The Storm (19 page)

“Make sure you take a good look!” As if she didn’t totally trust the reports of the girl she was already inclined to regard as a daughter or daughter-in-law. Such connections are quick to form in certain circumstances.

The girl kept looking. “It’s him. Hocke.”

They both flashed a glance for help at Simon Cau, but his back was turned, so they looked out of the window again. About a hundred yards away, the trailer, now almost entirely invisible underwater, was transporting a little group of people who could still be seen above the swells and who would have to find a place in the house here. Aside from Hocke she counted seven of them, survivors of a group of families who had lived a few miles from here in a hamlet on a protected island formed of silt where the ditch surrounding the polder divided into two arms—one contained a lock that had been rusted shut for years, and the second ran on until it met the main drainage system at Grevelingen.

Hocke gestured and yelled something that was unintelligible from the window. He had maneuvered the tractor into position right opposite the house and was now apparently trying to figure out how far he could still advance along the road that sloped downward under the water. Meanwhile the travelers he had brought waited, their faces set and cold. They looked as if they had appeared out of the void, resurrected perhaps, but without any idea of where they’d come from, or any expectation that they’d ever find out. Yet the massive current pouring from the north swept past them, carrying entire collections of their random household possessions, from clog boxes, doors, and roof gutters to smaller objects like beds, scales, tobacco jars, birdcages, shoes, a set of false teeth, a baking pan, an edition of
Donald Duck
. They looked out over it all, not so much blank as unburdened of everything their eyes had known before.

Eight little houses. The wall of water had come at them from one side at the exact moment when Hocke on the other side was trying to get down to them by driving alongside the drainage ditch. The families
of two of his farmhands and several day laborers didn’t know which they heard first, the breathless honking of the tractor horn or the bomb that split open their house walls and tore off the roofs. The energy of a hurricane when transferred into water is a mad force in any space that presents obstacles to that force. Shearing its way with razor sharpness along the collapsing dikes, turning, forcing its way to the side, and then streaming back, the flood wave was carrying a pressure of dozens of tons per square meter as it reached the first eight houses on the Naweg and landed on them like a wrecking ball. Most of the inhabitants made it just as far as the ladder in the stairwell. What followed was something that no human being was there to witness.

A fourteen-year-old boy and his father hack a way through the roof tiles with a chisel, pull themselves up hand-over-hand to the ridge beam, hang over it; the next minute a vertical tongue of water sweeps upward, the father drowns immediately, the boy thrashes around in the water, struggling desperately. Another house: a fifteen-year-old girl squeezes herself against the chimney, the roof is torn off, nothing around her but a force-12 wind and the floor heaving under her feet. Her forty-year-old mother, extremely pregnant, lands in a floating laundry cupboard as the house wall collapses outward; she’s been having cramps all night but now they stop. The current will carry her by chance right past the tractor, she will manage to make it, at least to begin with, as does her eight-year-old son, whom Hocke fishes out of a hedge of whitethorn. As the girl falls backward, along with the chimney and everything else, she gives a deafening scream and clutches empty air. It’s pitch black. The sea pushes on from the north with huge force, only to crash into the constricted waters of the Oosterschelde on the south side of the island. The inhabitants try to grab onto whatever they bump up against in the water. Not one of the flimsy houses held together with little more than whitewash withstands the enormous churning movement of the waters triggered by waves that are now breaking under their own weight. A man and two children in striped pajamas are standing on the rear part of a shed that is already sinking. As they land in the water, the man manages to pull them onto a rafter, which immediately shoots away like a torpedo.
Lord have mercy—but the man is astounded to find himself groping the road embankment a minute later and crawls up it under the lights of the tractor. It’s snowing. A young married couple and child have been pulling themselves forward along the hedge that lines the road. The man, who’s very strong, is holding his two-year-old daughter above water by her clothing, switching from his right hand to his left. He’s also using his teeth. Hocke, who hears them calling through the darkness, comes to their aid and pulls them onto the wagon. The mother takes the child, who’s been plunged right under the water twice, in her freezing arms. Extraordinarily, the rumble of the Ferguson engine can be heard even through the howling storm. Six or seven rats have popped up out of the water next to the trailer and are climbing onto the tailgate. There’s still room on the trailer, but if they don’t get away from there now, up the gently sloping road, there’ll be no point in trying.

