Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  After that, a familiar law of momentum took over: the more the comrades studied the polder, the less interest they showed in the original list of sanctuaries which were to be tried before falling back, as a last resort, on a substitute. By a swift overturn, comparable to a revolution, almost overnight and yet without anyone’s conscious decision, the last became first. When finally, after cautious reconnoitering and consultation of a geodetic map, this particular farmhouse had been pinpointed as most suited to their purpose, it was as if they could no longer, willingly, reverse direction, any more than a snowball rolling downhill could change course. This, at any rate, was Jeroen’s analysis of the phenomenon as he looked back from today’s perspective on the stages, unrolling as in a slow-motion film, from doubt to total commitment the plan had traversed. From here, like any process when looked at backward, it appeared foreordained, never to have been in doubt. Yet at the final meeting in Paris, on the eve of the great day, it had still been voted that on take-over the pilot would query the “sympathizing” Arab capitals for permission to land. But more as a matter of form—if his sense of that meeting was correct—and as a brotherly concession to the Syrian arms-suppliers than in any serious expectation of a favorable response. Jeroen did not like to think, now, what his reaction would have been if an Arab capital had surprised them. Bitter regret, surely, for the time and work and study that had gone into the polder alternative—not to mention the air fares and the rent money and the Majorca hotel outlay—but, beyond that, for Jeroen and perhaps for Greet too, there would have been almost an artistic disappointment.

  Already, while it was still a blueprint, they were proud of their idea, of its simple clean lines and undeniable originality—it owed nothing in its conception to any of the current models of revolutionary strategy. The Japanese Red Army comrades, Wadi Haddad and his PFLP contingent, even the matchless “Carlos” could only admire. And in the captive Boeing, Jeroen had needed all his schooling in indifference to keep an impassive face as they monitored the radio for answers which were strangely slow in coming, while the plane flew steadily southward and, on the polder, if all had gone well, the farmhouse stood ready and waiting. To sit dully, by contrast, in the Libyan desert, while Khaddafi’s people bargained for you would have been a sorry comedown; in fact such a prospect had become unthinkable to Jeroen, and not merely because the most predictable outcome would be “administrative detention” in a Benghazi jail.

  Working out the details—the bothersome minutiae, each of which required a separate inspiration to resolve—he had fallen in love with the plan. He had watched it grow under their hands, change and develop, meet and encompass obstacles or else leap over them. The sense of it as a work of art had grown in him, and not a solitary work of art fashioned by a bourgeois dreamer out of lifeless materials but an active, vital collaboration in which even the farmer and his wife and red-cheeked children played a part, albeit an unwitting one. They were the local materials to be worked in, as your architect used brick or fieldstone, according to availability, and they were also the “local color,” the oud-Hollands camouflage serving as your disguise. And insofar as they were a part of the medium you worked in, the resistance they offered to your design had to be calculated and incorporated as an element in the overall picture. In short, they were a challenge, and here again it was Greet who had responded creatively.

  The problem presented was simple, and yet everything hung on it: how to approach these people with an offer to “borrow” their property that would not excite their suspicions. Suspicion was inbred in farm-dwellers—a reflex set in motion by any novelty, by the mere sight of a stranger. Yet to take over the house by force was an option ruled out by the circumstances; violence applied prematurely would abort the whole design. Some stratagem was needed that would disarm the pair as effectively as a weapon and yet have an innocent, indeed attractive appearance. Something familiar to them in their everyday life, something they would welcome as it crossed their threshold. A fistful of money would not do it; the sight of money in quantity would be too unfamiliar. To find an “open sesame” was not so easy; the others were almost ready to give up and look for another stronghold when Greet hit on the answer: television, of course. They would pose as a television crew doing a story on the polder.

