The meteorologist presented his proposal that they keep the radio transmission going tonight so that news updates and warnings could continue to be passed on, confidently at first, then merely impatiently, as he could already tell from the silence on the line what the other man was going to say.
“It’s not my decision to make!”
More silence on the line. The meteorologist waited, drumming his fingers, till he heard something again.
“Office of the Director of Programming,” sighed a three-quarters-asleep or bored man.
With authority, but without expectations, the meteorologist asked Hilversum again to keep the transmitter open tonight.
“Given the weather conditions, it is my opinion that you would be justified.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, felt a second go by as he listened to the windows groan under a wild pressure, and received his answer.
“What are you thinking of? The last newscast here is and always has been eleven p.m., and we’re past that now.”
The meteorologist heard the radio employee take his time to stifle a sneeze and blow his nose.
“Besides which, I’m unwell.”
Midnight had passed. His colleague went home, he stayed. At first the meteorologist followed every bulletin that came in, but as night wore on, he lost interest in charts and numbers. He sat stiffly in his place, the left-hand desk in front of the window, getting to his feet only once, to fetch a telescope from the bottom compartment of a cupboard where all the useless junk was kept, and then trained it directly against the windowpane to spy into the blackness outside. Naturally there was nothing to be seen. It was simply a storm that had reached its top speed and was racing unchecked, whistling and screaming. As he looked farther, to where the darkness dissolved into a pale, transparent heaving motion, he felt everything downstairs being upended. He put down the telescope, took his seat again as if in an abandoned theater, and imagined the appalling devastation, images of derailed freight trains, torn-off roofs, uprooted trees, tangled power lines. He also thought of the chaos out at sea and the helpless ships in distress.
But his mind was not capable of imagining real flooding.
The state of dikes and coastal defenses was not his area of expertise. Nonetheless he would always remember these hours, later, as hours when he had had to sit with his hands in his lap, watching, as the sea rolled over Capelle, Stavenisse, and ’s-Gravendeel, as Kortgene, Bath, and Battenoord found themselves directly in the path of a mountain of water being driven into the narrows, as the dike southwest of Numansdorp collapsed in nine places and neighboring Schuring, no more than a little road, disappeared from one moment to the next. Oude-Tonge, pitiful site of a storm flood that attacked it from three sides at once. Ouwekerk, Nieuwerkerk, villages that were, mind you, right in the middle of the island, he saw them go under without any warning from him in the northwesterly storm whose charts at this very moment were right under his nose.
The weatherman stared out into the night. The northwesterly storm, whose eye, he knew, was now moving toward Berlin, would be forever in his memory: 4 a.m., when people everywhere began to attempt to flee, in carts, in trucks, in a bus, most of them on foot. And everywhere on that first February night in the icy wind, people were to be found in small groups on the overflowing dikes. Shuffling over the ground to try to avoid being seized and dragged away by the current, they linked arms tightly, heading toward a village on higher ground or the red or yellow lights of a distant car, till they were captured by the pillar of water that came in pursuit out of the utter darkness, the little clusters disappearing in a flash into the wave as it broke and they were sucked under into the storm that was emitting a sound that none of the refugees had ever heard a storm make before — a long-drawn-out, deep bellowing, the noise that cows make when they’re swimming in circles in blind panic, before they give up, quicker than horses do.
The three of them looked at it from the attic window. Lidy, Simon Cau, and Gerarda Hocke, who had waited for them up on the stairs, while the water at the bottom tore out part of the side wall. The old lady of the house was wearing the costume of Duiveland, black, with a white bonnet that fitted tight around the face, and what was amazing was that the first thing Lidy had noticed as she rushed toward the farmer’s wife was the two gold pins to either side of the bonnet; they seemed to her to be ancient, probably heirlooms.
Now all three of them were staring out of the only window on the top floor of the house, built with its narrow side to the street. Gray moonlight shone down on a wild surge of water in which wood, straw, and large dark shapes were floating around, some of which made movements now and again. They saw one of the cows swimming to and fro like a dog, striking at the water with its forelegs. Roughly twenty yards away, to the right, they could see the pointed gables of the attic floor of the Gabriëllina farmhouse poking up out of the swell, a light inside still burning. The first to look away was Cau. As the farmer’s wife asked him if he would like a cigarette, he patted his coat and said, “Got my own.” She pushed a glass of cognac into his hand. Lidy got one too, and a cigarette, dry socks, and a pair of black shoes with laces. The attic was as large as a church. A coachman’s lantern threw a weak blue light on the things that were stored here, among them two featherbeds with accessories and a bed frame with a mattress, all of which would soon come in handy. Lying peacefully on a small rug were a dog and one of the six geese from the coop in the orchard next to the street, which, like the shed alongside it, and the beehives and the bees, no longer existed.
Izak Hocke, his mother told them, had set off more than an hour ago with the big wagon hitched to the tractor.
16. Low Barometer in Amsterdam
The last week in June finally brought summer with it. The wind blew from the southeast, bringing a heat to the city that was very pleasant to begin with but had turned humid and oppressive today. The people assembled in the Amstel church for Lidy’s memorial service felt it too. The wooden church, originally built as a barn church and then rebuilt in the Gothic Revival style, was extremely dilapidated, which added an extra touch of the tragic to the consecrated atmosphere.
Armanda sat in the first pew between her mother and Jacob. She glanced from the place where the coffin should have been up to the three pointed windows high in the façade, from which white sunlight, as damp as steam, was slanting down. Lidy, where are you, she murmured inside her head, and wiped off her sticky hands on the black worsted skirt that she was wearing for the second time this month and in which she felt miserable for the second time, because the skirt, which was unlined, was the kind that works its way up your legs when you walk. Ten days before, she had gone with Betsy and Sjoerd to Schouwen-Duiveland, where the congregation of Ouwerkerk was burying its dead once more in the cemetery that had reemerged from the floodwaters. There had been coffins beyond number that time; now just a single was jarring by its absence. She fixed her eyes on the flagstones that had formed the floor of the church since the seventeenth century.
It was suffocatingly hot. Her mother’s light perfume, very faint but typical Nadine, was the only counterweight to the atmosphere of depression and overt grief that filled the church. No flower arrangement, not a single burning candle. Instead a pastor, corpulent, short, who began to declaim something mournful. Behind her she suddenly heard the labored sniffs of a man trying to choke back his sobs. Probably Sjoerd’s father, an elegant banker, nice man, who had just come for a month from New York with his second wife. She had to force herself not to turn round in sympathetic curiosity.