They stared at each other for a moment, each of them unfathomable, and Armanda said quickly, “I mean, a half-orphan as regards my own life. Everyone has a past and a future, which sounds really banal, you’ll say, but I don’t care, that’s how it is.”
Betsy, up for more, kept quiet.
“Yes, really, everyone has a past, a run-up to the present, and that’s your youth, at least for normal mortals, in which you were already fully the creature that you are now, it wouldn’t be possible any other way, would it, but mostly it first took the form of a promise. I know, nice story, my run-up to today isn’t to be found in my past, it’s … tsch … it’s in my dead sister. So let’s …” She turned around, reached for the tea things, and stared crossly at the photos of the most beautiful day of her life. “Just call my past what it really is: a step-past.”
Betsy, who had promised only to stay a minute and didn’t want to offer the slightest excuse for more tea to be brewed, started making hasty, spur-of-the-moment remarks about starting a new life, which were meant to cheer her up. She, Armanda, she said, was herself, Armanda, and absolutely nothing could prevent her from choosing her own path through life and making it a great success. Finish your studies first, you hear me? Get your hair cut. Paint the doors and stairs in your house blue or green. Buy yourself a ficus tree….
But Armanda kept shaking her head thoughtfully as Betsy, all excited, came to the end of her long list with: “Love your husband!” And gave a merry look as she brought up the night at the school play; she and Lidy had got the giggles when the leading actor, who was seriously drunk, said, “If you’re on the planet, it’s a fact that you’ve got a no-account job in nowheresville.”
“Well, Betsy, don’t misunderstand me, but how does this sound? ‘If I’m on the planet, it’s a fact that strictly speaking I’m my elder sister.’”
Armanda chose a cookie, a café noir, Betsy did the same, and for a moment the two of them stood there nibbling, first with a grin, then expressionlessly, but quite peacefully; for their conjoint nibbling was actually an echo of Lidy and Armanda as sisters, since everyone always said they were exactly alike.
“Absolutely not,” Armanda suddenly said unexpectedly. “We distinguished between the two of us the way only sisters can. We knew it. If you live that close together, if you grow up minute by minute in a world that’s almost yours, but by a hair’s breadth not quite, then you register the tiniest things about each other that are different.”
Her face was animated now. Had she not at that moment heard the front door opening and closing downstairs, she would have been able to chatter with her beloved visitor. For however odd, even mad, her conversation with her mother had seemed a short while ago, she had felt that she was being completely rational in the other conversation that had just followed it. “Fundamentally different!” she had said again. “Brothers always want to be the opposite of brothers, and sisters of sisters. Oppositeness is at the root of the brother or sister relationship. I’m pretty certain that’s the case. So now that my past has been exchanged for hers, while her future has passed to me, there’s this veil of bottomless sadness, though naturally I try to ignore it.”
That is roughly the kind of thing she might have said, slightly breathlessly but in a heartfelt way, if she hadn’t heard someone coming up the stairs.
She blushed.
20. Sunny Day II
Sjoerd and Armanda Blaauw-Brouwer. Married couple.
They too took a brief look at the photographs together, why is not clear, for the two of them were focused on something else entirely; Sjoerd had just thrown the jacket of his beautiful light gray suit onto a chair. He was now in his late twenties, a tall, slender man with carefully combed blond hair and a face that was beginning to show the open, straightforward, intelligent qualities that are valued in the world of money and business. With an arm around Armanda’s hips, he bent loyally over the photos. It’s well known that when a newly married couple first sees their wedding portrait, the bride looks only at the bride and the bridegroom does the same. One could switch bridegrooms in the darkroom for fun, but never brides.
“Beautiful,” murmured Sjoerd, without the faintest astonishment over the snow-white dress lifting away from the neck and the little hat, perched at an angle to set off the beloved little face, and the bouquet held up under the chin, that he must know from a previous photo, already glued into the album, in the same always-flattering three-quarter pose. His eyes were already elsewhere. He turned around purposefully and felt Armanda’s whole body respond immediately, as he had expected, with a yes! yes! During this afternoon’s meeting with the administrative department of the Capital Investment Committee of Mees & Hope, he had felt as miserable as a dog, almost ill with sheer repressed impatience to get home. It was his first week back at work after his ten-day honeymoon, the first three days of which had been extremely peculiar, because after so much hesitation, he and Armanda had felt no desire for each other at all.
Neither of them had been able to understand it.
The wedding banquet in the Geldersekade was still going on when they escaped at around five thirty. After they had changed clothes at number 36 and number 77 respectively, they put their luggage in the trunk of the Skoda and began their honeymoon journey to Normandy. First stopping point was a village near Rotterdam, a surprise for Armanda, just like the beautiful hotel there where Sjoerd had made reservations. They arrived at around eight. Along the way they had still been talking about the party at first, then, when the car left the main road, Armanda, showing her surprise, had gamely read out the place-names of the little towns they passed through, Alblasserdam, Ridderkerk, while the bright blue sky turned slowly to a deeper blue. She awoke on her husband’s shoulder in front of the hotel, it was still light, but there was a thin layer of mist over the flagstones and the surrounding area. They dealt with the formalities at reception, took the elevator, walked down a long, brilliantly lit corridor, and came to their room, outside which the porter was just lifting their suitcases off a gold-colored luggage cart.
It was idiotic, but the moment the door closed, neither of them knew how to deal with the sudden proximity of the other. Okay, go and stand close. Armanda was happy that he immediately threw his arms around her; she cuddled up to him, kissed him somewhere on the face, now I must be happy, she probably thought, and probably that’s what he thought too. Free at last! At last we can do and not do whatever we want! Meantime they avoided looking directly at each other, Armanda even kept her eyes closed and found herself thinking, whether she wanted to or not, about her suitcase with its tightly packed, freshly ironed clothes, some of which she ought to hang up right away. Sjoerd, over her shoulder, looked out of the window.
He left her standing there.
“Take a look, see what it’s like outside.”
Of course she followed him. “Beautiful,” she said as she slipped off her shoes and felt how small she was next to him on the soft carpet. They leaned side by side on the window bench. Dusk was falling, the sky turned yellow, and they were looking at a rolling countryside, meadows, trees, with a broad stream of water running through it, flat and pale in the mist, and on the other bank a row of eight or nine windmills. What was there to say about it? It was nature, the windmills included, as they stood there in a pensive row, their vanes motionless despite the weak to middling northwest wind, fixed, the sails rolled up. A few minutes later, when they were lying in each other’s arms in bed, cheek to cheek, Sjoerd still saw the windmills in his mind’s eye, and Armanda was realizing that there were two, three dresses and a blouse that she really had to hang up right away.