A drowned village, a section of broken dike, against a sound track of howling wind Armanda saw a handful of soldiers in long coats, with berets pulled down over their ears, shoveling sand into sacks. She looked at the water lapping at their boots in little waves, completely disconnected from the whistling wind in the film, and at the surface of the water with the roofs of the village poking up out of it, looking oddly calm; water that looked like a normal sea, except that one simply didn’t understand how it had got there. Soon the familiar newsreel announcer’s voice came out of the music accompanying the storm to tell her more authoritatively than any messenger in a play what she was seeing and what she was to make of it.
“Something that is more tragically familiar to our country than any other in the world.”
The picture showed groups of refugees being loaded onto buses, a herd of cows stampeding full tilt through a shopping street that had turned into a river, a cart pulled by a mournful-looking horse on which some women were sitting; the camera zoomed in so close that only one remained visible, filling the screen as she looked directly at Armanda out of another world, infinitely removed in space and time. The deaths didn’t number in the dozens, the newsreel voice continued; alas, the previous figures had to be revised, the tally was in the hundreds. This is Oude-Tonge and Overflakkee — a dirty gray picture appeared — where three hundred people lost their lives in the floods. This is ’s-Gravendeel in the Hoeksche Waard, where fifty-five people drowned. To the accompaniment of urgent music, a whole series of disaster zones now appeared, as abstract to Armanda as the names of places in ancient stories where mythical events had unfolded. Dordrecht, Willemstad, West Brabant, the Hollands Diep, they carried a message that was far beyond her grasp as they collected around a white space in her heart: she and Lidy, and their roles in a drama that had taken on a life of its own.
Drops of sweat formed on her forehead and cheeks. It was very warm in the movie theater and both the music and the announcer’s voice kept getting louder. All around her she could sense the other moviegoers, packed tight, staring at the screen, which made no mention of Schouwen-Duiveland, not even once. So she slowly began to believe that Lidy had gone someplace that had absolutely nothing to do with these images shot through with flashes and wavy lines but was simply wandering around somewhere on solid ground with grass coming up between the paving stones, where people lived normally in houses, cows stood in the cowshed, and horses trotted around in green meadows.
“Helicopters with English, Belgian, and Dutch pilots buzzed around like huge wasps….” She stood up.
As she left the cinema, the wind from the movie was still howling in her ears, but when she got out onto the street, she realized that a song was going around and around in her head. It was a mournful, incomprehensible song, and the words “The winds they whirl, the winds they whirl all around the boatman’s girl …” came in a tragic voice that was Lidy’s voice. Lidy, who was the musical daughter in the family, who practiced on the grand piano with full pedal, but in certain moods let herself go in such pure schmaltz, singing along at the top of her voice, that the family couldn’t listen to her with straight faces.
She crossed the Ceintuurbaan with Lidy’s voice still in her head, singing the song that had always succeeded years ago in inducing a feeling of inexplicable sorrow in her younger sister. It was about a girl child, one who was “only” a boatman’s girl, and the song broadened and deepened the pathos of this with a melody that commanded Armanda’s most painful awareness. Even the first words naturally struck a nerve; “the winds they whirl, the winds they whirl,” sung in a hasty rhythm, put the child, who was only the boatman’s girl, in a fearsome storm. Wind and more wind, gust after gust. Then the song continued with an appeal to which no one in the world is immune: “Come here …,” the last word sung emphatically by Lidy at her little sister, who was already melting away, and then followed by something that never failed to pierce her to the core. Her name. “Come here, Manja,” sang Lidy, substituting Armanda’s baby name for that of the girl in the song, so that she could end the line of the verse, now richer and more personal, with “you’re my sister, you’re my sister,” and then, with even greater emphasis than on the line about the wind, sing it all over again.
As Armanda entered the park, she stepped aside to avoid a wild-looking man who was coming toward her with his peddler’s tray of socks and eyeglass cases, but she felt as softhearted as a little lamb. For the first time in days, she saw her sister in an old familiar scenario, namely with brass polish in one hand and a yellow cloth in the other. As she polishes the faucet in the hall — very nice of her, there are bound to be visitors tonight — her voice rings out in the second verse of the boatman’s daughter song, which begins “O Hell’s spawn, O Hell’s spawn, my sister is gone,” then commands again, “Come here, Manja,” before turning suddenly in a way that still gives Armanda goose bumps, as it did then: “You’re not her, you’re not her,” sung to the same despairing waltz that had swirled around “you’re my sister,” but now with these words, seems to reveal its deepest intentions.
Lidy. When she was around twelve. Busy in the doctor’s house, polishing the brass faucet. As Armanda goes past her on her way upstairs, Lidy wails out the song all the way to the end at the top of her lungs, and casts a mock-despairing, cryptic glance at her that appears to signify that everything is going to end badly. As Armanda closes the door to the room with the balcony behind her, the final words of the song, “Yes, yes!” like an exclamation, echo in her ears, and her eyes fill with tears.
She put the front-door key into the lock. In the hall she cocked her ear for a few moments. At first she thought there was no sign of life in the house, then she heard her mother upstairs, talking to someone.
Nadine Brouwer-Langjouw and Betsy Blaauw were sitting in the back room at a low table along the side wall, lit by a shaded lamp in the corner. In front of them tea was laid out. Cigarette smoke hung in the air. As Armanda appeared in the doorway, she saw them both look up without reacting, which is to say that Betsy, who was talking, continued rather formally, as if she were forcing herself not to leave anything out.
Armanda heard: “He told me that they sailed the boat around in the night and you just couldn’t imagine that the area had ever been inhabited. He saw the corpses of every kind of animal floating about, and tables and chairs and bales of straw, and most of all he saw the ship’s navigation lights shining on waves with big white crests that came rolling in between the remains of the farmhouses as if they belonged there.”
Armanda had come into the room, pulled up a chair, and now asked her mother firmly, by way of interrupting the conversation, “Is there any left?”
In the silence that followed, Nadine lifted the lid of the teapot, made an anxious face, and glanced up to see her daughter’s pleading look. Sjoerd, she explained, had called Betsy today to tell her he’d managed to get on board a lighter in Zierikzee with the help of a couple of students from Utrecht. Armanda nodded — she understood — but was shocked for the umpteenth time this week by the dreadful alienation in her mother’s eyes, a look that was quite foreign to her, and chilling, and the blue vein that was pulsing visibly in her temple.