Astonishing circumstances, or rather, fairly normal circumstances that had shed their skin tonight in a most astonishing fashion. These big northwesterly storms cropped up along this latitude in western Europe several times a year, after all, and spring tides were two a penny.
But tonight all this had been swept away. The visitor, snowed in here by chance, was not the only one who was bewildered. The entire delta of southwest Holland, which was always a puzzlement, was in the same predicament. Were they on one of the outlying sandbanks here that normally stayed above water off the coast of Brabant? Or were they in a real honest-to-god province, on solid ground, through which the Rhine, the Maas, and the Schelde empty themselves in an orderly fashion into the sea just as the Nile, the Seine, and the Thames do elsewhere on the planet, even when the arms of the sea reach greedily back at them along currents and channels? Not now — it would be days before the Netherlands could even believe it — but later, people would know the answer to the question of how it could possibly be that the Wester and Oosterschelde, the Grevelingen, and the Haringvliet, along with the inshore waters behind them, would flood over the islands like a plague from heaven, sweeping away 1,836 people, 120,000 animals, and 772 square miles of land at one stroke. Was this scientifically possible? Lidy stood looking until her eyes were out on stalks, her pale young face lifted above the collar of her thick coat. Scientists some years before had used a ruler to divide the North Sea that was now catapulting itself toward her into three precise sectors.
North sector, south sector, channel. Three figments of the imagination which affected Lidy tonight, like everyone else here, in the most personal way, whether she knew anything about them or not. Even the north sector, the absolutely straight line between Scandinavia and Scotland where the North Sea is still connected with the Atlantic Ocean and is also fairly deep, was something thought up by others, but frighteningly real, and that had a place in her life story. The wind had already created a modest mountain of water there hours before.
A shallow sea offers a larger spectacle: the south sector, the triangle drawn between the coasts of England, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Lidy sees a violet-tinged mountain range of water, the waves in it making peaks and valleys that cannot be underestimated, bearing down on her from all sides. Can anyone see such a thing and not be dumbfounded? And yet it is fundamentally normal, for even when there’s the lightest wind, the surface of the water begins to ruffle, the gentle push that is the beginning of every wave. But tonight the Goeree and the Noordhinder have already reported wind speeds of sixty-three knots off the coast. So: waves, enormous waves, that the eye can measure only above sea level, like icebergs, but whose main force to a fantastic degree is exercised below the surface of the water. When they encounter a shallow seabed, they get shorter but do not lose a significant amount of energy. They pile up, higher and steeper, the longer the wind blows, at the southernmost point of the south sector, where the seabed rises quickly to meet the Dutch coastline, ending at a row of dunes and an antiquated system of coastal defenses, locks, barriers, and pumping stations. Halted finally in sector three, the channel, where after more than sixteen hours of storm there’s a sort of traffic jam at the narrow bottleneck, the flood, the depth of its line of attack now stretching back more than a thousand miles, will burst unchecked into the sea arms of Zuid-Holland and Zeeland. From there it will force an exit to achieve what every liquid must achieve: its own level.
Something was coming. She pressed her forehead to the glass. To the right of the farm, something seemed to be approaching. A monster, with a light leading it. Was this Izak Hocke returning? The closer the 28-horsepower Ferguson and its trailer got, the more clearly Lidy thought she recognized him. Strange. Because the sky right now was so overcast that she could hear the water storming, but could barely see it. The slowly approaching vehicle with a man slumped down in the driver’s seat looked more like a hallucination than something out of the land of the living.
Somewhere there was a full moon, or, more accurately, it was two days after the full moon, the time when the spring tide is at its highest. But by chance tonight the moon was exercising relatively little pull; astronomically speaking, it was ebb tide. Moon and sun, aligned on the same axis, were indeed both drawing the water table upward, but the moon had just reached its farthest point on its elliptical path around the earth, the apogee, in which the forces it exerts on the tides are particularly weak. It has no relevance for the movement of light, and so this aspect of the moon’s disc during the night was fully present — cool, pale, and undiminished in its capacity from somewhere behind the cloud cover to cast its unshadowed spotlight, like the one in which Lidy now saw the tractor struggling through the water.
In the trailer behind it was a handful of people.
The wind hurled a piece of wrought iron like a curved sword into the room through the windowpane. Everyone flinched. There was a momentary but powerful wave of pressure, the shutter was wrenched out of the back wall of the house, the lamp flared up. Simon Cau had clearly become the kind of man who could just sit there motionless at a time like this, as if he were all alone, but Lidy and the old woman pressed themselves against the wall next to the window, to see what was going on out there. With your arms up shielding your face, wind gusts of more than seventy-five miles an hour feel like glass splinters in your hands and eyes. The old woman, who had cataracts, was relying on the observations of her visitor.
“Make sure you take a good look!” As if she didn’t totally trust the reports of the girl she was already inclined to regard as a daughter or daughter-in-law. Such connections are quick to form in certain circumstances.
The girl kept looking. “It’s him. Hocke.”
They both flashed a glance for help at Simon Cau, but his back was turned, so they looked out of the window again. About a hundred yards away, the trailer, now almost entirely invisible underwater, was transporting a little group of people who could still be seen above the swells and who would have to find a place in the house here. Aside from Hocke she counted seven of them, survivors of a group of families who had lived a few miles from here in a hamlet on a protected island formed of silt where the ditch surrounding the polder divided into two arms — one contained a lock that had been rusted shut for years, and the second ran on until it met the main drainage system at Grevelingen.
Hocke gestured and yelled something that was unintelligible from the window. He had maneuvered the tractor into position right opposite the house and was now apparently trying to figure out how far he could still advance along the road that sloped downward under the water. Meanwhile the travelers he had brought waited, their faces set and cold. They looked as if they had appeared out of the void, resurrected perhaps, but without any idea of where they’d come from, or any expectation that they’d ever find out. Yet the massive current pouring from the north swept past them, carrying entire collections of their random household possessions, from clog boxes, doors, and roof gutters to smaller objects like beds, scales, tobacco jars, birdcages, shoes, a set of false teeth, a baking pan, an edition of Donald Duck. They looked out over it all, not so much blank as unburdened of everything their eyes had known before.