Free The Storm by Margriet de Moor Page B

successfully achieved through a small window halfway up the tower. The most striking thing about these people, said Sjoerd, was their complete lack of fear. They sat disheveled in the deckhouse, breathing a little heavily, but didn’t say a word. In the moment when they were saved and the boat was pulling away, and he asked about Lidy, Lidy Blaauw, they apparently looked at him as if he weren’t quite right in the head. Finally one of them had opened his mouth. ‘Just take us to the Raampartse Dike.’”
    Betsy broke off and her face went slack, as if the report had suddenly led her to something else. She turned to Nadine and said unsteadily, “Oh, Mrs. Brouwer …”
    The latter looked astonished, then showed her understanding of the moment: the silent, awkward turmoil of someone trying to express empathy. She bent forward and closed her hand round the visitor’s wrist.
    Three. There were three people in the room, plus an animal that hadn’t yet been heard from, a neutered yellow tomcat that was sitting on the windowseat looking out. Of the three of them, one had a mouth that had suddenly gone dry, eyes that were suddenly swimming and who felt she was a ghost, lucky to be able to see anything at all. Armanda got to her feet, picked up the teapot, and went into the kitchen to brew a fresh supply.
    When she returned with it on a tray that also had a plate of open sandwiches with smoked mackerel and mustard, Betsy was saying something that sounded very like a closing remark.
    “By the end of the afternoon, there was nothing more they could do.”
    “Why?” cried Armanda, coming to a halt in the middle of the room, her voice rising in distress. “Why was there nothing more they could do?”
    Betsy stubbed out her cigarette in the full ashtray. It took her some time.
    “Because everyone was either saved or drowned.”
    For a moment it was still. Then Betsy, with an almost placating look at Armanda, said, “Sjoerd said that the professionals have now taken over. The army and the Red Cross.”
    Armanda set the tray down on the table with the greatest care. “The army,” she repeated. “The Red Cross.”
    She didn’t sit down with the other two again. Her hands wrapped around a cup of tea, she walked slowly up and down in the front room as she often did when she was thinking or, as now, pulling back into herself because the world gave her little other choice.
    Meanwhile the streetlamps had come on, and Betsy made a move to say good-bye to the lady of the house. She had told almost all there was to tell. In three days her brother would take up the continuation of his report himself. At the same, always semimagical hour of the dusk, he would ring the doorbell of number 77. And Armanda, guessing at once it would be him, would run downstairs and open up.
    But for the moment things weren’t that far along. For the moment Armanda stood in the darkened front room, almost absent from the other two women, stroking the cat, and thought, as she climbed the first step toward a capacity for empathy, about Lidy. A distant and strange state of being, annotated by the newspaper, presented by the newsreel, and commandeered by the army and the Red Cross. The craziest circumstances, which everyone understood how to report on—except her.
    For Nadine and Jan Brouwer had also gone to the southwest this week to search for their daughter. They had managed to reach Schouwen-Duiveland on the boat of a fisherman from what had once been the island of Urk, had learned in the dreadfully damaged little regional capital that their daughter hadn’t remained there on the night of the calamity, also learned that everyone without exception who had been rescued from the polders had been evacuated to terra firma, and by afternoon they were on a lugger from Scheveningen overladen with other refugees on their way to Dordrecht and Rotterdam. Jan Brouwer had already started to take medical care of the people crammed into the hold while they were still in