Margriet de Moor - The Storm

The girl, hand ready on the till, asked: “For the exhibition or just for the museum?”

“Just The Night Watch .”

While the girl entered the price of the ticket, Armanda felt a surge of ugly obstinacy. It was as if the conversation she had had with her father shortly before his second death were now jabbing her in the side. She had gone into De Laatste Stuiver. He had seen her at once, and although she too had immediately spotted him at the window, in front of a backdrop of gray houses (it was about to start raining), she looked around the room at first, as if hesitating. Fine, they were both soon sitting in front of a drink, and her father was telling her wasn’t it extraordinary, he’d just run into one of his old patients for the nth time, who was feeling great and had charmingly reminded him about the prescription he had written for her fifteen or twenty years before.

“Aha, and?” she’d asked, as someone was already bringing them another round, and she was thinking: who knows, maybe the way he walks and looks and talks and thinks these days reflects his real self? So? Isn’t it time I recognize this second-class father as simply my father?

He had said he’d finally worked out the meaning of a day in the life of a man.

“And what is it?” she had pushed him.

Like a bird, he took a sip from his glass with a movement that was rather extravagant for someone in his condition. When he looked up, he began evasively: “You know, this patient, who’s been following my orders to swallow a modest daily dose of twenty milligrams of dipyridamole for the last twelve years—”

She’d interrupted him.

“Father, you were going to say something else! Some definition of the core of daily life, something nice about how small it is, something logical about this horribly and yet pleasingly sticky coating on our everyday routine, and I really want to hear it from you!”

Then he had stared at the ceiling and started to talk about eating food out of the garbage, about using a black bolt gun to stun cows so that they collapse without making a sound, about sitting in a chair on rainy days watching the windows in the house across the road steam up….

Armanda stared at the cashier as if in a trance. The girl was holding out her ticket.

She said, “Absolute nonsense! Of course I knew it was Father Number Two talking!”

“What are you talking about?” asked the girl suspiciously. “Please pay. You’re holding up the entire queue.”

Short pause, in which nothing happened. Oh, that’s how traffic jams start, thought Armanda as she dug around in her purse for a two-and-a-half-guilder coin. Then she went up the stone staircase, followed a sign with an arrow, and soon was in front of the enormous canvas that took up the entire back wall of a rectangular room full of seventeenth-century masterpieces.

“Dear God!” she murmured, astounded by the scale of the painting.

Next to her was an old lady, small but dignified, with gray hair wound in plaits around her head and horn-rimmed glasses perched on her little mouse face. A former presser from one of the oldest cleaning establishments here in the city, as she learned, after they had struck up a conversation; she would have guessed an old baroness. Still possessed by the need to tell her story, she gave the other woman a pregnant look and then turned back to The Night Watch .

“Incredible figures, aren’t they?” she said. “Just look at the way they stand together so proudly and joyfully! In a moment they’re going to exercise and shoot. Isn’t it sickening what’s become of Amsterdammers since then?”

“Oh yes,” said the old lady in a voice like a little silver dinner bell. “There are moments that come over you like a cloud of hot steam and then vanish again, when you think, What kind of a city is this now, so devoid of really rebellious ideas or even a hint of class warfare.” She snapped her fingers and pushed her glasses higher up on her nose. “But this painting isn’t about Banning Cocq and his men, it’s about that little fleck of light, that bizarre child pushing her way up out of the darkness.”

“Shall we sit down for a moment?” Armanda proposed.

A few minutes later she and the old lady were on a blue velvet bench right in front of the enormous canvas, agreeing that there was nothing this city needed more than The Night Watch . And in the same breath Armanda had kept talking about what was weighing on her heart: “Twice! Imagine! And the second time, mind you, he was all pink and fat!”

They stared at each other searchingly. “For my mother,” Armanda continued a little less agitatedly, “it was much easier to keep seeing this resurrected husband as the same man she’d loved before. Maybe because she’s a more generous person than I am, that could be, or maybe because she had been breathing together with him every night in the dark. That would have maintained some sort of relationship even if, let’s say, he’d turned into a dog. But I’m pretty sure of one thing: she felt as uneasy as I did. And this unease of hers, like mine, didn’t just spring directly from the change in all these externals, because when you look at it, the change wasn’t really that large. It didn’t come from him getting up at the crack of dawn, it didn’t come from his loud ‘good morning’ over an extended breakfast, or his new brand of aftershave, or his switch to paper handkerchiefs, or the way he turned up the corners of his lips when he laughed; he got fat so quickly, started buying dreadful new suits without consulting her, but he remained a very lovable man, really, and a well-meaning husband, bought flowers on Saturdays, went with her to visit relatives and friends, accompanied her to the theater, where he simply forgot that she was used to him helping her into her coat in the cloakroom.”

The old lady cleared her throat and stood up, smiling politely. Armanda stayed sitting.

“Oh God, no! All that wouldn’t have bothered us at all. But how can I explain to you, it was his godforsaken uninvolvement in everything. Sitting in the corner full of energy and all alert, arms and legs spread, his hiking shoes still on his feet, while Mother and I were in the same room and hadn’t the slightest connection to whatever was going on inside him!”

Unbothered by the fact that the lady had left, Armanda stared at The Night Watch . She and the great canvas, it seemed to her, were both on the same level . But after a quarter of an hour she’d had enough. I’ll buy a couple of pretty postcards, she thought, feeling idiotic because what she really meant was: I’ve got lots more to tell!

In the museum shop she saw a familiar figure.

“Betsy!”

Why should she doubt the one real reason why her friend and ex-sister-in-law had come? Betsy turned round, holding the card she had just taken out of the rack. (The Jewish Bride , Armanda saw at once, flashing on the unconnected thought that Betsy was named Rebecca after her grandmother Vaz Dias.) They greeted each other affectionately. “Shall we do something?” “Do you have time?”

The museum cafeteria was a space as large as a church, and at this time of day no sunlight came through the painted glass windows. They ordered coffee and began to talk, what about was irrelevant, they knew almost everything about each other. Betsy and Leo’s twin sons, Wim and Stijn, were students and thank God they still came home with bags of dirty laundry at age twenty-three. The mathematics teacher, Cees, was still in Armanda’s life, but she didn’t want this fair-weather friend to move in with her. Sjoerd had got married again in 1978, he was working in a high-level job with Labouchère in Paris and was always on the phone to his beloved half sister about this or that. Violet was doing an internship at a bank in London; Allan, who lived in an extremely comfortable squat, was getting more simple-minded by the day, and Nadja had been living for years now with a sculptor.