“No, no,” murmured Sjoerd, who actually hadn’t heard a thing, since the sound of the doorbell sometimes didn’t reach this high up in the house.
But it was true. In number 77 the table had been laid ready for some time now. Grandpa Brouwer and Nadja had taken a little walk and come to fetch the two lovebirds home to supper.
The bell rang again softly.
Up on the fourth floor the bedroom was already bathed in lamplight. With Sjoerd’s cold, tired eyes looking at her from the bed, Armanda was slipping hastily into her clothes.
14
In the Village
This is what they call sleep….
As she stumped through the puddles of an anonymous street in an anonymous village at half past three in the morning, she was alone with the storm for the first time. To left and right were low houses, and not a light to be seen anywhere. Simon Cau had dispatched her and the two daughters of the tavernkeeper to different parts of the village to drum the inhabitants awake.
“Wake them,” she had had time to ask quickly, “and then what?” They had climbed out of the car at the church. The sky had begun to rain large hailstones. Simon Cau had wanted to start ringing the storm bell immediately, but although the church door stood open, they discovered by the light of a match that the door to the tower was locked. Back outside, as they stood in the moonlight that had somehow found its way through to them, Lidy had looked into Simon Cau’s face. And seen that he had no belief in his own orders, but didn’t know what else to do.
“Wake them!”
She did what she was told. It wasn’t easy. It was obvious that nobody here had any wish to interrupt their sleep. Embarrassed, she stood between doors and windows that remained closed to her hammering. Everything was calm and secure in the world behind them, she could feel it; buried in their bedclothes, legs curled up, men, women, and children slept with slow heartbeats. Inhaling the warm breath of their sleeping companions, they placed their trust in the strength of their inadequate imaginations and let her muddle on in the storm that was just a storm, that swooped down into the narrow street and howled through it as if through a fallen chimneypot.
She looked around. Nothing but this bedlam of noise. Suddenly it occurred to her that absolutely nobody knew she was here. With a new kind of unease she crossed the street, decided on the door to a small shop, and banged, palms out, on its upper portion. Unreal village, she thought, with the fearfulness of someone who knows herself to be overlooked by an oblivious God and her oblivious fellow men. If nobody has any idea where you are and cannot form any image of it, do you exist? Her eyes slid over the white letters, carefully painted in italics on the dull glass pane above the shop door: Baked Goods.
Someone had awakened in the apartment at the back. An alert, elderly lady who heard noises in her sleep that her ears couldn’t identify as a normal part of foul weather like this. She felt her way blindly into her bedroom slippers. The light wasn’t working, so she lit a candle. She was about to go directly to answer the drumming on the front door when she noticed a faint roar from somewhere in the house that demanded her more urgent attention. A moment later she was standing in amazement in the toilet, where the water was spouting up out of the pan as if from a spring. She turned around, hurried through the shop, and opened the door.
“Come look at this,” she said, and Lidy followed her.
It was one of those lavatories that had been carpentered together out of planks and sheet metal against the outside wall at some point in the past, capturing every bad smell forever. Now it had a white porcelain toilet bowl and a lacquered cistern above it with a chain. Lidy and the old woman, who had survived most of her life without electricity and had possessed this beautiful WC with its connection to the sewage system for only the last four years, which made it still a daily enchantment, looked first at the high-spurting column of water and then at each other.
Their reactions were almost simultaneous.
“The light’s out too.”
“The water’s up over the sea dike already, I’ve seen it myself.”
The woman in her white nightgown turned round, because someone was coming through the hall, lantern in hand.
“Nothing’s working anymore,” she complained loudly but patiently to the man whom she didn’t yet recognize but took to be a neighbor.
