“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.