“Wake them,” she had had time to ask quickly, “and then what?” They had climbed out of the car at the church. The sky had begun to rain large hailstones. Simon Cau had wanted to start ringing the storm bell immediately, but although the church door stood open, they discovered by the light of a match that the door to the tower was locked. Back outside, as they stood in the moonlight that had somehow found its way through to them, Lidy had looked into Simon Cau’s face. And seen that he had no belief in his own orders, but didn’t know what else to do.
“Wake them!”
She did what she was told. It wasn’t easy. It was obvious that nobody here had any wish to interrupt their sleep. Embarrassed, she stood between doors and windows that remained closed to her hammering. Everything was calm and secure in the world behind them, she could feel it; buried in their bedclothes, legs curled up, men, women, and children slept with slow heartbeats. Inhaling the warm breath of their sleeping companions, they placed their trust in the strength of their inadequate imaginations and let her muddle on in the storm that was just a storm, that swooped down into the narrow street and howled through it as if through a fallen chimneypot.
She looked around. Nothing but this bedlam of noise. Suddenly it occurred to her that absolutely nobody knew she was here. With a new kind of unease she crossed the street, decided on the door to a small shop, and banged, palms out, on its upper portion. Unreal village, she thought, with the fearfulness of someone who knows herself to be overlooked by an oblivious God and her oblivious fellow men. If nobody has any idea where you are and cannot form any image of it, do you exist? Her eyes slid over the white letters, carefully painted in italics on the dull glass pane above the shop door: Baked Goods.
Someone had awakened in the apartment at the back. An alert, elderly lady who heard noises in her sleep that her ears couldn’t identify as a normal part of foul weather like this. She felt her way blindly into her bedroom slippers. The light wasn’t working, so she lit a candle. She was about to go directly to answer the drumming on the front door when she noticed a faint roar from somewhere in the house that demanded her more urgent attention. A moment later she was standing in amazement in the toilet, where the water was spouting up out of the pan as if from a spring. She turned around, hurried through the shop, and opened the door.
“Come look at this,” she said, and Lidy followed her.
It was one of those lavatories that had been carpentered together out of planks and sheet metal against the outside wall at some point in the past, capturing every bad smell forever. Now it had a white porcelain toilet bowl and a lacquered cistern above it with a chain. Lidy and the old woman, who had survived most of her life without electricity and had possessed this beautiful WC with its connection to the sewage system for only the last four years, which made it still a daily enchantment, looked first at the high-spurting column of water and then at each other.
Their reactions were almost simultaneous.
“The light’s out too.”
“The water’s up over the sea dike already, I’ve seen it myself.”
The woman in her white nightgown turned round, because someone was coming through the hall, lantern in hand.
“Nothing’s working anymore,” she complained loudly but patiently to the man whom she didn’t yet recognize but took to be a neighbor.
She couldn’t know how right she was. For at this moment elsewhere on the island the first telephone poles were coming down. The total isolation had begun. There were, it is true, a few telephone operators at their posts in some of the slumbering villages, attentive employees who had gone to work in the belief that the need to make an emergency call to the provincial or even the national authorities tonight might not be just the product of an overzealous sense of duty. But none of them got through. In some places the telephone switchboard was an old-fashioned operation, run by hand with a generator that produced its own power, and it happened a couple of times that the operator, totally concentrated on the alarm call even as the flood-waters poured into the building, received an electric shock as the water reached the height of his chair and the stool supporting the equipment with its worn but indestructible parts. This was a lost island. It would be submerged completely, without the outside world lifting a finger or even noticing, because as chance would have it, this confluence of the position of the moon and the endless wind happened during a weekend.
Nonetheless: one extraordinary exception.
Very early in the morning, a post office employee was still trying. At the last moment, shortly before the technical equipment gave up the ghost and the last shutters on the telephone exchange fell off, he managed to dial the number of a fairly high official. He reached him personally.
“Yes?”
The chief engineer of the Royal Hydraulic Engineering Authorities was three-quarters asleep. The phone operator had to repeat his request twice, in different formulations. “I’m calling you in desperation, something’s got to happen.”
“Yes, well, but what can I …” the chief engineer began, then said, “Good, I’ll order the necessary measures.” He hung up again, looked at the clock, yawned, shook his head — the bright green hands were pointing to ten past four — and crawled back under the covers. But he kept his word. When he dared to rouse the queen’s commissioner from his Sunday-morning sleep with a 7 a.m. phone call, in the village under discussion the flotsam and jetsam was already thundering against the house walls and there were corpses floating everywhere.
Having to die is everyman’s excusable fear, and in a region such as this, death by drowning rapidly becomes the most particular fear of all. Lidy, who had now been traveling for eighteen hours, found herself on the street with a handful of villagers who were arguing with one another. The storm had increased to force 12, i.e., a hurricane. People were wearing coats over nightclothes, and kept to the shelter of their houses; two or three of them were carrying torches. Universal darkness. Going by their faces, none of them seemed overly concerned; what was occupying each of them was what the others were making of the spectacle.
Bad weather. And not good that the water was coming over the dike out there. Everyone knew that at ebb tide that evening, the water-depth gauge at the Laurens sluice hadn’t gone down by even a quarter of an inch. And where there had been no ebb, they had projected that there would be no high tide, because this logic had held true all their lives. A young man who had been down to the harbor to take a look tonight said he’d seen the farmer at the entrance to the village hastily hitching his horses to the wagon not fifteen minutes before, with his best cows in tow, to move himself, his wife, his children, and all his worldly goods, farther inland.
The people standing around in the darkness let their eyes slide wishfully leftward, away from the silhouette of the church tower, inland, away from the sea.
Living in a dangerous place leads inevitably to a kind of deaf-and-blindness to the elements of that danger. Every single person in the street, Lidy included, knew that yes this was a village, but it was also one tiny point in a landscape given over entirely to the moon, the sea, and the wind. Water is the heaviest element in existence — that was also known. Whoever lived here was descended from generations who had centuries of experience that in long-drawn-out storms, the sea exercises a counterpressure and then rises on one side. Oceanographers had done the calculations to prove that the height of this lopsided rise is in inverse proportion to the depth of the sea — but people here had known this forever and understood it. Every person here in the street had grown up with eerie tales of monstrous hands of water reaching abruptly out of the arms of the North Sea, whose floor rises toward the coast of this country like a chute.