She couldn’t know how right she was. For at this moment elsewhere on the island the first telephone poles were coming down. The total isolation had begun. There were, it is true, a few telephone operators at their posts in some of the slumbering villages, attentive employees who had gone to work in the belief that the need to make an emergency call to the provincial or even the national authorities tonight might not be just the product of an overzealous sense of duty. But none of them got through. In some places the telephone switchboard was an old-fashioned operation, run by hand with a generator that produced its own power, and it happened a couple of times that the operator, totally concentrated on the alarm call even as the flood-waters poured into the building, received an electric shock as the water reached the height of his chair and the stool supporting the equipment with its worn but indestructible parts. This was a lost island. It would be submerged completely, without the outside world lifting a finger or even noticing, because as chance would have it, this confluence of the position of the moon and the endless wind happened during a weekend.
Nonetheless: one extraordinary exception.
Very early in the morning, a post office employee was still trying. At the last moment, shortly before the technical equipment gave up the ghost and the last shutters on the telephone exchange fell off, he managed to dial the number of a fairly high official. He reached him personally.
“Yes?”
The chief engineer of the Royal Hydraulic Engineering Authorities was three-quarters asleep. The phone operator had to repeat his request twice, in different formulations. “I’m calling you in desperation, something’s got to happen.”
“Yes, well, but what can I …” the chief engineer began, then said, “Good, I’ll order the necessary measures.” He hung up again, looked at the clock, yawned, shook his head—the bright green hands were pointing to ten past four—and crawled back under the covers. But he kept his word. When he dared to rouse the queen’s commissioner from his Sunday-morning sleep with a 7 a.m. phone call, in the village under discussion the flotsam and jetsam was already thundering against the house walls and there were corpses floating everywhere.
Having to die is everyman’s excusable fear, and in a region such as this, death by drowning rapidly becomes the most particular fear of all. Lidy, who had now been traveling for eighteen hours, found herself on the street with a handful of villagers who were arguing with one another. The storm had increased to force 12, i.e., a hurricane. People were wearing coats over nightclothes, and kept to the shelter of their houses; two or three of them were carrying torches. Universal darkness. Going by their faces, none of them seemed overly concerned; what was occupying each of them was what the others were making of the spectacle.
Bad weather. And not good that the water was coming over the dike out there. Everyone knew that at ebb tide that evening, the water-depth gauge at the Laurens sluice hadn’t gone down by even a quarter of an inch. And where there had been no ebb, they had projected that there would be no high tide, because this logic had held true all their lives. A young man who had been down to the harbor to take a look tonight said he’d seen the farmer at the entrance to the village hastily hitching his horses to the wagon not fifteen minutes before, with his best cows in tow, to move himself, his wife, his children, and all his worldly goods, farther inland.
The people standing around in the darkness let their eyes slide wishfully leftward, away from the silhouette of the church tower, inland, away from the sea.
Living in a dangerous place leads inevitably to a kind of deaf-and-blindness to the elements of that danger. Every single person in the street, Lidy included, knew that yes this was a vill
age, but it was also one tiny point in a landscape given over entirely to the moon, the sea, and the wind. Water is the heaviest element in existence—that was also known. Whoever lived here was descended from generations who had centuries of experience that in long-drawn-out storms, the sea exercises a counterpressure and then rises on one side. Oceanographers had done the calculations to prove that the height of this lopsided rise is in inverse proportion to the depth of the sea—but people here had known this forever and understood it. Every person here in the street had grown up with eerie tales of monstrous hands of water reaching abruptly out of the arms of the North Sea, whose floor rises toward the coast of this country like a chute.
Lidy glanced to the side. The old woman had nudged her.
“I think I’d better carry some things upstairs.”
“I’d do the same,” replied Lidy, and thought: I’ll give the woman a hand for a few minutes.
Other people, too, were giving one another meaningful looks. The group in the street broke up. Shutters and attic windows had already been made fast that afternoon. There was nothing on any of the farms still standing around loose. Now they went to fetch their children out of bed, taking all the covers with them, and to settle them back down in attics, along with buckets of water, camping stoves, supplies, matches, and even perhaps the most valuable thing in the house, the black sewing machine with the cast-iron treadle.
