“Wash? Trim the ends?” Experienced fingers were already lifting her hair and tying a cape around her neck.
“Yes, but no more than a quarter of an inch.”
The hairdresser moved a washbasin behind her head and went off to get something. Armanda kept looking forward, pale, with rings under her eyes. Although she and Lidy had always been good sleepers and loved the way dreams did such a beautiful job of mixing up everything that had happened in real life with things that hadn’t happened yet but could happen at any moment, Armanda was sleeping very badly these days. If she thought at all about Lidy during the night, she simply felt a distressing distance, quite different from the normal, actually quite comforting sadness of her days. Irritating. Moving her legs restlessly, she would stare into the darkness. And force herself not to go into the deep sleep she and Lidy had enjoyed since they were children and in which it didn’t matter whether this dreaming girl corresponded with the woman she would certainly one day become.
This kind of thing is likely to mean that one doesn’t feel quite all there on the following day. Because look — the sun, which had disappeared into the clouds, came out again, casting a cone-shaped beam of light that seemed to be almost religious; she was lying with her head back on a washbasin on wheels, while the hairdresser’s hands ran through her foaming hair, then came warm rushing water, then a towel, and then suddenly she sat up: there went a camel! In the mirror she was seeing a camel walking down the rather narrow street that led to the bridge. She stared. Camels, she thought, remembering involuntarily a book about the zoo that they had at home, are slow-moving, patient ruminants approximately ten feet tall. Approximately ten feet tall … she mentally persevered even as she observed the actual smallish, skinny, maybe one-year-old creature from the Orient, stretching its long neck and emitting strange cries as it passed the window of the Amsterdam hair salon.
“What’s that?!” she burst out, not able to believe her own eyes. She turned to look out directly, to where the vision of the camel with its pathetic little tail over its hindquarters was fast dissolving again into the daylight, leaving a large crowd of children behind it.
“That’ll be that camel,” drawled the hairdresser.
He waited, a large comb in hand, for her to be nice enough to face front again. Responding to her quizzical look, he explained that the children of Amsterdam had written twice to Prime Minister Nehru of India to remind him how much damage had been done to the city zoo during the war. Although they had been thrilled with the baby elephant he had already sent them as a present, they were now hoping for a camel as well, because, as they had explained to Nehru in a little poem, no camel in a northern city means no soul and that’s a pity. That was all. Nehru had answered in the affirmative, and it was his answer, received with great acclaim, that they had just seen striding past.
“Camels?” she murmured. “Are there camels in India?”
“Oh yes,” said the hairdresser in a way that implied this was common knowledge. “There are camels in North Africa and Arabia, and also some in northern India, though not so many.”
Convinced all over again that there was a great wild world out there, just beyond arm’s length, that she couldn’t grasp at all, or only in miniaturized fashion, as if through the wrong end of a telescope, Armanda decided to keep silent. The velvety brown humps still an image on her retinas, she felt the comb pulling the tangles out of her wet hair. An apprentice, a well-meaning little thing, brought her a cup of tea slopping over in its saucer. She nodded and thought, Just put it down, child, yes, this is my life. Small, quotidian, all of it as much like the old one as possible. A noisy dryer was pushed down over her head. Her hands in her lap, Armanda thought first about the shopping list in her purse for a moment, and then about herself.
Oldest daughter in the family now. The one now who had to make conversation with all the aunts and uncles on her parents’ birthdays without her sister to support her. A memory came to her. Last year, the middle of November. Her mother’s birthday. In the big room upstairs at number 77, about twenty guests, relatives and friends, all knowing in advance that the hospitality will be splendid and that the conversation, despite the fact that a daughter is being mourned here, will be light and quite lively. She, Armanda, is wearing an old but still very beautiful blouse of violet-blue silk. Carrying a tray full of coffee cups, she maneuvers past the guests from the sliding doors to the corner of the room.
It was not unexpected that conversation at a certain point should turn to the uncompromising and generous Dutch people who found themselves, so to speak, in a war again.
“Over here!” a young uncle had called to Betsy, who was following Armanda with a bowl of cookies. He raised his eyebrows, stretched out a hand, looked at Betsy emphatically, and continued to make his remarks to nobody in particular.
“Ships’ warehouses full! And there are about half a million people living in this area. They reckon you could clothe eight million people from head to foot with what’s there!”
Armanda saw that Betsy didn’t yet understand what this was about, but she herself did. In the disaster zone of Zeeland and South Holland, people had already been driven mad with the sheer quantity of clothing in the first weeks, donated by a nation possessed. With a knowing look she glanced from Uncle Leo, her mother’s youngest brother, to Uncle Bart, also a Langjouw, sitting next to him, and jumped into the conversation.
“There were evening capes in there, and swimsuits, and streetcar conductor’s uniforms.”
Her eyes slid past them, and as she moved on she said, “Wilder-vank sent a whole batch of chef’s hats.”
As she and Betsy handed round the coffee and cookies, always the boring bit at such a party, she heard the uncles continue.
“Be quiet,” said Bart.
“I swear it.” Leo had been the envoy-on-the-spot of the City of Amsterdam, which had taken on special responsibility for Schouwen-Duiveland. “Shoes lying everywhere. In the square in front of the church, in the streets, all of them in the mud. There was barely a living soul left to be seen in the village, everyone had been evacuated, it all looked absolutely tragic.”
“Really,” said Bart.
“Yes. One of those donations. Thousands and thousands of pairs of shoes. Out of sheer despair, because every warehouse on the island was already overflowing with clothes, so they threw them at the first fishing village they came to.”
The other man snorted.
“In Bruinisse the stuff was stacked to the ceiling in a school with big high windows, there was so much of it not a single ray of light could get through. I saw how people can get drunk on the sheer availability of a huge quantity of stuff, it doesn’t matter what the stuff is. The ones who came to find something didn’t just take what they needed, they began to carry on like voles or crazed moles, tunnelling through it all. Honest. Do you know that the Red Cross is being almost bankrupted by the storage costs? Someone told me that recently they had a hundred thousand cubic yards of clothing that they didn’t even distribute, just shunted it down the line like that, free gratis and for nothing.”
“How about a cigar?”
On the living room table diagonally opposite them was an opened box of Sumatras.
“Yes, give me one. Some of it went to the rag merchants, and some of it to all our faithful Indonesian immigrants.”
A few minutes later, when Armanda came back to sit with them again, the conversation had become more general. She followed it with a cup of coffee in her hand and a plate with a slice of pie on her lap, but didn’t join in. In the circle across from her sat her father and her mother. With the forbearing, slightly astonished expressions that were so typical of both of them and sometimes made them in some remarkable way the spitting image of each other, they listened to these anecdotes that were circulating through every Dutch living room right now, and which their guests were telling one another the way people tell jokes. In Zieriksee the entire population had been forcibly evacuated by the authorities. Nobody wanted to leave, everyone had to. And as a result the workers, yes, it’s true, who had the necessary knowledge to work on the dikes, were suddenly sitting parceled out with host families in Arnhem, Hilversum, Aerdenhout, and so on, and most of them had never even been away from home before. But because the work still had to be done, every single road worker and anyone who could hold a shovel were herded together by the officials of all the city engineering departments across the country and billeted in emergency barracks behind the Stone Dike.