Margriet de Moor - The Storm

It was next day before I got any more details about these spirits, all perfectly normal according to my guy, one huge family according to him, that also included Voodoo. Oh, but aren’t they really dangerous, I asked. What? he said, the Voodoo wintis. ? And he told me how back home on his farm an iguana with revolving yellow eyes had sat in a tree for weeks, and there would have been no point in chasing him away. But there are also lots of examples of well-intentioned spirits, he said, and named some water sprite. When such a watra takes up residence in a person during a party, he or she always asks right away for a bottle of rum and a box of cigars. At the end you must banish him or her, because water sprites love social gatherings. I know, the whole thing’s madness, but it interested me, because I thought: it’s all him .

So, I wanted to tell you about the party. Everyone in the place was dancing. And did it get hot! Then the thing everyone had been waiting for happened. Crazed yelling. A boy, not even ten years old, I think. Began stepping backward, tried to say something: um, um, as if there was a name he couldn’t remember. Then this child asks for something in a booming voice, really overwhelming, sounds very heavy — and he gets it. When will I ever see a child glug down a glass of beer that size again, his hands already reaching for another which also goes down at one go? It was one of those watras, it really was, Mama; he came, he said in this huge voice, from Alkmaar, no, no, not our nice little town near Amsterdam, this Alkmaar was once a sugarcane plantation, a vast stretch of land on the banks of the Commewijne. People were passing on in whispers everything he said, as translated by an interpreter, because the boy, who was possessed, was speaking in an African language he himself didn’t understand. Never knew that what we call the factual is such an elastic concept. The ancestral spirit first complained at the top of his voice about the neighbors around the coffee plantation at Nijd-en-Spijt, then cheered up a bit, looked around, said hello to his family, and asked them how things were going .

I couldn’t tell you how the party ended and whether the spirit really did leave. I needed air. This watra also gave off a particular smell, formalin, you know, the smell of new schoolbags. And what was I thinking as I stood there all on my own in the grass all covered in the evening dew? Absolutely nothing! I believe the way we’re supposed to use rational connections when we think is completely overvalued. It hardly ever happens. I, for one, don’t like it and I only do it when I have to write something for one of my study groups at the university. I just stood there in the cool and looked .

My neck hurts. My fingers hurt. I’m crushed by this dreadful unhappiness. Am I empty enough to go to bed now?

I give you a hug. Don’t be angry anymore .

Nadja

P.S. It’s late morning, the day is bright. I was thinking about my mother, Mama. Where she actually is. Became a spirit far too early. And I didn’t just think about her, to tell you the truth, I … called her. I whispered mother! mother!

For a time they were side by side, being propelled forward at an insane speed. Like two boats that have cast off and started a race. She lay flat on her stomach, her head in her arms, hands clamped on the edge. It had happened unbelievably fast. When a house comes off its foundations and the roof is torn off, the entire fabric gives way. It described a little curve on the water, then the wind knocked away the walls. The floors were ripped away in sections by the current. There was no panic. She had heard no screams. Nor seen any in eyes or faces.

There had even been a kind of farewell. She saw Izak Hocke look at his mother and Cathrien Padmos look at her baby and Laurina and Nico van de Velde look at each other and Zesgever at little Adriaan and Gerarda Hocke, the heavy goose clutched to her breast, look at the failing roof of her house. She registered. It all happened in a fraction of this one second of terror. This old woman knows she’s old, and close to death. She sees the floor of the attic of her house break in two, and the furniture suddenly fly into the air. An enormous force pushes the objects to the surface. Cupboards, tables, she knows every one of them piece by piece, knows what has been in them or on them. It doesn’t require conscious thought. Just before a wave riding from the bottom lifted both parts of the floor and hurled them forward more than thirty feet in a single blow, the old woman saw the beds, water jugs, and the pathetically sodden featherbeds from all three bedrooms on the second floor come swirling up in front of her feet. The house was half afloat. The cellar and storerooms had already parted company with it. An inhuman situation: an old woman surviving her own home?

Only Simon Cau in his last moments, thinking of nothing and no one. He didn’t even wait. Lidy, who needed all her strength to seize some outstretched hands and hold on tight, still saw him throw himself into the water. A gray silhouette bending forward, then streaks of foam.

Now, painfully, she eased her grip on the edge of the wood that was not swimming on the surface of the water but about four inches beneath it. She lifted herself a little. The raft was being propelled by a powerful current. Beneath her only yesterday, there had been a sandy road called the Captain’s Road, which led, by way of many twists and turns, over the Melk dike to the main road to Zierikzee and finally to the Oosterschelde. Inching her way backward, seeing almost nothing, she became aware of the identity of her companion on this slab of flooring, on which until a moment ago an entire life had played out, as if on another planet, with its own time and laws, a life complete and full of significance, to which she now had been compelled to say adieu.

Cornelius Jaeger. She knew he was there. When the house broke apart, her faculty of observation was aborted. As if events were trying to prevent themselves from happening. And after that, as she was flailing in the water, she had only looked at his face, then his hands. To actually heave her up onto the raft had not been necessary, and the boy wouldn’t have been able to do it anyway. She had crawled onto it by herself, just before a wave coming right up off the bottom had risen and taken the little nothing, the foolish chance repository that was her house and her sanctuary, up onto its back. Now, as she risked a quick glance around her and then back in the direction of the storm, she took stock of her situation. A few square feet of floating debris. On it, by way of company, in addition to Cornelius Jaeger, the Hockes, mother and son, an assemblage of shoulders, arms, eyes, trying to keep its seat.

It began to snow. Wet flakes flying past her face in a southerly direction. Everything jolting, wobbling, no purpose in life other than to hang on. Lidy, without a roof over her head for the first time since she was born, was bent on survival. As the house broke apart, her exhaustion had transmuted itself instantaneously into terror, her terror into action, and action into the absolute determination to live through this maelstrom. Nothing would be able to shake her of this. She saw a whole mass of unidentifiable objects appear in front of her, caught on a post here, a tree there, and then she was shooting past it. She saw dead cows, a dead horse, a dead man, oil drums, and knew that right behind her on the raft was a whole little family. How could it be possible? The old woman was still wearing her gold. The farming women of Schouwen and Duiveland have every imaginable way of keeping their headdresses and their gold jewelry firmly pinned to their heads. Gerarda Hocke’s bonnet of white lace or finely starched linen had blown away, but under it she always wore a black crocheted undercap, which fitted tightly to the head and held the gold spirals so tightly that they could not be dislodged.