The Storm

15. The Meteorologist

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

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

What could he do?

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

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

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

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

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

Hilversum was still on the air.

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

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

“It’s not my decision to make!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Besides which, I’m unwell.”

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

But his mind was not capable of imagining real flooding.

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

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

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

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

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

16. Low Barometer in Amsterdam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Should we ask?” said Betsy suddenly.

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

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

Then Sjoerd asked about the still-unoccupied graves.

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

“They get a stone too.”

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

The three of them kept looking at him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How? she moaned. Just tell me, man …

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

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

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

17. Moon in Its Apogee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the trailer behind it was a handful of people.

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

“Make sure you take a good look!” As if she didn’t totally trust the reports of the girl she was already inclined to regard as a daughter or daughter-in-law. Such connections are quick to form in certain circumstances.

The girl kept looking. “It’s him. Hocke.”

They both flashed a glance for help at Simon Cau, but his back was turned, so they looked out of the window again. About a hundred yards away, the trailer, now almost entirely invisible underwater, was transporting a little group of people who could still be seen above the swells and who would have to find a place in the house here. Aside from Hocke she counted seven of them, survivors of a group of families who had lived a few miles from here in a hamlet on a protected island formed of silt where the ditch surrounding the polder divided into two arms — one contained a lock that had been rusted shut for years, and the second ran on until it met the main drainage system at Grevelingen.

Hocke gestured and yelled something that was unintelligible from the window. He had maneuvered the tractor into position right opposite the house and was now apparently trying to figure out how far he could still advance along the road that sloped downward under the water. Meanwhile the travelers he had brought waited, their faces set and cold. They looked as if they had appeared out of the void, resurrected perhaps, but without any idea of where they’d come from, or any expectation that they’d ever find out. Yet the massive current pouring from the north swept past them, carrying entire collections of their random household possessions, from clog boxes, doors, and roof gutters to smaller objects like beds, scales, tobacco jars, birdcages, shoes, a set of false teeth, a baking pan, an edition of Donald Duck. They looked out over it all, not so much blank as unburdened of everything their eyes had known before.

Eight little houses. The wall of water had come at them from one side at the exact moment when Hocke on the other side was trying to get down to them by driving alongside the drainage ditch. The families of two of his farmhands and several day laborers didn’t know which they heard first, the breathless honking of the tractor horn or the bomb that split open their house walls and tore off the roofs. The energy of a hurricane when transferred into water is a mad force in any space that presents obstacles to that force. Shearing its way with razor sharpness along the collapsing dikes, turning, forcing its way to the side, and then streaming back, the flood wave was carrying a pressure of dozens of tons per square meter as it reached the first eight houses on the Naweg and landed on them like a wrecking ball. Most of the inhabitants made it just as far as the ladder in the stairwell. What followed was something that no human being was there to witness.

A fourteen-year-old boy and his father hack a way through the roof tiles with a chisel, pull themselves up hand-over-hand to the ridge beam, hang over it; the next minute a vertical tongue of water sweeps upward, the father drowns immediately, the boy thrashes around in the water, struggling desperately. Another house: a fifteen-year-old girl squeezes herself against the chimney, the roof is torn off, nothing around her but a force-12 wind and the floor heaving under her feet. Her forty-year-old mother, extremely pregnant, lands in a floating laundry cupboard as the house wall collapses outward; she’s been having cramps all night but now they stop. The current will carry her by chance right past the tractor, she will manage to make it, at least to begin with, as does her eight-year-old son, whom Hocke fishes out of a hedge of whitethorn. As the girl falls backward, along with the chimney and everything else, she gives a deafening scream and clutches empty air. It’s pitch black. The sea pushes on from the north with huge force, only to crash into the constricted waters of the Oosterschelde on the south side of the island. The inhabitants try to grab onto whatever they bump up against in the water. Not one of the flimsy houses held together with little more than whitewash withstands the enormous churning movement of the waters triggered by waves that are now breaking under their own weight. A man and two children in striped pajamas are standing on the rear part of a shed that is already sinking. As they land in the water, the man manages to pull them onto a rafter, which immediately shoots away like a torpedo. Lord have mercy — but the man is astounded to find himself groping the road embankment a minute later and crawls up it under the lights of the tractor. It’s snowing. A young married couple and child have been pulling themselves forward along the hedge that lines the road. The man, who’s very strong, is holding his two-year-old daughter above water by her clothing, switching from his right hand to his left. He’s also using his teeth. Hocke, who hears them calling through the darkness, comes to their aid and pulls them onto the wagon. The mother takes the child, who’s been plunged right under the water twice, in her freezing arms. Extraordinarily, the rumble of the Ferguson engine can be heard even through the howling storm. Six or seven rats have popped up out of the water next to the trailer and are climbing onto the tailgate. There’s still room on the trailer, but if they don’t get away from there now, up the gently sloping road, there’ll be no point in trying.

“We’re going!”

He knew the lay of the land around here. Hocke took his bearings from the electric poles and the wind-bowed picket lines of willows and poplars planted after the deliberate inundation by the Germans in 1944. The absolutely critical thing for him was to stay on the road, which laid an underwater trail to his house if indeed it still existed. Working his way forward on an imaginary path, taking an imaginary curve, everything done by guesswork. It was after about ten minutes that Hocke, the one in charge, the only one with a thought in his head, stopped and peered over his shoulder.

