The Assault

by Harry Mulisch

  It was as if the gun on the table were a weight that dragged Anton along with it into the depths of the past. Just as he had completely forgotten what happened later in the cell, so he clearly remembered that last evening at home: the shots, and then the empty quay with Ploeg’s body. He had known all along, of course, that someone must have been on the quay minutes before the shots sounded, but only in an abstract way, whereas now it became a reality. The scream he heard hadn’t been Ploeg’s, then, but Takes’s. He could have sworn it had been the scream of a dying man.

  In the ashtray next to the gun something began to smoulder.

  “And then?” he asked.

  “And then—and then—and then …” said Takes, taking some odd dance steps. “ ‘Once upon a time, they lived happily ever after.’ You’re just like a child … And then she was unable to go on. I tried to hoist her onto my baggage rack, and after that to hide the two of us in the bushes. But when the Germans appeared, a woman called from a window and told them where we were. Truus gave me her gun and a kiss, and that was that. A bit more shooting, and I was off. I tried to find that bitch again before the end of the War, to deal with her on my own terms. But no such luck. She’s still around somewhere, pretending to be a dear little old grandmother.” He took the gun from the table and weighed it in his hand, the way an antique dealer would handle a precious jewel. “I would have loved to confront her with this. ‘Good evening, madam, how are things? All well with the children?’ ”

  He surrounded the trigger with his finger and examined the weapon from all sides. “It can still be used for shooting, you know that? After the War, your father-in-law and his buddies would have liked me to hand it in. I’m under surveillance these days. You’re only allowed to keep it as a souvenir, but then you have to have it spiked, so it can’t be used. I decided not to. You can never tell when you’re going to need it one last time.” He put it down and lifted a finger. “Do you hear? It’s crying a little. No mother has ever spoiled her child as much as Truus did this thing here …”

  For a moment it looked as if tears were going to fill Takes’s eyes, but it didn’t happen. “You know what,” he said, suddenly changing the subject, “I saw a film once, about a man whose daughter has been raped and murdered. The culprit is given eighteen years, and the father swears he’ll murder him the day he gets out. The man is freed after about eight years: a commuted sentence for good behavior, parole, the lot. The father waits at the gate with a gun in his pocket, and all day long you see them getting along fine and chatting together. He doesn’t shoot him in the end, because he understands that the other is just another miserable victim of circumstances.”

  Upstairs the phone was ringing. As Takes slowly made his way to the door, he finished the story. “Last shot: the father remains standing while you see the other guy walking away with his suitcase along a path through the forest. Then you see a white speck appear on his back which moves forward and grows into the letters THE END. And at that moment one thing became very clear to me, namely, that the father, in spite of all his broad-mindedness, should have pulled out his revolver and shot the other in the back. Because his daughter had not been killed on account of circumstances, but by that particular man. And if you don’t follow through, then what you’re saying is that all those who have lived under unfortunate conditions are potential rapists and murderers. I’ll be right back.”

  The basement was silent, but the violence that Takes had evoked hung there like an inaudible echo. The defective fluorescent tubes went on blinking. With his back to the pistol, Anton sat on the edge of the table and looked at the lips hanging over the North Sea. He would have pressed his mouth to them, but didn’t dare. The face on the photograph smiled back at him. Wherever he was, she kept looking at him without moving her eyes. She could look at hundreds of people at once, just as she had when the photograph was taken, and never age, and never see anything herself. And so, with Saskia’s eyes, she had looked at him that time in the dark, past him, through him. Wounded, having just killed a murderer, she was on the eve of God knows what torture and her execution in the dunes.

  He laid his hands against his face where she had touched him, and closed his eyes. The world is hell, he thought, hell. Even if we had heaven on earth tomorrow, it couldn’t be perfect because of all that’s happened. Never again could things be set right. Life on this planet was a failure, a big flop; better that it should never have begun. Not until it ended, and with it every single memory of all those death throes, would the world return to order.

  Suddenly there was a terrible stench. He opened his eyes. A blue pillar of smoke was rising straight from the ashtray. He dumped his leftover whisky on the glowing mess, which only made it worse. In the corner he saw a kitchen faucet over a low, square sink, but when he tried to pick up the ashtray he burned his fingers. He took his glass to the sink. After letting some water run over his fingers, he filled the glass and emptied it into the ashtray. The contents turned into a disgusting black brew, and smoke billowed up to the low ceiling. After he had tried in vain to open the transom window, he left the basement.

  In the hall he remembered the gun on the table. Since the key was still in the lock, he turned it and went upstairs.

  Takes stood in his room, looking out. The receiver was back on the hook. Outside the sirens sounded, and the roar of the crowd.

  “Here’s the key,” said Anton. “It stinks downstairs. The ashtray caught fire.”

  Takes did not turn to him.

  “Do you remember that man sitting next to me, yesterday in the café?”

