Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  This rich farmer’s house boasted eight rooms: on the ground floor, utility room, kitchen, family living-room, and beste kamer, plus a lavatory off the entry hall, containing shower and toilet; upstairs, the parents’ room, two rooms for the children, playroom, and bathroom with tub and toilet. Above, reached by a ladder, was an attic. These boers had a washing-machine, a color television, a floor-waxer, a dish-washer, and central heating, fueled by oil—earth gas, the Netherlands’ bragging retort to the Arab oil “boycott,” had not arrived at the polder. The cookstove ran on propane. In addition, these folk had a tractor, fueled by petrol, and a new family automobile—a Ford Fiesta—as well as bicycles. On Sunday morning, bright and early, the Fiesta had carried the farmer and his butterball wife and four children to Schiphol, with six round-trip tickets (four half-fare) to the Balearics for a two weeks’ winter vacation in the sun. Besides the dreck of capitalist technology, the family had a real eiderdown on the matrimonial bed, a child’s crib painted with traditional Hindeloopen designs, and, in the beste kamer, genuine old-time oak-framed samplers embroidered with Old Testament mottoes, an erfstuk Reformed Bible bound in leather, with silver locks, a vase of peacock feathers, and three oriental carpets, one of which Yusuf declared to be genuine and at least fifty years old.

  The Palestine Liberation Army had been impressed by this farmer’s style of life. That was one of the negative side-effects of the decision to lease a pioneer house on the new polder as a base of operations. The Arab comrades should have been armed by their revolutionary training to resist the crude seductions of the welfare state. What they saw here, they should know, was window-dressing. The upper peasantry of the “advanced” countries of the West were a privileged caste, the same as the trade unionists, poisoned by the crumbs that fell to them from the rich man’s table. All these social elements were the bribed tools of imperialism, in Marx’s phrase—some of the old prophet’s insights were still useful. One had thought that Hussein and Ahmed, at least, as “guest workers” in the kitchens and streets and sewers of Paris, would long ago have been demystified. They had seen with their own eyes the realities of class and race behind the façade: the HLMs and bidonvilles of Giscard’s police state, alias la belle France. Their social origin was petty bourgeois, but in their political activity as emigrants they had shared the “quality of life” of the sweated under-proletariat and did not need to be taught how to hate.

  Yusuf, by contrast, was a greenhorn, detailed to the present mission from his training camp in Syria; he was an expert in explosives but still innocent of the inner workings of bourgeois democracy on its home ground. In view of that, it had seemed wiser to withhold him from the first and most dangerous phase of the operation. His physical courage was guaranteed by his Syrian sponsors, but the take-over of an airplane was a more serious affair than raiding a kibbutz or blowing up a hotel. A direct strike at the vital organs of the West called for a more seasoned militant than Yusuf, on arrival, proved to be. After a preliminary screening, in Frankfurt, it had been decided to defer him for service on the polder, where he would be able to make himself useful and profit from instruction from the other comrades. He had been conducted to a safe house in Aachen, issued a new false passport and identity papers, provided with a haircut, a suit of clothes, and a solid pair of shoes. Three days ago, with the German comrades and Carlos, the Uruguayan, he had crossed the border at Maastricht. The signal from Paris had come. The following noon, Sunday, the operation would begin; at that time the support elements arriving from Germany should already be in place, with concise directions for preparing the farmhouse to receive the commando and its prisoners, whose number was still unknown.

  Coordination had been excellent. There had been no difficulty at the border with Yusuf’s papers, and the trunk of the car had not even been opened. Twenty-four hours later, it might have been another story—with the capture of the plane a general alert could have gone out. Yet, despite the good functioning of the time-table and the accurate deployment of the reserves, it now looked as if there might have been an error of judgment on the human level, insofar as Yusuf was concerned. Too little was known about him; his language capacity, in particular, had been overestimated by the Syrian contact—the only Western tongue familiar to him was a rudimentary English he had picked up in a Zionist carpet factory. Inspection this morning showed that he had carried out his assignments creditably: the house had been correctly wired, the remaining stocks of explosives stored in a dry place—the choice of a flour bin was commendable. But he had no reading skill, and, once his work was completed, time, it seemed, had hung heavy on his hands.

