The Storm (3 page)

It had been a sudden stirring, a blind impulse that had come to her the previous Monday from out of the blue, and which, just like that, she had allowed to take hold.

When Sjoerd came home shortly after midday, the table was covered with papers, and Armanda was hunched over her diploma thesis. She put down her pen and greeted him with a smile signifying that she and Nadja, who was at the head of the table with two fingers in her mouth, drawing a bear, had spent a wonderful morning together. She quickly poured him a cup of coffee; a plate of rolls sat on a dictionary between them. The mood was companionable as Sjoerd tried good-naturedly to report on the urgent meeting he’d had to have in the office this Saturday morning with a client involving a mortgage loan of many hundreds of thousands of guilders that would have to be converted in a flash on Monday into a 6 percent bond, but the thing didn’t interest her, and conversation soon moved on to Betsy’s party.

“Fine by me.” He stared at her for a moment, and then said with the same indifference, “I’ll pick you up at nine fifteen.”

The rain had stopped, but the wind was still raging.

“Seems to be getting worse,” he said, without turning to look at the window.

“Yes?”

Armanda observed his face, which was almost being erased by the background behind it: rattling panes of glass in the west-facing window, and behind them treetops swaying wildly in a chaos of branches. She was suddenly overcome by the feeling that everything was happening in almost farcical parallel with the story that had been occupying
her for half the morning in her work, for the part she’d been working on involved a play in which a storm, conjured up by human powers, broke out and tore across an island. So—and why should that be impossible? By human powers? Out of revenge, out of holy outrage or some such? Now, as she thought back over it again, it didn’t strike her as
not
at all unthinkable. In earlier times—and we can be sure that the human race was no dumber back then than it is now, maybe it was even a little more intelligent—people believed absolutely it was possible, highly possible, that mental energy, the mad heart of pure invention, could trick an event into becoming real. God, in short, and why not? Who says that everything that is fated to happen must first be properly thought out? Thought out and, maybe, written down in the most convincing way possible? She closed her books. While she was thinking that an event, if it announces itself, discovers that a place has already been made for it and hence connects so familiarly with the imagination that those it touches, i.e., us, respond accordingly, she gathered up her sheets of paper. Dialogues, gestures, scenes, everything already predigested by a literary memory.

She made an unconscious movement. Her pen rolled onto the floor. He bent down faster than she did.

“Thank you.”

She saw something in his eyes as they flashed at her. What kind of marriage did the two of them have? she wondered, and at that moment something so wicked tightened around her heart that she didn’t even try consciously to understand it. She stood up and started pushing her things into her bag.

“Okay,” said Sjoerd, also getting to his feet.

Armanda bent down to fish her shoes out from under the table. She heard the house creak under the force of a squall. My God, she thought, with the detachment of the incurably candid, what a terrific, homely sound! Just think, the weather is going to get so much worse in the night that some of the ferry services will certainly get interrupted, and the captains can thumb their noses at the idea of working tomorrow, maybe even the day after tomorrow, maybe even till hell freezes over. Just think!

Looking distracted, she said good-bye.

As she and Sjoerd got out of the taxi that evening on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, Betsy’s front door was standing open. Sjoerd took the four narrow, almost vertical flights of stairs so fast that they had to pant at each other speechlessly for a moment when they reached the apartment door at the top. He took the coat from her shoulders. There was already a mountain of wet clothes hanging over the banisters. Betsy discovered them, called out a welcome, and led them into the attic room that once upon a time had served as a secret church; it had very high ceilings and was already filled with the din of voices. Armanda was in seventh heaven. It felt so good to walk in with a carefree Sjoerd in his old tweed jacket. And naturally there were any number of more casual acquaintances who did a double take when they first saw her.

“Armanda,” she had to say more than once. “I’m Armanda.”

