Margriet de Moor - The Storm

“Mister Cau!”

She couldn’t recognize his face. She had no idea what was driving him. Madness? A despairing soul? It didn’t interest her. She bent down as if approaching a trained animal and touched his arm. He seemed to understand, to decode it at once: a woman with her hair down loose and hanging over her shoulders in strands, a voice that still addressed him in a formal way but nonetheless was in command. She was holding a tangle of flax rope in her hands.

A moment later Lidy and the man were standing at the west window.

No thought of home, not one. Only the question: Will we manage it? The ease with which one self takes a step back, allowing another to take precedence. Not twenty-four hours before, she had been the wife of a future banker and mother of a future primary school pupil, high school pupil, student … now the only thing that interested her was the Stygian panorama of sea and sky — both in motion, southward, chasing desperately past the house. Izak Hocke’s diesel tractor was drowning in them. How in God’s name to get these little figures, ten, twenty yards away, into the house? They were wedging a large piece of driftwood against the side of the trailer. They had managed to make themselves heard over the howl of the wind, screaming that they needed a rope to save them. Following the farmer’s wife’s directions, she had gone searching for one in the middle of a heap of the most unlikely things — never before had she seen a schoolbag made of wood.

Lidy. Cau. However the relationship between the two of them had been formed, it was stable enough for her to know what tasks belonged to each of them. She pulled the window inward till it was wide open and held it firm with both hands. He was short and no longer young, but he had the strength of two men; he paused for a few moments to assess the situation and then slung the rope, which he’d fastened at one end to a roof beam, out into the night. The old woman was also standing by.

Of course, no. Doesn’t happen that way. The three of them at the window realized this as clearly as the people in the trailer with the water foaming as it climbed its sides; they had been freezing for so long already that they had forgotten their own terror. The rope sank. While they were hauling it back in again, Cau and Lidy saw a small, stocky figure stand up, arms wide.

It was the crippled boy. He leapt into the water and plowed his way thrashing toward the house. Lidy laid the last tiny remnant of her detached carelessness on ice. From now until the moment they could pull him up over the windowsill, all she could think of was, would the boy make it?

A troll! was the first thought that came to her mind as the boy stood before them, dripping wet.

They had pulled him out of the water, yet to her it seemed as if he had abruptly pushed his way into the house by himself, his entire character expressing itself in his arms and legs. Light and shadow played over his face, which was scratched and bleeding and reminded Lidy of something very familiar, whether out of her own life story or not. When one feels at home with something one encounters, a certain gentleness, then one loves that gentleness, and it becomes one’s own. Life is no longer life without it. She was not thinking for a moment of her own child, this tiny signal from a faraway place. Here and now she wanted to dab carefully at this battered face with a cloth, the hair too, and press a kiss against it.

Without looking up, he pushed her hand away.

“Onto my belt, now,” he instructed, teeth chattering, chin down to his chest.

A child’s voice, she heard. He and Cau wrapped the rescue line around his waist and he insisted that they also tie it to his belt with a loop, for safety’s sake.

“Are you sure? Can you really do it again?” asked Lidy, who was no longer trying to meet the boy’s eyes, noticing only that his whole body was trembling.

He looked sideways for a moment. Irritated? Or was he merely half-blinded by the stinging water in his eyes? She took his hand and stroked it, waiting for him to pull back, but he didn’t right away.

“We’ll hold tight to you with the rope.”

A smile, as if she had said something idiotic.

They paid out the line. For the first few yards she could still see him, then he seemed to vanish under the flotsam and jetsam, then, if she wasn’t mistaken, she saw his head break the surface of the water again. Relief. Then nothing more. Nothing but the passing minutes that seemed to go very slowly. The present can push itself so far into the foreground that everything that has happened before, the entire story, becomes a hallucination that lacks all conviction.

Weddings often suddenly bring together two families who do not know each other, but when Sjoerd and Armanda got married, intimate bonds already existed between their relatives. Nonetheless something occurred that frequently happens at large family parties, particularly weddings: a deepening of mutual feelings and the real confidence that these will endure.

It was a sunny afternoon in May. Flecks of light danced off the blue damask tablecloth, a wedding present. The doors to the little balcony on the street were open. On the narrow side of the oval table Armanda was laying out photographs and sorting them, barefoot, wearing a dress of checked muslin that had belonged to Lidy. She had pulled the garment quickly out of a cupboard and slipped it on, because the sun on the windowpanes was making the house warmer and warmer; the photos were waiting on the table. That very particular starting-today-everything-is-different mood of the wedding guests soon fades for most people, but not everyone. Armanda lifted her head. The kettle on the stove in the kitchen at the end of the hall began to sing. She was expecting her mother. Armanda went into the kitchen, rinsed out the teapot with boiling water, poured the rest of the water onto the tea leaves, put the cups and some cookies on the tray, and encountered in all these little routines what was new in herself, the mysterious thing that most people around her had a word for, whether spoken innocently or ironically: wife . The doorbell rang.

“Wonderful!” said Nadine Brouwer a few minutes later. “Gorgeous, oh, and look at that one!” She laid her hand against her neck and glanced from the photos, each of which she picked up for a moment, to her daughter and back again. She looked fresh and rested in a bright red dress in a dotted material that set off her still-girlish figure. Her upswept hair, ash-brown, showed no hint of gray.

Armanda, sitting beside her mother at the table, took another look at her wedding photographs. Her mother’s profile, with its fine lines, and her candid blue eyes, radiated a delight beyond words onto the photographs and also of course onto the day that they commemorated, May 3, 1955. Yes, thought Armanda initially, my wedding day, my wedding day, what a celebration, look, here we are at the town hall, here we are at the church, and she had the urge to relive it all with her mother.

A virgin as she left her parents’ house to begin a marriage. In white, yes of course, anyone could have told her that, why not, in a beautiful white dress, therefore, but maybe better not to have a long one, and with a little white hat, no veil, and of course no traditional entrance on the arm of her father: five years before, Lidy and Sjoerd had walked into the Amstel church arm in arm, she in a lime-green suit with a loose jacket that came down over her stomach, to enjoy the organ playing and God’s blessing simply because they were so festive. It had been a beautiful June day, Armanda remembered. Clear sunless weather without a breath of wind, the kind that never shows up in photographs.