The Assault

by Harry Mulisch

  “Do you mind if I touch your face so I can make out what you look like?”

  Softly her cold fingertips caressed his forehead, his eyebrows, cheeks, nose, and lips. He sat motionless, his head slightly tilted back. He felt that this was something very solemn, a kind of initiation, something they might do in Africa. All of a sudden she pulled her hand back and moaned.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, frightened.

  “Nothing … Never mind.” Now she sat bent over.

  “Do you hurt?”

  “Really, it’s nothing. Honest!” She straightened and said, “A few weeks ago I was in an even darker place than this.”

  “Do you live in Heemstede?”

  “Don’t ask. It’s better for you not to know a thing about me. You’ll understand later. All right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then listen. Tonight there’s no moon, and yet it’s very bright, but that time it was cloudy and there was no snow yet. I had gone to visit a friend in my neighborhood and we sat and talked. I didn’t leave him till the middle of the night, long after curfew. It was so dark that no one would be able to see me. I know the neighborhood by heart and walked home feeling my way along the walls and fences. I couldn’t see a thing. I might as well have had no eyes. I had taken off my shoes so as not to make any noise. I really saw absolutely nothing, but all along I knew exactly where I was. At least, so I thought. I visualized everything in my memory, I had walked along here at least a thousand times, I knew every corner, every hedge, every tree, every stoop—everything.

  “And suddenly I lost it. Nothing fitted anymore. I felt a bush where there should have been a windowsill, a lamppost where there ought to be a garage exit. I took a few more steps and couldn’t feel anything more. I was still standing on the cobblestones, but I knew that a moat was somewhere near, and I was afraid I might fall into it if I took another step. I crept around on hands and knees for a while. I didn’t have any matches or a flashlight. Finally I just sat down and waited for dawn. Can you imagine how alone I felt?”

  “Did you cry?” asked Anton, and held his breath. It was as if here in the pitch dark, he could see whatever had been invisible then, too.

  “Not exactly,” she said with a laugh. “But I was scared, believe me! Perhaps even more by the silence than by the darkness. I knew that there were lots of people all about, but everything had disappeared. The world stopped at my skin. My fear had nothing to do with the War anymore. Besides, I was terribly cold.”

  “And then?”

  “What do you suppose? I was sitting on the street right in front of my own house. Just imagine! In five steps I was home.”

  “Something like that happened to me once!” said Anton, who had completely forgotten where he was, and why. “When I was staying with my uncle in Amsterdam.”

  “That must have been some time ago?”

  “Last summer, when the trains were still running. I think I’d had a bad dream; I woke up and wanted to go to the bathroom. It was pitch-black. At home I always step out of my bed on the left side, you know, but here there was suddenly a wall. On my right, where the wall usually is, there wasn’t anything. I was scared stiff. It was as if the wall was much harder and thicker than an ordinary wall, and on the other side where there was no wall, it seemed like a canyon.”

  “And then did you cry?”

  “Sure, of course. What else!”

  “And then your aunt or your uncle turned on the light, and you remembered where you were.”

  “Yes, my uncle did. I was sitting up in bed and …”

  “Sh!”

  Steps came down the stairs. She put her arm around him again and listened, motionless. Voices in the hall, a rattle of keys. Briefly there was a sound that Anton could not identify, then a sudden cursing and the dull thud of a beating. Someone was being dragged along the hall, while someone else was left swearing in the cell. With a loud iron clang the door fell closed. In the hall the man was being beaten or kicked; he screamed. More boots came pounding down the stairs, more screaming, after which it sounded as if the man was being dragged upstairs. It grew quiet. Someone laughed. They heard nothing more.

  Anton was trembling. “Who was that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been here long either. Those bastards … Thank God they’ll all end up on the gallows, and sooner than you think. Believe me, the Russians and the Americans will make short shrift of them. Let’s think about something else,” she said, turning toward him and stroking his hair with both hands, “while we still can.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, while they still leave us together in here. Tomorrow they’ll let you go.”