  This was a restless knabe, Elfride reported, and, like so many of the fedayin, curious, full of questions needing clear answers, which, because of the language handicap, she had been unable to give him, she feared. In the end, he had passed his Sunday silently roaming about the house, doing his laundry in the washing-machine, and watching the children’s hour program from a German station on the farmer’s television: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. On Monday he had counted the piles of starched linen sheets in the housewife’s cupboard and walked over the farmer’s fields. Horst and Carlos had not known what to do with him.

  With the appearance last night of Ahmed and Hussein, his tongue had loosened. But Ahmed, who had his own weaknesses, was more concerned with his cut thumb—wondering whether he should not give himself an injection of blood plasma from the frigidaire—than with their comrade’s political education. Like Yusuf, Ahmed and Hussein seemed bewitched by the kulak’s living space and by the signs of wealth they pointed to, eagerly chattering in Arabic. Encouraged by Yusuf and his childlike excitement, they had reverted themselves to an infantile level. It became clear that there was an irritating residue of gullibility in all three comrades. Yusuf had showed them his discovery—the shower—and they got into it together, giggling and splashing each other, as though they had never met a hot-and-cold shower before. Then, having been assigned to the big bed, they climbed under the eiderdown, which they fingered with awe, tucking it tenderly under their chins, when a mature political reaction, as Greet commented, would have been to slash the old fetish through with a knife and let the feathers fly. The whole disheartening performance was like an advertisement of the benefits of capitalism. Did the sleeping patriots dream of this fat land of milk and honey, where the merry peasant had “never had it so good”?

  Jeroen felt discouraged. Seated at the kitchen table, he spat out a morsel of ham onto the paper plate in front of him. Then he sought to be fair. There was a reverence for property here, he realized, that no bourgeois could possibly feel, and it would have to be treated with care or the Arabs could become problems. He was touched by it in a way, remembering himself when he had first come to Amsterdam as an apprentice electrician and looked with wonder at the great houses on the canals and the pictures in the Rijksmuseum. It had been a feeling close to worship and had made him ask whether he should not become an artist, dedicate himself to a thing he thought he saw represented here, which he had called to himself “waarde.” This “worth” or value, he imagined, was what the liberation fighters were seeing in the farmer’s housing, which was causing them, still this morning, to open their dark eyes wide, as though they had been given a vision of paradise.

  An oriental paradise, he thought to himself, shaking his head, and hoped the idea was not racist. A regular Garden of Allah, sumptuously carpeted, for it was the beste kamer, he perceived, that affected them most strongly—they would tire of the shower-bath and the washing-machine. Except for the couple’s bedroom, the remainder of the dwelling was more like a “contemporary” suburban villa than an agricultural worker’s home. The manipulative hand of some firm of Amsterdam architects—planners for the state—was crudely evident in the family room, where the new television throned and a stack of religious newspapers seemed to wait for banishment. “Picture” window, rough plaster wall with “sculpture” pattern, false ceiling beams, synthetic-tweed floor covering, indirect l
ighting panels—Jeroen was sadly familiar with this alienating mass-produced rommel. He had installed the identical panels and fixtures in city housing developments for workers and could look back on the shame of it as a step in his own development. Here they would name it “polder style,” and where the wild sedges now grew there would be a landscaped house lot, ornamental shrubbery, a weeping willow, a rock garden, possibly a pool. But the couple had respected the old concept in furnishing the parlor.

  Crossing the magic threshold, the three Arabs stared at the housewife’s collection of well-watered plants blooming on window-sill and tables before the shining plate-glass window, at the framed tinted photos of the ancestors, at the harmonium in the corner, at the doilies and antimacassars, at the vase of peacock feathers; they stood silent before the deep-toned carpet, apparently the real one, that hung on the round window-table and they stepped softly, as if fearful of leaving a footprint, on the thick carpets that lay on the waxed floor.

