The Storm (2 page)

Shortly before she reached Maasshuis she stopped for gas. A young
man in blue overalls filled her tank and washed her windows. Lidy followed him into the little office, which smelled of coffee and cigarettes. The news had just started on the radio.

“How do I get to the ferry?” she asked as the young man was closing the drawer of the cash register.

He indicated with his head for her to follow him and stood in the doorway to point the way. While Lidy nodded and took in the road that ran straight as a die until it finally curved slightly as it met a crossroads, the news announcer in the background began to read an announcement from the Flood Warning Service in a voice that projected no greater or lesser urgency than usual.

“… Very high water levels in the area of Rotterdam, Williamstad, Bergen op Zoom, and Gorinchem …”

Lidy thanked the man and stepped back out into the wind.

“You can’t miss it!” the gas station guy called after her.

And indeed she found her way quite easily. In no time at all she was at the harbor. She shielded her eyes with one hand. The water was very narrow. Nonetheless the far bank really was another bank, a gray line that seemed closer to being rubbed out than to holding firm. Her scarf tied round her head, she went to the pier, where there was a board with the ferry schedule on it. She read that the ferry coming from the other side wouldn’t dock for another half hour. There was a little hut, up a couple of steps, where she ordered coffee. Dim light, the radio again, she let herself slide into the general mood of passive waiting. Just sitting there, nothing more. Dozily she put a cigarette between her lips.

What am I doing here, for heaven’s sake? Who or what brought me here?

A quarter of an hour after she’d seen her sister alive for the last time, Armanda was walking across the market. She was pushing a stroller with a clear hood, and under the hood was Nadja. Because she was going to a party this evening, Armanda wanted to find a comb to wear in her hair. Because it was so windy and indeed the wind was picking up, many of the market people were packing up their goods and rolling up the awnings of their stalls. The pieces of cloth flapping around the poles contrasted with the anxious faces of the customers still peering inward in their winter coats gave Armanda the impression of a wild contagious abandon. She bought a comb and then added a couple of elastic hairbands decorated with tiny pearls. She pushed back the hood of the stroller and while the Syrian stallholder squatted down and held a mirror in front of the child, Armanda made two little ponytails on top of Nadja’s head and wound the hairbands around them so that they stood straight up; Nadja now looked like a little marmoset.

“Look how pretty you are….”

She loved the child. Nadja was something miraculous, the impudent trick Lidy had stunned her by pulling roughly two and a half years ago. Naked, in the room with the balcony, Lidy had poked herself gently in the belly with her forefinger. Armanda could still call up this image whenever she chose: tall, white Lidy, meeting her eyes in the mirror as she recounted how she’d been to the family doctor that
afternoon, where she’d had to spread her knees embarrassingly wide over a pair of wretchedly hard stirrups.

“Oh, but …” Armanda had stammered after a pause. And then, “Didn’t you take precautions?”

Overcome by a strange, dejected feeling that she’d lost something forever, she had looked at Lidy in the mirror, as Lidy turned toward her with a motion that for Armanda was synonymous with hips, shoulders, soft upper arms, breasts: a woman far gone in a love affair. It had been the beginning of summer, the middle of May, and just as Armanda was working out that it must have happened at the beginning of March, the phone rang. She ran out into the hall. After the spacious brightness of the room, it was suddenly dark, like a tunnel. Suddenly uncertain, she stopped, facing the wall with the ringing telephone, then reached for the receiver and heard the voice of someone she knew well and consequently could immediately see right there in front of her but now suddenly as if for the first time: long-limbed, good-looking, blond, a strong face with a fascinatingly intelligent nose. I always liked to talk politics, money, and English literature with him, I always liked it when he kissed me in that seductive, dangerous way you see in French films, God, it was fine with me back then: he kissed my throat, made a funny snorting noise as he pounced on the nape of my neck, he breathed into my ears, and after he’d done all that, he looked into my face, and I saw that his eyes were terribly serious. Good. But when nothing happened in the days that followed, no letter, no phone call, nothing … why didn’t I wonder about it for a single moment?

