“Another four inches,” said one of them, turning back again, “and it’s going to be coming over.”
Simon Cau looked at the other man silently, glanced sideways again as if trying to persuade himself that the half-rotted wood, already bowing forward under the pressure from the other side, would certainly hold, and said, “Going to be like this for another two hours. Won’t be high tide till then.”
He had spoken in a formal way, unsure of himself in his role as officer-very-late-arriving-on-duty, but the men both signaled their solidarity in a way that implied “Right.” And one of them said, “Not much we can do, is there?”
A couple of the other bystanders joined them. Slightly in disarray thanks to the howling of the wind and the interruption of their sleep, they chimed in with their own ideas of what could happen next. The sea dike here at the harbor suddenly dipped more than six feet below its height farther away. No one paid much attention to Lidy; the circumstances were too unusual, and the very fact that she was here at this impossible time of night made her one of them, half-awake, half-asleep, half-focused, half-calm, with the sly cunning of the mad who know that reality is what it is, and must be accommodated.
So she was freezing now. Scarf pulled down over her forehead. Hands deep in the pockets of a dark gray winter coat. As she looked over at Cau and heard him pronounce that it was impossible for things to come out well, he struck her as sounding sharp, indeed very suspicious. And, far from being capable of seeing the despair that in some people resembles pugnacity, far from being capable of registering the shame, the appalling remorse of a man who knows he has committed the misjudgment of a lifetime, the error that will define him until his death, she didn’t understand him anymore. His cheeks made two deep vertical furrows on either side of his mouth.
“What does the bürgermeister say?” he barked, after a pause.
Alert, very dependable. One would have to know him well to know that his loyalty was rooted in a single passion that had long been concealed from the outside world. A man can love a farm every bit as much as he loves a woman.
On June 14, 1947, at the open auction for the Gabriëllina property, when Simon Cau had learned that his was the highest bid, his knuckles went white. More than a year before, he had buried his wife, a farm wife, who had understood the force of his will over the years and had only occasionally, on sleepless nights, reminded him that this was his life and there was no point waiting for another one, she hadn’t given him children. The latter argument was no argument at all. With or without heirs, Simon Cau signed on the dotted line, and the business, which he and his now dead brothers had leased twenty-five years before, became his property for the contractual sum of 37,000 guilders. And yes, a different life, with the same summers, winters, meadows, fields, drainage ditches, and weather reports, began! It makes quite a difference whether one is a farmer’s tenant or the big farmer oneself. When he received the letter with the request from the polder authorities, he was not surprised. No one else knew more about the drainage on the polders than he did.
He wrote his reply that same evening with great seriousness. “I would like to accept this appointment and I promise you to engage all my skills in the care of the dike and the polder.” So it was that from then on, when there were storms, he sometimes went to the dike and sometimes not, depending on when it crossed his mind, to check whether flood timbers needed to be brought or sand required; in such matters the dike sheriff is his own authority. And at the meetings of the dike association he was always a most amiable leader of the company, and soon came to terms with the fact that no matter how one pleaded or haggled with the royal authorities or the local ones, there was no money for the dikes so soon after the war, though everyone knew that they were a joke with regard to a storm that was certainly in the general calculations but that unfortunately came too soon.
Snowflakes stuck to her cheeks. The wind sometimes brought moonlight with it, and sometimes icy precipitation. So there she stood on this winter night on a muddy landing stage, a sliver of ground by the Grevelingen, which was an arm of the North Sea piling toward land under the force of tempest and spring tides but held back by five ancient timbers in a fence, and she felt no fear. Of course she saw the danger, she wasn’t crazy, like all the others she could see very well that no power on earth could hold back the biblical flood, but it still seemed a beautiful thing to her that one could have such a close-up view of the situation and know that one had done everything that could be done.
Meantime it escaped no one that Simon Cau was cracking up. When he asked the two workmen what the bürgermeister’s view of things was, his voice was harsh and his face looked furious. The two of them looked back both somberly and obsequiously, and shrugged.
