The Storm

by Margriet de Moor

  View of a village. A streetcar stop, a brand-new streetlamp, a row of low houses closed tight, and a bicycle against a wooden fence; a day later all this would be gone, vanished forever, but for now it was still a perfectly normal Saturday evening in winter, the nicest night of the week. Another twenty-four hours and the first house walls would be collapsing outward, the storm would continue unabated, snow would be falling, all this was inevitable. What was also inevitable was that Lidy accelerated again, passed the back of an instant coffee factory, left the built-up area behind her, and three miles farther on could see the little provincial town with its oversize late-Gothic church tower spread out in front of her.

  She drove in through the Noordhaven Gate.

  A sparsely lit backdrop. An inner harbor with quays, lined with splendid ancient houses, each with a flight of steps leading to the front door protected by a balustrade. Houseboats in the water. Here and there were pedestrians to be seen striding along purposefully in the wind or slowing down, if they were in a group, to have a discussion about something that involved lots of gesticulation. She drove slowly past the grand houses, some of which had subsided, their windows pitch-black, and turned at the end of the harbor into the first street she found. She knew she was supposed to be here in this town, no longer remembered quite why, and so followed her impulse to take a little tour first.

  How narrow and dark it all is; she forced her eyes wide open. The town, like any town first seen by night, surprised her with its unfathomably mysterious outlines. Streets and alleys crisscrossed one another in a tight pattern of straight lines, but every time she thought, Now I’m stuck, now I really can’t see a thing anymore, the street plan made room for her and conjured up a magnificent church or a fish market or presented her with a sixteenth-century town hall.

  She had had enough of driving. And she was hungry. As she was deciding to ask someone the way—there were enough people on the street—she saw a woman stop with her back to the houses, as if she knew she was needed.

  “The Verre Nieuwstraat?”

  The woman screamed the question back at her, to show that she had understood in spite of the wind.

  The two of them looked at each other through the open window of the car. Lidy saw a round face not six inches from her own, wearing extravagant makeup; somehow it seemed to fit right in with the storm. She wasn’t at all surprised by the green eyelids and the tragic scarlet mouth, but was given an explanation nonetheless.

  “We had dress rehearsal this afternoon. I’m the duke’s daughter!”

  The woman advised her that the best way to go was along the new harbor.

  That way lay danger, impossible not to see it. Lidy was offered a lively, almost entertaining view of this when she had to wait for a moment at the Hoofdpoortstraat before being able to make the turn onto the quay. Men were busy lifting the planks of a sort of wooden fence out of some concrete footings that had been positioned against the house walls on both sides of the street. One of them was nice enough to explain to the unknown girl who had climbed out of the car in the howling wind, clutching her hair with both hands, that the high tide would start retreating at any moment, should have done so already, actually, so they were taking down the fencing until the next high tide, later tonight. Give it a minute and she could be on her way again!

  Distracted, her mind a muddle, Lidy stared into the man’s enthusiastic face, which seemed to be captured on film against a background of hell and damnation. Ink-black sky, a row of fragile little houses, and high above the quay a whole fleet of heaving ships.

  “Wow,” she said to herself quietly a moment later, “people in this town keep working really late.”

  She drove slowly behind an old Vauxhall along the quay, which was underwater, just like the one in Numansdorp. The whole atmosphere was like an autumn fair, she thought, the same sense of people caught up in every sort of activity in a cold, wet twilight.

  Indeed, a lot was going on here on the south side of town, where the tidal basin with its moorings for regular ships, cutters, and the direct daily service to Rotterdam had access to the Oosterschelde by way of a canal. At this hour on a Saturday the pubs were full of customers. Excited by the storm, many of them were raising their glasses toward the windows, outside which things were raging most impressively in the dark sky. In front of the houses a little farther down, figures were to be seen kneeling and crouching. Inhabitants of the wharves, who had erected the wooden flood barriers in front of their doorsteps a few hours before, inspected them again, smeared them with handfuls of clay, and then straightened up again, to have conversations with one another about whether the windows, which the Flood of 1906 had almost reached, might not be able to use a board or two this evening as well. Diagonally opposite, under the lamp with its yellow light, which looked lost against the huge soaring bulk of the corn mill with its fixed sails behind it and to one side, stood a little group of fishermen watching the boats. They were worried, understandably, but not excessively so, since the wind, thank God, was pushing the boats away from the quay. And now the harbormaster appeared, downstage right. He was holding his hands in front of his mouth like a megaphone. Although everyone already knew this, nobody took it amiss that they were getting another official announcement that according to the depth gauge, the water this evening was going to remain high, instead of turning into an ebb tide.

  Bizarre, but it was common knowledge that according to fishermen’s physics it was true more often than not that when there is no ebb tide, no high tide will follow, either. So who could have guessed that at two thirty in the morning the newly reinserted boards along the Hoofdpoortstraat and the other side streets leading off from the quay would burst open like folding doors, that a wall of black water crested with ash-gray foam would come crashing down and sweep away the modest houses, and that fifteen inhabitants, sound asleep in their beds on the first floor, would be drowned, to their great surprise? Still, the Royal Hydraulic Engineering Authorities had already calculated that if there were a confluence of all possible negative factors—spring tide, wind direction, wind force, duration of wind force, and water levels in the major rivers—the sea would not be held back by a single one of the dikes in this region, and certainly not by some puny board fence…. They could all have figured it out. But this was the place where they had not only been born but had lived their lives untroubled until today.

