Simon Cau greeted the two men with a nod, as they stood crouched over behind the flood planks and smoked.
“So?” asked Cau.
The men didn’t answer. What was the point? Because the concrete roadbed leading to the quay had no slots in it, never had, they had laid some sandbags against the lowest beam, but the sea was already spraying a little water through them again.
“Very high,” said Cau, pointing with his chin toward the water. “I’ve never seen it so high here in my life.”
The two workmen nodded, but they weren’t pulling long faces the way the dike sheriff was; they took a brief look at the young woman who had fetched up here, didn’t recognize her, and then straightened up to look over the timbers of the barrier at the unholy blue-tinged expanse behind. High. That was certainly the word for it. The sea, never in their experience so far inland, looked to them like a maddened beast penned in behind their shoulders.
“Another four inches,” said one of them, turning back again, “and it’s going to be coming over.”
Simon Cau looked at the other man silently, glanced sideways again as if trying to persuade himself that the half-rotted wood, already bowing forward under the pressure from the other side, would certainly hold, and said, “Going to be like this for another two hours. Won’t be high tide till then.”
He had spoken in a formal way, unsure of himself in his role as officer-very-late-arriving-on-duty, but the men both signaled their solidarity in a way that implied “Right.” And one of them said, “Not much we can do, is there?”
A couple of the other bystanders joined them. Slightly in disarray thanks to the howling of the wind and the interruption of their sleep, they chimed in with their own ideas of what could happen next. The sea dike here at the harbor suddenly dipped more than six feet below its height farther away. No one paid much attention to Lidy; the circumstances were too unusual, and the very fact that she was here at this impossible time of night made her one of them, half-awake, half-asleep, half-focused, half-calm, with the sly cunning of the mad who know that reality is what it is, and must be accommodated.
So she was freezing now. Scarf pulled down over her forehead. Hands deep in the pockets of a dark gray winter coat. As she looked over at Cau and heard him pronounce that it was impossible for things to come out well, he struck her as sounding sharp, indeed very suspicious. And, far from being capable of seeing the despair that in some people resembles pugnacity, far from being capable of registering the shame, the appalling remorse of a man who knows he has committed the misjudgment of a lifetime, the error that will define him until his death, she didn’t understand him anymore. His cheeks made two deep vertical furrows on either side of his mouth.
“What does the bürgermeister say?” he barked, after a pause.
Alert, very dependable. One would have to know him well to know that his loyalty was rooted in a single passion that had long been concealed from the outside world. A man can love a farm every bit as much as he loves a woman.
On June 14, 1947, at the open auction for the Gabriëllina property, when Simon Cau had learned that his was the highest bid, his knuckles went white. More than a year before, he had buried his wife, a farm wife, who had understood the force of his will over the years and had only occasionally, on sleepless nights, reminded him that this was his life and there was no point waiting for another one, she hadn’t given him children. The latter argument was no argument at all. With or without heirs, Simon Cau signed on the dotted line, and the business, which he and his now dead brothers had leased twenty-five years before, became his property for the contractual sum of 37,000 guilders. And yes, a different life, with the same summers, winters, meadows, fields, drainage ditches, and weather reports, began! It makes quite a difference whether one is a farmer’s tenant or the big farmer oneself. When he received the letter with the request from the polder authorities, he was not surprised. No one else knew more about the drainage on the polders than he did.
He wrote his reply that same evening with great seriousness. “I would like to accept this appointment and I promise you to engage all my skills in the care of the dike and the polder.” So it was that from then on, when there were storms, he sometimes went to the dike and sometimes not, depending on when it crossed his mind, to check whether flood timbers needed to be brought or sand required; in such matters the dike sheriff is his own authority. And at the meetings of the dike association he was always a most amiable leader of the company, and soon came to terms with the fact that no matter how one pleaded or haggled with the royal authorities or the local ones, there was no money for the dikes so soon after the war, though everyone knew that they were a joke with regard to a storm that was certainly in the general calculations but that unfortunately came too soon.
Snowflakes stuck to her cheeks. The wind sometimes brought moonlight with it, and sometimes icy precipitation. So there she stood on this winter night on a muddy landing stage, a sliver of ground by the Grevelingen, which was an arm of the North Sea piling toward land under the force of tempest and spring tides but held back by five ancient timbers in a fence, and she felt no fear. Of course she saw the danger, she wasn’t crazy, like all the others she could see very well that no power on earth could hold back the biblical flood, but it still seemed a beautiful thing to her that one could have such a close-up view of the situation and know that one had done everything that could be done.
Meantime it escaped no one that Simon Cau was cracking up. When he asked the two workmen what the bürgermeister’s view of things was, his voice was harsh and his face looked furious. The two of them looked back both somberly and obsequiously, and shrugged.
“We couldn’t wake him.”
To which Cau, even more angrily, replied, “Did you hammer on the door?”
They had.
“Yelled? Threw stones at the bedroom window?”
That too. And they’d also telephoned twice, unsuccessfully, from a farmhouse on the Krabbenhoeksweg.
“That’s the limit!”
Very nervous. Was he the only one to understand that they were faced with an enormity? The two men he was addressing nonetheless stayed calm. They simply asked themselves if they shouldn’t be going home. Lidy asked herself nothing. She waited for them to finally set off in the car again. Where to was a mystery, but she’d stopped caring.
Cau was about to say something crude about the bürgermeister when his attention was so distracted that everyone turned round to look. Two girls were pedaling toward them in the darkness from the direction of the village. Silvery blond hair was blowing in every direction from under the caps they wore pulled down tight over their heads. Although the others here had also come the same way, they had pushed their bikes for most of the distance. The girls were lurching along yard by yard and didn’t dismount till they reached the group.
“Horrible weather,” they said breathlessly. “You can barely move.”
It was the Hin sisters, daughters of the tavernkeeper and owner of the gas station, who lived with his family at the three-branched fork in the inner dike that was known as the Gallows. They must have been eighteen or nineteen years old; faces white with cold, they were wearing their nightdresses with a winter coat over the top, and high boots. Their father, they reported, had sent them off with instructions to reach a couple of the outlying houses and tell people they’d be better off coming to the tavern tonight because it was on higher ground. He himself had mounted his motorbike and had gone with his son to the inner lock on the Anna-Sabina polder, where the gate was so rusted after many years that it probably couldn’t be closed, but it was worth a try.