The Storm (17 page)

The meteorologist heard the radio employee take his time to stifle a sneeze and blow his nose.

“Besides which, I’m unwell.”

Midnight had passed. His colleague went home, he stayed. At first the meteorologist followed every bulletin that came in, but as night wore on, he lost interest in charts and numbers. He sat stiffly in his place, the left-hand desk in front of the window, getting to his feet only once, to fetch a telescope from the bottom compartment of a cupboard where all the useless junk was kept, and then trained it directly against the windowpane to spy into the blackness outside. Naturally there was nothing to be seen. It was simply a storm that had reached its top speed and was racing unchecked, whistling and screaming. As he looked farther, to where the darkness dissolved into a pale, transparent heaving motion, he felt everything downstairs being upended. He put down the telescope, took his seat again as if in an abandoned theater, and imagined the appalling devastation, images of derailed freight trains, torn-off roofs, uprooted trees, tangled power lines. He also thought of the chaos out at sea and the helpless ships in distress.

But his mind was not capable of imagining real flooding.

The state of dikes and coastal defenses was not his area of expertise. Nonetheless he would always remember these hours, later, as hours when he had had to sit with his hands in his lap, watching, as the sea rolled over Capelle, Stavenisse, and ’s-Gravendeel, as Kortgene, Bath, and Battenoord found themselves directly in the path of a mountain of water being driven into the narrows, as the dike southwest of Numansdorp collapsed in nine places and neighboring Schuring, no more than a little road, disappeared from one moment to the next. Oude-Tonge, pitiful site of a storm flood that attacked it from three sides at once. Ouwekerk, Nieuwerkerk, villages that were, mind you, right in the middle of the island, he saw them go under without
any warning from him in the northwesterly storm whose charts at this very moment were right under his nose.

The weatherman stared out into the night. The northwesterly storm, whose eye, he knew, was now moving toward Berlin, would be forever in his memory: 4 a.m., when people everywhere began to attempt to flee, in carts, in trucks, in a bus, most of them on foot. And everywhere on that first February night in the icy wind, people were to be found in small groups on the overflowing dikes. Shuffling over the ground to try to avoid being seized and dragged away by the current, they linked arms tightly, heading toward a village on higher ground or the red or yellow lights of a distant car, till they were captured by the pillar of water that came in pursuit out of the utter darkness, the little clusters disappearing in a flash into the wave as it broke and they were sucked under into the storm that was emitting a sound that none of the refugees had ever heard a storm make before—a long-drawn-out, deep bellowing, the noise that cows make when they’re swimming in circles in blind panic, before they give up, quicker than horses do.

The three of them looked at it from the attic window. Lidy, Simon Cau, and Gerarda Hocke, who had waited for them up on the stairs, while the water at the bottom tore out part of the side wall. The old lady of the house was wearing the costume of Duiveland, black, with a white bonnet that fitted tight around the face, and what was amazing was that the first thing Lidy had noticed as she rushed toward the farmer’s wife was the two gold pins to either side of the bonnet; they seemed to her to be ancient, probably heirlooms.

Now all three of them were staring out of the only window on the top floor of the house, built with its narrow side to the street. Gray moonlight shone down on a wild surge of water in which wood, straw, and large dark shapes were floating around, some of which made movements now and again. They saw one of the cows swimming to and fro like a dog, striking at the water with its forelegs. Roughly twenty yards away, to the right, they could see the pointed gables of the attic floor of the Gabriëllina farmhouse poking up out of the swell, a light inside still burning. The first to look away was Cau. As
the farmer’s wife asked him if he would like a cigarette, he patted his coat and said, “Got my own.” She pushed a glass of cognac into his hand. Lidy got one too, and a cigarette, dry socks, and a pair of black shoes with laces. The attic was as large as a church. A coachman’s lantern threw a weak blue light on the things that were stored here, among them two featherbeds with accessories and a bed frame with a mattress, all of which would soon come in handy. Lying peacefully on a small rug were a dog and one of the six geese from the coop in the orchard next to the street, which, like the shed alongside it, and the beehives and the bees, no longer existed.

