Margriet de Moor - The Storm

They don’t sleep, they’re at least half-awake. He lies there, his nose in the hair of the last woman of his life. The wind is like a sword slicing over their heads, there is no question of any caresses between them. But does that imply the most cold and cynical way a man and a woman can be with each other, with a total lack of “I love you”? Their bed of reeds is beginning to calve dangerously, particularly on Hocke’s side. Another moment or two, and they will interrupt their sentimental journey without much ceremony and go their separate ways. Lidy felt him from time to time pressed close against her back, and then for a time she wouldn’t feel him at all. Holding fast to his will to live, nourishing herself on it, continuing to do so whether the end of days had arrived or not. Lidy kept her fingers interlaced with his; cramped with cold, there was nothing else she could do.

They should have stayed like that. As if someone had set a glass bell over the two of them and arranged things so that ordinary time ceased to exist underneath. The two bodies bedded in the reeds no longer looked like those of ordinary mortals. Rather, they resembled sleepers in a fairy tale, in suspended animation, sleeping on in their muddy, ooze-filled clothes, dreaming on, existing in a tempo all their own. Later, weary of this pathos that seemed already carved on a tombstone, they would stumble into time again. Or would they?

Meanwhile, time itself was not going to be stopped. Where there’s time, there are tides; it was almost ten o’clock and this one was already moving fast. That the mat of reeds came apart, and the section that Izak Hocke was lying on was too fragile to stay afloat in the power of the undertow, was attributable, first and foremost, to the moon, which dictates a timetable of six hours of rising water and six hours of sinking. Hocke loosed his fingers from hers. He needed them in order to cling onto something else. It’s ebb tide. Low water, a good thing, one would think, but in this case not. The water begins to try to find its way back to the sea through the opening in the dike. The flood turns and twists but is caught by the storm, which isn’t running out of time, and keeps on blowing with a relentlessness unknown to anyone who has lived here even since childhood; the water goes on being replenished from the north and continues to pile up.

The small portion of the mat of reeds broke off and sank. Hocke drowned. He swam a few strokes, but very rapidly his muscles became too cold.

She didn’t notice. As the reed island began to rock like crazy, she had thrown herself about and rolled away, because her inner command to herself was: Survive. She was caught and held by a soft figure crouched down like a hare, but still recognizable in the faint moonlight: the old woman. Who was looking over Lidy’s shoulder with terrible concentration in her eyes. Oh God, had she now risen again as one star in another constellation of two? Each incomplete without the other. Daughter, look, over there in front of that backdrop of hell, your mother. Sunday evening, a quarter past eleven: Gerarda Hocke and Lidy Blaauw found themselves in a swirling current moving toward something that would later be called “the hole of Ouwerkerk,” one of the largest breaches in what was originally the eighteen-foot-high dike of Oosterschelde.

They both felt it. Their mat was breaking up and more water was coming through on every side. As they were lifted on the crest of a wave and banged against a V-shaped double pylon reinforced by a crossbeam, the two women were immediately of one mind as to tactics. Up on their knees, they threw their arms around the rock-solid structure. In that moment, as the wave retreated again, they were able to pull themselves onto the crossbeam, where they could sit, suddenly a good three feet above the grip of the water. Thin cords whipped their faces. In the last moonlight that would shine through tonight, they saw that these were made of wire, torn telephone or electric cables. Lidy grabbed for them, wound them round the old woman’s waist and shoulders, and tied her fast. The next hours reduced her to a creature that could only fight against sleep, struggling to keep her eyes open regardless of the utter darkness all around them.

Did she go to sleep? Or simply remove herself for a moment from the uncertainties of the present as a way of making the best of her situation? Without being able to remember them, she was completely in the spell of the hours that passed, filled with snatches of the howling songs of the wind. Until, suddenly coming back to life, she felt the water slopping over her knees. The tide and the weather were running their course and the next one was coming in.

Lidy managed to untie the old woman in the dark. Standing on the crossbeam, they both felt the water, with a temperature of 36 to 37 degrees Fahrenheit, come creeping up over their knees and hips. Lidy wasn’t sure whether the high-pitched, mad singing that came from her right from time to time was real. The melodies, some familiar, some not, seemed intended to fix certain facts in her mind: the torso in her arms was going slack. Gerarda Hocke had lost the power to fight. But before she slid downward, she did manage to push two small objects into the other woman’s hand. Lidy’s fingers recognized the gold headdress clips. She shoved them into a coat pocket and realized that the old woman was no longer there. It would have been around three thirty in the morning when among all the flotsam and jetsam a door came sweeping past, within reach. Lidy was standing up to her shoulders in water, and she had to jump. In the attic of a farmhouse about to collapse, about a hundred yards away, a large family was still singing with all their might.

Lidy had not been particularly religiously brought up, but she loved songs, the more melancholy the better. So she carried the melodies of the psalms quite well in her head, and the words too, even if in fragments, and these words, as is often the case with songs too, when combined with the notes, come across as totally real, indeed believable. The family in the farmhouse had been singing psalms for hours, loudly, and intent on getting the words absolutely right. They were doomed, they probably knew as much, but were clinging to something beautiful, which might or might not be meaningless, but which they had built into their lives as a Given, to prevent themselves from being reduced to common clay. Lidy had managed to keep holding the dying old woman tight for a long time. During this interval, appropriately, given what was happening to the two of them, what had been echoing over in their direction, perversely but comfortingly, was “For he saves thee from the bird catcher’s net…. The days of man are but grass … take up Thy shield and Thy weapons….” The psalms of David, in the rhyming translations sanctioned in the eighteenth century by the ministers of Friesland, Gelderland, Zuid-Holland, Nord-Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Overijssel, and Drenthe.

So now she was on the door. A heavy, precious front door carried her along stretched out on her stomach. Monday had arrived some time ago. Monday morning, the second of February, 1953, between half past three and half past five. She kept her eyes open. She felt clear headed, focused, and full of memories. What does “forever” mean? Lidy remembered and would for the rest of her life remember the place where she was suddenly left totally to her own devices: an invisible place, although one with a faint blue glow circled by snatches of music that rose above the wind and came to her with the texts that had been sung so often in the course of time that they had become independent entities conveying no more than the quintessence of eternal longing.

It isn’t far from the area around Ouwerkerk to the Oosterschelde. Nonetheless it took Lidy about an hour. The raft kept bumping into things, spun around, was carried westward, then east, or came up against some passing object, a chunk of a barn, a sluicekeeper’s hut, a telephone pole, that came out of the black nothingness and disappeared back into it again. None of it bothered her. She seemed quite patient as she went into the last part of the night.