The Assault

by Harry Mulisch

  Can’t the Sun God give you a more precise definition for this heap of ruins? So this was it. Anton threw back his head and took a deep breath, staring unseeing at a banner that flapped behind an airplane. This peace demonstration now seemed further away than what had happened thirty-six years ago. And yet he had not been present in that room where he used to play board games with Karin, and where Peter had been shot through a crack in the window.

  “And then?” he asked.

  “I can’t remember exactly …” He could tell from her voice that she was crying, but he didn’t look at her. “I wasn’t watching anymore. We were dragged out of the house immediately, as if something worse was going to happen to us. I think we stood for a long time in the cold. I can only remember the glass shattering as they broke your windows. Many more Germans came and walked in and out of the house. Then they took us across the lots, where other cars were waiting. We had to go to the Ortskommandantur, but in the distance I still heard the explosions as they blew up your house …”

  She was choking. Anton remembered Korteweg crossing a hall at the Ortskommandantur, the glass of warm milk, the sandwich with Schmaltz … He felt in total disorder, like a room that has been ransacked by thieves, and yet a wave of pleasure came over him at this memory. But it vanished at the thought of Schulz as he had last seen him, turned over near the running board of the truck. Anton squeezed his eyes together tightly, then opened them wide.

  “Were you questioned?” he asked.

  “I was questioned separately.”

  “Did you tell them the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did they say when they heard that Peter had nothing to do with it?”

  “They just shrugged. They had suspected it, since the gun must have been Ploeg’s. But in the meantime they had caught someone else. A girl, if I remember correctly.”

  “Yes,” said Anton. “I’ve been told the same thing.” He took four steps, then said, “Someone your age.” Now, he must know everything and then bury it forever, roll a stone over it and never think about it again. “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” he said. “They had seen Peter threatening you with that gun, hadn’t they? Didn’t they ask why?”

  “Of course.”

  “And what did you tell them?”

  “The truth.”

  He wondered whether he should believe her. On the other hand, she probably hadn’t known yet that his parents could no longer talk. He himself, in fact, could have told them, but no one had asked him.

  “So you admitted that Ploeg had been lying at your door first?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that you had dragged him to ours?” She nodded. Perhaps she thought that he wanted to rub it in, but that wasn’t true. For a while neither of them said a word. They walked along in the demonstration, yet out of it, side by side.

  “Weren’t you afraid,” Anton asked, “that they’d set your house on fire too?”

  “I wish they had,” said Karin, as if she’d expected the question. “How do you think I felt, after all that? If they had, I would have led quite a different life. At that moment I had only one desire—to be shot by them or by Peter.”

  Anton could tell that she meant it. His impulse was to touch her, but he didn’t.

  “What did they say when you told them? Was the Ortskommandant present in person?”

  “How should I know? I was questioned by a Kraut in civilian clothes. First …”

  “Did he have a scar on his face?”

  “A scar? I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Go on.”

  “First he just muttered, ‘What’s it to me? Why should I care who did what?’ without looking up. Then he put down his pen, crossed his arms, looked at me for a while, and said with admiration, ‘Congratulations.’ ”

  Anton was tempted to congratulate her for meriting such a compliment, but he controlled himself.

  “Did you tell your father this?”

  In a faraway voice Karin continued, “He never knew what I said, or told me what he said. We didn’t see each other again till the next morning, when we were allowed to go home. Before I could say a word, he spoke: ‘Karin, we’ll never talk about this again!’ ”

  “And you agreed.”

  “He never mentioned it for the rest of his life. Even after we got home and saw that smouldering heap of ashes, and heard from Mrs. Beumer … I mean, that your father … and your mother too …”

  The woman pushing the old man in the wheelchair had disappeared, caught in a current streaming off in another direction. Led by a woman with a megaphone, the crowd was shouting more slogans accompanied by applause, but the unamplified voices got lost. Most people walked silently ahead, as if a dearly beloved were being carried away in a coffin further on. Bystanders on the sidewalk watched the passing parade. There was a difference between the marchers and those looking on, a kind of chill that had to do with warfare.

  “I went to see the Beumers once, a few years after the War,” he said. “She told me you had moved right after the Liberation.”