For the first time today she was crossing water. The Nieuwe Waterweg is a deep but fairly narrow channel—the ferry only needs ten minutes to get from one side to the other—but the fare between the two landing stages is still a quarter guilder. Lidy saw a shockingly old peasant’s face loom up by her left-hand window. She understood, wound it down, and put the demanded coin in the ferryman’s paw. As all the windows in the car promptly steamed up, she got out and was startled by the wind, which seemed to her to be extremely strong out here on the water.

She looked around, and was amused to see a broad-shouldered man in a captain’s uniform up on the bridge, standing at the wheel and looking serious. I really am on a ship. Little waves all around, at an angle ahead of them an oceangoing steamer making course for the open sea, and over to the left the freighter RO8, headed toward the harbor in Rotterdam. Leaning against the car, she was standing in the blurry light of an imminent rain shower. Under the roof of the gangway, people with bicycles and people on foot. Her eye fell on a chest standing next to the railing, with
Life Vests
painted on it in white letters, as if to make absolutely clear to her once more that she really had left dry land. A few minutes later and the ship was already swinging round and coming to a stop. The loading ramp landed on the quay with a loud crash. And yet: as Lidy drove onto the island of Rozenburg, the crossing, regardless of how short it had been, had
succeeded in placing a greater distance between her and home than she had expected or intended. This little outing was supposed to be only a fantasy, wasn’t it, a little exercise in tyranny on the part of her sister, Armanda, one that she herself had almost no part in?

Right, but in the hours that followed there was no pretense of a proper road to follow. A labyrinth of little side roads, locks, and bridges demanded her total attention. Impossible to think anything else in life more important, even for a moment, than the route, which seemed to have a will of its own and cared very little about the map spread out on the passenger seat. Near Nieuw-Beijerland she had to take another ferry, and a quarter of an hour later she reached the sea dike with a narrow asphalt road along the top. She stopped and ran in the wind to a faded street sign on which, luckily, she was able to decipher the name Numansdorp. That was where the harbor must be, at the Hollands Diep, which was the departure point for several ferries that made the crossing of the long arm of the sea.

The sea itself was not to be seen. But she had its unmistakable smell in her nose as she hit the gas again and put her face up close to the windshield, peering out at the landscape with the first stirrings of alarm. Landscape? In contrast to the huge arch of space above, the ground was almost erased. The solid rain cover had been shredded by the wind. Clouds with glistening edges were being pushed in front and behind one another like flats of scenery across the panorama on the other side of the windshield. To what extent were there any inhabitants in this panorama? She overtook only two disheveled cyclists with the wind at their backs, and once a farmer waiting on a side road with horse and cart waved when she honked at him. Tops of steeples, farmsteads, windmills with flying sails, a horse behind a fence—everything buried by the sky all the way to the dike, which wasn’t that high but still drew your eyes away from the sea. Ghostly, she thought. The harbor took forever to come into view. She wished she could see both land and sea at the same time. This was still the province of South Holland, a sort of betwixt-and-between area with bare black polders that was, however, familiar to her. Her plan was to get to the harbor in Numansdorp and take the ferry across to Zeeland, a province she had never set foot in, but whose shadow she had already been sensing all morning, because it was the goal of her journey.
That her compass needle was pointing her toward a group of completely unknown people, a family in a little rural town that didn’t interest her, had never interested her, and doubtless never would, was something that she was gradually coming in the course of these few hours to find completely normal.

And when were they actually expecting this godmother?

It was now two o’clock. On the coast, the wind was strengthening to thirty knots, which corresponds to a full 7 on the Beaufort wind force scale, and from now on, was going to increase at the rate of another Beaufort number every hour. Lidy reached the port and drove into the town square. To her delight, she saw that she could continue her journey exactly as she had planned it that morning. Next to a couple of rocking freighters, the ferry,
Den Bommel
, was waiting at the quayside, and there was space to load her car. That part of the jetty was completely submerged didn’t strike her as being in any way out of the ordinary.

