The Storm (23 page)

No, nobody was thinking of that anymore. But they were thinking about the boy sitting half-concealed behind one of the roof beams. Someone had put a pair of thick socks on his feet, and Hocke had squatted down once beside him to say something nice that ended with “lady apple,” did he want one from the basket where they were stored here in winter, but he shook his head and went to use the bucket for the second time. Adriaan Padmos had just turned eight. Such a child is sometimes quick to recognize what is familiar in strange things, and squats there with an unreadable expression, all hunched up, his knees under his chin, and looks at his socks.

Nobody, on the other hand, was paying attention to the van de Velde girl anymore. She was dead, and they had laid the little body in the space between two cupboards stuffed full of old clothes which were now coming in incredibly handy. Work gear made of napped cotton flannel underneath, summer skirt with flowers on it over the top. Better this way, yes? Last night the girl had been brought this far by the superhuman efforts of her parents, and bringing her any farther was beyond human capacity. For the moment there was nothing more to be done. The father, Nico van de Velde, stood with the others
at the dirty window, outside which dirty things were happening. He and Zesgever were smoking, sharing one of the available cigarettes, which were being strictly rationed. The mother was attending the birth.

Lethargically, but like a night insect drawn to the light behind a kitchen windowpane, Laurina van de Velde had come closer, and was now looking apologetically, perhaps because she was trembling and making no attempt to stop it, at the mounded thing on the wide bed. She knew, had she been capable of thought, that she’d been through something similar, but the event, the actual image of it, where was it? For a moment she caught Lidy’s eye, as Lidy stretched her back against the headboard. Did Lidy want to say something? She had had her child, who would be her only one, at the age of twenty-one.

It had been in fall, a beautiful sunny fall day. They had sent word to Nico in the field at Hocke’s when things were that far along. He had left the Smythe, a chunky English mechanical sower with an unworkable operating width of six feet, standing. You boys keep going with the winter wheat. What you sow, you reap at the appointed time, I’m off. Nico was an agile, well-set man who was often able to rouse his wife, who was inclined to melancholy, with his abruptness. “Be a little more cheerful, kiddo,” he’d say when he got home, saw her looking absentminded, and took her face with the sky-blue eyes he’d fallen in love with in his hands, or again: “Stop thinking so much! Both feet on the floor, that’s it!”

“Where? Here? On this floor?” she once replied, more bewitched by him than convinced, and set her feet in their soft socks on top of his. She was a woman in a permanent state of disquiet, that was her normal mood. Uneasy because of the machines that her husband worked with, uneasy because of the horses that could kick out backward, uneasy because of the heavy backbreaking labor of pulling out the flax roots in mid-July, handwork he excelled at. In the last month he had joined the Reds and started talking about “comrades,” balling his fists or holding up a finger, which bothered her even more. What would happen when the farmer, Hocke, heard about this, and what would become of Dina and her other future children if their father was put out on the street?

So now she looked at the imminent birth and felt nothing, not even
the slightest disquiet. She glanced at Cathrien Padmos’s face, which she had known since she was a child, saw how she was sweating, tried to hold her hand, accepted that she was pushed away by the other woman, perhaps because the latter needed to retch, and meantime was so desperately cold that she couldn’t make her mind function in any normal way at all. When Lidy asked, “Shouldn’t we find something we can wrap the baby in, the little child, in a minute?” she nodded.

“Good.”

She and Lidy went to one of the two cupboards.

“This?” asked Lidy, holding something woolly.

“Or this?” Laurina hesitated.

A few minutes later, the women gathered around the mother-to-be and Izak Hocke, who for some reason had been summoned to join them, were able to reassure her that they could already see the crown of the little head. It was eleven in the morning. Outside the window of the delivery room was a world that nobody could now imagine being anything other than it was. Murderous, a single surge of gray and brown. That the storm had still not begun to abate after more than twenty-four hours was, meteorologically speaking, to be considered a freak occurrence.

Cathrien Padmos was the type of woman who gives birth to children on her own. She had accepted having a piece of bedding rolled up and pushed against her back, but she wanted none of the hands, the looks, the help that were intended to be of assistance to her but actually worked as its express opposite. She was at the height of her battle with the pain, that invisible enemy, also an angel who numbs and transports one to a faraway place where one can cease thinking about one’s loved ones who are dead, or noticing and realizing it to be significant that the bed one is lying on is standing on a worryingly unstable, swaying attic floor. She raised her head and began to scream uninhibitedly.

