The Storm (16 page)

“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 as 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.

In the Netherlands, the radio stopped broadcasting at midnight on the dot. At one minute to midnight, Hilversum One and Two played a lively brass-band version of the national anthem, and after that the country, radio-wise, was put to bed. As Simon Cau and Lidy Blaauw flew into the house and heard the water break against the outside of the door that they were holding shut with the full weight of their bodies, someone in the weather bureau of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute at De Bilt was still awake.

A meteorologist, who was under no official obligation to be on duty at this hour, was standing at the window high up in the building, looking from the telephone on his desk to the outside and then back to his desktop again, where a couple of weather charts were spread out. He was wearing a good suit. After accompanying his wife to a concert, he couldn’t get back quickly enough to his post, from which he could keep an eye on the storm. Its howl was deafening. The meteorological institute, a relatively slender six-story building topped with a roof terrace, was in a little park in the midst of flat meadows that stretched all the way to Utrecht.

What could he do?

He ran his fingers over his lower jaw and listened to the storm, which he not only felt he understood better than anyone else but also regarded as his absolute personal property. During the concert he
had totally ignored the oscillations of the musical sound waves, focusing instead on those of the gusts of wind, which he estimated at close to sixty knots, if not higher, against the walls and windows of the hall. As he did so, he had mentally reviewed with razor sharpness the weather maps of 6 a.m. and 12 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time—large hand-drawn charts, on which he himself had penciled in the contours of air pressure over northwestern Europe, erased them again several times after receiving updated information, and drawn them in again: the isobars were lying more and more alarmingly close together. Hunched over the paper, he had studied the warm and cold fronts, drawn in red and blue, and the violet lines showing the areas in which the cold following behind would dissipate the warm air over the earth’s surface, and the harsh green shading filled in with the pencil held flat to indicate the zones of rainfall surrounding the fronts.

This was the view, the true heavens of the RNMI that the meteorologist had held fixed in his mind’s eye right through the Brahms. And which that eye, trained to measure barometers, thermometers, wind, and rain, had read all too clearly.

The areas of low pressure. He’d been following them since the beginning of the week as they formed over Iceland, Labrador, the Azores. And here, the trough with very large varieties of pressure that started developing northwest of Scotland at 6 a.m. One can know an enormous number of facts, and still the 12 noon chart will be made up of countless details that are already in the process of escaping their own diagram at the bidding of some force unknown to us. The trough had moved ineluctably to the east coast of Scotland. Look what was bearing down on us! From this time on, the meteorologist had kept promptly demanding updated figures. At 3 p.m. he had received a transmission from an English lightship about a sharp drop in air pressure, followed by another at 6 p.m. Almost immediately thereafter, shortly before he was relieved by a colleague, because he had to get home to change for the concert, he had taken another look at the measurements from Den Helder and Vlissingen: the difference in pressure between the north and the south coasts of the country was now more than 13 millibars. The prognosis was certain—it was going to be quite something!

And so he had sat motionless in the parterre of the warm concert
hall next to his equally motionless wife. Although he, like she, had his eyes closed, he was still looking, being a bird like all meteorologists. His element, the air; his perspective, the earth. Surrounded by the music, increasingly restless, increasingly impatient, he made a mental picture of the weather chart he had had on his desk today. Nothing but fleeting visual snapshots, which had already changed considerably by now. As he followed the storm in his head as it veered northwest, his mind was drawing the new map, which showed with utter precision that the area of low pressure was moving into the German Bight, in the direction of Hamburg. The storm field accompanying it now took up the entire North Sea west of the fifth degree of longitude.

He was right. Around 10:30 p.m., after the meteorologist had hurriedly delivered his wife back home and gone to his colleagues in the weather bureau, he saw that the storm had indeed developed according to the scientific predictions. He bent over a message that had come in by telex from the
Goeree
, a lightship positioned some miles off the coast of Zeeland. Given the breaking waves and the behavior of the short but mountainously steep seas all around the ship, the crew had relayed an estimated wind speed of sixty-three knots, which was the equivalent of almost force 12 on the Beaufort scale. A hurricane. The meteorologist had looked at his colleagues and received very dark looks in return. Then he looked at the clock.

Hilversum was still on the air.

The telephone made the most terrible crackling noises. First there was a woman’s voice, then a defensive male voice.
“Who
is this?”

The meteorologist presented his proposal that they keep the radio transmission going tonight so that news updates and warnings could continue to be passed on, confidently at first, then merely impatiently, as he could already tell from the silence on the line what the other man was going to say.

“It’s not my decision to make!”

More silence on the line. The meteorologist waited, drumming his fingers, till he heard something again.

“Office of the Director of Programming,” sighed a three-quarters-asleep or bored man.

With authority, but without expectations, the meteorologist asked Hilversum again to keep the transmitter open tonight.

“Given the weather conditions, it is my opinion that you would be justified.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, felt a second go by as he listened to the windows groan under a wild pressure, and received his answer.

“What are you thinking of? The last newscast here is and always has been eleven p.m., and we’re past that now.”