Margriet de Moor - The Storm

Neither of them had been able to understand it.

The wedding banquet in the Geldersekade was still going on when they escaped at around five thirty. After they had changed clothes at number 36 and number 77 respectively, they put their luggage in the trunk of the Skoda and began their honeymoon journey to Normandy. First stopping point was a village near Rotterdam, a surprise for Armanda, just like the beautiful hotel there where Sjoerd had made reservations. They arrived at around eight. Along the way they had still been talking about the party at first, then, when the car left the main road, Armanda, showing her surprise, had gamely read out the place-names of the little towns they passed through, Alblasserdam, Ridderkerk, while the bright blue sky turned slowly to a deeper blue. She awoke on her husband’s shoulder in front of the hotel, it was still light, but there was a thin layer of mist over the flagstones and the surrounding area. They dealt with the formalities at reception, took the elevator, walked down a long, brilliantly lit corridor, and came to their room, outside which the porter was just lifting their suitcases off a gold-colored luggage cart.

It was idiotic, but the moment the door closed, neither of them knew how to deal with the sudden proximity of the other. Okay, go and stand close. Armanda was happy that he immediately threw his arms around her; she cuddled up to him, kissed him somewhere on the face, now I must be happy, she probably thought, and probably that’s what he thought too. Free at last! At last we can do and not do whatever we want! Meantime they avoided looking directly at each other, Armanda even kept her eyes closed and found herself thinking, whether she wanted to or not, about her suitcase with its tightly packed, freshly ironed clothes, some of which she ought to hang up right away. Sjoerd, over her shoulder, looked out of the window.

He left her standing there.

“Take a look, see what it’s like outside.”

Of course she followed him. “Beautiful,” she said as she slipped off her shoes and felt how small she was next to him on the soft carpet. They leaned side by side on the window bench. Dusk was falling, the sky turned yellow, and they were looking at a rolling countryside, meadows, trees, with a broad stream of water running through it, flat and pale in the mist, and on the other bank a row of eight or nine windmills. What was there to say about it? It was nature, the windmills included, as they stood there in a pensive row, their vanes motionless despite the weak to middling northwest wind, fixed, the sails rolled up. A few minutes later, when they were lying in each other’s arms in bed, cheek to cheek, Sjoerd still saw the windmills in his mind’s eye, and Armanda was realizing that there were two, three dresses and a blouse that she really had to hang up right away.

“Just a moment,” she said and rolled away from him.

Without paying any further attention to him, as if she were alone in the room, Armanda opened her suitcase and began carefully to unfold several pieces of clothing at the shoulders, to inspect them and then hang them up. Sjoerd listened to the hangers being pushed this way and that, heard bathwater running a little later, and dozed off in a scent of soap and perfume. The next thing that happened was a naked Armanda tiptoeing to the bed, and then an Armanda in a nightshirt tiptoeing to the bed again. To take a good, long look.

All he had taken off was his shirt, which she picked up off the floor. Then she began to fumble with his shoelaces. It is perfectly possible to undress a sleeping man without his noticing, but as soon as you pull down his pants, he will wake up for a moment unless he’s dead drunk. Sjoerd, without a moment’s thought, crawled under the covers and sank back happily into a deep sleep. Armanda went round the room switching off the lamps, then slipped into bed on her side. She dropped off to sleep too, a heavy, abandoned sleep, though with interruptions. The first time she awoke, she lay there, surrounded by a glowing warmth, in the pitch darkness, and began to actually pant when she realized that Sjoerd was starting to caress her the way he had once a long time before, in the bedroom at number 36, when an oh-so-unemphatic ring at the doorbell had interrupted them. To heighten her desire, she thought back to it in detail, to this postponement, intending, with superstitious naïveté, to have everything from back then happen all over again, this time with a happy ending. When she opened her eyes for the second time, she knew immediately that she was alone in bed. There was tobacco smoke in the room, and it was still dark, but not completely. As she allowed her mind to dawdle peacefully over the fact that what was supposed to happen had happened, she heard the wind, strong now and blowing from the west, whistle against the wall of the building, and she turned her head away.

He was standing at the window with his back to her. Ground mist, mist on the water, and a row of water mills, their lower parts invisible, their vanes with the white starched sails spinning madly, joyously, in circles. What effect does such an image have on a young woman who has just woken up? If she saw the tip of his cigarette glow from time to time and then disappear again, she was lucky.

For three days they felt almost no desire for each other, and Armanda found herself ugly. Then she noticed that whether the moment was suitable or not, her eyes would linger whenever she looked at him.

“Come with me,” he said on the fourth day, when for a moment she found herself unable to utter another word. They were already in a hotel in the Strandboulevard in Houlgate and had made love on all three nights.

She came to his side, he took her hand, and they climbed the path through the dunes and up to their room.

How is that possible, she wondered some time later.

The bedroom revealed a certain customary disorder in the middle of the afternoon, and through the window you could hear the sea. She liked hearing her husband snoring on her shoulder with an innocent face. How is it possible? she thought, by which she meant: Three days, it’s only three days, two days before yesterday, the day before yesterday, then yesterday, I’ve never heard or read anywhere that as time elapses, it exposes each of us to its manipulations and its unmistakable side effects, though we have no idea where these come from and how they work. The way we kissed first! Then took off our clothes so uninhibitedly, so fast, so urgently!

On the floor a man’s shirt, a top-quality pair of light gray trousers, men’s shoes — no, no women’s shoes — and a pair of panties, obviously toe-kicked right over into the corner behind the vanity, where they would have to be searched for later; the long shadow of a tree outside in the inner courtyard; inside, another piece of clothing, a worn checked dress that carried some vague memory, but one that wasn’t damaging to anybody. In bed the pair of lovers who belonged to these belongings.

Armanda: for the first time in her life as a married woman, experiencing the long pang of what is also known as la petite mort .

Years later, when Lidy had been long dead, the experts were united about one thing: it could have been worse. Had the moon, for example, been close to the earth, as it had been two weeks earlier on January 18, then the astronomical high tide could have used its pull to rise almost another two feet. An absolutely exceptional spring tide would then have been a possibility.

The possibility that did occur during this night was the following. A farm, between Zierikzee and Dreischor. The sea, that had risen to within three feet of the attic floor. Moonlight, ear-deadening noise, a wind now blowing in short blasts, that seemed to temper the movement of the waves in the deeper water over the fields even as it reinforced the speed of the current coming over the road. The great mass of the water pounded against the sides and back of the trailer, which miraculously had not yet cracked to pieces. Inside the house, Cau, Lidy, and Gerarda Hocke were asking themselves if it might be possible for these people to ferry themselves across using a door to one of the stalls that was floating around as a makeshift raft.