At first there was nothing to see but waves crashing and crisscrossing one another in fountains of spray and general chaos. Then suddenly something was yelling and coming toward them, a dot that soon grew until it became a living thing clamped to a bale of hay. Hocke looked, as did the others.

It was a boy, a child, who as the hay bale raced alongside them in the current, slid into the water at the exact right moment, also contriving with considerable skill to dodge the driftwood that was hurtling past as well. Coughing and bleeding — one of the rats landed on him as people pulled him in over the tailgate — he joined the little group, who reached the farmhouse shortly thereafter. The boy’s name was Cornelius Jaeger, he was twelve years old but would soon make an everlasting impression up in the Hockes’ attic because of his deformity — he was a hunchback — and he came from Dreischor. Vague things, the kind one doesn’t notice consciously, but that still led Lidy to the assumption that none of the others knew where this child came from or what his name was.

18. When the Wind Roars and the Shutters Bang

“Mister Cau!”

She couldn’t recognize his face. She had no idea what was driving him. Madness? A despairing soul? It didn’t interest her. She bent down as if approaching a trained animal and touched his arm. He seemed to understand, to decode it at once: a woman with her hair down loose and hanging over her shoulders in strands, a voice that still addressed him in a formal way but nonetheless was in command. She was holding a tangle of flax rope in her hands.

A moment later Lidy and the man were standing at the west window.

No thought of home, not one. Only the question: Will we manage it? The ease with which one self takes a step back, allowing another to take precedence. Not twenty-four hours before, she had been the wife of a future banker and mother of a future primary school pupil, high school pupil, student … now the only thing that interested her was the Stygian panorama of sea and sky — both in motion, southward, chasing desperately past the house. Izak Hocke’s diesel tractor was drowning in them. How in God’s name to get these little figures, ten, twenty yards away, into the house? They were wedging a large piece of driftwood against the side of the trailer. They had managed to make themselves heard over the howl of the wind, screaming that they needed a rope to save them. Following the farmer’s wife’s directions, she had gone searching for one in the middle of a heap of the most unlikely things — never before had she seen a schoolbag made of wood.

Lidy. Cau. However the relationship between the two of them had been formed, it was stable enough for her to know what tasks belonged to each of them. She pulled the window inward till it was wide open and held it firm with both hands. He was short and no longer young, but he had the strength of two men; he paused for a few moments to assess the situation and then slung the rope, which he’d fastened at one end to a roof beam, out into the night. The old woman was also standing by.

Of course, no. Doesn’t happen that way. The three of them at the window realized this as clearly as the people in the trailer with the water foaming as it climbed its sides; they had been freezing for so long already that they had forgotten their own terror. The rope sank. While they were hauling it back in again, Cau and Lidy saw a small, stocky figure stand up, arms wide.

It was the crippled boy. He leapt into the water and plowed his way thrashing toward the house. Lidy laid the last tiny remnant of her detached carelessness on ice. From now until the moment they could pull him up over the windowsill, all she could think of was, would the boy make it?

A troll! was the first thought that came to her mind as the boy stood before them, dripping wet.

They had pulled him out of the water, yet to her it seemed as if he had abruptly pushed his way into the house by himself, his entire character expressing itself in his arms and legs. Light and shadow played over his face, which was scratched and bleeding and reminded Lidy of something very familiar, whether out of her own life story or not. When one feels at home with something one encounters, a certain gentleness, then one loves that gentleness, and it becomes one’s own. Life is no longer life without it. She was not thinking for a moment of her own child, this tiny signal from a faraway place. Here and now she wanted to dab carefully at this battered face with a cloth, the hair too, and press a kiss against it.

Without looking up, he pushed her hand away.

“Onto my belt, now,” he instructed, teeth chattering, chin down to his chest.

A child’s voice, she heard. He and Cau wrapped the rescue line around his waist and he insisted that they also tie it to his belt with a loop, for safety’s sake.

“Are you sure? Can you really do it again?” asked Lidy, who was no longer trying to meet the boy’s eyes, noticing only that his whole body was trembling.

He looked sideways for a moment. Irritated? Or was he merely half-blinded by the stinging water in his eyes? She took his hand and stroked it, waiting for him to pull back, but he didn’t right away.

“We’ll hold tight to you with the rope.”

A smile, as if she had said something idiotic.

They paid out the line. For the first few yards she could still see him, then he seemed to vanish under the flotsam and jetsam, then, if she wasn’t mistaken, she saw his head break the surface of the water again. Relief. Then nothing more. Nothing but the passing minutes that seemed to go very slowly. The present can push itself so far into the foreground that everything that has happened before, the entire story, becomes a hallucination that lacks all conviction.

19. Sunny Day I

Weddings often suddenly bring together two families who do not know each other, but when Sjoerd and Armanda got married, intimate bonds already existed between their relatives. Nonetheless something occurred that frequently happens at large family parties, particularly weddings: a deepening of mutual feelings and the real confidence that these will endure.

