The Assault

by Harry Mulisch

  Fake turned his back to Anton and remained motionless, bent slightly forward, as he asked, “Are you implying it was my father’s fault that your family was murdered?”

  Now, Anton realized, every word mattered. Above the mantelpiece hung a tall mirror with an intricately carved frame, bought for a song at the flea market to make his room look bigger. In the weathered glass he saw that Fake had closed his eyes.

  “Why can’t you love your father without trying to whitewash him?” asked Anton. “After all, it doesn’t take much to love a saint. That’s like loving animals. Why don’t you simply say: my father was definitely a collaborator, but he was my father and I love him.”

  “But dammit, he was not a collaborator, at least, not in the way you’re implying.”

  “But suppose you knew for certain,” Anton said to his back, “that he had done terrible things … God knows … just name something … wouldn’t you still love him?”

  Fake turned around, looked at him briefly, and began to pace up and down through the room. “Collaborator … collaborating …” he said after a while. “That’s what they call it, and yet now they all think the way he did about Communism. Listen to what’s going on out there. What’s the difference between that and the Eastern Front? And all that stuff about the Jews; he didn’t know a thing about that. He was ignorant of all that. You can’t blame him for it, what the Germans did to them. He was with the police and simply did his duty, what he was told. Even before the War he had to arrest people, and he didn’t know what would happen to them then, either. Of course he was a Fascist, but a good one, out of conviction. Things would have to change in Holland; it shouldn’t ever go back to the way it was under Minister Colijn, when my father had to fire on workers. At least he didn’t just follow the crowd, like most Hollanders. If Hitler had won the War, how many people in Holland would still be against him now, do you suppose? Don’t make me laugh, man. Not till they saw that Hitler was losing did they all suddenly belong to the Resistance, those yellow bastards.”

  The stove, in which he had put too much oil, began to sputter in dull, rhythmic spurts. Fake gave it a professional glance and said, “That’s never going to work.” But he would not be distracted. With his glass in both hands he sat down on the window seat and asked, “Do you know when my father became a member of the National Socialist Party? In September, nineteen forty-four, after Mad Tuesday, when the whole thing was as good as lost and all those phony Fascists fled to Germany, or suddenly had always belonged to the Resistance. That’s when he thought it was time to take a stand. My mother often told us this. And because of his conviction they shot him—for nothing else—and that’s what cost your family their lives. If the Communists hadn’t done that, your father and mother would be here today. Possibly my father would have spent a couple of years in prison, and by now he would be back simply working for the police.”

  He straightened up and walked to the piano, on which he played a few notes in the middle register. The sound, mixed with the sputtering of the stove, reminded Anton of Stravinsky. Each word of Fake’s made his head ache worse. How could anyone embroil himself in such a web of lies? Love was what caused it all—love, through thick and thin.

  “To hear you tell it,” he said, “your father’s name belongs on that monument too.”

  “What monument?”

  “The one back there on our quay.”

  “Is there a monument?”

  “I didn’t find out till much later myself. It has my parents’ names and those of the twenty-nine hostages. Should Fake Ploeg be on it too?”

  Fake looked at him and wanted to say something, then suddenly began to sob. The sobs rose out of him as if they belonged to someone else who was inhabiting his body.

  “Shit …” he said, but it was unclear whether he was replying to Anton’s question or angry with himself for crying “As your house went up in flames, we got the news that our father was dead. Did you ever think of that? I’ve thought of what you went through; did you ever do the same for me?”

  He turned toward him, then away, passed his hand over his eyes in despair, and suddenly grabbed the stone. He looked about, looked at Anton, who raised his arms to his head in self-defense and cried, “Fake!”

  Fake took aim and threw it straight at the mirror. Anton ducked. With averted face he saw the glass break into large pieces that landed in splinters on the iron lid of the stove, which was now sputtering feebly. The stone bounced onto the mantelpiece and remained lying there. Surveying the damage with pounding heart, he heard Fake’s footsteps run down the stairs.

