The Storm (18 page)

A snack cart had come by. Hungry, she’d asked for coffee and rolls. Staring through the rain-soaked window at the fields, she’d then thought out loud, “Once we’re home, we ought to do something for Lidy. What do you think, something in her memory or …”

As she looked away from the landscape again, she saw that Betsy and Sjoerd, sitting opposite her, were nodding in agreement, almost delighted.

“Good idea,” said Sjoerd, biting into his roll. “Yes, why should we wait for the endless legal procedures to drag themselves out?”

But then, chewing quickly and swallowing, he had given her another look, so openly that she had immediately understood his question had not been a question at all but a bitter male reproach. They had still not gone to bed together. Oh God, she had thought. What a torture, for me but most of all for him. For she was not so naïve as not to know that any man would consider it a scandal and a crying injustice for a woman living more or less continuously under
his roof, who had made clear more than once that she had nothing against being kissed and fondled by him, nonetheless to keep suddenly pulling away each time like an awkward bride, an unbearable tease.

In recent days she’d been trying whenever possible to avoid spending time with him in number 36.

She had looked down. The rumble of the train was intoxicating. Sjoerd and his half sister began to discuss the process that would soon allow Lidy, as everyone hoped, to be finally declared legally dead. Armanda leaned back, her body language indicating that she had switched off. It had always been difficult, she knew, to obtain a death certificate for someone who had clearly gone missing. Ten years had to elapse before a declaration of probable death could be wrung from a court, after which the heirs could raise specific but very modest claims and a surviving spouse would be permitted to marry again. Armanda heard them quietly touch on the law of 1949, which had allowed more than one hundred thousand of those missing in the war to be reclassified as dead and entered into the register of deaths in the local government offices nearest their former homes. They talked very dispassionately and matter-of-factly, perhaps because Betsy, who was Jewish on her mother’s side, had already had her own dealings with this law and its macabre stipulations. This tragic law, the result of intensive efforts by the state, soon had to stand as also valid for a new list of missing persons, shorter than the original one, but still encompassing more than eight hundred names.

“All that’s needed is a stamp,” she heard Sjoerd say, “and then they can immediately apply the wording to anyone living in the provinces of Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland, Noord-Brabant, and Zeeland between January thirty-first and February tenth, and
for whom no further proof of existence could be found.”

She was weeping uncontrollably now. Her mother passed her a handkerchief. This gesture by her gentle, innocent-looking mother shamed her in a way she couldn’t define, and she became even more upset. She felt as if the conversation in the train was now echoing through the entire church, its bone-dry words transformed into something quite different in this heavy atmosphere, exposing their true meaning for everyone to hear.

Lidy’s farewell was also her, Armanda’s, engagement party. The sister is dead, long live the sister.

Armanda rubbed the palms of her hands across her face, licked the teardrops from her lips—I miss you, Lidy, you know that, oh no, Lidy, don’t let it be true, be alive again—and who knows what further display her distress would have prompted, had she not been jolted back to life by the force of a new text.

“The wormwood and the gall! My soul dwells on them and is cast down.”

God! Armanda’s eyes turned to the preacher up in the pulpit, who was looking extremely imposing. How do you mean us to take this? Leaning perilously far forward, here was someone engaged in reiterating Jeremiah’s song of sorrow, working it, expertly tailoring it to today’s occasion. What I mean is, it’s about time for you to stop all this. How? thinks Armanda cunningly. You know perfectly well. Wormwood and gall, all the wretched thoughts that do not make any soul more magnanimous, including yours. And think of the little one who stayed at home this morning! Nadja! Yes, precisely. Should she have to grow up in such misery-ridden surroundings? God has taken your sister from us, and it is according to His plan. Stop. Pay attention. God’s cruelty is a great taboo. Let go of your narrow-minded outrage and reflect that His ways are not your ways. God encompasses even those of us who are of unsound mind. And today He is giving you His simple commandment. Let her go. Live your life.