  No one doubted that this at last was the solution—an answer so obvious that it might have been overlooked, like the television aerial on the roof of the dwelling over which the eye passed without taking notice, any more than of a chimney. And the event had proved her right, as if it had been programmed; the knock on the door, footsteps inside, a pair of blue eyes peering out the window, cautious unbolting of the door, inspection of the four persons standing outside, carrying cameras and sound equipment, quick glance at the small truck parked in the entry road with large stickers “Hamburger Rundfunk” on its sides and rear, removal of apron, smoothing of hair, and “Come in, please, ladies and gentlemen, but kindly wipe your feet.” Then, after the inevitable service of coffee, the housewife was ready to hear their proposition.

  The truck and the stickers on it must have dispelled any lingering doubt. The stickers had been Horst’s idea. Strange how, from the instant that impersonating a television crew was thought of, the details had fallen into place, like iron filings assembling around a powerful magnet. Improvements and minor corrections seemed to derive naturally from the key concept, as if it had a brain of its own. Jeroen, at the beginning, had thought of hand-lettering the trunk with the name of the German station, but Horst had showed him the risk in that if they should happen to be stopped by the highway police—stickers, which could be removed immediately on leaving the farmhouse, served the same purpose and would not be seen to be stickers unless examined close up. Similarly, the original scenario had had them coming from the Omroepstichting. But Jeroen himself had seen the flaw: it would be too easy for the couple to check up with the Dutch feature service; a simple phone call would do it. German television combined the known and the remote. It was watched regularly in Holland, yet to place a call to Hamburg to check up on a polder documentary would be beyond these people. In addition, “Hamburger Rundfunk” had the virtue of explaining the German comrades: Horst was posing as the sound-man, with Elfride as his script girl. Jeroen was the camera-man, and Greet his lighting assistant and the crew’s interpreter. The dark-skinned Yusuf and Carlos would not be seen during the negotiations; they would appear later, when the family’s departure from Schiphol had been confirmed by the comrade at the KLM desk.

  It had been wonderful how the couple had swallowed the story. “Dummköpfer!” said Horst. Yet should one sneer at them for credulousness, considering the inducements to belief furnished by the stickers, the Hamburg license-plate, the paraphernalia of sound-equipment, cameras, cables, blackboard, tripod, light meter, carried into the house by the “crew”? Hundreds of feet of simulated film were turned, showing the husband seated on the tractor, the wife feeding the chickens, the children at play, and so on. An interview with the couple on polder conditions was taped—a genuine one, by good luck, since the woman’s final request, when the team was already packing up, was to hear her voice played back.

  They had raised fewer objections than had been anticipated in the preparatory study. The man’s main concern was that he should be back in time for his spring sowing, which, given the state of the ground, could be as late as February, and he agreed, though with slight hesitation, that work on the barn should be halted when the keys were turned over—too noisy and disruptive for the crew while it was filming. He might have asked why the Germans had chosen the dead season of the year for doing a documentary on polder life—“scheduling” was the only answer Jeroen had been able to think of—but the question seemed not to have occurred to him, and the woman’s questions had to do with the sleeping arrangements—were the two couples married?—with the oil and electricity bills and potential damage to the furnishings—who would pay? A generous deposit, to cover, also, wear and tear on towels and bed linen, had s
ufficed to quiet her.

