The Storm

9. Against a Background of Moonlight, Icy Cold, Night

Squalls of snow battered the windshield, which the wipers could barely keep clear. They had left the town behind them. Izak Hocke had just taken over the driver’s seat; Lidy was beside him and Simon Cau in the back. Lidy looked with interest but absolute ignorance out at the pitch-dark road and the overflowing black drainage ditches to either side, which had nothing to do with her.

They were driving northeast.

She had reached her decision without hesitation. When she had been inspired within a couple of seconds to say, “Hang on, I’m coming with you,” it was only a confirmation of her previous decision to embark on this little excursion, which had at first simply attracted her and now had become an essential condition of her life.

She had thrown on her clothes in the blink of an eye. Trousers, the angora sweater that had originally been Armanda’s and that she’d worn all day on the way here. Izak Hocke and Simon Cau had waited for her downstairs in the entrance hall by the reception desk. With their heavy coats and headgear — Hocke was wearing a woolen cap — they looked quite different from the way they’d looked at the family gathering, during which she had immediately and quite naturally addressed both Hocke and Jacomina using the familiar form, whereas she had spoken to the charming landowner who was her dinner partner using the more formal turn of phrase. Now both men were standing waiting at reception, their faces expressionless. But she didn’t feel awkward in any way.

Why had she wanted to go along too? Why hadn’t she just handed over the car keys instead of getting into her winter coat, dark rings under her eyes, and marching after them as if it were the only thing to do?

They had needed a means of transport. The two men, friends and neighbors, had come to the party in Hocke’s car, but Hocke had then lent it instead of holding on to it. What Jacomina had told Lidy in a rush at the bedroom door was that Simon had had an urgent call and needed to get to a dike on the other side of the island and Izak Hocke should have been back home with his old mother long since in this terrible weather. Whereupon she had offered them the Citroën. With the greatest pleasure, of course. And when she said — just like that, because it seemed self-evident to her — that she would drive, the two men accepted with distant politeness. Only Jacomina still asked, “Do you really want to do this?”

“Yes.”

“Not go back to your nice warm bed?”

“No.” And with the bedroom door still open, she was already unbuttoning her pajama jacket.

So this was her situation. Straightforward, nice, and it was fine with the Hockes and Simon Cau. Which of them could have known what was coming at them? The land was used to storms and bad omens. And besides, Lidy was a girl with a taste for adventure, for whom finding a second bed out in the polder tonight was not an alarming thought in the least. As she stepped out onto the deserted street behind the men, all she felt, fleetingly, was that her father’s car, there at the curb, stuck out as very much something from home.

“Nice car,” said Hocke.

“Yes,” she replied, “but it’s hard to start.”

But she knew how to do it; the first time the engine turned over you gave it a little gas, and the second time you immediately gave it more. The wind was making so much noise that she had to do it by feel this time, not by ear. It worked on the second try. The lights went on, and the three of them drove off. The windshield was steamed up; Hocke wiped it clear and gave her directions.

“Turn right at the end. Now there’s a sharp curve. The Nobelpoort is just past the corner. Why don’t you switch on the windshield wipers?”

It was around 2 a.m. The town was asleep, and elsewhere on the island, which lay far below sea level, most people were asleep too, the way they sleep when the wind sweeps over the roof on a Saturday night. Just here and there, things were beginning to happen. A few people in a house near the New Harbor had got up to make themselves a cup of tea, because even the wallpaper on the walls was moving. And at the flood fence that blocked the access road to the quay, the mayor, wrapped in his fur coat, was looking in amazement at the waters of the harbor on the other side, which had almost reached the topmost plank and therefore were simply going to overflow it. Someone in his entourage had immediately signaled that something had to be done, and at lightning speed: namely, go fetch the carpenter who lived a hundred yards down the street. At the very moment when the latter, screaming into the wind, was beginning to explain that the ramshackle props couldn’t take one more nail, even a decorative one, the Citroën, with Lidy still at the wheel, was clearing the Korte Nobelstraat on its way to the town gate at the other end.

And afterward, it was absolute madness for anyone who had no experience to be trying to hold a car on the road. Once you were out beyond the houses, it really came home to you what a force-11 gale actually was. But before Lidy could panic, Izak Hocke turned to her and said calmly in her ear, “Pull over.”

He got out, the interior light went on; she grasped immediately, got out too; he had already gone round the car past the headlights and held the door as she hurried past him in the insane wind. Switching drivers only took a moment, but as she slid back into the car next to Izak Hocke, she was out of breath, said, “My God” several times over, and realized that what she was sharing with her two companions was something enormous. She tried to look over her shoulder, seeking agreement, but Simon Cau, his face gray and sunken, was sitting hunched over in the middle of the backseat, his eyes going from the road to her and back again, no smile to be seen.

So the three of them were a group portrait.

The car drove off again at once. Izak Hocke searched for the lever to push the seat back farther. “It’s here,” said Lidy, noticing how hard and impatient his hand was. What a night, she thought. The kind of night that would stick in the memory as a sort of dream.

The straits formed a funnel through which the flood came pouring in, thundering against the coastal ramparts in an ever-rising tide. On the south side of the island these coastal defenses were lower and in a great deal more wretched condition than those in the north, where the unceasing northwest winds ensured that the sea was taken seriously.

The Citroën meanwhile was driving north. Lidy, now over her sleepiness and her initial confusion, saw that Izak Hocke knew exactly where he was going and, with the wind blowing at them head-on, was focused entirely on the driving. She felt his concentration, without any sense of anxiety or panic. But he was in a hurry, as was Simon Cau: you can tell something like that even when you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Which is to say: exasperation when the car suddenly had to stop. The engine died. Curses from Hocke. An electric pole was lying right across the road, along with all sorts of drifting debris, including a piece of reddish-orange tarpaulin that had got caught up in it.

Pity, just when we’re almost there, she thought.

Glistening harshly in the headlights, the tarpaulin sprang toward them. Like a dog on a chain. She stared into the chaos. She knew that somewhere behind it, maybe twenty or thirty yards from here, were two farms diagonally across from each other. To the left, Simon Cau’s, though neither the farmhouse nor the outbuildings were visible, but to the right of the road, where Izak Hocke lived with his wife and children and his mother, she could see light. An upstairs window showed that the old lady, alone in the house, was still awake.

She leaned toward the man sitting beside her, but before she could ask anything, he was already out of the car, and Simon Cau with him.

What can they do? she wondered. The two figures stood at the barrier after some futile tugging and had a discussion. Simon Cau turned his face toward her and nodded, while Hocke, head forward with the cap pulled right down, spread his arms wide and shrugged. She switched off the windshield wipers. It was hardly raining anymore. Curious, her eyes wandered to the distant little illuminated rectangle, and suddenly she knew: he would rather leave the car standing in the middle of the road than leave her alone for another five minutes.

From that moment on, she sensed that she was in danger.

She had watched Izak Hocke climb over the barricade and disappear into the bottomless darkness on the other side without so much as a backward glance. Simon Cau came back to the car, crawled behind the steering wheel, started the engine, and as it sprang to life, shifted awkwardly into reverse.

“Now what?” asked Lidy, who was thinking the storm had suddenly intensified.

“We’re going to drive along behind the unloading docks. We turn right there, and then on the other side we’ll get to where we’re going.”

