The Storm (10 page)

“Nice car,” said Hocke.

“Yes,” she replied, “but it’s hard to start.”

But she knew how to do it; the first time the engine turned over you gave it a little gas, and the second time you immediately gave it more. The wind was making so much noise that she had to do it by feel this time, not by ear. It worked on the second try. The lights went on, and the three of them drove off. The windshield was steamed up; Hocke wiped it clear and gave her directions.

“Turn right at the end. Now there’s a sharp curve. The Nobelpoort is just past the corner. Why don’t you switch on the windshield wipers?”

It was around 2 a.m. The town was asleep, and elsewhere on the island, which lay far below sea level, most people were asleep too, the way they sleep when the wind sweeps over the roof on a Saturday night. Just here and there, things were beginning to happen. A few people in a house near the New Harbor had got up to make themselves a cup of tea, because even the wallpaper on the walls was moving. And at the flood fence that blocked the access road to the quay, the mayor, wrapped in his fur coat, was looking in amazement at the waters of the harbor on the other side, which had almost reached the topmost plank and therefore were simply going to overflow it. Someone in his entourage had immediately signaled that something had to be done, and at lightning speed: namely, go fetch the carpenter who lived a hundred yards down the street. At the very moment when the latter, screaming into the wind, was beginning to explain that the ramshackle props couldn’t take one more nail, even a decorative one, the Citroën, with Lidy still at the wheel, was clearing the Korte Nobelstraat on its way to the town gate at the other end.

And afterward, it was absolute madness for anyone who had no experience to be trying to hold a car on the road. Once you were out beyond the houses, it really came home to you what a force-11 gale actually was. But before Lidy could panic, Izak Hocke turned to her and said calmly in her ear, “Pull over.”

He got out, the interior light went on; she grasped immediately, got out too; he had already gone round the car past the headlights and held the door as she hurried past him in the insane wind. Switching drivers only took a moment, but as she slid back into the car next to Izak Hocke, she was out of breath, said, “My God” several times over, and realized that what she was sharing with her two companions was something enormous. She tried to look over her shoulder, seeking agreement, but Simon Cau, his face gray and sunken, was sitting hunched over in the middle of the backseat, his eyes going from the road to her and back again, no smile to be seen.

So the three of them were a group portrait.

The car drove off again at once. Izak Hocke searched for the lever
to push the seat back farther. “It’s here,” said Lidy, noticing how hard and impatient his hand was. What a night, she thought. The kind of night that would stick in the memory as a sort of dream.

The straits formed a funnel through which the flood came pouring in, thundering against the coastal ramparts in an ever-rising tide. On the south side of the island these coastal defenses were lower and in a great deal more wretched condition than those in the north, where the unceasing northwest winds ensured that the sea was taken seriously.

The Citroën meanwhile was driving north. Lidy, now over her sleepiness and her initial confusion, saw that Izak Hocke knew exactly where he was going and, with the wind blowing at them head-on, was focused entirely on the driving. She felt his concentration, without any sense of anxiety or panic. But he was in a hurry, as was Simon Cau: you can tell something like that even when you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Which is to say: exasperation when the car suddenly had to stop. The engine died. Curses from Hocke. An electric pole was lying right across the road, along with all sorts of drifting debris, including a piece of reddish-orange tarpaulin that had got caught up in it.

Pity, just when we’re almost there, she thought.

Glistening harshly in the headlights, the tarpaulin sprang toward them. Like a dog on a chain. She stared into the chaos. She knew that somewhere behind it, maybe twenty or thirty yards from here, were two farms diagonally across from each other. To the left, Simon Cau’s, though neither the farmhouse nor the outbuildings were visible, but to the right of the road, where Izak Hocke lived with his wife and children and his mother, she could see light. An upstairs window showed that the old lady, alone in the house, was still awake.

She leaned toward the man sitting beside her, but before she could ask anything, he was already out of the car, and Simon Cau with him.

