The Assault

by Harry Mulisch

  He finished the gymnasium as a fair to middling student and went on to medical school. By then a lot had been published about the Occupation, but he didn’t bother to read any of it, or any of the novels and stories about those days. Nor did he go to the State Institute for War Information, where he might have found out all that was known about the death of Fake Ploeg, and exactly how Peter had met his death. The family of which he had been a member had been exterminated once and for all; it was enough to be aware of this. All he knew was that the assault had never been brought to trial, for in that case he would have been questioned.

  And the German man with the scar in the long coat had never been tracked down. (But perhaps he had already been removed by the Gestapo. Never mind; he is the least important character in this drama.) He must have acted more or less on his own initiative. To set houses on fire in places where Nazis had been shot was not unusual, but to execute the inhabitants as well—that kind of terror had been practiced only in Poland and Russia. In those countries, however, Anton would have been killed too, even if he had still been in the cradle.

  2

  But things don’t vanish all that easily. In September, 1952, while he was in his second year of medical school, a fellow student invited him to a birthday party in Haarlem. He had not been back since he left seven years before with the German convoy. At first he didn’t plan to go, yet all day he kept thinking about it. Suddenly after lunch he grabbed a novel by a young Haarlem writer that would do for a present, though he had actually meant to read it himself, and took the trolley to the station. He felt like someone going to a whorehouse for the first time.

  Beyond the sandy embankment, the train passed under a huge steel pipe that was vomiting a thick, steel-gray mud onto the former peat diggings on the other side of the street. The burned-out truck had been removed. He watched the traffic on the street, his chin resting in the palm of his hand. The trolley too was running again. As he passed Halfweg he saw the silhouette of Haarlem, still very much the way Ruysdael painted it—although in those days there were woods and fields where laundry lay bleaching, where Anton’s house later stood. But the sky was the same: massive Alps of clouds with beams of light leaning against them. What he saw was not just any city like so many others in the world. It was as different as he himself was from other people.

  Anyone watching him sitting on the pale wooden bench in third class, peering out of the compartment window of a train confiscated from the Reichsbahn, would see a twenty-year-old with sleek, dark hair that kept falling over his forehead, which he would toss back with a brief movement of the head. For some reason this gesture was attractive, perhaps because it was repeated so often that it implied a certain amount of patience. He had dark eyebrows and a smooth, nut-colored complexion, somewhat darker around the eyes. He wore gray slacks, a heavy blue blazer, a club tie, and a shirt whose pointed collar tips turned upward. The smoke that he blew with pursed lips at the windowpane clung to the glass in a thin mist for a moment.

  He took the trolley to his friend’s house. The friend too lived in Haarlem South, but since his family hadn’t moved there till after the war, they wouldn’t question Anton about the past. When the trolley swerved into the Hout, he caught sight for a minute of the former Ortskommandantur. The trench and barbed wire had disappeared; there was nothing left but a dilapidated abandoned hotel, its windows nailed shut. The garage (a restaurant before the War) was now in ruins. Probably his friend had no idea what kind of establishment this had once been.

  “So you came after all,” he said as he opened the door.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Never mind. Did you have trouble finding it?”

  “Not really.”

  In the garden behind the house a long table stood under the tall trees. It held potato salad and other delicacies, bottles, stacks of plates, silver. On another table were the presents, to which Anton added his book. The guests stood and sat about the lawn. After he had been introduced to everyone, he joined the slightly inebriated group that he knew from Amsterdam. Holding their glasses of beer in front of their chests, they formed a circle by the edge of the water. Like Anton, they wore blazers that hung loose on their boyish frames. The leader of the group was his friend’s older brother, a dentistry student in Utrecht, who wore a huge, shapeless black shoe on his right foot.

  He was holding forth: “The fact is, you’re all softies; that’s natural. All you’ve got on your minds, except for jerking off, of course, is how to avoid the draft.”

  “That’s easy for you to say, Gerrit Jan. They obviously don’t want you, with that paw of yours.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you something else, you jerk. If you had one ounce of guts, you’d not only join the army, but volunteer to go to Korea. None of you have any idea what’s going on over there. The barbarians are storming the gates of Christian civilization.” He wagged his index finger at them. “Compared to them, the Fascists were mere boys. Just read Koestler.”

  “Why don’t you go yourself? Kick in their brains with that ridiculous shoe of yours, Quasimodo.”

  “Touché!” Gerrit Jan laughed.

  “Korea is getting to be just like the University of Amsterdam,” commented another. “A haven for misfits.”

  “Gentlemen,” said Gerrit Jan, raising his glass, “let’s drink to the downfall of Red Fascism, at home and abroad.”

  “I do keep thinking I should have joined,” said a boy who hadn’t picked up the drift of the conversation. “But apparently there are lots of former SS-ers in the army. I heard that if they enlist, they get off scot-free.”

  “So what? There’s more in it than that for the SS-ers. In Korea they can really get ahead.”

