Authors: Margriet de Moor
Lidy managed to untie the old woman in the dark. Standing on the crossbeam, they both felt the water, with a temperature of 36 to 37 degrees Fahrenheit, come creeping up over their knees and hips. Lidy wasn’t sure whether the high-pitched, mad singing that came from her right from time to time was real. The melodies, some familiar, some not, seemed intended to fix certain facts in her mind: the torso in her arms was going slack. Gerarda Hocke had lost the power to fight. But before she slid downward, she did manage to push two small objects into the other woman’s hand. Lidy’s fingers recognized
the gold headdress clips. She shoved them into a coat pocket and realized that the old woman was no longer there. It would have been around three thirty in the morning when among all the flotsam and jetsam a door came sweeping past, within reach. Lidy was standing up to her shoulders in water, and she had to jump. In the attic of a farmhouse about to collapse, about a hundred yards away, a large family was still singing with all their might.
Lidy had not been particularly religiously brought up, but she loved songs, the more melancholy the better. So she carried the melodies of the psalms quite well in her head, and the words too, even if in fragments, and these words, as is often the case with songs too, when combined with the notes, come across as totally real, indeed believable. The family in the farmhouse had been singing psalms for hours, loudly, and intent on getting the words absolutely right. They were doomed, they probably knew as much, but were clinging to something beautiful, which might or might not be meaningless, but which they had built into their lives as a Given, to prevent themselves from being reduced to common clay. Lidy had managed to keep holding the dying old woman tight for a long time. During this interval, appropriately, given what was happening to the two of them, what had been echoing over in their direction, perversely but comfortingly, was “For he saves thee from the bird catcher’s net…. The days of man are but grass … take up Thy shield and Thy weapons….” The psalms of David, in the rhyming translations sanctioned in the eighteenth century by the ministers of Friesland, Gelderland, Zuid-Holland, Nord-Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Overijssel, and Drenthe.
So now she was on the door. A heavy, precious front door carried her along stretched out on her stomach. Monday had arrived some time ago. Monday morning, the second of February, 1953, between half past three and half past five. She kept her eyes open. She felt clear headed, focused, and full of memories. What does “forever” mean? Lidy remembered and would for the rest of her life remember the place where she was suddenly left totally to her own devices: an invisible place, although one with a faint blue glow circled by snatches of music that rose above the wind and came to her with the texts that had been sung so often in the course of time that they had
become independent entities conveying no more than the quintessence of eternal longing.
It isn’t far from the area around Ouwerkerk to the Oosterschelde. Nonetheless it took Lidy about an hour. The raft kept bumping into things, spun around, was carried westward, then east, or came up against some passing object, a chunk of a barn, a sluicekeeper’s hut, a telephone pole, that came out of the black nothingness and disappeared back into it again. None of it bothered her. She seemed quite patient as she went into the last part of the night.
Thus it was that everything she still experienced was accompanied by the texts and nourished by them, as they echoed and reechoed in her head. “Take up Thy shield and Thy weapons …” Defiantly, shrilly sung verses that in no way decreased the howling of the wind, God knows, but acted as a commentary on it. A projectile slammed into her leg, she flinched in shock, but it didn’t really hurt. Once she got a brief but absolutely clear look at the overpowered landscape around her, the dikes heaved this way and that, the remains of farmhouses from which loud cries for help still came here and there. Then she had to reach wildly for whatever was at hand.
She was there. A kind of waterfall was pulling the door downward, but miracle of miracles, she didn’t fall underneath. The breach in the dike at Ouwerkerk was so huge that it could no longer be called a breach, there was simply no dike left. Half past six. The flood tide was still high, and the storm was still relentlessly driving the water from the north. Lidy lay half on her left side, her face on one arm, her legs spread, her feet turned to the side. Her little boat, with neither engine nor oars, obeying the current and the wind, was on direct course for the Oosterschelde, which leads straight into the North Sea. She was trembling uncontrollably, long past the point now where she could ask herself who she was, but still saying softly in her heart: “Here. I’m here!”