  “We emigrated, to New Zealand.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” said Karin, looking him straight in the eye, “because he was afraid of you.”

  “Of me?” Anton laughed.

  “He said he wanted to start a new life, but I think it’s because he didn’t want to have to face you. He began to set everything in motion the first day after the Liberation. I’m sure he was afraid you might take revenge—on me too—when you grew up.”

  “Of all things!” said Anton. “It never even occurred to me.”

  “But it did to him. Your uncle rang our doorbell a few days after the Liberation, but my father slammed the door in his face when he saw who it was. From that moment on, he was driven. A few weeks later we moved in with an aunt of mine in Rotterdam. Since he had all kinds of connections there from before the War, we managed to leave on a merchant ship within the year. We may have been the first Dutch immigrants in New Zealand.” With a strange, cold expression she added, “And there, in forty-eight, he committed suicide.”

  Though at first Anton was aghast, his horror was soon replaced by a feeling of acceptance and peace, as if he had finally been vindicated. Thirty-three years ago Peter’s death had already been avenged. What would Takes have said to that? Three years after he had aimed at Ploeg, there had been still another victim.

  “Why?” Anton asked.

  “What did you say?”

  “Why did he commit suicide? After all, he moved the body in self-defense. Perhaps he did it mainly for you. He just helped fate along a little bit.”

  There must have been an obstruction ahead somewhere, for they had come to a standstill. Karin shook her head.

  “You don’t think so?” asked Anton.

  “No, it never occurred to any of us that they would shoot all the inhabitants. They never had before. We felt our lives were in danger only because Peter pointed the gun at us.”

  “Then I still don’t understand it. He just wanted our house to go up in flames instead of his own: All right, it’s not very pretty, but he couldn’t know that everything would turn out much worse. I can understand that his conscience might be bothering him … but suicide?”

  He saw Karin swallow. “Tonny,” she said, “there’s something I have to tell you …” She stood still, then had to keep walking because the procession was moving. “When we heard those shots and he saw Ploeg lying in front of the house, what he said was, ‘My God, the lizards!’ ”

  With wide-eyed disbelief Anton looked out over her head. The lizards … Was it possible? Could everything be blamed on the lizards? Were they the culprits in the end?

  “Do you mean,” he said, “that without those lizards, none of this would have happened?”

  Deep in thought, Karin picked a hair off his shoulder with her thumb and finger and dropped it on the pavement.

  “I’ve never understood what they meant to him. Something about eternit
y and immortality, some secret he saw in them. I don’t know how to put it—like little children, the way they always seem to have a secret. He could sit staring at them for hours, as motionless as they were. I believe it had something to do with Mother’s death, but don’t ask me what. You should have seen how much trouble he took to keep them alive through that winter of hunger. It was almost the only thing he still cared about. Possibly he was more attached to those animals than to me. They had become his only reason for living.”

  The parade had come to a stop again. The street was completely blocked, because all the separate demonstrations were now trying to join the main one. Anton and Karin stood behind a wide banner which was not held taut, so that it obstructed the view.

  “But when all that had happened,” she continued, “Peter dead, and your parents too, they seemed to turn back into lizards for him again, just ordinary animals. As soon as we came home from the Ortskommandantur, he trampled them all to death. I heard him stamping up there like a madman. After that he locked the door, and I wasn’t allowed into the room. It was weeks before he cleaned up the mess and buried what was left of them in the garden.” Karin made a hesitant move. “Maybe that’s what he couldn’t face, that three people had lost their lives because of his love for a bunch of reptiles, and the thought that you might kill him if you ever got the chance.”

  “How could I?” Anton said. “I didn’t know about all this.”

  “But I knew. And he knew that I knew. And that’s why he had to drag me along with him to the other side of the world, very much against my will. But in the end, he didn’t need you to kill him. He was possessed by you.”

  Anton felt sick. The whole story was worse than the partial one he had known. He looked at Karin’s face, the tears still on it. He had to get away from her, never see her again. But there was one more thing he must find out. She was still talking, but hardly to him. “He was a desperately unhappy man. Whenever he wasn’t busy with his lizards, he stared at maps. The road to Moermansk, American convoys … He was too old to try to escape to England, so that …”

  “Karin,” said Anton. She fell silent and looked at him. “We were sitting at home. You heard those shots. Then when you saw Ploeg lying there, you went outside to move him, right?”

