Margriet de Moor - The Storm

The village, in which every inhabitant had crawled under the covers.

The sleep of the simple minded: on the other side of the island, ten miles farther south, with a sound of thunder like the end of the world, the sea dike had just given way. The fourteen-ton front of a lock was lifted out of its colossal iron joints. The windows in the lockkeeper’s house were blown out by the pressure, even before the building was flattened by the water, and everything in the surrounding area rocked as if under bombardment. From a place named Simonskerkerinlaag after the village that had drowned there hundreds of years before, the Oosterschelde poured in a torrent over the polder.

They were driving straight for the village on an unpaved road. Cau pointed at the church tower and ordered them to begin by ringing the warning bells.

“But they’re rung electrically now,” said one of the girls, as if she knew that the current was about to fail or had already failed.

“Electrically or with a rope, I don’t care.”

Lidy took her eyes off the road to look at the glowing tip of Cau’s cigarette. Twenty hours and an awkward excursion had been sufficient to exchange the familiar bright reality of everyone she had lived with until now for these traveling companions.

Between them and the oncoming tidal wave were still two inner dikes.

It was a day in late February 1954, a month with so little sun that De Bilt was talking about it as the second-darkest month of the century. In contrast with the year before, there hadn’t been much wind. De Bilt said that not since records had started being kept in 1848 had there been a February with so little wind.

As Armanda, rolled umbrella in hand, opened the door to the hair salon, at exactly the moment when the shop’s bell rang, a harsh ray of sunlight shone in like a path of trick light of the kind that appears when the sun is hidden behind fast-moving rain clouds. She said hello to no one in particular, hung her coat on the stand, and went to one of the seats covered in fake leather in front of the row of mirrors. It was quiet in the salon, Tuesday afternoon, two o’clock. Armanda, who wasn’t planning to have any changes made to her haircut, stretched out her legs. She had come to be cheered up by the sight of the flacons, the brushes, and the hair dryers, and to look at herself in the mirror.

The hairdresser, an Indonesian of indeterminable age, his neck outstretched in an attitude of permanent devotion, positioned himself behind her chair. Their eyes met in the mirror, smiling in understanding, and then they both looked at her reflection in the brightly lit glass.

“Wash? Trim the ends?” Experienced fingers were already lifting her hair and tying a cape around her neck.

“Yes, but no more than a quarter of an inch.”

The hairdresser moved a washbasin behind her head and went off to get something. Armanda kept looking forward, pale, with rings under her eyes. Although she and Lidy had always been good sleepers and loved the way dreams did such a beautiful job of mixing up everything that had happened in real life with things that hadn’t happened yet but could happen at any moment, Armanda was sleeping very badly these days. If she thought at all about Lidy during the night, she simply felt a distressing distance, quite different from the normal, actually quite comforting sadness of her days. Irritating. Moving her legs restlessly, she would stare into the darkness. And force herself not to go into the deep sleep she and Lidy had enjoyed since they were children and in which it didn’t matter whether this dreaming girl corresponded with the woman she would certainly one day become.

This kind of thing is likely to mean that one doesn’t feel quite all there on the following day. Because look — the sun, which had disappeared into the clouds, came out again, casting a cone-shaped beam of light that seemed to be almost religious; she was lying with her head back on a washbasin on wheels, while the hairdresser’s hands ran through her foaming hair, then came warm rushing water, then a towel, and then suddenly she sat up: there went a camel! In the mirror she was seeing a camel walking down the rather narrow street that led to the bridge. She stared. Camels, she thought, remembering involuntarily a book about the zoo that they had at home, are slow-moving, patient ruminants approximately ten feet tall. Approximately ten feet tall … she mentally persevered even as she observed the actual smallish, skinny, maybe one-year-old creature from the Orient, stretching its long neck and emitting strange cries as it passed the window of the Amsterdam hair salon.

“What’s that?!” she burst out, not able to believe her own eyes. She turned to look out directly, to where the vision of the camel with its pathetic little tail over its hindquarters was fast dissolving again into the daylight, leaving a large crowd of children behind it.

“That’ll be that camel,” drawled the hairdresser.

He waited, a large comb in hand, for her to be nice enough to face front again. Responding to her quizzical look, he explained that the children of Amsterdam had written twice to Prime Minister Nehru of India to remind him how much damage had been done to the city zoo during the war. Although they had been thrilled with the baby elephant he had already sent them as a present, they were now hoping for a camel as well, because, as they had explained to Nehru in a little poem, no camel in a northern city means no soul and that’s a pity. That was all. Nehru had answered in the affirmative, and it was his answer, received with great acclaim, that they had just seen striding past.

“Camels?” she murmured. “Are there camels in India?”

“Oh yes,” said the hairdresser in a way that implied this was common knowledge. “There are camels in North Africa and Arabia, and also some in northern India, though not so many.”

Convinced all over again that there was a great wild world out there, just beyond arm’s length, that she couldn’t grasp at all, or only in miniaturized fashion, as if through the wrong end of a telescope, Armanda decided to keep silent. The velvety brown humps still an image on her retinas, she felt the comb pulling the tangles out of her wet hair. An apprentice, a well-meaning little thing, brought her a cup of tea slopping over in its saucer. She nodded and thought, Just put it down, child, yes, this is my life. Small, quotidian, all of it as much like the old one as possible. A noisy dryer was pushed down over her head. Her hands in her lap, Armanda thought first about the shopping list in her purse for a moment, and then about herself.

Oldest daughter in the family now. The one now who had to make conversation with all the aunts and uncles on her parents’ birthdays without her sister to support her. A memory came to her. Last year, the middle of November. Her mother’s birthday. In the big room upstairs at number 77, about twenty guests, relatives and friends, all knowing in advance that the hospitality will be splendid and that the conversation, despite the fact that a daughter is being mourned here, will be light and quite lively. She, Armanda, is wearing an old but still very beautiful blouse of violet-blue silk. Carrying a tray full of coffee cups, she maneuvers past the guests from the sliding doors to the corner of the room.

It was not unexpected that conversation at a certain point should turn to the uncompromising and generous Dutch people who found themselves, so to speak, in a war again.

“Over here!” a young uncle had called to Betsy, who was following Armanda with a bowl of cookies. He raised his eyebrows, stretched out a hand, looked at Betsy emphatically, and continued to make his remarks to nobody in particular.