It was one of those suddenly very cold December mornings that transport a country into a state of excitement, disbelief, good feelings. The weather reports for the beginning of the week had used words like “dry,” “overcast,” “mild,” and had spoken of a moderate wind out of the southeast. The idea that the day begins with frozen water pipes and ice blooming on the windows of your car, which refuses to start, is therefore pretty far-fetched. Nadja and Armanda were in the train going from Amsterdam to Goes by way of Rotterdam and Bergen op Zoom. The rush hour was over, and the carriage wasn’t that full. They sat in facing window seats, looking out at the patches of white and the quiet sky, an optical phenomenon that struck them both as having a remarkable affinity with the purpose of their journey. A funeral, but not of anything that could be understood as a dead person or even a dead body. After more than thirty years in silt, what remains of a human body is little more than some bones, two jaws, a skull. Armanda and Nadja stared out at the thin, fresh layer of snow, the result of a trough of pressure that had moved southward over the North Sea during the night, and let their conversation lapse for a while. Since Monday of the previous week they had known that Lidy—maybe—had been found.
Their shocking return to her trail, long abandoned, totally lost, had begun a month before. On the aforementioned Monday afternoon, Armanda had received a call from a representative of the local
police, who asked her if he was speaking to Mrs. Brouwer. Within the hour a man in street clothes, with soft gray eyes and a sailor’s beard, was sitting at her table. He informed her, wanted at least to give her the information, that they had first gone looking for Mr. Blaauw, then for the Brouwer family, who had once lived on Sarphati Park, but then quickly switched to the question that was burning in her eyes. Lidy Blaauw-Brouwer. Indeed. You would like me to tell you where?
A short silence. Another glance. In the mud near the Schelphoek, the construction site behind the secondary dike on the northwest bank of the Oosterschelde, right near where one of the three great river channels, the Hammen, drains into the estuary and where they’ve been building the gigantic flood barriers for years now—
She interrupted him. “How …”
He waited while she bent down to scratch a bone in her foot, then stared up at him, motionless.
“How is that possible?”
“You’re right,” he’d replied. “On the face of it, it’s impossible.” He seemed to be searching for the facts. “Totally impossible, so I’ve heard.”
She leaned over the edge of the table, as if taking a first step toward this barely credible possibility, and waited. A backhoe was the first detail that she could get hold of, and then she had a mental image of the practical little Bobcat which a skilled operator can maneuver with real speed and agility. It had been in the middle of the previous month, one afternoon around five. But isn’t it dark by then? It had been getting dark. And the skull that had been dug up had been stained very dark by the earth it had been in, all that silt and heavy clay and peat, too.
Her sister, if indeed it was her sister, must …
She made a gesture. A moment please.
“At five o’clock there’s nobody still working on a building site, surely?”
The plainclothes policeman had looked at her thoughtfully, brought up short by her question, then he’d gone back to talking about the back hoe operator. Who had summoned a coworker still running around on the mudflats, the eerie area at the mouth of the Oosterschelde, dug up and dug over for years now as they tried first one
method, then another, to effectively block the arm of the sea. They used scoops to collect a few skeletal fragments, which they laid out together in the open air. Their workday was over, but they managed to find a construction foreman still in a trailer with a telephone. Shortly before total darkness fell, the national police came and put all the parts in a plastic sack and took them away, including a small, eroded piece of metal, some kind of hinge or spiral, possibly a clue, which had evidently, as was visible in the flashlit photo, been lying there too.
Yes. Exactly. Pause. Mutual appraisal. Then Armanda watched as the policeman removed a piece of paper from the little portfolio he had set down on the table as soon as he arrived. He unfolded it and pushed it between them in such a way that both of them could have read it if they so chose. The attorney general, Armanda understood, twisting her head sideways to stare at the sheet, which appeared to be a form letter, a typed report or some such, had given his authorization for the transportation of the body parts. Authorization, aha. Her eyes fixed on the paragraphs of type, she withdrew herself somewhat from a situation that on the one hand spoke of an end to a great and apparently insoluble riddle—whatever confusion might accompany it—and, on the other, phrases like “the judicial laboratory in Rijswijk, that usually requested Leiden’s help in the business of attempting to make reliable identifications.” She didn’t look up again till her visitor said something that seemed to connect with the known world.
“Your sister, if it is indeed your sister, must have been buried in a layer of mud very quickly after she was washed ashore.”
“Yes?”