“We’re going!”

He knew the lay of the land around here. Hocke took his bearings from the electric poles and the wind-bowed picket lines of willows and poplars planted after the deliberate inundation by the Germans in 1944. The absolutely critical thing for him was to stay on the road, which laid an underwater trail to his house if indeed it still existed. Working his way forward on an imaginary path, taking an imaginary curve, everything done by guesswork. It was after about ten minutes that Hocke, the one in charge, the only one with a thought in his head, stopped and peered over his shoulder.

At first there was nothing to see but waves crashing and crisscrossing one another in fountains of spray and general chaos. Then suddenly something was yelling and coming toward them, a dot that soon grew until it became a living thing clamped to a bale of hay. Hocke looked, as did the others.

It was a boy, a child, who as the hay bale raced alongside them in the current, slid into the water at the exact right moment, also contriving with considerable skill to dodge the driftwood that was hurtling past as well. Coughing and bleeding—one of the rats landed on him as people pulled him in over the tailgate—he joined the little group, who reached the farmhouse shortly thereafter. The boy’s
name was Cornelius Jaeger, he was twelve years old but would soon make an everlasting impression up in the Hockes’ attic because of his deformity—he was a hunchback—and he came from Dreischor. Vague things, the kind one doesn’t notice consciously, but that still led Lidy to the assumption that none of the others knew where this child came from or what his name was.

“Mister Cau!”

She couldn’t recognize his face. She had no idea what was driving him. Madness? A despairing soul? It didn’t interest her. She bent down as if approaching a trained animal and touched his arm. He seemed to understand, to decode it at once: a woman with her hair down loose and hanging over her shoulders in strands, a voice that still addressed him in a formal way but nonetheless was in command. She was holding a tangle of flax rope in her hands.

A moment later Lidy and the man were standing at the west window.

No thought of home, not one. Only the question: Will we manage it? The ease with which one self takes a step back, allowing another to take precedence. Not twenty-four hours before, she had been the wife of a future banker and mother of a future primary school pupil, high school pupil, student … now the only thing that interested her was the Stygian panorama of sea and sky—both in motion, southward, chasing desperately past the house. Izak Hocke’s diesel tractor was drowning in them. How in God’s name to get these little figures, ten, twenty yards away, into the house? They were wedging a large piece of driftwood against the side of the trailer. They had managed to make themselves heard over the howl of the wind, screaming that they needed a rope to save them. Following the farmer’s wife’s directions, she had gone searching for one in the middle of a heap of the
most unlikely things—never before had she seen a schoolbag made of wood.

Lidy. Cau. However the relationship between the two of them had been formed, it was stable enough for her to know what tasks belonged to each of them. She pulled the window inward till it was wide open and held it firm with both hands. He was short and no longer young, but he had the strength of two men; he paused for a few moments to assess the situation and then slung the rope, which he’d fastened at one end to a roof beam, out into the night. The old woman was also standing by.

Of course, no. Doesn’t happen that way. The three of them at the window realized this as clearly as the people in the trailer with the water foaming as it climbed its sides; they had been freezing for so long already that they had forgotten their own terror. The rope sank. While they were hauling it back in again, Cau and Lidy saw a small, stocky figure stand up, arms wide.

It was the crippled boy. He leapt into the water and plowed his way thrashing toward the house. Lidy laid the last tiny remnant of her detached carelessness on ice. From now until the moment they could pull him up over the windowsill, all she could think of was, would the boy make it?

A troll! was the first thought that came to her mind as the boy stood before them, dripping wet.

