Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  “Goody!” Charles cried, with a clap of his hands. “He can have my place.” Greet looked to her partner. Jeroen shrugged. More hurried Dutch undertones. She was angry. In a way, Henk sympathized: to let the incorrigible old man stay in defiance of her orders would undermine her whole conception of discipline. But Charles, as he had said, had a “way” with him. Jeroen overruled her. Once again, from the parlor window, they witnessed a departure to freedom. Seeing Victor safely stowed in the freight bay, Henk and Jim breathed easier. “Wouldn’t you know, they forgot to search them!” observed Aileen, clicking her tongue.

  The following day brought Margaret’s collection. No expert accompanied her El Greco “Saint in Ecstasy,” her tiny Lorenzo Monaco “Virgin and Saints,” her sepia drawings by Raphael and sanguine by Michelangelo. Jeroen, however, was satisfied, and they were put in the parlor, replacing the Ramsbotham collection, which was stacked in the shed. “What your museum needs is an annex, Jeroen,” Jim commented, as Margaret took her leave. But with Margaret, Charles went, definitively—he had gained only a day of grace. Next to go were Dirk and Pieter and the NATO helicopter, which was pushed out of the barn with surprising ease. Of the collectors, there remained only Lily and Beryl. This, as Henk and Sophie decided long after, had been the happiest time. There was not so much work for Denise and Jean; chicken and rabbit appeared on the menu. The kapers’ mood was still indulgent; everyone got toilet privileges, and the men were allowed to shave. There were walks twice a day for the entire company, with only one guard, and pairing off occurred as a matter of course: Jim and Lily—on rainy days under the Bishop’s umbrella—Aileen and Archie—fast friends by now—Henk and Sophie, and, in the rear, the pastor and Beryl, unluckily not so well matched. The pastor’s binoculars were a godsend. Thanks to them and to Henk’s instruction, the hostages learned the shore birds of the Netherlands; as Lily said, that was something they would have in common all their lives. In the house, Frank conducted morning service as usual, which somewhat appeased his longing to be shepherd to the flock. But when he sought by example to introduce grace before meals, the practice was discouraged. There were no more arguments—only lively discussions often lasting till late in the evening and usually touched off by the paintings that confronted them at every turn of the head.

  Afterward it was sadder. The departures of Lily and Beryl appeared in retrospect to have been the turning-point. It was odd to have Lily replaced by her water-colors, which uncannily resembled her. Airy clouds, mountain peaks at sunrise, cottages, ancient bridges, country-church spires, hay ricks, lichened castles, they represented Nature and the works of men in their least terrestrial aspect—they were gentle English “inklings.” In their tasteful “neutral” frames, they were ranged upstairs in the children’s playroom, and Jim, using the excuse of going to the toilet, frequently went up to look at them. He was communing with her spirit, he said. She had kissed him on leaving and cried a little, producing the chaste handkerchief—still immaculate—that she had used for the Bishop’s funeral. Henk and Sophie, trying not to watch, could not make out what her real feelings were. “Come on, Ma,” Beryl interrupted. She had already said good-bye to Ahmed and given him her address in New York. With Lily and Beryl, Jean went. Now they were only seven.

  The realignment that followed was inevitable. With Jim bereft of Lily, Henk and Sophie saw no choice but to close ranks around him. Once again, as at the start, they were a threesome, Sophie between the two men. Jim’s efforts to join up with Aileen, leaving them alone, were seldom successful. Having “lost” Jim to Lily, Aileen was determined to keep Archie to herself, and Archie, when Jim joined them, tended to detach himself and gravitate toward the also bereft and quite pretty Denise, mismatched with the pastor, who could not speak French. It was jackstraws, said Sophie: when you pulled out one—Lily—the whole house came down. In any case, the reduction in numbers made being alone in this confined space all but impossible. Lovers lost themselves best in a crowd.

  This became cruelly apparent at night, when the lights were turned off. The attic was no longer serving as a dormitory; for sleeping, the hostages were divided between the beste kamer and the family room. By Aileen’s decree, Sophie was on one sofa and she herself on the other, with Denise curling up in a chair. The men were assigned to the floor, and Henk was farther removed in every sense from Sophie than he had been when the room was packed with bodies and they had lain side by side often, sensing each other’s breathing as they listened to the older people snore.