The sound of a storm defies words. Or rather, the effect it has. The world makes noises. There isn’t a moment of peace in which it isn’t creaking or rustling or banging or talking and uttering every possible
nuance of lament until sometimes it even sings. Some of these noises can wait a little, but others are absolutely urgent.

Up in the attic, everyone had gradually become oblivious to the wind. The incessant hammering on their instincts, the incessant demands on their imaginative powers to foresee what could happen if they didn’t figure out a way to get out of here, had dulled their minds.

Hocke, van de Velde, Zesgever, and Cornelius Jaeger stood at the window from which, if you laid your head against the glass and turned it all the way to the right, you could see Cau’s farm. Cau himself wasn’t standing with them. He was down on his heels by the now abandoned camping stove, seeing if maybe there was still a splash of coffee remaining in the pot. The wind had been rattling against the roof like artillery fire for some time now. Sometimes it was there, and you knew it, even relied on it to be there, then it would suddenly stop, and there would be a pause. Even Cau must then have heard the other noise from outside, and felt it go through his very bone marrow.

His house no longer had a façade. Hocke and Zesgever, quite detached, concerned only insofar as they had to wonder if their own home was going to hold, let their eyes wander over the exposed interior of the Gabriëllina’s attic as it still stood above the water. Oh, the stuff, the worn-out inner spring mattress, the cast-iron stove. The cupboard with long out-of-date and unusable cans, jars, preserving jars, horsehair sieves: it was all there in total conformity with the situation, as if the objects had just fled from downstairs to upstairs like the people. But not a trace of Simon Cau’s nephew, Marien. No sign of life in the attic across the way.

But that was made up for by the human cargo on rafts that were being swept past them, and other flotsam and jetsam. Under a bad spell, bemused, the little group of men stood at the window and heard the screams of terror and cries for help, and the curses.

“Bastards! Help us or drown!”

A chunk of a roof went whirling past.

“Vipers! You’re godforsaken!”

Most of its roof tiles were missing. It came, with at least eight people, perhaps an entire family, aboard, from the direction of Gabriëllina Farm and swept southward past the top floor where Hocke and his evacuees were sheltering. There wasn’t even any point in wrenching
open the window and trying something with a rope. The family, about to be submerged, was seized almost at that very moment by the current that was pouring past the house and away at an angle toward the grayish horizon. The screaming man’s protests changed immediately, merging, as they could see from the house, with the last movements of people struggling with all their might to stay alive one more minute, one more second, and who knew, even in that last minute, the fullness of that last second—you could tell—that a child was still a child, a novice in conditions that were sometimes glaring and senseless, and that a parent was a parent. Don’t be afraid, just hold tight to me … two of the onlookers, van de Velde and Zesgever, squeezed their eyes as the roof capsized and they heard a sort of animal howl. Izak Hocke turned around. Another similar freight was coming at them from the right.

“I can’t look anymore!” he said, absolutely at his wit’s end, talking to his mother’s back as she wandered around in the half-darkness.

The only one left looking out into the storm now was Cornelius Jaeger. His head low, immersed in the din as if he had become its medium and was internalizing it, he stood at the window. Did he feel that at least one person had to bear witness that the high-pitched, multi-toned whistle was in the process of obliterating the communities of Dreischor, Ouwerkerk, Nieuwerkerk, and Oosterland? Midday had already passed. The tide was slowly beginning to rise again. Out on the great polder of Schouwen it crept forward insidiously across the ditches, because the sea dike that ran from the coast all the way to Zierikzee had been breached only at Schelphoek. But even on the heaving, drowning polders of Duiveland, the majority of the victims were still at this point alive. From attics, rooftops, and rafts, they did what victims who are still alive always do: they scream, and they wait for help.

Up in this particular attic, they were waiting for something that can be characterized, questionably perhaps but also not wrongly, as deliverance. The birth, almost upon them now, took precedence over the storm. The cervix was fully dilated, the head of the baby had emerged and was pointing down through the pelvic girdle. Lidy, among those surrounding the bed, was the one most involved in what was happening. Leaning far forward she watched as the little head,
with its skull bones that, as she knew, were as flexible as the whalebones in a corset and could move over one another, pushed its way forward a tiny bit, then slid back again.

