Margriet de Moor - De verdronkene

Three days later, early in the evening, the doorbell rang. Sjoerd.

“Give me your coat!” said Armanda, who had opened the door to him. But he didn’t want to, and upstairs, where the family was already sitting down to dinner, he declined good-naturedly but firmly, when his father-in-law, who had also returned home that afternoon, invited him to stay.

“Sit down, man!”

“Go with him for a little bit, Armanda,” said Nadine, when she realized that Sjoerd, after three disturbing days, evidently wanted to have his little daughter back home with him. By which she meant, take bread, fresh milk, cookies, and a decent portion of the casserole that’s still in the oven, because of course there won’t be anything in the house over there.

Number 36 was dark and cold. But Armanda didn’t mind, quite the contrary. It was actually really nice, while Sjoerd lit the oil stove and switched on the lamps, to warm the food, button Nadja into an extra cardigan, take a neatly ironed cornflower-blue cloth out of the cupboard, and lay the table.

After dinner, while Sjoerd was putting Nadja to bed, she sat smoking with her feet up on a stool, looking out of the darkened window. Kindly, with a feeling of being a simple, gentle woman, she thought, No, no coffee for me, I’d rather have something stronger. Yet all through dinner, she and Sjoerd had kept giving each other brief, faintly embarrassed looks, in which each recognized the other’s sense of guilt. Perhaps it couldn’t have been otherwise, with Lidy in the background the whole time. What had happened to her, where was she? And so they had eaten well and played with the little girl. Would you like something more? Should I heat up a little more of the meat? And of course without really daring to think about it clearly, Armanda from second to second was replaying the party of a full week ago now, and them dancing, and the fact that he had been turned on by her. She liked it that men’s bodies responded so openly and spontaneously, despite themselves. And she liked herself for being so sensible, and not having gone home with him to number 36 for a quick drink.

When Sjoerd came back downstairs, Armanda asked, “Is she asleep?” Sjoerd said, “Yes,” and next moment they were both sitting on the sofa by the stove, each in a corner, drinking cognac out of shot glasses. Sjoerd began to recount everything he’d seen and done. He took his time and spoke straight ahead, as if he were giving a slide show in a darkened room.

“It was the Raampartse Dike,” he said. “A dry stretch of road that was still high enough out of the water. When we tied up, there were at least a hundred freezing people standing there, more were lying on the ground soaked to the skin, you have to imagine that they’d been washed up there for days and the storm was still blowing. And don’t think that there was much we could do at this point. The army had arrived at the same time as we did; in those practical amphibious machines they call DUKWs. I stood on the dike and heard a British, a Dutch, and an American officer consulting. It was the American, a short little major, totally calm, who had hit upon the idea of taking the DUKWs and had come chugging up from the Rhineland in short order with an entire collection of emergency assistance teams. And the teams were made up of Germans, former German soldiers, and in less than a minute they were scaling the dikes.”

“Whaaat?”

“Yes. And you can bet that the poor half-drowned devils on the dike were happy to see the enemy come marching along in their big boots.”

Armanda sank back a little and tucked her legs up under her. Gradually she felt herself slipping into the tentative, trusting frame of mind that she often felt with Lidy when they were talking as if they were both caught up in a dream. It was just like that now, although Sjoerd was the one talking while she only listened, more or less uncomprehendingly, a fact that bothered her as little as it would in such a dream, in which recognition doesn’t follow the usual logical patterns. The room was getting warm. Armanda listened to Sjoerd saying how bad it had been when the sky, after the third day of pointless activity, had turned absolutely black again. Nodded sympathetically. And at the same time heard a kind of interior running commentary rubbing her nose in the fact that all the while she had been at home taking care of an adorable two-year-old, reveling in her little fat hands, a doll with her book made of cardboard to read aloud from, and that she had gone shopping and done a little cooking: the usual rhythm of her own usual days. Everything else, everything dramatic, everything large-scale, was as far distant from her as could be, and even as part of the country disappeared from the map, she could almost have been working away peacefully on her diploma thesis, so that she’d be able to hand it in on time in the upcoming week….

And so, as her mind wandered in Now and Back Then, Here and Back There, she suddenly saw herself with utter precision sitting at home in the corner, surrounded by books and notebooks. She had in fact been doing exactly that: on Wednesday evening, full of cheer, Armanda had finished her paper on Plot in Shakespeare’s Early Plays. Somewhere around midnight she had rubbed her eyes, listened to the wind for a moment, and gone into the bathroom. The water from both taps began to fill the bath rapidly. She had undressed.

Sjoerd stood up. She watched him, trying to work out what he wanted.

“Okay,” she said sweetly as he held up the bottle questioningly.

He filled her glass right up, then turned a little farther away from her as he sat down than he had been before.

“Yes?” she said.

A confusing muddle of images. Dream images, but they were real. Trying to find a support, she fixed her eyes on his mouth, which was still talking about their common theme, Lidy; she wanted to know what there was to know. Impressed by the gravity of things, but happy that Sjoerd was talking to her so gently and seriously, she tried to picture Lidy out in the flooded provinces. She could barely manage it. What had to happen, happened, but the evening hour meant that what took absolute priority was her perception of someone else, i.e., herself, Armanda. She, who at midnight last Wednesday had slid into the warm water without so much as a thought for her lost sister, leaving the taps still running, till the bath was full right up to her chin. So as not to veil the sight of her own body with blobs of foam, she didn’t lather herself with soap. I think it’s really good now, she said to herself. Appreciatively, still caught up in the spell of her own cleverness in finishing her work, she had contemplated her white body as it floated almost weightlessly under the surface of the water in the deep enameled bath.

Sjoerd looked sideways. He was eyeing her in a way that indicated that he was expecting a reaction from her to what he had just reported. Still absorbed in her memories, which were engendering the feeling in her that he must be sharing them, she leaned toward him, radiating warmth.

“Next day I went to a Red Cross station, right behind the streetcar stop. There was a woman there behind a table buried in paper, to talk and answer questions; she was dog tired and her patience was such as to kill all hope.”

“And?” said Armanda, while what she was thinking was: Please why don’t you move a little closer? Everything imaginable has happened, everything imaginable has gone wrong. Why don’t we just embrace each other?

“Yes,” he said. And after a little pause that produced a small shift in the mood: “She asked me for Lidy’s personal details.”

“Lidy’s personal details …” Armanda began, and stopped, suddenly overwhelmed by the significance of everything around her, pictures lined up together like pictures in a rebus puzzle of which the solution wasn’t a word but something far worse. The sofa, the lamp, Sjoerd’s body, fragments of dikes, wisps of water, ink-black sky, her own body, absolutely flat, if she was to be honest about it, and — mixed in with it all — Lidy’s body, whose details the Red Cross Information lady had noted down precisely on a form.