  A final fragment slipped out of the frame and shattered into pieces. Immediately afterwards the lid of the stove blew off with a dull thud, five centimeters up in the air, and let out a cloud of soot. Anton crossed his hands behind his neck, cracked his fingers, and took a deep breath. He felt on the verge of hysterical laughter. The shattered mirror, the exploding stove, the screaming in the street—with his headache he couldn’t stand it. How senseless, all this! The soot spread through the room, and he knew it would take hours to clean it up.

  He heard Fake come back up the stairs; only then did he realize that the street door had never closed. Instinctively he looked around for something to defend himself with. He seized his tennis racket.

  Fake appeared in the doorway and glanced briefly at the disorder in the room.

  “I wanted to tell you,” Fake said, “that I’ll never forget that time in the classroom.”

  “What time in the classroom?”

  “That time you came in, when I was sitting there in my monkey suit.”

  “Oh God, yes,” said Anton. “That happened too.”

  Fake hesitated. Perhaps he wanted to shake hands, but he just raised one briefly and went downstairs again. A minute later the door slammed in its lock.

  Anton looked about. All his things were covered with a veil of grease. The books and the sextants were the worst. Fortunately the piano had been closed. First he had to clean up, headache or no headache. He drew the curtains and opened the windows wide. As the noise invaded the room, he looked at the shards. On the reverse side they were a dull black. Only a few sharp splinters were still stuck in the frame, which encircled nothing but dark brown wood that had once been papered over with newspapers, now mostly torn off. The two gilt putti, with their fruit platter and tails made of curled leaves, looked down at him with unchanged angelic expressions.

  First he must get rid of the stone. He might simply throw it out of the window. Carefully, so as not to slip on the glass lying on the straw carpet, he went to the mantelpiece. Holding the stone in his hand, he read a fragment on a strip of newspaper still sticking to the wooden back of the mirror: NEL DI 2 LUGLIO 1854. SOLENNIZZANDOSI CON SACRA DEVOTA POMPA NELL’AUGUSTO TEMPIO DI MARIA SS. DEL SOCCORSO. “On the second of July, 1854. Celebrated with sacred ceremony at the Church of Blessed Mary of Perpetual Help.”

  One more thing he would never have found out if it hadn’t been for Fake.

  1

  In love, too, he simply let things happen to him. Every few weeks a different girl would come and sit on his worn-out couch, usually with her legs folded under her, and he would explain the mechanism of a sextant one more time. This never bored him; he was fascinated by the shiny brass instruments with their small mirrors, measured scales, and little telescopes containing the night sky and the stars. Often the girls couldn’t understand the apparatus, but always they understood the absorption with which he explained, and which therefore was directed a little at them. At times the couch remained empty for a week or two, which didn’t bother him much. It was not his style to go to a bar to pick someone up.

  In 1959 he passed his final medical exams and, having become an assistant anesthesiologist, rented a larger apartment with lots of light in the neighborhood of the Leidseplein. Every morning he walked the few blocks to the Wilhelmina Hospital, which had been called the Western Hospital during the War. In the streets around the complex of buildings, ther
e was always much coming and going of ambulances, visitors, and patients taking a first stroll, wearing striped pajamas under their overcoats. Doctors walked from one building to another, their white coats casually unbuttoned. Anton, his head slightly to one side, tossing back his hair now and then, somewhat careless in manner, aroused the motherly instinct in the nurses bicycling by, who would then end up on his couch. Sometimes he had to pass the shed on which Lazarett had been written, but this reminded him less and less of Schulz, who had been brought here dying, or already dead.

  He met his first wife in London in 1960, when he was there on Christmas vacation. During the day he strolled about the city, bought clothes on Regent Street, and dropped in on the dealers in antique navigational instruments behind the British Museum. At night he usually went to a concert. Most men still wore bowlers and carried rolled-up umbrellas. When he lunched in a pub, the umbrella stand would be full of those endearing instruments. One rainy afternoon, strolling down Whitehall between its colossal monuments to power, where the Horse Guard performed its inexplicable dances like strutting roosters, he decided to enter Westminster Abbey for the first time.