  “And you?”

  “Maybe not,” she said, as if there were a possibility that tomorrow they might set her free also. “But with me, too, everything will be all right in the end; don’t worry. What shall we talk about? Or are you tired? Do you want to sleep?”

  “Not me.”

  “Good. We’ve been talking all the time about the dark; shall we talk about light?”

  “Fine.”

  “Just imagine, lots of light. Sun. Summer. What else?”

  “The beach.”

  “Yes, before it was full of bunkers and barricades. The dunes. The sun shining in a dune hollow. Do you remember how blinding that could be?”

  “You bet I do. And how! The branches lying in there were always bleached by the sun.”

  Suddenly, without transition, she began to talk as if to a third person in the cell.

  “Light, yes, but light is not always just light. I mean, a long time ago I wanted to write a poem comparing light to love—no, I mean love to light. Yes, that’s another possibility, of course. You could also compare light to love. Maybe that’s even more beautiful, for light is older than love. Christians say it’s not so, but then, they’re Christians. Or are you a Christian?”

  “I don’t really think so.”

  “In the poem I wanted to compare love to the kind of light you sometimes see clinging to trees right after a sunset: the magical sort of light. That’s the kind of light people have inside them when they’re in love with someone. Hate is the darkness, that’s no good. And yet we’ve got to hate Fascists, and that’s considered perfectly all right. How is that possible? It’s because we hate them in the name of the light, I guess, whereas they hate only in the name of darkness. We hate hate itself, and for this reason our hate is better than theirs.

  “But that’s why it’s more difficult for us. For them everything is very simple, but for us it’s more complicated. We’ve got to become a little bit like them in order to fight them—so we become a little bit unlike ourselves. But they don’t have that problem; they can do away with us without any qualms. We first have to do away with something inside ourselves before we can do away with them. Not them; they can simply remain themselves, that’s why they’re so strong. But they’ll lose in the end, because they have no light in them. The only thing is, we mustn’t become too much like them, mustn’t destroy ourselves altogether, otherwise they’ll have won in the end …”

  She gave a brief moan. Before he could speak, she continued. He didn’t understand a word she was saying, but he was flattered that she should be talking to him as to a grown-up.

  “And there’s something else about that kind of light. Whenever someone is in love with someone else, they always say that the person they love is very beautiful, physically or mentally, or both. Often other people can’t see this at all, and they’re usually right. But when people are in love they’re always beautiful, for in loving they are lit up by the light. There’s a man who loves me and finds me very beautiful, which I’m not at all, really. He’s the beautiful one, even though in many ways he’s terribly ugly. And I’m beautiful too, but only because I’m in love with him, though he doesn’t know it. He thinks I’m not, but I do love him. Now you’re the only one who knows it, even though you don’t know who I am and who he is. He has a wife and
two children about your age. They need him, just as you need your father and mother …”

  Suddenly she was silent.

  “Where do you suppose my father and mother are?” Anton asked softly.

  “They’re probably locked up too, somewhere. I’m sure you’ll see them tomorrow.”

  “But why are they in another place than I am?”

  “Why indeed! Because we’re dealing with monsters. And because the whole thing is a big heap of ruins; the Krauts are just keeping busy. They’re shitting in their pants at the moment. But don’t you worry. I’m much more concerned about your brother.”

  “As he ran away, he picked up Ploeg’s gun,” Anton said, hoping this would not strike her as too terrible.

  A few seconds went by before she said, “For Christ’s sake.”

  He could tell by her voice that this was somehow fatal. What had happened to Peter? Suddenly he could take no more. He slumped against her and instantly fell sound asleep.

  4

  He was awakened half an hour or an hour later by the shouting that had echoed throughout Europe for years. Right away another flashlight blinded him. He was grabbed by the arm and pulled off the cot and down the hall so fast that he never even saw his cell mate. Germans and policemen were still standing all over the place. An important SS man with a skull on his cap and silver stars and stripes on his collar slammed the cell door shut. He was a handsome man of about thirty-five with the kind of regular, noble features that Anton had often seen in boys’ book illustrations.

