Chapter 4
Forty Days
You’re picking up where you left off.
The draw took place on the morning of the 6th, in the gymnasium of the Goes school group, and it was public because everyone had insisted that it should be.
There was a ball machine that had been got out of a cupboard and that dated from before, a man from resources who read out the numbers, two witnesses drawn by lot from the people present, and a register in which the household number and the draw rank were written by hand, row after row.
It lasted eleven hours. They stopped twice.
Élise did not go. She was at sector four, pumping water that was rising to 6.1, with Joren, who had not said a word all morning.
At seven in the evening she went round to her mother's.
Margriet Vantroyen lived on the ground floor of a low house in the rue des Serres, with a door that opened straight onto the pavement and a curtain she never closed. She was sixty-two. She had spent thirty-one years in the northern glasshouses growing tomatoes and had stopped at fifty-eight because of her back, and since then she had minded the children of three families in the street, which was not a registered trade.
She had her paper on the table, flat, right in the middle.
“One thousand one hundred and eighty-seven,” she said.
Élise picked up the paper.
“That's good,” she said. “That's very good.”
“Is it good?”
“The convoys go in fourteen hundreds. You're in the second one.”
Her mother looked at her to check whether she was lying, the way she had been checking for twenty-nine years, and she saw that she was not lying, and her face came apart all at once and put itself back together almost as fast.
“And you?”
“I don't know yet.”
“What do you mean, you don't know?”
“They got to V at four o'clock. They're delivering by district and block Oost is one of the last.”
Her mother got up, went to fetch something from the sideboard, and came back with a jar of tomatoes she had preserved in July, and she put it down in front of Élise and said:
“Take it now. Later it'll be too heavy.”
The Zone came apart tidily. It was something nobody had foreseen and that was talked about for a long time afterwards, among people from the delta: that there was almost no disorder for the first three weeks.
People queued. They queued at the numbers office, at the baggage office, at the clinic for three-month prescriptions, at the animal office, at the school for the attendance certificates that no other Zone would ever ask for but that were issued anyway, because people asked for them.
Rationing came in order: methanol first, then parts, then thread, then soap.
People took anything. Élise saw a woman of seventy in the baggage queue with a flat iron in a canvas bag. A real one, cast iron, the sort you put on the hotplate. She took it out to be weighed and put it back in, and nobody said anything to her, and Élise thought about that iron for three days.
At sector four, they pumped.
Those were the orders and they made no sense, and everyone knew it, including the man who had written them. They were pumping to slow the salt in a polder they were going to abandon in five weeks.
Wies did not question the order once.
“While we're here,” she said, “we hold the level.”
On the 9th, 6.1 became 6.8. On the 10th, point three passed four and Élise had to sit down on the bank for two minutes, not because of the figure but because she had slept badly and because point three was the prettiest of the four, with the willows.
The animals were settled on the 10th.
There were in the Zone, at the last count, eleven thousand dogs, an unknown number of cats, four hundred horses, seven hundred goats and the herds.
On the 10th the animal office published a six-line notice saying that the horses and cattle would go on foot with the herdsmen, that the goats would follow, and that no pet would be admitted to the convoys.
They opened a counter.
Élise walked past it at five in the afternoon. There was a queue of two hundred people with animals on the end of a rope.
Nobody was obliged. It was simply stated that the convoys would not take them and that abandoning them in the town would, in a fortnight, create a problem nobody wanted to name.
People waited their turn. That was the worst of it: they queued.
Élise turned back and took another street, which added a kilometre and a half, and she did not forgive herself for that either.
On the 10th she went to the clinic.
There was a queue right round the building. They were issuing three-month prescriptions to people who knew perfectly well that no other Zone would honour them, and they issued them anyway, and people folded them in four and held them against their chests.
A notice at the entrance announced final closure on the 28th.
Élise queued for three hours to ask whether a removal could be brought forward.
“Fittings and removals have been suspended since the 9th,” said the woman at the counter. “The team left with convoy 1. There are two nurses left and they're doing emergencies.”
“And after the 28th?”
“After the 28th there's no clinic.”
“And implants?”
The woman looked up. She was forty years old and she had had to answer that question four hundred times in a week.
“You'll ask when you get there,” she said.
Élise came out with her paper folded in four.
She did not show it to Jonas.
On the 11th Joren announced that he would not be coming any more: his brother-in-law had a place on convoy 4 and a trailer, and he was going with his sister and Joren's wife.
He stood in the workshop to say it, cap in hand, as though he were resigning.
“Go on,” said Wies.
“I can stay until—”
“Go on, Joren.”
He went. Élise came out after him and caught him up on the ramp and thanked him for the samphire, which was stupid, and he said goodbye Ms Vantroyen, which was stupid too, because he had never called her that in his life.
On the 12th there was the thing at the baggage office.
A queue of two hundred people, one counter, a limit of twelve kilos per adult. One man had fifteen. He was told to choose. He refused to choose. He was told again. He grabbed the scales by the pan and threw them against the wall, and two men from the queue went for him — not the order service: two men from the queue, who had been waiting four hours.
They hit him three or four times, on the ground, and they were pulled apart, and the queue re-formed in twelve seconds.
Élise was six places back. She had done nothing. She had held her bag against her and she had watched, and when the queue re-formed she had moved forward two paces like everyone else, and what stayed with her that evening was not the blows: it was her own hand, closed on the strap, while it was happening.
Her number arrived on the evening of the 12th, pushed under the door in a brown envelope.
She opened it standing in the hall.
It was a card the size of a hand, with her name, her household number, and in the middle, printed large:
CONVOY 2 — KRUININGEN — 16/09 — 05.30
She stood for a moment with the card between her fingers.
Convoy 2 was the second to leave. It went before the third, the fourth, the fifth and the other thirty-five. It went with the first trailers, the ones that had not yet done four runs, and on the Roosendaal road while it was still clear.
The card did not give the rank. It gave the convoy, and the convoy was the same as her mother's.
Jonas came in twenty minutes later.
She had put the card on the table, in the middle, the way her mother had put hers.
He saw it as he took off his coat. He stopped for a quarter of a second, no more.
“Good,” he said.
“It's the second.”
“I see.”
“Mum's in the second too.”
“I know.”
She looked up.
He was hanging up his coat and he did not turn round, and he said, in the same tone as ever:
“I see the lists go through, Élise. I see everything go through.”
She looked at him. He hung up the coat, pulled it straight, and went to wash his hands.
She could have asked. There was a question to be asked and it came to four words.
She did not ask it, and she never quite knew whether that was trust or cowardice, and she told herself that perhaps the difference between the two had never existed.
The six o'clock bulletin, on the 12th, gave the levels, the tide times, the state of the convoys, and an announcement at the end of the broadcast, read more slowly than the rest:
Notice from the Vlissingen meteorological station. A deep depression is expected over the southern North Sea on the night of 13–14 September, with north-westerly winds of force 9 to 10 and a storm surge estimated at between one metre sixty and two metres twenty. Spring high water is at 03.41. The Eastern Scheldt barrier has been ordered to close.
The next day was the 13th.