  It was full of foreign tourists and day trippers from the country. He had bought a guidebook bound in the kind of purplish red common throughout England. For the central nave just at the entrance to the choir, it listed the one hundred and seventy graves of the finest flower of the nation, dating from the last six centuries. He closed the book. Everywhere, on the pavement, in the walls, and on the pillars, were sculptures and inscriptions. In the chapels, statues and tombstones stood just as if they were on display at a secondhand furniture auction. In the narrow passage along the choir the dead were aligned end to end, the way patients sometimes lay on stretchers in the hall in front of the operating rooms; only here, on their backs, in marble, on top of their sarcophagi, they were permanently anesthetized. He tried to imagine what would happen on Judgment Day, when they would all rise from their tombs and be introduced to each other, these hundreds of heroes, noblemen, and artists, the most exclusive club in the United Kingdom.

  Royalty lay in the chapel behind the main altar. Past the throng of kings and queens shuffled the people who would never be buried here. At the Coronation Chair they came to a standstill. He himself was fascinated by this throne on which almost every ruler had been crowned since the fourteenth century. Ancient oak, simply ornamented, the back scratched full of initials from one century or another. In the true spirit of historical veracity, it had never been cleaned up. Under the wooden seat, a large stone: the Stone of Scone. Anton opened his guidebook again. The stone had once been the pillow of the biblical Jacob. It had ended up in Ireland (via Egypt and Spain) during the eighth century before Christ, then fourteen hundred years later in Scotland, and finally in England, where it could be seen at this very moment and on this spot. Just as the real truth about the kings all around him could be found only in Shakespeare’s plays, so also this legend about the stone seemed to reveal an essential truth. Only if the Irish claimant to the throne had royal blood would the stone groan at coronation time; otherwise not. Anton burst out laughing and said aloud, “How true!” Upon which a young woman next to him asked, “What’s true?”

  He looked at her, and at that moment everything was decided.

  It was her glance, the look in her eyes, and her hair, thick, springy, reddish hair. Her name was Saskia De Graaff, and she was a stewardess with KLM. After having visited the Poet’s Corner as well, they went off together. She had to pick her father up at a club in St. James’s. Every year he went to London for Christmas to meet his old wartime friends. As they arrived at the club building and made plans to meet in Amsterdam, they saw a general come down the stairs and step into a waiting car with a military driver.

  A week later, during their first meeting in the lobby of the Hotel Des Indes, De Graaff inquired tactfully about his family. Anton said that his father had been a clerk at the law courts in Haarlem, but that both his parents had died long ago. Not till six months later, one warm evening in Athens, where De Graaff was ambassador, did he tell the whole story to his future father-in-law. Having heard him out, De Graaff remained silent and gazed from the darkened room into the brilliant, perfumed garden, vibrant with the chirping of crickets, where a small fountain murmured as it spouted up into the air. A servant in a white jacket clinked some pieces of ice together on the terrace. Saskia and her mother were sitting out there. The Acropolis could be seen in the distance between cypresses and pine trees. All De Graaff said after a while was, “Even the good has its evil side in this world. But there is still another side.”

  He himself had belonged to an organization that coordinated all the Resistance groups, and as such had been in direct contact with the exiled government in London. He too spoke little of those days. All Anton knew about them was what Saskia had told him, but he had no desire to hear more. He could probably have read up on the subject in the reports from the Parliamentary Inquest Committee, but he didn’t.

  A year after their first meeting, they got married. His uncle was not there; a senseless auto accident had put an end to his life. Shortly after his wedding Anton got a permanent job, and with financial help from De Graaff they bought half of a two-family house in the neighborhood behind the Concertgebouw.

  2

  During the heat wave at the beginning of June, 1966, Saskia had to attend the funeral of one of her father’s friends, an important journalist and poet by the name of Sjoerd, whom she too had known after the War. She asked Anton to come with her, and he had managed to get the day off. He wanted to take their four-year-old, Sandra, along as well.

