Margriet de Moor - The Storm

“They’ll be getting gray concrete memorial slabs,” the man replied, without raising his head from a worn notebook he was holding. “Fifteen by twenty.” The foreman scribbled something down, paused for thought, and then, as if announcing the result of this meditation, said, “And then they’ll be getting black lettering with the personal details of the dead. Name, place, and date of birth, date and place of death.”

Then Sjoerd asked about the still-unoccupied graves.

The digger had looked at him with a certain kindness in his eyes.

“They get a stone too.”

And after a moment, as if he heard their unspoken question, he nodded and said, “Absolutely. With their own inscription too, though of course in these cases the date of death and the fact of death itself aren’t one hundred percent certain.”

The three of them kept looking at him.

“So to be safe, we’ll add the word missing to the inscription.”

As they walked away down the narrow, trampled paths, it had suddenly started to rain much harder. They began to hurry. Armanda took a last look around the pathetic burial ground, which she couldn’t ever imagine looking like a normal, friendly churchyard. Those gravestones for the invisible dead. Why not inscribe presumed dead on them instead of missing?

They were in the train heading for Rotterdam when the idea came to them about a memorial service for Lidy, a farewell that now, ten days later, was taking place in the Amstel church, where the weather was making the air insufferably sticky, and Armanda had started to cry openly, her tears streaming down her cheeks as the individual details being cited in the ongoing words went through her head again.

A snack cart had come by. Hungry, she’d asked for coffee and rolls. Staring through the rain-soaked window at the fields, she’d then thought out loud, “Once we’re home, we ought to do something for Lidy. What do you think, something in her memory or …”

As she looked away from the landscape again, she saw that Betsy and Sjoerd, sitting opposite her, were nodding in agreement, almost delighted.

“Good idea,” said Sjoerd, biting into his roll. “Yes, why should we wait for the endless legal procedures to drag themselves out?”

But then, chewing quickly and swallowing, he had given her another look, so openly that she had immediately understood his question had not been a question at all but a bitter male reproach. They had still not gone to bed together. Oh God, she had thought. What a torture, for me but most of all for him. For she was not so naïve as not to know that any man would consider it a scandal and a crying injustice for a woman living more or less continuously under his roof, who had made clear more than once that she had nothing against being kissed and fondled by him, nonetheless to keep suddenly pulling away each time like an awkward bride, an unbearable tease.

In recent days she’d been trying whenever possible to avoid spending time with him in number 36.

She had looked down. The rumble of the train was intoxicating. Sjoerd and his half sister began to discuss the process that would soon allow Lidy, as everyone hoped, to be finally declared legally dead. Armanda leaned back, her body language indicating that she had switched off. It had always been difficult, she knew, to obtain a death certificate for someone who had clearly gone missing. Ten years had to elapse before a declaration of probable death could be wrung from a court, after which the heirs could raise specific but very modest claims and a surviving spouse would be permitted to marry again. Armanda heard them quietly touch on the law of 1949, which had allowed more than one hundred thousand of those missing in the war to be reclassified as dead and entered into the register of deaths in the local government offices nearest their former homes. They talked very dispassionately and matter-of-factly, perhaps because Betsy, who was Jewish on her mother’s side, had already had her own dealings with this law and its macabre stipulations. This tragic law, the result of intensive efforts by the state, soon had to stand as also valid for a new list of missing persons, shorter than the original one, but still encompassing more than eight hundred names.

“All that’s needed is a stamp,” she heard Sjoerd say, “and then they can immediately apply the wording to anyone living in the provinces of Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland, Noord-Brabant, and Zeeland between January thirty-first and February tenth, and for whom no further proof of existence could be found.”

She was weeping uncontrollably now. Her mother passed her a handkerchief. This gesture by her gentle, innocent-looking mother shamed her in a way she couldn’t define, and she became even more upset. She felt as if the conversation in the train was now echoing through the entire church, its bone-dry words transformed into something quite different in this heavy atmosphere, exposing their true meaning for everyone to hear.

Lidy’s farewell was also her, Armanda’s, engagement party. The sister is dead, long live the sister.

Armanda rubbed the palms of her hands across her face, licked the teardrops from her lips — I miss you, Lidy, you know that, oh no, Lidy, don’t let it be true, be alive again — and who knows what further display her distress would have prompted, had she not been jolted back to life by the force of a new text.

“The wormwood and the gall! My soul dwells on them and is cast down.”

God! Armanda’s eyes turned to the preacher up in the pulpit, who was looking extremely imposing. How do you mean us to take this? Leaning perilously far forward, here was someone engaged in reiterating Jeremiah’s song of sorrow, working it, expertly tailoring it to today’s occasion. What I mean is, it’s about time for you to stop all this. How? thinks Armanda cunningly. You know perfectly well. Wormwood and gall, all the wretched thoughts that do not make any soul more magnanimous, including yours. And think of the little one who stayed at home this morning! Nadja! Yes, precisely. Should she have to grow up in such misery-ridden surroundings? God has taken your sister from us, and it is according to His plan. Stop. Pay attention. God’s cruelty is a great taboo. Let go of your narrow-minded outrage and reflect that His ways are not your ways. God encompasses even those of us who are of unsound mind. And today He is giving you His simple commandment. Let her go. Live your life.

How? she moaned. Just tell me, man …

Even in the church it could be felt that not the slightest breeze was stirring outside. Breathing in was still feasible, but breathing out was measurably more difficult. All of a sudden the daylight vanished. Then, just before the final blessing, as if the one God had been unable to wait until the other God had finished speaking, there was a deafening crash of the kind that makes your heart jump into your throat, and the thunder broke. The family in their two front rows got to their feet, shocked.

After that an unceremonious procession formed. Armanda didn’t wait around. Green eyes glittering feverishly, drops of sweat on her nose, smooth fringe glued to her forehead, the spitting image of her sister. They’re all looking at me, she thought, naïvely perhaps but not wrong, and she looked with them. Look, look … all she could see was an image of herself. To the terrible din of the organ, overridden by cannon shots of thunder, she steered carefully, like a drunk, for the exit.

A few yards to one side of the porch the funeral cars were waiting. Everyone ran to them through the downpour. Armanda jumped into the first one she came to and let herself fall into the backseat. One of the Brouwer aunts slid hastily sideways and a Langjouw uncle, Leo, leapt in after her. “A beer!” he cried, as the car started moving, and Armanda answered, “Oh, God, yes please!”