  To lock up such a young boy, he shouted as he climbed the stairs, and with that terrorist, yet! Had everyone lost their minds? That blasted Communist female didn’t belong here either, he would take her with him to Amsterdam, to his office on Euterpe Street. It was lucky she hadn’t been freed yet, or some of the officials in this place wouldn’t have survived either. What kind of pigsty was this? Who had given the orders? What? Someone from the Security Service! Et tu, Brute! Probably another one of those two-faced operators getting into position for the next time around, making himself out to be Santa Claus, the great ally of the Resistance. That will be of enormous interest to the Gestapo. This boy is lucky he is still alive. How did he get blood on his face?

  Once more Anton was standing in the waiting room with a gloved finger pointing at him. Blood? He touched his cheeks. A cop pointed to a round shaving glass hanging from one of the steel braces against the wall. He stood on tiptoe and in the magnifying mirror saw the bloody, dried traces of her fingers on his white face and in his hair.

  “That’s not mine.”

  So then it was hers! exclaimed the officer. That’s the limit. She’s been wounded, get a doctor here at once, he still needed her. As far as the boy goes, take him to the Ortskommandantur, the Regional Command, for the night so he can be handed over to his family tomorrow. And be quick about it, bisschen Ruck-Zuck, you bunch of cheeseheads. No wonder they’re getting themselves mowed down at the drop of a hat. Chief Inspector Ploeg! Had to go for a little bike ride in the dark, the idiot.

  Wrapped in a horse blanket, Anton was taken outside by a helmeted German. The night was still crystal clear. In front of the door stood a Mercedes belonging, of course, to the officer, with a convertible linen roof and big compressors next to the hood.

  The German had a carbine on his back, and the tails of his dark-gray coat were tied around his legs, so that he walked with the wide-legged, ungainly tread of a bear. He told Anton to sit behind him on the motorcycle and hold on tight. Anton hitched up the blanket, embraced the huge shoulders, and clung with his torso to the man’s gun-strapped back.

  Weaving and skidding, they drove off beneath the stars through the abandoned streets to Haarlem, a ride of less than ten minutes. The snow crunched beneath the tires, but it seemed as if not even the sputtering of the motor could disturb the silence. So now here he was, riding a motorcycle for the first time in his life. In spite of the cold he had to make an effort not to drop off to sleep again. It was dark and light at the same time. The neck of the German in front of his eyes was a strip of skin with short, dark hair between the rubber collar of the coat and the steel of the helmet. Anton was thinking of something that had happened a year ago, at the indoor swimming pool. It was supposed to be evacuated at a certain hour for the Wehrmacht, but he had dawdled so long in his cubicle that he was too late. Outside he heard singing and the stamping of boots as the column approached. “Hei li, hei lo, hei la!” A little later the soldiers, laughing and whooping, thundered into the silent bathhouse. He didn’t hear any of the cubicle doors opening; they were stripping in the communal area. A minute later their naked feet splashed in the direction of the swimming pool. When everything had quieted down, he summoned the courage to slip out. Suddenly he saw them at the end of the hall behind the glass doors. Inexplicably, they had suddenly changed into human beings, just ordinary men, all naked, white bodies with brown faces and necks, arms that were brown up to the elbows. He left in a hurry. He saw the abandoned uniforms hanging in the dressing room normally used only by poor people, the caps, the belts, the boots. Such menace there, all that violence at rest … With the weightless suspension of sleepwalkers rising from their beds, the uniforms now detach themselves from their hooks and float toward a burning pile of firewood, tall flames licking the porch of a white country house—but luckily everything is underwater, in a canal or a swimming pool; the flames hiss as they go out …

  He woke up with a start. They had come to a standstill in the Hout, at the entrance to the trench that had been dug around the Ortskommandantur. Everywhere he saw barbed wire. A sentry let them pass. In the dark courtyard there was a coming and going of trucks and cars. Their headlights were shielded with little visors, and the glass was blacked out except for narrow horizontal strips. The racket of motors and horns made a strange contrast to this careful control of lights.