“How long will it take?”

She didn’t get an answer right away. It wasn’t easy navigating a road that was underwater and had ditches on both sides.

“Ten, twelve minutes.”

Lidy glanced sideways. An almost unrecognizable figure. Simon Cau, her only link now to the putative bed that was waiting for her somewhere in all this violence, and was beckoning her to come to sleep in ten, twelve minutes, all warm and snuggled in.

An almost black landscape under breaking clouds. Here and there an obstacle, a house or a barn. Lidy, still believing in the bed, hadn’t lost her mind. All around here, people were sleeping securely, although they knew, indeed took as given, that this was a region of ancient and thus deep-lying polders. The older the dikes, the lower the land. Rationally or irrationally, over the course of many generations, people in this area had developed the unshakable conviction that whoever lived in this waterlogged, self-created terrarium made their homes here by inalienable right and would never leave. Very close to here, during the night, the sea dike would collapse in several places. Lidy, who was a stranger here, was not the only one who had no premonition of this. This was land that had been pushing itself outward for centuries, changing its shape constantly and sometimes drastically, because it lay embedded between two arms of the sea that did what arms usually do: they move. That their villages and hamlets were in some way impermanent, as was the sea itself, was not a perception held by the inhabitants. Unwaveringly they drew the common boundaries of their polders far out beyond the sea dike. They counted eddies, shallows, and barely navigable channels as part of their living space just as they counted drowned church towers, windmills, farms, and livestock sheds on the sea floor.

The detour that Simon Cau was taking now led directly to the sea dike, where a few little harbors used to ship farm produce lay in a bay of the Grevelingen. Lidy, who had lost any idea of where she was some time ago, along with any sense of time, straightened herself up at a certain point: on the left-hand side of the road she thought she was seeing some kind of ghostly apparition running toward them in the beam of the headlights. Simon Cau braked. He knew exactly where he was, he also knew the boy lurching at them, yet he brought the car to a halt in a kind of trance.

“The water’s coming!”

It was his nephew, Marien Cau, who was poking his windblown head through the open car window. The boy had studied advanced agricultural economy, but the only thing that counted for his widowed, childless uncle was that he had proved himself to be perfect with horses.

“Are you heading for the stables?”

“Yes.”

The two of them consulted for a moment, while Cau, prey to some wild, rising impatience, kept peering through the windshield in the direction of the dike, which here, right in the Grevelingen, rose a good twenty feet above the official Normal Amsterdam Water Level. The boy, they agreed, should continue to his uncle’s farm without delay, where the animal quotient consisted of not just the ten horses that were the pride and joy of both uncle and nephew but also thirty cows. It was almost two thirty in the morning, it was not yet high tide, and neither Simon nor Marien Cau had yet seen the water come right over the dike. Nevertheless, they agreed that the boy should untie the cows for safety’s sake. The cowshed was low-lying. The road, and the inner dike, ran approximately five feet higher. It was an impulsive thought, and not illogical, but neither of them had ever tested it as an emergency measure. This night Marien would indeed herd the cows out up onto the dike, and his uncle, unable to reach the farm anymore, would be able to watch from a window on the other side of the road to see it being done. But the cows, all thirty of them, would be found some weeks later by a group of men nicknamed the cadaver team, their bloated bodies dragged up out of the mud. The cowshed being the only thing they knew, they had swum back to it in the darkness. The horses …

Horses are something else. It is certain that Simon Cau told his nephew and chosen successor to get to the horses first, as soon as he reached the farm, to talk to them, calm them down, and watch over them till his uncle returned from his mission. But nothing happened that way. Two of the horses, the heaviest and most handsome, were photographed some days later by a journalist in a boat. They had been standing for more than fifty hours in water by then, up to their nostrils at first, then even up to their withers as time went on. The photo, intended to be a prize shot, was for the next day’s paper. Two horses, about sixty feet between them, turned away from the camera lens in a gray-white rectangle of endless sea. That they had been intelligent enough to remain on the dike can be seen from some things sticking up from the water in front of them, and the parapet of a bridge. The two horses seem to find themselves in some mysterious harmony with their hopeless situation. In exactly the same poses, heads turned a little to the left in the direction of the wind, they stare at the water, each moved independently by the same feeling of deep sadness that they are the only creatures surviving on earth.

“Back soon, back soon!”

As the Citroën drove on, nothing in the atmosphere inside suggested an intention to make for home and bed as soon as possible. The car heading for the unloading docks was being driven by a man who was feverishly preoccupied with practical things. Beside him was a young woman who, once again, had no role here. However, even she felt the strange — or perhaps not so much strange as concentrated — aura of danger in which people know that something has to be done. After about five minutes the dike appeared, a hunchbacked silhouette against the moonlight. Turn right here and a half mile farther on you came to the loading docks, which were no more than a mooring place where, in accordance with regulations, the passage through the dike to the quay had to be closed at high tide with flood fencing.

But the car braked and stopped right here. After a moment, Simon Cau bent over and ran for the dike, to try to climb it on hands and knees. An unreal sight. What was he trying to do, grabbing onto the weeds to pull himself up the pitiful structure, which had been built as steep as possible to save money? Sinking down continually into the waterlogged mole tunnels that riddled the entire edifice, he reached the crown. It was impossible to stand upright on this arched crest, barely twenty inches across, in the teeth of the hurricane. Cau pressed his stomach to the ground, held on to his cap with both hands, and lifted his head, drenched with flying water, a fraction. What are visions of terror? Unreal things against an unreal backdrop? Simon Cau drew in his breath with a loud gasp. What he was looking at, almost at eye level, was an oncoming mass of water that had no end.

Lidy too got out for a moment. She stood there beside the embankment, which was echoing from inside with a sonorous, throbbing roar audible through the wind. She listened without knowing what was causing the throbbing: a mountain of sand coated with a thin layer of clay, which after years of seawater washing over it was useless. On the very narrow crown, a few little walls erected here and there after the flood of 1906, with spaces to let the sheep through. The inner side was already so cracked even back then that it is a miracle that it had held until tonight before crumbling in the space of an hour and a half under the enormous hydraulic pressure on the outer side, foundering into the ditch of the inner dike. The outer side, undermined, will withstand the sea for a further fifteen minutes before finally collapsing.

Lidy tugged her feet out of the mud and ran back to the car. Even on the reinforced road, the ground was shaking perceptibly.

10. Seeing Her

April had begun with rain, but since yesterday you could smell spring. Armanda was taking a stroll along the Kloveniersburgwal, after spending the entire afternoon in lectures. The sun was shining in her face, and she’d unbuttoned her coat. The weather report in De Bilt had forecast a moderate west wind, but instead it turned from northeast to southeast and slackened to the point where the flags outside the Hotel de L’Europe hung down limp.

From the Amstel bridge she saw Sjoerd coming from the direction of the Muntplein, which was no surprise, since the bank he worked in was on the Rokin. She raised her arm, saw that he spotted her, and waited. Nothing was more logical than that they should walk home together. It was Monday. During the week, Sjoerd Blaauw ate dinner with the Brouwers, his in-laws, who had also taken in his two-year-old daughter, full of affection for her and totally understanding that she would spend weekends at home with her father. Armanda, the way things worked out, also tended to spend some time there too.

