Free The Storm by Margriet de Moor Page A

lighter in Zierikzee with the help of a couple of students from Utrecht. Armanda nodded—she understood—but was shocked for the umpteenth time this week by the dreadful alienation in her mother’s eyes, a look that was quite foreign to her, and chilling, and the blue vein that was pulsing visibly in her temple.
    Betsy, her face closed, waited for their conversation to end. Now she drew a deep breath. As she resumed her report on the report, slowly but without a single pause, Armanda felt it was as fantastical as the movie images she had just seen.
    “They used the ship’s horn. They surveyed all the attic floors and rooftops so that they could steer for them if there were any signs of life. He said they took a total of eight people on board in the course of the night, which was hellishly hard to do, given all the floating debris crashing against the hull, and the current, but they were all completely apathetic and didn’t even understand what he was talking about when he asked about Lidy or where Izak Hocke’s farm was, which Lidy had gone to on Saturday night. Meantime he and the students had not the faintest idea anymore where they were on the polder. They took the people on the lighter to a fifty-foot cutter skipperedby a mussel fisherman from Yerseke, who had sailed it through a hole in the dike and anchored there. Day dawned. The wind began to blow from the east and everything on board turned white with frost. He said the cold was so intense that they couldn’t think, all they could do was act. They sailed farther into the polder on the off chance of finding something, and came up against the gutters of houses that were in the process of falling apart, with walls that were sometimes thirty or forty degrees out of true. Don’t think, said Sjoerd to me, that we were the only ones out on the water that morning. In amongst the oddest small boats there was even a punt from Giethoorn. The skipper, like everyone else, seemed to be aware of a general plan that all these ghost-drivers were following: the little boats gave over their catch to the bigger, mostly fishing, boats, which made sure they either got into harbor or out to the open sea, because the tide was going out. He said you could watch the water go down from one half hour to the next.”
    Armanda made to open her mouth.
    “Of course,” Betsy continued hastily, “he kept on asking, no matter what. He told me that he pointlessly questioned a farmer’s wife whom he and the students had had the greatest difficulty in persuading to leave her attic. Clutching two jars of preserves, she was sitting under the roof. She only agreed to put her legs over the windowsill after he, Sjoerd, had looked at the roasted rib cuts under their thick layer of fat and told her they could come too. While the students steered toward the outline of a church tower, the woman shook her head in answer to his interrogation, she thought about it carefully but no, said Sjoerd, she’d never in her life heard of anyone named Lidy. So they headed for the tower. Two helicopters were in the process of rescuing some people who had crowded onto the parapet of the hollow circular structure, which was so narrow that you couldn’t imagine how there could be a staircase inside. Its sides were full of holes and it could collapse at any moment. Nothing of the church itself remained except the tips of wreckage of wood and brick in a sea that stretched all the way to the horizon. They heaved to and followed the rescue operation. A man, a rescuer in yellow oilskins and a life vest, was calmly—or so it seemed, said Sjoerd—attaching a steel cable that came snaking down from the helicopter to people who lined up one afterthe other, some of them wearing local costume, and then rose into the air like saints. After the machines had made a sharp dip to the side and flown away, three of the remaining people had decided they would rather board the boat than wait for the pilots to return. This was