  Her only demur arose over the contract, made out in duplicate on paper bearing the letterhead of the Hamburg station, which Jeroen put in her hands, pleased to have remembered this crowning small touch of verisimilitude. She did not want it, and her man, meeting her eyes, had concurred. For a moment, Jeroen had been dumbfounded. Then he understood: taxes. Obviously the couple preferred to have the deal take place under the table, with nothing on paper to show income received. Putting the contract back in his pocket, he had nearly laughed for joy. This solved the last problem confronting the commando: how to keep the woman from talking. Were she to boast to her kin and neighbors that her house had been chosen by a German network for a documentary on the polder, the place would be surrounded by curiosity-seekers. Even the resourceful Greet had been unable to think of a means, stronger than mere persuasion, of guaranteeing the creature’s silence. A reward to be placed in the couple’s hands on their return if the crew had been allowed to film undisturbed by neighbors or relatives? But the promise of a reward for silence might sow a germ of doubt: respectable people, the pair might well reflect, did not pay to have no witnesses to their doings. In the group’s thinking, that bridge had been still uncrossed when they had arrived at the house that first morning; they were waiting on inspiration. Then the woman’s gesture, totally unexpected, of pushing back the contract, did their work for them. There could be no better insurance that the affair would remain quiet than that the couple had their own motive for concealment: cheating the tax man! And this illustrated once again the genius of the central concept: the raw materials of bourgeois life, of their own initiative, sprang forward to collaborate in a revolutionary design aimed at its destruction. Moreover it showed—to descend to the particular—how erroneous it would have been to pretend to come from Dutch television: revenue from Omroepstichting would be automatically reported to The Hague; no motive, then, for silence. Looking back on that series of lucky chances, or narrow escapes, Jeroen felt confirmed in his persistent sense of being guided in this enterprise by an unseen power that fitted everything together, like Hegel’s “cunning of reason” or Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” He did not yet know the name of this power that was directing him but every now and again he felt its gentle pressure. What had prompted him, for example, to draw up a contract that had seemed at the time a mere touch of artistry, a perhaps wasteful embellishment? And the labor of printing the letterhead had been, in one sense, a waste; yet if he had not been moved to do that, how else could the group have learned that it had no cause for worry in the woman’s wagging tongue? It was as if every “artistic” stroke had responded to a logic in the decaying capitalist structure. When a spearhead of revolutionaries brought a plan of subversion to bear on a bourgeois entity, that inner logic, uncannily, started to apply of itself, without priming.

  Nevertheless, on Sunday afternoon, while Yusuf was watching Schneeweiss und die sieben Zwerge on the Kinderprogramm in the living-room and Carlos was napping, Elfride and Horst had passed an anxious hour or so at the kitchen window, alert to the danger represented by the woman’s parents in Kampen, only half an hour’s drive away. Who knew, after all, what story the daughter had told them? And if the old people were to turn up on an after-church ride with a bee in their bonnet of “keeping an eye on” the property, their failing eyesight could hardly miss the redoubt of sandbags that Carlos had toiled all morning to build, making efficient use of the farmer’s potato sacks. But the Sabbath afternoon had gone by without a sign of an interloper. Jeroen, had he thought of it, could have put the comrades’ minds at rest. From all the signs, as Elfride, a pastor’s daughter, might have noted herself, these people were strict Calvinists, and their parents would be stricter. A born Lutheran from Hesse maybe would not know, but Dutch Calvinists of that persuasion did not joy-ride on Sunday or visit back and forth. In fact, the man of the house, though Elfride and Horst were unaware of the episode, had entered his first objection on learning that they were to fly on the Sunday morning.

  Jeroen ought to have foreseen that. When poor Greet, all unsuspecting, came by with the tickets and the hotel vouchers, it had been too late to change. Everything depended on adherence to the schedule, which had the family’s departure from Schiphol synchronizing with the Boeing’s departure from De Gaulle and following, by eighteen hours, on the crossing of the border at Maastricht by the German-led detail. The man’s sudden balking, at that juncture, could have been a real disaster. Luckily, he had allowed Greet and his disappointed family to persuade him to overlook, for once, the observance of the Sabbath: the fault would not be his but Hamburg’s for setting an inflexible date. And on the way to the airport, as the woman pointed out, they could get the Gereformeerd service on the car radio.