She watched him approach with long strides, looking toward her without even the hint of a smile. Her books in a bag pressed against her hip, she stood still as other people walked on past her to either side; there was a lot of traffic at this hour. Without an idea of how they would or should behave toward each other, she waited for her brother-in-law at the corner of the bridge. She would just let things happen. What was the alternative? For some time now things had been awkward between her and Sjoerd. Would there be the same iciness between them today as there had been yesterday?

She thought about how suddenly his mood had changed as he stared into her face in a way that wasn’t pleasant. And she had stared back. Widower … the word pushed its way up into her mind without her being able to suppress it. Widower, but his dead wife had still not been found.

That had been yesterday in number 36. Sunday afternoon, the doors to the little balcony at the front had stood open, and fresh air from the park came streaming in through the wrought-iron grille. Inside the sun-filled room Nadja was thundering across the room on a red wooden horse with wheels, working her way busily toward her by pushing off with both feet at once. Sjoerd and she had talked over the racket.

“She’s still somewhere,” he had said after a moment’s silence.

She had wanted to reach for his hand, but he pushed away from her, changed the way he was sitting, and looked around. In the sumptuous sunlight the furniture, mostly old family pieces, looked a little shabby, and in the corner by the sliding doors, motes of dust were dancing above the piano in a fan of light. She followed his gaze and felt that he knew in his heart what her eyes could see: Wherever she is, she’s not here.

But she had nodded. “Yes.” And afterward, to say something that would comfort both of them: “She certainly hasn’t just vanished from her house and her life without a trace.”

Did he hear what she said? Remarks, thoughts, remarks, thoughts, it doesn’t take long to put miles between them.

Expressionlessly, almost formally, he had repeated, “She’s still somewhere.” But as he turned toward Armanda and searched her face with his eyes, as if trying to find something, his words changed, though they were the same words, and suddenly they sounded a second meaning, icy, hostile, as if what he’d wanted to say was: scandalous, unforgivable, my sister-in-law, how much you look like her!

Now she waited for him at the corner of the bridge, and knew, as he came toward her in a straight line, that yesterday’s conversation was still ongoing. She smiled — what could be more natural than that? Less natural, perhaps, was that she saw herself smiling, saw herself in her wide blue coat smiling out at him from under her bangs, with the rest of her smooth dark hair hanging down on either side of her face.

They greeted each other. “Hello!” And said, as they continued on their way: “How was it today?” Good, good. They crossed the road.

“Lovely day,” she said a few minutes later.

He didn’t react.

A bit farther along the Amstel, the street got noticeably quieter. The river glistened like a band of silver.

“Shall we take a little walk?”

Relieved, she said, “Yes, why don’t we!”

They went along the Keizersgracht. To break the silence, she asked, “Do you have any news? Did you get another call?”

She was alluding to the identification. Lidy’s identification, for the sake of which Sjoerd had already traveled several times into the disaster zone, an undertaking that struck Armanda as spookier and more abstract with every day that passed. Lidy was one of hundreds of the missing who were still being searched for. Sjoerd made calls and was called. He, the husband, was the contact person. But gradually the calls from the Red Cross to come and check the morgues in Goes, Zieriksee, or Dordrecht became more and more infrequent, and it was also a rarity if he got a message from the police to please come look at a photo. The faces of the dead who were still being washed up or surfacing out of the mud were no longer fit to be photographed.

Close together they walked along the narrow, crumbling sidewalk in front of the houses, then over a wooden footbridge and through underneath a landing stage, and finally down the middle of the street. The canal under the canopy of the new green leaves looked very welcoming in the sun.

She glanced sideways. He seemed to be sunk in thought. Would she ever appear out of the water? Did that ever happen? Hastily she began to talk.

“When you asked me last week about that pullover …”

He immediately said, “Lidy’s pullover.”

“Well, actually, mine.”

She saw him shrug uncomfortably. “In the end it didn’t belong to either of you.”

Last week they’d called him again. An investigator had told him about the body of a young woman whose physical description included a blue roll-neck pullover made of thin fleecy wool. The collar and sleeves were edged in a decorative pattern in paler blue, and one of the helpers, who was a keen knitter herself, recognized the pattern from Woman and Home magazine.

“Decorative pattern? Woman and Home?” Armanda repeated, when Sjoerd relayed the details to her. “Our pullover was only the one color. Made of angora. I bought it at Vos.”

Now she said, “Maybe you’ll think this is crazy, but it really did me good to talk, well, so normally about the pullover that Lidy swiped.”

He grabbed her arm hard. She was shocked. “Do you think it’s crazy?” she asked hastily.

They had reached the spot where a little arched bridge leads over from one canal to the next. They stopped at the balustrade. His grip on her arm became so tight that she looked at him.

“She has to come back to me,” he said. “It’s possible, you know that.”

She could hear that he was talking like a madman, but she too, as she realized, was listening to him like a madwoman as well, as he said, “I want to hold her tight again, hold her in my arms. Does that make sense?”

She looked at him unflinchingly.

“It makes absolute sense, Armanda. Think about it. Her and me. Our whole lives are still ahead of us!”

She turned away, confused. When he let go of her, there was an unpleasant tension between them. A barge appeared under the bridge. She watched as it traversed the crossing of the two canals, where trees and houses were reflected in the water, and continued toward the inner city. Was there any place he hadn’t been in the last months? she wondered. What had he seen? She knew any number of small things about him, the everyday routine, the rhythm of things in number 36 and number 77, but what about the big things? When he returned home from one of his trips, none of them at home knew how to deal with the combination of his grief and their own. Her mother would hastily lay another place at the table, her father would offer him a cigarette, and Jacob would steal glances at his face, lit up by the flame from the lighter. As far as they were concerned, words were unnecessary. “No.” A shake of the head. “Nothing.”

To break the ice between them, she said, “Listen, Sjoerd.” And asked him if she could maybe hear some more details about these journeys into hell. He looked at her for a moment, as if wondering where she found the courage to do that, then an odd weary look came into his eyes, as if he were getting ready to tell a story.

“Shall we go over the Amstelveld?” he suggested.

They were in warehouses, schools, the wholesale fish market in Yerseke. The morgues at the cemeteries were mostly too small for the number of dead who were recovered in the first two weeks. Because a large number of those drowned in Schouwen-Duiveland had been washed right across the Oosterschelde to Beveland, it made sense to at least take a look in the Great Church in Goes. There were things he’d had to get used to. He had been in a nursery school somewhere out on the Vierbannen polder where someone had lifted a cloth to show him the mortal remains of a young woman, still unidentified, underneath. The filth that was all that was left of a village, and the stinking horse lying on its side in the mud as if it had been poured into it, had prepared him for what he saw. It wasn’t her. Long, dark hair, age between twenty and thirty, teeth complete except for the two molars at the back: she would be identified during the course of the week by her husband, a tenant farmer in Capelle, by her clothing.

“You’ll receive word as soon as we hear anything new.”

