Margriet de Moor - The Storm

Coffee cup in hand, Armanda sat at the table between the living room and the winter garden, which was lit at that moment by a ray of the morning sun. It was eleven o’clock. She was wearing thin blue trousers, cut wide, and a red blouse with rolled-up sleeves. As she was getting ready she had taken the scissors to her hair, still loose on her shoulders, to trim the ends and her fringe, in a routine intended to preserve this look for the rest of her life. The color would also remain the same: a medium chestnut brown, according to the description on the package.

On the table were a letter and a newspaper, both still unread. After her children had left for school, she had picked both up off the mat, and her eye had been caught, for a moment, unavoidably, by the large headline. Wednesday, 11 August 1972, seven people had died in a wind funnel the previous day that had struck a camping ground in Ameland. Uh, uh, uh, she had thought vaguely as she looked at the envelope with Nadja’s writing on it, and decided to leave it unopened for the moment. News that one hasn’t yet read hasn’t yet happened, in a way, just as truths set down on paper in heaven knows what frame of mind have flowed out of one heart but have not yet reached the other. Armanda stared into her lush, unkempt garden. She hadn’t seen Nadja for weeks.

It was her day off. While she hung out the laundry on the drying frame in the stairwell, she let her thoughts wander to her odd fate and that of her daughter Nadja. Nadja was a lively girl with a luxuriant mane of red hair, who was studying history at the University of Amsterdam, more or less diligently but not with any great urgency. The remarkable thing that Armanda was thinking about was the fact that Nadja, although she was her stepchild, was closer to her heart than Violet, a delightful teenager, and Allan, who since the divorce had so clung to his mother that when he went off to school, he always knocked one last time on the window from outdoors to wave at her and be sure she noticed.

Armanda shook the folds out of a pillowcase, remembering the day when Nadja had lain on her stomach on her bed, sobbing with fury, while she sat next to her discreetly on a chair in the dim light. It must have been in November, after school, it was already getting dark. While Nadja was telling her in all its miserable details (his bed was in the same room as the Bechstein grand) that it was all over with the piano teacher, she had really had to struggle to suppress the feeling, as she stood to stroke Nadja’s hair, that her hand was not part of her body but belonged to the doppelgänger who had remained sitting on the chair in the half-darkness to watch how she was getting on with this growing daughter.

Good, Nadja had soon got up again to switch on the light and wash her face and tell her lightly that given her lack of genius she’d prefer to switch from piano to history. “Wait, take a look at this.” She had turned round to look for something.

A picture, a beautiful but terrible picture, torn out of a book and drawn by Rembrandt, of an eighteen-year-old girl, executed by strangulation by the City of Amsterdam for having killed her landlady by hitting her over the head with an axe. She and Nadja had looked together at the little body bound with ropes. The mood in the room was one of Crisis Over — Life Goes On. In a tone that sounded like an explanation of something, Nadja said, “One of the jurors at her trial before the sentence was carried out was named Blaauw.”

The doorbell rang. Armanda set down the basket with the rest of the laundry and went downstairs to open up. Jan Brouwer was on his morning walk.

“You need to get something done,” said the old man, right in the middle of the sidewalk, pointing up at the façade. The white climbing rose, which had come loose in yesterday’s bad weather along with its trellis, was hanging over forward, baring a house wall that needed replastering.

“I know, Father,” said Armanda, pressing a kiss onto the freshly shaved cheek. As she went back inside she made a mental note to call the builder that afternoon. Sjoerd and she had been apart for almost three and a half years now. Exterior work on the house had always been part of his responsibility.

Now for the letter! she thought, as she chatted to her father about the weather, now back to normal (warm; weak wind from the southwest, stronger along the coast). She glanced from the envelope on the table to her father, who simply by being there miraculously transformed whatever might be contained in the room into a moment of present calm: two cups of coffee, a bowl of cookies, and a great streak of sunlight across the floor that was targeting a male leg dressed in gray lightweight flannel. Months before, she and Nadja had had a conversation in which Nadja announced she was going to move in with a man in Bijlmer, a Surinamese, and there had been a big scene.

“There’s a letter from Nadja. Should I read it out?”

Oh, Grandpa Brouwer’s open, benevolent look! He settled himself comfortably, ready to hear how things were going with his beloved eldest grandchild.

Dear Mama ,

It’s three in the morning. I’m sitting at the table wearing the winter coat he left behind, over my pajamas. I can’t sleep. You were right, I think, he’s left me. I didn’t know it, but the early morning bus trip last week through the Bijlmer was our good-bye. It looks absolutely awful there, Mama, unfinished apartment houses and otherwise nothing but sand, though at least you see corn poppies and stuff growing on it. He leaned over to me, all confidential. I’ll never say it out loud, he murmured in my ear, but the Netherlands are beautiful. I find the Netherlands beautiful. We were on our way to the University Hospital .

I was going along to keep him company, and then continuing on to my lecture. You know, or actually you don’t know, so I’m going to tell you, he’s a senior male nurse in Paramaribo, and came here for a specific time to work at the U.H. in the intensive care unit. For further training. How was I to know that the time was up?

So I’ve been absolutely flattened for the last six days, and I’ve done nothing but think about him, it’s unbearable but he’s still mine and he’s black as black can be. (Once we were walking down the Warmoesstraat when someone in a group of guys from the Antilles or Surinam yelled something at him, some curse word I couldn’t understand . Sranan, he said, when I asked him what sort of language it was in, and he burst out laughing when he told me what it meant: horribly black!) Once when we were in bed, I made some sentimental remark about this black/white contrast thing in our relationship. While I stuck out my leg ostentatiously and held it next to his, I was carrying on about “isn’t that beautiful” … and at the same time I was thinking secretly that blackness isn’t something external, it’s inside him, he lives in his blackness. And in the same moment I felt I was flying across hundreds of years of West Africa’s past, that I was sailing across the ocean in the blink of an eye, to land in Fort Zeelandia in Surinam, our colony of traders in coffee, cotton, sugar, and slaves in our fine Dutch seventeenth century, where our souls would meet .

That thoughts are thoughts and words are words is something you can figure out just by looking at the idiotic difference in the speed at which they move, you know? The only thing I said about all this wonderfulness was “isn’t that beautiful?” Nothing more. And Mama, the words were barely out of my mouth when I looked sideways and you know, he was absolutely furious. Suddenly I was looking at this man on the pillow and the sheets who was very angry, angry up to here, even his shoulders were rigid. Am I your first nigger? he asked .