“We couldn’t wake him.”
To which Cau, even more angrily, replied, “Did you hammer on the door?”
They had.
“Yelled? Threw stones at the bedroom window?”
That too. And they’d also telephoned twice, unsuccessfully, from a farmhouse on the Krabbenhoeksweg.
“That’s the limit!”
Very nervous. Was he the only one to understand that they were faced with an enormity? The two men he was addressing nonetheless stayed calm. They simply asked themselves if they shouldn’t be going home. Lidy asked herself nothing. She waited for them to finally set off in the car again. Where to was a mystery, but she’d stopped caring.
Cau was about to say something crude about the bürgermeister when his attention was so distracted that everyone turned round to look. Two girls were pedaling toward them in the darkness from the direction of the village. Silvery blond hair was blowing in every direction from under the caps they wore pulled down tight over their heads. Although the others here had also come the same way, they had pushed their bikes for most of the distance. The girls were lurching along yard by yard and didn’t dismount till they reached the group.
“Horrible weather,” they said breathlessly. “You can barely move.”
It was the Hin sisters, daughters of the tavernkeeper and owner of the gas station, who lived with his family at the three-branched fork in the inner dike that was known as the Gallows. They must have been eighteen or nineteen years old; faces white with cold, they were wearing their nightdresses with a winter coat over the top, and high boots. Their father, they reported, had sent them off with instructions to reach a couple of the outlying houses and tell people they’d be better off coming to the tavern tonight because it was on higher ground. He himself had mounted his motorbike and had gone with his son to the inner lock on the Anna-Sabina polder, where the gate was so rusted after many years that it probably couldn’t be closed, but it was worth a try.
The girls looked away from the circle of faces toward the other side of the open expanse, where somewhere in the darkness was the little house they wanted to make their last call.
“We must get going,” they said.
But Simon Cau was looking in the opposite direction and then back at the dike workers. While the girls were talking about their father and brother—who were certainly trying in vain at this very moment to cope with an immovable piece of scrap metal—Cau must have come to the realization that he had failed to take care of the two inner sluices in his own polder. Both were reasonably well-maintained mechanisms, built of cast iron in a casing of plastered stone. At high tide he usually lowered them, one of the standard measures that nobody ever thought about. The dike-enclosed inner polder didn’t draw its excess water off into the sea but into the ditches of the neighboring Louise polder, which then took it across the Vrouw Jansz polder to the pumping station at the docks for agricultural produce on the Grevelingen. If one closed the sluices of the inner dike at high tide, the polder, should the sea dike give way farther along, would also be protected from direct contact with the sea.
Simon Cau shook his head swiftly several times, like a man trying to stir up something in his memory. In an accusatory way, not making eye contact, he reminded the di
ke workers about the Dirk sluice and the sluice at Draiideich.
“Get going! Now!”
Yes, chief, and they were already on their way. The two dike workers ran with deliberately long strides, so as not to slip on the muddy ground, toward the tractor, which was still hitched to the cart with the last of the sand. Meanwhile the handful of people who had come out of curiosity started back to the village. “Look at that,” said one of them, pointing to the left side of the dike, apparently feeling that the vision in the moonlight rendered him and all the others now setting off home something close to sleepwalkers. A tongue of foam, followed by a swell of black water, licked over the crown of the dike.
As his companions all moved away, Cau, as if nailed to the spot, stared at the gobs of foam shooting past him. The advance guard of the floodwater was pouring in a glistening stream down over the dike. But surely the water came up over the protective barriers somewhere on this island almost every year? Somewhere this island was always underwater. And it was well known that in 1944, when the Germans, who feared an invasion, left the sluices in the delta open, the land was flooded without raising any surprise. People here were really used to water, but tonight the situation was obviously scaring Simon Cau. As Lidy headed for the car and the Hin sisters began to push their bikes through the sand to the road, Cau hesitated and stood still, leaning against the wind. He moved his lips and made a face, as if he were assessing the massed weight of what was behind the dike and preparing, if possible, to take it on his own head, neck, and shoulders.