So a day later he found himself in the church in Goes. A town that had survived unscathed, and a space dedicated to the Lord in which an immensely long row of corpses was laid out. Washed and wrapped in shrouds, they were awaiting identification and burial by their relatives. He arrived at around four o’clock. A buzz of voices; he was by no means the only one going round and searching. Shortly beforehand a Red Cross helper had shown him a national police report signed by the state attorney in Middelburg. Nails and toes well taken care of, he had read, skin color white, chin round, no calluses on hands. In consternation, he had nodded. Even the clothing seemed right, though he hesitated. Blue pullover, dark gray trousers with a zipper on the left-hand side, white underpants, white undershirt, pink shirt, gray men’s kneesocks. The Red Cross helper lifted a cloth from one of the tables that stood at the head of each bier. There lay the clothes and other objects as described to him. And when he said nothing, only nodded carefully, she pulled the cloth back farther so that he could see the face.

He screamed, “No!” and began to tremble violently.

Who has such a thing on their conscience?

Pointless question, which nonetheless kept running through his head as he made his way out of the nave by way of the transept that was dedicated to prayer but now was echoing with the stuttering cries of the eighteen-year-old girl who had recognized not just her parents but, totally unexpectedly, the boy she had been going out with, the murmuring of women with lists of names in their heads, the whispering of the man who had broken down at the sight of three blond children, in a row, their little muzzles completely eroded, and confirmed that yes, that was them, yes, yes, the three youngest of his four children. He had already pushed open the door of the vestibule when he heard, off to the right, the cheerful sound of men discussing a job. He looked over with something like relief. About eighteen or twenty feet away, through the open door, he saw a room, probably the presbytery, with a large number of coffins piled every which way on top of one another. On some of the coffins men were sitting in their work clothes, smoking and talking.

Out to the street! Cars, passersby, he looked upward. Was he trying to refer the nightmare to the heavens? He was more closely related to the men on the coffins, the excavators, the poachers, than he realized. For they were the ones who had been found by the health officials and the police to pull the bodies out from under the driftwood, fish them out of the water with pickaxes or their bare hands, and so it followed that they were also the ones who had pulled the woman he had viewed today out of the barbed wire. Nails and toes well taken care of. Once again, it hadn’t been her, no. But for a second, in the face with the empty eye sockets, he had seen Lidy’s features.

Weeks went by. Then there was a call from Zierikzee. The local body squad had found a woman, still young, whom the state identification team could describe only in the vaguest terms, clothing almost disintegrated, hair color no longer identifiable, left arm missing, feet approximately size nine. He borrowed a car from a friend and went to the cemetery. Hopeful, yes, as always. Come to look at the victim’s ring. Lidy had got married in a bright green silk suit; in the church on the Amstelveld he had slipped a ring with a little ruby onto her finger. Without paying attention to the graves, he went to the morgue, situated to the side of a path covered in tire tracks at the edge of a mudhole.

Late morning. He had already spent a short time with Jacomina Hocke, who was still living in her parents’ hotel with the three children. In the lounge, packed to bursting with officials, soldiers, and journalists, he had sat opposite a woman about whom all he knew was that she had lost her husband, which didn’t interest him. After a brief conversation she had fetched Lidy’s little suitcase from upstairs and set it on the table in front of him. Oddly shy, he had searched for the lock with his fingers and then looked up at Jacomina for a moment as if to ask for her blessing. Then: a moment of overwhelming, ignominious happiness. There were her clothes! No possible doubt. Her tight skirt, her petticoat with the narrow straps, her nylon stockings, her shoes, size nine, that she called “Queenies,” her good-little-girl pajamas made of pink and blue striped flannel. What else is there to do at such a moment than to take a very deep breath?

The scent of L’Air du Temps had stayed with him all the way through the accursed town and along the path between the gravestones till he entered the Lysol-saturated morgue, where a very young girl showed him a bucket with a couple of pathetic objects floating in it.

“Knitted woolen undershirt,” the child read out from a piece of paper. “Knitted pullover, color no longer identifiable.”

Then she showed him a box with some smaller objects in it, standing ready on the table.

“Ring with red stone.”

He bent down over it. Half dreaming, distracted, he stared for a while at the touching piece of jewelry. Sweet, he thought, small, for a narrow fine finger. And then, his mind clouded by the chemical stench in the room: dammit, now can I finally find out what happened before all this?!

As he turned round, he found himself looking straight into the eyes of a man who had just that minute walked in. Powerfully built, red-faced, he wore overalls, a green slicker, and rubber boots. A farmer, Sjoerd assumed, and looked at him for a long second in wild supplication.

It was the leader of the body squad, a preacher, who had just driven a small truck full of new human remains onto the grounds. They were pulling out two, at most three, new corpses a day, using the engineers’ boats, always with someone from one of the old shipbuilding families on board, because they knew the places to look. If they spotted a screaming flock of seagulls somewhere fluttering over the brown water rising and falling with the tide, then they didn’t need anyone to point it out to them, they already knew themselves what it meant. The trips with the corpses became fewer over time, but grislier. Some of the watchers on the Steinernen Dike, where the boats moored, spread unsparing descriptions of the bodily remains that were brought onto land, they couldn’t leave it alone, and said they would never eat eels again as long as they lived.

The red-faced man didn’t say why he had come, but held his cigarettes out to Sjoerd. As the latter said, “It wasn’t her,” the man nodded and suggested they go out into the fresh air. They talked for a while in front of the little building. Sjoerd indicated the gravestones with his head. “So that’s where you buried her.” The other man understood that he meant the woman who wasn’t Lidy.

“No. The mass grave here is full. And we always take the unknowns to the emergency burial ground farther away on the island.”

To their left, by the small truck, some workers from the body squad had begun to unload something. In the brief exchange that followed, Sjoerd said, “I don’t know how you can do this.”

The other man didn’t answer at first, and seemed to recognize that it didn’t matter whether he said anything or not. On Sunday he would preach an ingenious but truly comforting sermon on a text from Isaiah: “Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth” that came to him with mysterious ease after or even during the filthy work, but for now, all he could see was what the other man saw.

“Damn mud,” he said.

No reply.

Then, “To begin with, the only way we could get through it was with gin; man, we drank, sometimes we were completely loaded. But now we do it stone-cold sober.”

The emergency cemetery was not far from the harbor at Zijpe, close by the marshaling yards for the streetcars. Because the ferry to St. Philipsland wouldn’t leave for another hour, Sjoerd had had time to pay a brief visit. He got out and was immediately stunned by the panorama, which had the bleak power to bury the onlooker in memories of horror, whether the memories were real or not. In the foreground were two rows of hastily but professionally piled up mounds of earth with the approximate dimensions of a prone body, and slightly higher behind these the streetcar rails, in the curve a row of wet black freight cars, and behind them, in the distance, scarcely distinguishable from the sky, the line made by the bank of the Zijpe, where the afternoon mist was already lying low over the water. He walked down the row of grave mounds. Read the inscriptions on the tarred wooden crosses stuck at angles into the earth. Unknown man, number 121. Unknown girl, number 108. Unknown woman, number 77. He didn’t know whether he abhorred them or was grateful to them in his heart as he thought, From now on they’re her relatives, and imagined them waiting there, cold, wet, unidentifiable, until she joined them for good.

They crossed the Amstelveld. Children were playing between the parked cars. The sun had disappeared behind the houses, and Armanda did up the buttons on her coat. Sjoerd walked beside her, silent for some time now, and smoking, but she sensed that it wasn’t calming him. Where is he? she wondered. He’s wandering around somewhere where I can’t follow him, even with the best will in the world. Mourning my deeply loved, woefully missed sister. She would have known how to fathom his mood. If you know how a man is when he makes love, when he drops all restraint, can you also know how it is with his other passions? I think so.