Izak Hocke, his mother told them, had set off more than an hour ago with the big wagon hitched to the tractor.

The last week in June finally brought summer with it. The wind blew from the southeast, bringing a heat to the city that was very pleasant to begin with but had turned humid and oppressive today. The people assembled in the Amstel church for Lidy’s memorial service felt it too. The wooden church, originally built as a barn church and then rebuilt in the Gothic Revival style, was extremely dilapidated, which added an extra touch of the tragic to the consecrated atmosphere.

Armanda sat in the first pew between her mother and Jacob. She glanced from the place where the coffin should have been up to the three pointed windows high in the façade, from which white sunlight, as damp as steam, was slanting down. Lidy, where are you, she murmured inside her head, and wiped off her sticky hands on the black worsted skirt that she was wearing for the second time this month and in which she felt miserable for the second time, because the skirt, which was unlined, was the kind that works its way up your legs when you walk. Ten days before, she had gone with Betsy and Sjoerd to Schouwen-Duiveland, where the congregation of Ouwerkerk was burying its dead once more in the cemetery that had reemerged from the floodwaters. There had been coffins beyond number that time; now just a single was jarring by its absence. She fixed her eyes on the flagstones that had formed the floor of the church since the seventeenth century.

It was suffocatingly hot. Her mother’s light perfume, very faint but
typical Nadine, was the only counterweight to the atmosphere of depression and overt grief that filled the church. No flower arrangement, not a single burning candle. Instead a pastor, corpulent, short, who began to declaim something mournful. Behind her she suddenly heard the labored sniffs of a man trying to choke back his sobs. Probably Sjoerd’s father, an elegant banker, nice man, who had just come for a month from New York with his second wife. She had to force herself not to turn round in sympathetic curiosity.

God knows this isn’t a normal memorial service, she brooded. And all these people, all the relatives, friends, Father’s colleagues and patients, neighbors, fellow students of mine and Lidy’s, they all know that those of us here in the first two rows aren’t a normal family, we’re one that’s been stood on its head. And I, the surviving sister, who can certainly say I’m the personification of us both, have spent the last year and a half occupying a horribly ambivalent position in this family.

Jacob and she were sitting shoulder to shoulder in the pew. It occurred to her that her brother was listening, stock stiff, not leaning against her. She glanced at his face, far too weary for his age. It seemed as if the voice of the pastor, who knew how to make it echo right up into the roof of the wooden building, had put him in a trance. She nudged him, asked, “Peppermint?” raised her shoulder to grope in her jacket pocket, saw his gratitude as she held out the bonbon to him, and lifted her head again.

The voice meanwhile seemed to her to be using a normal way of speaking, but from the beginning, during the first prayer, it had turned her to stone. Stern, almost peremptory in his direct conversation with the Almighty, this preacher had used no euphemisms in stating the essential. “You know where she is, we don’t.”

Oh yes, that is how it is. Amen. That is the situation.

After which the pastor, who might be small but radiated authority, began to beg for help and comfort. He managed to weave Lidy’s name into every new subject. Lidy here and Lidy there, but whether it was Armanda’s fault or not, as the service went on, Lidy, rather than coming closer, began to retreat further and more finally into her absence. Until Armanda finally grasped that this was his intention.

“As for man, his days are as grass.” So it’s not so terrible, you’re
dead, or at least that’s what we’re assuming for now, we too will be dead soon enough, but not yet! The organ started to play, with full vibrato. Armanda, who could feel the deepening bass notes vibrating in her chest, noticed that the general state of feelings about Lidy was slowly changing, secretly at first but then more and more openly, from tenderness to sheer hard-heartedness.

Clear them out of the way, your precious dead, otherwise you will never get free of them!

Yes, Armanda sobbed inwardly, bury their physical remains, give them peace, these ghosts who arouse our sympathy but are intent on our warm, living blood. And as she did so, she was acutely aware that the poeticizing, insincere tone of her lament fitted perfectly with the tenor of the psalms and hymns, whose melancholy certainly wasn’t aimed at
them
but at the sighing, panting attendees of the memorial service here in the church. Bury her, yes, but what, when there’s nothing to bury?

