Free The Storm by Margriet de Moor

that had always succeeded years ago in inducing a feeling of inexplicable sorrow in her younger sister. It was about a girl child, one who was “only” a boatman’s girl, and the song broadened and deepened the pathos of this with a melody that commanded Armanda’s most painful awareness. Even the first words naturally struck a nerve; “the winds they whirl, the winds they whirl,” sung in a hasty rhythm, put the child, who was only the boatman’s girl, in a fearsome storm. Wind and more wind, gust after gust. Then the song continued with an appeal to which no one in the world is immune:“Come here …,” the last word sung emphatically by Lidy at her little sister, who was already melting away, and then followed by something that never failed to pierce her to the core. Her name. “Come here, Manja,” sang Lidy, substituting Armanda’s baby name for that of the girl in the song, so that she could end the line of the verse, now richer and more personal, with “you’re my sister, you’re my sister,” and then, with even greater emphasis than on the line about the wind, sing it all over again.
    As Armanda entered the park, she stepped aside to avoid a wild-looking man who was coming toward her with his peddler’s tray of socks and eyeglass cases, but she felt as softhearted as a little lamb. For the first time in days, she saw her sister in an old familiar scenario, namely with brass polish in one hand and a yellow cloth in the other. As she polishes the faucet in the hall—very nice of her, there are bound to be visitors tonight—her voice rings out in the second verse of the boatman’s daughter song, which begins “O Hell’s spawn, O Hell’s spawn, my sister is gone,” then commands again, “Come here, Manja,” before turning suddenly in a way that still gives Armanda goose bumps, as it did then: “You’re not
her
, you’re not
her,”
sung to the same despairing waltz that had swirled around “you’re my sister,” but now with these words, seems to reveal its deepest intentions.
    Lidy. When she was around twelve. Busy in the doctor’s house, polishing the brass faucet. As Armanda goes past her on her way upstairs, Lidy wails out the song all the way to the end at the top of her lungs, and casts a mock-despairing, cryptic glance at her that appears to signify that everything is going to end badly. As Armanda closes the door to the room with the balcony behind her, the final words of the song, “Yes, yes!” like an exclamation, echo in her ears, and her eyes fill with tears.
    She put the front-door key into the lock. In the hall she cocked her ear for a few moments. At first she thought there was no sign of life in the house, then she heard her mother upstairs, talking to someone.
    Nadine Brouwer-Langjouw and Betsy Blaauw were sitting in the back room at a low table along the side wall, lit by a shaded lamp inthe corner. In front of them tea was laid out. Cigarette smoke hung in the air. As Armanda appeared in the doorway, she saw them both look up without reacting, which is to say that Betsy, who was talking, continued rather formally, as if she were forcing herself not to leave anything out.
    Armanda heard: “He told me that they sailed the boat around in the night and you just couldn’t imagine that the area had ever been inhabited. He saw the corpses of every kind of animal floating about, and tables and chairs and bales of straw, and most of all he saw the ship’s navigation lights shining on waves with big white crests that came rolling in between the remains of the farmhouses as if they belonged there.”
    Armanda had come into the room, pulled up a chair, and now asked her mother firmly, by way of interrupting the conversation, “Is there any left?”
    In the silence that followed, Nadine lifted the lid of the teapot, made an anxious face, and glanced up to see her daughter’s pleading look. Sjoerd, she explained, had called Betsy today to tell her he’d managed to get on board a