She reached Dordrecht in the early evening. Failing to find any trace of Lidy among the evacuees in schools and churches, she spent the night on the floor of a post office and went on next morning to the Ahoy Halls in Rotterdam. There too she searched for Lidy for hours in the throng of people that seemed to have adapted itself noisily to a world roofed in glass and steel, with row upon row of stretchers on the concrete floors, coverlets, cushions, cardboard boxes tied up with string, prehistoric suitcases, the occasional well-behaved dog, and an army of helpers, mostly extremely nice women of the sort who always knew what to do no matter what the circumstances, making the rounds with coffee and open-face sandwiches. When she came home around dusk, she was too exhausted to speak. But Armanda, who had barely reached the front door herself, because she had been taking care of Nadja, hadn’t been able to wait, and wanted to know what her mother had seen.
Was she cold, was Armanda’s first question, was she tired? And she had read in her mother’s face that Lidy for the moment had been nowhere to be found. After she had guided her into the warm sitting room, led her to the sofa, taken off her shoes, and waited till she had hugged Nadja and kissed her, Armanda stared at her inquiringly.
When nothing was forthcoming: “I’ve heard there’s looting down there, and people have already been shot.”
Her mother had looked around the room. “Where’s Jacob?”
She hadn’t answered. No one in these days was paying attention to the thirteen-year-old. She said: “An entire cowshed with all the cows still tied up inside is said to have been sucked out to sea on the ebb tide.”
Armanda saw her mother nod thoughtfully. “I read somewhere,” she said, not giving up, “that the atmosphere over some of the islands is so wet that the birds in the air are inhaling water and just drowning on the wing.”
To which Nadine replied that she hadn’t seen that, but she’d seen plenty else.
“In the Hollands Diep …” she began, but then broke off at the sound of the front door closing downstairs. While Jacob came up the stairs whistling a tune, she hastily told Armanda, as if wanting to be done with it as fast as possible, about the flotilla of ships in the snow that had spread out in two directions across the waters, still almost at peak levels.
“And it was so odd,” she said, “suddenly”—she turned her eyes to her son, who had just entered the room—“one of these boats climbed right out of the water and went up this really steep dike, and then drove away quite fast on wheels.”
“An amphibious vehicle” was Jacob’s calm response. “A Detroit United, made by the Americans.”
Later that evening, alone in her room, when she thought back to her mother’s return home, Armanda could make no connection, not even the beginnings of one, between her own days just past and those of her mother. Small-boned, in the gray roll-necked sweater that was soon too warm for her, her mother had sat on the sofa, right on the edge, as if she had to leave again at any moment, and had talked about seeing a ship near Moerdijk coming toward them from the opposite direction and then passing them, with hundreds of coffins piled on deck.
Downstairs in the hall Betsy put on her cap in front of the mirror.
“He also told us,” Armanda heard her say to her mother, “that they spent the night outside the dike. They were allowed to tie up the boat to a fishing smack from Hellevoetsluis that was anchored there with its bow toward the open sea. They were given permission to sleep in the galley, which they did, despite force ten winds, storm gusts, and showers of hail. But shortly after four, the smack tore itself loose as the tide reached its high point, and vanished at high speed, their boat behind it, somewhere on the pitch-dark waters of the Krammer.”
8. Missing
Three days later, early in the evening, the doorbell rang. Sjoerd.
“Give me your coat!” said Armanda, who had opened the door to him. But he didn’t want to, and upstairs, where the family was already sitting down to dinner, he declined good-naturedly but firmly, when his father-in-law, who had also returned home that afternoon, invited him to stay.
“Sit down, man!”
“Go with him for a little bit, Armanda,” said Nadine, when she realized that Sjoerd, after three disturbing days, evidently wanted to have his little daughter back home with him. By which she meant, take bread, fresh milk, cookies, and a decent portion of the casserole that’s still in the oven, because of course there won’t be anything in the house over there.
Number 36 was dark and cold. But Armanda didn’t mind, quite the contrary. It was actually really nice, while Sjoerd lit the oil stove and switched on the lamps, to warm the food, button Nadja into an extra cardigan, take a neatly ironed cornflower-blue cloth out of the cupboard, and lay the table.
After dinner, while Sjoerd was putting Nadja to bed, she sat smoking with her feet up on a stool, looking out of the darkened window. Kindly, with a feeling of being a simple, gentle woman, she thought, No, no coffee for me, I’d rather have something stronger. Yet all through dinner, she and Sjoerd had kept giving each other brief, faintly embarrassed looks, in which each recognized the other’s sense of guilt. Perhaps it couldn’t have been otherwise, with Lidy in the background the whole time. What had happened to her, where was she? And so they had eaten well and played with the little girl. Would you like something more? Should I heat up a little more of the meat? And of course without really daring to think about it clearly, Armanda from second to second was replaying the party of a full week ago now, and them dancing, and the fact that he had been turned on by her. She liked it that men’s bodies responded so openly and spontaneously, despite themselves. And she liked herself for being so sensible, and not having gone home with him to number 36 for a quick drink.
When Sjoerd came back downstairs, Armanda asked, “Is she asleep?” Sjoerd said, “Yes,” and next moment they were both sitting on the sofa by the stove, each in a corner, drinking cognac out of shot glasses. Sjoerd began to recount everything he’d seen and done. He took his time and spoke straight ahead, as if he were giving a slide show in a darkened room.
“It was the Raampartse Dike,” he said. “A dry stretch of road that was still high enough out of the water. When we tied up, there were at least a hundred freezing people standing there, more were lying on the ground soaked to the skin, you have to imagine that they’d been washed up there for days and the storm was still blowing. And don’t think that there was much we could do at this point. The army had arrived at the same time as we did; in those practical amphibious machines they call DUKWs. I stood on the dike and heard a British, a Dutch, and an American officer consulting. It was the American, a short little major, totally calm, who had hit upon the idea of taking the DUKWs and had come chugging up from the Rhineland in short order with an entire collection of emergency assistance teams. And the teams were made up of Germans, former German soldiers, and in less than a minute they were scaling the dikes.”
“Whaaat?”
“Yes. And you can bet that the poor half-drowned devils on the dike were happy to see the enemy come marching along in their big boots.”
Armanda sank back a little and tucked her legs up under her. Gradually she felt herself slipping into the tentative, trusting frame of mind that she often felt with Lidy when they were talking as if they were both caught up in a dream. It was just like that now, although Sjoerd was the one talking while she only listened, more or less uncomprehendingly, a fact that bothered her as little as it would in such a dream, in which recognition doesn’t follow the usual logical patterns. The room was getting warm. Armanda listened to Sjoerd saying how bad it had been when the sky, after the third day of pointless activity, had turned absolutely black again. Nodded sympathetically. And at the same time heard a kind of interior running commentary rubbing her nose in the fact that all the while she had been at home taking care of an adorable two-year-old, reveling in her little fat hands, a doll with her book made of cardboard to read aloud from, and that she had gone shopping and done a little cooking: the usual rhythm of her own usual days. Everything else, everything dramatic, everything large-scale, was as far distant from her as could be, and even as part of the country disappeared from the map, she could almost have been working away peacefully on her diploma thesis, so that she’d be able to hand it in on time in the upcoming week….