  “Should we, Ton?” asked Saskia. “Death isn’t exactly for children.”

  “I’ve never heard such a ridiculous platitude,” he said. It sounded sharper than he intended. He excused himself and kissed her. They decided to go to the beach after the funeral.

  His father-in-law, who was as old as the century, had just retired and was living in a country house in Gelderland. He would be coming by car. Saskia called and suggested that he pick them up—then they could have coffee together first. A typical country dweller, he replied that he wouldn’t be caught dead in Amsterdam; what did they think, that he wanted to be attacked by a gang of hippie Provos? He laughed as he said it, but he didn’t come, though God knows he’d faced worse dangers in his life.

  The funeral was in a village north of Amsterdam. The Steenwijks parked their car on the outskirts and walked to the small church, the two adults perspiring in their dark clothes, while Sandra, dressed in white, didn’t mind the sun. In the village square was a crowd of men and women, mostly older, who all seemed to be acquainted. They greeted each other, not somberly and mournfully, but with laughter and exuberant embraces. There were many photographers. A cabinet minister—the one who had recently been much in the news in connection with the Amsterdam riots—stepped out of a big black Cadillac. He too was greeted with kisses and slaps on the back.

  “These people all fought against the Germans,” Anton told his daughter.

  “In the War,” she said as if she knew all about it, and twisted her doll’s head with a decisive gesture.

  Anton surveyed the scene with a continuous feeling of excitement. He knew no one. Saskia greeted a few people, though she had forgotten their names. Inside the bare Protestant church, where the organ was already playing, they sat in the last row. When the coffin was carried in, everyone stood up. He put his arm around Sandra, who asked in a whisper whether that gentleman was inside there now. On De Graaff’s arm the widow entered—sad, of course, but facing the people with head high, nodding now and then with a gentle smile.

  Suddenly Sandra called out, “Grandpa!”

  He turned to her briefly and winked. They sat down in front, near the cabinet minister.

  Anton recognized the mayor of Amsterdam. The funeral address was given by a famous clergyman who had spent years in a concentration camp. His delivery was so melodramatic that he seemed
to have acquired his rhetorical manner by overcoming a speech defect, like Demosthenes training with the pebbles in his mouth. He made Sandra look up and wink with amusement at her father. Anton, only half listening, was struck by the profile of a woman across the aisle and a few rows ahead. For some reason it made him think of a sword, with its sharp tip planted straight in the ground. She must have been about forty-five; her dark hair, thick and bushy, was graying in places.

  They joined the rear of the procession to the cemetery behind the church. During the short walk on the street and then along the gravel paths, everyone was again deep in conversation. People were waving, some walking ahead, others falling back to the rear. It was not so much a funeral as a reunion.

  “They feel at home again,” said Saskia.

  “I hope no one finds out that they’re all here in one place.”

  “What do you mean, no one?”

  “The Germans, of course.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Photographers were once more tracking down celebrities; the villagers stood looking on from across the street. All these years most of them had probably been unaware of the important personage living in their midst … Boys on motorbikes observed the procession with mocking faces, but their motors were silent. Obviously something about these men and women, a few of them disabled, impressed the boys enough to behave themselves.

  “Papa?”

  “Yes?”

  “What is war, really?”

  “A big quarrel. Two bunches of people who want to chop each other’s heads off.”

  “You don’t have to overdo it,” said Saskia.

  “You think so?” Anton laughed. At the cemetery a tight circle had formed around the grave, and the Steenwijks couldn’t see much. Sandra got bored, so Saskia took her hand and led her on a walk. Behind him he could hear her reading inscriptions on the graves and explaining them. Now and then, ignoring the fact that his clothes were sticking to him, he lifted his face to the bright sun. The soft murmur in the last rows of the crowd did not die down until the widow herself addressed them, but her words were lost to him in the wide-open space of this sunny day. The birds flying overhead must have seen the people gathered here in the open landscape of the polders, around the small, dark hole in the earth, like a big eye looking up at heaven.