What can they do? she wondered. The two figures stood at the barrier after some futile tugging and had a discussion. Simon Cau turned his face toward her and nodded, while Hocke, head forward with the cap pulled right down, spread his arms wide and shrugged.
She switched off the windshield wipers. It was hardly raining anymore. Curious, her eyes wandered to the distant little illuminated rectangle, and suddenly she knew: he would rather leave the car standing in the middle of the road than leave her alone for another five minutes.

From that moment on, she sensed that she was in danger.

She had watched Izak Hocke climb over the barricade and disappear into the bottomless darkness on the other side without so much as a backward glance. Simon Cau came back to the car, crawled behind the steering wheel, started the engine, and as it sprang to life, shifted awkwardly into reverse.

“Now what?” asked Lidy, who was thinking the storm had suddenly intensified.

“We’re going to drive along behind the unloading docks. We turn right there, and then on the other side we’ll get to where we’re going.”

“How long will it take?”

She didn’t get an answer right away. It wasn’t easy navigating a road that was underwater and had ditches on both sides.

“Ten, twelve minutes.”

Lidy glanced sideways. An almost unrecognizable figure. Simon Cau, her only link now to the putative bed that was waiting for her somewhere in all this violence, and was beckoning her to come to sleep in ten, twelve minutes, all warm and snuggled in.

An almost black landscape under breaking clouds. Here and there an obstacle, a house or a barn. Lidy, still believing in the bed, hadn’t lost her mind. All around here, people were sleeping securely, although they knew, indeed took as given, that this was a region of ancient and thus deep-lying polders. The older the dikes, the lower the land. Rationally or irrationally, over the course of many generations, people in this area had developed the unshakable conviction that whoever lived in this waterlogged, self-created terrarium made their homes here by inalienable right and would never leave. Very close to here, during the night, the sea dike would collapse in several places. Lidy, who was a stranger here, was not the only one who had
no premonition of this. This was land that had been pushing itself outward for centuries, changing its shape constantly and sometimes drastically, because it lay embedded between two arms of the sea that did what arms usually do: they move. That their villages and hamlets were in some way impermanent, as was the sea itself, was not a perception held by the inhabitants. Unwaveringly they drew the common boundaries of their polders far out beyond the sea dike. They counted eddies, shallows, and barely navigable channels as part of their living space just as they counted drowned church towers, windmills, farms, and livestock sheds on the sea floor.

The detour that Simon Cau was taking now led directly to the sea dike, where a few little harbors used to ship farm produce lay in a bay of the Grevelingen. Lidy, who had lost any idea of where she was some time ago, along with any sense of time, straightened herself up at a certain point: on the left-hand side of the road she thought she was seeing some kind of ghostly apparition running toward them in the beam of the headlights. Simon Cau braked. He knew exactly where he was, he also knew the boy lurching at them, yet he brought the car to a halt in a kind of trance.

“The water’s
coming!”

It was his nephew, Marien Cau, who was poking his windblown head through the open car window. The boy had studied advanced agricultural economy, but the only thing that counted for his widowed, childless uncle was that he had proved himself to be perfect with horses.

“Are you heading for the stables?”

“Yes.”

The two of them consulted for a moment, while Cau, prey to some wild, rising impatience, kept peering through the windshield in the direction of the dike, which here, right in the Grevelingen, rose a good twenty feet above the official Normal Amsterdam Water Level. The boy, they agreed, should continue to his uncle’s farm without delay, where the animal quotient consisted of not just the ten horses that were the pride and joy of both uncle and nephew but also thirty cows. It was almost two thirty in the morning, it was not yet high tide, and neither Simon nor Marien Cau had yet seen the water come right over the dike. Nevertheless, they agreed that the boy should untie the
cows for safety’s sake. The cowshed was low-lying. The road, and the inner dike, ran approximately five feet higher. It was an impulsive thought, and not illogical, but neither of them had ever tested it as an emergency measure. This night Marien would indeed herd the cows out up onto the dike, and his uncle, unable to reach the farm anymore, would be able to watch from a window on the other side of the road to see it being done. But the cows, all thirty of them, would be found some weeks later by a group of men nicknamed the cadaver team, their bloated bodies dragged up out of the mud. The cowshed being the only thing they knew, they had swum back to it in the darkness. The horses …

