Lidy glanced to the side. The old woman had nudged her.
“I think I’d better carry some things upstairs.”
“I’d do the same,” replied Lidy, and thought: I’ll give the woman a hand for a few minutes.
Other people, too, were giving one another meaningful looks. The group in the street broke up. Shutters and attic windows had already been made fast that afternoon. There was nothing on any of the farms still standing around loose. Now they went to fetch their children out of bed, taking all the covers with them, and to settle them back down in attics, along with buckets of water, camping stoves, supplies, matches, and even perhaps the most valuable thing in the house, the black sewing machine with the cast-iron treadle.
Permission to stay granted, and best not to think too much. Another way of fighting back against the impossibility of nature. It is true that most of the houses in this street were little buildings put up for farmworkers, with walls thrown up using not cement but a pitiful mixture of sand and plaster. But they were their dwellings, and they wanted to feel safe in them. For the time being they wanted to have the interval between one sleep and the next preserve as much of the order of their everyday lives as possible.
Lidy went back into the little shop. The old woman walked resolutely ahead of her through the dark. Behind an intervening door the candle was still burning.
A few seconds later: “Here, you take these.”
She had two large biscuit tins pushed into her arms.
“There.”
A cash box.
Filled with the same dreamlike sense of closeness she’d experienced a few hours earlier at the family dinner, Lidy climbed a ladder to a peaked attic where she couldn’t stand upright. In the circular glow cast by a tealight she saw her feet encased in muddy shoes. A person must have two or three different people inside them, she thought, as she stood at the top of the ladder to receive a cushion, parts of a kapok mattress, a chamber pot, a coverlet, and then another.
“Got it?”
“Yes.”
She set the things on the floor, pushing aside with her foot what was lying there. The shrieking night outside and the sea, which she’d seen with her own eyes at the crest of the dike, had been shrunk again to something less enormous in this creaking, groaning little hut. As the other woman worked her way up through the trapdoor, now wearing a hairy brown coat, she looked at her crumpled old face, lit from below. Enough? Everything the way you want it? And imagined herself and the old lady, when dawn came a few hours later, carrying the whole lot back down and making coffee in the kitchen behind the shop.
“Quiet!”
The old woman turned her head toward the din raging a hand’s breadth over their heads. Then Lidy heard it too. Laboriously, at intervals, yet unmistakable, the sound of a bell was making itself heard in the wind.
So he managed it, she thought.
And immediately thereafter she felt, more than she saw, the old woman’s eyes fix themselves on her, huge and dark with anxious recognition.
“Fire!”
Simon Cau hadn’t been able to get the key to the bell tower. It was no help at all that he knew where the sexton — a good carpenter and also the commandant of the fire brigade — lived. Neither ringing the doorbell nor banging a stick against a windowpane had succeeded in waking the man, who as he slept had one ear cocked only for the sound of the telephone. After some time a blacksmith had got out of bed in a neighboring house. It wasn’t long thereafter before the hinges of the door to the church tower gave way under the blows of a sledgehammer, and Cau and the blacksmith climbed the stairs by the light of an oil lamp. At first they were barely able to coax a sound from the bell. The failed electrical mechanism gave off sparks when they tried it with a rope. So Cau had run back down and fetched the sledgehammer.
When Lidy and one of the Hin daughters wanted to attract the attention of the men a short time later, they found it hard to do. The two of them had met outside the church: Lidy sent out by the old woman to find out what was going on, and the tavernkeeper’s daughter to spread some reassuring news.
“The water’s going down again already,” the girl said.
It was no easy task to bring the good news up into the tower. Lidy and the tavernkeeper’s daughter stood in the stairwell with their fingers in their ears, looking up at the two men who were going at it as if possessed. The blacksmith, hanging onto the rope with all his weight, managed to keep the bell swinging in the correct rhythm while Simon Cau, who clearly didn’t find the heavy booming sufficient, struck the sledgehammer against the rim, which produced an additional high-pitched clang. Eventually they noticed the two young women.
“Impossible” was Cau’s first exclamation after the bell had stopped moving. “Absolutely impossible!” Without straightening up, he stood there panting, the heavy hammer in his hand.
But the tavernkeeper’s daughter was certain. She named the names of several boatmen who had just returned from the harbor and whom she had met in the village.
“They said it happened very quickly. In just a few minutes they saw the water go down by whole yards!”
Speechlessly, Cau handed the blacksmith his sledgehammer. Wrapping his scarf around his neck, and looking angry, he reached for the lamp, which was smoking in the downdraft under one of the louvers that let out the sound.
As the little group got downstairs, there were more people in the street, including the tavernkeeper’s other daughter. Everyone had just heard that the water situation wasn’t so serious, and feeling somewhat light-headed because of the alarm bells and the strange hour, they were having little chats about it all. Relieved, naturally. And again, all too naturally, drawing only those conclusions that made sense to them from the reality in which unwittingly they found themselves: the night, the wind, the wet, and the salt in the air.
Let’s go, quick, back to our featherbeds!
Soon the car was bumping its way over the water-filled potholes out of the village again, where peace had descended once more, and only the occasional dog refused to stop barking.
Was Cau thinking perhaps that he’d be held up as a fool?
Or what?
When he drove back by way of the harbor with the three girls again, it was a needless stop, and one that bored the three of them to distraction. Nevertheless they all got out, went to the barricade in the dike, and there was a brief discussion. Cau, to sum up, didn’t want to believe his eyes, while the three others just wanted to go to bed.
“The timbers really held up well!”
“Till now!”
“God I’m tired.”
“It’s … it’s impossible!”
“Well, anyhow, the water’s down more than six feet!”
“It can’t go down!”
“Shall we go?”
“It can’t go down, high tide isn’t for another hour!”
“Nonetheless, shall we go?”
Cau couldn’t get the engine to start, so Lidy tried it her way. After a few attempts it worked, whereupon she set off confidently along the bend in the road as if she knew the darkness here like the back of her hand. Five minutes later they were at the three-way fork in the dike, and the little tavern, a hut, appeared. Vague silhouettes, vague light behind steamed-up windows. The two tavernkeeper’s daughters leapt out of the car. Lidy watched as they stumbled up the steps to their parents’ house, blew the horn by way of a farewell, and set off on the last part of the detour to Izak Hocke’s farm, where they were, she assumed, expecting her.