It was a sunny afternoon in May. Flecks of light danced off the blue damask tablecloth, a wedding present. The doors to the little balcony on the street were open. On the narrow side of the oval table Armanda was laying out photographs and sorting them, barefoot, wearing a dress of checked muslin that had belonged to Lidy. She had pulled the garment quickly out of a cupboard and slipped it on, because the sun on the windowpanes was making the house warmer and warmer; the photos were waiting on the table. That very particular starting-today-everything-is-different mood of the wedding guests soon fades for most people, but not everyone. Armanda lifted her head. The kettle on the stove in the kitchen at the end of the hall began to sing. She was expecting her mother. Armanda went into the kitchen, rinsed out the teapot with boiling water, poured the rest of the water onto the tea leaves, put the cups and some cookies on the tray, and encountered in all these little routines what was new in herself, the mysterious thing that most people around her had a word for, whether spoken innocently or ironically: wife. The doorbell rang.

“Wonderful!” said Nadine Brouwer a few minutes later. “Gorgeous, oh, and look at that one!” She laid her hand against her neck and glanced from the photos, each of which she picked up for a moment, to her daughter and back again. She looked fresh and rested in a bright red dress in a dotted material that set off her still-girlish figure. Her upswept hair, ash-brown, showed no hint of gray.

Armanda, sitting beside her mother at the table, took another look at her wedding photographs. Her mother’s profile, with its fine lines, and her candid blue eyes, radiated a delight beyond words onto the photographs and also of course onto the day that they commemorated, May 3, 1955. Yes, thought Armanda initially, my wedding day, my wedding day, what a celebration, look, here we are at the town hall, here we are at the church, and she had the urge to relive it all with her mother.

A virgin as she left her parents’ house to begin a marriage. In white, yes of course, anyone could have told her that, why not, in a beautiful white dress, therefore, but maybe better not to have a long one, and with a little white hat, no veil, and of course no traditional entrance on the arm of her father: five years before, Lidy and Sjoerd had walked into the Amstel church arm in arm, she in a lime-green suit with a loose jacket that came down over her stomach, to enjoy the organ playing and God’s blessing simply because they were so festive. It had been a beautiful June day, Armanda remembered. Clear sunless weather without a breath of wind, the kind that never shows up in photographs.

“Look, Uncle Leo’s in this one, nice.”

“Yes, and here he is again with Betsy.”

“If you ask me, the two of them really hit it off!”

Armanda felt her thoughts wander off, as often happened, even as she was talking. With some people you can have really interesting conversations, she’d noticed, but they stop your thoughts. Others, and her mother was one of them, leave your private self in peace and yet always manage to latch onto wherever your mind has landed up.

“Everyone was in a good mood, absolutely everyone,” said her mother at a certain point.

Armanda had been quiet for a while.

“Yes,” she murmured, stretching out her hand, and drank her now lukewarm tea at one go. The sun was now shining straight into the room. She stood up to partway close the curtain. “But Mother …”

Armanda saw her mother look up with an expression that can only be described as “knowing.” Knowing that her daughter’s high spirits had left her, and also knowing why.

“… but something about the day was, was … dreadful!”

The answer came at once. Fully formed, as if she’d already heard this remark before and had thought it through.

“Child, please don’t say that.” Her mother frowned for a moment. Then she glanced at her watch. In a moment, at four o’clock, she would collect Nadja from play school, as they had arranged, and take her to number 77, and only bring her back at bedtime. “And please don’t think it either.”

“Can I tell you something?” Armanda looked at her mother defiantly, and let her wait for a moment. “All day long what I was secretly thinking was: This isn’t my wedding!”

But her mother immediately shook her head. Oh no, don’t talk like that, you’re just imagining things!

And she was right. In reality, the entire day had run its course for Armanda in a kind of haze. The slight sense of strain to begin with, then the emotion, and then finally the happiness all around her had created a ringing in her ears like a confused blur of voices. Almost like an anesthetic. Now, by contrast, it broke up into clearly identifiable individual voices: this wonderful celebration is really a continuation of that other wonderful celebration, a little course correction between then and now. The bride is wearing a mask. By chance it’s her own face.

“Don’t spoil it for yourself in hindsight.”

Like a hand being stroked over her hair. An exercise of maternal influence that Armanda was glad to heed. She reached out and began to push the photographs together, but there was one thought she couldn’t suppress: Will I ever be able to remember who or what I was back then? One of the photos wouldn’t align itself and slipped out of the stack. Her mother set her finger on it.

“Ah!”

Armanda looked too. Her mother’s favorite brother.

“Uncle Bart,” she said briskly. And then, “My God, Mother!”

The crumpled-looking man with the gray buzz cut and spectacles perched on the end of his small nose had made a long speech at the end of the wedding feast. Deep in his cups, breaking out repeatedly in tears, he had spoken to the guests about Lidy, whom they must never, never forget. Shortly before his voice broke, he had even managed to ask the company for a minute of silence.

“I spent the whole time staring at the napkin next to his plate,” said Armanda. “I could still draw you every little fold in it.”

Her mother nodded, as if to say, yes, maybe he shouldn’t have done it, but Bart is a good man, through and through.

The minute of silence was not entirely silent, naturally enough. Nonetheless each of them, a little dazed, a little painfully, had thought of Lidy, whose name today had been entered for exactly the past three weeks in the official Register of Deaths at the local government offices. The date and place of death were made up.

Died in the environs of Zierikzee on Schouwen-Duiveland on February 1, 1953.

