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 tim
e 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.
10
Seeing Her
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.
She watched him approach with long strides, looking toward her without even the hint of a smile. Her books in a bag pressed against her hip, she stood still as other people walked on past her to either side; there was a lot of traffic at this hour. Without an idea of how they would or should behave toward each other, she waited for her brother-in-law at the corner of the bridge. She would just let things happen. What was the alternative? For some time now things had been awkward between her and Sjoerd. Would there be the same iciness between them today as there had been yesterday?
She thought about how suddenly his mood had changed as he stared into her face in a way that wasn’t pleasant. And she had stared back. Widower … the word pushed its way up into her mind without her being able to suppress it. Widower, but his dead wife had still not been found.
That had been yesterday in number 36. Sunday afternoon, the doors to the little balcony at the front had stood open, and fresh air from the park came streaming in through the wrought-iron grille. Inside the sun-filled room Nadja was thundering across the room on a red wooden horse with wheels, working her way busily toward her by pushing off with both feet at once. Sjoerd and she had talked over the racket.
“She’s still somewhere,” he had said after a moment’s silence.
She had wanted to reach for his hand, but he pushed away from her, changed the way he was sitting, and looked around. In the sumptuous sunlight the furniture, mostly old family pieces, looked a little shabby, and in the corner by the sliding doors, motes of dust were dancing above the piano in a fan of light. She followed his gaze and felt that he knew in his heart what her eyes could see: Wherever she is, she’s not here.
But she had nodded. “Yes.” And afterward, to say something that would comfort both of them: “She certainly hasn’t just vanished from her house and her life without a trace.”
Did he hear what she said? Remarks, thoughts, remarks, thoughts, it doesn’t take long to put miles between them.
Expressionlessly, almost formally, he had repeated, “She’s still somewhere.” But as he turned toward Armanda and searched her face with his eyes, as if trying to find something, his words changed, though they were the same words, and suddenly they sounded a second meaning, icy, hostile, as if what he’d wanted to say was: scandalous, unforgivable, my sister-in-law, how much you look like her!
Now she waited for him at the corner of the bridge, and knew, as he came toward her in a straight line, that yesterday’s conversation was still ongoing. She smiled—what could be more natural than that? Less natural, perhaps, was that she saw herself smiling, saw herself in her wide blue coat smiling out at him from under her bangs, with the rest of her smooth dark hair hanging down on either side of her face.
They greeted each other. “Hello!” And said, as they continued on their way: “How was it today?” Good, good. They crossed the road.
“Lovely day,” she said a few minutes later.
He didn’t react.
A bit farther along the Amstel, the street got noticeably quieter. The river glistened like a band of silver.
“Shall we take a little walk?”
Relieved, she said, “Yes, why don’t we!”
They went along the Keizersgracht. To break the silence, she asked, “Do you have any news? Did you get another call?”
She was alluding to the identification. Lidy’s identification, for the sake of which Sjoerd had already traveled several times into the disaster zone, an undertaking that struck Armanda as spookier and more abstract with every day that passed. Lidy was one of hundreds of the missing who were still being searched for. Sjoerd made calls and was called. He, the husband, was the contact person. But gradually the calls from the Red Cross to come and check the morgues in Goes, Zieriksee, or Dordrecht became more and more infrequent, and it was also a rarity if he got a message from the police to please come look at a photo. The faces of the dead who were still bein
g washed up or surfacing out of the mud were no longer fit to be photographed.
Close together they walked along the narrow, crumbling sidewalk in front of the houses, then over a wooden footbridge and through underneath a landing stage, and finally down the middle of the street. The canal under the canopy of the new green leaves looked very welcoming in the sun.
She glanced sideways. He seemed to be sunk in thought. Would she ever appear out of the water? Did that ever happen? Hastily she began to talk.
“When you asked me last week about that pullover …”
He immediately said, “Lidy’s pullover.”
“Well, actually, mine.”
She saw him shrug uncomfortably. “In the end it didn’t belong to either of you.”
Last week they’d called him again. An investigator had told him about the body of a young woman whose physical description included a blue roll-neck pullover made of thin fleecy wool. The collar and sleeves were edged in a decorative pattern in paler blue, and one of the helpers, who was a keen knitter herself, recognized the pattern from Woman and Home magazine.
“Decorative pattern? Woman and Home?” Armanda repeated, when Sjoerd relayed the details to her. “Our pullover was only the one color. Made of angora. I bought it at Vos.”
Now she said, “Maybe you’ll think this is crazy, but it really did me good to talk, well, so normally about the pullover that Lidy swiped.”
He grabbed her arm hard. She was shocked. “Do you think it’s crazy?” she asked hastily.
They had reached the spot where a little arched bridge leads over from one canal to the next. They stopped at the balustrade. His grip on her arm became so tight that she looked at him.
“She has to come back to me,” he said. “It’s possible, you know that.”
The Storm Page 8