Margriet de Moor - The Storm

“You’re really wrong,” said Betsy that evening to her husband. “It was dry all afternoon.”

Leo had told her he was astonished that Nadja and her playmates had been allowed out into the park in this weather. He jerked his head toward the rain and the third-floor window at the beginning of the almost pitch-dark Prinsengracht, bare elms, black ruffled water.

“Which wasn’t in the forecast,” Betsy continued, as she followed his glance from her position slumped on the sofa with her swollen feet up on a cushion. “It was supposed to be unsettled. Rain showers, cold air coming in from the east, possibility of snow. But the children were determined that it was dry and way above freezing.”

So they had wanted to go outdoors, right after the cake with its six little candles in a layer of frosting. But mother and aunt, who was acting as her assistant, proposed hide-and-seek. It must have been shortly before three when Armanda, standing under the bust of Samuel Sarphati with her hands over her face, began to count, eeny, meeny, miny, mo, while Betsy, also gamely keeping her eyes shut, and wrapped in a warm coat on a park bench, listened and checked that the children had disappeared before the rhyme, a warning now, came to an end.

“I’m coming!”

It’s strange that they didn’t find each other quite quickly. To start with, Nadja was just crouching in a rhododendron bush behind the first gravel path. Soft earth under her feet, she looked down at it absentmindedly, completely focused on not being seen, and didn’t allow herself to notice until some time later that everyone was calling for her, which wasn’t part of the game.

The first thing that not being seen involves, as everyone knows, is not looking, either. Nadja moved backward, her head down against her chest, tripped over a small twig, rolled down a sand hill for several yards, and at some point found a new hiding place in a shallow hollow. Next to it was an old oak tree. That’s where the decision was finally made that had been coming for some time, and the argument that clinched it began with B as in beetle or F as in fly or M as in moth. She didn’t bother to work out which forms of life were now twinkling like a giant handful of precious stones at her feet and moving in some mysterious way. The winter had been mild up till now. Last night De Bilt had recorded the warmest temperature of the century: fifty-two degrees. In any case, it had been raining for days. The enormous insect nest and the bit of the hollow tree it had been in could have fallen down only in the last few months, for the overwintering beetles, flies, bees, and moths had just decided they needed to move on, crawling cautiously at first, then hopping wildly or flying. Oh, marvelous! Astonished, Nadja followed the rainbow-colored creatures, blue, green, some of them even fire red, which were suddenly disappearing as if by magic. Some of them flew up on their transparent tiny wings and hovered in the air so close to her nose that she could see their glittering eyes, and then suddenly — gone. Others crawled around with mysterious single-mindedness, not panicked, quite comfortably, showing her their powerful back legs, their faces elongated into little snouts, their hard, smooth bodies, some of them with stingers, and then suddenly … oh, where did they go? Darkness had already fallen when Nadja, at peace with her decision, went up the Van Woustraat and then down again, and then turned right at the corner where the green neon light was, toward the Amstel dike.

“I just don’t understand,” said Sjoerd that evening after the visitors had gone. Grandpa Brouwer and Uncle Jacob had given the birthday girl a last surprise with a set of tiddlywinks and a Little Black Sambo doll before she went to bed, and Grandma Brouwer, who had already been there during the day, had come back with them for a short moment, to drink a toast to the little monkey. “Absolutely not!” Leaning back from the dining room table balanced on the two back legs of his chair, he looked at Armanda pacing up and down the room with a glass of rosé in her hand. When the child had been missing for more than an hour and a half, she had called him in the office. Pale, his hair standing up every which way, he was in the car turning in to their street when he too saw Nadja jump off the bike, flinch away from her mother, and run. And then leap into the arms of Grandma Nadine, who had squatted down to catch her.

Nadja must have seen herself surrounded by a ring of wet, distraught faces. And from all sides, a slew of questions, which she answered with a smile. It had turned very cold. Everything pointed to a lot more rain or even snow.

The birth took ruthless precedence. It took precedence first over the darkness; the pains had started, quietly to begin with, in the early hours of the morning, but now they were serious and could no longer be concealed, and dawn was breaking. When the enormously pregnant woman had arrived in the attic, where the strangest atmosphere reigned — a combination of imminent rescue and the awareness that death was just around the corner — she had been helped by many hands to lie down on a mattress laid on a bed frame. They had covered her with a horse blanket. A woman, whose accent defined her as being a stranger to this area, had spread a heavy coat over the bed by way of addition, then laid herself down beside her, shoes and all: “Come close, it’ll warm you up!” The woman had obeyed. While the other one dropped off to sleep almost instantly, she — her name was Cathrien Padmos, born Clement — had felt the cold retreat and transform itself into a sensation that she was descending a stone staircase, step by step, into a comfortably warm cave. Then everything started again. Uncontrollable now, in its own rhythm that made no allowances for the weather.

It was coming up on 9 a.m. The attic stank of mud, wet clothes, animal dung, probably rat droppings too, and the bucket behind the door to the staircase. The temperature couldn’t have been much above freezing. The west window, one side of which was nailed shut with boards, admitted a first light of a leaden greenish tinge perfectly in keeping with the general aura of death and destruction. Everyone here, whether asleep or awake, dazed or fully conscious, felt the swaying of the house walls and knew that the undiminished power of the storm was close to tearing off the roof. In the bed, which had been pushed deep under the eaves to protect from drafts, forty-year-old Cathrien Padmos began to breathe heavily for the third time in her married life, or to put it more precisely, the cervix was in its last stages of dilation. To her left, a powerfully built man, Albert Zesgever, who had crawled in with the rest of them, seemed not to notice anything yet.

On the other hand, her bedmate on the right grasped the situation. Lidy raised her head. Where am I, she thought for a moment, then she saw, next to her, a sweat-drenched face that almost instantly took on the dull look that she remembered in herself, whether she had registered it or not at the time, with no choice or will of her own. “How often are they coming?” she asked, as she saw the face soften.

“One behind the other. There’s no pause now,” the other one said, before she threw herself onto her side.

“Oh, then you’re already quite far along!”

Humoring her with false cheer.

This one and that one were now awakening in the attic, and the most unbelievable proof of it was that the air began to smell gloriously of coffee. In a corner, on a sort of improvised dresser made of some cabin trunks with flat lids, the old lady had set up a single-burner camping stove and on it a percolator, a kind of pot with a spout, and a little glass dome that lets you see the coffee bubbling up inside. As she watched her son drive off in the storm the previous night, a tiny mound of humanity perched on enormous tires, Gerarda Hocke had made good use of her fear by carrying every possible thing upstairs. An intelligent old woman, certainly, who remembered one thing above all about a birth, which was that there had to be boiling water. She took the coffee off the flame and poured half of a four-quart milk can of tap water into an enamel pail. Everyday, ordinary actions that tamped down the extremes of the morning. In the daylight this randomly assembled collection of people, who had been as unprepared for the high spring flood as they would have been for war or plague, began to form themselves into a group. Utterly disoriented, they got up off the mattresses or off the floor. For the first time they could now see where they were and who were their companions. The dog, large and brown, his head on his paws and staring straight ahead of him, was giving a not unpleasant imitation of being at peace. Some of them were aware that the goose hadn’t left the heels of the farmer’s wife from the first moment on, others now noticed her, white, with brilliant orange feet, as she stood for a moment then hunkered down again. The first to take up his post by the window again was Cornelius Jaeger. Soon the rest of the grown men were standing there with him. Fundamentally it was the imminent birth that was imposing a certain order on this household.