  Would they ever make love? For his part, he was unable to imagine its happening now, as if on a public stage. Sophie was bolder. The other day she had wistfully mentioned the attic. “Do you think Ahmed…?” She meant would Ahmed let them use it some night when he was on guard. “For a few minutes or all night?” he had answered dryly. Impossible, he had told her, with seven kapers bedded on the floor below, the creaking stairs, and the unlucky other hostages waking, perhaps, and missing them. He would not want to restrain himself to a quick noiseless act with Sophie; she was not a whore you went upstairs with while your friends waited below. Finally, it would seem wrong to him to joy in her hungrily when the others were not so favored. It might have been different when Lily was still here. Not that she and Jim, at their age, would have been likely to have a go themselves. But they had formed a kind of couple. No, he would not attempt it and, if he did, he would probably be impotent or at any rate dissatisfied.

  Yet when he spoke of a future meeting it was Sophie who drew back. “You could stay on in Amsterdam,” he pointed out. “No.” On the polder, she said, she would have no scruple, because the polder was a separate world. It could not be mistaken for real life. On the polder, they could love each other and be sure of a clean ending: death for either or both or release, which would cut the thread. She did not want their love to be “messy,” that is, clouded by his thoughts for his family, deception, stolen meetings—“the usual when the man is married.” She was right, he recognized, as far as Amsterdam went: he was too well known to register in a hotel with her or even to go up in the lift to a room she would be waiting in. And The Hague would be worse. Indeed, thanks to the present adventure, there was no corner in Holland where they could hope to hide. And, once restored to his family, he could not promptly leave them and his work to fly off to meet her in Avila or Assisi or a chalet in the Austrian Alps. But Flanders might be possible.

  “Do you know Bruges?” he said. “No. But no,” said Sophie. “The people there would know you. Anyway, what would your plan be? To meet me for overnight?” She could stay on, he said, and visit the museums, and he would come back to her. “Bruges is nice. You could even take a train to Gand for the day.” “Ghent,” she said. “‘The Mystic Lamb.’ I’ve seen it. And when you came to Bruges, Henk, what would you do? Leave a friend’s telephone number where you could be reached, I suppose. Then clear it with the friend so that he could call you at our hotel in case something happened at home. A government crisis or one of the children sick.” He had not sufficiently reflected. Sophie laughed. “I can see you’ve never had a serious affair. Not overnight, with hotels and friends covering for you.” “And you have?” “It sounds so, doesn’t it? Yes. But this is different. I think I truly love you, Henk. I wouldn’t like to watch you behaving shabbily. To be honest, I think you’d find it quite hard.”

  Unfairly, he had been angry. Her resistance had struck the vein of obstinacy in him. In the bathroom mirror, he saw that his jaw was set in moody lines of determination. He resented the mention of the attic—a substitute, such as you might offer a child. He was jealous, of course, as well. It irked him that a one-time affair with a married man (or several) should prejudge her relation with him. Yet gradually his irritation subsided. He was being wilful himself, he perceived. Moreover, she was righter than he. It was absurd that he should be sad because she refused to meet him in Bruges. The local outlook, after Lily’s departure, made nonsense of such a quarrel. As soon debate whether she would accept a rendezvo
us in heaven—on a cloud—which seemed closer to hand.

  Negotiations, he had learned, were at a standstill. Jeroen himself confirmed it, with a curious show of pride. And Jim had not been wrong: they were serious about their Demand Two. That was the sticking-point. Holding valuable live hostages and invaluable works of art, Jeroen believed himself to be an irresistible force. He could not see that Den Uyl was an immovable object. “Talk to him, Henk,” Aileen begged. But he had already shown the lot of them, point by point, why it was impossible for Den Uyl to agree. Greet had listened intently; Henk had felt he was half-convincing her. Horst and Elfride were noncommittal; the Arabs and Carlos could not follow the presentation, and Jeroen calmly smiled. “You will see,” he predicted.

