Margriet de Moor - The Storm

One beautiful day in May 1962, in an Amsterdam bedroom, a man who could only describe himself as contented and happy both in his private and professional life awakened with the immortal words in his head: my wife doesn’t understand me . Nonplussed, he rolled onto his side. Armanda was still asleep, on her back, chin pointing up in the air, a position she’d taught herself to use, initially with playful light-heartedness, after reading a newspaper article about double chins. Where did these words come from? Heavy and awkward, they ran through his mind. He stretched out an arm; she was wearing a short nightgown she called a babydoll. He could see the beginnings of her responsive smile, because the unbleached linen curtains let a lot of light into the room.

“Yes, that’s better,” she’d decided when they were settling on the decoration of the new house. “Now maybe we’ll wake up early by ourselves as the children do.”

His hand slid over her sweet, soft belly. Since the birth of their youngest she hadn’t quite managed to get back to her old weight.

At breakfast half an hour later, the words were submerged but didn’t really disappear in all the busy activity of a family starting a new day with quite a lot of noise. On top of this the radio was on, to give them the news. French underground atomic test in the Sahara. He reached for the milk bottle — the first thing he did every morning was drink a glass of cold milk — and looked absentmindedly at Armanda in her blue mohair bathrobe as she cut a piece of buttered bread into little pieces for Allan, sitting beside her all big and plump in his high chair. Some men love their wives less when they’re sitting opposite in their bathrobes, unwashed and uncombed, but he had always liked the blurring of this line between table and bed. “Stop it!” she was saying to an angelic little blond girl as she took the tin of rusks away from her without even looking — his favorite, four-year-old Violet, who gave her father a smile as soon as she saw him looking at her, with such sparkling eyes that no movie star could have topped it.

“Open your mouth and close your eyes!”

It was Nadja, smelling strongly of eau de cologne. He obeyed. Last downstairs, Nadja laid her cheek against his and put a piece of nougat, her passion of the moment, into his mouth. Since the move, during which she had come across the photo of her mother in the Hotel Kirke, in a cardboard box full of old odds and ends, she had, amazingly, become demonstrably more loving and good-natured.

Heaven knows why, but he got to his feet to turn up the volume on the news. Chancellor Adenauer considers the conversations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union over the status of Berlin to have lost direction. Dutch troops dispatched to New Guinea on the frigate Zuiderkruis . The Upper Chamber, by a vote of 78 to 58, has passed a revision to the law permitting the sale of fresh bread to begin at 9:30 in the morning instead of 10 a.m.

He raised his head to observe an area of the wall above the radio: the building of a dam to control the Grevelingen at Schouwen-Duiveland has been resumed after an interruption. The Delta Commission expects this fourth major stage in the eventual closing of the sea arms of Zeeland and Zuid-Holland to be completed within two years.

“The weather …”

While he listened in the bright dining room — Armanda was going to have the wall broken through to the kitchen before fall — to the forecast about the cold front from the northwest that would envelop the country during the course of the day, he was seized by an impulsive fantasy masquerading as a totally rational decision. Quite strong winds in the coastal provinces, he heard, as he wiped his mouth and got to his feet. The Grevelingen was an easy drive if you took the highway through Noord-Brabant.

Shortly afterward he was in the car on the Rokin. He parked in front of the entrance to the bank and went to the room adjacent to his office on the second floor to give his secretary instructions for the day. A quarter of an hour later, en route to The Hague, he was hearing the words again that he had woken up with this morning. And the gentle, inviting, absolutely undramatic nostalgia that they contained. Sjoerd Blaauw and Armanda Brouwer had now been married for seven years. This was a fact. But when he, Sjoerd, thought consciously about himself as a married man, he automatically included in this a previous past, as free as a dream that he yearned for, the way you yearn for something that one day slipped between your fingers and is gone.

Armanda was lovable. She was damned difficult. She was an angel in bed. She stuck her head in the pillow and complained in a muffled voice that she had a headache. In the first years her eagerness when he came home was sometimes so blatant, and she let herself fall into the sofa with her arms outstretched in such open invitation that he actually felt more like having a simple conversation with her about, say, football. “Did you know they’re broadcasting a big match— mmm —tonight on the radio?” Baffled look from her, and he turns toward the living room table and goes on: “Starts at eight.” Six months after Violet was born, she was back to teaching three mornings a week, and the moment his mother-in-law came in to look after the baby, she disappeared to the Barlaeus school, in a rush, cheerfully, dressed appropriately in a tweed jacket that seemed made for a young English teacher.

Then came the time she liked to provoke him with the question “Who am I?” and lay her hands over his eyes. Playful results, of course, and a suitable response from him that necessitated no compliments. Shortly before Allan was born, she said she wanted to move, and immediately. Bad evening. October, wind howling on the roof. They were building or hanging something up in the attic, doesn’t matter which, when she laid the hammer aside. After they had looked at each other for a moment, listening to the wind, and she had said, “It’s too Lidy-like for me,” he had snorted once in the way that was typical of him and then replied idly, “Oh — maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to look for somewhere on the ground floor.”

“Not a bad idea,” she continued as she turned around heavily to go back to work. “And we’re not going to take a thing, not a single piece of furniture, from this house when we go.”

Nadja thought it was terrific. An eleven-year-old girl — skinny as a beanpole, but with a red plait down her back as thick as your wrist, and absolutely no freckles — can happily say Yes! when told that her entire life is going to be stood on its head. When it took place, her little brother, Allan, was three years old. While her mother did a drastic clean-out of the attic, stuffing photos, letters, schoolbooks, and reports into garbage bags, Nadja was on her knees in the rectangle of light thrown by one of the attic windows, with a photo in her hands.

“Hey, Mama!”

Armanda went over and immediately recognized the family photograph that Jacomina Hocke, with whom she was no longer in contact, had sent her as a keepsake.

“Who’s the child you’re sitting there with?”

Armanda, without hesitating, her voice involuntarily outraged, said quietly, “That’s not me.”

“Not you?”

The astonished forefinger of a girl who has never been told a thing about an exchange of mothers. In the beginning her father and the whole family were in too much disarray; later, having accustomed themselves to the slightly edited family story, the new version with all the details that fit perfectly, had even been added to, they never got around to it. But in their hearts they surely must have known, didn’t they, that at some point they would have to tell Nadja everything.