Permission to stay granted, and best not to think too much. Another way of fighting back against the impossibility of nature. It is true that most of the houses in this street were little buildings put up for farmworkers, with walls thrown up using not cement but a pitiful mixture of sand and plaster. But they were their dwellings, and they wanted to feel safe in them. For the time being they wanted to have the interval between one sleep and the next preserve as much of the order of their everyday lives as possible.
Lidy went back into the little shop. The old woman walked resolutely ahead of her through the dark. Behind an intervening door the candle was still burning.
A few seconds later: “Here, you take these.”
She had two large biscuit tins pushed into her arms.
“There.”
A cash box.
Filled with the same dreamlike sense of closeness she’d experienced a few hours earlier at the family dinner, Lidy climbed a ladder to a peaked attic where she couldn’t stand upright. In the circular glow cast by a tealight she saw her feet encased in muddy shoes. A person must have two or three different people inside them, she thought, as she stood at the top of the ladder to receive a cushion, parts of a kapok mattress, a chamber pot, a coverlet, and then another.
“Got it?”
“Yes.”
She set the things on the floor, pushing aside with her foot what was lying there. The shrieking night outside and the sea, which she’d seen with her own eyes at the crest of the dike, had been shrunk again to something less enormous in this creaking, groaning little hut. As the other woman worked her way up through the trapdoor, now wearing a hairy brown coat, she looked at her crumpled old face, lit from below. Enough? Everything the way you want it? And imagined herself and the old lady, when dawn came a few hours later, carrying the whole lot back down and making coffee in the kitchen behind the shop.
“Quiet!”
The old woman turned her head toward the din raging a hand’s breadth over their heads. Then Lidy heard it too. Laboriously, at intervals, yet unmistakable, the sound of a bell was making itself heard in the wind.
So he managed it, she thought.
And immediately thereafter she felt, more than she saw, the old woman’s eyes fix themselves on her, huge and dark with anxious recognition.
“Fire!”
Simon Cau hadn’t been able to get the key to the bell tower. It was no help at all that he knew where the sexton—a good carpenter and also the commandant of the fire brigade—lived. Neither ringing the doorbell nor banging a stick against a windowpane had succeeded in waking the man, who as he slept had one ear cocked only for the sound of the telephone. After some time a blacksmith had got out of bed in a neighboring house. It wasn’t long thereafter before the hinges of the door to the church tower gave way under the blows of a sledgehammer, and Cau and the blacksmith climbed the stairs by the light of an oil lamp. At first they were barely able to coax a sound from the bell. The failed electrical mechanism gave off sparks when they tried it with a rope. So Cau had run back down and fetched the sledgehammer.
When Lidy and one of the Hin daughters wanted to attract the attention of the men a short time later, they found it hard to do. The two of them had met outside the church: Lidy sent out by the old woman to find out what was going on, and the tavernkeeper’s daughter to spread some reassuring news.
“The water’s going down again already,” the girl said.
It was no easy task to bring the good news up into the tower. Lidy and the tavernkeeper’s daughter stood in the stairwell with their fingers in their ears, looking up at the two men who were going at it as if possessed. The blacksmith, hanging onto the rope with all his weight, managed to keep the bell swinging in the correct rhythm while Simon Cau, who clearly didn’t find the heavy booming sufficient, struck the sledgehammer against the rim, which produced an additional high-pitched clang. Eventually they noticed the two young women.
“Impossible” was Cau’s first exclamation after the bell had stopped moving. “Absolutely impossible!” Without straightening up, he stood there panting, the heavy hammer in his hand.
But the tavernkeeper’s daughter was certain. She named the names of several boatmen who had just returned from the harbor and whom she had met in the village.
“They said it happened very quickly. In just a few minutes they saw the water go down by whole yards!”
Speechlessly, Cau handed the blacksmith his sledgehammer. Wrapping his scarf around his neck, and looking angry, he reached for the lamp, which was smoking in the downdraft under one of the louvers that let out the sound.
