Margriet de Moor - The Storm

“Ridiculous,” said Sjoerd in the same tone of voice he had just used to whisper something sweet in her ear. “You know as well as I do.”

“Maybe,” she said, and told him right to his stunned face that in this moment she could feel not only her sister’s ghostly eyes on her but, to tell him the truth, his as well. Together they were watching to see if she did everything the right, well-tested way. “Am I right, or not?”

“No.”

“And while I remember it, why did you just say ‘be my wife’ and not, for example, ‘be my love’ or, just as good, ‘let’s crawl under the covers’?”

He began to laugh. Before she knew what was happening to her, he slid out of bed, switched off the lamp, and took her in his arms again in the pitch darkness.

“Nobody can watch you now,” he said in the same sweet whisper, but then his voice changed. As if he found himself in a discussion with her at a point where only the most powerful arguments could hope to prevail, Sjoerd told Armanda how much he loved her and how beautiful she was. Not a night went by, he said, in which he didn’t spend time thinking about her — and she should know that thinking meant more than just thinking — as he saw her face and her perfect round mouth and emerald green eyes always in front of him, no different from now, along with her long dark brown hair, and the most magnificent naked breasts that a lonely man could imagine, and if it came to that, would be able to recognize at once and prefer to a thousand other pairs of breasts!

At this point his voice sank again, as Armanda buried him in kisses. And everything would have run its normal course if the front doorbell had not rung at that very moment.

Armanda flinched, horrified.

“There’s someone at the door. Someone wants to come in!”

“No, no,” murmured Sjoerd, who actually hadn’t heard a thing, since the sound of the doorbell sometimes didn’t reach this high up in the house.

But it was true. In number 77 the table had been laid ready for some time now. Grandpa Brouwer and Nadja had taken a little walk and come to fetch the two lovebirds home to supper.

The bell rang again softly.

Up on the fourth floor the bedroom was already bathed in lamplight. With Sjoerd’s cold, tired eyes looking at her from the bed, Armanda was slipping hastily into her clothes.

This is what they call sleep….

As she stumped through the puddles of an anonymous street in an anonymous village at half past three in the morning, she was alone with the storm for the first time. To left and right were low houses, and not a light to be seen anywhere. Simon Cau had dispatched her and the two daughters of the tavernkeeper to different parts of the village to drum the inhabitants awake.

“Wake them,” she had had time to ask quickly, “and then what?” They had climbed out of the car at the church. The sky had begun to rain large hailstones. Simon Cau had wanted to start ringing the storm bell immediately, but although the church door stood open, they discovered by the light of a match that the door to the tower was locked. Back outside, as they stood in the moonlight that had somehow found its way through to them, Lidy had looked into Simon Cau’s face. And seen that he had no belief in his own orders, but didn’t know what else to do.

“Wake them!”

She did what she was told. It wasn’t easy. It was obvious that nobody here had any wish to interrupt their sleep. Embarrassed, she stood between doors and windows that remained closed to her hammering. Everything was calm and secure in the world behind them, she could feel it; buried in their bedclothes, legs curled up, men, women, and children slept with slow heartbeats. Inhaling the warm breath of their sleeping companions, they placed their trust in the strength of their inadequate imaginations and let her muddle on in the storm that was just a storm, that swooped down into the narrow street and howled through it as if through a fallen chimneypot.

She looked around. Nothing but this bedlam of noise. Suddenly it occurred to her that absolutely nobody knew she was here. With a new kind of unease she crossed the street, decided on the door to a small shop, and banged, palms out, on its upper portion. Unreal village, she thought, with the fearfulness of someone who knows herself to be overlooked by an oblivious God and her oblivious fellow men. If nobody has any idea where you are and cannot form any image of it, do you exist? Her eyes slid over the white letters, carefully painted in italics on the dull glass pane above the shop door: Baked Goods .

Someone had awakened in the apartment at the back. An alert, elderly lady who heard noises in her sleep that her ears couldn’t identify as a normal part of foul weather like this. She felt her way blindly into her bedroom slippers. The light wasn’t working, so she lit a candle. She was about to go directly to answer the drumming on the front door when she noticed a faint roar from somewhere in the house that demanded her more urgent attention. A moment later she was standing in amazement in the toilet, where the water was spouting up out of the pan as if from a spring. She turned around, hurried through the shop, and opened the door.

“Come look at this,” she said, and Lidy followed her.

It was one of those lavatories that had been carpentered together out of planks and sheet metal against the outside wall at some point in the past, capturing every bad smell forever. Now it had a white porcelain toilet bowl and a lacquered cistern above it with a chain. Lidy and the old woman, who had survived most of her life without electricity and had possessed this beautiful WC with its connection to the sewage system for only the last four years, which made it still a daily enchantment, looked first at the high-spurting column of water and then at each other.

Their reactions were almost simultaneous.

“The light’s out too.”

“The water’s up over the sea dike already, I’ve seen it myself.”

The woman in her white nightgown turned round, because someone was coming through the hall, lantern in hand.

“Nothing’s working anymore,” she complained loudly but patiently to the man whom she didn’t yet recognize but took to be a neighbor.

She couldn’t know how right she was. For at this moment elsewhere on the island the first telephone poles were coming down. The total isolation had begun. There were, it is true, a few telephone operators at their posts in some of the slumbering villages, attentive employees who had gone to work in the belief that the need to make an emergency call to the provincial or even the national authorities tonight might not be just the product of an overzealous sense of duty. But none of them got through. In some places the telephone switchboard was an old-fashioned operation, run by hand with a generator that produced its own power, and it happened a couple of times that the operator, totally concentrated on the alarm call even as the flood-waters poured into the building, received an electric shock as the water reached the height of his chair and the stool supporting the equipment with its worn but indestructible parts. This was a lost island. It would be submerged completely, without the outside world lifting a finger or even noticing, because as chance would have it, this confluence of the position of the moon and the endless wind happened during a weekend.

Nonetheless: one extraordinary exception.

Very early in the morning, a post office employee was still trying. At the last moment, shortly before the technical equipment gave up the ghost and the last shutters on the telephone exchange fell off, he managed to dial the number of a fairly high official. He reached him personally.