The Storm (21 page)

“Beautiful,” murmured Sjoerd, without the faintest astonishment over the snow-white dress lifting away from the neck and the little hat, perched at an angle to set off the beloved little face, and the bouquet held up under the chin, that he must know from a previous photo, already glued into the album, in the same always-flattering three-quarter pose. His eyes were already elsewhere. He turned around purposefully and felt Armanda’s whole body respond immediately, as he had expected, with a yes! yes! During this afternoon’s meeting with the administrative department of the Capital Investment Committee of Mees & Hope, he had felt as miserable as a dog, almost ill with sheer repressed impatience to get home. It was his first
week back at work after his ten-day honeymoon, the first three days of which had been extremely peculiar, because after so much hesitation, he and Armanda had felt no desire for each other at all.

Neither of them had been able to understand it.

The wedding banquet in the Geldersekade was still going on when they escaped at around five thirty. After they had changed clothes at number 36 and number 77 respectively, they put their luggage in the trunk of the Skoda and began their honeymoon journey to Normandy. First stopping point was a village near Rotterdam, a surprise for Armanda, just like the beautiful hotel there where Sjoerd had made reservations. They arrived at around eight. Along the way they had still been talking about the party at first, then, when the car left the main road, Armanda, showing her surprise, had gamely read out the place-names of the little towns they passed through, Alblasserdam, Ridderkerk, while the bright blue sky turned slowly to a deeper blue. She awoke on her husband’s shoulder in front of the hotel, it was still light, but there was a thin layer of mist over the flagstones and the surrounding area. They dealt with the formalities at reception, took the elevator, walked down a long, brilliantly lit corridor, and came to their room, outside which the porter was just lifting their suitcases off a gold-colored luggage cart.

It was idiotic, but the moment the door closed, neither of them knew how to deal with the sudden proximity of the other. Okay, go and stand close. Armanda was happy that he immediately threw his arms around her; she cuddled up to him, kissed him somewhere on the face, now I must be happy, she probably thought, and probably that’s what he thought too. Free at last! At last we can do and not do whatever we want! Meantime they avoided looking directly at each other, Armanda even kept her eyes closed and found herself thinking, whether she wanted to or not, about her suitcase with its tightly packed, freshly ironed clothes, some of which she ought to hang up right away. Sjoerd, over her shoulder, looked out of the window.

He left her standing there.

“Take a look, see what it’s like outside.”

Of course she followed him. “Beautiful,” she said as she slipped off her shoes and felt how small she was next to him on the soft carpet. They leaned side by side on the window bench. Dusk was falling, the
sky turned yellow, and they were looking at a rolling countryside, meadows, trees, with a broad stream of water running through it, flat and pale in the mist, and on the other bank a row of eight or nine windmills. What was there to say about it? It was nature, the windmills included, as they stood there in a pensive row, their vanes motionless despite the weak to middling northwest wind, fixed, the sails rolled up. A few minutes later, when they were lying in each other’s arms in bed, cheek to cheek, Sjoerd still saw the windmills in his mind’s eye, and Armanda was realizing that there were two, three dresses and a blouse that she really had to hang up right away.

“Just a moment,” she said and rolled away from him.

Without paying any further attention to him, as if she were alone in the room, Armanda opened her suitcase and began carefully to unfold several pieces of clothing at the shoulders, to inspect them and then hang them up. Sjoerd listened to the hangers being pushed this way and that, heard bathwater running a little later, and dozed off in a scent of soap and perfume. The next thing that happened was a naked Armanda tiptoeing to the bed, and then an Armanda in a nightshirt tiptoeing to the bed again. To take a good, long look.

