Margriet de Moor - The Storm

Late morning. He had already spent a short time with Jacomina Hocke, who was still living in her parents’ hotel with the three children. In the lounge, packed to bursting with officials, soldiers, and journalists, he had sat opposite a woman about whom all he knew was that she had lost her husband, which didn’t interest him. After a brief conversation she had fetched Lidy’s little suitcase from upstairs and set it on the table in front of him. Oddly shy, he had searched for the lock with his fingers and then looked up at Jacomina for a moment as if to ask for her blessing. Then: a moment of overwhelming, ignominious happiness. There were her clothes! No possible doubt. Her tight skirt, her petticoat with the narrow straps, her nylon stockings, her shoes, size nine, that she called “Queenies,” her good-little-girl pajamas made of pink and blue striped flannel. What else is there to do at such a moment than to take a very deep breath?

The scent of L’Air du Temps had stayed with him all the way through the accursed town and along the path between the gravestones till he entered the Lysol-saturated morgue, where a very young girl showed him a bucket with a couple of pathetic objects floating in it.

“Knitted woolen undershirt,” the child read out from a piece of paper. “Knitted pullover, color no longer identifiable.”

Then she showed him a box with some smaller objects in it, standing ready on the table.

“Ring with red stone.”

He bent down over it. Half dreaming, distracted, he stared for a while at the touching piece of jewelry. Sweet, he thought, small, for a narrow fine finger. And then, his mind clouded by the chemical stench in the room: dammit, now can I finally find out what happened before all this?!

As he turned round, he found himself looking straight into the eyes of a man who had just that minute walked in. Powerfully built, red-faced, he wore overalls, a green slicker, and rubber boots. A farmer, Sjoerd assumed, and looked at him for a long second in wild supplication.

It was the leader of the body squad, a preacher, who had just driven a small truck full of new human remains onto the grounds. They were pulling out two, at most three, new corpses a day, using the engineers’ boats, always with someone from one of the old shipbuilding families on board, because they knew the places to look. If they spotted a screaming flock of seagulls somewhere fluttering over the brown water rising and falling with the tide, then they didn’t need anyone to point it out to them, they already knew themselves what it meant. The trips with the corpses became fewer over time, but grislier. Some of the watchers on the Steinernen Dike, where the boats moored, spread unsparing descriptions of the bodily remains that were brought onto land, they couldn’t leave it alone, and said they would never eat eels again as long as they lived.

The red-faced man didn’t say why he had come, but held his cigarettes out to Sjoerd. As the latter said, “It wasn’t her,” the man nodded and suggested they go out into the fresh air. They talked for a while in front of the little building. Sjoerd indicated the gravestones with his head. “So that’s where you buried her.” The other man understood that he meant the woman who wasn’t Lidy.

“No. The mass grave here is full. And we always take the unknowns to the emergency burial ground farther away on the island.”

To their left, by the small truck, some workers from the body squad had begun to unload something. In the brief exchange that followed, Sjoerd said, “I don’t know how you can do this.”

The other man didn’t answer at first, and seemed to recognize that it didn’t matter whether he said anything or not. On Sunday he would preach an ingenious but truly comforting sermon on a text from Isaiah: “Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth” that came to him with mysterious ease after or even during the filthy work, but for now, all he could see was what the other man saw.

“Damn mud,” he said.

No reply.

Then, “To begin with, the only way we could get through it was with gin; man, we drank, sometimes we were completely loaded. But now we do it stone-cold sober.”

The emergency cemetery was not far from the harbor at Zijpe, close by the marshaling yards for the streetcars. Because the ferry to St. Philipsland wouldn’t leave for another hour, Sjoerd had had time to pay a brief visit. He got out and was immediately stunned by the panorama, which had the bleak power to bury the onlooker in memories of horror, whether the memories were real or not. In the foreground were two rows of hastily but professionally piled up mounds of earth with the approximate dimensions of a prone body, and slightly higher behind these the streetcar rails, in the curve a row of wet black freight cars, and behind them, in the distance, scarcely distinguishable from the sky, the line made by the bank of the Zijpe, where the afternoon mist was already lying low over the water. He walked down the row of grave mounds. Read the inscriptions on the tarred wooden crosses stuck at angles into the earth. Unknown man, number 121. Unknown girl, number 108. Unknown woman, number 77. He didn’t know whether he abhorred them or was grateful to them in his heart as he thought, From now on they’re her relatives, and imagined them waiting there, cold, wet, unidentifiable, until she joined them for good.

They crossed the Amstelveld. Children were playing between the parked cars. The sun had disappeared behind the houses, and Armanda did up the buttons on her coat. Sjoerd walked beside her, silent for some time now, and smoking, but she sensed that it wasn’t calming him. Where is he? she wondered. He’s wandering around somewhere where I can’t follow him, even with the best will in the world. Mourning my deeply loved, woefully missed sister. She would have known how to fathom his mood. If you know how a man is when he makes love, when he drops all restraint, can you also know how it is with his other passions? I think so.

Unable to change anything, she suddenly thought irritably: You look pale, brother-in-law, and hollow-eyed. And before she knew what she was doing, she began to scold. “Shouldn’t you start to let go of her? She’s out there and she’s going to stay out there. You can’t reach her anymore — it’s impossible!”

Odd, the way her words found their own direction, took on their own force as they revealed something in her that had turned from gentle to angry. She felt Sjoerd look at her, stunned. As she was about to carry on in the same rough tone of voice, he cut her off.

“Don’t say that! They’re still working flat-out! Aside from this phone call about the pullover, I was also summoned to the police last week. The station at Kloveniersburgwal!”

He had picked up on her fiery tone. For some reason, this pleased her.

“They had received another photo for me to look at, God knows why,” he said.

He had stopped. She looked at him intransigently.

“And?”

“It was the face of a middle-aged woman,” he said. “You know, a motherly type with dark curly hair, all stuck together, and a double chin. You could see that they’d set her on a ladder when they found her, as a sort of stretcher, and that’s how they photographed her, with her head against the rungs. She looked nothing like Lidy, nothing at all, but as I stood there with the photo in my hand and it looked back at me for a while, I don’t know, every face of Lidy’s that I knew was gone, I couldn’t recall any of them, I didn’t even try. I liked the woman. Her head seemed to me to be caught a little between the rungs, but the expression on the face was peaceful, although one cheek was very creased and much more bloated than the other. The eyes weren’t quite closed, her little pupils stared brokenly but kindly into the distance, dead. So I stood there holding the photo, which was as foreign to me as it was familiar, while the policeman behind his desk waited for me to be finally ready to say yes or no. I think I must have tried his patience. You’ll probably find this strange, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to hand him back the woman’s face, which didn’t really look like Lidy’s but still was her, at least a little bit.”