Unable to change anything, she suddenly thought irritably: You look pale, brother-in-law, and hollow-eyed. And before she knew what she was doing, she began to scold. “Shouldn’t you start to let go of her? She’s out there and she’s going to stay out there. You can’t reach her anymore — it’s impossible!”

Odd, the way her words found their own direction, took on their own force as they revealed something in her that had turned from gentle to angry. She felt Sjoerd look at her, stunned. As she was about to carry on in the same rough tone of voice, he cut her off.

“Don’t say that! They’re still working flat-out! Aside from this phone call about the pullover, I was also summoned to the police last week. The station at Kloveniersburgwal!”

He had picked up on her fiery tone. For some reason, this pleased her.

“They had received another photo for me to look at, God knows why,” he said.

He had stopped. She looked at him intransigently.

“And?”

“It was the face of a middle-aged woman,” he said. “You know, a motherly type with dark curly hair, all stuck together, and a double chin. You could see that they’d set her on a ladder when they found her, as a sort of stretcher, and that’s how they photographed her, with her head against the rungs. She looked nothing like Lidy, nothing at all, but as I stood there with the photo in my hand and it looked back at me for a while, I don’t know, every face of Lidy’s that I knew was gone, I couldn’t recall any of them, I didn’t even try. I liked the woman. Her head seemed to me to be caught a little between the rungs, but the expression on the face was peaceful, although one cheek was very creased and much more bloated than the other. The eyes weren’t quite closed, her little pupils stared brokenly but kindly into the distance, dead. So I stood there holding the photo, which was as foreign to me as it was familiar, while the policeman behind his desk waited for me to be finally ready to say yes or no. I think I must have tried his patience. You’ll probably find this strange, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to hand him back the woman’s face, which didn’t really look like Lidy’s but still was her, at least a little bit.”

He threw his cigarette butt into the canal.

“Of course you won’t understand.”

I understand very well, thought Armanda, and lowered her eyes. The red paving stones were cracked and old. She ran her foot over them. A moment devoid of rational thought, a moment when her mind stood still. But she had pictures in her head. Fragments, faces, all signaling death. As if knotted on a rope, they told their story, one that was made up, as every story is, of its gaps and dark holes. Holy God, thought Armanda, and envisioned a last photo in the police station at the Kloveniersburgwal, that was neither of Lidy nor of the poor woman on the ladder. It was a friendly image of death itself, which may have different expressions in each individual snapshot, but the subject is always the same.

She stood for a moment, lost in her own broodings, but was distracted when Sjoerd seized her arm again, and her light-headedness changed to a chaos of emotions.

He was staring at her.

“Please don’t look so angry!” he begged. “Don’t clench your lips like that.”

As she obeyed, he took hold of her hair with an innocent, absent-minded movement of his hand, played with it for a moment, then let it go again.

11. At the Harbor

Ten minutes later. Simon Cau’s destination, to which he had been hurrying them with increased urgency, was suddenly reached. The road ended. The car stopped next to a pitiful little crane on wheels, overturned, the wooden cabin smashed to pieces. They got out. She, Lidy, was a mere figment of herself, but Cau too, who seemed to have forgotten altogether that she was there, looked in the soft violet light of the moon as though he no longer belonged among the living.

About sixty feet away stood a small group of people, lost in the thundering surroundings of the dike embankment, the sky, the ragged clouds, and the black land at their backs. It was icy cold, the temperature around zero. The northwest wind was blowing straight at the bay and at the little arbitrary jumble of people, villagers, dike workers, six in all, who had thought it better to leave their beds to check on the water. You had to know there was a tiny harbor here at all, a mere mooring-place for the flat-bottomed barges that came and went in fall during the beet harvest. It was invisible, because both the quay and the landing stage were under water, and the opening in the dike through which one normally gained access to the quay was blocked off by a kind of barricade up to shoulder height. They both looked at it as they headed down across the sand. Even Lidy knew instinctively that the first thing they had to check was the five old beams, one above the other, pushed into two slots to build a sort of plank fence, and only after that to look at what was behind it. In this she was behaving in exactly the same way as everyone else here.

As night fell, the structure of the flood planks had been put in place by two workmen — Simon Cau was now hurrying guiltily in their direction — with much cursing and groaning. With the dike sheriff nowhere to be seen, they had come here on their own initiative with a tractor and a cartful of sand. It had been a struggle, and during all their trudging and messing around the dowels — there must have been forty-nine of them — had regurgitated themselves as they dragged the things out of the shed for the last time, nor was there any remaining trace of the chalk marks that had been left on them the previous time.

Simon Cau greeted the two men with a nod, as they stood crouched over behind the flood planks and smoked.

“So?” asked Cau.

The men didn’t answer. What was the point? Because the concrete roadbed leading to the quay had no slots in it, never had, they had laid some sandbags against the lowest beam, but the sea was already spraying a little water through them again.

“Very high,” said Cau, pointing with his chin toward the water. “I’ve never seen it so high here in my life.”

The two workmen nodded, but they weren’t pulling long faces the way the dike sheriff was; they took a brief look at the young woman who had fetched up here, didn’t recognize her, and then straightened up to look over the timbers of the barrier at the unholy blue-tinged expanse behind. High. That was certainly the word for it. The sea, never in their experience so far inland, looked to them like a maddened beast penned in behind their shoulders.

“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 dike 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 little 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.

It was not unexpected that conversation at a certain point should turn to the uncompromising and generous Dutch people who found themselves, so to speak, in a war again.

“Over here!” a young uncle had called to Betsy, who was following Armanda with a bowl of cookies. He raised his eyebrows, stretched out a hand, looked at Betsy emphatically, and continued to make his remarks to nobody in particular.

“Ships’ warehouses full! And there are about half a million people living in this area. They reckon you could clothe eight million people from head to foot with what’s there!”

Armanda saw that Betsy didn’t yet understand what this was about, but she herself did. In the disaster zone of Zeeland and South Holland, people had already been driven mad with the sheer quantity of clothing in the first weeks, donated by a nation possessed. With a knowing look she glanced from Uncle Leo, her mother’s youngest brother, to Uncle Bart, also a Langjouw, sitting next to him, and jumped into the conversation.

“There were evening capes in there, and swimsuits, and streetcar conductor’s uniforms.”

Her eyes slid past them, and as she moved on she said, “Wilder-vank sent a whole batch of chef’s hats.”

As she and Betsy handed round the coffee and cookies, always the boring bit at such a party, she heard the uncles continue.

“Be quiet,” said Bart.

“I swear it.” Leo had been the envoy-on-the-spot of the City of Amsterdam, which had taken on special responsibility for Schouwen-Duiveland. “Shoes lying everywhere. In the square in front of the church, in the streets, all of them in the mud. There was barely a living soul left to be seen in the village, everyone had been evacuated, it all looked absolutely tragic.”

“Really,” said Bart.

“Yes. One of those donations. Thousands and thousands of pairs of shoes. Out of sheer despair, because every warehouse on the island was already overflowing with clothes, so they threw them at the first fishing village they came to.”

The other man snorted.

