The detour that Simon Cau was taking now led directly to the sea dike, where a few little harbors used to ship farm produce lay in a bay of the Grevelingen. Lidy, who had lost any idea of where she was some time ago, along with any sense of time, straightened herself up at a certain point: on the left-hand side of the road she thought she was seeing some kind of ghostly apparition running toward them in the beam of the headlights. Simon Cau braked. He knew exactly where he was, he also knew the boy lurching at them, yet he brought the car to a halt in a kind of trance.
“The water’s coming!”
It was his nephew, Marien Cau, who was poking his windblown head through the open car window. The boy had studied advanced agricultural economy, but the only thing that counted for his widowed, childless uncle was that he had proved himself to be perfect with horses.
“Are you heading for the stables?”
“Yes.”
The two of them consulted for a moment, while Cau, prey to some wild, rising impatience, kept peering through the windshield in the direction of the dike, which here, right in the Grevelingen, rose a good twenty feet above the official Normal Amsterdam Water Level. The boy, they agreed, should continue to his uncle’s farm without delay, where the animal quotient consisted of not just the ten horses that were the pride and joy of both uncle and nephew but also thirty cows. It was almost two thirty in the morning, it was not yet high tide, and neither Simon nor Marien Cau had yet seen the water come right over the dike. Nevertheless, they agreed that the boy should untie the cows for safety’s sake. The cowshed was low-lying. The road, and the inner dike, ran approximately five feet higher. It was an impulsive thought, and not illogical, but neither of them had ever tested it as an emergency measure. This night Marien would indeed herd the cows out up onto the dike, and his uncle, unable to reach the farm anymore, would be able to watch from a window on the other side of the road to see it being done. But the cows, all thirty of them, would be found some weeks later by a group of men nicknamed the cadaver team, their bloated bodies dragged up out of the mud. The cowshed being the only thing they knew, they had swum back to it in the darkness. The horses …
Horses are something else. It is certain that Simon Cau told his nephew and chosen successor to get to the horses first, as soon as he reached the farm, to talk to them, calm them down, and watch over them till his uncle returned from his mission. But nothing happened that way. Two of the horses, the heaviest and most handsome, were photographed some days later by a journalist in a boat. They had been standing for more than fifty hours in water by then, up to their nostrils at first, then even up to their withers as time went on. The photo, intended to be a prize shot, was for the next day’s paper. Two horses, about sixty feet between them, turned away from the camera lens in a gray-white rectangle of endless sea. That they had been intelligent enough to remain on the dike can be seen from some things sticking up from the water in front of them, and the parapet of a bridge. The two horses seem to find themselves in some mysterious harmony with their hopeless situation. In exactly the same poses, heads turned a little to the left in the direction of the wind, they stare at the water, each moved independently by the same feeling of deep sadness that they are the only creatures surviving on earth.
“Back soon, back soon!”
As the Citroën drove on, nothing in the atmosphere inside suggested an intention to make for home and bed as soon as possible. The car heading for the unloading docks was being driven by a man who was feverishly preoccupied with practical things. Beside him was a young woman who, once again, had no role here. However, even she felt the strange — or perhaps not so much strange as concentrated — aura of danger in which people know that something has to be done. After about five minutes the dike appeared, a hunchbacked silhouette against the moonlight. Turn right here and a half mile farther on you came to the loading docks, which were no more than a mooring place where, in accordance with regulations, the passage through the dike to the quay had to be closed at high tide with flood fencing.
But the car braked and stopped right here. After a moment, Simon Cau bent over and ran for the dike, to try to climb it on hands and knees. An unreal sight. What was he trying to do, grabbing onto the weeds to pull himself up the pitiful structure, which had been built as steep as possible to save money? Sinking down continually into the waterlogged mole tunnels that riddled the entire edifice, he reached the crown. It was impossible to stand upright on this arched crest, barely twenty inches across, in the teeth of the hurricane. Cau pressed his stomach to the ground, held on to his cap with both hands, and lifted his head, drenched with flying water, a fraction. What are visions of terror? Unreal things against an unreal backdrop? Simon Cau drew in his breath with a loud gasp. What he was looking at, almost at eye level, was an oncoming mass of water that had no end.
Lidy too got out for a moment. She stood there beside the embankment, which was echoing from inside with a sonorous, throbbing roar audible through the wind. She listened without knowing what was causing the throbbing: a mountain of sand coated with a thin layer of clay, which after years of seawater washing over it was useless. On the very narrow crown, a few little walls erected here and there after the flood of 1906, with spaces to let the sheep through. The inner side was already so cracked even back then that it is a miracle that it had held until tonight before crumbling in the space of an hour and a half under the enormous hydraulic pressure on the outer side, foundering into the ditch of the inner dike. The outer side, undermined, will withstand the sea for a further fifteen minutes before finally collapsing.
Lidy tugged her feet out of the mud and ran back to the car. Even on the reinforced road, the ground was shaking perceptibly.
10. Seeing Her
April had begun with rain, but since yesterday you could smell spring. Armanda was taking a stroll along the Kloveniersburgwal, after spending the entire afternoon in lectures. The sun was shining in her face, and she’d unbuttoned her coat. The weather report in De Bilt had forecast a moderate west wind, but instead it turned from northeast to southeast and slackened to the point where the flags outside the Hotel de L’Europe hung down limp.
From the Amstel bridge she saw Sjoerd coming from the direction of the Muntplein, which was no surprise, since the bank he worked in was on the Rokin. She raised her arm, saw that he spotted her, and waited. Nothing was more logical than that they should walk home together. It was Monday. During the week, Sjoerd Blaauw ate dinner with the Brouwers, his in-laws, who had also taken in his two-year-old daughter, full of affection for her and totally understanding that she would spend weekends at home with her father. Armanda, the way things worked out, also tended to spend some time there too.