How? she moaned. Just tell me, man …

Even in the church it could be felt that not the slightest breeze was stirring outside. Breathing in was still feasible, but breathing out was measurably more difficult. All of a sudden the daylight vanished. Then, just before the final blessing, as if the one God had been unable to wait until the other God had finished speaking, there was a deafening crash of the kind that makes your heart jump into your throat, and the thunder broke. The family in their two front rows got to their feet, shocked.

After that an unceremonious procession formed. Armanda didn’t wait around. Green eyes glittering feverishly, drops of sweat on her
nose, smooth fringe glued to her forehead, the spitting image of her sister. They’re all looking at me, she thought, naïvely perhaps but not wrong, and she looked with them. Look, look … all she could see was an image of herself. To the terrible din of the organ, overridden by cannon shots of thunder, she steered carefully, like a drunk, for the exit.

A few yards to one side of the porch the funeral cars were waiting. Everyone ran to them through the downpour. Armanda jumped into the first one she came to and let herself fall into the backseat. One of the Brouwer aunts slid hastily sideways and a Langjouw uncle, Leo, leapt in after her. “A beer!” he cried, as the car started moving, and Armanda answered, “Oh, God, yes please!”

Lidy was the only one still at the window of a farmhouse that, strangely, no longer stood in the middle of fields or meadows but in an ocean current. For an inundation was no longer the word for it, what was out there on the other side of the window, the swells, was part of the sea. High tide of the North Sea with the moon in its apogee. Up in the attic of the farmhouse were now, in total, two animals and three humans. They were all absolutely still, as creatures are when they encounter something utterly unexpected that defies description. Simon Cau, a man transformed by the decision to go to a birthday party instead of checking, however quickly, on the Willems, Galge, and Westwaartse dikes, was sitting on a stool, or rather a little footstool. Because it was placed under the roof that sloped steeply down to the floor, he had had to tuck himself in, forearms on his knees, hands hanging down loosely. Gerarda Hocke was no longer making an effort to take care of him, let alone ask him to give her a hand in some fashion. In what was still the house in which she had been born and in which she intended to die, she tugged at the mattresses, held a match to the kerosene stove, adjusted the mantel, and turned off the flame again. Downstairs in the living room, tables and chairs were floating around and banging against the walls.

Lidy stood there and looked out. Very early on Sunday morning, February 1. Since waking some hours ago in a strange bed, she had never felt for a moment that she knew where she was, stuck between
waking and dreaming, her memory being shuffled like playing cards between a stranger’s hands. Suddenly one of life’s most normal accompaniments, the weather, had pushed its way into the foreground in demented fashion. Was the water still rising? In her head, the wind was already blowing in longer gusts like a now familiar, deafening dream, but what about the water, which was flooding into and out of the house four or five feet below her? She thought she felt the floor sway gently under her feet. Out there, to the left along the road, was the barricade, wasn’t it, where she had had to turn around in the Citroën tonight? Impossible to tell whether any remnants of it were still poking up out of the water; the cloud cover had closed itself again to a jagged edge tinged with violet and pink, and sky and water were almost indistinguishable from each other. Yet she remained where she was, and looked. A wind from hell! she thought vaguely, lethargically. But the cows were now quiet. Through a fog of anxiety and weariness, Lidy marveled at the general destruction, as if she were an onlooker not a participant, trying to figure out how it had come about that yesterday’s trip to the seaside had got so out of hand.

Astonishing circumstances, or rather, fairly normal circumstances that had shed their skin tonight in a most astonishing fashion. These big northwesterly storms cropped up along this latitude in western Europe several times a year, after all, and spring tides were two a penny.