They had pulled him out of the water, yet to her it seemed as if he had abruptly pushed his way into the house by himself, his entire character expressing itself in his arms and legs. Light and shadow played over his face, which was scratched and bleeding and reminded Lidy of something very familiar, whether out of her own life story or not. When one feels at home with something one encounters, a certain gentleness, then one loves that gentleness, and it becomes one’s own. Life is no longer life without it. She was not thinking for a moment of her own child, this tiny signal from a faraway place.
Here and now
she wanted to dab carefully at this battered face with a cloth, the hair too, and press a kiss against it.

Without looking up, he pushed her hand away.

“Onto my belt, now,” he instructed, teeth chattering, chin down to his chest.

A child’s voice, she heard. He and Cau wrapped the rescue line around his waist and he insisted that they also tie it to his belt with a loop, for safety’s sake.

“Are you sure? Can you really do it again?” asked Lidy, who was no longer trying to meet the boy’s eyes, noticing only that his whole body was trembling.

He looked sideways for a moment. Irritated? Or was he merely half-blinded by the stinging water in his eyes? She took his hand and stroked it, waiting for him to pull back, but he didn’t right away.

“We’ll hold tight to you with the rope.”

A smile, as if she had said something idiotic.

They paid out the line. For the first few yards she could still see him, then he seemed to vanish under the flotsam and jetsam, then, if she wasn’t mistaken, she saw his head break the surface of the water again. Relief. Then nothing more. Nothing but the passing minutes that seemed to go very slowly. The present can push itself so far into the foreground that everything that has happened before, the entire story, becomes a hallucination that lacks all conviction.

Weddings often suddenly bring together two families who do not know each other, but when Sjoerd and Armanda got married, intimate bonds already existed between their relatives. Nonetheless something occurred that frequently happens at large family parties, particularly weddings: a deepening of mutual feelings and the real confidence that these will endure.

It was a sunny afternoon in May. Flecks of light danced off the blue damask tablecloth, a wedding present. The doors to the little balcony on the street were open. On the narrow side of the oval table Armanda was laying out photographs and sorting them, barefoot, wearing a dress of checked muslin that had belonged to Lidy. She had pulled the garment quickly out of a cupboard and slipped it on, because the sun on the windowpanes was making the house warmer and warmer; the photos were waiting on the table. That very particular starting-today-everything-is-different mood of the wedding guests soon fades for most people, but not everyone. Armanda lifted her head. The kettle on the stove in the kitchen at the end of the hall began to sing. She was expecting her mother. Armanda went into the kitchen, rinsed out the teapot with boiling water, poured the rest of the water onto the tea leaves, put the cups and some cookies on the tray, and encountered in all these little routines what was new in herself, the mysterious thing that most people around her had a word for, whether spoken innocently or ironically:
wife
. The doorbell rang.

“Wonderful!” said Nadine Brouwer a few minutes later. “Gorgeous, oh, and look at that one!” She laid her hand against her neck and glanced from the photos, each of which she picked up for a moment, to her daughter and back again. She looked fresh and rested in a bright red dress in a dotted material that set off her still-girlish figure. Her upswept hair, ash-brown, showed no hint of gray.

Armanda, sitting beside her mother at the table, took another look at her wedding photographs. Her mother’s profile, with its fine lines, and her candid blue eyes, radiated a delight beyond words onto the photographs and also of course onto the day that they commemorated, May 3, 1955. Yes, thought Armanda initially, my wedding day, my wedding day, what a celebration, look, here we are at the town hall, here we are at the church, and she had the urge to relive it all with her mother.

A virgin as she left her parents’ house to begin a marriage. In white, yes of course, anyone could have told her that, why not, in a beautiful white dress, therefore, but maybe better not to have a long one, and with a little white hat, no veil, and of course no traditional entrance on the arm of her father: five years before, Lidy and Sjoerd had walked into the Amstel church arm in arm, she in a lime-green suit with a loose jacket that came down over her stomach, to enjoy the organ playing and God’s blessing simply because they were so festive. It had been a beautiful June day, Armanda remembered. Clear sunless weather without a breath of wind, the kind that never shows up in photographs.