As the little group got downstairs, there were more people in the street, including the tavernkeeper’s other daughter. Everyone had just heard that the water situation wasn’t so serious, and feeling somewhat light-headed because of the alarm bells and the strange hour, they were having little chats about it all. Relieved, naturally. And again, all too naturally, drawing only those conclusions that made sense to them from the reality in which unwittingly they found themselves: the night, the wind, the wet, and the salt in the air.
Let’s go, quick, back to our featherbeds!
Soon the car was bumping its way over the water-filled potholes out of the village again, where peace had descended once more, and only the occasional dog refused to stop barking.
Was Cau thinking perhaps that he’d be held up as a fool?
Or what?
When he drove back by way of the harbor with the three girls again, it was a needless stop, and one that bored the three of them to distraction. Nevertheless they all got out, went to the barricade in the dike, and there was a brief discussion. Cau, to sum up, didn’t want to believe his eyes, while the three others just wanted to go to bed.
“The timbers really held up well!”
“Till now!”
“God I’m tired.”
“It’s … it’s impossible!”
“Well, anyhow, the water’s down more than six feet!”
“It can’t go down!”
“Shall we go?”
“It can’t go down, high tide isn’t for another hour!”
“Nonetheless, shall we go?”
Cau couldn’t get the engine to start, so Lidy tried it her way. After a few attempts it worked, whereupon she set off confidently along the bend in the road as if she knew the darkness here like the back of her hand. Five minutes later they were at the three-way fork in the dike, and the little tavern, a hut, appeared. Vague silhouettes, vague light behind steamed-up windows. The two tavernkeeper’s daughters leapt out of the car. Lidy watched a
s they stumbled up the steps to their parents’ house, blew the horn by way of a farewell, and set off on the last part of the detour to Izak Hocke’s farm, where they were, she assumed, expecting her.
Cau was silent now. Lidy was wide awake and, remarkably perhaps, still felt no fear or anything similar. Her instincts corresponded in no way with what was bearing down on her. Where was the awareness, however minimal, of those moments that precede reality, and yet are themselves their own reality?
While out in the southwest polders the inner dikes were crumbling and one sea was joining with the other, Lidy was struggling in the blasts of wind to keep the car on the road. As she reached a very dark spot, she took her foot off the gas and leaned over to her traveling companion. Which muddy road should she now take—the left or the right? There was a growl from Cau, but it hardly registered with her in her eagerness to reach the end of her winter journey. Nearby, more than half a mile northeast, where the mouth of the Grevelingen opened into the bay, this was the moment when the masses of water forced their way through the sea dike in three places, filling the polders behind it at such speed that the water-level gauge in the little harbor dropped briefly but powerfully by almost seven feet. But Lidy steered back on course again and thought, Ah, there they are, the two farms, diagonally opposite each other, and I can see a light in each of them behind a window.
Finally she parks the car squarely in the yard in front of the part of the building that is the Hockes’ house. She and Cau get out. They go to the front door to see if it’s been left open. The cold is even icier now. Lidy takes a quick look at the rather high-stepped gable end and the adjacent barn, its shutters closed with crossbars. She knows there’s endless flat land to right and left. There’s a little moonlight, but on the southern horizon it’s as if the night fields are being faintly lit by a glow that comes out of the earth itself. Okay, the front door is open. Just as she’s about to say good-night to Cau before he goes across to his own house, Lidy realizes that he’s gone rigid and is listening for something. She catches his eye, registers that he’s frightened, then she hears it too. The noise to begin with is abstract. A kind of rushing sound, getting louder. For a moment she’s seized by the image of a plague of locusts, then of an army of a thousand men marching toward her at top speed from the other side of the island. She has no time to be terrified. The entire view disappears. A horrifying wave of black water comes towering out of nowhere and rolls down on them.
The Storm Page 12