It was Sjoerd Blaauw, a friend of hers who was now going out with Lidy. Still completely shaken, she greeted him with the first words that came into her head: “Sjoerd, while I’ve got you on the line, maybe you can tell me …”

Before she was able to ask whether the new Buñuel movie had opened at the Rialto, Lidy, in an unbuttoned checked dress, had snatched the receiver from her hands. There was a lot of breathless whispering, but Armanda was already out on the balcony, looking at the rear of the house on the Govert Flinkstraat, and it was dawning, dawning on her, as dawn it must, that she was already nineteen. A part
of life she’d now missed out on, she thought. A shame, but don’t keep looking at it, that part has turned elsewhere.

Below her in the gardens and inner courtyards the afternoon sun shone on sandboxes, sheds, dogs, bicycles. And in the foreground, in the decking of the balcony, were Lidy’s freshly whitened tennis shoes, set out neatly to dry, and looking not white but orange in the reflection of the sun’s rays. The two of them wanted to fall in love, okay, they’ve gone and done it and not by half measures either. I’m not pretending to myself: I’m really truly shocked! She had fiddled with her skirt, stared up into the air, and followed an imaginary bird with an old-spinsterish look in her eyes. Meanwhile her very simple thought was: I still have my life ahead of me, while she felt an unease that declared in essence, okay, maybe there are still terrific things in my future, but indications are that I lack the talent to experience them, or even recognize them when they’re right in front of me.

Armanda went on studying English at university. Lidy broke off her degree in French language and literature to marry her hands-on lover, who already had a job with good prospects at Bank Mees & Hope. In the months that followed, there were no more comments about how much the two girls looked alike, because Lidy’s belly was starting to swell. And not just the belly: her arms and legs also transformed themselves into soft, rounded masses of flesh. Her face, in which her eyelids drooped mysteriously, took on a look of plump melancholy. For the first time they looked totally unalike.

Once they had a conversation about this.

“What does it actually mean,” said Lidy as she poured herself a glass of lemonade after taking a quick look at Armanda’s still-half-full glass of port, “what does it actually mean to look alike? That we have the same color eyes?”

“I think so.”

They took a short look at each other, as Lidy, in a way Armanda felt was significant, remarked, “Eme-rald-green.”

It was the end of an afternoon in November. From the living room on the street side of the park, where Lidy now lived with her husband, it was almost possible to see the house where she and her sister had grown up.

Armanda drained her glass. She said, “Everyone loves the idea of brotherhood and sisterhood. God, it’s lovely and all that but … I mean, why is it so lovely?”

“What do I know? Nesting instinct, some kind of memory of cuddling and being cuddled, and so on, being wise to all someone else’s tricks, even the most innocent ones, you know …”

“And maybe that we’re all going to die someday?”

“Oh God! Who knows—yes, that must be part of it too.”

Armanda glanced down at the old Persian carpet from home, with the blue birds and the garlands, which oddly enough seemed much more familiar to her here, and also much more beautiful. As she stared at the blue birds, she said to herself: Once upon a time there were two girls, who wore the same clothes when they were children, who went to the same school when they turned six, and to the same high school when they were twelve. She looked up and continued out loud. “The Vossius Academy. Because both of them were good at languages, they decided to make this their specialty, and the older sister’s textbooks could be passed straight on to the younger one two years later.”

Lidy stared at her for a moment, nonplussed. “Hah, bound together by fate,” she said, and poured Armanda’s glass so full that she had to stick her head forward quickly and lap a couple of mouthfuls.

“Damn.” Armanda had sat down again, her hands flat on the table on either side of her glass. “Your underlinings were still in them,” she said. “Words of wisdom in Goethe, revenge and curses in Shakespeare, everything so frightfully beautiful and true. So my eyes would keep wandering to the same things you’d seen a couple of years before, the very same lofty, grandiose things.”

She felt the alcohol going to her head.

A little hoarsely she went on: “Don’t think I read all those beautiful things the same way you did.”

The two of them were silent for a while. But the two of them had known each other so long that their observations and retorts continued unspoken.

