Margriet de Moor - De verdronkene

As Lidy went into the hotel that was the agreed venue for the party on Saturday the thirty-first of January, 1953, she had the feeling that although her journey had merely taken a day, she had been on the road for weeks. She entered through a revolving door and went past the empty reception desk with her purse and a little suitcase. The hotel had a large, warm lobby, and it was bustling. The wooden ceiling bounced back both the light of an old matte copper chandelier and sounds of laughter and conversation. The warmth, the voices, and the smells of food all suddenly triggered a yearning in her for a few words of personal greeting, which she had certainly earned after such an epic journey. She peeked from the reception area into the jammed and noisy rooms that all opened off the lobby, then, as she heard someone call the familiar name “Armanda!” she turned around, relieved.

“Yes!”

She quickly set down her suitcase.

If being happy means being in the right place, surrounded by people you want to belong with, then this evening she was happy.

The table was in the Winter Garden and had been set with a blue cloth, a flowered dinner service, and old, slightly battered family silver. The company around it numbered twelve, all of them in the best of spirits: this was a celebration. And in their midst: her. “Shall I refill your glass, Lidy?” said the sixty-or sixty-five-year-old man with the gray cap and the gray eyes, whom she’d come to sit beside. She immediately nodded, full of sympathy as she looked at her table companion’s emaciated face. Everyone had accustomed themselves by now to the fact that her name was Lidy. She’d explained things right after her arrival and admitted who she was, whereupon each of them had repeated the name most warmly and then passed it on. A young man jokingly identified her as a secret agent.

Candle flames flickered restlessly. She looked over into the dining room. People were all shouting at the same time, salvos of laughter erupted, there was singing. This was the island’s evening off. “I feel like a million dollars,” she said to Jacomina Hocke, the godchild’s mother, who was sitting one chair down. The woman, freckled, round-faced, and curly-haired, promptly leaned over toward her and told her, smiling, to look where she was looking. Between them, at the right-hand corner of the table, two armchairs had been pushed together and a thin child in a stiff little white skirt was lying on them, asleep, with ballet shoes on her feet. Despite the lack of incisors, the open mouth suggested the little muzzle of a cat. At such a moment, a nice guest smiles along with the mother. Lidy, so preoccupied by the details of her adventure that she had blocked out all other memories of her previous life, felt dizzy for a moment. As she yawned, the other woman stretched out her arm and took hold of her wrist.

“Soon! It’ll soon be time for you to go upstairs and have a good sleep, but not yet!”

And in fact she herself was conscious that she had to shake off her sleepiness. She perked up and looked around the table: relatives and husbands and wives of relatives of the sleeping girl, friends, two younger brothers, who had crawled under the table. A godmother is also definitely a member of the family. At the head of the table, side by side, sat the maternal grandparents. They were the owners of this little hotel, whose main source of income was the parties given here, rather than the occasional commercial traveler or civil servant passing through for one night. It was a tradition that anytime a grandchild had a birthday, the whole family ate in the hotel and spent the night.

If someone beside you is inspecting your face, you can feel it.

“Yes?” she said, turning back to Jacomina Hocke.

“Oh, I know it all so well,” the latter said.

Taken together, the words and the look, focused on the child again, made it clear that since she was here as a representative and lacked the relevant shared past, she must listen as all the missing details were told to her. So, please, Lidy, here’s a memory for you, in three parts. To bind you for this evening to an earlier time that doesn’t actually belong to you. A summer holiday camp shortly after the war. And she, Jacomina, had been one of the leaders, despite the fact that she was pregnant. A little helper from Amsterdam, about fourteen years old, had followed her around for four weeks like a page.

Oh, of course, she thought.

“A sweet, shy child. Doctor’s daughter.”

After a few minutes she had almost ceased to listen. The meal was very heavy. When she looked up from her plate to see what was going on around her, she felt the way she often did when she was in company: lethargic, shortsighted, although her eyes were fine. The Winter Garden creaked and groaned in the squalls, and each time one hit, the gently swaying hanging lamps dimmed, then flamed up again with a larger, brighter light. The people at the table were changing places more often, and there was also a lot of coming and going between the Winter Garden and the dining room. The news bulletins that reached them now and again from the town fit the party mood, for such an atmosphere has a natural affinity for the wilder dramas of real life. A chimney had come down in the Meelstraat; the water in the Old Harbor was already washing across the bluestone pavings; a fire had broken out in the Hage dairy; the streetcars were no longer running. However, she did also notice here and there in the dining room that people had risen to their feet, and hadn’t come back.

And the chair next to her at some point was no longer occupied. A tiny isolated space in the midst of the racket both indoors and out. At the other end of the table she saw Izak Hocke adjusting the lens of a camera. She hadn’t talked much with him, but had already talked about him. So she knew that he had a farm about eight miles from here. This was a man who hadn’t wanted to get married until he found a woman he could be sure would not concern herself either with the land or the business: both were the province of his mother, who lived with him. Jacomina had been a teacher until she married. He was ardent, jealous, and prudish, she’d told Lidy woman to woman. If he wanted to have sex during the day, first he checked the hall, then locked the bedroom door, and hung his shirt over the knob to cover the keyhole!

She saw him stand up. Chairs were pushed aside, the sleeping child was wakened, but before she and her two brothers were taken up to bed, a few more photos were in order.

Excellent. “And now one with you, Lidy …”

She laid her napkin on the table, went to the two armchairs in the Winter Garden that had been set out for the purpose, and sat down willingly, her hands in her lap. The godchild, beside her, was busy spreading her fingers and licking them. Then came the moment, and she smiled, taking care not to look directly into the lens but a few inches above it. She saw Hocke, the shutter cable in hand, staring from the viewfinder of the Ikoflex to her and the child from a distance of about ten feet. He knit his eyebrows: black, bushy, overshadowing the roundest, heavy-lidded eyes, which gave the face a melancholy, introverted look.

He looked down into the camera again and then squeezed the cable.

Suddenly someone came up to him. She saw a man in a jacket, soaked to the skin and giving off the stench of mud, who seized the chair that Izak was offering him with a gesture, and yanked it out from the table. His back half turned to her, they began a conversation that she could overhear in part, though she was still posed for the photograph. The man was talking about a sluice in some inner dike, and the words he was using—“rust,” “garbage,” “criminal negligence”—couldn’t fail to have their effect.