Hocke crawled quickly to the other side, and Cornelius Jaeger let himself drop into the water, water that tonight was seventeen feet above Normal Amsterdam Water Level, but that according to experts later on could easily have risen by another seven feet if a third factor had not helpfully intervened. The water level in this area is determined not only by the sea that comes thundering eastward against the coast but also by the rivers that flow continuously west. December and January that year had been unusually dry in the Alps and in the Vosges. If the precipitation in the upper reaches of the Rhine, the Maas, and the Schelde had been typical for the time of year, then, adding to the already devastating situation, there would have been a catastrophe in the estuaries of literally fantastic proportions.
A man had half climbed, half fallen through the window. He immediately got to his feet and turned around, waving his arms, to yell something to his wife, who was still out in the full grip of the wind. She hadn’t dared to give him her little daughter, who had turned two in November and was huddled under her sodden coat. Beside him, Simon Cau and the man, who had already managed to climb into the attic, were also holding out their arms. A true reception committee to whom she could have handed the little thing.
No. A hopeless situation that seemed to go on for an eternity.
In reality ten, twelve seconds at most elapsed until the young woman on the door that was now banging against the gable lifted her head and saw another young woman leaning far out of the window. The two looked at each other, sharing the knowledge for one despairing second that if she couldn’t keep holding tight to her tiny freezing burden out there in the cold …
“Give her here!” screamed Lidy.
The other woman obeyed.
“Have you got her?”
“Yes.”
They were all inside. The family complete. Izak Hocke and the hunchbacked boy, who was still trembling all over his body, were already busy with wire, wood, and fiberboard, making a makeshift replacement for the shutter in the back gable end. The newly arrived woman put up no resistance. A woolen jacket was held out to her and she pushed her arms into it willingly. Her eyes fixed on the shadows moving on the sheathing under the steep roof in front of her, she waited to see what was expected of her. Lidy meantime seized a chair that was standing in a corner and lifted the apathetic little girl into her lap. Eia popeia, nice and quiet now, rocking comes naturally. Between a natural catastrophe involving 1,836 dead and the fate of this one child, Dina van de Velde, lay countless newspaper articles, newsreels, Red Cross lists, and a five-volume report by the Delta Commission years later.
22. There’s Always Weather
When the child was finally picked up, the weather had changed and there was a cold drizzle. One of the fruit sellers from the Albert Cuyp market had seen her walking along the side of the river and over the Amstel dike, leading toward the Berlage bridge. It was around five, and almost dark already. He was on his delivery bike and had turned at the church and was headed for Van Ostadestraat, where he lived, when he saw her trudging along the opposite side past the soaring bulk of the Generaal Praag, a decommissioned coal ship that had been moored here for years. “She said she was on the way to Rotterdam,” the fruit seller reported to Armanda and Nadine sometime later; they were in no condition at that moment to wonder about it.
He had braked. Nadja was wearing a little white teddy-bear coat. The fruit seller, who would have bet his life that something wasn’t right, pushed his cap back on his head and crossed the street. Where are you off to? Nadja had had no objection to climbing up and sitting in there with the Jonathan apples to ride along with him for a bit with the rain and the wind in her face. Right around the corner was a street of dark tall houses with little shops at ground level, but mainly she was interested in the man who bent way down to the left or right each time he pushed on the pedals. In the little tin shed where the delivery bicycle was kept in its place between crates and sacks, Nadja confided in the fruit seller where she lived. “Number Thirty-six and Number Seventy-seven?” Calm nods from her. About ten minutes later, Nadine Brouwer, anxiously keeping watch outside her front door, saw her granddaughter arrive perched on the bicycle carrier of an unknown individual. The picture this made seemed quite unreal to her, the more so perhaps because of the yellow lamplight shining down on the two of them and the wintry vegetation in the park.
Now something occurred that could best be described as a little competition between Nadja and her mother.
For Armanda too had seen her daughter sitting on the carrier. From the moment Nadja had refused to come out from behind her tree or whatever it was, she had been running around the park, calling and searching in between the bushes, and had gone out onto the Ceintuurbaan to ask everyone she met if they’d seen her. Now she was standing distraught by the drinking fountain at the north entrance to the park, diagonally opposite her parents’ house. Her cry sounded like a ghost crying in a dream even to her own ears, totally muffled, but the man on the bicycle heard it and set his foot on the ground. At this moment Betsy came waddling out of Tweede Jan Steenstraat, very fat, fatter than is normal in the seventh month of pregnancy, and saw Nadja running fast, and managing to evade Armanda as she leapt into her granny’s arms on the front steps of number 77.
“You’re really wrong,” said Betsy that evening to her husband. “It was dry all afternoon.”
Leo had told her he was astonished that Nadja and her playmates had been allowed out into the park in this weather. He jerked his head toward the rain and the third-floor window at the beginning of the almost pitch-dark Prinsengracht, bare elms, black ruffled water.
“Which wasn’t in the forecast,” Betsy continued, as she followed his glance from her position slumped on the sofa with her swollen feet up on a cushion. “It was supposed to be unsettled. Rain showers, cold air coming in from the east, possibility of snow. But the children were determined that it was dry and way above freezing.”
So they had wanted to go outdoors, right after the cake with its six little candles in a layer of frosting. But mother and aunt, who was acting as her assistant, proposed hide-and-seek. It must have been shortly before three when Armanda, standing under the bust of Samuel Sarphati with her hands over her face, began to count, eeny, meeny, miny, mo, while Betsy, also gamely keeping her eyes shut, and wrapped in a warm coat on a park bench, listened and checked that the children had disappeared before the rhyme, a warning now, came to an end.
“I’m coming!”
It’s strange that they didn’t find each other quite quickly. To start with, Nadja was just crouching in a rhododendron bush behind the first gravel path. Soft earth under her feet, she looked down at it absentmindedly, completely focused on not being seen, and didn’t allow herself to notice until some time later that everyone was calling for her, which wasn’t part of the game.
The first thing that not being seen involves, as everyone knows, is not looking, either. Nadja moved backward, her head down against her chest, tripped over a small twig, rolled down a sand hill for several yards, and at some point found a new hiding place in a shallow hollow. Next to it was an old oak tree. That’s where the decision was finally made that had been coming for some time, and the argument that clinched it began with B as in beetle or F as in fly or M as in moth. She didn’t bother to work out which forms of life were now twinkling like a giant handful of precious stones at her feet and moving in some mysterious way. The winter had been mild up till now. Last night De Bilt had recorded the warmest temperature of the century: fifty-two degrees. In any case, it had been raining for days. The enormous insect nest and the bit of the hollow tree it had been in could have fallen down only in the last few months, for the overwintering beetles, flies, bees, and moths had just decided they needed to move on, crawling cautiously at first, then hopping wildly or flying. Oh, marvelous! Astonished, Nadja followed the rainbow-colored creatures, blue, green, some of them even fire red, which were suddenly disappearing as if by magic. Some of them flew up on their transparent tiny wings and hovered in the air so close to her nose that she could see their glittering eyes, and then suddenly — gone. Others crawled around with mysterious single-mindedness, not panicked, quite comfortably, showing her their powerful back legs, their faces elongated into little snouts, their hard, smooth bodies, some of them with stingers, and then suddenly … oh, where did they go? Darkness had already fallen when Nadja, at peace with her decision, went up the Van Woustraat and then down again, and then turned right at the corner where the green neon light was, toward the Amstel dike.