Margriet de Moor - The Storm

And indeed, something seemed to be separating itself from the wagon. Ignoring the rumbling of the furniture down below them, they watched the little load approach. It was managing to keep on course with the help of the rope slung around a roof beam at this end and attached to something else at the other. It didn’t take that long. Dragged in over the windowsill dripping wet, three of the four passengers stood there for a long minute, gasping for air. Lidy noticed that they brought with them a heavy stench of putrefaction. And somewhat later, as she and Gerarda Hocke stripped off their sodden clothes, wiped away the greasy mud as best they could, and offered them bedding and safety on the ice-cold floor, she had a sudden image of them as a gaggle of newborn babies. The trio consisted of a tall man with a thick shock of hair, an extremely pregnant woman, not his wife, as was later established, and a little boy of about eight, her son. Number four had stayed behind on the raft.

As Lidy ran to the window to see how he was getting on, he was already halfway across on the return journey. She watched as the boy, down on his knees, kept moving his hands along the rope and pulling.

Water usually follows wind by a matter of two or three hours. Later, oceanographers would calculate that the whipping up of the waters could have been significantly worse. For the hurricane, which achieved maximum strength on the coast of Scotland, had weakened a little to the south over the North Sea, as the flood was reaching its height on the coasts of the provinces of Zeeland and Holland. Wind speeds can moderate over land due to friction, but over water they do what these winds did. It would have been possible, people reckoned later, for the pronounced trough of low pressure that moved that night from Scotland over the German Bight and on southeast to deviate a little from its course. Had it done so, the Scottish wind speeds and the Dutch northwest storm would have combined with truly fatal results.

The hunchbacked boy had succeeded in making fast to the wagon again. At that moment two seas broke over it, one of them carrying a piece of debris on its crest. It cut deep into Izak Hocke’s forehead, the trailer tipped over, but stayed hitched. Shortly before the tractor sank, the last five drowning people made it onto the raft; the rope that had been hanging slack was pulled tight by those in the house. It worked, but everyone was at the end of their strength now; the door was too small for five people and too big to be maneuvered with such a load on it.

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.

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.