  “Yes. My father forced me to. It took him only a second to decide.”

  “Listen. Each of you was holding one end of him—your father the shoulders, you the feet.”

  “Did you see that?”

  “Never mind. There’s something more I have to know: why did you put him in front of our door and not at the Aartses’ on the other side?”

  “That’s what I wanted, that’s what I wanted!” cried Karin in sudden agitation, clutching at Anton’s arm. “It seemed so obvious to me that he shouldn’t land at your door, yours and Peter’s, but at the Aartses’, where there were only two people, whom we really didn’t know. I had already taken a step toward their house, but then Father said, ‘No, not there. They’re hiding Jews.’ ”

  “Christ!” exclaimed Anton, slapping his forehead.

  “Yes, I had no idea, but father did, apparently. A young family with a small child had been hiding there since forty-three. I saw them for the first time on Liberation Day. Those people certainly would have been killed if Ploeg had been found over there. They must have been watching us too, but they never knew what was really going on.”

  The Aartses, whom nobody could stand because they kept to themselves: they had saved the lives of three Jews, and those Jews, with their presence, had saved their own. In spite of everything, Korteweg had been a good man! So this was why Ploeg’s body had landed on the other side, at their own door, so that … Anton couldn’t take any more.

  “Goodbye, Karin,” he said. “Please excuse me, I … Good luck to you.”

  Without waiting for an answer, leaving her standing there, he turned away and forged through the crowd, going this way and that, as if to make sure that she could never find him again.

  4

  It took a while before he came to his senses, but not too long. He joined a part of the parade that was still moving, or was once more on the move, and let himself be carried along by the crowd. It was as if these hundreds of thousands of people, these endless streams of human lives, were helping him, crossing bridges and canals in front of him and behind him, swelling with still more groups emerging from the side streets. Suddenly he felt a hand on his. It was Peter smiling up at him. He smiled back, but his eyes were stinging. He leaned over and without a word kissed the warm top of his head. The boy began to chatter, but Anton hardly heard him.

  Was everyone both guilty and not guilty? Was guilt innocent, and innocence guilty? The three Jews … Six million of them had been killed, twelve times as many as there were people marching here. But by being in danger, those three people had unknowingly saved themselves and the lives of two others, and instead of them, his own father and mother and Peter had died, all because of some lizards …

  “Peter,” he said, but when the boy smiled up at him he shook his head and laughed, while Peter laughed back. At the same time he thought: ravage, of course, ravage. That would be the Sun God Ra’s vague definition, giving away the U.

  And as they came to the Westerkerk, on their way to the Dam, a dreadful howl of the mob sounded in the distance behind them and moved closer. Frightened, everyone turned around. What was happening? Nothing must happen now! It was unmistakably a howl of fear, which did not stop but was coming closer and closer. As it reached them, nothing at all happened, but everyone suddenly began to scream without reason—even Peter, and even Anton. A minute later the scream had passed them by and moved ahead, leaving them laughing in its wake. Around the bend of the Raadhuisstraat it died down. Peter tried to revive it, but without success. Then some minutes later the howl approached once more from behind, overtook them again, and disappeared ahead. Anton realized that it was moving through the entire city, the first marchers having already returned to the Museumplein, the last ones not having left it yet. It circled about, everyone shouting and laughing at once, and yet it was a howl of fear, the primal scream of mankind rising from all of them.

  But what does it matter? Everything is forgotten in the end. The shouting dies down, the waves subside, the streets empty, and all is silent once more. A tall, slender man walks hand in hand with his son in a demonstration. He has “lived through the War” as they say, one of the last, perhaps, to remember. He has joined it against his will, this demonstration, and there’s an ironical look in his eye, as if he finds the situation amusing. So, his head somewhat to the side, as if he were listening to a distant sound, he lets himself be carried along through the city, back to the place where he began. With a quick gesture he tosses back his straight graying hair, dragging his feet a bit, as if each step raised clouds of ashes, although there are no ashes in sight.

  Amsterdam, January–July, 1982