Finally. Finally there had been someone — the minister of justice, in fact — with the legal authority to pronounce the death of Lidy Blaauw-Brouwer, along with more than eight hundred other victims of drowning. According to the rules of the state courts it had been a fairly quick process, completed already in July 1954, to expand the law originally written to cover only those deemed missing from the Second World War to those missing in the storm flood. Three months after January 13, 1955, the day when, following an enormous amount of work in the files, the mass listing had been officially published in the Nederlandse Staatscourant, the survivors were allowed to make applications to the various town halls. On April 13, at two thirty in the afternoon, Sjoerd drove in the first car he had ever owned, a used Skoda, to the town hall on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal. He was shown to a small office and handed a copy of the certificate, a rather unusual document even for the official who had prepared it.

“Please would you check to see that everything’s correct?” the man had asked.

“Yes, thank you,” said Sjoerd, cleared his throat and began to read: “Article Two of the Law …” and then, after he’d read to the end, said, “Thank you” again.

The official looked at him with reddened eyes, as if he’d had a sleepless night.

“My deepest condolences, Mr. Blaauw.”

That was a Wednesday. On Friday, Armanda and Sjoerd posted the notice of their intended marriage.

A painful moment! While the bridal couple had intended to slip away quietly at this point, here was this uncle insisting on making a speech! The wedding guests had made faces like a group of miscreants who are perfectly aware of what they’re doing and aren’t really sorry about it.

And one of them naturally pulled himself together sufficiently to say, “To the bride!”

Silence. Mother and daughter were each thinking their own thoughts. The sun meantime had moved on around until it was shining into the room through the curtain again. Now it was Armanda who checked the time. It was time to pick Nadja up from play school.

“Oh,” said her mother, getting to her feet and looking for her purse. “Bart is a sweetheart. He meant well.”

Armanda went downstairs ahead of her mother. The stairwell was dark except for a bright ceiling light that shone down onto the middle of the first step. At the very moment she was suddenly struck by the conviction that she and her mother had just been conducting a conversation that was totally mad on both their parts, Armanda saw two huge shadows swaying across the wall.

They said good-bye in the sun-flooded front doorway. Intending to finally tidy herself up and change her clothes, as Sjoerd would be home in an hour, Armanda was about to close the door behind her when she heard, “Wait! Wait! Armanda!”

Oh, please, she thought, no!

And, before she knew what was happening, she was back in the living room next to a panting Betsy, who had called out, “Only a moment, just to say hello,” but had now discovered the photos on the table and was bent over them, stirring them to life again.

Armanda followed. Still barefoot, she followed the glance of her friend, who quickly pulled out a photo of the adorable Nadja. The child had been a bridesmaid.

“Do you remember?” asked Betsy, glancing sideways surreptitiously, with a curious expression.

Of course. Armanda nodded in a slightly sleepy way, but she remembered everything. She relived the whole incident, seeing it more precisely now than she had the first time around. After the ceremony in the church there had been no reception, better not to, but a formal banquet in an old house on the Geldersekade, a property that could be rented with its own staff for private parties. After the main course, when everyone was swapping places or running around a little, and she, Armanda, was sitting under a palm tree adjusting something on her dress, Nadja came up to her newly married mother. Somewhere in the background an accordionist and two violinists were playing.

“How pretty she looks.” Betsy said.

Armanda cocked her head to one side and looked at the photo, slightly confused. Suddenly she felt the memory of herself with the little girl come flooding over her.

“Oh, my sweetie pie …” She stopped short.

Extremely elegant, as only a four-and-a-half-year-old bridesmaid can be, Nadja had walked all the way across the room, hopped and skipped a couple of times, never once blinking her large pale green eyes, till she jumped with outstretched little hands onto Armanda, smiling under her palm tree. A little game. Definitely. A little act of aggression, like a cat that forgets what it’s doing for a moment because it’s been blissfully stroked for too long. Suddenly a smack from the little hand landed unhappily on Armanda’s outstretched cheek, and little fingers clutched at the pearls on one of her earrings, which got torn off. Inadvertent, really not intended. Can happen. But the little girl in her white dress, with the copper-red hair, knew nothing, absolutely nothing about the fact that before her mother there had been another mother, as nobody in the first chaotic days had wanted to talk to her about it and afterward it just hadn’t happened; and the little girl stood there looking at the blood welling out of Armanda’s ear, as if this stream of red was the very thing she had wanted to see on this memorable day. Armanda had risen to her feet. She had bent down, taken Nadja by the hand, and pulled her along. And while several of the guests got onto their knees to search for the pearl, Armanda and Nadja spun round in a merry circle to one of the Viennese waltzes being played at top speed by the three musicians. Whenever her feet left the floor entirely, the little one crowed with laughter. At one moment Armanda felt a stab of a compulsion — which would only grow stronger between the time of the party and the session with the photos — both to hug her small dance partner and to join her in bursting into tears.

A little cough. Betsy was watching her discreetly out of the corner of her eye, as she could feel. Oh, Nadja, she thought. Oh, such a pitiable little creature, who first of all has no real mother, only a substitute, in a world in which you can expire in thunder and lightning like a heroine in a tragedy, but in which you can also be granted the freedom to live a totally banal life from one day to the next, with no greater mystery to struggle with than one you’ve inherited from someone else. Oh, poor little half-orphan!

“You know,” she said to Betsy, “maybe you’ll think I’m crazy for saying this, and even crazier for saying it to you of all people, so please don’t take it badly, but in some way I feel like a half-orphan.”

They stared at each other for a moment, each of them unfathomable, and Armanda said quickly, “I mean, a half-orphan as regards my own life. Everyone has a past and a future, which sounds really banal, you’ll say, but I don’t care, that’s how it is.”