  Get ahead, thought Anton. Really get ahead. Between two boys he peered at the opposite shore of the pond, at the peaceful lanes where people bicycled and someone was taking a dog out. Villas were there, too. Somewhat beyond them, though not visible from here, was the nursery school where he used to stand in line at the central kitchen. A bit farther and toward the left, behind the vacant lots, was the place where it had all happened. He shouldn’t have come; he should never have returned to Haarlem. He should have buried all that, the way one buries the dead.

  “A certain dreamer is peering into the distance,” said Gerrit Jan, and when Anton looked up at him, “Yes, you, Steenwijk. Well, what’s your opinion?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are we going to face up to the Communists, or are we going to pussyfoot around them?”

  “I’ve had my share,” said Anton.

  At that moment someone started a record on the veranda: “Thanks for the memory …” He smiled at the coincidence, but when he saw that the others hadn’t noticed, shrugged briefly and walked away from them. The music blended with the dappled shade below the trees and somehow stirred up his memories. He was in Haarlem. It was a warm autumn day, perhaps the last one of the year, and he was once more in Haarlem. This was all wrong, and he resolved never to come back again, even if he were offered a job here at a hundred thousand gulden a year. But since he happened to be here, he wanted to say goodbye once and for all—now, immediately.

  “And you, young man?”

  Startled, he looked up into the face of his host. A short man with gray hair brushed to the side, wearing an ill-fitting suit with pants too short for him, as was the fashion with a certain element of the Dutch upper classes. Beside him stood his wife, a refined lady with a crooked back, so frail, all in white, that she looked as if at any moment she might fly away in a puff of dust.

  “Yes, Mr. Van Lennep,” he said with a smile, although he had no idea what the question was.

  “Are you having fun?”

  “I’m doing my best.”

  “Good for you. Though you don’t look very happy, my friend.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I think I’ll take a tour around the block. Please don’t mind me.”

  “Oh, we don’t mind anything. Free and easy. Go ahead and stret
ch your legs, it clears the head.”

  Between tea-drinking family members sitting in white garden chairs, he found his way into the house and out to the street. He turned into a side street and walked along the pond. When he had crossed to the other side, he looked back at the party on the lawn. The music that drifted over the water sounded even louder from here. At that moment Gerrit Jan noticed him.

  “Hey, over there, Steenwijk, you asshole. The recruiting office is in the other direction.”

  With a wave of his hand Anton let him know that he got the joke. After that he did not look back again.

  He didn’t take the path across the lots, but went along the street which, around the bend, turned into the quay. This was all wrong, what he was doing; it was a mistake. “The criminal returns to the scene of the crime.” With sudden excitement he recognized the herringbone pattern of the brick pavement. He had never noticed it in the old days, but now he saw it and realized that it had always been there. When he came to the water, he kept his eyes focused on the other side. The farmhands’ cottages, the little farms, the mill, the meadows; nothing had changed. The clouds had vanished, the cows grazed peacefully in the evening sun. Beyond the horizon, Amsterdam, which he now knew better than Haarlem, but only in the way one knows someone else’s face better than one’s own.

  He crossed to the sidewalk that had since been laid out along the embankment, walked on a bit, and only then jerked his face away from the water, in the other direction.

  3

  The three houses. An open space between the first and second, like a missing tooth. Only the fence was still there. It surrounded a thick vegetation of nettles and bushes with a few slender trees among them, like in some sixteenth-century paintings that have an angel on a hilltop and an ill-tempered crow staring at a monstrous little man. Many more weeds grew there than on the empty lots in back, perhaps because the ashes made it especially fertile. According to his uncle, in the hills of northern France there were places like this among the fields, places the farmers left unplowed because they were mass graves from the First World War.

  In the shade, under the nettles, there were probably still some bricks, fragments of walls, foundations; and down in the earth, the cellar (his old scooter no doubt stolen out of it), everything filled with rubbish. Even though he had not thought about them, these ruins had been here all these years, without interruption.

  Slowly, tilting his head a bit to the side, tossing his hair back now and then, he walked toward the spot where he had sat in the car, and once more looked at the empty space. While sparrows made a racket in the small trees, he saw the house rise up in front of him, built out of transparent bricks, the windowpanes and the thatch as he remembered them, the bay window and above it the little balcony of the bedroom, the pointed roof, and to the left, the dormer window of his room. On the board under the balcony were the letters

  CAREFREE

  The name of the Kortewegs’ house had disappeared, painted over; but Hideaway and Bide-a-Wee were still there. He looked at the spot where Ploeg had been lying, ages ago. He saw him prone on the patterned bricks, as if drawn in contour with fluorescent chalk by the police. He was tempted to touch the spot, to lay his hands on it, and this worried him. Nevertheless, he did slowly cross the street—but before he reached the other side he saw something move at the window of Hideaway. Looking closely, he recognized Mrs. Beumer. She had already noticed him and waved.

  He was upset. Not once had it occurred to him that she or any of the others might still be living here. That was inconceivable. He cared only about the place, not the people. Whenever he had thought about it, the Beumers, the Kortewegs, and the Aartses had not been present. That the people too had remained the same … he wanted to run away, but she was already standing in the doorway.

  “Tonny!”

