No, nobody was thinking of that anymore. But they were thinking about the boy sitting half-concealed behind one of the roof beams. Someone had put a pair of thick socks on his feet, and Hocke had squatted down once beside him to say something nice that ended with “lady apple,” did he want one from the basket where they were stored here in winter, but he shook his head and went to use the bucket for the second time. Adriaan Padmos had just turned eight. Such a child is sometimes quick to recognize what is familiar in strange things, and squats there with an unreadable expression, all hunched up, his knees under his chin, and looks at his socks.
Nobody, on the other hand, was paying attention to the van de Velde girl anymore. She was dead, and they had laid the little body in the space between two cupboards stuffed full of old clothes which were now coming in incredibly handy. Work gear made of napped cotton flannel underneath, summer skirt with flowers on it over the top. Better this way, yes? Last night the girl had been brought this far by the superhuman efforts of her parents, and bringing her any farther was beyond human capacity. For the moment there was nothing more to be done. The father, Nico van de Velde, stood with the others at the dirty window, outside which dirty things were happening. He and Zesgever were smoking, sharing one of the available cigarettes, which were being strictly rationed. The mother was attending the birth.
Lethargically, but like a night insect drawn to the light behind a kitchen windowpane, Laurina van de Velde had come closer, and was now looking apologetically, perhaps because she was trembling and making no attempt to stop it, at the mounded thing on the wide bed. She knew, had she been capable of thought, that she’d been through something similar, but the event, the actual image of it, where was it? For a moment she caught Lidy’s eye, as Lidy stretched her back against the headboard. Did Lidy want to say something? She had had her child, who would be her only one, at the age of twenty-one.
It had been in fall, a beautiful sunny fall day. They had sent word to Nico in the field at Hocke’s when things were that far along. He had left the Smythe, a chunky English mechanical sower with an unworkable operating width of six feet, standing. You boys keep going with the winter wheat. What you sow, you reap at the appointed time, I’m off. Nico was an agile, well-set man who was often able to rouse his wife, who was inclined to melancholy, with his abruptness. “Be a little more cheerful, kiddo,” he’d say when he got home, saw her looking absentminded, and took her face with the sky-blue eyes he’d fallen in love with in his hands, or again: “Stop thinking so much! Both feet on the floor, that’s it!”
“Where? Here? On this floor?” she once replied, more bewitched by him than convinced, and set her feet in their soft socks on top of his. She was a woman in a permanent state of disquiet, that was her normal mood. Uneasy because of the machines that her husband worked with, uneasy because of the horses that could kick out backward, uneasy because of the heavy backbreaking labor of pulling out the flax roots in mid-July, handwork he excelled at. In the last month he had joined the Reds and started talking about “comrades,” balling his fists or holding up a finger, which bothered her even more. What would happen when the farmer, Hocke, heard about this, and what would become of Dina and her other future children if their father was put out on the street?
So now she looked at the imminent birth and felt nothing, not even the slightest disquiet. She glanced at Cathrien Padmos’s face, which she had known since she was a child, saw how she was sweating, tried to hold her hand, accepted that she was pushed away by the other woman, perhaps because the latter needed to retch, and meantime was so desperately cold that she couldn’t make her mind function in any normal way at all. When Lidy asked, “Shouldn’t we find something we can wrap the baby in, the little child, in a minute?” she nodded.
“Good.”
She and Lidy went to one of the two cupboards.
“This?” asked Lidy, holding something woolly.
“Or this?” Laurina hesitated.
A few minutes later, the women gathered around the mother-to-be and Izak Hocke, who for some reason had been summoned to join them, were able to reassure her that they could already see the crown of the little head. It was eleven in the morning. Outside the window of the delivery room was a world that nobody could now imagine being anything other than it was. Murderous, a single surge of gray and brown. That the storm had still not begun to abate after more than twenty-four hours was, meteorologically speaking, to be considered a freak occurrence.
Cathrien Padmos was the type of woman who gives birth to children on her own. She had accepted having a piece of bedding rolled up and pushed against her back, but she wanted none of the hands, the looks, the help that were intended to be of assistance to her but actually worked as its express opposite. She was at the height of her battle with the pain, that invisible enemy, also an angel who numbs and transports one to a faraway place where one can cease thinking about one’s loved ones who are dead, or noticing and realizing it to be significant that the bed one is lying on is standing on a worryingly unstable, swaying attic floor. She raised her head and began to scream uninhibitedly.
The sound of a storm defies words. Or rather, the effect it has. The world makes noises. There isn’t a moment of peace in which it isn’t creaking or rustling or banging or talking and uttering every possible nuance of lament until sometimes it even sings. Some of these noises can wait a little, but others are absolutely urgent.
Up in the attic, everyone had gradually become oblivious to the wind. The incessant hammering on their instincts, the incessant demands on their imaginative powers to foresee what could happen if they didn’t figure out a way to get out of here, had dulled their minds.
Hocke, van de Velde, Zesgever, and Cornelius Jaeger stood at the window from which, if you laid your head against the glass and turned it all the way to the right, you could see Cau’s farm. Cau himself wasn’t standing with them. He was down on his heels by the now abandoned camping stove, seeing if maybe there was still a splash of coffee remaining in the pot. The wind had been rattling against the roof like artillery fire for some time now. Sometimes it was there, and you knew it, even relied on it to be there, then it would suddenly stop, and there would be a pause. Even Cau must then have heard the other noise from outside, and felt it go through his very bone marrow.