“In Bruinisse the stuff was stacked to the ceiling in a school with big high windows, there was so much of it not a single ray of light could get through. I saw how people can get drunk on the sheer availability of a huge quantity of stuff, it doesn’t matter what the stuff is. The ones who came to find something didn’t just take what they needed, they began to carry on like voles or crazed moles, tunnelling through it all. Honest. Do you know that the Red Cross is being almost bankrupted by the storage costs? Someone told me that recently they had a hundred thousand cubic yards of clothing that they didn’t even distribute, just shunted it down the line like that, free gratis and for nothing.”

“How about a cigar?”

On the living room table diagonally opposite them was an opened box of Sumatras.

“Yes, give me one. Some of it went to the rag merchants, and some of it to all our faithful Indonesian immigrants.”

A few minutes later, when Armanda came back to sit with them again, the conversation had become more general. She followed it with a cup of coffee in her hand and a plate with a slice of pie on her lap, but didn’t join in. In the circle across from her sat her father and her mother. With the forbearing, slightly astonished expressions that were so typical of both of them and sometimes made them in some remarkable way the spitting image of each other, they listened to these anecdotes that were circulating through every Dutch living room right now, and which their guests were telling one another the way people tell jokes. In Zieriksee the entire population had been forcibly evacuated by the authorities. Nobody wanted to leave, everyone had to. And as a result the workers, yes, it’s true, who had the necessary knowledge to work on the dikes, were suddenly sitting parceled out with host families in Arnhem, Hilversum, Aerdenhout, and so on, and most of them had never even been away from home before. But because the work still had to be done, every single road worker and anyone who could hold a shovel were herded together by the officials of all the city engineering departments across the country and billeted in emergency barracks behind the Stone Dike.

Armanda saw her father’s fingers tapping quietly on the arms of his chair. Uneasily, she felt the impulse to go sit on one of the arms and put her hand in his. All men, the conversation went on, young unmarried men and fathers of households with withdrawal symptoms, basically they were expected to wait. But it wasn’t for long. A holiday bus from Leiden swept festively into the old marketplace, where it disgorged its passengers in front of a well-known small hotel. It was almost evening. The entire waterfront street was full as the girls, roughly twenty of them, climbed out, laughing and waving at the men, to get rooms.

Smiles all round. A very strange atmosphere, Armanda remembered later, without a single drop of anything high-proof doing the rounds. A cousin, the daughter of a certain Aunt Noor, had burst out laughing loudly, but then checked her laughter to tell a quick story about her fiancé, who had spent the summer with a colleague from the national police in one of these half-drowned villages. The girl, a rather brainless creature, gave some totally tactless details about her fiancé’s summer. Beautiful weather. At high tide you could sail through an opening in the sea dike to the highest point of the village, where it rose up out of the water, and you could moor behind the pastor’s house. Residence permits were almost never granted to the actual inhabitants of the village, not even if someone’s house was still standing and they absolutely wanted to return. The only people there were a rescue team, a tavernkeeper with an ancient mother on whom they, the fiancé and his colleague, could unload entire boxes full of cats they’d fished up, and a few boys who collected the machinery from the farms and set it out to dry in the sun. The two policemen had their hands full. Even late at night they would sometimes be awakened by the approaching buzzing of a motorboat with a troop of merry thieves on board, who assumed the village was totally abandoned. All in all, a terrific time: driving around, hilarious evenings in the tavern, fish to catch by the pound just by lowering a net in front of the opening by the dike, idiotic games with a pig that was running around, the Handelsblad sent a crate of oranges, and naturally going swimming, jumping into the water, which they did right from …

The cousin, a little uncertain now, had begun to pull at her lip.

“Oh, I’m boring you.”

“Not at all! Which they did right from … yes?”

Armanda had already stopped looking at the storyteller some time ago, but as the account began to pull her in, she had turned her eyes toward her father, her mother, and her brother. She saw her father pick up a matchbox and examine it carefully, while her mother bent forward with a lifeless smile to pour some cream into Jacob’s coffee. In the meantime she heard, as did her parents, how the cousin’s fiancé and his colleague had jumped right off the makeshift landing behind the pastor’s house to go for a swim. Of course, only when the water was as clear as glass, and with their eyes open, because as her fiancé had said, man, you had no idea what was floating around down there!

At that very moment everyone looked up, laughing and saying hello. Sjoerd had come in, a little late, he’d had some things to do in the city after dinner. Armanda, who had hardly been able to move for the last fifteen minutes, felt a surge of relief go through her. With a sense of everything’s-okay-now she got to her feet to take the empty coffee cups into the kitchen, knowing that Sjoerd would take up his duties as son-in-law at the sideboard in the back room where the bottles and glasses were standing ready. As the two of them did the rounds shortly afterward with wine, vermouth, egg liqueur, and gin, most of the guests barely detected any difference between this and earlier parties here in the house, and after the first glasses nobody saw any difference at all.

Shortly after eleven the door to the living room opened. A little barefoot creature with dark sleepy eyes came toddling in: Nadja. The entire assembled company immediately stopped all conversations, looked at the child, laughed and cooed, and in general presented a picture that would make anyone wonder what kind of spooky effect it would have on a stone-sober almost-three-year-old. But — at this moment the little one discovered the face of her mother and steered for a pair of open arms.

Nothing special. Armanda, who had been called Mama by Nadja for so long already that she’d forgotten it had ever been otherwise, kissed the copper-red curls on the head of the toddler now sitting on her lap. Then, contented, as she looked around the room, where conversation had started up again, she realized that Betsy was trying to meet her eyes, and looking acutely interested. It was the look of a friend from a far corner of the room, but so penetrating that her inner ear could pick up the whispered arguments that came with it.

“Sweetheart, fate has certainly intervened in your life, hasn’t it?”

Calm, persuasive. Armanda stared back.

“A little effort on your part, and my brother, shall we say, gets his wife, whom he misses, back again. But à propos, do tell me why you behaved so impossibly to him after the movies last week.”

Without dropping her gaze, Armanda had carefully picked up her glass from the occasional table and taken a sip. Then, with Nadja’s hot little head resting against her neck, she had telegraphed back: “Dear Betsy, I do understand — you want to see your half brother and his family settled with a competent woman to run the house again. I myself am conscious of certain powers that sometimes encourage this, and sometimes suddenly rule it out altogether. When the three of us went to the Rialto last week to see La Città Dolente, to begin with I liked it that you arranged things so that Sjoerd sat in the middle and I could feel his shoulder against mine as soon as the lights went down. When afterward you wanted to excuse yourself quickly so that Sjoerd and I could spend a few minutes in the rosy dimness of the foyer talking a little about the really moving story of the man who got left at the North Pole, I was already ahead of you. Two quick kisses for each of you, then I beat it. And now you want an explanation. All I’m going to say is that because of the short that ran before the main film, I didn’t register a single thing about the North Pole business. It was about Schouwen-Duiveland. Do you remember? The weekly newsreel once again was delivering the most heroic report, and in the most heroic voice: all forces had been deployed to close the last breach in the dike in Zeeland, near Ouwerkerk. Why this had to be done in night and fog was a mystery, but here were the pictures: the black expanse of water, sections of the dike, cranes, and on the foredeck of a ship the queen, a beret on her head, standing among the workers chewing her lip, because this job has already been done once, and failed miserably. But this time it works. Incredibly impressive, all these lights at night! The gap in the dike at Ouwerkerk is enormous, and four huge concrete caissons have to be pulled into it by tugs and then lowered. Three of the things are already in place, tonight it’s the turn of number four. The tugs have brought it into position as the tide goes out, and now, one and a half hours later, it comes to rest on the sea bottom, precisely placed to the inch. How diligent we are today. From now on, no more tides turning right there between the houses. All over the island, which I’ve long thought of as Lidy’s island now, bells begin to ring out in the night. Major celebrations. I kept hearing them, Betsy, in fragments, all through the other film about that man at the North Pole.”