She had driven with Cau and the Hin girls to the last address on the pair’s list. She sat in the backseat with one sister, while the other, in front, gave Cau directions. They had come along because Simon Cau, desperate to appear to be in charge at the dock, had ordered them to leave their bikes; they could come back for them tomorrow, he would drive them. They reached the little house. Quick now! Cau kept the engine running. One sister leapt out of the car with Lidy, and both of them ran immediately to the windowpanes, but these were already making such a noise in the wind that their hammering did no good, and everything inside stayed dark. So they went around the house, through the vegetable garden, already underwater, to the back, where they banged on a crooked side door that had a little window at eye level. Meanwhile Cau, waiting on the road, must have felt the pressure of time to be unbearable.
Suddenly the wind was drowned out by the heavy blast of a horn.
Lidy froze. In the pitch dark, without a conscious memory, she was called to order. A signal from home. Loud, long, three notes. The cramp that ran all the way into her fingertips was like an electric shock. For a long moment, shocked awake as if from an anesthetic, she was back in her own life, along with everything that belonged in it, father, mother, sister, husband, child, and then just as swiftly, just as she registered all this, it was gone again. Behind the door a dog had begun to bark.
The little window opened. A vague face had showed itself.
Now they were on their way again, between pollarded willows bent over at odd angles. Lidy’s legs were wet only to the knees; the girl beside her was soaked to the waist. Because the road was underwater, they had failed to notice the hollow filled with spurting water as they raced back to the car. Lidy had suddenly seen the girl sink, and had grabbed for her reflexively. It wasn’t clear why, but the Hin girls were now insisting on taking part in the next stage as well.
The village, in which every inhabitant had crawled under the covers.
The sleep of the simple minded: on the other side of the island, ten miles farther south, with a sound of thunder like the end of the world, the sea dike had just given way. The fourteen-ton front of a lock was lifted out of its colossal iron joints. The windows in the lockkeeper’s house were blown out by the pressure, even before the building was flattened by the water, and everything in the surrounding area rocked as if under bombardment. From a place named Simonskerkerinlaag after the village that had drowned there hundreds of years before, the Oosterschelde poured in a torrent over the polder.
They were driving straight for the village on an unpaved road. Cau pointed at the church tower and ordered them to begin by ringing the warning bells.
“But they’re rung electrically now,” said one of the girls, as if she knew that the current was about to fail or had already failed.
“Electrically or with a rope, I don’t care.”
Lidy took her eyes off the road to look at the glowing tip of Cau’s cigarette. Twenty hours and an awkward excursion had been sufficient to exchange the familiar bright reality of everyone she had lived with until now for these traveling companions.
Between them and the oncoming tidal wave were still two inner dikes.
12
Dreams and Ghosts
It was a day in late February 1954, a month with so little sun that De Bilt was talking about it as the second-darkest month of the century. In contrast with the year before, there hadn’t been much wind. De Bilt said that not since records had started being kept in 1848 had there been a February with so little wind.
As Armanda, rolled umbrella in hand, opened the door to the hair salon, at exactly the moment when the shop’s bell rang, a harsh ray of sunlight shone in like a path of trick light of the kind that appears when the sun is hidden behind fast-moving rain clouds. She said hello to no one in particular, hung her coat on the stand, and went to one of the seats covered in fake leather in front of the row of mirrors. It was quiet in the salon, Tuesday afternoon, two o’clock. Armanda, who wasn’t planning to have any changes made to her haircut, stretched out her legs. She had come to be cheered up by the sight of the flacons, the brushes, and the hair dryers, and to look at herself in the mirror.
The hairdresser, an Indonesian of indeterminable age, his neck outstretched in an attitude of permanent devotion, positioned himself behind her chair. Their eyes met in the mirror, smiling in understanding, and then they both looked at her reflection in the brightly lit glass.
