Margriet de Moor - The Storm

She was already at the door when the policeman gave her one more instruction. It had to be a photo of Lidy laughing.

“Laughing,” she said. “Yes, of course!”

Then she thought, Why?

The train was approaching Rotterdam. Nadja and Armanda got up, like most of the other passengers, put on their coats and gloves, and waited with their bags on their laps until the rattling over the points had ceased. On the platform, they were surprised all over again by the cold. They went to the departures board and saw that the express train to Vlissingen must already be standing at platform 10.

“So they couldn’t say for sure,” Nadja began, after they’d found an empty compartment at the back of the train and shut the door.

Words. Which gave them a certain sense of looking-things-straight-in-the-eye. The dubious identity of this dead person of theirs. Which not even the teeth in the photo of the young woman with the radiant laugh could change.

“So what did he actually say yesterday?” asked Nadja.

“The day before yesterday,” said Armanda. Nadja nodded. “The day before yesterday, I went to”—she hesitated—“to collect the photo, for today.”

This could be true. She saw Nadja nod again and nodded herself. She had gone to the police laboratory in Rijswijk to collect the photo that she was going to put secretly, even illegally in the eyes of officialdom, into the coffin with Lidy’s bones or the bones of some twenty-to twenty-five-year-old farmer’s wife from Zeeland. What a terrific idea, she thought, if she got the opportunity! In reality, she had done nothing two days ago other than speak to the pathologist. Why? Because. His expert report, even after seeing the photo, had remained on balance that “we cannot come to any definite conclusion.”

“Oh, it was all so complicated. He said the process of ossification of the bone …”

They looked up — what did it mean? The door opened. New passengers were looking for seats, even though the train had been moving for some minutes. One was a little gray lady who sat down in the corner by the aisle, after slipping out from under the arm of the other person, a tall man who was loud in more ways than one.

“So, people,” he said, rubbing his hands, after hanging up his coat, “the only problem we have left is when are they going to come round with the coffee?”

The gregariousness of a train trip in winter. The soft seats, and everything outside white, gray, cold. The little woman in the corner stared straight ahead like a resigned animal, but her companion was a man of alarming charisma. Within a quarter of an hour, before Dordrecht, even, Nadja and Armanda knew that he was an expert in hydrodynamics, that he worked with the authorities in “delta services,” that he was getting out at Rilland-Bath, and all this interested them in a certain sense. Up to Zeeland, in the beat of the rattling click-clack of the train. Nothing there, none of it, is the way it was before the flood, said the hydrodynamics expert, take a good look as soon as we pass Bergen op Zoom. Were you there this summer? No. Oh, the whole country has made incredible profits from it in the last years. Acre after acre of landholdings, all looking exactly the same, all the way to the horizon, yes, dammit, and in the middle of each a brand-new farm, freestanding barns, drainage ditches in the distance straight as a die, roads surfaced with asphalt even out on the polders, a system of canals that reaches into every corner, and none of it has cost the province more than a cent. Pigs in the built-up area? Not one to be seen anymore!

He stopped talking and glanced at the little old woman in the corner, as if by accident, but she sat up and reacted.

“There once were beautiful old mulberry trees on Schouwen.”

Spoken quietly, but with a remarkable solemnity that irritated the hydrodynamics man.

“Oh, be quiet! Nature, is it? Do you think people have no eyes to see, these days?” And he started talking about how wonderful the delta works were, and their beauty, the guts it had taken to build them, and all the money it had cost.

Armanda, seeing that Nadja was maintaining eye contact with the man, turned back to the window. A pale sun was standing twenty degrees above the southeastern horizon, with the train cutting through the winter landscape on a parallel track. Barns standing out against the snow. Branches trimmed. Shrouded in the typical frosty air that seemed to come streaming right into the compartment. Her mind was so clear that the conversation between Nadja and the hydrodynamics expert transmitted itself directly into her thoughts without troubling her. After about twenty minutes the rails curved westward at an almost ninety-degree angle. The train passed the Schelde-Rhein canal bridge and entered the land where Lidy had disappeared. A cold storage locker, a mortuary.

“Caissons with steel bars in all three sluice openings, cost per caisson eight hundred forty million guilders, construction time four years!”

“Wow.”

“Then the commission had another thought about putting barriers in the Roompot eddy, and quays that the water can wash right over and feed into the Schaar and the Hammen. Cost: a billion!”

Yes, Armanda thought, at the end of the day, everything in this country is now linked forever to Lidy’s epic.

The poor heroine. And dear God, is it actually her, finally, in the rosewood coffin Nadja and I ordered, in which — we felt it was the right thing — we also had them put that little metal thing that was brought up into the light of day along with the bones. When they examined it, it turned out to have been plated originally with twenty-four-carat gold. Does it belong? or … It could just have been lying in the earth there by total chance, with no connection, she’d asked them this in Rijswijk. Right, who could know such a thing? And the pin, which was part of the traditional costume of Noord-Beveland or Schouwen, remained, in a formal sense, an element in the Lidy Problem: to be identified or not to be identified? If only the teeth had been—

“… twenty-six gigantic buttresses filled with an average of eight thousand cubic yards of cement. You should be thinking the Egyptian pyramids!”

— more complete!

Now she was staring out of the window the same way she’d once, when she was young, stared into the mirror. The goal of her journey was no longer visible. The landscape, Lidy’s property, spread out and came closer and closer until it no longer consisted of anything but a gray background. Perfect for the illusion or vision that had haunted her regularly for half her life now: Lidy conscientiously unscrewing the cap on a little bottle of whitener and using the brush attached to the underside of the cap to whiten her tennis shoes, that are standing on a newspaper on the table in front of the high window. Location of the action is some grand house with flowering plasterwork on the ceiling, not number 77 and not number 36 but very similar. There’s a dog sitting on the floor. It’s snowing on the other side of the window. She herself, Armanda, is also present, though only in the form of a sense of unease, an extreme anxiety that now, at this moment of her journey, was so intense that as everything outside the window reverted to normal and became visible again, the horizon with its red misty glow, the telephone poles, the fences and chimneys, all looked to her like parts of some formula that she need only simplify in order to arrive at zero. Some things had never taken place. An entire family history really could correct itself if she only made the effort. She’s the one, not Lidy, who begs her father for the car and sets off on a journey to Zierikzee … logical, fate’s original intention. Why tease this beast so dangerously with a little plan, a little prank? The engine was slowing. A bell rang somewhere.