They had both laughed out loud. Betsy had stuck out a knee and filched a cigarette from the glass on the table.

13. Let’s Crawl Under the Covers

When she was finished at the hairdresser, Armanda took care of a couple of errands, then went home. Surgery hours were still in progress on the first floor, her father’s patients came and went, but upstairs she bumped into no one. So I’ll just pop over to number 36, she thought with the feeling of happy relief that she had come to associate with this idea. She liked going to Lidy’s house. She really loved to keep it running in apple pie order.

When she got there, there were a couple of letters lying on the mat. As she picked them up and checked to whom they were addressed and who had sent them, her raincoat dragged on the floor. “Mrs. L. Blaauw,” she murmured on the stairs, realized it sounded strange, got a lump in her throat, and went, as soon as she got upstairs, to the garbage can that lived in a deep cupboard next to the kitchen. A short time later the unopened mailing from the perfumery to its customers was buried under the chrysanthemums that had been there all week. She also emptied the ashtrays.

The light was already fading as she looked around the living room. No need to dust today. So I’ll iron a couple of shirts. A few minutes later she was doing this, one flight up. The ironing board had its allotted place in the hall, with a lamp above it, and she spread out the ironed shirts on the bed in the master bedroom next door.

Inhaling the smell of steam and almost singed cotton that Lidy always said made her feel faint, she was just getting a dress iron out of the cupboard when she heard the front door close downstairs. She jumped, and looked at the time. He’s early today, she thought, and then did something that just came over her. She hurried to the dressing table set at an angle in the corner, ran a brush through her hair, and pulled her sweater nice and tight over her breasts. Then she switched off the overhead light, and lit a floor lamp, cast a glance at the curtains but decided to leave them open so that Sjoerd, whom she could already hear on the third tread of the stair, would find her bathed in ocher light, very much to her advantage, with a mysterious reflection in the window behind her.

He stood in the doorway. Pausing for a moment to take in the situation, he came over to her with the same decisiveness, she realized in a flash, with which he must have stopped work half an hour before. And they started to kiss, immediately, greedily. Moving one arm behind her back, he had already succeeded in closing the curtains.

It was not their first embrace, far from it. For more than a year now, Armanda had been going around the house at the oddest hours for a woman. And Sjoerd had quite often reached out in the dark hallways or by the stove in the kitchen to pull her close. But contrary to what might be assumed, the more time went on, the more she began to be coy, pushing him away from her when he pressed her against a wall, his desire for her declaring itself openly as he went hard against her stomach. One time she had interrupted their playful wrestling and said, “I won’t do it till I’ve seen my sister’s dead body.”

Did those words come out of my mouth? she had thought immediately, and was relieved when he reacted so casually, even quite heartlessly.

“Anyone who still surfaces these days is put straight into a closed coffin. You’ll never get to see it now.”

So today it looked as if Armanda had pushed her reservations aside. When Sjoerd said, “Be my wife,” whispering, as if someone could hear him, she found it wonderful that his fingers, which never had a problem anyway, had already located the hooks on her bra.

Armanda returned his embrace, pulled her sweater over her head, let him undo the zipper on her skirt, climbed out of it eagerly, and searched at once for his warm mouth again. Then she simply couldn’t find anything amiss in her behavior, as she fell back with him onto the bed covered in carefully ironed shirts, first she was on top, then he was. In that moment Armanda was already far away in her head. The only signal her thoughts gave off was in a certain look, yearning, utterly honest, that a man would recognize as declaring that she was his love, and yes, she was willing.

Then, at a moment that was totally inconvenient, erotically speaking, Armanda, who was still a virgin — this requires saying, because these things are relevant — started a conversation. And its opening theme was the undeniable fact that legally speaking, Lidy was still alive.

“Ridiculous,” said Sjoerd in the same tone of voice he had just used to whisper something sweet in her ear. “You know as well as I do.”

“Maybe,” she said, and told him right to his stunned face that in this moment she could feel not only her sister’s ghostly eyes on her but, to tell him the truth, his as well. Together they were watching to see if she did everything the right, well-tested way. “Am I right, or not?”

“No.”

“And while I remember it, why did you just say ‘be my wife’ and not, for example, ‘be my love’ or, just as good, ‘let’s crawl under the covers’?”

He began to laugh. Before she knew what was happening to her, he slid out of bed, switched off the lamp, and took her in his arms again in the pitch darkness.

“Nobody can watch you now,” he said in the same sweet whisper, but then his voice changed. As if he found himself in a discussion with her at a point where only the most powerful arguments could hope to prevail, Sjoerd told Armanda how much he loved her and how beautiful she was. Not a night went by, he said, in which he didn’t spend time thinking about her — and she should know that thinking meant more than just thinking — as he saw her face and her perfect round mouth and emerald green eyes always in front of him, no different from now, along with her long dark brown hair, and the most magnificent naked breasts that a lonely man could imagine, and if it came to that, would be able to recognize at once and prefer to a thousand other pairs of breasts!

At this point his voice sank again, as Armanda buried him in kisses. And everything would have run its normal course if the front doorbell had not rung at that very moment.

Armanda flinched, horrified.

“There’s someone at the door. Someone wants to come in!”

“No, no,” murmured Sjoerd, who actually hadn’t heard a thing, since the sound of the doorbell sometimes didn’t reach this high up in the house.

But it was true. In number 77 the table had been laid ready for some time now. Grandpa Brouwer and Nadja had taken a little walk and come to fetch the two lovebirds home to supper.

The bell rang again softly.

Up on the fourth floor the bedroom was already bathed in lamplight. With Sjoerd’s cold, tired eyes looking at her from the bed, Armanda was slipping hastily into her clothes.

14. In the Village

This is what they call sleep….

As she stumped through the puddles of an anonymous street in an anonymous village at half past three in the morning, she was alone with the storm for the first time. To left and right were low houses, and not a light to be seen anywhere. Simon Cau had dispatched her and the two daughters of the tavernkeeper to different parts of the village to drum the inhabitants awake.

“Wake them,” she had had time to ask quickly, “and then what?” They had climbed out of the car at the church. The sky had begun to rain large hailstones. Simon Cau had wanted to start ringing the storm bell immediately, but although the church door stood open, they discovered by the light of a match that the door to the tower was locked. Back outside, as they stood in the moonlight that had somehow found its way through to them, Lidy had looked into Simon Cau’s face. And seen that he had no belief in his own orders, but didn’t know what else to do.

“Wake them!”

