“‘Eternity,’ you said, or maybe I said, ‘is that we have to live the lives of everyone who ever lived or will ever live, from beginning to end.’
“Mmmm, yes, and so interesting, isn’t it? Even down to the details?”
“Even down to the details, without the slightest deviation from the facts.
“We slid around ice rinks on shoes with leather soles. We licked the metal railings on the Mageren Bridge. The Amstel froze over.”
“No, it was summer. We lay in our bathing suits on the beach at Langevelder Slag.”
“We put on our skates with double runners and went slicing through the flocks of gulls that happened to be so numerous that year and had flown from the IJ, which was all iced over, into the city.”
“I can remember to this day our sense of pleasure — space, not a movement in the sky, our warm bodies, and the even greater warmth of the sand — as we looked over at the hazy outlines of a gray ship that stood out against the furthest rim of the sea.”
“Cyclists were also crossing the river.”
“We thought about the bottomless chasm there must be right behind the horizon where the ship was. An aunt of our maid had killed herself the week before, and they’d only just told us, so we were in a very solemn mood.”
“We’d heard that there was such a terrible cold front approaching from Siberia that within a day or so the North Sea was going to freeze over. The question that interested us was whether we’d get absorbed into the Arctic Circle just like Canada and Nova Semlya, which would mean we’d get to see the Northern Lights — yes, it was definitely winter.”
“If you say so.”
“Why are you lying in bed?”
“I’m lying in bed because I’m dying.”
“Armanda, you can really be pathetic.”
“No, no. It’s really true. The children have been here twice already to say their good-byes. They plumped up my pillow, gave me a glass of water, held my hand. Oh, darlings, I said, I’m making such a lot of trouble and worries for you, do me a favor, go into town and get something to eat. I’ll be awake for a bit yet.”
“Ha, that reminds me that you had to go to bed half an hour earlier than I did at home, and I never allowed you to go to sleep till I’d crawled into bed too. To control this, I used to run upstairs sometimes during the half hour and bend over you in the dark, and if I smelled from your breath that you were asleep, I’d hiss in your ear reproachfully: ‘You’re asleep!’ You were incredibly well trained, trained against me, and you were able to say ‘Am not!’ so convincingly out of a deep sleep that although I knew perfectly well you were lying, I had to put up with it.”
“God, yes, I remember that.”
“So the young ones are in town now. Take advantage, I’d say, seize the opportunity to exit in peace, on your own. You’re alone.”
“Yes, insofar as anyone who has another person who’s taken up residence inside them can be said to be alone.”
“What? I didn’t quite understand you. Another person?”
“Someone who’s spent my whole life looking and listening with me. In some way, a great advantage. So my sister who lives hidden inside me is older than I am, but still a lot less forgetful. Beautiful moments that I’ve lived, even if they’ve faded, shine on a little longer through her. Did you come, I ask her now, to say good-bye or to fetch me? That well-known look of till-death-us-do-part meets mine, even if it’s a little frostier than it used to be. The face is blue, which occurs when the oxygen content of the blood drops below the critical point and death is very close. As it happens, I’m an expert on this. All the same, oddly, as long as I live, I automatically keep her, my moribund other, alive.”
“Classic thought, sympathetic too! Tell me, are you lying comfortably?”
“Very comfortably. Now that I’m nothing but skin and bone, they’ve laid a sheepskin on my mattress. It’s delightfully warm in the room. I’m very tired already, and I just peek out through the slits in my eyelids. I have almost no eyelashes left, which means that though I’m half hallucinating, I’m spared spiders and beetles. I think about whatever comes into my head: a conversation from years back about your last moments. How they may have looked. The Dutch Institute of Forensic Medicine was still in Rijswijk then. No idea why, but I feel more comforted now by my gravity and my grief back then than I did at the time. A pathologist like that knows a great deal. A great sense of peace emanated from him while he explained to me quite calmly the actual process of your drowning. He had gray eyes with such heavy lids and a lethargic twinkle, but you imagined that already. On the table between us, the photo with your face and your absurd laugh. Surprisingly, he couldn’t answer my first questions, namely whether you had gone on shivering underwater, since your body temperature had already dropped so hellishly, and whether your teeth went on chattering, the way a body always does instinctively to generate a last bit of warmth. I know it was crazy and pointless to ask, but he didn’t know.”
“Oh, well, I still shiver like crazy, even though I’m unconscious.”
“The doctor, who saw I was fighting back tears, reassured me that you can have suffered only for a minute or two. The specific weight of a human body is higher than the specific weight of water, but not much, a little movement and the person keeps swimming. A small reserve of air in the lungs is not bad, of course, screaming and calling out aren’t sensible, and I assume you didn’t do it anyway out of sheer exhaustion. A great disadvantage was apparently that there was no more air between you and your sodden clothes, so I assume that you sank immediately.”
“True.”
“How hopeless water is! It siphons off your body heat twenty-six times faster than air at the same temperature. Twenty-six times! So is it realistic to demand that your heart keep beating normally when you’re in water that’s thirty-six to thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit? That your brain keep thinking normally when it’s cooling down at that speed? After ninety seconds, even your most rational reflexes are completely disrupted. What are you supposed to do with your nose and mouth underwater, breathe or not breathe? That was your only moment of despair. In the grip of a great lack of oxygen, your instinct finally said yes. A large gulp of water met the opening of your respiratory tract.”
“That’s right, and the respiratory tract rejected it. I can tell you, Armanda, that if your friend the pathologist were to open up my poor drowned body, he wouldn’t find a single drop of seawater in my lungs. Sometimes the larynx is so shocked by the passage of water over the vocal cords that it angrily contracts all the muscles to block it. That’s what happened with me. For a moment I was panicked. Shame, shame, shame, I thought, I really wanted to try that recipe for pancakes with the little bits of ginger stirred in under the batter. I felt a hellish pain, as if my head were being squeezed together by a muscular hand, and wanted to cry out, which of course I couldn’t do. Yes, yes, so where are they, the sun-flooded fields of tulips at the end of the tunnel you always hear about in connection with drowning, I thought furiously, and I hadn’t even finished the thought when I noticed that the pain was gone. I opened my eyes. You cannot imagine, child, how beautiful the colder, more temperate sea under the surface of the water is! It’s a well-worn cliché that what you think of as you’re dying is flying away, upward, but in my opinion, heading downward is a lot easier. You weigh so little, at the end, don’t you? At this moment my poor body, head downward, is spiraling toward the bottom of the Oosterschelde. My heart has already stopped beating, there’s no more pulse, but deep in my brain there’s still life. If your doctor were to thrust a thermometer through the top of my skull, he’d establish the temperature in there was still at least eighty-two degrees Fahrenheit.