  It was now a true siege. As in the Middle Ages, the opponents faced each other across a neutral terrain, each counting on the force of attrition to sap the other’s morale. Inside the fortress, supplies were running low. But the kapers, so far, had declined to ask for a food drop. That would be a sign of weakness, Greet told Aileen. There was still flour in the larder, dried milk, a little cooking fat, and some legumes. The rabbits had been sacrificed at the rate of two a week, but the hens were being hoarded, for their eggs, until they ceased to lay. A share of the new-laid eggs was replaced under the hen each morning with the idea of hatching chickens. “How long does it take,” Sophie wondered, “for a chicken to be big enough to eat?” Archie had the answer; he had grown up on a sheep farm in Aberdeenshire. Three or four months. That gave them the measure of the kapers’ determination. In view of this, it was lucky that the farmer had left a good supply of chicken feed. “We’ll be eating it soon ourselves,” Aileen prophesied. “Not so daft,” said Archie: chicken feed was readily digestible, having a high protein content, considerable fat, and roughage. There were no crops yet, naturally, in the farmer’s new-planted fields, but the binoculars had shown ducks swimming in the distant canal, and the whir of pheasants had been heard. This inspired Ahmed and Hussein to talk of foraging out for game, taking a hostage along for protection. But the leaders were doubtful about a dispersion of forces. Up to now, this had differed from a medieval siege in that there had been no sorties and no attempt at scaling the ramparts, which were reinforced nevertheless from time to time.

  As the unchanging days passed, the hostages came to perceive that the world outside was diminishing in reality for them. Staring fixedly out the parlor window, Henk no longer “saw” the marechaussee drawn up in the field. They had become part of the scenery. He supposed he was aware of them all the time “subliminally,” like Lily with her collection. If he looked out one morning and they were not there, he would notice them, he hoped, as an absence. Just as he had ceased to pay attention to the air traffic overhead and perceived one day with an effect of surprise that it had stopped; the sky was empty except for an occasional patrol plane. In a parallel development, the world was becoming oblivious of them.

  On television, the polder “ordeal” figured more and more rarely. The descent of Lily and Beryl, in their furs, at the heliport was a kind of grand finale—though the fond audience in the family room did not guess it—before a curtain dropped. Now nights in a row went by without the obligatory shots of the farmhouse and the accompanying bulletin read by a spokesman from the Justice Ministry. The farmhouse returned briefly to a stellar place on the screen when the boer himself and his vrouw, back from the Balearics with peeling sunburns, were interviewed in the house of relatives in Kampen. (“The old country,” they both called the mainland, where they were staying, which made Henk smile, translating—that was how the polder settlers thought of Holland.) Hearing them tell their tale, the captives, as in a cinema flashback, were able to reconstruct the early part of the story, its infancy, you might say. Its humble birth, in the mind of Jeroen, remained obscure.

  The couple’s testimony led the police to an abandoned truck with a false Hamburg license-plate in the airport parking lot. This was the first clue, the spokesman explained, that the police had had to work on; there was hope now of finding the gang’s accomplices. But the trail, evidently, was cold. The truck—stolen, of course—was shown on an evening program, and then no more was heard of it, or of the boer, who had spoken feelingly of his winter wheat crop. The story, like the year, was at a dead point. “I wonder what happened to Archie’s tunnel,” Jim inquired with a dry laugh one night.

  Consciousness of being buried, like a small item in a newspaper, was affecting the kapers too. Their fading from the news, to be replaced by other raiders, kidnappers, bombers, could not fail to worry them. To maintain their ascendancy, they would feel bound, soon, to execute a hostage. Or so Henk feared and he supposed that Jim was sharing the thought—Archie too, perhaps. The external signs were ominous: frequent sounds of argument from the kitchen, with Yusuf’s voice dominant—sometimes plaintive, sometimes shrill. Present policy, obviously, was being questioned. It was natural that some of the commando—the less intelligent—should be spoiling for an action. Jeroen, heavy-browed and silent, as if marking a withdrawal, was spending more and more time shut up in the parlor with the Vermeer. Ahmed now and then softly knocked and joined him. When on guard, Ahmed seemed depressed.

