Margriet de Moor - The Storm

“Might we perhaps make a quick call for a taxi?” Armanda asked the shop owner.

They drove out of town in the back of the taxi, the flowers on their knees. Here too the fields stretched away, all at perfect right angles to the horizon. The trees lining the road were still small. They looked at them, dreaming of the truth and pondering what it meant. Armanda was conscious that Nadja, who was leaning against her, viewed the entire enterprise as a kind of serious farce, since she didn’t know who her mother was, but found this posthumous adoption of a dead farmer’s wife totally okay. She herself was holding tight to Lidy. So much so, in fact, that at a certain point the empty black and white countryside seemed to deliver its own proof: Far too much of you has accumulated in me, Lidy. Because of you, I could never become the person I was. The taxi turned left into the village, which was made up in its entirety of new, modern houses.

The entrance gates to the cemetery were a wrought-iron monstrosity between two pillars, each of which bore a sculpture of angels’ wings. Armanda recognized them from the ceremony of mourning years before, when the region had reburied all its flood victims in a single service. The graveyard in the plain, which was still open to the sea dike, looked very well tended now. Armanda and Nadja walked to the middle section of the burial ground with all the simple, identical graves that would never be moved because they had been declared a monument. They saw that the fifteen-by twenty-inch gray gravestone was already standing next to the mound of earth, covered with a thin layer of snow. It had already been explained to Armanda that nothing on it could be altered: her claiming of the bones was acceptable to the state, her putting of Lidy’s name to them was also acceptable in principle, but the stone, like the three others here, must remain blank. It wasn’t long before the hearse arrived. Armanda and Nadja walked back to the road.

“Can you open the lid again for a moment?” Armanda asked the undertaker, as soon as he and his assistant had pushed the full-sized coffin out of the car and set it on a bier on wheels.

And with a nod of her head, she showed him the photo of Lidy.

The undertaker took it out of her hand, looked from the laughing Lidy to Armanda, and then from under the brim of his black silk hat at the row of apartment buildings on the other side of the street.

“It’s totally against regulations,” he said in a tone that meant “Well, okay.”

The sun went in behind the low-hanging clouds as the little procession moved to the middle section of the graveyard. Once there, the undertaker used a flat chisel on the coffin to raise the lid a fraction, which happened quite easily. As Armanda pushed the photo inside, she managed a quick searching look, but all she saw was the soft, dark cloth that had been used to wrap the skull and the bones, so that they wouldn’t roll around. The coffin, light as a feather, was lowered skillfully into the grave with the help of straps. Armanda and Nadja each threw a shovelful of sand down onto it. Immediately afterward the grave of the anonymous woman was filled in.

The hearse left.

Armanda and Nadja stood for a few minutes in the silence. They looked out over the stone and the chrysanthemums to the land, bordered in the distance by the sea dike, and then they too left. Armanda had wondered briefly if it was possible when the wind was in the right direction to hear the sea from here. The temperature was already dropping again. A moderate frost was forecast for tonight, but an area of low pressure over Scotland, starting tomorrow, would bring milder air, with rain and wind.

“How’s it going?”

“Oh, I had a terrible scene with one of the nurses here, the woman wanted to stick me under the shower, but I hung onto the bathroom door with everything I’d got. It happens. Now everything’s quiet again. Out there, down below, the streetcar clanks by, you know, the number three, it goes to the Concertgebouw in one direction and Amsterdam East in the other. Just recently they moved me up to the top floor. The door to the corridor and the elevator is always locked, most of the people sitting here are too out of it to be able to give you their own names or write them down if you ask them. I think it’s still morning. We have ‘recreation’ this afternoon. The staff is absolutely obsessed with the expression.”

“You look a little shaky.”

“Not surprising if you’re spending twenty-four hours a day collecting your thoughts. I’m guessing what you’re doing right now is looking at the room I’m in, with its fresh paint, and two windows that look north, two cupboards, two chairs, a table, a bed, and a blue velour sofa, which they keep telling me, no idea why, is the sofa from home. From home , they said at the beginning every time they came in, and gave me pregnant looks. Go on, sit down on it. Okay, then, I will, but personally I don’t believe a word of it. When I took a sniff at the seat, I could smell old food and cigar butts, the smell of decline. Maybe it’s because of that smell, or maybe it’s also all the changes in the weather we’ve been having recently, or all the hours I spend sound asleep, but I sit on the couch without budging and regularly ask myself what life actually is.”

“Yeah. No one has the answer to that one.”

“All this sorrow, all these little worries, all these desires. When we go to the dining room at noon and we all sit down at those long tables, almost everyone keeps their heads down, we’re serious and quiet, the people next to me hardly say a thing, but when the food carts are brought in, we all look up like prisoners in a penal colony who’ve just been pardoned. I give an absentminded smile as I lift the lid off the food tray, divided up into compartments, when it’s set down in front of me. My mouth’s all dry, but it responds automatically, I don’t mind, my whole body says yes, but what’s the point? Where does it come from, this morbid appetite, maybe it’s just a desire to keep my footing on the very last step before I trip and fall into the grave?”

“You’re in a really grouchy mood, aren’t you?”

“Grouchy, grouchy, I sit, I look out the window, I eat. I grant you, I still love the smell of bread. I know it’s a treacherous feeling, but I do still find reality attractive. Down on the first floor, in the entrance hall, there’s a wooden bench along the wall next to the swing doors. When I sit there sometimes in the afternoon for a little bit, shoulder to shoulder with my fellow inmates and fellow sufferers, I feel as weary and as dull as the toothless old guys in a shady little square somewhere in Spain.”

“Sounds familiar. And that blue sofa stood for years in the room at the end of the little staircase to the mezzanine.”

“Really? Well, I guess that must be right.”

“Yes. And at the top of the back, there by the wall there was a lamp with two shades made of wavy orange-red frosted glass, that didn’t really go with it, but were perfect when you wanted to submerge yourself for hours in Russian and French novels, which we often did. Next to it were those low doors to the second, smaller, balcony at the back of our house, which we used to go out onto at night and listen to the nearby gunfire in the last winter of the war. You were twelve, I was fourteen, we were both incredibly skinny, and one night we slipped through the railing on the balcony like cats and dropped down into the garden, a pothole or two, a couple of hedges, and we were in a side alley. I’m certain that from the moment we climbed back up about an hour later, we were obsessed for days with the same question, though we never said it out loud to each other. You never ask anyone else the real questions. We’d found a man in a narrow street lined with high, straight houses, he’d been shot, he was lying on his back, and we decided to keep going. A city where the shops and buildings are half in ruins looks much softer at night than it does during the day. In the Eerste Sweelinckstraat there was a doorway and a couple necking in it. We could see that the man wanted more than the woman was willing to give. My God, the despair in the way he was clutching the girl to him with such force, you’d have thought he only had a matter of hours left in his life to do it. Is that, is that what our salvation depends on? We stood stock still and gaped at them like frogs, then headed back to bed in what pitiful starlight there was. You wanted to stick your half-frozen feet into the backs of my knees.”