Chapter 2
Allocation Officer
You’re picking up where you left off.
The second-floor room had never been heated and never would be, because you do not heat a room where fifteen people spend four hours a week. Jonas kept his coat on. Everyone kept their coats on. Greet Boone, who was seventy-four and ran the steam room in the south quarter, had a shawl as well, and two years earlier she had suggested holding the sessions at her place, in the steam, and they had laughed about it for six months without ever giving her an answer.
On the table were a carafe of water, fifteen glasses, fifteen blotters, and the register.
The register was bound in grey cloth, landscape format, and on the spine was a label where someone had written by hand EASTERN SCHELDT BARRIER — OPERATING GEAR — 2126 to, and had not finished the sentence because nobody knew when it would stop.
Ineke Doorn had brought it from the Topshuis by bike, in an oilcloth bag, and she had opened it at the right page before anyone had sat down.
Aart Mesu opened the session at two minutes past nine and gave the floor to Ineke.
She made no preamble. She turned the register round to face the table and pushed it into the middle, and those close enough leaned in.
“The entry for 2 October 2139,” she said.
The entry for 2 October 2139 read: Roompot, gate 44 — port ram replaced with the reserve unit. Reserve exhausted. It was written in blue ink, in a sloping hand, and it was followed by eleven entries in eleven different hands, one a year, all saying roughly the same thing in the same order: annual inspection, sill 31, wear to the starboard guide, no part, deferred.
In the margin, beside each of them, someone had recalculated a figure. 3.9. 4.1. 4.0. 4.4. 4.2. The last one said 4.6.
“Per cent,” said Ineke. “Per year. That's the probability that in any winter we'll have a surge that forces us to close the Roompot channel.”
“And we can't close it,” said Cas Wisse.
“We can bring it down. It doesn't seat on the sill. On one gate that makes almost no difference, the barrier isn't watertight and never has been. But the starboard guide has eighty years of seawater in it and the conservation programme stopped in 2112. If we bring it down under load, I can't tell you it won't jam across.”
“And if it jams across.”
“Then we don't close the channel at all. And we take the whole surge on the inside.”
Nobody asked what that meant. It was one of the three or four things everyone here knew, the way you know that water runs downhill: the inner dykes of the Scheldt had been calculated after 1986 for a tidal range held by the barrier, and not for what the barrier was holding back. They had not built a dam, back then. They had built a gate, to keep the tide alive and the oysters with it, and they had left the dykes on the inside at the height they already had.
Greet Boone said:
“And the part?”
“Four hundred and twenty bore,” said Ineke. “We can machine up to three hundred.”
“Elsewhere?”
“I've asked Brabant, Rijn-Maas and Ghent. Brabant answered. They have a lathe that can do it. They'll make it for us in eighteen months if they put everything else back, and they won't put everything else back.”
Aart Mesu let the silence run on a little, not for effect but because he was slow and always had been.
“Four point six a year,” he said at last. “Over one winter.”
“Four point six is the probability that we have to close,” said Ineke. “Not the probability that it breaks. If we close, I give it a one in three chance that 31 doesn't do its job. And if it doesn't, I don't know what the inner dykes do. Nobody does. They've never been tried.”
“Over how many winters?”
“You mean how long we can go on like this.”
“Yes.”
Ineke looked at the register, which she knew by heart, and she answered looking at the register.
“Every winter that passes, we put one more piece into the machine. The guide goes on opening up. In two years I won't bring that gate down at all, not even unloaded, because I'll be afraid I won't get it up again. And at that point the channel will be permanently open and there will be no decision left to take.”
Jonas was writing. He had been writing from the start, because it was his job and because it kept his hands busy. He wrote 2 yrs, and circled it, and looked at the circle for a while.
Greet Boone asked what they would do about the old.
She asked it without emphasis, barely raising her hand, and Aart Mesu asked her to be more specific, and she was more specific.
“There are ninety-one thousand people over seventy in this Zone. I have twelve who come to the steam room every day and eight of them wouldn't manage three kilometres.”
“They'll have a number like everyone else,” said Jonas.
“And if they don't have an early one?”
“Then they'll walk.”
“They won't walk.”
“I know,” said Jonas.
He had said it without harshness and without evasion, and around the table there was a silence unlike the others.
“You can create a category,” said Greet.
“I can. If I create a category for the over-seventies, it comes to ninety-one thousand people, and at four thousand a day it eats twenty-three days out of forty.
And the next category is children under five, and there are sixty-eight thousand of them. The two together come to a hundred and fifty-nine thousand, and we are getting a hundred and sixty thousand out.
So the question isn't whether I can create a category, Ms Boone. It's which of the two.”
Greet Boone nodded, very slowly, and asked nothing further.
She was the first to vote.
There was no guilty party.