  She had reached the end of the quay. There was only one way to go now, left into a street that sloped away steeply. Making her way down from the level of the dike to the level of the polder, she drove into the town again and at six fifteen finally found her way to the Verre Nieuwstraat. Like all the other streets, it was not completely empty of people, but it was still very dark. As she drove carefully behind a couple of pedestrians, she found a building halfway along the closed fronts of the houses that had three rows of brightly lit windows, one above the other. A sign hanging outside said Hotel Kirke.

  As Lidy went into the hotel that was the agreed venue for the party on Saturday the thirty-first of January, 1953, she had the feeling that although her journey had merely taken a day, she had been on the road for weeks. She entered through a revolving door and went past the empty reception desk with her purse and a little suitcase. The hotel had a large, warm lobby, and it was bustling. The wooden ceiling bounced back both the light of an old matte copper chandelier and sounds of laughter and conversation. The warmth, the voices, and the smells of food all suddenly triggered a yearning in her for a few words of personal greeting, which she had certainly earned after such an epic journey. She peeked from the reception area into the jammed and noisy rooms that all opened off the lobby, then, as she heard someone call the familiar name “Armanda!,” she turned around, relieved.

  “Yes!”

  She quickly set down her suitcase.

  6

  The Godmother

  If being happy means being in the right place, surrounded by people you want to belong with, then this evening she was happy. />
  The table was in the Winter Garden and had been set with a blue cloth, a flowered dinner service, and old, slightly battered family silver. The company around it numbered twelve, all of them in the best of spirits: this was a celebration. And in their midst: her. “Shall I refill your glass, Lidy?” said the sixty-or sixty-five-year-old man with the gray cap and the gray eyes, whom she’d come to sit beside. She immediately nodded, full of sympathy as she looked at her table companion’s emaciated face. Everyone had accustomed themselves by now to the fact that her name was Lidy. She’d explained things right after her arrival and admitted who she was, whereupon each of them had repeated the name most warmly and then passed it on. A young man jokingly identified her as a secret agent.

  Candle flames flickered restlessly. She looked over into the dining room. People were all shouting at the same time, salvos of laughter erupted, there was singing. This was the island’s evening off. “I feel like a million dollars,” she said to Jacomina Hocke, the godchild’s mother, who was sitting one chair down. The woman, freckled, round-faced, and curly-haired, promptly leaned over toward her and told her, smiling, to look where she was looking. Between them, at the right-hand corner of the table, two armchairs had been pushed together and a thin child in a stiff little white skirt was lying on them, asleep, with ballet shoes on her feet. Despite the lack of incisors, the open mouth suggested the little muzzle of a cat. At such a moment, a nice guest smiles along with the mother. Lidy, so preoccupied by the details of her adventure that she had blocked out all other memories of her previous life, felt dizzy for a moment. As she yawned, the other woman stretched out her arm and took hold of her wrist.

  “Soon! It’ll soon be time for you to go upstairs and have a good sleep, but not yet!”

  And in fact she herself was conscious that she had to shake off her sleepiness. She perked up and looked around the table: relatives and husbands and wives of relatives of the sleeping girl, friends, two younger brothers, who had crawled under the table. A godmother is also definitely a member of the family. At the head of the table, side by side, sat the maternal grandparents. They were the owners of this little hotel, whose main source of income was the parties given here, rather than the occasional commercial traveler or civil servant passing through for one night. It was a tradition that anytime a grandchild had a birthday, the whole family ate in the hotel and spent the night.

  If someone beside you is inspecting your face, you can feel it.

  “Yes?” she said, turning back to Jacomina Hocke.

  “Oh, I know it all so well,” the latter said.

  Taken together, the words and the look, focused on the child again, made it clear that since she was here as a representative and lacked the relevant shared past, she must listen as all the missing details were told to her. So, please, Lidy, here’s a memory for you, in three parts. To bind you for this evening to an earlier time that doesn’t actually belong to you. A summer holiday camp shortly after the war. And she, Jacomina, had been one of the leaders, despite the fact that she was pregnant. A little helper from Amsterdam, about fourteen years old, had followed her around for four weeks like a page.

  Oh, of course, she thought.

  “A sweet, shy child. Doctor’s daughter.”

  After a few minutes she had almost ceased to listen. The meal was very heavy. When she looked up from her plate to see what was going on around her, she felt the way she often did when she was in company: lethargic, shortsighted, although her eyes were fine. The Winter Garden creaked and groaned in the squalls, and each time one hit, the gently swaying hanging lamps dimmed, then flamed up again with a larger, brighter light. The people at the table were changing places more often, and there was also a lot of coming and going between the Winter Garden and the dining room. The news bulletins that reached them now and again from the town fit the party mood, for such an atmosphere has a natural affinity for the wilder dramas of real life. A chimney had come down in the Meelstraat; the water in the Old Harbor was already washing across the bluestone pavings; a fire had broken out in the Hage dairy; the streetcars were no longer running. However, she did also notice here and there in the dining room that people had risen to their feet, and hadn’t come back.