Then came explanations to clarify that not one single person missing from 1953 had been found in the last ten, no, twenty years. “It’s a real miracle, lady,” hard to imagine just how fast a body disintegrates in water, particularly seawater, till there’s absolute nothing left. “Five, six months at the most,” depending on the factors involved. Armanda, who was maintaining an air of great interest but couldn’t keep up with the dizzying speed with which thirty years were reduced to zero in a single blow, heard phrases like “low or high water temperatures,” “polluted water,” “crabs and crayfish,” and “ships’ propellers.” There was no doubt that it was thanks to the mud and its capacity for preservation that so much of “your sister, possibly” had survived.
But not enough.
“Can you give me a photo of her to take with me?”
The policeman asked this after he had made a dome of his fingers before setting his hand down over the paper on the desk. Based entirely on the long bones and the pelvis, the hand went on, Leiden had decided that what was involved here was a female, twenty to twenty-five years old, height approximately five foot ten, probable date of death, 1953, since the cartilage had stopped thickening. Armanda was on her feet. Yes, just a moment, please … yes, a photo! A photo they could lay on those dark, cold long bones and that pelvis that are such good indicators of probable age! And wasn’t it high time she should offer her guest a cup of tea?
She was already at the door when the policeman gave her one more instruction. It had to be a photo of Lidy laughing.
“Laughing,” she said. “Yes, of course!”
Then she thought, Why?
The train was approaching Rotterdam. Nadja and Armanda got up, like most of the other passengers, put on their coats and gloves, and waited with their bags on their laps until the rattling over the points had ceased. On the platform, they were surprised all over again by the cold. They went to the departures board and saw that the express train to Vlissingen must already be standing at platform 10.
“So they couldn’t say for sure,” Nadja began, after they’d found an empty compartment at the back of the train and shut the door.
Words. Which gave them a certain sense of looking-things-straight-in-the-eye. The dubious identity of this dead person of theirs. Which not even the teeth in the photo of the young woman with the radiant laugh could change.
“So what did he actually say yesterday?” asked Nadja.
“The day before yesterday,” said Armanda. Nadja nodded. “The day before yesterday, I went to”—she hesitated—“to collect the photo, for today.”
This could be true. She saw Nadja nod again and nodded herself. She had gone to the police laboratory in Rijswijk to collect the photo that she was going to put secretly, even illegally in the eyes of officialdom,
into the coffin with Lidy’s bones or the bones of some twenty-to twenty-five-year-old farmer’s wife from Zeeland. What a terrific idea, she thought, if she got the opportunity! In reality, she had done nothing two days ago other than speak to the pathologist. Why? Because. His expert report, even after seeing the photo, had remained on balance that “we cannot come to any definite conclusion.”
“Oh, it was all so complicated. He said the process of ossification of the bone …”
They looked up—what did it mean? The door opened. New passengers were looking for seats, even though the train had been moving for some minutes. One was a little gray lady who sat down in the corner by the aisle, after slipping out from under the arm of the other person, a tall man who was loud in more ways than one.
“So, people,” he said, rubbing his hands, after hanging up his coat, “the only problem we have left is when are they going to come round with the coffee?”
The gregariousness of a train trip in winter. The soft seats, and everything outside white, gray, cold. The little woman in the corner stared straight ahead like a resigned animal, but her companion was a man of alarming charisma. Within a quarter of an hour, before Dordrecht, even, Nadja and Armanda knew that he was an expert in hydrodynamics, that he worked with the authorities in “delta services,” that he was getting out at Rilland-Bath, and all this interested them in a certain sense. Up to Zeeland, in the beat of the rattling click-clack of the train. Nothing there, none of it, is the way it was before the flood, said the hydrodynamics expert, take a good look as soon as we pass Bergen op Zoom. Were you there this summer? No. Oh, the whole country has made incredible profits from it in the last years. Acre after acre of landholdings, all looking exactly the same, all the way to the horizon, yes, dammit, and in the middle of each a brand-new farm, freestanding barns, drainage ditches in the distance straight as a die, roads surfaced with asphalt even out on the polders, a system of canals that reaches into every corner, and none of it has cost the province more than a cent. Pigs in the built-up area? Not one to be seen anymore!