  Aside from this conscientious obstacle—the ultimate close shave—the family had given no real problems. Early Sunday morning, Elfride and Horst had arrived at the farmhouse in the by-now-familiar truck, explaining that the Dutch crew would follow: they had been held up in Amsterdam by trouble with one of the cameras; probably the family would cross them on the road. The woman, at Greet’s suggestion, had prepared a list of instructions as to the watering of the plants, the regulation of the thermostat, disposal of the garbage, and so on. The Fiesta was already packed, and the man was worrying about parking it at the airport in a place where it would not be stolen—“too many lawless elements these days,” he told Horst in broken German. Then came the transfer of the keys, and for an instant Elfride thought she saw a shade of doubt in the woman’s eyes; clearly she would rather have Greet, who spoke her language, to entrust them to—that would be almost like “in the family.” The man told her to hurry. Outside, the children, restless and eager to leave, were examining the truck. The older boy was pulling at one of the stickers. He called out something in Dutch. “Look, moeder, it comes off!” was what he was saying, plainly. He held up the sticker in his grubby little hand. Elfride caught her breath. She was sure she saw a funny, thoughtful expression come over the woman’s face. But Horst was really a wonder. “Ja, ja, it comes off,” he told the child in German, with a hearty laugh. “Now let’s put it back, shall we?” Seeing his good humor, the woman scolded the child. “Genoeg!” she said—“That’s enough.” Then, to Horst, “Excuse it.” Whatever she may have asked herself for a fleeting second, the importance of the stickers had not sunk into her mind. The Fiesta drove off, with the children waving from the rear window. In a few minutes, the back-up car waiting with Yusuf and Carlos was able to emerge from a side road off the highway. Supplies and the short-wave radio were swiftly transferred to the house. Werner, the driver, would head straight for the German border. The truck, stolen in Rotterdam, with the false Hamburg license-plate and altered serial number, had no further part to play; eventually it would be found by the police in the parking lot at Schiphol, where the young comrade assigned to fetch it had been instructed to abandon it after wiping off his fingerprints.

  Now, two days later, Jeroen sat at the kitchen table before the short-wave set, holding an earphone to his right ear—the hearing of the left had been impaired by a beating he had got in a “Red Youth” demonstration in The Hague. The breakfast service was finished. The Air France people had washed up the coffee-pot and cleared off the paper plates and cups, which would be burned in the outdoor incinerator when the right moment came. He was alone. The kitchen had been declared out of bounds except to the Air France cabin crew and the two Dutch pilots. It had been decided to treat them as neutrals; they were working folk, with the usual pay grievances, and so, in principle, capable of being radicalized—Greet herself was a former KLM hostess, won to the just cause during a siege on the Cairo air-strip. In any case, their services were needed for the preparation and issue of food. Jeroen had elected to make the kitchen their command post because of its size, the unbroken view from the windows, and the privacy it offered during most of the day; it had sliding doors, which could be closed, as now, when important business was being transacted. Moreo
ver, it pleased him to sit in a kitchen.

  Werner’s voice was coming through, clearly now, from Aachen. Still no news. Irritably, Jeroen put down the earphone and pushed the big set aside: he did not need to be reminded of the time difference; he knew quite well that it was only four in the morning in New York. Of course it was too early to expect a full report on the list of eleven parasites that Aachen had relayed to the comrades there; obviously museums and galleries would not open till ten, which would be four in the afternoon here. But there were other sources; newspapers stayed open all night. The names he and Greet had hurried last night to copy from the first-class passports must be on file in any newspaper “morgue.” In that metropolis, surely, there were also students of art, critics of art, professors of art, with links to the movement who could be waked up for consultation. Some relevant information, however incomplete, should have reached the cell in Aachen by this time; the details could be filled in when the museums and art libraries opened.

  But the names “Ramsbotham,” “Tallboys,” “Potter,” “Chadwick,” et cetera—with home cities added to avoid the possibility of confusion—had produced from New York, so far, only such banalities as “millionaire sportsman,” “fat cat,” “self-styled philanthropist,” “extreme right-winger.” Not a word suggestive of art patronage, to the point where Jeroen was beginning to wonder whether he and Greet had not made a mistake. Had they been too impulsive in departing, on their own initiative, from the agreed-on plan calling for the release of all first-class passengers? When they had got wind of a tour of collectors aboard the Boeing, it had seemed, at least to Jeroen, a challenge that could not be refused. Now, however, he asked himself if he and Greet had not over-reacted when she had hurried forward bringing word of “Giorgiones and Titians” belonging to a tour of millionaires traveling in first class: she had heard the little liberal woman say so. But that woman was an exaggerator, as they had since observed. Perhaps these people were not art collectors at all but just ordinary rich people who “owned” a painting or two.