All he had taken off was his shirt, which she picked up off the floor. Then she began to fumble with his shoelaces. It is perfectly possible to undress a sleeping man without his noticing, but as soon as you pull down his pants, he will wake up for a moment unless he’s dead drunk. Sjoerd, without a moment’s thought, crawled under the covers and sank back happily into a deep sleep. Armanda went round the room switching off the lamps, then slipped into bed on her side. She dropped off to sleep too, a heavy, abandoned sleep, though with interruptions. The first time she awoke, she lay there, surrounded by a glowing warmth, in the pitch darkness, and began to actually pant when she realized that Sjoerd was starting to caress her the way he had once a long time before, in the bedroom at number 36, when an oh-so-unemphatic ring at the doorbell had interrupted them. To heighten her desire, she thought back to it in detail, to this postponement, intending, with superstitious naïveté, to have everything from back then happen all over again, this time with a happy ending. When she opened her eyes for the second time, she knew immediately that she was alone in bed. There was tobacco smoke in the room, and it
was still dark, but not completely. As she allowed her mind to dawdle peacefully over the fact that what was supposed to happen had happened, she heard the wind, strong now and blowing from the west, whistle against the wall of the building, and she turned her head away.

He was standing at the window with his back to her. Ground mist, mist on the water, and a row of water mills, their lower parts invisible, their vanes with the white starched sails spinning madly, joyously, in circles. What effect does such an image have on a young woman who has just woken up? If she saw the tip of his cigarette glow from time to time and then disappear again, she was lucky.

For three days they felt almost no desire for each other, and Armanda found herself ugly. Then she noticed that whether the moment was suitable or not, her eyes would linger whenever she looked at him.

“Come with me,” he said on the fourth day, when for a moment she found herself unable to utter another word. They were already in a hotel in the Strandboulevard in Houlgate and had made love on all three nights.

She came to his side, he took her hand, and they climbed the path through the dunes and up to their room.

How is that possible, she wondered some time later.

The bedroom revealed a certain customary disorder in the middle of the afternoon, and through the window you could hear the sea. She liked hearing her husband snoring on her shoulder with an innocent face. How is it possible? she thought, by which she meant: Three days, it’s only three days, two days before yesterday, the day before yesterday, then yesterday, I’ve never heard or read anywhere that as time elapses, it exposes each of us to its manipulations and its unmistakable side effects, though we have no idea where these come from and how they work. The way we kissed first! Then took off our clothes so uninhibitedly, so fast, so urgently!

On the floor a man’s shirt, a top-quality pair of light gray trousers, men’s shoes—no, no women’s shoes—and a pair of panties, obviously toe-kicked right over into the corner behind the vanity, where they would have to be searched for later; the long shadow of a tree outside
in the inner courtyard; inside, another piece of clothing, a worn checked dress that carried some vague memory, but one that wasn’t damaging to anybody. In bed the pair of lovers who belonged to these belongings.

Armanda: for the first time in her life as a married woman, experiencing the long pang of what is also known as
la petite mort
.

Years later, when Lidy had been long dead, the experts were united about one thing: it could have been worse. Had the moon, for example, been close to the earth, as it had been two weeks earlier on January 18, then the astronomical high tide could have used its pull to rise almost another two feet. An absolutely exceptional spring tide would then have been a possibility.

The possibility that did occur during this night was the following. A farm, between Zierikzee and Dreischor. The sea, that had risen to within three feet of the attic floor. Moonlight, ear-deadening noise, a wind now blowing in short blasts, that seemed to temper the movement of the waves in the deeper water over the fields even as it reinforced the speed of the current coming over the road. The great mass of the water pounded against the sides and back of the trailer, which miraculously had not yet cracked to pieces. Inside the house, Cau, Lidy, and Gerarda Hocke were asking themselves if it might be possible for these people to ferry themselves across using a door to one of the stalls that was floating around as a makeshift raft.