With fat Lidy facing her like an idol, Armanda said rather sadly, “You can never feel what someone else feels.” And as Lidy only nodded absentmindedly, she went on in the same tone, “The movements
that little monster makes in your stomach, do you feel them the same way you feel your tongue moving in your mouth, only bigger?”

“What nonsense!” Lidy shot to her feet so uncontrollably that she had to hold tight to the edge of the table.

“Careful!” said Armanda affectionately but without moving an inch.

Lidy trudged awkwardly out of the room.

When she came back a few minutes later, Armanda’s mood had changed. Taken aback, even deeply moved, she looked at Lidy’s body as she spread her legs and laid her hands on her belly to sit down again beside her.

She leaned forward. Quietly and emphatically, like someone who has known something for a long time but only just found the way to put it into words, she said, “You know, quite objectively, I really can’t stand myself.”

“What?”

“True. If I had the choice, I’d prefer not to have that much to do with myself.”

“Well, that’s your bad luck.”

“Don’t laugh, it’s true, even when I was a child I hadn’t the faintest sympathy for myself, not the faintest.”

Since she was a little drunk, she had trouble getting the words out, but her gesticulating hand spoke volumes.

“Those dresses with the smocking on the bodice never looked good on me.”

“Oh, stop it.”

“Forehead was too high for a child.”

“True. Mine was too.”

“Didn’t suit me.”

“Nonsense.” Lidy contradicted her without paying much attention, but Armanda kept going, that most people felt really tender toward themselves. Not her. Which was why it really wasn’t so bad, not bad at all, to have an older sister who was sitting here right now, right here opposite her with a body so much more voluminous than her own and so pleased with herself that it was totally infectious.

A sudden surge of love went through her that curiously she experienced first and foremost as love for herself.

“Not bad at all,” she repeated warmly, looking up at her sister, unembarrassed, with tears in her eyes.

Lidy turned her head to one side.

“Be quiet.”

Armanda also pricked up her ears. Downstairs the front door had opened and shut with a bang. She jumped to her feet. “Is it that late already?”

The staircase in this kind of house was narrow. If you hit the light switch with the automatic timer downstairs and started up, you could bet that the light would go out by the time you reached the half-landing. In the pitch darkness Armanda, still buttoning her coat, met Lidy’s husband on his way upstairs with a rustling newspaper. Both of them had to laugh. Armanda felt his breath on her face.

After she’d done her shopping, Armanda took Nadja in the stroller back to Lidy and Sjoerd’s house on the short side of the park. While she climbed the stairs one by one, holding the child by the hand, she was thinking about the evening to come, and the party, murmuring: After nine. He’s not allowed to pick me up before nine. This time she really wanted to arrive a little late. Betsy often gave parties in her loft on the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. At first Armanda had been unable to believe that Sjoerd was the brother of this friend, who was quite a bit older than she was, and whom she admired for her narrow, intelligent face and curly black hair. Then she discovered that they were stepbrother and- sister, with the same father but different mothers.

She reached the top panting, having carried the child up the second flight of stairs. Why, the question suddenly struck her as she took out the little decorative comb in the living room and looked at it again, why had she set her heart on going to this party? Although she had already committed herself to a visit to Zierikzee (her annual pilgrimage of love, which until now had always been such a joy and which meant she really couldn’t go to the party) on Monday evening she had gone out into the hall. Some decisions just make themselves. A firm plan—she wanted to wear the blue dress with the tight skirt—drew her to the phone and secured her sister on the other end of the line.

“Mr
s
. Blaauw.”

Very funny even now. She cleared her throat sarcastically.

“Hello, it’s me.”

Lidy hadn’t been able to get it at first and found it all a little strange: Armanda’s goddaughter was turning seven and was determined that her aunt and beloved godmother, who came to visit once a year, must make the long trip to the little provincial town, bringing ballet shoes as a birthday present. And now Armanda was asking her to go in her place? Oh. But why?

“All right, okay, I guess it sounds like a nice idea,” Lidy finally said after five minutes of to-and-fro.