  “Of course,” said Anton. “It was me.”

  “The one on the other side, the one I was talking to.”

  “Vaguely.”

  “He just committed suicide.”

  Anton felt he couldn’t take much more. “Why?” he whispered, though he did not mean to whisper.

  “He kept his word,” said Takes, not really talking to Anton anymore. “When Lages’s sentence was commuted in 1952, he predicted: ‘Now you’ll see, they’ll let him out too, but if they do, I’ll blow my brains out.’ And we used to laugh at him, saying he’d live as long as Methuselah …”

  Anton stared at his back a few minutes longer, then turned and left the room. In the hall the old man wearing the pajama top had disappeared. Behind a door a smoldering voice on the radio sang, “Red roses for a blue lady …”

  1

  And then … and then … and then … Time passes. “That, at least, is behind us,” we say, “but what still lies ahead?” The way we word it, it’s as if our backs were turned to the past as we look toward the future; and that is, in fact, how we actually think of it: the future in front, the past behind. To dynamic personalities, the present is a ship that drives its bow through the rough seas of the future. To more passive ones, it is rather like a raft drifting along with the tide. There is, of course, something wrong with both these images, for if time is movement, then it must be moving through another kind of time, and the secondary time through yet another; and thus time is endlessly multiplied. This is the kind of concept that does not please philosophers, but then, inventions of the heart have little to do with those of the intellect.

  Besides, whoever keeps the future in front of him and the past at his back is doing something else that is hard to imagine. For the image implies that events somehow already exist in the future, reach the present at a determined moment, and finally come to rest in the past. But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute. Therefore such a person has his face turned toward the void, whereas it is the past behind him that is visible, stored in the memory.

  This is why when the Greeks speak of the future, they say, “What do we still have behind us?” And in this sense Anton Steenwijk was a Greek. He too stood with his back to the future and his face toward the past. Whenever he thought about time, which he did once in a while, he did not conceive of events as coming out of the future to move through the present into the past.
Instead, they developed out of the past in the present on their way to an unknown future. This always reminded him of an experiment he once made in his uncle’s attic that he described as “artificial life.” Into a solution of water glass (the slimy liquid in which his mother had preserved eggs at the beginning of the War) he had dropped a few crumbs of copper sulfate, those crystals of an unforgettable blue which he saw again much later in Padua, in Giotto’s frescoes. These began to spread out like worms, billowing out further and further, and there, in his attic room, sprouting ever-lengthening blue branches through the lifeless pallor of the water glass.

  He went on a honeymoon to Padua with his second wife, Liesbeth. This was in 1968, a year after his divorce from Saskia. Liesbeth, an art-history student, had a part-time administrative job in the ultramodern hospital where he worked, a place where nothing functioned properly but where he earned more. Her father had married just before the war, and as a young colonial administrator had returned to his post in the Dutch East Indies just in time to get himself put into a Japanese concentration camp. He had even worked on the railroads in Burma—but like Anton, he did not like to talk about his experiences in the War. Liesbeth, who was born shortly after her parents’ repatriation, had no connection with all that. Her eyes were blue but her hair was dark-brown, almost black. Although she had never been in Indonesia and there was no Indonesian blood in the family, there was something Eastern about her expression and the way she moved. It made Anton wonder whether there wasn’t some truth to Lysenko’s claim that even acquired characteristics can become hereditary.

  Their son was born a year after they got married, and they called him Peter. Because Saskia and Sandra were still living in his first house, he bought another one with a garden in Amsterdam South. Taking his son in his arms, he sometimes marveled that the child was much further removed from the Second World War than he himself had been from the First. What had the First World War meant to him? Less than the Peloponnesian War. And although he had never thought about it before, he realized that the Second World War meant just as little to his daughter Sandra.

  From then on he spent his holidays in Tuscany, in a roomy old house on the outskirts of a village near Sienna. He bought it for very little and had it remodeled by a local contractor. The rear of the house was carved out of the rock cliff behind it, and in one room the surface of the stone was left bare. It broke through the plaster in a crooked, veined, brownish-yellow streak. He loved to touch the rock with his hands; it gave him the feeling that he was in touch with the whole world here in his own room. He drove the family to Tuscany in their big station wagon even at Christmastime, and soon he began to live from vacation to vacation. Sitting on his terrace in the shade of the olive tree, he could look out over the green hills, the vineyards, the cypresses, the oleanders, and here and there a square, crenellated tower in that wondrous landscape which was not only what it appeared at first glance, but looked now like a backdrop for the Renaissance and the next minute like a setting for Roman antiquity, and which in any event was far, far removed from Haarlem during the wartime winter of nineteen forty-five. He was barely forty years old when he began to consider the prospect of retiring here as soon as Peter was grown and out of the house.

