The Storm (24 page)

“Open your mouth and close your eyes!”

It was Nadja, smelling strongly of eau de cologne. He obeyed. Last downstairs, Nadja laid her cheek against his and put a piece of nougat, her passion of the moment, into his mouth. Since the move, during which she had come across the photo of her mother in the Hotel Kirke, in a cardboard box full of old odds and ends, she had, amazingly, become demonstrably more loving and good-natured.

Heaven knows why, but he got to his feet to turn up the volume on the news. Chancellor Adenauer considers the conversations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union over the status of Berlin to have lost direction. Dutch troops dispatched to New Guinea on the frigate
Zuiderkruis
. The Upper Chamber, by a vote of 78 to 58, has passed a revision to the law permitting the sale of fresh bread to begin at 9:30 in the morning instead of 10 a.m.

He raised his head to observe an area of the wall above the radio: the building of a dam to control the Grevelingen at Schouwen-Duiveland has been resumed after an interruption. The Delta Commission expects this fourth major stage in the eventual closing of the sea arms of Zeeland and Zuid-Holland to be completed within two years.

“The weather …”

While he listened in the bright dining room—Armanda was going to have the wall broken through to the kitchen before fall—to the forecast about the cold front from the northwest that would envelop the country during the course of the day, he was seized by an impulsive fantasy masquerading as a totally rational decision. Quite strong
winds in the coastal provinces, he heard, as he wiped his mouth and got to his feet. The Grevelingen was an easy drive if you took the highway through Noord-Brabant.

Shortly afterward he was in the car on the Rokin. He parked in front of the entrance to the bank and went to the room adjacent to his office on the second floor to give his secretary instructions for the day. A quarter of an hour later, en route to The Hague, he was hearing the words again that he had woken up with this morning. And the gentle, inviting, absolutely undramatic nostalgia that they contained. Sjoerd Blaauw and Armanda Brouwer had now been married for seven years. This was a fact. But when he, Sjoerd, thought consciously about himself as a married man, he automatically included in this a previous past, as free as a dream that he yearned for, the way you yearn for something that one day slipped between your fingers and is gone.

Armanda was lovable. She was damned difficult. She was an angel in bed. She stuck her head in the pillow and complained in a muffled voice that she had a headache. In the first years her eagerness when he came home was sometimes so blatant, and she let herself fall into the sofa with her arms outstretched in such open invitation that he actually felt more like having a simple conversation with her about, say, football. “Did you know they’re broadcasting a big match—
mmm
—tonight on the radio?” Baffled look from her, and he turns toward the living room table and goes on: “Starts at eight.” Six months after Violet was born, she was back to teaching three mornings a week, and the moment his mother-in-law came in to look after the baby, she disappeared to the Barlaeus school, in a rush, cheerfully, dressed appropriately in a tweed jacket that seemed made for a young English teacher.

Then came the time she liked to provoke him with the question “Who am I?” and lay her hands over his eyes. Playful results, of course, and a suitable response from him that necessitated no compliments. Shortly before Allan was born, she said she wanted to move, and immediately. Bad evening. October, wind howling on the roof. They were building or hanging something up in the attic, doesn’t matter which, when she laid the hammer aside. After they had looked at each other for a moment, listening to the wind, and she had said,
“It’s too Lidy-like for me,” he had snorted once in the way that was typical of him and then replied idly, “Oh—maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to look for somewhere on the ground floor.”

“Not a bad idea,” she continued as she turned around heavily to go back to work. “And we’re not going to take a thing, not a single piece of furniture, from this house when we go.”

Nadja thought it was terrific. An eleven-year-old girl—skinny as a beanpole, but with a red plait down her back as thick as your wrist, and absolutely no freckles—can happily say Yes! when told that her entire life is going to be stood on its head. When it took place, her little brother, Allan, was three years old. While her mother did a drastic clean-out of the attic, stuffing photos, letters, schoolbooks, and reports into garbage bags, Nadja was on her knees in the rectangle of light thrown by one of the attic windows, with a photo in her hands.

“Hey, Mama!”

