Margriet de Moor - The Storm

Lidy Blaauw-Brouwer. Who had given birth in the early onset of winter in 1950–51 to a little daughter, Nadine (“We’re going to call her Nadja”), thereby also giving herself an enchanting task that would last her the rest of her life.

She was now deeply asleep. As one ear continued to register the satisfying sounds of the storm, her brain was still lingering a little on Lidy, who had walked around her living room one winter evening with a nursing infant on her arm as if nothing, absolutely nothing in the world, could come close to equaling this experience. In the same room with her were two admirers: her husband and her younger sister, who had just realized that if things had gone a little, just a very little differently, this man could as easily have been loved by her, immoderately.

The sleeping girl lingered over this truth, which frightened her not at all; on the contrary, it left her in a state of private yearning as the hours slipped by unmarked. Toward dawn, she was rewarded with an erotic dream. She was startled awake, in a state of euphoria, only to plunge back into the dream’s continuation. It was dark, and Sjoerd was seizing her shoulders to turn her around. It wasn’t an embrace. Rather he was pushing her away from him by the shoulders, but this was made difficult for him because she refused to take a step back. This image was followed by a series of uninhibited details that jolted her mind as she woke up again, roused this time by a child’s solid little knee planted in her stomach. It was morning, and Nadja had climbed into bed with her aunt. Armanda pushed back the bedclothes and let the child snuggle up against her.

When she appeared for breakfast at around 10:30, everything still seemed perfectly normal, cozy, small-format. It was Sunday, and at home people listened to the national news on radio only on weekdays at 8 a.m. She said good morning to her mother, kissed her father, and laughed at Nadja, who was using both hands to push a rusk sprinkled with a crumbled lump of aniseed sugar up to her mouth. She sat down next to her father at the side of the table in the bay window on the second floor, which allowed a view of most of the street.

“Yes,” she said in reply to a remark of her father’s about the storm. “Just awful.” She followed his eyes to the broken branches on the cobblestones as she stretched out an arm to take the cup of tea her mother had poured for her.

It was a peaceful moment, despite the stormy weather. Armanda was wearing a blue bathrobe; her parents, smelling of shaving soap and eau de cologne, were already fully dressed. Jan Brouwer and Nadine Langjouw: people with fixed habits and habitual sunny dispositions, made even sunnier this morning by the presence of the little girl. Armanda couldn’t remember ever having heard her parents raise their voices to each other.

Shortly after eleven, they saw Sjoerd marching toward them through the swirling debris on the street, coattails flapping.

“In Zandvoort the sea’s lapping up over the boulevard,” he reported as he came in. Coffee was ready on the table. He sat down with them, saying that a friend had called to say why don’t we go and take a look at IJmuiden, the water’s lifted some of the ships right up onto the quay.

Armanda was wandering around restlessly, pouring coffee, sitting down again, running her fingers over the embroidery on the tablecloth, and when she looked up, she met the eyes of her mother, who asked, “So when’s Lidy getting back?” as if she was supposed to know.

“We didn’t settle on a specific time,” Sjoerd answered for her. And then, after stubbing out his cigarette and beginning to get to his feet: “Should I give her a call, maybe?”

Upon which the rest of a day began, which would fix itself permanently in Armanda’s mind as a series of household tasks whose simple familiarity concealed something utterly sinister.

Sjoerd came back into the living room from the hall. He hadn’t been able to get through to Schouwen-Duiveland.

“The line to the island is stone dead.”

At almost the same moment Armanda saw her father bent over in the corner, turning the knobs on the radio. The dial glowed green. She heard the voice of the announcer, heard him say that Army Central Command had ordered all military personnel on weekend leave to return to barracks at the same time as she waved hello to her brother, Jacob, who had finally slept himself out and was now in search of breakfast, still looking a little pale but already sufficiently awake to pay attention to the news.

“Oh, it’s war.” He took a roll.

Sjoerd left the house. Armanda went to get dressed and to tidy her room, in order to have something to do. While her hands were busy with the bed, the washbasin, and the wall cupboard, the radio was still on in the living room. The male voice calmly reported collapsed dikes, floods in the cities of Dordrecht and Willemstad, even danger to human life. At six o’clock, she and her mother began to make dinner. Darkness came early today. A Beechcraft from the military airfield at Gilze-Rijen had done a reconnaissance flight during the afternoon over West Brabant, Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, Walcheren, and Goeree. Everything was underwater.

As for Schouwen-Duiveland: no word.

She lay awake in the night; she was sick of the storm, which was still raging. Lidy hadn’t phoned once during the whole day. It would be good, she thought rather crossly, if you checked in tomorrow, Sister, surely you must realize we’re worried to death about you!

Near morning the newspaper thumped through the letterbox. She heard it and went downstairs. Switching on the lamp in the hall, she stared at the huge headline: ZEELAND WIPED OFF THE MAP, and then read a report that struck her as being no report but a complete fantasy.

“The Dakota flew low over the boiling waters of the Krammer in the direction of Schouwen-Duiveland. The island, battered and then overwhelmed, has ceased to exist. Entire villages lay strewn like driftwood along the broken dikes. Zierikzee was crying its death song. The spring tide has destroyed the harbor, and the North Sea has poured in from behind to attack the surrounding polders in a surprise rearguard pincer movement that has annihilated them.”

Shivering, she went up the stairs, had a brief thought of How was I to know … and then blocked it out. She crawled back into her warm bed, but stayed sitting upright. Her mind in a daze, suddenly aware of this one tiny point in time against the background of the endless roll call of place-names, she looked at the alarm clock on the night table beside her. Half past six. Eyes open and then squeezed tight shut, Armanda for the first time saw her sister as she would appear to her, pitilessly from now on. Tragic, even heroic, in front of a landscape reduced to a wasteland.

As Lidy reached Schouwen-Duiveland in late afternoon, not tired at all, indeed wide awake, the flood tide had already passed the high-water mark, and the Flood Warning Service had immediately decided to put out one of their rare radio alerts. It spoke — in anticipation of the night to come — of a “dangerous high tide.”

She had taken the last ferry of the day to risk the crossing from Numansdorp to Zijpe. The entry into the harbor was so rough that it triggered a short-lived outbreak of screaming and running around on the decks. Nevertheless it wasn’t ten minutes before she was raising a hand in greeting to the boy who had lowered the ramp, and she drove unhesitatingly onto the island of her destiny.

The heavy cloud cover was breaking here and there. By the light of the hidden moon, she followed a little road that offered no resistance to the storm. During the war, the island had been flooded by the Germans, killing both trees and hedges. The drainage ditches to left and right were full to the brim. Wherever she looked, cold, wet, dark land stretched away in all directions, but this didn’t depress her. After all these hours, she accepted the howling wind, the cold, and the wet as part and parcel of her little odyssey. Even when she had to swerve as she rounded a bend to avoid at least ten hares racing along the road in the same direction as the car, she didn’t take this as a sign.