  He could still have escaped. Probably it was his good manners that made him walk with a smile through the garden gate toward her.

  “Hello, Mrs. Beumer!”

  “Tonny, my boy.” She took his hand and put her other arm around his waist, holding him with brief little squeezes against her, awkwardly, as if she had not embraced anyone in a long time. She had grown much older and smaller, her hair now completely white, with a tightly curled permanent. She would not let go of his hand. “Come in,” she said, pulling him across the threshold. There were tears in her eyes.

  “I’m afraid I really should …”

  “Look who’s here,” she called through the door of the front parlor.

  In an armchair dating from the previous century, which at that time had not become modern again but was still old-fashioned (the way it is now too, for the second time) sat Mr. Beumer, grown so old and thin that the crown of his head no longer reached the wood carving on the high-backed chair. His legs were hidden beneath a brown plaid blanket. On top of it lay his hands, in continuous motion. His head constantly nodded. When Anton held out his hand, Mr. Beumer’s came toward him like a wounded, fluttering bird. Anton held it but felt only the cool, feeble likeness of a hand.

  “How are you doing, Hans?” he asked in a gentle, broken voice.

  Anton looked at Mrs. Beumer. She made a gesture as if to say, this is the way things are.

  “Fine, Mr. Beumer,” he said. “Thank you. And how are you?”

  But putting the question seemed to have exhausted Mr. Beumer. He nodded and said nothing more, continuing to observe Anton with small, watery blue eyes. The corners of his mouth were damp and shiny. The skin of his face was as thin as wax paper. Whatever hair he had left was straw-colored, the way Anton remembered it. Perhaps he had been a redhead long ago. A dark-brown radio made of Bakelite and shaped like an egg halved lengthwise was broadcasting a program for children. Mrs. Beumer had started clearing the table; apparently they had finished supper.

  “Let me help you.”

  “No. Just make yourself comfortable and I’ll fix you a cup of coffee.”

  He sat straddling the exotic stool by the fireplace, a camel saddle which had been familiar to him all his life. Mr. Beumer did not take his eyes off him. Anton smiled and looked about. Nothing had changed. At the dining room table stood the four black-lacquered chairs, with their intricately carved, pointed backs, rather gothic and creepy, that used to frighten him when he came here for tea and cake. Above the door still hung the crucifix with the twisted, yellowed Corpus. There was a sour smell in the room; all the windows were closed tight. So were the connecting doors with the leaded panes. “Weedywot,” chanted the disguised woman’s voice on the radio. “I see you but I pick you not.” Suddenly Mr. Beumer belched and looked about him in surprise, as if he heard something unexpected.

  “Why didn’t you come sooner, Tonny?” Mrs. Beumer called from the kitchen.

  He got up and went to her. From the hall he could see that their bed stood in the back room, probably because Mr. Beumer could no longer climb the stairs. From a whistling kettle, she poured a thin trickle of water over the coffee.

  “This is the first time I’ve returned to Haarlem.”

  “He hasn’t been well at all lately,” Mrs. Beumer said softly. “Just pretend you don’t notice.”

  Of course. What else? Should I burst out laughing and exclaim, “Don’t talk nonsense!” But actually that would probably have been better, he realized.

  “Obviously,” he said.

  “Do you know that you haven’t changed at all? You’re even taller than your father, but I recognized you at once. Are you still living in Amsterdam?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Beumer.”

  “I knew that, because your uncle came right after the Liberation. My husband saw you being driven off in that German car, and we had no idea whether you were still alive. No one knew about anything in those dreadful times. You can’t imagine how often we talked about you. Come.”

  They returned to the living room. When Mr. Beumer saw Anton he once more held out his hand, and Anton shook it in silence. Mrs. Beumer laid the Persian cloth, whose pattern he still re
membered, back on the table. She poured the coffee.

  “Do you take sugar and milk?”

  “Just milk, please.”

  She poured some hot milk out of the small saucepan into the wide, low cup.

  “To think that you should never have wanted to see this place again …” she said as she handed him the cup. “But actually I can understand it. It was just too awful, all that. Someone else has been here several times and stood looking at us from across the street.”

  “Who was it?”

  “No idea. A man.” She handed him the cookie tin. “A biscuit?”

  “Please.”

  “Are you sure you’re comfortable there? Why don’t you sit at the table?”

  “But this is my usual place.” He laughed. “Don’t you remember? When your husband read to me out of The Three Musketeers?”

  Mrs. Beumer turned off the radio and sat sideways at the table. She laughed along with him, but a minute later her laughter died and her face turned red. Anton looked away. With thumb and finger he took the skin off his milk exactly in the middle, and lifted it slowly. It folded up like an umbrella, and he draped it over the edge of his saucer. He took a sip of the weak brew. Now something was expected of him, a question about long ago. His should be the opening move, no doubt, but he had no desire to begin. They probably thought that he was terribly disturbed by the past, dreamed about it every night, but the fact was that he almost never thought about it. As he sat before these two old people in this room, at least one of them must imagine him to be quite different from what he was. He looked at Mrs. Beumer. Once more there were tears in her eyes.