Margriet de Moor - De verdronkene

One of them, Lidy, stood at the window and looked out. It was one of those midwinter mornings when it’s just getting light and last night’s storm no longer makes you feel cozy indoors, it’s like a whine that gets on your nerves. She held her little daughter in her arms and her coat was already buttoned. In the process of leaving she hesitated for this one moment like someone who’s glad to be on her way, if that’s what comes next, but would be just as glad to stay home. That the whole plan wasn’t hers to begin with, but Armanda’s, was irrelevant. At this moment, all she was thinking was: I really want to drive a car again. Today and tomorrow, Armanda, you can take care of my daughter, and go with my husband to the party being given by your friend, who also happens to be his half sister. Tomorrow afternoon at the latest, I’ll be back.

The living room occupied the second and third floors of one of the imposing houses fronting a little park in a less imposing neighborhood. Lost in thought, she looked out over the treetops, bare and black against the rectangle of house façades. She didn’t see that diagonally opposite, the figure of a man was groping along a roof gutter until suddenly a flag flapped loose from his hands and immediately stood stiff and shivering in the northwest wind. It was the last day of January. If anyone had said to her that with Nadja held tight and safe in her arms she should take a good look all around because her farewell was a final one, she would have known deep in her heart that this was possible at any moment in life, but she wouldn’t have believed it. After all, she was only twenty-three.

So without turning around, she asked casually, “Do you think it’s going to snow?”

And Armanda, as she stood up from the table with a mug of coffee in her hand, answered, “Of course not, the wind’s too strong,” without the least pang of conscience in her voice. She began to pace up and down, slurping her coffee the way she always did. Not least because she’d taken off her shoes and was wearing a skirt and a knitted cardigan. She was the one who seemed at home here in the high space with the plaster rosette on the ceiling, not Lidy. There was hardly any light. In the back room the furniture was almost in darkness. The only things illuminated by a green standard lamp were a table pushed against the wall — on it a few objects, a teapot, a telephone, a briefcase with a protective band of tape around it — and the door to the hall and the stairs. The house had seen better days, like most of its big neighbors around the park, and the beautiful hardwood doors had been burnt for firewood during the war. But mostly in the rooms up on the third floor that smelled of beds and clothes and soap and cosmetics, it was still possible to recognize the original details of the house’s fin-de-siècle style. In the bedrooms, leaded panes of glass in the upper half of the windows filtered the light.

A squall of rain exploded against the panes and streamed downward. Lidy peered out through the drops. Okay, she decided, I’ll take the coast road. Once I’m past Rotterdam I won’t go over the Moer dike, I’ll head for Maassluis and take the ferry across the Nieuwe Waterweg. She still hadn’t really thought about the whole route, but she knew there were maps in the car. I’ll figure it out. Between another two squalls it was so silent for a moment that she heard the floorboards creak under Armanda’s feet, and as that sound also ceased, she knew that Armanda too was peering out at the foul weather.

“It’s funny really that I don’t know these people at all,” she said.

“It won’t matter to them,” said Armanda, now standing at the window by her side. “They haven’t seen me for a year either.” She sniggered. “Perfectly possible that when you go into the hotel, you know, the Hotel Kirke in the Verre Nieuwstraat, they’ll all make the same mistake and won’t realize right away that you’re not me, but, um, actually you.”

The same little irritated grin on both their faces.

They looked alike. Everyone thought so. They were tall girls with narrow, strong shoulders, always a little bent, which gave them a worried appearance that was quite misleading. And if they had turned round at that moment the double portrait would really have been striking: dark hair, almost chestnut-black, falling smoothly down their backs, exposing delicate little ears, and cut in a straight fringe that concealed the forehead completely. Nobody would ever see their foreheads. But everything could be read in the two pairs of eyes: merriment, sadness, mockery, indifference, passion, and also the speed of their shifting moods, yet what conveyed itself most clearly was that the two sisters appeared to see the world in exactly the same way, and to judge it.

Lidy set Nadja down on the floor and gave her a hug. Never mind the deceptive similarities, she was the mother here. “Mind she doesn’t catch cold,” she murmured, as she squatted down and pressed her nose against the child’s neck with a certain feeling of self-confidence born of the countless times she had brought the little girl into bed with her from baby days onward, while whispering to her husband to slide over a bit and maybe snore a little less loudly.

She stood up again. “Did you give me the car keys or not?” As she groped in her coat pocket, she looked around.

Both began to go through the room. They hunted all over the furniture till Armanda realized she’d left the key at home.

“Then I’ll get going,” said Lidy. “I’ll pick it up there.”

In the hall Armanda said, “Don’t forget their present,” and handed Lidy the package. They gave each other a fleeting kiss. As Armanda said, “Give them my best,” they both laughed.

Lidy clutched the umbrella to her chest, lifted the hem of her coat in one hand, and went down the stairs with her luggage. As she opened the front door, she wore a somewhat solemn expression and her forehead creased. As if she knew that she had to be serious about their exchange of roles, even if it was only for a day.

At the corner, by the street with the little shops and cafés that led to the market, she saw people with their shopping bags walking through the slanting sheets of rain: everyday lives, banal perhaps, but weighed down with work, she could identify with that, most of life got taken up with trivialities. So today she took an adventurous detour. She crossed the street. On the long side of the park, in front of number 77, her father’s car was parked in its usual place.

“Anyone home?”

She had used her key. Now she was crossing the marble-tiled hall to the stairs, where she trod carefully to muffle her footsteps, the way one does unconsciously in a house whose occupants seem to have left. Down below, the door to the waiting room stood open, and her father’s consulting room, as always, was closed. So where were they all? She supposed her father must be doing his rounds of the beds in the Binnengasthuis right now. And her mother must be shopping for food in town. As if she had all the time in the world, she went through the rooms on the first and second floors. In Armanda’s room, the one with the balcony that had once been hers, she wanted to take a customary quick look in the mirror, but the wall next to the window was suddenly empty, and refused to allow her any reflection of her face. After that for some reason she couldn’t resist a quick trip up to the attic. All dark, and what a hellish noise the wind was making against the roof. And of course there on his mattress under the low eaves she found her brother sleeping the way thirteen-year-olds can sleep, as if he were going to keep it up for all eternity. The little skylight was misted over. Daylight fell on the pillow. She looked at the pleading expression on the boy’s face and thought: Why wait any longer?