“It’s going fine!” she encouraged the not-so-young mother, who was looking around as if she were hoping to break out of an encirclement. She too, if she remembered correctly, had made quite a spectacle of herself during this last phase, but this woman chose from now on to let not a single sound escape her. So whether they wanted to or not, everyone could hear the screams coming from outside. Lidy looked at the red face, saw the arms that tried to cover it. With the clarity that comes with exhaustion, she registered that death cries and birth cries are similar, that they both resemble and illuminate one another.

Muffled barks from the dog.

When a child is born without professional help, those present have to use their own good sense. Unwind the umbilical cord from round its neck. Rub the soaking wet little body till it’s dry. Wrap it up warmly. Clamp off the umbilical cord, cut it with something sharp. If the child is a bluish red because blood or slime is blocking its throat and windpipe, suck them out. Lidy, with a strange, salty taste in her mouth, heard the child whimper a little, then scream. Cathrien Padmos had given life to a healthy boy.

Moving heavily, weak at the knees, she went from the bed to the window, where the strange deformed boy took a step to one side to make room for her. She leaned her forehead against the window. Feeling light-headed, she sank back for a moment into what she had not forgotten, home, Nadja, Sjoerd, her sister, her brother. One could not describe it as coherent thought. It was more a knowledge, certain but as vague as fantasies of heaven and hell, that they were there, in some unimaginable place in safety. She forced her eyes open and craned her neck, for in the middle of the stream of debris that was sailing past her on the waves she saw a raft with a high rim around the edges, maybe the upturned roof of a hut or something like that, and on it was an animal, alone, motionless, it looked to her like a pig. Before she could wonder if it was still alive, she saw the animal lift itself a little
on its front legs and then tread forward into the water in a way that looked intentional.

“My God!”

Now there wasn’t a human being or an animal to be seen anywhere. Not even a bird.

Utterly shocked, she turned away. The boy, right next to her, looked at her and she stared back into the eyes under the continuous line of the eyebrows, at the mouth, already with a hint of fuzz on the upper lip. Nadja? Sjoerd? Sarphati Park, number 36? A paradox of danger and safety: there had to have been a moment of clarity, a short leap between its onset and its end, that was a rude awakening for her. The world was under a flood, the universe was turning in the wind, and they in this attic were the only ones to have been spared.

One beautiful day in May 1962, in an Amsterdam bedroom, a man who could only describe himself as contented and happy both in his private and professional life awakened with the immortal words in his head:
my wife doesn’t understand me
. Nonplussed, he rolled onto his side. Armanda was still asleep, on her back, chin pointing up in the air, a position she’d taught herself to use, initially with playful light-heartedness, after reading a newspaper article about double chins. Where did these words come from? Heavy and awkward, they ran through his mind. He stretched out an arm; she was wearing a short nightgown she called a babydoll. He could see the beginnings of her responsive smile, because the unbleached linen curtains let a lot of light into the room.

“Yes, that’s better,” she’d decided when they were settling on the decoration of the new house. “Now maybe we’ll wake up early by ourselves as the children do.”

His hand slid over her sweet, soft belly. Since the birth of their youngest she hadn’t quite managed to get back to her old weight.

At breakfast half an hour later, the words were submerged but didn’t really disappear in all the busy activity of a family starting a new day with quite a lot of noise. On top of this the radio was on, to give them the news. French underground atomic test in the Sahara. He reached for the milk bottle—the first thing he did every morning was
drink a glass of cold milk—and looked absentmindedly at Armanda in her blue mohair bathrobe as she cut a piece of buttered bread into little pieces for Allan, sitting beside her all big and plump in his high chair. Some men love their wives less when they’re sitting opposite in their bathrobes, unwashed and uncombed, but he had always liked the blurring of this line between table and bed. “Stop it!” she was saying to an angelic little blond girl as she took the tin of rusks away from her without even looking—his favorite, four-year-old Violet, who gave her father a smile as soon as she saw him looking at her, with such sparkling eyes that no movie star could have topped it.