But tonight all this had been swept away. The visitor, snowed in here by chance, was not the only one who was bewildered. The entire delta of southwest Holland, which was always a puzzlement, was in the same predicament. Were they on one of the outlying sandbanks here that normally stayed above water off the coast of Brabant? Or were they in a real honest-to-god province, on solid ground, through which the Rhine, the Maas, and the Schelde empty themselves in an orderly fashion into the sea just as the Nile, the Seine, and the Thames do elsewhere on the planet, even when the arms of the sea reach greedily back at them along currents and channels? Not now—it would be days before the Netherlands could even believe it—but later, people would know the answer to the question of how it could possibly be that the Wester and Oosterschelde, the Grevelingen, and the Haringvliet, along with the inshore waters behind them, would
flood over the islands like a plague from heaven, sweeping away 1,836 people, 120,000 animals, and 772 square miles of land at one stroke. Was this scientifically possible? Lidy stood looking until her eyes were out on stalks, her pale young face lifted above the collar of her thick coat. Scientists some years before had used a ruler to divide the North Sea that was now catapulting itself toward her into three precise sectors.

North sector, south sector, channel. Three figments of the imagination which affected Lidy tonight, like everyone else here, in the most personal way, whether she knew anything about them or not. Even the north sector, the absolutely straight line between Scandinavia and Scotland where the North Sea is still connected with the Atlantic Ocean and is also fairly deep, was something thought up by others, but frighteningly real, and that had a place in her life story. The wind had already created a modest mountain of water there hours before.

A shallow sea offers a larger spectacle: the south sector, the triangle drawn between the coasts of England, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Lidy sees a violet-tinged mountain range of water, the waves in it making peaks and valleys that cannot be underestimated, bearing down on her from all sides. Can anyone see such a thing and not be dumbfounded? And yet it is fundamentally normal, for even when there’s the lightest wind, the surface of the water begins to ruffle, the gentle push that is the beginning of every wave. But tonight the
Goeree
and the
Noordhinder
have already reported wind speeds of sixty-three knots off the coast. So: waves, enormous waves, that the eye can measure only above sea level, like icebergs, but whose main force to a fantastic degree is exercised below the surface of the water. When they encounter a shallow seabed, they get shorter but do not lose a significant amount of energy. They pile up, higher and steeper, the longer the wind blows, at the southernmost point of the south sector, where the seabed rises quickly to meet the Dutch coastline, ending at a row of dunes and an antiquated system of coastal defenses, locks, barriers, and pumping stations. Halted finally in sector three, the channel, where after more than sixteen hours of storm there’s a sort of traffic jam at the narrow bottleneck, the flood, the depth of its line of attack now stretching back more than a thousand miles, will
burst unchecked into the sea arms of Zuid-Holland and Zeeland. From there it will force an exit to achieve what every liquid
must
achieve: its own level.

Something was coming. She pressed her forehead to the glass. To the right of the farm, something seemed to be approaching. A monster, with a light leading it. Was this Izak Hocke returning? The closer the 28-horsepower Ferguson and its trailer got, the more clearly Lidy thought she recognized him. Strange. Because the sky right now was so overcast that she could hear the water storming, but could barely see it. The slowly approaching vehicle with a man slumped down in the driver’s seat looked more like a hallucination than something out of the land of the living.

Somewhere there was a full moon, or, more accurately, it was two days after the full moon, the time when the spring tide is at its highest. But by chance tonight the moon was exercising relatively little pull; astronomically speaking, it was ebb tide. Moon and sun, aligned on the same axis, were indeed both drawing the water table upward, but the moon had just reached its farthest point on its elliptical path around the earth, the apogee, in which the forces it exerts on the tides are particularly weak. It has no relevance for the movement of light, and so this aspect of the moon’s disc during the night was fully present—cool, pale, and undiminished in its capacity from somewhere behind the cloud cover to cast its unshadowed spotlight, like the one in which Lidy now saw the tractor struggling through the water.

In the trailer behind it was a handful of people.

The wind hurled a piece of wrought iron like a curved sword into the room through the windowpane. Everyone flinched. There was a momentary but powerful wave of pressure, the shutter was wrenched out of the back wall of the house, the lamp flared up. Simon Cau had clearly become the kind of man who could just sit there motionless at a time like this, as if he were all alone, but Lidy and the old woman pressed themselves against the wall next to the window, to see what
was going on out there. With your arms up shielding your face, wind gusts of more than seventy-five miles an hour feel like glass splinters in your hands and eyes. The old woman, who had cataracts, was relying on the observations of her visitor.