“How’s Henk?” she asks, and I tell her he’s got some kind of chest thing. “As long as he’s healthy,” she replies. I don’t see any reason to quibble.
The bottom shelves of her refrigerator are puddled with liquid from deliquescing vegetables and something spilled. The bristles of her bottle scraper on the counter are coated with dried mayonnaise. The front of her nightgown is an archipelago of stains.
“How’s Cato?” she asks.
“Cato wants to know if we’re going to get you some help,” I tell her.
“I just talked with her,” my mother says irritably. “She didn’t say anything like that.”
“You talked with her? What’d you talk about?” I ask. But she waves me off. “Did you talk to her or not?”
“That girl from up north you brought here to meet me, I couldn’t even understand her,” she tells me. She talks about regional differences as though her country’s the size of China.
“We thought she seemed very efficient,” I reply. “What else did Cato talk with you about?”
But she’s already shifted her interest to the window. Years ago she had a traffic mirror mounted outside on the frame to let her spy on the street unobserved. She uses a finger to widen the gap in the lace curtains.
What else should she do all day long? She never goes out. The street’s her revival house, always showing the same movie.
The holes in her winter stockings are patched with a carnival array of colored thread. We always lived by the maxim that things last longer mended than new. My whole life, I heard that with thrift and hard work I could build a mansion. My father had a typewritten note tacked to the wall in his office at home: Let those with abundance remember that they are surrounded by thorns.
“Who said that?” Cato asked when we were going through his belongings.
“Calvin,” I told her.
“Well, you would know,” she said.
He hadn’t been so much a conservative as a man whose life philosophy had boiled down to the principle of no nonsense. I’d noticed even as a tiny boy that whenever he liked a business associate, or anyone else, that’s what he said about them.
My mother’s got her nose to the glass at this point. “You think you’re the only one with secrets,” she remarks.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, but she acts as though she’s not going to dignify that with a response. Follow-up questions don’t get anywhere, either. I sit with her a while longer. We watch a Chinese game show. I soak her bread in milk, walk her to the toilet, and tell her we have to at least think about moving her bed downstairs somewhere. The steps to her second floor are vertiginous even by Dutch standards, and the risers accommodate less than half your foot. She makes an effort to follow what I’m saying, puzzled that she needs to puzzle something out. But then her expression dissipates and she complains she spent half the night looking for the coffee grinder.
“Why were you looking for the coffee grinder?” I ask, a question I have to repeat. Then I stop, for fear of frightening her.
Henk’s class is viewing a presentation at the Climate campus—“Water: Precious Resource and Deadly Companion”—so we have the dinner table to ourselves. Since Cato’s day was even longer than mine, I prepared the meal, two cans of pea soup with pigs’ knuckles and some Belgian beer, but she’s too tired to complain. She’s dealing with both the Americans, who are always hectoring for clarification on the changing risk factors for our projects in Miami and New Orleans, and the Germans, who’ve publicly dug in their heels on the issue of accepting any spillover from the Rhine in order to take some of the pressure off the situation downstream.
It’s the usual debate, as far as the latter argument’s concerned. We take the high road — it’s only through cooperation that we can face such monumental challenges, etc. — while other countries scoff at our aspirations toward ever more comprehensive safety measures. The German foreign minister last year accused us on a simulcast of acting like old women.
“Maybe he’s right,” Cato says wearily. “Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to live in a country where you don’t need a license to build a fence around your garden.”
Exasperated, we indulge in a little Dutch bashing. No one complains about themselves as well as the Dutch. Cato asks if I remember that story about the manufacturers having to certify that each of the chocolate letters handed out by Santa Claus contained an equal amount of chocolate. I remind her about the number-one download of the year turning out to have been of fireworks sound effects, for those New Year’s revelers who found real fireworks too worrisome.
After we stop, she looks at me, her mouth a little slack. “Why does this sort of thing make us horny?” she wonders.
“Maybe it’s the pea soup,” I tell her in the shower. She’s examining little crescents of fingernail marks where she held me when she came. Then she turns off the water and we wrap ourselves in the bedsheet-sized towel she had made in Surinam. Cocooned on the floor in the tiny, steamy bathroom we discuss Kees’s love life. He now shops at a singles’ supermarket, the kind where you use a blue basket if you’re taken and a yellow if you’re available. When I asked how his latest fling was working out, he said, “Well, I’m back to the yellow basket.”
Cato thinks this is hilarious.
“How’d we get to be so lucky?” I ask her. We’re spooning and she does a minimal grind that allows me to grow inside her.
“The other day someone from BBC1 asked my boss that same question about how he ended up where he did,” she says. She turns her cheek so I can kiss it.
“What’d he say?” I ask when I’ve moved from her cheek to her neck. She’s not a big fan of her boss.
She shrugs comfortably, her shoulder blades against my chest. I wrap my arms tighter so the fit is even more perfect. The gist of his answer, she tells me, was mostly by not asking too many questions.
My mother always had memory problems and even before my sister died my father said that he didn’t blame her; she’d seen her own brothers swept away in the 1953 flood and had been a wreck for years afterward. On January 31, the night after her sixth birthday, a storm field that covered the entire North Sea swept down out of the northwest with winds that registered gale force 11 and combined with a spring tide to raise the sea six meters over NAP. The breakers overtopped the dikes in eighty-nine locations over a 170-kilometer stretch and hollowed them out on their land sides so that the surges that followed broke them. My mother remembered eating her soup alongside her two brothers listening to the wind increase in volume until her father went out to check on the barn and the draft from the opened door blew their board game off the table. Her mother’s Bible pages flapped in her hands like panicked birds. Water was seeping through the window casing, and her brother touched it and held out his finger for her to taste. She remembered his look when she realized that it was salty: not rain but spray from the sea.
Her father returned and said they all had to leave, now. They held hands in a chain and he went first and she went second, and once the door was open, the wind staggered him and blew her off her feet. He managed to retrieve her but by then they couldn’t find the others in the dark and the rain. She was soaked in ice and the water was already up to her thighs and in the distance she could see breakers where the dike had been. They headed inland and found refuge inside a neighbor’s brick home and discovered that the back half of the house had already been torn away by the water. He led her up the stairs to the third floor and through a trapdoor onto the roof. Their neighbors were already there, and her mother, huddling against the wind and the cold. The house west of them imploded but its roof held together and was pushed upright in front of theirs, diverting the main force of the flood around them like a breakwater. She remembered holding her father’s hand so their bodies would be found in the same place. Her mother shrieked and pointed and she saw her brothers beside a woman with a baby on the roof of the house beyond them to the east. Each wave that broke against the front drenched her brothers and the woman with spray, and the woman kept turning her torso to shield the baby. And then the front of the house caved in and they all became bobbing heads in the water that were swept around the collapsing walls and away.