As Lidy reached Schouwen-Duiveland in late afternoon, not tired at all, indeed wide awake, the flood tide had already passed the high-water mark, and the Flood Warning Service had immediately decided to put out one of their rare radio alerts. It spoke—in anticipation of the night to come—of a “dangerous high tide.”
She had taken the last ferry of the day to risk the crossing from Numansdorp to Zijpe. The entry into the harbor was so rough that it triggered a short-lived outbreak of screaming and running around on the decks. Nevertheless it wasn’t ten minutes before she was raising a hand in greeting to the boy who had lowered the ramp, and she drove unhesitatingly onto the island of her destiny.
The heavy cloud cover was breaking here and there. By the light of the hidden moon, she followed a little road that offered no resistance to the storm. During the war, the island had been flooded by the Germans, killing both trees and hedges. The drainage ditches to left and right were full to the brim. Wherever she looked, cold, wet, dark land stretched away in all directions, but this didn’t depress her. After all these hours, she accepted the howling wind, the cold, and the wet as part and parcel of her little odyssey. Even when she had to swerve as she rounded a bend to avoid at least ten hares racing along the road in the same direction as the car, she didn’t take this as a sign.
“Hares!” she said, nonplussed as she switched back into her lane, for she had taken the animals for huge cats at first glance.
To her right were streetcar rails. A distant bell made her aware that a streetcar was coming up behind her, then for a few minutes it was moving alongside. If she looked to the side she could see travelers buttoned up in their coats in the well-lit interior, playing cards and eating sandwiches. Then the streetcar overtook her, and shortly thereafter forced her to a halt when it stopped to let off a few passengers, who then crossed the road.
View of a village. A streetcar stop, a brand-new streetlamp, a row of low houses closed tight, and a bicycle against a wooden fence; a day later all this would be gone, vanished forever, but for now it was still a perfectly normal Saturday evening in winter, the nicest night of the week. Another twenty-four hours and the first house walls would be collapsing outward, the storm would continue unabated, snow would be falling, all this was inevitable. What was also inevitable was that Lidy accelerated again, passed the back of an instant coffee factory, left the built-up area behind her, and three miles farther on could see the little provincial town with its oversize late-Gothic church tower spread out in front of her.
She drove in through the Noordhaven Gate.
A sparsely lit backdrop. An inner harbor with quays, lined with splendid ancient houses, each with a flight of steps leading to the front door protected by a balustrade. Houseboats in the water. Here and there were pedestrians to be seen striding along purposefully in the wind or slowing down, if they were in a group, to have a discussion about something that involved lots of gesticulation. She drove slowly past the grand houses, some of which had subsided, their windows pitch-black, and turned at the end of the harbor into the first street she found. She knew she was supposed to be here in this town, no longer remembered quite why, and so followed her impulse to take a little tour first.
How narrow and dark it all is; she forced her eyes wide open. The town, like any town first seen by night, surprised her with its unfathomably mysterious outlines. Streets and alleys crisscrossed one another in a tight pattern of straight lines, but every time she thought, Now I’m stuck, now I really can’t see a thing anymore, the street plan made room for her and conjured up a magnificent church or a fish market or presented her with a sixteenth-century town hall.
She had had enough of driving. And she was hungry. As she was deciding to ask someone the way—there were enough people on the street—she saw a woman stop with her back to the houses, as if she knew she was needed.
“The Verre Nieuwstraat?”
The woman screamed the question back at her, to show that she had understood in spite of the wind.
The two of them looked at each other through the open window of the car. Lidy saw a round face not six inches from her own, wearing extravagant makeup; somehow it seemed to fit right in with the storm. She wasn’t at all surprised by the green eyelids and the tragic scarlet mouth, but was given an explanation nonetheless.
“We had dress rehearsal this afternoon. I’m the duke’s daughter!”
The woman advised her that the best way to go was along the new harbor.
