able to suppress it. Widower, but his dead wife had still not been found.

That had been yesterday in number 36. Sunday afternoon, the doors to the little balcony at the front had stood open, and fresh air from the park came streaming in through the wrought-iron grille. Inside the sun-filled room Nadja was thundering across the room on a red wooden horse with wheels, working her way busily toward her by pushing off with both feet at once. Sjoerd and she had talked over the racket.

“She’s still somewhere,” he had said after a moment’s silence.

She had wanted to reach for his hand, but he pushed away from her, changed the way he was sitting, and looked around. In the sumptuous sunlight the furniture, mostly old family pieces, looked a little shabby, and in the corner by the sliding doors, motes of dust were dancing above the piano in a fan of light. She followed his gaze and felt that he knew in his heart what her eyes could see: Wherever she is, she’s not here .

But she had nodded. “Yes.” And afterward, to say something that would comfort both of them: “She certainly hasn’t just vanished from her house and her life without a trace.”

Did he hear what she said? Remarks, thoughts, remarks, thoughts, it doesn’t take long to put miles between them.

Expressionlessly, almost formally, he had repeated, “She’s still somewhere.” But as he turned toward Armanda and searched her face with his eyes, as if trying to find something, his words changed, though they were the same words, and suddenly they sounded a second meaning, icy, hostile, as if what he’d wanted to say was: scandalous, unforgivable, my sister-in-law, how much you look like her!

Now she waited for him at the corner of the bridge, and knew, as he came toward her in a straight line, that yesterday’s conversation was still ongoing. She smiled — what could be more natural than that? Less natural, perhaps, was that she saw herself smiling, saw herself in her wide blue coat smiling out at him from under her bangs, with the rest of her smooth dark hair hanging down on either side of her face.

They greeted each other. “Hello!” And said, as they continued on their way: “How was it today?” Good, good. They crossed the road.

“Lovely day,” she said a few minutes later.

He didn’t react.

A bit farther along the Amstel, the street got noticeably quieter. The river glistened like a band of silver.

“Shall we take a little walk?”

Relieved, she said, “Yes, why don’t we!”

They went along the Keizersgracht. To break the silence, she asked, “Do you have any news? Did you get another call?”

She was alluding to the identification. Lidy’s identification, for the sake of which Sjoerd had already traveled several times into the disaster zone, an undertaking that struck Armanda as spookier and more abstract with every day that passed. Lidy was one of hundreds of the missing who were still being searched for. Sjoerd made calls and was called. He, the husband, was the contact person. But gradually the calls from the Red Cross to come and check the morgues in Goes, Zieriksee, or Dordrecht became more and more infrequent, and it was also a rarity if he got a message from the police to please come look at a photo. The faces of the dead who were still being washed up or surfacing out of the mud were no longer fit to be photographed.