Margriet de Moor - The Storm

And obviously it took priority over death and despair. Although Cathrien Padmos must know that her husband and her five-year-old daughter had already drowned, she wasn’t thinking of them. She could feel none of the terrible grief that must be there inside her, only a very particular pain that unlike all others is not the harbinger of death. Only now, as it announced itself again, did she remember it from eight years ago.

She had married early, a boy from the next village, when she was only sixteen. An intimation of this had come to her on July 3, 1930. As she was cycling that evening to Dreischor in the low last light of the glowing red sunset, she had suddenly had the unsettling thought that tonight, at the weekly choir practice of Soli Deo Gloria, she might meet her future husband. And indeed, as became apparent, there was a new voice among the baritones. Age: twenty. Profession: ordinary worker on the farm of Anthonie Hocke, Izak’s father. His name: Johan Padmos. Cathrien Clement was strongly built and dark blond (her hair the same color as the coats of the farm dogs around her) — a girl of the kind who knows what she wants — to get married and then get pregnant as soon as possible. When that didn’t happen, not after the first month of marriage, not after the first year and not after the second, third, or fourth, it became clear to her that she was facing the most important decision of her life. Unhappiness or happiness. The farm girl, who worked as a day laborer, determined to make happiness her calling in the most emphatic way, and was supported in it by her husband, even-tempered by nature, who identified totally with his work and his status on a famous farm where he soon succeeded in becoming one of the six permanent farmworkers. In August, when she rode into the farmyard at vespers on her bike, she saw her husband’s work team laboring under the black cloud of smoke of the colossal five-foot reaping-and-binding machine. They were stacking the sheaves in the German manner, crosswise by fours, and then putting three on top with the ears of the wheat pointing downward. Not a communicative man, her husband, but in the evenings, if the wind was blowing with unexpected force, he would say, “Not the faintest chance,” and she would know what he meant, and would have an image of the same landscape as he did. Black sky, a path with extensive meadows to either side, and farther down, the stubbled fields covered with the sheaves of wheat stacked in this fashion, laughing off the attacks of the strong-to-stormy northwest wind. To their mutual astonishment, after eight years with her husband, who had now risen to become foreman, she found herself pregnant. Seven years after that, pregnant again.

No, nobody was thinking of that anymore. But they were thinking about the boy sitting half-concealed behind one of the roof beams. Someone had put a pair of thick socks on his feet, and Hocke had squatted down once beside him to say something nice that ended with “lady apple,” did he want one from the basket where they were stored here in winter, but he shook his head and went to use the bucket for the second time. Adriaan Padmos had just turned eight. Such a child is sometimes quick to recognize what is familiar in strange things, and squats there with an unreadable expression, all hunched up, his knees under his chin, and looks at his socks.

Nobody, on the other hand, was paying attention to the van de Velde girl anymore. She was dead, and they had laid the little body in the space between two cupboards stuffed full of old clothes which were now coming in incredibly handy. Work gear made of napped cotton flannel underneath, summer skirt with flowers on it over the top. Better this way, yes? Last night the girl had been brought this far by the superhuman efforts of her parents, and bringing her any farther was beyond human capacity. For the moment there was nothing more to be done. The father, Nico van de Velde, stood with the others at the dirty window, outside which dirty things were happening. He and Zesgever were smoking, sharing one of the available cigarettes, which were being strictly rationed. The mother was attending the birth.

Lethargically, but like a night insect drawn to the light behind a kitchen windowpane, Laurina van de Velde had come closer, and was now looking apologetically, perhaps because she was trembling and making no attempt to stop it, at the mounded thing on the wide bed. She knew, had she been capable of thought, that she’d been through something similar, but the event, the actual image of it, where was it? For a moment she caught Lidy’s eye, as Lidy stretched her back against the headboard. Did Lidy want to say something? She had had her child, who would be her only one, at the age of twenty-one.

It had been in fall, a beautiful sunny fall day. They had sent word to Nico in the field at Hocke’s when things were that far along. He had left the Smythe, a chunky English mechanical sower with an unworkable operating width of six feet, standing. You boys keep going with the winter wheat. What you sow, you reap at the appointed time, I’m off. Nico was an agile, well-set man who was often able to rouse his wife, who was inclined to melancholy, with his abruptness. “Be a little more cheerful, kiddo,” he’d say when he got home, saw her looking absentminded, and took her face with the sky-blue eyes he’d fallen in love with in his hands, or again: “Stop thinking so much! Both feet on the floor, that’s it!”

“Where? Here? On this floor?” she once replied, more bewitched by him than convinced, and set her feet in their soft socks on top of his. She was a woman in a permanent state of disquiet, that was her normal mood. Uneasy because of the machines that her husband worked with, uneasy because of the horses that could kick out backward, uneasy because of the heavy backbreaking labor of pulling out the flax roots in mid-July, handwork he excelled at. In the last month he had joined the Reds and started talking about “comrades,” balling his fists or holding up a finger, which bothered her even more. What would happen when the farmer, Hocke, heard about this, and what would become of Dina and her other future children if their father was put out on the street?

So now she looked at the imminent birth and felt nothing, not even the slightest disquiet. She glanced at Cathrien Padmos’s face, which she had known since she was a child, saw how she was sweating, tried to hold her hand, accepted that she was pushed away by the other woman, perhaps because the latter needed to retch, and meantime was so desperately cold that she couldn’t make her mind function in any normal way at all. When Lidy asked, “Shouldn’t we find something we can wrap the baby in, the little child, in a minute?” she nodded.

“Good.”

She and Lidy went to one of the two cupboards.

“This?” asked Lidy, holding something woolly.

“Or this?” Laurina hesitated.

A few minutes later, the women gathered around the mother-to-be and Izak Hocke, who for some reason had been summoned to join them, were able to reassure her that they could already see the crown of the little head. It was eleven in the morning. Outside the window of the delivery room was a world that nobody could now imagine being anything other than it was. Murderous, a single surge of gray and brown. That the storm had still not begun to abate after more than twenty-four hours was, meteorologically speaking, to be considered a freak occurrence.

Cathrien Padmos was the type of woman who gives birth to children on her own. She had accepted having a piece of bedding rolled up and pushed against her back, but she wanted none of the hands, the looks, the help that were intended to be of assistance to her but actually worked as its express opposite. She was at the height of her battle with the pain, that invisible enemy, also an angel who numbs and transports one to a faraway place where one can cease thinking about one’s loved ones who are dead, or noticing and realizing it to be significant that the bed one is lying on is standing on a worryingly unstable, swaying attic floor. She raised her head and began to scream uninhibitedly.