“Wash? Trim the ends?” Experienced fingers were already lifting her hair and tying a cape around her neck.
“Yes, but no more than a quarter of an inch.”
The hairdresser moved a washbasin behind her head and went off to get something. Armanda kept looking forward, pale, with rings under her eyes. Although she and Lidy had always been good sleepers and loved the way dreams did such a beautiful job of mixing up everything that had happened in real life with things that hadn’t happened yet but could happen at any moment, Armanda was sleeping very badly these days. If she thought at all about Lidy during the night, she simply felt a distressing distance, quite different from the normal, actually quite comforting sadness of her days. Irritating. Moving her legs restlessly, she would stare into the darkness. And force herself not to go into the deep sleep she and Lidy had enjoyed since they were children and in which it didn’t matter whether this dreaming girl corresponded with the woman she would certainly one day become.
This kind of thing is likely to mean that one doesn’t feel quite all there on the following day. Because look—the sun, which had disappeared into the clouds, came out again, casting a cone-shaped beam of light that seemed to be almost religious; she was lying with her head back on a washbasin on wheels, while the hairdresser’s hands ran through her foaming hair, then came warm rushing water, then a towel, and then suddenly she sat up: there went a camel! In the mirror she was seeing a camel walking down the rather narrow street that led to the bridge. She stared. Camels, she thought, remembering involuntarily a book about the zoo that they had at home, are slow-moving, patient ruminants approximately ten feet tall. Approximately ten feet tall … she mentally persevered even as she observed the actual smallish, skinny, maybe one-year-old creature from the Orient, stretching its long neck and emitting strange cries as it passed the window of the Amsterdam hair salon.
“What’s that?!” she burst out, not able to believe her own eyes. She turned to look out directly, to where the vision of the camel with its pathetic lit
tle tail over its hindquarters was fast dissolving again into the daylight, leaving a large crowd of children behind it.
“That’ll be that camel,” drawled the hairdresser.
He waited, a large comb in hand, for her to be nice enough to face front again. Responding to her quizzical look, he explained that the children of Amsterdam had written twice to Prime Minister Nehru of India to remind him how much damage had been done to the city zoo during the war. Although they had been thrilled with the baby elephant he had already sent them as a present, they were now hoping for a camel as well, because, as they had explained to Nehru in a little poem, no camel in a northern city means no soul and that’s a pity. That was all. Nehru had answered in the affirmative, and it was his answer, received with great acclaim, that they had just seen striding past.
“Camels?” she murmured. “Are there camels in India?”
“Oh yes,” said the hairdresser in a way that implied this was common knowledge. “There are camels in North Africa and Arabia, and also some in northern India, though not so many.”
Convinced all over again that there was a great wild world out there, just beyond arm’s length, that she couldn’t grasp at all, or only in miniaturized fashion, as if through the wrong end of a telescope, Armanda decided to keep silent. The velvety brown humps still an image on her retinas, she felt the comb pulling the tangles out of her wet hair. An apprentice, a well-meaning little thing, brought her a cup of tea slopping over in its saucer. She nodded and thought, Just put it down, child, yes, this is my life. Small, quotidian, all of it as much like the old one as possible. A noisy dryer was pushed down over her head. Her hands in her lap, Armanda thought first about the shopping list in her purse for a moment, and then about herself.
Oldest daughter in the family now. The one now who had to make conversation with all the aunts and uncles on her parents’ birthdays without her sister to support her. A memory came to her. Last year, the middle of November. Her mother’s birthday. In the big room upstairs at number 77, about twenty guests, relatives and friends, all knowing in advance that the hospitality will be splendid and that the conversation, despite the fact that a daughter is being mourned here, will be light and quite lively. She, Armanda, is wearing an old but still very beautiful blouse of violet-blue silk. Carrying a tray full of coffee cups, she maneuvers past the guests from the sliding doors to the corner of the room.
The Storm Page 10
