Cau was silent now. Lidy was wide awake and, remarkably perhaps, still felt no fear or anything similar. Her instincts corresponded in no way with what was bearing down on her. Where was the awareness, however minimal, of those moments that precede reality, and yet are themselves their own reality?
While out in the southwest polders the inner dikes were crumbling and one sea was joining with the other, Lidy was struggling in the blasts of wind to keep the car on the road. As she reached a very dark spot, she took her foot off the gas and leaned over to her traveling companion. Which muddy road should she now take — the left or the right? There was a growl from Cau, but it hardly registered with her in her eagerness to reach the end of her winter journey. Nearby, more than half a mile northeast, where the mouth of the Grevelingen opened into the bay, this was the moment when the masses of water forced their way through the sea dike in three places, filling the polders behind it at such speed that the water-level gauge in the little harbor dropped briefly but powerfully by almost seven feet. But Lidy steered back on course again and thought, Ah, there they are, the two farms, diagonally opposite each other, and I can see a light in each of them behind a window.
Finally she parks the car squarely in the yard in front of the part of the building that is the Hockes’ house. She and Cau get out. They go to the front door to see if it’s been left open. The cold is even icier now. Lidy takes a quick look at the rather high-stepped gable end and the adjacent barn, its shutters closed with crossbars. She knows there’s endless flat land to right and left. There’s a little moonlight, but on the southern horizon it’s as if the night fields are being faintly lit by a glow that comes out of the earth itself. Okay, the front door is open. Just as she’s about to say good-night to Cau before he goes across to his own house, Lidy realizes that he’s gone rigid and is listening for something. She catches his eye, registers that he’s frightened, then she hears it too. The noise to begin with is abstract. A kind of rushing sound, getting louder. For a moment she’s seized by the image of a plague of locusts, then of an army of a thousand men marching toward her at top speed from the other side of the island. She has no time to be terrified. The entire view disappears. A horrifying wave of black water comes towering out of nowhere and rolls down on them.
III. There’s Always Weather
15. The Meteorologist
In the Netherlands, the radio stopped broadcasting at midnight on the dot. At one minute to midnight, Hilversum One and Two played a lively brass-band version of the national anthem, and after that the country, radio-wise, was put to bed. As Simon Cau and Lidy Blaauw flew into the house and heard the water break against the outside of the door that they were holding shut with the full weight of their bodies, someone in the weather bureau of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute at De Bilt was still awake.
A meteorologist, who was under no official obligation to be on duty at this hour, was standing at the window high up in the building, looking from the telephone on his desk to the outside and then back to his desktop again, where a couple of weather charts were spread out. He was wearing a good suit. After accompanying his wife to a concert, he couldn’t get back quickly enough to his post, from which he could keep an eye on the storm. Its howl was deafening. The meteorological institute, a relatively slender six-story building topped with a roof terrace, was in a little park in the midst of flat meadows that stretched all the way to Utrecht.
What could he do?
He ran his fingers over his lower jaw and listened to the storm, which he not only felt he understood better than anyone else but also regarded as his absolute personal property. During the concert he had totally ignored the oscillations of the musical sound waves, focusing instead on those of the gusts of wind, which he estimated at close to sixty knots, if not higher, against the walls and windows of the hall. As he did so, he had mentally reviewed with razor sharpness the weather maps of 6 a.m. and 12 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time — large hand-drawn charts, on which he himself had penciled in the contours of air pressure over northwestern Europe, erased them again several times after receiving updated information, and drawn them in again: the isobars were lying more and more alarmingly close together. Hunched over the paper, he had studied the warm and cold fronts, drawn in red and blue, and the violet lines showing the areas in which the cold following behind would dissipate the warm air over the earth’s surface, and the harsh green shading filled in with the pencil held flat to indicate the zones of rainfall surrounding the fronts.
This was the view, the true heavens of the RNMI that the meteorologist had held fixed in his mind’s eye right through the Brahms. And which that eye, trained to measure barometers, thermometers, wind, and rain, had read all too clearly.
The areas of low pressure. He’d been following them since the beginning of the week as they formed over Iceland, Labrador, the Azores. And here, the trough with very large varieties of pressure that started developing northwest of Scotland at 6 a.m. One can know an enormous number of facts, and still the 12 noon chart will be made up of countless details that are already in the process of escaping their own diagram at the bidding of some force unknown to us. The trough had moved ineluctably to the east coast of Scotland. Look what was bearing down on us! From this time on, the meteorologist had kept promptly demanding updated figures. At 3 p.m. he had received a transmission from an English lightship about a sharp drop in air pressure, followed by another at 6 p.m. Almost immediately thereafter, shortly before he was relieved by a colleague, because he had to get home to change for the concert, he had taken another look at the measurements from Den Helder and Vlissingen: the difference in pressure between the north and the south coasts of the country was now more than 13 millibars. The prognosis was certain — it was going to be quite something!
And so he had sat motionless in the parterre of the warm concert hall next to his equally motionless wife. Although he, like she, had his eyes closed, he was still looking, being a bird like all meteorologists. His element, the air; his perspective, the earth. Surrounded by the music, increasingly restless, increasingly impatient, he made a mental picture of the weather chart he had had on his desk today. Nothing but fleeting visual snapshots, which had already changed considerably by now. As he followed the storm in his head as it veered northwest, his mind was drawing the new map, which showed with utter precision that the area of low pressure was moving into the German Bight, in the direction of Hamburg. The storm field accompanying it now took up the entire North Sea west of the fifth degree of longitude.
He was right. Around 10:30 p.m., after the meteorologist had hurriedly delivered his wife back home and gone to his colleagues in the weather bureau, he saw that the storm had indeed developed according to the scientific predictions. He bent over a message that had come in by telex from the Goeree, a lightship positioned some miles off the coast of Zeeland. Given the breaking waves and the behavior of the short but mountainously steep seas all around the ship, the crew had relayed an estimated wind speed of sixty-three knots, which was the equivalent of almost force 12 on the Beaufort scale. A hurricane. The meteorologist had looked at his colleagues and received very dark looks in return. Then he looked at the clock.
Hilversum was still on the air.
The telephone made the most terrible crackling noises. First there was a woman’s voice, then a defensive male voice. “Who is this?”