  Jeroen had watched their nostrils sensuously take in the characteristic Dutch beste kamer smell, of furniture polish—the good old boenwas, guaranteed pure from the hive—mixed with the moist hothouse fragrance of flowering plants, with a strong sniff of lye, and a damp, slightly moldy odor of upholstery fabric exuded by a rarely opened room. Yet it was pointless to explain to them, as Greet was doing, that the room was never used except for marriages and will-readings and maybe sometimes the Sabbath. That could only heighten the value of the room in their eyes; what they sensed here was something sacred. The beste kamer was a religious shrine, a holy of holies, with a ceremonial carpet serving as altar cloth; the predominant smell of soap and beeswax was the odor of sanctity. If it was used for everyday, it would no longer be a place of worship. To demystify them, it would be necessary to show them what god was being worshipped here and at what cost of blood and grinding toil to their brothers.

  It was true that such a room occupied valuable space in a house and had no practical utility. But a mosque had no practical utility. And in Jeroen’s view, which differed sharply from Greet’s on this point, a revolutionary should not try to set at naught the experience of something higher, called “transcendence” in philosophy. He did not accept the position, typical of orthodox Leninism, that the philosophers had been sheer obscurantists; some of their terms, if reinterpreted and purged of ruling-class overtones, pointed to truths that the revolutionary should embrace as his own. There was a potential in man for rising above—in other words, transcending—gross material concerns that the revolutionary by his act and example sought to bring to full life in every human creature, while the bourgeois and the bourgeois revisionist sought to strangle it at birth, above all in the working masses but finally, perforce, in themselves. The argument of practicality, which Greet was invoking to disabuse the Arabs, could make no impression on them since it was essentially a bourgeois argument.

  Moreover the childish reverence they showed for this standard Dutch kitsch had to be understood and allowed for in context. It reflected the oppression and deprivation of agricultural workers in their homeland. That such a house should appear to them as a palace told the whole story of imperialist exploitation of the “backward” peoples. To let oneself be impatient with the comrades’ wonderment would be a fault, mirroring one’s own sense of superior social development. Greet despised the beste kamer of her middle-class parents as the ultimate symbol of Dutch hypocrisy; to profane this farmer’s parlor was seen by her as a revolutionary necessity—she was insisting, for instance, that they go back on the promise they had given to water the housewife’s army of plants. With all that Jeroen did not sympathize. He had no especially vengeful feelings toward his hard-working parents’ humble best room with the big black Bible and the wheezy old harmonium; the clambering “Busy Lizzies” on the window-sill, industriously flowering without care or nourishment, the lowest of the low among house plants, had been a bright joy of his childhood. To leave this woman’s innocent plants to droop and die as an act of revolutionary justice would be a kind of slow execution painful to witness and, far from setting the Arabs an example of disciplined class behavior, would only confuse and hurt them. Their development in these matters should be allowed to find its own way without undue prompting or correction. Regarding Ahmed and Hussein, it had been a mistake, plainly, to assume that the lessons learned in Giscard’s France would be seen to apply to the Netherlands; the West was a hydra, bearing many heads, which had to be struck off separately, even though the trunk of the beast was one and indivisible.

  The fact was that Den Uyl and his allies were cleverer than their brothers of the Right. They were able to take in the working class with their skilful propaganda, which consisted not in empty slogans but in social measures speaking for themselves and to a certain degree incontestably. A revolutionary would err in saying that there was large-scale poverty in Holland and naked oppression of minorities, that the aged were harshly neglected—Jeroen’s own parents, drawing their state pension and health benefits, were living proof of paternalistic “favoritism” to the old. That the pension policy was a ruse to induce early retirement and withdraw a section of the work force from the labor market, thus masking real unemployment, did not alter the facts. The noisy protests of the Right, howling against “confiscatory” taxation and blind to its own interests—in reality so well served by Den Uyl and Company—helped sustain the fiction. It was only in foreign policy that Den Uyl and his gang regularly gave their game away: was it not openly boasted that staunch little Holland was the “best friend” of Israel and the U.S. imperialist warmakers? Hand in glove with the imperialists, as their trusted lackey, Den Uyl could afford a crocodile’s concern for human rights in General Pinochet’s Chile and the moribund Franco’s Spain. On the domestic scene, the multi-nationals flourished through shameless bribery and corruption, while land-reclamation projects, such as this polder, kept alive the national myth of sturdy self-help. That the Communist Party had no influence and the only real opposition came from the Right and the fanatic confessional parties demonstrated how effective the simulation of socialism had been. Even the Indonesians, after a period in unpublicized camps, were consenting to be “absorbed” by their former colonialist masters. Should one blame Arab patriots, born and raised in the teeming bazaars, if they were not wholly immune to the subtle indoctrination of this farmer’s housing?