Armanda went over and immediately recognized the family photograph that Jacomina Hocke, with whom she was no longer in contact, had sent her as a keepsake.

“Who’s the child you’re sitting
there
with?”

Armanda, without hesitating, her voice involuntarily outraged, said quietly, “That’s not
me.”

“Not
you?”

The astonished forefinger of a girl who has never been told a thing about an exchange of mothers. In the beginning her father and the whole family were in too much disarray; later, having accustomed themselves to the slightly edited family story, the new version with all the details that fit perfectly, had even been added to, they never got around to it. But in their hearts they surely must have known, didn’t they, that at some point they would have to tell Nadja everything.

“Just a moment,” Armanda had said, reaching for a packing chest so that she could sit down. Bent over next to Nadja, she was better able to look at the picture, and did so, suppressing the first, instantaneous, strong impulse to tell her adopted daughter straight out, without the slightest psychological subtlety: “That’s your real mother.” She knew the corner from which the photo had been taken, the year before it had been snapped, she had after all been there herself. From
the Winter Garden of the Hotel Kirke, you look into the reception room with the tables laid. There are draperies to either side of the staircase, and there’s a palm tree. Given the backdrop, you wonder what the two people in the foreground, in adjacent wicker chairs, have to celebrate in such a grand way: the little gap-toothed girl, laughing shyly, and the woman, Lidy, with eyes that look slightly tragic because of the lack of lighting, and a smile around the lips that you’d have to know in order to interpret as “All very nice, but tomorrow I’ll be home again.”

“That’s your real mother,” said Armanda.

“Goodness!” said Nadja.

That is how it happened.

In the fishing village of Bruinisse, on the Grevelingen, a complete working harbor had been built to block off three miles of water by means of a dam. It was late in the morning. Sjoerd Blaauw, like a tourist, politely stopped a workman in overalls and boots to ask if they were making good progress.

“Let me through, friend!”

Quite right. He took a step to one side and lost himself for a moment in contemplation of the phenomenon in gray and blue-white, the two in spectacular contrast to each other, and which he would have loved to have explained to him. Gray was the color of the quays (which were also loud and dusty), full of asphalt, steel cables, blocks and tackles, trucks, and machines that looked like military equipment, and gray was the color of the contours of the construction site a little farther off, in which a tide lock 450 feet long by 55 feet wide was already in operation, and also the portion of the dam that was slowly advancing from Flakkee. The row of caissons lying ready in the water next to the quay were also gray, a beautiful example of hydraulic engineering to instill respect, but naturally a joke, a child’s toys compared with the Phoenix-A-X caissons, as tall as high-rises, which would shortly be sunk directly at the edge of the sea in an opening several hundred yards wide by fifteen yards deep with a tidal range of eighteen feet. With a warm breeze in his face, Sjoerd looked up high. Blue-white (the quiet, independent, comfortable, tolerant
blue-white that their national culture demands) was the color of the all-encompassing cloudy sky of the Dutch Masters above it.

A faint feeling of dizziness. His eyes moved down again. At an angle to the quay, with its bow toward the caissons, was a ship the color of red lead, a totally normal domestic ship with a cabin, named
Klazina
. Sjoerd turned to a man wearing a greenish leather jacket and tugged on his sleeve.

“No, back here,” the man answered in response to his question as to why the dangerous arm of the sea was not being blocked off directly at the shoreline.

“But why?”

The man adopted a more comfortable stance as he explained to Sjoerd about the separation of the floodplains of the Grevelingen and the Oosterschelde. And about the injection of millions of cubic yards of sand, the building of entire asphalt mixing plants on-site, a foreign cable railway in our polders and watery lands, and about piers and caissons and abutments and swing bridges and sluices in the Haringvliet, where enormous shields would be steered from seventy machine rooms…. “Oh, mister, have you ever thought that the nightmare of ’fifty-three, back then, was the beginning of a damn magnificent dream?”

“Dream?” Sjoerd’s face had taken on the well-known expression of schoolboys and students who want to learn the mandatory stuff for a test, while their hearts, otherwise occupied, do what hearts want to do: swell to bursting.