And indeed, something seemed to be separating itself from the wagon. Ignoring the rumbling of the furniture down below them, they watched the little load approach. It was managing to keep on course with the help of the rope slung around a roof beam at this end and attached to something else at the other. It didn’t take that long. Dragged in over the windowsill dripping wet, three of the four passengers
stood there for a long minute, gasping for air. Lidy noticed that they brought with them a heavy stench of putrefaction. And somewhat later, as she and Gerarda Hocke stripped off their sodden clothes, wiped away the greasy mud as best they could, and offered them bedding and safety on the ice-cold floor, she had a sudden image of them as a gaggle of newborn babies. The trio consisted of a tall man with a thick shock of hair, an extremely pregnant woman, not his wife, as was later established, and a little boy of about eight, her son. Number four had stayed behind on the raft.

As Lidy ran to the window to see how he was getting on, he was already halfway across on the return journey. She watched as the boy, down on his knees, kept moving his hands along the rope and pulling.

Water usually follows wind by a matter of two or three hours. Later, oceanographers would calculate that the whipping up of the waters could have been significantly worse. For the hurricane, which achieved maximum strength on the coast of Scotland, had weakened a little to the south over the North Sea, as the flood was reaching its height on the coasts of the provinces of Zeeland and Holland. Wind speeds can moderate over land due to friction, but over water they do what these winds did. It would have been possible, people reckoned later, for the pronounced trough of low pressure that moved that night from Scotland over the German Bight and on southeast to deviate a little from its course. Had it done so, the Scottish wind speeds and the Dutch northwest storm would have combined with truly fatal results.

The hunchbacked boy had succeeded in making fast to the wagon again. At that moment two seas broke over it, one of them carrying a piece of debris on its crest. It cut deep into Izak Hocke’s forehead, the trailer tipped over, but stayed hitched. Shortly before the tractor sank, the last five drowning people made it onto the raft; the rope that had been hanging slack was pulled tight by those in the house. It worked, but everyone was at the end of their strength now; the door was too small for five people and too big to be maneuvered with such a load on it.

Hocke crawled quickly to the other side, and Cornelius Jaeger let himself drop into the water, water that tonight was seventeen feet above Normal Amsterdam Water Level, but that according to experts
later on could easily have risen by another seven feet if a third factor had not helpfully intervened. The water level in this area is determined not only by the sea that comes thundering eastward against the coast but also by the rivers that flow continuously west. December and January that year had been unusually dry in the Alps and in the Vosges. If the precipitation in the upper reaches of the Rhine, the Maas, and the Schelde had been typical for the time of year, then, adding to the already devastating situation, there would have been a catastrophe in the estuaries of literally fantastic proportions.

A man had half climbed, half fallen through the window. He immediately got to his feet and turned around, waving his arms, to yell something to his wife, who was still out in the full grip of the wind. She hadn’t dared to give him her little daughter, who had turned two in November and was huddled under her sodden coat. Beside him, Simon Cau and the man, who had already managed to climb into the attic, were also holding out their arms. A true reception committee to whom she could have handed the little thing.

No. A hopeless situation that seemed to go on for an eternity.

In reality ten, twelve seconds at most elapsed until the young woman on the door that was now banging against the gable lifted her head and saw another young woman leaning far out of the window. The two looked at each other, sharing the knowledge for one despairing second that if she couldn’t keep holding tight to her tiny freezing burden out there in the cold …

“Give her here!” screamed Lidy.

The other woman obeyed.

“Have you got her?”

“Yes.”

They were all inside. The family complete. Izak Hocke and the hunchbacked boy, who was still trembling all over his body, were already busy with wire, wood, and fiberboard, making a makeshift replacement for the shutter in the back gable end. The newly arrived woman put up no resistance. A woolen jacket was held out to her and she pushed her arms into it willingly. Her eyes fixed on the shadows moving on the sheathing under the steep roof in front of her, she
waited to see what was expected of her. Lidy meantime seized a chair that was standing in a corner and lifted the apathetic little girl into her lap.
Eia popeia
, nice and quiet now, rocking comes naturally. Between a natural catastrophe involving 1,836 dead and the fate of this one child, Dina van de Velde, lay countless newspaper articles, newsreels, Red Cross lists, and a five-volume report by the Delta Commission years later.