  But executing a hostage would be a mistake, from their own point of view. Henk believed he could show that much to a few of them, at least to Greet and Jeroen. It was not a point of principle, on which Jeroen would balk, but a point of praxis. Having resolved to speak, Henk waited till he could find the two alone. The moment came after lunch on a Sunday—their fourth in captivity, unless he was losing count—when Denise had finished washing up and Carlos, a “friendly,” was on guard. Carlos carried his message, and the kitchen door was opened. The pair sat at the table. Greet was darning Jeroen’s sock, and his big white foot was bare. The others were above, presumably napping.

  “You have something to tell us?” “Yes.” He had determined to come straight to the subject, and she had spoken Dutch—from her, a good sign. They had been discussing the execution of a hostage, he told them. They showed no surprise that he knew. It would be an error, he said—a fout. “Waarom?” That was Greet, not sounding, as so often, sarcastic but as though she were more than curious to know his reasons. Jeroen’s reaction could not be seen; he was bending down to put the sock and heavy boot on. If they killed a hostage now, Henk explained, it would be like a signal to the authorities to strike—a pretext certain elements in the coalition would have been waiting for to employ “strong measures.” “Van Agt,” said Greet, naming the Minister of Justice. “There must be much public pressure,” continued Henk. Killing a hostage would clear the way, which had been blocked by Den Uyl’s scruples. “They will storm the house. You cannot prevent that.” Jeroen held up a hand. “You are right. We cannot prevent that. But there are comrades here who do not believe they will storm it. They say, look at your Bishop. There was no reprisal. To the contrary, we gained our way. You recall that?”

  That had been in the early stages, Henk pointed out, when the policy of peaceful negotiations had had the upper hand. “But now it is late, Jeroen. My government is tired; the people are tired. They feel this has gone on too long. But they will be patient and wait a little longer if you do not kill.” Jeroen nodded. That was his view, he acknowledged, and Greet’s. “But maybe we see that, like you, because we are all Dutch. Though we are enemies, we have a similar political understanding of this country. We Dutch are not fond of bloodshed. Mr. Den Uyl is not fond of bloodshed. We are of one mind on this. But the others…Even Carlos.” He sighed. Not Ahmed, said Greet. He was loyal to Jeroen; he loved him. But the others…Jeroen sighed again. “Because the imperialists did not retaliate when we gave them your Bishop’s body, they are sure the imperialists here are weak. If we shoot a hostage, they say, the imperialists will see we are serious and concede us whatever we demand. They say the imperialists will not storm the command post for fear of heavy casualties.”

  “Among the hostages,” Henk corrected. “Again, that was true
at the start. But not any more, if you kill.” Greet interrupted. “They have learned to accept the assurance of casualties. That is the weakness, evidently, of too long confrontation. I have told you so, Jeroen.” “And they are stronger,” Henk added. “You are only eight. If they lose eight men storming the house, for them it is only unfortunate. But you cannot lose eight. Even six, even five. Those who do not die will be taken prisoners. As for us, some will die, but that, too, is only unfortunate. A tragedy, people will say. But that is literature.” “They will not willingly harm the pictures,” Jeroen suddenly objected. “That was true, too, at one time,” said Henk. “But no longer, I imagine. Now, if you force them to strike, they will hope not to harm the pictures. Or only a few.”

  “So what do you advise? An action is necessary for the comrades’ morale.” The Arabs, he said, were failing to grasp the importance of the second demand, the part, that is, concerning the NATO forces. They were interested only in Israel. “We will be frank with you, Van Vliet de Jonge. Yusuf has been a problem. He believes that we deceived him, that we promised to liberate the Israeli prisoners.” “And you did not?” “We saw this idea was invalid, though I confess we had considered it for a time. To liberate Israeli prisoners, you must strike directly at Israel. At the outset we believed that world feeling might be capable of forcing Israel’s compliance. But we came to recognize our error. Solidarity, even among those of the same interests, is unnatural in the capitalist world. You saw how Washington sought to block the agreed-on delivery of the paintings. But Yusuf is too undeveloped to understand this. He suspects we betrayed the Palestine liberation fighters to enrich ourselves with Western art.”