That way lay danger, impossible not to see it. Lidy was offered a lively, almost entertaining view of this when she had to wait for a moment at the Hoofdpoortstraat before being able to make the turn onto the quay. Men were busy lifting the planks of a sort of wooden fence out of some concrete footings that had been positioned against the house walls on both sides of the street. One of them was nice enough to explain to the unknown girl who had climbed out of the car in the howling wind, clutching her hair with both hands, that the high tide would start retreating at any moment, should have done so already, actually, so they were taking down the fencing until the next high tide, later tonight. Give it a minute and she could be on her way again!
Distracted, her mind a muddle, Lidy stared into the man’s enthusiastic face, which seemed to be captured on film against a background of hell and damnation. Ink-black sky, a row of fragile little houses, and high above the quay a whole fleet of heaving ships.
“Wow,” she said to herself quietly a moment later, “people in this town keep working really late.”
She drove slowly behind an old Vauxhall along the quay, which was underwater, just like the one in Numansdorp. The whole atmosphere was like an autumn fair, she thought, the same sense of people caught up in every sort of activity in a cold, wet twilight.
Indeed, a lot was going on here on the south side of town, where the tidal basin with its moorings for regular ships, cutters, and the direct daily service to Rotterdam had access to the Oosterschelde by way of a canal. At this hour on a Saturday the pubs were full of customers. Excited by the storm, many of them were raising their glasses toward the windows, outside which things were raging most impressively in the dark sky. In front of the houses a little farther down, figures were to be seen kneeling and crouching. Inhabitants of the wharves, who had erected the wooden flood barriers in front of their doorsteps a few hours before, inspected them again, smeared them with handfuls of clay, and then straightened up again, to have conversations with one another about whether the windows, which the Flood of 1906 had almost reached, might not be able to use a board or two this evening as well. Diagonally opposite, under the lamp with its yellow light, which looked lost against the huge soaring bulk of the corn mill with its fixed sails behind it and to one side, stood a little group of fishermen watching the boats. They were worried, understandably, but not excessively so, since the wind, thank God, was pushing the boats away from the quay. And now the harbormaster appeared, downstage right. He was holding his hands in front of his mouth like a megaphone. Although everyone already knew this, nobody took it amiss that they were getting another official announcement that according to the depth gauge, the water this evening was going to remain high, instead of turning into an ebb tide.
Bizarre, but it was common knowledge that according to fishermen’s physics it was true more often than not that when there is no ebb tide, no high tide will follow, either. So who could have guessed that at two thirty in the morning the newly reinserted boards along the Hoofdpoortstraat and the other side streets leading off from the quay would burst open like folding doors, that a wall of black water crested with ash-gray foam would come crashing down and sweep away the modest houses, and that fifteen inhabitants, sound asleep in their beds on the first floor, would be drowned, to their great surprise? Still, the Royal Hydraulic Engineering Authorities had already calculated that if there were a confluence of all possible negative factors—spring tide, wind direction, wind force, duration of wind force, and water levels in the major rivers—the sea would not be held back by a single one of the dikes in this region, and certainly not by some puny board fence…. They could all have figured it out. But this was the place where they had not only been born but had lived their lives untroubled until today.
She had reached the end of the quay. There was only one way to go now, left into a street that sloped away steeply. Making her way down from the level of the dike to the level of the polder, she drove into the town again and at six fifteen finally found her way to the Verre Nieuwstraat. Like all the other streets, it was not completely empty of people, but it was still very dark. As she drove carefully behind a couple of pedestrians, she found a building halfway along the closed fronts of the houses that had three rows of brightly lit windows, one above the other. A sign hanging outside said Hotel Kirke.
As Lidy went into the hotel that was the agreed venue for the party on Saturday the thirty-first of January, 1953, she had the feeling that although her journey had merely taken a day, she had been on the road for weeks. She entered through a revolving door and went past the empty reception desk with her purse and a little suitcase. The hotel had a large, warm lobby, and it was bustling. The wooden ceiling bounced back both the light of an old matte copper chandelier and sounds of laughter and conversation. The warmth, the voices, and the smells of food all suddenly triggered a yearning in her for a few words of personal greeting, which she had certainly earned after such an epic journey. She peeked from the reception area into the jammed and noisy rooms that all opened off the lobby, then, as she heard someone call the familiar name “Armanda!,” she turned around, relieved.
“Yes!”
She quickly set down her suitcase.