Margriet de Moor - The Storm

“Oh. What’s your guess? Fear? Losing a grip on himself? My own guess is that he thought the flood was his own doing. That he was absolutely reclaiming the responsibility for it himself. Not just for the water and, God help us, its effects, but also for the utterly unfamiliar meteorological conditions this weekend, including the astronomical forces associated with them, and the oceanology, because this water had come a very, very long distance.

“Grandiose? But fear can also occur on a grand scale. He arrived too late, basta , at this ramshackle section of the Grevelingen dike which, mind you, he had recently discussed one afternoon in the tavern De Galg with three technical engineers from the hydraulics department, venting his worry and frustration over the state of the embankment, the stone reinforcements, and pushing back against their doubts and fruitlessly pious hopes that all this was surely first and foremost the responsibility of the national authorities. So he reached the dike at a point when all was already lost. Can you imagine this? The wind that was blowing there wasn’t a force of nature, it was the force of his own bad decision, fool that he was, to ignore the classification of ‘dangerous’ that was being broadcast on the radio, put on his good suit, and head for the Hotel Kirke in Zierikzee with his neighbors.

“Cause and effect. They are the Furies, Siamese twins…. This would not have happened, if … But enough of Cau. I stopped watching him, decided that what I wanted was a mouthful of cognac, but there was none left.

“‘Here,’ I heard. It was Albert Zesgever, passing me the tail end of a cigarette that I could still manage to puff on two or three times if I held my fingertips right up to my lips.

“I looked at him, full of sympathy. Tall man, maybe forty. Red face, dark hair that seemed to grow up out of his neck like tarpaper. He was a very coarse man, a poacher, but also someone who could apply artificial fertilizer so finely and evenly by hand that Hocke, for this reason alone, had not yet acquired a mechanical spreader. I am guessing that Zesgever for the rest of his life became someone other than the man who messed around with his wife, which everyone knew, just as they knew how things had got totally out of control the night before.”

“Oh, you mean, the night before, when …”

“Yes,” she would have said. “As the wind reached hurricane speed. You need to know, before I tell you how things went when it hit force eight in the night of January thirty-first to February first, that Zesgever was a drunk, and when he had been drinking, he beat up his wife, Janna Maria. There are always things that set a man off, Albert Zesgever was that way too, and when he was loaded, he always knew whom to blame.

“That evening Janna Maria was sitting at home with her elbow on the table. A kerosene lamp that was turned way down illuminated her face and, to either side, her hands, along with a piece of clothing she had been altering. Outside the window one of those storms was howling that occur every year. It was close to eleven at night, the two children were asleep in clean, ironed pajamas, Zesgever was out somewhere. Because she knew that her marriage was the part of her life that often ended in a thrashing, and because she also knew that this could sometimes be avoided if she appeared to be asleep in the dark, she decided to pick up the lamp and climb the ladder. But suddenly, he was there. A length of the roof guttering was rattling, so she hadn’t heard the front door scraping across the floor. She half turned toward him and saw from the game bag hanging slack across his shoulder that his drunken state was that of a man whose gun hadn’t brought him any luck. The salt marshes behind the dike along the Zuidlangeweg were underwater. What Zesgever, for his part, saw as he came out of his haze was a creature who was radiating fear.

“He was well aware that the whole world, which is to say this little hamlet, saw and judged his abusive conduct harshly. He himself could no longer understand his own rage once he sobered up and came back to his senses. But then he had to endure for days, sometimes even weeks, that Janna Maria’s black eye and split lip made his neighbors and acquaintances lower their voices whenever he was in earshot.

“So tomorrow — Sunday — his father-in-law was supposed to come pay them a visit. Zesgever was terrified of this man, a dike worker and excavator at a nearby freight harbor, thoughtful and friendly to one and all, and he was always at his humblest when they encountered each other. But for now it was still Saturday. The wind is blowing almost relentlessly, but aside from that, everything is quiet. Zesgever takes a few steps, asks something, Janna Maria’s answer is not to the point, and also inaudible over the howling and thundering of the storm. Zesgever immediately focuses on Janna Maria’s white, damp face, and something inside him erupts.

“This time it lasts longer than usual, and is more ferocious, perhaps in tandem with the violent weather. Blows can be delivered with a hand or with a fist. When he stops to catch his breath, she can no longer stand. Then she begins to vomit, lying on her back.

“At first, when he crawls into bed under the eaves still fully dressed, he’s cheered by the rising force of the storm. Janna Maria, dragged upstairs, is lying beside him absolutely motionless, but still warm — isn’t that how it was? Yes, that’s how it was, he knows it, and imagines that for the rest of his life he will know that her head is so close to his ear that in more normal weather he would have heard her breathing. He stretches out and begins to sleep off the booze. What is the happy thought that sticks in his head just before his legs start to turn heavy? “It’s not hard to guess: the old man won’t be coming. In weather like this, the old man absolutely won’t be able to leave his harbor!”

“And you?”

“What do you mean, ‘and you?’”

“Well, how have you changed since then?”

And then she would have looked away from Armanda for a moment (for it would have been Armanda asking these questions) and into the sunny dining room. Next to the window, a vase of purple tulips from the garden. A sleeping tomcat, a fat red thing, lying among the toys on the floor. The smell of freshly brewed coffee wafting in from the kitchen.

“Oh.” She would have reached for the cigarette just lit by her husband. “God, I’ve no idea.”

But Armanda would have kept looking at her, interested. Until, a little light-headed from the Riesling in the middle of the day, she would have come up with an improvised, but honest, answer.

“If I think about it — in every way. In all the hundreds and thousands of shitty little things that make up life and that you feel, since that time, are actually part of something else entirely. Something terrible, that involves only you, and that you can’t talk to anyone about, because you were the only one there back then.”

And she and her sister, suddenly overcome with emotion, would have fallen into each other’s arms.

The present had other demands. Four thirty on the dot. Dusk was falling, it was high tide again, and the weather forecast for this Sunday was the opposite of mild. In De Bilt, the national meteorological office was warning all regions of the country, once again, about a severe storm coming from the west-northwest. What this meant for the attic in Hocke’s farmhouse was as follows. A blow struck the house without any forewarning. There had been no particularly powerful gust of wind, but the blow unleashed such a huge wave of pressure that they all could feel it in their eardrums. The first thing they became aware of, in almost the same moment, was four or five gray projectiles suddenly shooting at random around the room. Nobody had time to realize that these were bats, abandoning their winter hibernation spots under the roof beams: what everyone saw was a network of cracks spreading across both side walls. The glass in the window exploded. The roof was torn upward, part of it disappearing to make way for a pile of black clouds. The house twisted and came off its foundations.