  They were also impressed—and for the same reasons, rooted in history—by the extent of the farmer’s fields. After walking them yesterday, Yusuf had concluded that they must comprise fifty hectares already ploughed, with about five, including the house lot, still unimproved. He had said to Elfride that the man here must be a big landowner, an exploiter. She had told him no, correctly. Lying to the masses was always a mistake; one had to explain and carefully expose the underlying contradictions. Being a German and unfamiliar with Dutch agrarian patterns, she could not say whether this farmer owned the land or rented it from the state, but in the end it came to the same. Narrowly speaking, he was not an exploiter, since it was clear that he used machinery rather than the labor of landless peasants to work it, yet, in a broader sense, as an instrument of imperialism, he was exploiting the resources of the Third World, in his very tractor and the diesel that fueled it, the rubber tires of his automobile, the copper-derived chromium of his wife’s appliances, the nitrates of his fertilizer, and so on. On the other hand, it would be stupid to pretend that he and his wife, by Dutch standards, enjoyed great prosperity; there was too much evidence here to the contrary, though some of it might not be visible to a Palestinian eye. Even the word “kulak” was probably misplaced. In terms of the Dutch class structure, these were not moneyed people. The new furniture consisted of “suites” purchased no doubt at a discount house; there were no books, and the only picture was a cheap reproduction of a Rembrandt self-portrait tacked up in the children’s playroom. Very likely the man was still paying out to the usurers of the loan companies on the car and the tractor. His wife made her own and the childre
n’s clothes, as an old Singer in the couple’s room testified. But in Yusuf’s eyes, a sewing-machine was a sign of affluence—another contradiction springing from historical unevenness.

  The clearest proof, however, that this family’s circumstances were relatively modest was the way they had jumped at the offer to vacate the premises for a two-week period. It had perhaps not even been necessary to throw in the vacation in the Balearics. Probably they would have been glad to move in with relatives on the mainland—the woman had her people in Kampen. So Jeroen had contended, but Greet, though not denying it, had argued that the cost factor must be weighed against the temptation the couple might feel to “look in” on their tenants—some trivial pretext could always be found. She did not trust the woman; to her mind, it was worth a thousand guilders for the group to have the assurance that the creature was out of Holland, safely lying on a beach and coated with sunburn lotion, during the crucial first phase of the operation. Doubtless she had been right; Jeroen knew it was inconsistent for a revolutionary to have, like him, a penny-pinching mentality inherited from peasant forebears of the deepest “black-stockings” dye.

  Besides, Greet had to be deferred to for the remarkable vision she had shown in proposing the polder as a base. From the start they had all seen that for a strike of this magnitude a fall-back position would have to be prepared, since the usual ports of call, though sometimes curiously open to commercial hijackers, could not be counted on to receive a people’s army commando and its prisoners of war—this was one of the sad results of factional division within the liquidation-of-the-Zionist-entity forces. That among the people’s prisoners an American senator would figure made it all the more likely that a “diplomatic” attitude could be expected from the Arab capitals, to say nothing of Havana, where this senator was regarded, simplistically, as some kind of friend. Hence it had been essential to develop a serious alternative, not dependent on the whims and opportunistic calculations of national leaders, and it was Greet, at the December meeting, who had had the genius to think of the polder. Like every creative idea, it had got a lukewarm reception to begin with; all sorts of “practical” objections were raised, particularly by the German comrades. But then Jeroen himself had caught fire, and, before the meeting was over, the whole planning council was converted.