Betsy, up for more, kept quiet.

“Yes, really, everyone has a past, a run-up to the present, and that’s your youth, at least for normal mortals, in which you were already fully the creature that you are now, it wouldn’t be possible any other way, would it, but mostly it first took the form of a promise. I know, nice story, my run-up to today isn’t to be found in my past, it’s … tsch … it’s in my dead sister. So let’s …” She turned around, reached for the tea things, and stared crossly at the photos of the most beautiful day of her life. “Just call my past what it really is: a step-past.”

Betsy, who had promised only to stay a minute and didn’t want to offer the slightest excuse for more tea to be brewed, started making hasty, spur-of-the-moment remarks about starting a new life, which were meant to cheer her up. She, Armanda, she said, was herself, Armanda, and absolutely nothing could prevent her from choosing her own path through life and making it a great success. Finish your studies first, you hear me? Get your hair cut. Paint the doors and stairs in your house blue or green. Buy yourself a ficus tree….

But Armanda kept shaking her head thoughtfully as Betsy, all excited, came to the end of her long list with: “Love your husband!” And gave a merry look as she brought up the night at the school play; she and Lidy had got the giggles when the leading actor, who was seriously drunk, said, “If you’re on the planet, it’s a fact that you’ve got a no-account job in nowheresville.”

“Well, Betsy, don’t misunderstand me, but how does this sound? ‘If I’m on the planet, it’s a fact that strictly speaking I’m my elder sister.’”

Armanda chose a cookie, a café noir, Betsy did the same, and for a moment the two of them stood there nibbling, first with a grin, then expressionlessly, but quite peacefully; for their conjoint nibbling was actually an echo of Lidy and Armanda as sisters, since everyone always said they were exactly alike.

“Absolutely not,” Armanda suddenly said unexpectedly. “We distinguished between the two of us the way only sisters can. We knew it. If you live that close together, if you grow up minute by minute in a world that’s almost yours, but by a hair’s breadth not quite, then you register the tiniest things about each other that are different.”

Her face was animated now. Had she not at that moment heard the front door opening and closing downstairs, she would have been able to chatter with her beloved visitor. For however odd, even mad, her conversation with her mother had seemed a short while ago, she had felt that she was being completely rational in the other conversation that had just followed it. “Fundamentally different!” she had said again. “Brothers always want to be the opposite of brothers, and sisters of sisters. Oppositeness is at the root of the brother or sister relationship. I’m pretty certain that’s the case. So now that my past has been exchanged for hers, while her future has passed to me, there’s this veil of bottomless sadness, though naturally I try to ignore it.”

That is roughly the kind of thing she might have said, slightly breathlessly but in a heartfelt way, if she hadn’t heard someone coming up the stairs.

She blushed.

20. Sunny Day II

Sjoerd and Armanda Blaauw-Brouwer. Married couple.

They too took a brief look at the photographs together, why is not clear, for the two of them were focused on something else entirely; Sjoerd had just thrown the jacket of his beautiful light gray suit onto a chair. He was now in his late twenties, a tall, slender man with carefully combed blond hair and a face that was beginning to show the open, straightforward, intelligent qualities that are valued in the world of money and business. With an arm around Armanda’s hips, he bent loyally over the photos. It’s well known that when a newly married couple first sees their wedding portrait, the bride looks only at the bride and the bridegroom does the same. One could switch bridegrooms in the darkroom for fun, but never brides.

“Beautiful,” murmured Sjoerd, without the faintest astonishment over the snow-white dress lifting away from the neck and the little hat, perched at an angle to set off the beloved little face, and the bouquet held up under the chin, that he must know from a previous photo, already glued into the album, in the same always-flattering three-quarter pose. His eyes were already elsewhere. He turned around purposefully and felt Armanda’s whole body respond immediately, as he had expected, with a yes! yes! During this afternoon’s meeting with the administrative department of the Capital Investment Committee of Mees & Hope, he had felt as miserable as a dog, almost ill with sheer repressed impatience to get home. It was his first week back at work after his ten-day honeymoon, the first three days of which had been extremely peculiar, because after so much hesitation, he and Armanda had felt no desire for each other at all.

Neither of them had been able to understand it.

The wedding banquet in the Geldersekade was still going on when they escaped at around five thirty. After they had changed clothes at number 36 and number 77 respectively, they put their luggage in the trunk of the Skoda and began their honeymoon journey to Normandy. First stopping point was a village near Rotterdam, a surprise for Armanda, just like the beautiful hotel there where Sjoerd had made reservations. They arrived at around eight. Along the way they had still been talking about the party at first, then, when the car left the main road, Armanda, showing her surprise, had gamely read out the place-names of the little towns they passed through, Alblasserdam, Ridderkerk, while the bright blue sky turned slowly to a deeper blue. She awoke on her husband’s shoulder in front of the hotel, it was still light, but there was a thin layer of mist over the flagstones and the surrounding area. They dealt with the formalities at reception, took the elevator, walked down a long, brilliantly lit corridor, and came to their room, outside which the porter was just lifting their suitcases off a gold-colored luggage cart.