She did what she was told. It wasn’t easy. It was obvious that nobody here had any wish to interrupt their sleep. Embarrassed, she stood between doors and windows that remained closed to her hammering. Everything was calm and secure in the world behind them, she could feel it; buried in their bedclothes, legs curled up, men, women, and children slept with slow heartbeats. Inhaling the warm breath of their sleeping companions, they placed their trust in the strength of their inadequate imaginations and let her muddle on in the storm that was just a storm, that swooped down into the narrow street and howled through it as if through a fallen chimneypot.

She looked around. Nothing but this bedlam of noise. Suddenly it occurred to her that absolutely nobody knew she was here. With a new kind of unease she crossed the street, decided on the door to a small shop, and banged, palms out, on its upper portion. Unreal village, she thought, with the fearfulness of someone who knows herself to be overlooked by an oblivious God and her oblivious fellow men. If nobody has any idea where you are and cannot form any image of it, do you exist? Her eyes slid over the white letters, carefully painted in italics on the dull glass pane above the shop door: Baked Goods.

Someone had awakened in the apartment at the back. An alert, elderly lady who heard noises in her sleep that her ears couldn’t identify as a normal part of foul weather like this. She felt her way blindly into her bedroom slippers. The light wasn’t working, so she lit a candle. She was about to go directly to answer the drumming on the front door when she noticed a faint roar from somewhere in the house that demanded her more urgent attention. A moment later she was standing in amazement in the toilet, where the water was spouting up out of the pan as if from a spring. She turned around, hurried through the shop, and opened the door.

“Come look at this,” she said, and Lidy followed her.

It was one of those lavatories that had been carpentered together out of planks and sheet metal against the outside wall at some point in the past, capturing every bad smell forever. Now it had a white porcelain toilet bowl and a lacquered cistern above it with a chain. Lidy and the old woman, who had survived most of her life without electricity and had possessed this beautiful WC with its connection to the sewage system for only the last four years, which made it still a daily enchantment, looked first at the high-spurting column of water and then at each other.

Their reactions were almost simultaneous.

“The light’s out too.”

“The water’s up over the sea dike already, I’ve seen it myself.”

The woman in her white nightgown turned round, because someone was coming through the hall, lantern in hand.

“Nothing’s working anymore,” she complained loudly but patiently to the man whom she didn’t yet recognize but took to be a neighbor.

She couldn’t know how right she was. For at this moment elsewhere on the island the first telephone poles were coming down. The total isolation had begun. There were, it is true, a few telephone operators at their posts in some of the slumbering villages, attentive employees who had gone to work in the belief that the need to make an emergency call to the provincial or even the national authorities tonight might not be just the product of an overzealous sense of duty. But none of them got through. In some places the telephone switchboard was an old-fashioned operation, run by hand with a generator that produced its own power, and it happened a couple of times that the operator, totally concentrated on the alarm call even as the flood-waters poured into the building, received an electric shock as the water reached the height of his chair and the stool supporting the equipment with its worn but indestructible parts. This was a lost island. It would be submerged completely, without the outside world lifting a finger or even noticing, because as chance would have it, this confluence of the position of the moon and the endless wind happened during a weekend.

Nonetheless: one extraordinary exception.

Very early in the morning, a post office employee was still trying. At the last moment, shortly before the technical equipment gave up the ghost and the last shutters on the telephone exchange fell off, he managed to dial the number of a fairly high official. He reached him personally.

“Yes?”

The chief engineer of the Royal Hydraulic Engineering Authorities was three-quarters asleep. The phone operator had to repeat his request twice, in different formulations. “I’m calling you in desperation, something’s got to happen.”

“Yes, well, but what can I …” the chief engineer began, then said, “Good, I’ll order the necessary measures.” He hung up again, looked at the clock, yawned, shook his head — the bright green hands were pointing to ten past four — and crawled back under the covers. But he kept his word. When he dared to rouse the queen’s commissioner from his Sunday-morning sleep with a 7 a.m. phone call, in the village under discussion the flotsam and jetsam was already thundering against the house walls and there were corpses floating everywhere.

Having to die is everyman’s excusable fear, and in a region such as this, death by drowning rapidly becomes the most particular fear of all. Lidy, who had now been traveling for eighteen hours, found herself on the street with a handful of villagers who were arguing with one another. The storm had increased to force 12, i.e., a hurricane. People were wearing coats over nightclothes, and kept to the shelter of their houses; two or three of them were carrying torches. Universal darkness. Going by their faces, none of them seemed overly concerned; what was occupying each of them was what the others were making of the spectacle.

Bad weather. And not good that the water was coming over the dike out there. Everyone knew that at ebb tide that evening, the water-depth gauge at the Laurens sluice hadn’t gone down by even a quarter of an inch. And where there had been no ebb, they had projected that there would be no high tide, because this logic had held true all their lives. A young man who had been down to the harbor to take a look tonight said he’d seen the farmer at the entrance to the village hastily hitching his horses to the wagon not fifteen minutes before, with his best cows in tow, to move himself, his wife, his children, and all his worldly goods, farther inland.

The people standing around in the darkness let their eyes slide wishfully leftward, away from the silhouette of the church tower, inland, away from the sea.

Living in a dangerous place leads inevitably to a kind of deaf-and-blindness to the elements of that danger. Every single person in the street, Lidy included, knew that yes this was a village, but it was also one tiny point in a landscape given over entirely to the moon, the sea, and the wind. Water is the heaviest element in existence — that was also known. Whoever lived here was descended from generations who had centuries of experience that in long-drawn-out storms, the sea exercises a counterpressure and then rises on one side. Oceanographers had done the calculations to prove that the height of this lopsided rise is in inverse proportion to the depth of the sea — but people here had known this forever and understood it. Every person here in the street had grown up with eerie tales of monstrous hands of water reaching abruptly out of the arms of the North Sea, whose floor rises toward the coast of this country like a chute.

Lidy glanced to the side. The old woman had nudged her.

“I think I’d better carry some things upstairs.”

“I’d do the same,” replied Lidy, and thought: I’ll give the woman a hand for a few minutes.

Other people, too, were giving one another meaningful looks. The group in the street broke up. Shutters and attic windows had already been made fast that afternoon. There was nothing on any of the farms still standing around loose. Now they went to fetch their children out of bed, taking all the covers with them, and to settle them back down in attics, along with buckets of water, camping stoves, supplies, matches, and even perhaps the most valuable thing in the house, the black sewing machine with the cast-iron treadle.

Permission to stay granted, and best not to think too much. Another way of fighting back against the impossibility of nature. It is true that most of the houses in this street were little buildings put up for farmworkers, with walls thrown up using not cement but a pitiful mixture of sand and plaster. But they were their dwellings, and they wanted to feel safe in them. For the time being they wanted to have the interval between one sleep and the next preserve as much of the order of their everyday lives as possible.

Lidy went back into the little shop. The old woman walked resolutely ahead of her through the dark. Behind an intervening door the candle was still burning.

A few seconds later: “Here, you take these.”

She had two large biscuit tins pushed into her arms.

“There.”

A cash box.

Filled with the same dreamlike sense of closeness she’d experienced a few hours earlier at the family dinner, Lidy climbed a ladder to a peaked attic where she couldn’t stand upright. In the circular glow cast by a tealight she saw her feet encased in muddy shoes. A person must have two or three different people inside them, she thought, as she stood at the top of the ladder to receive a cushion, parts of a kapok mattress, a chamber pot, a coverlet, and then another.

“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.