Nor indeed was it. Twice a month on average the water in the Hollands Diep rose to the level known as the boundary-depth gauge, and even regularly topped it. That brought with it the regular local flooding without anyone making a fuss about it. She got out. The way to the booth where the ferry tickets were sold was blocked by an uprooted tree. She clambered over it and made sure she worked her way into the lee of the wind by the harbor office. As she joined the queue, her face was as flushed as the faces of the other passengers for the Numansdorp-Zijpe ferry, all of them talking cheerily, even with relish, about the weather. We know what storms are. When it blows, it blows, it’s pretty strong today but we’ve seen worse!

Ten minutes later she reversed down a pretty steep ramp and over the metal plates in the hold, and got out of the car. An iron interior stairway led her up into the passenger lounge, which had a billiards table and a bar. The ferries were stable old tubs.
Den Bommel
registered 10,000 tons and had a 400-horsepower diesel engine that could power the ship at ten knots all the way to Schouwen-Duiveland in two hours. Bad weather, i.e., a storm out of the west or the northwest above gale force 9 in this treacherous area, demanded great skill from the pilot. Wind speeds of forty to sixty knots could transform the waters of Haringvliet, Volkerak, and Grevelingen into seas of steep,
relentlessly oncoming waves. No boat should if at all possible present itself to them broadside.

Find a fixed point and keep looking at it. The feeling is worse than being drunk. Sitting at a table with a fried
egg
sandwich and a hot chocolate in front of her, it didn’t take her long to realize she’d be better off in the open air. The tilting floor and the heaving of the world outside the windows bore no relation to what she was perceiving with her eyes or any other of her senses. Deathly white, she hurried to the middle deck, where more passengers were standing in the shelter provided by the engine room and staring fixedly at the massive volumes of oncoming water.

Her sick feeling vanished in an instant. Then she became aware that she was being observed from the side. A passenger standing next to her was just opening his mouth to say something to her, but she pointedly kept her eyes fixed in the distance. Reading the map in her mind’s eye, she knew that what she was crossing right now was the junction of Haringvliet and Hollands Diep en route to the smaller arm of the Volkerak, but the tide was on the rise, and it was clear that the North Sea was now the master here. Genuinely beautiful. The surface of the water was coming at her in wave after wave of blue light, overlaid with such white streaks of foam that it was impossible to understand where the reflection was coming from.

Why can’t I see any shoreline, why aren’t there any steeples or roofs? Surely there’s land all round me?

“Just look at that!” a voice said next to her.

It was her fellow traveler. A bear of a man with a red face was pointing something out to her with an outstretched arm and a serious expression. She looked at where he was pointing and nodded thoughtfully as she was told that there was usually excellent rabbit hunting on the foreshore of the dike, but the whole thing was now underwater. Then, as if in answer to a question, the man told her his occupation. “Chief engineer with the Royal Hydraulic Engineering Authorities.”

What? Ah. Disinclined to diminish the spectacle of the sea with idle conversation, she nonetheless replied, “So that means this magnificent view is—your field of work?”

“Yes, exactly.”

The chief engineer bent closer to her. She got a strong whiff of alcohol. “What you’re looking at, miss, is a tide that will rise way above the depth gauges at a whole number of monitoring stations, I can tell you from experience.”

She said nothing and frowned.

Her companion was now looking at her intently. “What you’re seeing here,” he said slowly, emphatically, “is the rising sea level, nothing special in and of itself, since it occurs with every tide. Obviously you’re familiar with this. An affair of the sun and the moon, which exert a pull on the water.” He balled both hands and lifted them to demonstrate. “But sometimes, umm, the tide speaks the language of the wind, not of astronomy.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yes. Sometimes it’s the storm that gives the water here along the coast an additional brute of a shove and lifts it higher.”

She wasn’t looking away anymore. She turned halfway toward her interlocutor, which didn’t mean that the expanse of water that the ship had now left behind was ceasing to have an effect on her—on the contrary, she reached for her lingering sense of direction and transformed it into a kind of anesthetic, through which the voice of the chief engineer echoed with all the logic of a dream….