Margriet de Moor - The Storm

“Ships’ warehouses full! And there are about half a million people living in this area. They reckon you could clothe eight million people from head to foot with what’s there!”

Armanda saw that Betsy didn’t yet understand what this was about, but she herself did. In the disaster zone of Zeeland and South Holland, people had already been driven mad with the sheer quantity of clothing in the first weeks, donated by a nation possessed. With a knowing look she glanced from Uncle Leo, her mother’s youngest brother, to Uncle Bart, also a Langjouw, sitting next to him, and jumped into the conversation.

“There were evening capes in there, and swimsuits, and streetcar conductor’s uniforms.”

Her eyes slid past them, and as she moved on she said, “Wilder-vank sent a whole batch of chef’s hats.”

As she and Betsy handed round the coffee and cookies, always the boring bit at such a party, she heard the uncles continue.

“Be quiet,” said Bart.

“I swear it.” Leo had been the envoy-on-the-spot of the City of Amsterdam, which had taken on special responsibility for Schouwen-Duiveland. “Shoes lying everywhere. In the square in front of the church, in the streets, all of them in the mud. There was barely a living soul left to be seen in the village, everyone had been evacuated, it all looked absolutely tragic.”

“Really,” said Bart.

“Yes. One of those donations. Thousands and thousands of pairs of shoes. Out of sheer despair, because every warehouse on the island was already overflowing with clothes, so they threw them at the first fishing village they came to.”

The other man snorted.

“In Bruinisse the stuff was stacked to the ceiling in a school with big high windows, there was so much of it not a single ray of light could get through. I saw how people can get drunk on the sheer availability of a huge quantity of stuff, it doesn’t matter what the stuff is. The ones who came to find something didn’t just take what they needed, they began to carry on like voles or crazed moles, tunnelling through it all. Honest. Do you know that the Red Cross is being almost bankrupted by the storage costs? Someone told me that recently they had a hundred thousand cubic yards of clothing that they didn’t even distribute, just shunted it down the line like that, free gratis and for nothing.”

“How about a cigar?”

On the living room table diagonally opposite them was an opened box of Sumatras.

“Yes, give me one. Some of it went to the rag merchants, and some of it to all our faithful Indonesian immigrants.”

A few minutes later, when Armanda came back to sit with them again, the conversation had become more general. She followed it with a cup of coffee in her hand and a plate with a slice of pie on her lap, but didn’t join in. In the circle across from her sat her father and her mother. With the forbearing, slightly astonished expressions that were so typical of both of them and sometimes made them in some remarkable way the spitting image of each other, they listened to these anecdotes that were circulating through every Dutch living room right now, and which their guests were telling one another the way people tell jokes. In Zieriksee the entire population had been forcibly evacuated by the authorities. Nobody wanted to leave, everyone had to. And as a result the workers, yes, it’s true, who had the necessary knowledge to work on the dikes, were suddenly sitting parceled out with host families in Arnhem, Hilversum, Aerdenhout, and so on, and most of them had never even been away from home before. But because the work still had to be done, every single road worker and anyone who could hold a shovel were herded together by the officials of all the city engineering departments across the country and billeted in emergency barracks behind the Stone Dike.

Armanda saw her father’s fingers tapping quietly on the arms of his chair. Uneasily, she felt the impulse to go sit on one of the arms and put her hand in his. All men, the conversation went on, young unmarried men and fathers of households with withdrawal symptoms, basically they were expected to wait. But it wasn’t for long. A holiday bus from Leiden swept festively into the old marketplace, where it disgorged its passengers in front of a well-known small hotel. It was almost evening. The entire waterfront street was full as the girls, roughly twenty of them, climbed out, laughing and waving at the men, to get rooms.

Smiles all round. A very strange atmosphere, Armanda remembered later, without a single drop of anything high-proof doing the rounds. A cousin, the daughter of a certain Aunt Noor, had burst out laughing loudly, but then checked her laughter to tell a quick story about her fiancé, who had spent the summer with a colleague from the national police in one of these half-drowned villages. The girl, a rather brainless creature, gave some totally tactless details about her fiancé’s summer. Beautiful weather. At high tide you could sail through an opening in the sea dike to the highest point of the village, where it rose up out of the water, and you could moor behind the pastor’s house. Residence permits were almost never granted to the actual inhabitants of the village, not even if someone’s house was still standing and they absolutely wanted to return. The only people there were a rescue team, a tavernkeeper with an ancient mother on whom they, the fiancé and his colleague, could unload entire boxes full of cats they’d fished up, and a few boys who collected the machinery from the farms and set it out to dry in the sun. The two policemen had their hands full. Even late at night they would sometimes be awakened by the approaching buzzing of a motorboat with a troop of merry thieves on board, who assumed the village was totally abandoned. All in all, a terrific time: driving around, hilarious evenings in the tavern, fish to catch by the pound just by lowering a net in front of the opening by the dike, idiotic games with a pig that was running around, the Handelsblad sent a crate of oranges, and naturally going swimming, jumping into the water, which they did right from …

The cousin, a little uncertain now, had begun to pull at her lip.

“Oh, I’m boring you.”

“Not at all! Which they did right from … yes?”

Armanda had already stopped looking at the storyteller some time ago, but as the account began to pull her in, she had turned her eyes toward her father, her mother, and her brother. She saw her father pick up a matchbox and examine it carefully, while her mother bent forward with a lifeless smile to pour some cream into Jacob’s coffee. In the meantime she heard, as did her parents, how the cousin’s fiancé and his colleague had jumped right off the makeshift landing behind the pastor’s house to go for a swim. Of course, only when the water was as clear as glass, and with their eyes open, because as her fiancé had said, man, you had no idea what was floating around down there!

At that very moment everyone looked up, laughing and saying hello. Sjoerd had come in, a little late, he’d had some things to do in the city after dinner. Armanda, who had hardly been able to move for the last fifteen minutes, felt a surge of relief go through her. With a sense of everything’s-okay-now she got to her feet to take the empty coffee cups into the kitchen, knowing that Sjoerd would take up his duties as son-in-law at the sideboard in the back room where the bottles and glasses were standing ready. As the two of them did the rounds shortly afterward with wine, vermouth, egg liqueur, and gin, most of the guests barely detected any difference between this and earlier parties here in the house, and after the first glasses nobody saw any difference at all.

Shortly after eleven the door to the living room opened. A little barefoot creature with dark sleepy eyes came toddling in: Nadja. The entire assembled company immediately stopped all conversations, looked at the child, laughed and cooed, and in general presented a picture that would make anyone wonder what kind of spooky effect it would have on a stone-sober almost-three-year-old. But — at this moment the little one discovered the face of her mother and steered for a pair of open arms.