Horses are something else. It is certain that Simon Cau told his nephew and chosen successor to get to the horses first, as soon as he reached the farm, to talk to them, calm them down, and watch over them till his uncle returned from his mission. But nothing happened that way. Two of the horses, the heaviest and most handsome, were photographed some days later by a journalist in a boat. They had been standing for more than fifty hours in water by then, up to their nostrils at first, then even up to their withers as time went on. The photo, intended to be a prize shot, was for the next day’s paper. Two horses, about sixty feet between them, turned away from the camera lens in a gray-white rectangle of endless sea. That they had been intelligent enough to remain on the dike can be seen from some things sticking up from the water in front of them, and the parapet of a bridge. The two horses seem to find themselves in some mysterious harmony with their hopeless situation. In exactly the same poses, heads turned a little to the left in the direction of the wind, they stare at the water, each moved independently by the same feeling of deep sadness that they are the only creatures surviving on earth.

“Back soon, back soon!”

As the Citroën drove on, nothing in the atmosphere inside suggested an intention to make for home and bed as soon as possible. The car heading for the unloading docks was being driven by a man who was feverishly preoccupied with practical things. Beside him was a young woman who, once again, had no role here. However, even she felt the strange—or perhaps not so much strange as concentrated—aura of danger in which people know that something has to
be done. After about five minutes the dike appeared, a hunchbacked silhouette against the moonlight. Turn right here and a half mile farther on you came to the loading docks, which were no more than a mooring place where, in accordance with regulations, the passage through the dike to the quay had to be closed at high tide with flood fencing.

But the car braked and stopped right here. After a moment, Simon Cau bent over and ran for the dike, to try to climb it on hands and knees. An unreal sight. What was he trying to do, grabbing onto the weeds to pull himself up the pitiful structure, which had been built as steep as possible to save money? Sinking down continually into the waterlogged mole tunnels that riddled the entire edifice, he reached the crown. It was impossible to stand upright on this arched crest, barely twenty inches across, in the teeth of the hurricane. Cau pressed his stomach to the ground, held on to his cap with both hands, and lifted his head, drenched with flying water, a fraction. What are visions of terror? Unreal things against an unreal backdrop? Simon Cau drew in his breath with a loud gasp. What he was looking at, almost at eye level, was an oncoming mass of water that had no end.

Lidy too got out for a moment. She stood there beside the embankment, which was echoing from inside with a sonorous, throbbing roar audible through the wind. She listened without knowing what was causing the throbbing: a mountain of sand coated with a thin layer of clay, which after years of seawater washing over it was useless. On the very narrow crown, a few little walls erected here and there after the flood of 1906, with spaces to let the sheep through. The inner side was already so cracked even back then that it is a miracle that it had held until tonight before crumbling in the space of an hour and a half under the enormous hydraulic pressure on the outer side, foundering into the ditch of the inner dike. The outer side, undermined, will withstand the sea for a further fifteen minutes before finally collapsing.

Lidy tugged her feet out of the mud and ran back to the car. Even on the reinforced road, the ground was shaking perceptibly.

April had begun with rain, but since yesterday you could smell spring. Armanda was taking a stroll along the Kloveniersburgwal, after spending the entire afternoon in lectures. The sun was shining in her face, and she’d unbuttoned her coat. The weather report in De Bilt had forecast a moderate west wind, but instead it turned from northeast to southeast and slackened to the point where the flags outside the Hotel de L’Europe hung down limp.

From the Amstel bridge she saw Sjoerd coming from the direction of the Muntplein, which was no surprise, since the bank he worked in was on the Rokin. She raised her arm, saw that he spotted her, and waited. Nothing was more logical than that they should walk home together. It was Monday. During the week, Sjoerd Blaauw ate dinner with the Brouwers, his in-laws, who had also taken in his two-year-old daughter, full of affection for her and totally understanding that she would spend weekends at home with her father. Armanda, the way things worked out, also tended to spend some time there too.