It was idiotic, but the moment the door closed, neither of them knew how to deal with the sudden proximity of the other. Okay, go and stand close. Armanda was happy that he immediately threw his arms around her; she cuddled up to him, kissed him somewhere on the face, now I must be happy, she probably thought, and probably that’s what he thought too. Free at last! At last we can do and not do whatever we want! Meantime they avoided looking directly at each other, Armanda even kept her eyes closed and found herself thinking, whether she wanted to or not, about her suitcase with its tightly packed, freshly ironed clothes, some of which she ought to hang up right away. Sjoerd, over her shoulder, looked out of the window.

He left her standing there.

“Take a look, see what it’s like outside.”

Of course she followed him. “Beautiful,” she said as she slipped off her shoes and felt how small she was next to him on the soft carpet. They leaned side by side on the window bench. Dusk was falling, the sky turned yellow, and they were looking at a rolling countryside, meadows, trees, with a broad stream of water running through it, flat and pale in the mist, and on the other bank a row of eight or nine windmills. What was there to say about it? It was nature, the windmills included, as they stood there in a pensive row, their vanes motionless despite the weak to middling northwest wind, fixed, the sails rolled up. A few minutes later, when they were lying in each other’s arms in bed, cheek to cheek, Sjoerd still saw the windmills in his mind’s eye, and Armanda was realizing that there were two, three dresses and a blouse that she really had to hang up right away.

“Just a moment,” she said and rolled away from him.

Without paying any further attention to him, as if she were alone in the room, Armanda opened her suitcase and began carefully to unfold several pieces of clothing at the shoulders, to inspect them and then hang them up. Sjoerd listened to the hangers being pushed this way and that, heard bathwater running a little later, and dozed off in a scent of soap and perfume. The next thing that happened was a naked Armanda tiptoeing to the bed, and then an Armanda in a nightshirt tiptoeing to the bed again. To take a good, long look.

All he had taken off was his shirt, which she picked up off the floor. Then she began to fumble with his shoelaces. It is perfectly possible to undress a sleeping man without his noticing, but as soon as you pull down his pants, he will wake up for a moment unless he’s dead drunk. Sjoerd, without a moment’s thought, crawled under the covers and sank back happily into a deep sleep. Armanda went round the room switching off the lamps, then slipped into bed on her side. She dropped off to sleep too, a heavy, abandoned sleep, though with interruptions. The first time she awoke, she lay there, surrounded by a glowing warmth, in the pitch darkness, and began to actually pant when she realized that Sjoerd was starting to caress her the way he had once a long time before, in the bedroom at number 36, when an oh-so-unemphatic ring at the doorbell had interrupted them. To heighten her desire, she thought back to it in detail, to this postponement, intending, with superstitious naïveté, to have everything from back then happen all over again, this time with a happy ending. When she opened her eyes for the second time, she knew immediately that she was alone in bed. There was tobacco smoke in the room, and it was still dark, but not completely. As she allowed her mind to dawdle peacefully over the fact that what was supposed to happen had happened, she heard the wind, strong now and blowing from the west, whistle against the wall of the building, and she turned her head away.

He was standing at the window with his back to her. Ground mist, mist on the water, and a row of water mills, their lower parts invisible, their vanes with the white starched sails spinning madly, joyously, in circles. What effect does such an image have on a young woman who has just woken up? If she saw the tip of his cigarette glow from time to time and then disappear again, she was lucky.

For three days they felt almost no desire for each other, and Armanda found herself ugly. Then she noticed that whether the moment was suitable or not, her eyes would linger whenever she looked at him.

“Come with me,” he said on the fourth day, when for a moment she found herself unable to utter another word. They were already in a hotel in the Strandboulevard in Houlgate and had made love on all three nights.

She came to his side, he took her hand, and they climbed the path through the dunes and up to their room.

How is that possible, she wondered some time later.

The bedroom revealed a certain customary disorder in the middle of the afternoon, and through the window you could hear the sea. She liked hearing her husband snoring on her shoulder with an innocent face. How is it possible? she thought, by which she meant: Three days, it’s only three days, two days before yesterday, the day before yesterday, then yesterday, I’ve never heard or read anywhere that as time elapses, it exposes each of us to its manipulations and its unmistakable side effects, though we have no idea where these come from and how they work. The way we kissed first! Then took off our clothes so uninhibitedly, so fast, so urgently!

On the floor a man’s shirt, a top-quality pair of light gray trousers, men’s shoes — no, no women’s shoes — and a pair of panties, obviously toe-kicked right over into the corner behind the vanity, where they would have to be searched for later; the long shadow of a tree outside in the inner courtyard; inside, another piece of clothing, a worn checked dress that carried some vague memory, but one that wasn’t damaging to anybody. In bed the pair of lovers who belonged to these belongings.

Armanda: for the first time in her life as a married woman, experiencing the long pang of what is also known as la petite mort.

21. By Chance, a Low High Tide

Years later, when Lidy had been long dead, the experts were united about one thing: it could have been worse. Had the moon, for example, been close to the earth, as it had been two weeks earlier on January 18, then the astronomical high tide could have used its pull to rise almost another two feet. An absolutely exceptional spring tide would then have been a possibility.

The possibility that did occur during this night was the following. A farm, between Zierikzee and Dreischor. The sea, that had risen to within three feet of the attic floor. Moonlight, ear-deadening noise, a wind now blowing in short blasts, that seemed to temper the movement of the waves in the deeper water over the fields even as it reinforced the speed of the current coming over the road. The great mass of the water pounded against the sides and back of the trailer, which miraculously had not yet cracked to pieces. Inside the house, Cau, Lidy, and Gerarda Hocke were asking themselves if it might be possible for these people to ferry themselves across using a door to one of the stalls that was floating around as a makeshift raft.