Impulsively she bent forward a little and turned her head to look for Sjoerd. Surreptitiously, of course, because as a member of the immediate family, you’re supposed to be sitting still, in silent sorrow. She spied along the row. In a passing glance, she saw that her parents, to her left, were holding hands. Jan and Nadine Brouwer were sitting, alert, with goodwill in their faces, but totally focused, when it came down to it, on what the two of them shared to the exclusion of all else as they listened.

Sjoerd sat in the place of honor due to him as the widower, in the end seat on the other side of the aisle. She saw him wipe his brow with a folded white handkerchief; he was perspiring freely. With literally every minute that passed, it was getting muggier. The color of the light falling through the three windows was turning to gray. You could feel that throughout the city the atmospheric pressure was dropping under a high, heavy cloud of powerful dimensions and carrying an increasing electrical charge.

He’s much less together than he was in Ouwerkerk ten days ago, she thought, even as she noticed how carefully he’d combed his thick, blond hair. Does he feel he’s finally, before God and the world, becoming the widower he’s allowed to be after eighteen months? The legitimate survivor of his wife? What terrible weather, she remembered,
when he and Betsy and she had stayed on after the ceremony in the churchyard at Ouwerkerk to ask one of the gravediggers working around the graves for help. For they had seen that seven or eight places had been staked out for missing people from the village whose bodies hadn’t been found. These, too, like the proper graves, had been covered with flowers.

Drizzle. Empty grayness all the way to the dike on the horizon.

Was it because of the absolute contrast in the state of the weather that this entire spectacle was coming back to her like something from a foggy past? And that the three of them, under close inspection, had been in much worse shape than they had actually felt?

They had stood there after all the local survivors had left to go to the reception in the town hall and the cars for the mourners and the trucks were heading back to their garages. The gravediggers, aided by a work detail from the city Board of Works, were hard at work shoveling earth on top of the more than fifty coffins that had been interred, and bringing a little order to the ocean of flowers. A dredger had stood in the expanse of mud behind them. Looking over in that direction, it was not hard to imagine that a hound of hell was standing there, bony, gigantic, dazed by today’s sudden influx into his kingdom of grief of more than fifty dead in a single procession.

“Should we ask?” said Betsy suddenly.

All three knew that each of them had been thinking about the seven or eight still-empty places in the wet, salt-saturated ground. So they went to the workman who struck them as being the leader, and their first question was what was going to happen with the graves that had merely been numbered with a little metal shield stuck into the soil.

“They’ll be getting gray concrete memorial slabs,” the man replied, without raising his head from a worn notebook he was holding. “Fifteen by twenty.” The foreman scribbled something down, paused for thought, and then, as if announcing the result of this meditation, said, “And then they’ll be getting black lettering with the personal details of the dead. Name, place, and date of birth, date and place of death.”

Then Sjoerd asked about the still-unoccupied graves.

The digger had looked at him with a certain kindness in his eyes.

“They get a stone too.”

And after a moment, as if he heard their unspoken question, he nodded and said, “Absolutely. With their own inscription too, though of course in these cases the date of death and the fact of death itself aren’t one hundred percent certain.”

The three of them kept looking at him.

“So to be safe, we’ll add the word
missing
to the inscription.”

As they walked away down the narrow, trampled paths, it had suddenly started to rain much harder. They began to hurry. Armanda took a last look around the pathetic burial ground, which she couldn’t ever imagine looking like a normal, friendly churchyard. Those gravestones for the invisible dead. Why not inscribe
presumed dead
on them instead of
missing?

They were in the train heading for Rotterdam when the idea came to them about a memorial service for Lidy, a farewell that now, ten days later, was taking place in the Amstel church, where the weather was making the air insufferably sticky, and Armanda had started to cry openly, her tears streaming down her cheeks as the individual details being cited in the ongoing words went through her head again.