  The soldier set the motorcycle on its kickstand and took Anton inside. Here too there was unbroken activity: the back-and-forth traffic of military men, telephones ringing, typewriters clattering. He had to wait on a wooden bench in a small, heated room. Through the open door he could look into a long hall—and there he suddenly saw Mr. Korteweg. He came out of one door, crossed the hall, and disappeared through the opposite door, accompanied by a hatless soldier carrying papers under one arm. No doubt they already knew what he had done. At the thought that his parents too were probably here somewhere, Anton yawned, keeled over sideways, and fell asleep.

  When he woke up, he was looking into the eyes of a rather elderly sergeant in a sloppy uniform and calf-length boots that were too wide, who gave him a friendly nod. Anton was lying in another room under a woolen blanket on a red sofa. Outside it was daylight. Anton smiled back. Awareness that his house no longer existed came briefly but vanished at once. The sergeant pulled up a chair. On its seat he set down a tin cup of warm milk and a plate with three large, oblong, dark-brown sandwiches spread with something the color of frosted glass. Years later, as he traveled through Germany to his house in Tuscany, Anton learned that this was goose fat: Schmaltz. Never again would anything taste as good. Not even the most expensive dinners in the best restaurants in the world, at Bocuse’s in Lyon, or Lasserre in Paris, where he would stop on the way back from Italy. Nor could the most expensive Lafite Rothschild or Chambertin ever compare to that warm milk back then. A man who has never been hungry may possess a more refined palate, but he has no idea what it means to eat.

  “Tastes good? Schmeckt?” said the sergeant. After he had fetched another cup of milk and watched, amused, as this one too was gulped down, Anton had to wash up at a faucet in the toilet. In the mirror he could see that the blood smears on his face had become rust-brown. Hesitantly, bit by bit, he removed the only trace left of her. After that he was ushered into the Ortskommandant’s room, an arm encircling his shoulders. He hesitated at the threshold, but the sergeant pointed him to the armchair facing the desk.

  The Ortskommandant, the military governor
of the city, was on the telephone and looked at him briefly, without actually seeing him, but with a reassuring, fatherly nod. A short, fat man with short-cropped gray hair, he wore the gray uniform of the Wehrmacht. His holster with the pistol in it lay next to his hat on the desk, near four framed photographs, of which Anton could only see the backs, resting on little triangular holders. On the opposite wall hung a portrait of Hitler. Anton looked out the window at the bare, ice-coated, impassive trees that were totally unaware of what wartime was all about. The Ortskommandant hung the receiver on the hook, made a note, searched for something among his papers, then folded his hands on the blotter and asked if Anton had slept well. He spoke Dutch with a heavy accent, but quite clearly.

  “Yes sir,” said Anton.

  “It is dreadful what all happened yesterday.” The Ortskommandant shook his head for a while. “The world is a Jammertal, a valley of tears. Everywhere it is the same. My house in Linz was bombed also. Everything kaput. Kinder dead.” Nodding, he kept looking at Anton. “You want to say something, don’t you? Go ahead.”

  “Are my father and mother here, maybe? They were also taken away yesterday.” He knew that he mustn’t mention Peter, because that might set them on his trail.

  The Ortskommandant once more began to shuffle papers. “That was another assignment. Sorry, I can do nothing about it. Everything is momentarily mixed up. I think they are somewhere near here. Dat we must wait and see. The War can ja überhaupt, not last much longer. Then this alles will have been a bad dream. Na,” he said with a sudden laugh and reached out with both arms toward Anton. “What we do now mit you? You stay by us? Will you be a soldier?”

  Anton smiled too and did not know what to say.

  “What you want to be when you grow up …” He glanced briefly at a small gray card, his identity card, Anton realized. “Anton Emanuel Willem Steenwijk?”