And indeed, something seemed to be separating itself from the wagon. Ignoring the rumbling of the furniture down below them, they watched the little load approach. It was managing to keep on course with the help of the rope slung around a roof beam at this end and attached to something else at the other. It didn’t take that long. Dragged in over the windowsill dripping wet, three of the four passengers stood there for a long minute, gasping for air. Lidy noticed that they brought with them a heavy stench of putrefaction. And somewhat later, as she and Gerarda Hocke stripped off their sodden clothes, wiped away the greasy mud as best they could, and offered them bedding and safety on the ice-cold floor, she had a sudden image of them as a gaggle of newborn babies. The trio consisted of a tall man with a thick shock of hair, an extremely pregnant woman, not his wife, as was later established, and a little boy of about eight, her son. Number four had stayed behind on the raft.

As Lidy ran to the window to see how he was getting on, he was already halfway across on the return journey. She watched as the boy, down on his knees, kept moving his hands along the rope and pulling.

Water usually follows wind by a matter of two or three hours. Later, oceanographers would calculate that the whipping up of the waters could have been significantly worse. For the hurricane, which achieved maximum strength on the coast of Scotland, had weakened a little to the south over the North Sea, as the flood was reaching its height on the coasts of the provinces of Zeeland and Holland. Wind speeds can moderate over land due to friction, but over water they do what these winds did. It would have been possible, people reckoned later, for the pronounced trough of low pressure that moved that night from Scotland over the German Bight and on southeast to deviate a little from its course. Had it done so, the Scottish wind speeds and the Dutch northwest storm would have combined with truly fatal results.

The hunchbacked boy had succeeded in making fast to the wagon again. At that moment two seas broke over it, one of them carrying a piece of debris on its crest. It cut deep into Izak Hocke’s forehead, the trailer tipped over, but stayed hitched. Shortly before the tractor sank, the last five drowning people made it onto the raft; the rope that had been hanging slack was pulled tight by those in the house. It worked, but everyone was at the end of their strength now; the door was too small for five people and too big to be maneuvered with such a load on it.

Hocke crawled quickly to the other side, and Cornelius Jaeger let himself drop into the water, water that tonight was seventeen feet above Normal Amsterdam Water Level, but that according to experts later on could easily have risen by another seven feet if a third factor had not helpfully intervened. The water level in this area is determined not only by the sea that comes thundering eastward against the coast but also by the rivers that flow continuously west. December and January that year had been unusually dry in the Alps and in the Vosges. If the precipitation in the upper reaches of the Rhine, the Maas, and the Schelde had been typical for the time of year, then, adding to the already devastating situation, there would have been a catastrophe in the estuaries of literally fantastic proportions.

A man had half climbed, half fallen through the window. He immediately got to his feet and turned around, waving his arms, to yell something to his wife, who was still out in the full grip of the wind. She hadn’t dared to give him her little daughter, who had turned two in November and was huddled under her sodden coat. Beside him, Simon Cau and the man, who had already managed to climb into the attic, were also holding out their arms. A true reception committee to whom she could have handed the little thing.

No. A hopeless situation that seemed to go on for an eternity.

In reality ten, twelve seconds at most elapsed until the young woman on the door that was now banging against the gable lifted her head and saw another young woman leaning far out of the window. The two looked at each other, sharing the knowledge for one despairing second that if she couldn’t keep holding tight to her tiny freezing burden out there in the cold …

“Give her here!” screamed Lidy.

The other woman obeyed.

“Have you got her?”

“Yes.”

They were all inside. The family complete. Izak Hocke and the hunchbacked boy, who was still trembling all over his body, were already busy with wire, wood, and fiberboard, making a makeshift replacement for the shutter in the back gable end. The newly arrived woman put up no resistance. A woolen jacket was held out to her and she pushed her arms into it willingly. Her eyes fixed on the shadows moving on the sheathing under the steep roof in front of her, she waited to see what was expected of her. Lidy meantime seized a chair that was standing in a corner and lifted the apathetic little girl into her lap. Eia popeia, nice and quiet now, rocking comes naturally. Between a natural catastrophe involving 1,836 dead and the fate of this one child, Dina van de Velde, lay countless newspaper articles, newsreels, Red Cross lists, and a five-volume report by the Delta Commission years later.

22. There’s Always Weather

When the child was finally picked up, the weather had changed and there was a cold drizzle. One of the fruit sellers from the Albert Cuyp market had seen her walking along the side of the river and over the Amstel dike, leading toward the Berlage bridge. It was around five, and almost dark already. He was on his delivery bike and had turned at the church and was headed for Van Ostadestraat, where he lived, when he saw her trudging along the opposite side past the soaring bulk of the Generaal Praag, a decommissioned coal ship that had been moored here for years. “She said she was on the way to Rotterdam,” the fruit seller reported to Armanda and Nadine sometime later; they were in no condition at that moment to wonder about it.

