Eight little houses. The wall of water had come at them from one side at the exact moment when Hocke on the other side was trying to get down to them by driving alongside the drainage ditch. The families of two of his farmhands and several day laborers didn’t know which they heard first, the breathless honking of the tractor horn or the bomb that split open their house walls and tore off the roofs. The energy of a hurricane when transferred into water is a mad force in any space that presents obstacles to that force. Shearing its way with razor sharpness along the collapsing dikes, turning, forcing its way to the side, and then streaming back, the flood wave was carrying a pressure of dozens of tons per square meter as it reached the first eight houses on the Naweg and landed on them like a wrecking ball. Most of the inhabitants made it just as far as the ladder in the stairwell. What followed was something that no human being was there to witness.
A fourteen-year-old boy and his father hack a way through the roof tiles with a chisel, pull themselves up hand-over-hand to the ridge beam, hang over it; the next minute a vertical tongue of water sweeps upward, the father drowns immediately, the boy thrashes around in the water, struggling desperately. Another house: a fifteen-year-old girl squeezes herself against the chimney, the roof is torn off, nothing around her but a force-12 wind and the floor heaving under her feet. Her forty-year-old mother, extremely pregnant, lands in a floating laundry cupboard as the house wall collapses outward; she’s been having cramps all night but now they stop. The current will carry her by chance right past the tractor, she will manage to make it, at least to begin with, as does her eight-year-old son, whom Hocke fishes out of a hedge of whitethorn. As the girl falls backward, along with the chimney and everything else, she gives a deafening scream and clutches empty air. It’s pitch black. The sea pushes on from the north with huge force, only to crash into the constricted waters of the Oosterschelde on the south side of the island. The inhabitants try to grab onto whatever they bump up against in the water. Not one of the flimsy houses held together with little more than whitewash withstands the enormous churning movement of the waters triggered by waves that are now breaking under their own weight. A man and two children in striped pajamas are standing on the rear part of a shed that is already sinking. As they land in the water, the man manages to pull them onto a rafter, which immediately shoots away like a torpedo. Lord have mercy — but the man is astounded to find himself groping the road embankment a minute later and crawls up it under the lights of the tractor. It’s snowing. A young married couple and child have been pulling themselves forward along the hedge that lines the road. The man, who’s very strong, is holding his two-year-old daughter above water by her clothing, switching from his right hand to his left. He’s also using his teeth. Hocke, who hears them calling through the darkness, comes to their aid and pulls them onto the wagon. The mother takes the child, who’s been plunged right under the water twice, in her freezing arms. Extraordinarily, the rumble of the Ferguson engine can be heard even through the howling storm. Six or seven rats have popped up out of the water next to the trailer and are climbing onto the tailgate. There’s still room on the trailer, but if they don’t get away from there now, up the gently sloping road, there’ll be no point in trying.
“We’re going!”
He knew the lay of the land around here. Hocke took his bearings from the electric poles and the wind-bowed picket lines of willows and poplars planted after the deliberate inundation by the Germans in 1944. The absolutely critical thing for him was to stay on the road, which laid an underwater trail to his house if indeed it still existed. Working his way forward on an imaginary path, taking an imaginary curve, everything done by guesswork. It was after about ten minutes that Hocke, the one in charge, the only one with a thought in his head, stopped and peered over his shoulder.
At first there was nothing to see but waves crashing and crisscrossing one another in fountains of spray and general chaos. Then suddenly something was yelling and coming toward them, a dot that soon grew until it became a living thing clamped to a bale of hay. Hocke looked, as did the others.
It was a boy, a child, who as the hay bale raced alongside them in the current, slid into the water at the exact right moment, also contriving with considerable skill to dodge the driftwood that was hurtling past as well. Coughing and bleeding — one of the rats landed on him as people pulled him in over the tailgate — he joined the little group, who reached the farmhouse shortly thereafter. The boy’s name was Cornelius Jaeger, he was twelve years old but would soon make an everlasting impression up in the Hockes’ attic because of his deformity — he was a hunchback — and he came from Dreischor. Vague things, the kind one doesn’t notice consciously, but that still led Lidy to the assumption that none of the others knew where this child came from or what his name was.
18. When the Wind Roars and the Shutters Bang
“Mister Cau!”
She couldn’t recognize his face. She had no idea what was driving him. Madness? A despairing soul? It didn’t interest her. She bent down as if approaching a trained animal and touched his arm. He seemed to understand, to decode it at once: a woman with her hair down loose and hanging over her shoulders in strands, a voice that still addressed him in a formal way but nonetheless was in command. She was holding a tangle of flax rope in her hands.
A moment later Lidy and the man were standing at the west window.
No thought of home, not one. Only the question: Will we manage it? The ease with which one self takes a step back, allowing another to take precedence. Not twenty-four hours before, she had been the wife of a future banker and mother of a future primary school pupil, high school pupil, student … now the only thing that interested her was the Stygian panorama of sea and sky — both in motion, southward, chasing desperately past the house. Izak Hocke’s diesel tractor was drowning in them. How in God’s name to get these little figures, ten, twenty yards away, into the house? They were wedging a large piece of driftwood against the side of the trailer. They had managed to make themselves heard over the howl of the wind, screaming that they needed a rope to save them. Following the farmer’s wife’s directions, she had gone searching for one in the middle of a heap of the most unlikely things — never before had she seen a schoolbag made of wood.
Lidy. Cau. However the relationship between the two of them had been formed, it was stable enough for her to know what tasks belonged to each of them. She pulled the window inward till it was wide open and held it firm with both hands. He was short and no longer young, but he had the strength of two men; he paused for a few moments to assess the situation and then slung the rope, which he’d fastened at one end to a roof beam, out into the night. The old woman was also standing by.
Of course, no. Doesn’t happen that way. The three of them at the window realized this as clearly as the people in the trailer with the water foaming as it climbed its sides; they had been freezing for so long already that they had forgotten their own terror. The rope sank. While they were hauling it back in again, Cau and Lidy saw a small, stocky figure stand up, arms wide.
It was the crippled boy. He leapt into the water and plowed his way thrashing toward the house. Lidy laid the last tiny remnant of her detached carelessness on ice. From now until the moment they could pull him up over the windowsill, all she could think of was, would the boy make it?