That was the thing Jonas came back to long afterwards, and that he never quite knew how to tell: that for the two hours that followed, in a room of fifteen people, five of them drawn by lot and with no reason to be polite, nobody went looking for a name.
They could have. There were eleven entries in the register and eleven signatures at the foot of eleven deferrals, and two of the signatories were dead and one was in the room. They could have asked why, in 2141, when there was money left, the quays at Yerseke had been redone rather than the starboard guide of a gate that was working perfectly well.
Nobody asked. They had all signed something, one day, that looked like that.
So they counted.
Nine hundred and forty-one thousand two hundred inhabitants on the last register. They rounded it to nine hundred and forty thousand, because you always round down when you are talking about people who have to be got out, and nobody noticed.
Ineke gave the date: the first depression capable of requiring a closure, statistically, came in the second half of October. Before that there were spring tides and bad weather, which was not the same thing.
That made forty days.
Jonas gave his figures. He had had them since the evening before, because Ineke had sent him a note at seven o'clock and he had understood from the first line what he was going to be asked.
A hundred and sixty-eight methanol lorries, thirty-one of them permanently in the workshop. Forty-one trailers. Two twenty-wagon trains running Goes–Roosendaal three times a week, which could be put up to five if the people could be found to hold the line. Sixty people per lorry, standing, with what they could carry and nothing else. Two days for the round trip.
“Four thousand a day,” he said. “Pushing it, four thousand two hundred. I'd rather announce four thousand.”
He let the table do the multiplication for itself.
Cas Wisse did it out loud, because he was a fisherman and saw no reason not to say things.
“Forty days at four thousand is a hundred and sixty thousand.”
“Yes.”
“There are nine hundred and forty thousand of us.”
“Yes.”
Greet Boone asked how many Zones had done this.
Aart Mesu looked to Ineke, and Ineke did not know, and it was a woman at the far end of the table, who dealt with the schools and had not spoken since the start, who answered.
“Four.”
“And where are they now?”
“Two of them are still there.”
There was a silence, and then Aart Mesu moved to the vote, because there was nothing to add to that and everyone in the room had just understood the same thing at the same moment.
Fifteen in favour. They raised their hands, they counted, they wrote it down.
Outside, through the window, it was a very ordinary September day, and you could see the tops of the glasshouses, and two men unloading something from a cart without hurrying.
The session did not end there. It went on for two hours, on the ordinary business, because there was an agenda and an agenda is not wiped out because you have just decided to evacuate a Zone.
There was the roof of the school at Kapelle, a boundary dispute, the recommissioning of a digester, and the quarterly technical allocations.
Ineke presented hers in four minutes. She had six people. She needed six to instrument the sill at 31, fit the sensors, take the clearance readings at every tide and tell her, in a month, whether or not she could bring that gate down.
Against that, on the list, were fourteen sector requests.
Jonas read them. He read them every quarter, and every quarter he granted three or four.
The eleventh read: Sector 4 — Zuidvliet, fork. Saline rise at all four points. Maximum upstream, decreasing downstream. Turbidity, fine sand. Deep seepage probable. Grouting team requested.
He knew the handwriting.
He stayed with it for the length of three breaths, and nobody noticed, because nobody watches a man reading a list.
A grouting job was five days, two rigs, and the same six people.
He thought, in this order: that if the seepage was what it looked like, sector 4 would be lost before Christmas. That sector 4 was eleven per cent of the Zone's market gardening. That in forty days there would be nobody left to eat the Zone's market gardening. And that the only thing that mattered now was knowing whether gate 31 could be brought down, because that was the difference between getting a hundred and sixty thousand people out in order and putting all of them into the water at once.
He wrote deferred against the eleventh, and signed at the foot of the page, like the eleven before him.
He was the last one left in the room, as always, to clear up.
So was Greet Boone, because it took her eleven minutes to get up, put on her shawl and find her stick.
“Mr Reyners.”
“Ms Boone.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-four.”
She nodded, leaning on the table.
“I'm seventy-four,” she said, “and I've just voted to evacuate a Zone where I was born and where my mother was born, and in forty days I'll be in a queue with a bag.
I wanted to tell you one thing. You're going to make lists for forty days. You're going to spend your nights on them.
When you've finished, there will be people outside and people inside, and you'll be asked whether you did right, and you'll say yes because it will be true.”
She picked up her stick.
“It won't help you,” she said. “I'm telling you now so that it doesn't take you by surprise.”
Sarah Okonjo was waiting for him in the corridor with two folders under her arm.
“Did they vote?”
“They voted.”
She nodded. She was twenty-nine and had worked with him for four years, and she had that way of only asking the questions she actually wanted the answer to.
“How many are we getting out?”
“A hundred and sixty thousand. A hundred and seventy perhaps, if the trains hold.”
He went down one step, then stopped, because he had just heard himself.
She waited, one hand on the rail.
“And the others?” she said.
“The others walk.”