He had braked. Nadja was wearing a little white teddy-bear coat. The fruit seller, who would have bet his life that something wasn’t right, pushed his cap back on his head and crossed the street. Where are you off to? Nadja had had no objection to climbing up and sitting in there with the Jonathan apples to ride along with him for a bit with the rain and the wind in her face. Right around the corner was a street of dark tall houses with little shops at ground level, but mainly she was interested in the man who bent way down to the left or right each time he pushed on the pedals. In the little tin shed where the delivery bicycle was kept in its place between crates and sacks, Nadja confided in the fruit seller where she lived. “Number Thirty-six and Number Seventy-seven?” Calm nods from her. About ten minutes later, Nadine Brouwer, anxiously keeping watch outside her front door, saw her granddaughter arrive perched on the bicycle carrier of an unknown individual. The picture this made seemed quite unreal to her, the more so perhaps because of the yellow lamplight shining down on the two of them and the wintry vegetation in the park.

Now something occurred that could best be described as a little competition between Nadja and her mother.

For Armanda too had seen her daughter sitting on the carrier. From the moment Nadja had refused to come out from behind her tree or whatever it was, she had been running around the park, calling and searching in between the bushes, and had gone out onto the Ceintuurbaan to ask everyone she met if they’d seen her. Now she was standing distraught by the drinking fountain at the north entrance to the park, diagonally opposite her parents’ house. Her cry sounded like a ghost crying in a dream even to her own ears, totally muffled, but the man on the bicycle heard it and set his foot on the ground. At this moment Betsy came waddling out of Tweede Jan Steenstraat, very fat, fatter than is normal in the seventh month of pregnancy, and saw Nadja running fast, and managing to evade Armanda as she leapt into her granny’s arms on the front steps of number 77.

“You’re really wrong,” said Betsy that evening to her husband. “It was dry all afternoon.”

Leo had told her he was astonished that Nadja and her playmates had been allowed out into the park in this weather. He jerked his head toward the rain and the third-floor window at the beginning of the almost pitch-dark Prinsengracht, bare elms, black ruffled water.

“Which wasn’t in the forecast,” Betsy continued, as she followed his glance from her position slumped on the sofa with her swollen feet up on a cushion. “It was supposed to be unsettled. Rain showers, cold air coming in from the east, possibility of snow. But the children were determined that it was dry and way above freezing.”

So they had wanted to go outdoors, right after the cake with its six little candles in a layer of frosting. But mother and aunt, who was acting as her assistant, proposed hide-and-seek. It must have been shortly before three when Armanda, standing under the bust of Samuel Sarphati with her hands over her face, began to count, eeny, meeny, miny, mo, while Betsy, also gamely keeping her eyes shut, and wrapped in a warm coat on a park bench, listened and checked that the children had disappeared before the rhyme, a warning now, came to an end.

“I’m coming!”

It’s strange that they didn’t find each other quite quickly. To start with, Nadja was just crouching in a rhododendron bush behind the first gravel path. Soft earth under her feet, she looked down at it absentmindedly, completely focused on not being seen, and didn’t allow herself to notice until some time later that everyone was calling for her, which wasn’t part of the game.

The first thing that not being seen involves, as everyone knows, is not looking, either. Nadja moved backward, her head down against her chest, tripped over a small twig, rolled down a sand hill for several yards, and at some point found a new hiding place in a shallow hollow. Next to it was an old oak tree. That’s where the decision was finally made that had been coming for some time, and the argument that clinched it began with B as in beetle or F as in fly or M as in moth. She didn’t bother to work out which forms of life were now twinkling like a giant handful of precious stones at her feet and moving in some mysterious way. The winter had been mild up till now. Last night De Bilt had recorded the warmest temperature of the century: fifty-two degrees. In any case, it had been raining for days. The enormous insect nest and the bit of the hollow tree it had been in could have fallen down only in the last few months, for the overwintering beetles, flies, bees, and moths had just decided they needed to move on, crawling cautiously at first, then hopping wildly or flying. Oh, marvelous! Astonished, Nadja followed the rainbow-colored creatures, blue, green, some of them even fire red, which were suddenly disappearing as if by magic. Some of them flew up on their transparent tiny wings and hovered in the air so close to her nose that she could see their glittering eyes, and then suddenly — gone. Others crawled around with mysterious single-mindedness, not panicked, quite comfortably, showing her their powerful back legs, their faces elongated into little snouts, their hard, smooth bodies, some of them with stingers, and then suddenly … oh, where did they go? Darkness had already fallen when Nadja, at peace with her decision, went up the Van Woustraat and then down again, and then turned right at the corner where the green neon light was, toward the Amstel dike.

“I just don’t understand,” said Sjoerd that evening after the visitors had gone. Grandpa Brouwer and Uncle Jacob had given the birthday girl a last surprise with a set of tiddlywinks and a Little Black Sambo doll before she went to bed, and Grandma Brouwer, who had already been there during the day, had come back with them for a short moment, to drink a toast to the little monkey. “Absolutely not!” Leaning back from the dining room table balanced on the two back legs of his chair, he looked at Armanda pacing up and down the room with a glass of rosé in her hand. When the child had been missing for more than an hour and a half, she had called him in the office. Pale, his hair standing up every which way, he was in the car turning in to their street when he too saw Nadja jump off the bike, flinch away from her mother, and run. And then leap into the arms of Grandma Nadine, who had squatted down to catch her.

Nadja must have seen herself surrounded by a ring of wet, distraught faces. And from all sides, a slew of questions, which she answered with a smile. It had turned very cold. Everything pointed to a lot more rain or even snow.