  And the chair next to her at some point was no longer occupied. A tiny isolated space in the midst of the racket both indoors and out. At the other end of the table she saw Izak Hocke adjusting the lens of a camera. She hadn’t talked much with him, but had already talked about him. So she knew that he had a farm about eight miles from here. This was a man who hadn’t wanted to get married until he found a woman he could be sure would not concern herself either with the land or the business: both were the province of his mother, who lived with him. Jacomina had been a teacher until she married. He was ardent, jealous, and prudish, she’d told Lidy woman to woman. If he wanted to have sex during the day, first he checked the hall, then locked the bedroom door, and hung his shirt over the knob to cover the keyhole!

  She saw him stand up. Chairs were pushed aside, the sleeping child was wakened, but before she and her two brothers were taken up to bed, a few more photos were in order.

  Excellent. “And now one with you, Lidy …”

  She laid her napkin on the table, went to the two armchairs in the Winter Garden that had been set out for the purpose, and sat down willingly, her hands in her lap. The godchild, beside her, was busy spreading her fingers and licking them. Then came the moment, and she smiled, taking care not to look directly into the lens but a few inches above it. She saw Hocke, the shutter cable in hand, staring from the viewfinder of the Ikoflex to her and the child from a distance of about ten feet. He knit his eyebrows: black, bushy, overshadowing the roundest, heavy-lidded eyes, which gave the face a melancholy, introverted look.

  He looked down into the camera again and then squeezed the cable.

  Suddenly someone came up to him. She saw a man in a jacket, soaked to the skin and giving off the stench of mud, who seized the chair that Izak was offering him with a gesture, and yanked it out from the table. His back half turned to her, they began a conversation that she could overhear in part, though she was still posed for the photograph. The man was talking about a sluice in some inner dike, and the words he was using—“rust,” “garbage,” “criminal negligence”—couldn’t fail to have their effect.

  Hocke nodded. He groped in his jacket pocket and handed the man his car keys.

  “Okay, if you think it’s necessary.”

  The other man promised to bring the car back within the hour.

  She went back to her place at the table. Someone new was now sitting beside her, a tall young man with intelligent eyes fringed by pale lashes, who opened the conversation by saying, “Nothing special!” She looked at him cheerfully and laughed, as a way of easing the conversation about the sea and how it was skipping the ebb tide this evening for a change.

  “Excuse me,” she said after a while and leaned toward her new table companion to ask where his predecessor had gone. She was very sleepy again and had already wondered a couple of times when she could politely head for the room where she had changed from her traveling clothes into a dress hours before and laid out her pajamas ready on the bed.

  “Where is he?”

  “Simon Cau?”

  “Yes.”

  The young man looked around. Simon Cau, he said, was the dike sheriff or superintendent of one of the large polders here, and had certainly made a quick trip to the harbor to check the water. The six o’clock news on the radio had spoken of “dangerous high tides” and that almost never happened. Dike superintendent, the highest authority on the dike, a noble office, some people took it seriously, others not at all.

  “Yes,” he went on, “what kind of a person is each of us inside … hmm … you, me, all of us? Does any of us have a choice? But sometimes someone manages to be that person he wants to be deep in his heart.”

  Lidy learned that Simon Cau was the last of three brothers, tenant farmers who had put
their lifelong efforts into acquiring the beautiful eighteenth-century Gabriëllina Farm. Finally he had succeeded, and nobody even today had been able to work out how he had assembled the money. By saving, borrowing money, and loaning it out again, sharpening one knife against the other? Afterward he had succeeded in making it into one of the best-run businesses in the area, everything done in the most up-to-date way imaginable, except for the one instance in which he refused to go along with the times: he wouldn’t allow any tractor on the farm. He was doing mixed farming, and everything, even the binding of the corn, was done using horses. For Cau, as the young man explained, loved horses, horses were his god, and it didn’t matter what the neighbors thought, the new landowner, who had started out as a farm laborer, built a second stable right up against the house. And with a batch of old clinker he paved the area all the way from the barn doors to the road. And last: two new pedigreed mares who were given such a thick layer of straw in their stalls that after the day’s work they couldn’t resist the temptation to stretch out like dogs and lie on their sides to sleep. Even though they were heavy Belgian shire horses.

  Lidy, who was listening with only half an ear, swallowed a yawn.

  “Heavy horses,” she murmured, her eyes damp. “Belgian shire horses.”

  And then, as if her words had conjured him back to the party, in the mirror next to the stairs that led to the upper floor, she suddenly saw Simon Cau cutting his way through the dining room. The light in the background made his figure stand out clearly: small and gray, hurrying, in an anthracite-colored coat with a cap on his head that people of his type usually take off only to hold in front of their faces while praying. Someone seized him by the arm in order to ask him something. Cau stopped, listened restlessly like a man interrupted, and shook his head several times.