“Over there is England, that way at an angle is France, up there are the West Frisian Islands, and we’re in the middle. Imagine a sculpture made of water, an ocean mountain range, relatively low at the outlying foothills but rising to a monumental height in the middle, and then draw a vertical line from there to here!”
The chief engineer laughed as he headed for the stairs. His voice and the wind had been piercing in her ears.
Dusk. An afternoon in January. Lidy, on a ferry on the Krammer, knew roughly where she was. The Krammer is the southeastern part of the Grevelingen, and the Grevelingen is the arm of the North Sea that divides South Holland and Zeeland.
Known facts that could put up no fight whatever against what was playing out before her eyes, and not only before her eyes. Underneath her, in the depths, and behind her something was also in motion that could not be marked on a map or a chart. It did not even reveal itself to the eye. Huge and deafening, it seemed to survey its own surroundings, with intentions that no human being could put into words, for the simple reason that no human being had even the smallest role to play in what was going on. You could at best try to transcribe it as: a cold wind is blowing in off the sea — and leave it at that.
Birds were still flying. She watched the gray-black specks sail out from under the layer of clouds. They must have convincing reasons to fly even short distances in this witches’ cauldron. As she looked from the birds to the waves, which were piling yards high and yet somehow remained beneath her feet, she made the discovery that “under” and “over” no longer existed. And because it was getting darker by the minute, she was soon unable to make out any wider space anymore, nor any expanse of water, only streaks of foam. Whitish, azure green. Into which the ferry plunged in the circuslike glare of its floodlights, disappearing into them, then surging up again as it continued a journey that had lost all relation to time. All it had now was circumstances.
She gave a start and quickly began to think of home, for suddenly she had seen herself, bundled in her winter coat, on the middle deck. A strange, thoughtless young woman. Everything vital to her overtaken by the spectacle surrounding her. In such a place the thing to do is to blindfold oneself and think of home. Think where the chairs and tables are.
Which ones? She noticed that she was totally muddling up the furniture in number 77 and number 36. These carpets went here, the others went there, mustn’t mix them up. She began pro forma to picture Sjoerd’s bachelor apartment on Korsjespoortsteeg, where she had followed him one winter afternoon. Back then, after the first time they’d made love, she had lain in bed watching the curtains in front of the sliding windows wave softly to and fro in the draft, but now this was a soulless memory. Love had come quickly. She had met him only the week before at one of the tennis courts in the Apollo Hall, just reopened for the first time since the war. Beginning of February? In January there had been freezing weather seven days in a row, yet suddenly the very idea of going skating seemed over. She had sat with a little group on a sort of terrace at the side, watching a mixed-doubles match. Armanda and Sjoerd, Betsy’s half brother, against Betsy and some partner or other. When the game was over, Sjoerd had looked at the chair next to her, as if he’d known the whole time, and indeed kept an eye out, that it was free. And after that, the date. And Sjoerd, after a short stroll in the exceptionally mild winter weather that was supposed to last for weeks now according to the weather forecast, took her to his intimate little pad on the fourth floor and didn’t waste any time in making clear what he wanted. She had been ready for the taking, she still remembered, and she also knew that she always would be: the frankness of male sexuality. Horniness, flattery, and getting-to-know-you-better all in one. His hands had found their way under her skirt in the nicest way.
She held on tight. The ship suddenly tilted twenty degrees to port, if not more. An enormous sea towered up off the starboard bow and rolled without breaking in a dark green mass over the ship, which began to spew water like crazy from all the scuppers.
A cold wind is blowing in off the sea….
Of course it spoke to her. Thrillingly inhospitable world, thrillingly bad weather! What could be more irresistible? Particularly when it was a question of mother-love. Can one ever look in to check on one’s sleeping child more adoringly than when the wind is howling and the shutters are banging? Determined to counter the present uproar with something of her own, she thought: Nadja. She also thought: Since you arrived, everything has been more complete. But what she saw as she was thinking was that this was a photo, an unsuccessful snapshot, in which she is standing with the child against her neck, looking into the lens and staring back at herself with empty, blanked-out eyes.
Leave it alone. This air and this arm of the sea contain no trace of you. The young woman — you — who left home this morning must get hold of herself for a moment and take a long look at her own happiness. Her hands and face were stiff with cold. Then — the ship had swung around and, propelled by a squall, flew right toward the Zijpe dock on Schouwen-Duiveland — she was shocked out of her thoughts. Den Bommel had crashed against the fenders with a sound like an exploding mine.
No other ferry captain in the coming days would attempt to make the crossing.
4. So You Go
They left around 1 a.m. Although the party was nowhere near winding down, Armanda had said, “Shall we go?” to Sjoerd as she laid her fingers on the lapels of his jacket.
“Good idea,” he said in a way that suggested that he had just had the same idea himself, and the fact that as he said this he took hold of her for a moment, simply grabbed her by the hips, was nothing surprising, because they had got on incredibly well all evening to the point where they were feeling basically intimate.
Parties: parties underline life’s festiveness, as Armanda had felt from the very first minute this evening. The attic room was heated by a cylindrical oil stove with a pipe that ran clear through the entire space, and this alone — the contrast between the glowing warmth and the filthy weather outside — had immediately put her in the mood, relaxed, free from … what, she didn’t know. When their hostess came over after about twenty minutes to ask her and Sjoerd, “Hey, where’s Lidy?” Armanda had already greeted a lot of people and smiled and finished her first glass of wine.
“Lidy?” she repeated.
Through the voices and the soft jazz playing, Betsy asked again, “Why didn’t Lidy come with you?”
They were standing in a circle, Betsy, Sjoerd, two or three other guests, and her. Oddly, just as she was about to answer, she was distracted by the red velvet band that Betsy was wearing around her neck, and indeed by Betsy altogether. Her friend, ten years older, was extraordinarily pretty, she was struck by this all over again, a grown-up kind of pretty, and her dress with its tight bodice, fashionably up-to-the-minute, looked fantastic on her. Luckily she didn’t look too bad herself, for a moment she saw herself standing in the front of the mirror at home a few hours ago and then as she was here, now, in the candlelit attic room in her little cocktail dress, skirt three-quarters of an inch below the knee, rounded neckline, from a pattern she’d found in Marion. Sometimes people said she looked like Vivien Leigh, and this evening she thought there was maybe something to it. The faintest hint of the characteristics of someone else to enhance what one was already … a little bewitched by her own image of herself, she stretched out her hand toward Betsy and touched the red velvet band.