  One day he realized that he was the owner of four houses. For since he also needed a weekend place, he had bought a small farm in Gelderland chosen for him by De Graaff. Of course Saskia and Sandra were welcome to use it, just as they did the house in Tuscany whenever their holidays permitted. Saskia was remarried, to an oboist somewhat younger than she. He had an international reputation, a temperament that was unfailingly cheerful, and a child of his own. Probably he would collect his own houses in due time. (Mrs. De Graaff hadn’t much approved of that marriage, but Saskia had never been like her friends—girls with pleated skirts, flat shoes, silk scarves around their necks, and pearl necklaces, who cared more about their social life than anything else.) A few times the four of them had gone on vacation together with all three children. Often Liesbeth showed some jealousy when it became apparent that Anton and Saskia’s relationship was a particularly close one, but Saskia’s husband only laughed. He understood very well that it was just because of this intimacy that their marriage had not survived. Liesbeth, the youngest of the four parents, could not grasp these subtleties; yet perhaps as a consequence she was the strongest of them all. At times they called her Mama, which amused Anton.

  His migraine headaches seemed to be diminishing as he grew older, but in his forties he developed some other complications. He felt tired and depressed, nightmares troubled his sleep, and the minute he woke up he was plagued by worries and anxieties: about having too many houses, about Sandra, whom he had abandoned, and so on. Like a drifting autumn leaf, a shred of despair rustled about inside him.

  It was the kind of despair he had so far experienced only when a patient died under his hands. Suddenly a human being would change into offal. Anton would straighten up, the others in the operating room would draw themselves up in silence, the machines would be turned off. With one hand he would remove the mask from his mouth, with the other he’d pull off his cap and, dragging his feet, his head to one side, he’d walk out of the operating room.

  One hot day in Italy, he suddenly found himself in the midst of a crisis which proved to be not just the climax but also the end of those months filled with anxiety. Because the village butcher never had anything but veal, Liesbeth had gone shopping in Sienna with Peter. Anton usually did the marketing in town himself, if only to hang around the café terraces on Il Campo, the incomparable age-old, shell-shaped square which showed that no progress had been made in architecture, either. But that morning he had felt unwell and decided to stay at home. He had been reading a little, and suddenly he looked up, disturbed by the silence. His eyes fell on the white table lighter with dice markings, a present from Liesbeth’s parents. Restless, he began to wander through the whitewashed, irregularly shaped rooms and went up and down the spiral staircase with the uneven steps. Now and then he tried to sit down, but this made it so much worse that he stood up at once.

  What was getting worse? He didn’t hurt anywhere, he had no fever, everything was all right; yet at the same time everything was all wrong. He wanted Liesbeth and Peter. They must come back at once; something was happening to him that he didn’t understand. Frantically he walked to the edge of the terrace, but the country road stretched empty into the distance until it disappeared around the mountain with the collapsed mill. He went inside, then out the front door. He climbed the steep steps to the road, which passed at the level of the roof. Perhaps they had returned and gone for a walk; but the car was not in its place. The square, treeless and much too big for the village, looked as if it had been flooded with boiling water. Crossing it were an old man and an old woman, two charred figures in the blinding sun. Meanwhile a few old men sat in the black shadow of the church.

  And now, as he stood there, a gray mountain rose up, a tidal wave that broke all about him. He ran downstairs two steps at a time, slammed the door behind him, and looked all around, trembling. The motionless whitewashed walls screamed their whiteness into his face; the curve of the staircase, the rough-hewn beams, everything had become so menacing that something wrenched loose in his head. The rock broke through the plaster and through his brain. Clasping his chest with both hands, he went out on the terrace. The cypresses were flames of black fire everywhere on the hills. His teeth were chattering like those of a small child coming out of the sea, but there was nothing he could do. Something was wrong with the world, not with him. The crickets chirped. Gasping, he entered the house and stepped on the red tiles. Above the fireplace hung his old mirror, the one with the putti. The black eyes of the dice! He knew that he should control himself and breathe regularly, so it wouldn’t get the better of him. He sat down at the table on a straight-backed chair, one of those slightly undersized Italian chairs with a rush seat, buried his nose and mouth in his hands, closed his eyes, and tried to calm
down.

  Liesbeth found him this way, motionless but trembling, like a statue during an earthquake. When she saw the look in his eyes she didn’t ask him if she should call a doctor, just called one. Anton looked at Peter and tried to laugh. Then his eyes fell on the full shopping bag Liesbeth had left on the table. On top lay a package. Its paper wrap came undone, unfolded like a flower, and revealed a bloody hunk of meat.

  The doctor came at once and assured him that this sort of thing was to be expected, that one should not be surprised by such symptoms. He gave Anton an injection, after which he slept for fifteen hours. The next morning he woke up refreshed. The doctor also left a prescription for Valium to be taken if the symptoms should return, but Anton tore it up at once. He could have written his own prescription, but he knew that if he once began taking tranquilizers, he would never stop.