When did
my wife doesn’t understand me
begin to echo in his ear again, like the line of a poem? When his eyes turned away to look at the powerful little ship that was in process of taking one of the caissons in tow, a red ship with a deckhouse on top and a name that was the only female presence in this world of men—
Klazina?

“So, would you like to come along?”

The man, about to say good-bye, had noticed what the other was looking at.

“Can I … could I really?”

“We’ll fix it.”

Not long afterward he was standing on the foredeck of the little tug. Sjoerd, on the water again where he’d been once before. Noticeably
calmer, the water, noticeably bluer than it had been when it engraved itself in his memory. Close behind him they were busy with chains and winches, was he standing in the way? No, the crew paid no attention to the strange, tall, blond fellow staring at the expanse of water as if he were staring at a world that had long been denied him. All the same, a boy brought him milky coffee in a pale pink mug, said, “Please!” with quiet warmth, and let him alone again with the vibrations under his feet. He lit a cigarette. The water between Bruinisse and Oude Tonge glittered, reflections, shouted orders, echoes: everything, all of it, exactly mirrored—even if in a fashion one couldn’t have guessed—the words he had woken to this morning.

Lidy, look at me. Do you remember how we went to Ouderkerk? You were already weeks late with your period. View of the bend in the Amstel. Freeze-frame of Rembrandt, down on his knee, drawing this view. And you with your news. Do you remember how I got the fright of my life, and you turned around to pick some flowers and to murmur: “What I’d like is …”

“Yes?”

“Is for you to make the same face you made back then when you caught that pike.”

We sat down on a bench at the entrance to the Amstel park.

That evening Sjoerd went on a date and cheated on his wife for the first time, and it isn’t clear that the one thing—his experiences of the day—had anything directly to do with the other. It simply happened that as he sat down in Amsterdam in the wonderful evening air on the café-terrace of the Hotel Americain, he made eye contact with a woman who happened to be passing. Slender, wearing a green dress. Who next moment was coming to sit next to him at the round table. Large, shiny shopping bag on the ground between their chairs.

“Good?”

Sjoerd had ordered a glass of claret for her too. The weather had ignored the forecast on RNMI all day. It was warm and wonderfully sultry.

“Mmmm.”

Not the slightest awkwardness between them. What did you do
today? His question to her, slightly narrowed eyes. Worked (in some institute), bought shoes (in the bag), talked to old friends on the phone (in Vienna). Like a woman letting her fantasy run at the first meeting, she didn’t look at him directly; instead her eyes seemed to go through him to someplace behind him, as if through a fog.

“And you?”

He began to talk about the construction in the delta as if he’d been waiting for this opportunity, his voice unusually emphatic and excited. And she listened, her arm next to his on the table, and twisted her wrist, because everything was already conspiring to have their hands end up on top of each other. (Later she would tell him she had fallen that evening for “the gleam” of his desire, his masculinity without even a trace of typical Dutch dullness in the way he looked at her or the way he spoke.)

“More than a billion cubic yards of seawater with every tide!” he almost shouted, telling her about the Oosterschelde. “They close it with a forty-foot-high dam smack up against the sea! Don’t think that’s easy, it involves an estuary with a mouth more than six miles wide! First they import enough sand to create three new islands, then in the channels the wild current forms as a result, they build thirteen gigantic towers on sills of steel and reinforced concrete cased in stone!”

They made a date for the next afternoon.

When Sjoerd came home at around eleven and went into the living room, Armanda stayed sitting close to him on the sofa and stared at the tips of her shoes with a tragic expression.

“What is it?”

He had called her that morning from Zeeland to say that that was where he was, and told her in good faith that he didn’t know yet when he’d be setting off back to Amsterdam.

So now this situation. Remorsefully Sjoerd sank down halfway onto the floor in front of her and looked into her face. Armanda, a little encouraged by this, immediately let loose a torrent of words, she’d spent the entire day imagining the whole area he’d felt compelled to go visit all of a sudden, just like that, the map, the layout of Schouwen-Duiveland closed in by its two sea arms.