I tell her things are progressing just as we’d hope.
“Just as we’d hope?” she repeats.
“That’s it in a nutshell,” I tell her, a little playfully, but her expression makes it clear she’s waiting for a real explanation.
“Don’t you have homework?” I ask Henk, and he and his mother exchange a look. I’ve always believed that I’m a master at hiding my feelings, but I seem to be alone in that regard.
Cato’s been through this before in various iterations. When my mother was first diagnosed, I hashed through the whole thing with Kees, who’d been in my office when the call came in. And then later that night I told Cato there’d been no change, so as not to have to trudge through the whole story again. But the doctor had called the next day, when I was out, to see how I was taking the news, and she got it all from him.
Henk looks at me like he’s using my face to attempt some long division.
Cato eats without saying anything until she finally loses her temper with the cutlery. “I told you before that if you don’t want to do this, I can,” she says.
“There’s nothing that needs doing,” I tell her.
“There’s plenty that needs doing,” she says. She pulls the remote from Henk and switches off the news. “Look at him,” she complains to Henk. “He’s always got his eyes somewhere else. Does he even know that he shakes his head when he listens?”
Pneumatic hammers pick up where they left off outside our window. There’s always construction somewhere. Why not rip up the streets? The Germans did such a good job of it in 1940 that it’s as if we’ve been competing with them ever since. Rotterdam: a deep hole in the pavement with a sign telling you to approach at your own risk. Our whole lives, walking through the city has meant muddy shoes.
As we’re undressing that night she asks how I’d rate my recent performance as a husband.
I don’t know; maybe not so good, not so bad, I tell her.
She answers that if I were a minister, I’d resign.
“What area are we talking about here,” I wonder aloud, “in terms of performance?”
“Go to sleep,” she tells me, and turns off the lamp.
If climate change is a hammer to the Dutch, the head’s coming down more or less where we live. Rotterdam sits astride a plain that absorbs the Scheldt, Meuse, and Rhine outflows, and what we’re facing is a troika of rising sea level, peak river discharges, and extreme weather events. We’ve got the jewel of our water defenses — the staggeringly massive water barriers at Maeslant and Dordrecht, and the rest of the Delta Works — ready to shut off the North Sea during the next cataclysmic storm, but what are we to do when that coincides with the peak river discharges? Sea levels are leaping up, our ground is subsiding, it’s raining harder and more often, and our program of managed flooding — Make Room for the Rivers — was overwhelmed long ago. The dunes and dikes at eleven locations from Ter Heijde to Westkapelle no longer meet what we decided would be the minimum safety standards. Temporary emergency measures are starting to be known to the public as Hans Brinkers.
And this winter’s been a festival of bad news. Kees’s team has measured increased snowmelt in the Alps to go along with prolonged rainfall across Northern Europe and steadily increasing windspeeds during gales, all of which lead to increasingly ominous winter flows, especially in the Rhine. He and I — known around the office as the Pessimists — forecasted this winter’s discharge at eighteen thousand cubic meters per second. It’s now up to twenty-one. What are those of us in charge of dealing with that supposed to do? A megastorm at this point would swamp the barriers from both sides and inundate Rotterdam and its surroundings — three million people — within twenty-four hours.
Which is quite the challenge for someone in media relations. “Remember, the Netherlands will always be here,” Cato likes to say when signing off with one of the news agencies. “Though probably under three meters of water,” she’ll add after she hangs up.
Before this most recent emergency, my area of expertise had to do with the strength and loading of the Water Defense structures, especially in terms of the Scheldt estuary. We’d been integrating forecasting and security software for high-risk areas and trying to get Arcadis to understand that it needed to share almost everything with IBM and vice versa. I’d even been lent out to work on the Venice, London, and Saint Petersburg surge barriers. But now all of us were back home and thrown into the Weak Links Project, an overeducated fire brigade formed to address new vulnerabilities the minute they emerged.
Our faces are turned helplessly to the Alps. There’s been a series of cloudbursts on the eastern slopes: thirty-five centimeters of rain in the last two weeks. The Germans have long since raised their river dikes to funnel the water right past them and into the Netherlands. Some of that water will be taken up in the soil, some in lakes and ponds and catchment basins, and some in polders and farmland that we’ve set aside for flooding emergencies. Some in water plazas and water gardens and specially designed underground parking garages and reservoirs. The rest will keep moving downriver to Rotterdam and the closed surge barriers.
“Well, ‘Change is the soul of Rotterdam,’ ” Kees joked when we first looked at the numbers on the meteorological disaster ahead. We were given private notification that there would be vertical evacuation if the warning time for an untenable situation was under two hours, and horizontal evacuation if it was over two.
“What am I supposed to do,” Cato demanded to know when I told her, “tell the helicopter that we have to pop over to Henk’s school?” He now has an agreed-upon code; when it appears on his iFuze, he’s to leave school immediately and head to her office.
But in the meantime we operate as though it won’t come to that. We think we’ll come up with something, as we always have. Where would New Orleans or the Mekong Delta be without Dutch hydraulics and Dutch water management? And where would the U.S. and Europe be if we hadn’t led them out of the financial panic and depression, just by being ourselves? EU dominoes from Iceland to Ireland to Italy came down around our ears but there we sat, having been protected by our own Dutchness. What was the joke about us, after all? That we didn’t go to the banks to take money out; we went to put money in. Who was going to be the first, as economy after economy capsized, to pony up the political courage to nationalize their banks and work cooperatively? Well, who took the public good more seriously than the Dutch? Who was more in love with rules? Who tells anyone who’ll listen that we’re providing the rest of the world with a glimpse of what the future will be?
After a third straight sleepless night—“Oh, who gets any sleep in the water sector?” Kees answered irritably the morning I complained about it — I leave the office early and ride a water taxi to Pernis. In Nieuwe Maas the shipping is so thick that it’s like kayaking through canyons, and the taxi captain charges extra for what he calls a piloting fee. We tip and tumble on the backswells while four tugs nudge a supertanker sideways into its berth like puppies snuffling at the base of a cliff. The tanker’s hull is so high that we can’t see any superstructure above it.
I hike from the dock to Polluxstraat, the traffic on the A4 above rolling like surf. “Look who’s here,” my mother says, instead of hello, and goes about her tea-making as though I dropped in unannounced every afternoon. We sit in the breakfast nook off the kitchen. Before she settles in, she reverses the pillow embroidered “Good Night” so that it now reads “Good Morning.”