The girls looked away from the circle of faces toward the other side of the open expanse, where somewhere in the darkness was the little house they wanted to make their last call.
“We must get going,” they said.
But Simon Cau was looking in the opposite direction and then back at the dike workers. While the girls were talking about their father and brother — who were certainly trying in vain at this very moment to cope with an immovable piece of scrap metal — Cau must have come to the realization that he had failed to take care of the two inner sluices in his own polder. Both were reasonably well-maintained mechanisms, built of cast iron in a casing of plastered stone. At high tide he usually lowered them, one of the standard measures that nobody ever thought about. The dike-enclosed inner polder didn’t draw its excess water off into the sea but into the ditches of the neighboring Louise polder, which then took it across the Vrouw Jansz polder to the pumping station at the docks for agricultural produce on the Grevelingen. If one closed the sluices of the inner dike at high tide, the polder, should the sea dike give way farther along, would also be protected from direct contact with the sea.
Simon Cau shook his head swiftly several times, like a man trying to stir up something in his memory. In an accusatory way, not making eye contact, he reminded the dike workers about the Dirk sluice and the sluice at Draiideich.
“Get going! Now!”
Yes, chief, and they were already on their way. The two dike workers ran with deliberately long strides, so as not to slip on the muddy ground, toward the tractor, which was still hitched to the cart with the last of the sand. Meanwhile the handful of people who had come out of curiosity started back to the village. “Look at that,” said one of them, pointing to the left side of the dike, apparently feeling that the vision in the moonlight rendered him and all the others now setting off home something close to sleepwalkers. A tongue of foam, followed by a swell of black water, licked over the crown of the dike.
As his companions all moved away, Cau, as if nailed to the spot, stared at the gobs of foam shooting past him. The advance guard of the floodwater was pouring in a glistening stream down over the dike. But surely the water came up over the protective barriers somewhere on this island almost every year? Somewhere this island was always underwater. And it was well known that in 1944, when the Germans, who feared an invasion, left the sluices in the delta open, the land was flooded without raising any surprise. People here were really used to water, but tonight the situation was obviously scaring Simon Cau. As Lidy headed for the car and the Hin sisters began to push their bikes through the sand to the road, Cau hesitated and stood still, leaning against the wind. He moved his lips and made a face, as if he were assessing the massed weight of what was behind the dike and preparing, if possible, to take it on his own head, neck, and shoulders.
She had driven with Cau and the Hin girls to the last address on the pair’s list. She sat in the backseat with one sister, while the other, in front, gave Cau directions. They had come along because Simon Cau, desperate to appear to be in charge at the dock, had ordered them to leave their bikes; they could come back for them tomorrow, he would drive them. They reached the little house. Quick now! Cau kept the engine running. One sister leapt out of the car with Lidy, and both of them ran immediately to the windowpanes, but these were already making such a noise in the wind that their hammering did no good, and everything inside stayed dark. So they went around the house, through the vegetable garden, already underwater, to the back, where they banged on a crooked side door that had a little window at eye level. Meanwhile Cau, waiting on the road, must have felt the pressure of time to be unbearable.
Suddenly the wind was drowned out by the heavy blast of a horn.
Lidy froze. In the pitch dark, without a conscious memory, she was called to order. A signal from home. Loud, long, three notes. The cramp that ran all the way into her fingertips was like an electric shock. For a long moment, shocked awake as if from an anesthetic, she was back in her own life, along with everything that belonged in it, father, mother, sister, husband, child, and then just as swiftly, just as she registered all this, it was gone again. Behind the door a dog had begun to bark.
The little window opened. A vague face had showed itself.
Now they were on their way again, between pollarded willows bent over at odd angles. Lidy’s legs were wet only to the knees; the girl beside her was soaked to the waist. Because the road was underwater, they had failed to notice the hollow filled with spurting water as they raced back to the car. Lidy had suddenly seen the girl sink, and had grabbed for her reflexively. It wasn’t clear why, but the Hin girls were now insisting on taking part in the next stage as well.
The village, in which every inhabitant had crawled under the covers.
The sleep of the simple minded: on the other side of the island, ten miles farther south, with a sound of thunder like the end of the world, the sea dike had just given way. The fourteen-ton front of a lock was lifted out of its colossal iron joints. The windows in the lockkeeper’s house were blown out by the pressure, even before the building was flattened by the water, and everything in the surrounding area rocked as if under bombardment. From a place named Simonskerkerinlaag after the village that had drowned there hundreds of years before, the Oosterschelde poured in a torrent over the polder.
They were driving straight for the village on an unpaved road. Cau pointed at the church tower and ordered them to begin by ringing the warning bells.
“But they’re rung electrically now,” said one of the girls, as if she knew that the current was about to fail or had already failed.
“Electrically or with a rope, I don’t care.”
Lidy took her eyes off the road to look at the glowing tip of Cau’s cigarette. Twenty hours and an awkward excursion had been sufficient to exchange the familiar bright reality of everyone she had lived with until now for these traveling companions.
Between them and the oncoming tidal wave were still two inner dikes.
12. Dreams and Ghosts
It was a day in late February 1954, a month with so little sun that De Bilt was talking about it as the second-darkest month of the century. In contrast with the year before, there hadn’t been much wind. De Bilt said that not since records had started being kept in 1848 had there been a February with so little wind.
As Armanda, rolled umbrella in hand, opened the door to the hair salon, at exactly the moment when the shop’s bell rang, a harsh ray of sunlight shone in like a path of trick light of the kind that appears when the sun is hidden behind fast-moving rain clouds. She said hello to no one in particular, hung her coat on the stand, and went to one of the seats covered in fake leather in front of the row of mirrors. It was quiet in the salon, Tuesday afternoon, two o’clock. Armanda, who wasn’t planning to have any changes made to her haircut, stretched out her legs. She had come to be cheered up by the sight of the flacons, the brushes, and the hair dryers, and to look at herself in the mirror.
The hairdresser, an Indonesian of indeterminable age, his neck outstretched in an attitude of permanent devotion, positioned himself behind her chair. Their eyes met in the mirror, smiling in understanding, and then they both looked at her reflection in the brightly lit glass.