The Assault

by Harry Mulisch

  The Steenwijks finally managed to offer their condolences to the widow at the end of the reception line in the parish house. Then, between cars starting up, they crossed over to the café on the other side of the street. The few outside tables were already taken by the villagers, and inside too it was busy. A crowd was gathering at the bar, tables were being pushed together, ties loosened, jackets removed, and loud calls issued for beer, coffee, and sandwiches. The jukebox was playing “Strangers in the Night.” The cabinet minister was there talking to the burgomaster and scribbling something on the back of a cigarette box. Famous writers were present, as well as a notorious Provo. Just as Saskia suggested that they go somewhere else, her father came in. He sat down at a large table in the back, probably reserved, with about seven other men, some of whose faces were familiar to Anton. Evidently his wife had gone back to the house with the widow and the family. When he saw his daughter and Anton, he beckoned to them.

  At the table he was in his element. In no time three conversations were going. In the one that he joined, he was on the defensive without losing his good humor, evidently quite aware that he was in control. A man with a blond forelock and still blonder eyebrows leaned toward him and said that he was becoming a real old bore. How in heaven’s name could he compare the Vietnamese Liberation Front to the Nazis? The trouble was that he thought Americans were still the same as in World War Two. But actually it was the Americans who had changed and who should now be compared to the Nazis.

  De Graaff leaned back with a laugh, holding onto the edge of the table with outsretched arms so that the men on his right and left also had to lean backwards. With his thinning white hair and imposing features he looked like the leader at a gathering of commissars, or the chairman presiding at a board meeting. “Jaap, my dear fellow,” he began condescendingly, but the blond man interrupted him at once.

  “Oh, I know; next you’ll say I must have forgotten that the Americans came to our rescue.”

  “That’s not at all what I was going to say.”

  “I’m not so sure. In any case I haven’t forgotten a thing, but you did forget something.”

  “And what’s that, may I ask?”

  “The Russians also came to our rescue, even though we didn’t see them here in our streets. They’re the ones who defeated the German army, and it’s still the Russians who are on the right side in Vietnam.”

  The man with the black mustache who sat behind De Graaff’s left arm said icily, “How about leaving this kind of talk to other people?”

  “But it’s the truth,” said Jaap. “The Russians have been de-Stalinized, but the Americans have become mass murderers.” The man on the left shrugged and smiled politely under his mustache, suggesting that though he agreed, he felt that Jaap had started a pointless quarrel.

  “Dirty Commies, all of them,” said De Graaff good-naturedly in Anton’s direction. “First-class fellows.”

  Anton smiled back. Obviously this conversation was a kind of game that they had played many times before.

  “Sure, sure,” said Jaap. “First-class fellows. But from nineteen forty-four on, Gerrit, you and your military government were no longer so much against the Germans as against the first-class fellows.” Anton’s father-in-law was not named Gerrit but Godfried Leopold Jérôme; in this company they apparently still addressed each other with their Underground pseudonyms. Jaap too was obviously not named Jaap.

  “Well, what do you expect? The Krauts had been defeated, after all.” Innocently De Graaff looked at Jaap. “Were we supposed to exchange one tyranny for another?” Gradually his smile faded.

  “Go to hell,” said Jaap.

  “You ought to be grateful to us. If you’d had your way in 1945, you wouldn’t have been expelled from the Party, as you are now; you’d have faced the firing squad. Certainly in your ambiguous position you wouldn’t have had a chance with the Stalinists. No more than Slansky, in Czechoslovakia. I was posted in Prague at the time of his execution. You owe your life to the military government.” And since Jaap didn’t answer: “Always better to be at the head of the soccer club on the dung heap of history, than dead. Right?”

  The large man on De Graaff’s other side, a well-known poet with a satanic expression in his slanted eyes, crossed his arms and began to laugh.

  “I have a feeling this is going to be an interesting conversation,” he said.

  “Sure,” said Jaap. “Let him win his argument, for all I care.”

  “Do you know these verses of Sjoerd’s?” asked De Graaff, and raising his finger, he declaimed:

  When to the will of tyrants

  A nation’s head is bowed,

  It loses more than life and goods—

  Its very light goes out.

  “Amazing, the uses of poetry—to justify the bombing of villages with napalm,” said the man with the mustache. “But of course, that’s only in Asia. Besides, during the Indonesian troubles you were already playing a peculiar role. ‘Indies lost, heavy the cost,’ and other such nonsense. Not a very good rhyme, if you ask me, but ask our expert here about that.”

  “An insignificant rhyme,” said the poet.

  “There you have it. Those very Indonesian police actions cost our deceased friend Sjoerd a few years of his life. And yet we’ve never had it so good in Holland as since we got rid of the Indonesian colonies.”

  “Thanks to the help of the Marshall Plan, dear Henk,” said De Graaff sweetly. “Financed by the Americans, remember?”

  “They owed it to us, we don’t have to thank them for it. The American Revolution was financed by banks in Amsterdam. That one happened to be the revolt of an English colony, dear Gerrit. We’re paying back the Marshall Plan to the last penny, whereas I’m not at all sure we got back a cent of that money in the eighteenth century.”

  “Must look it up,” said De Graaff.

  “And I’m no Communist, by the way. I’m an anti-Fascist. But because Communism is the greatest enemy of Fascism, I happen to be anti-anti-Communist, that’s for certain.”

  “Do you know why De Graaff happened to be in the Resistance?” Jaap asked suddenly. “Do you know who he did it for? For the little princesses …” His tone implied that he wanted to vomit.

  “Absolutely,” said De Graaff, once more with a self-satisfied grin.

  “An ordinary House of Orange Fascist, that’s what you are, nothing else.”

  “I’m getting out of here,” said Saskia, and stood up. “I don’t need this. See you later!”

  While De Graaff exclaimed, “An honorary title, an honorary title!” Anton stood up. The crowd parted to give him a brief glimpse of the woman he had been staring at in church. In the meantime his father-in-law was laughing loudly, obviously in his element.

  “What do you know about the secret charms of the monarchy?” he cried with mock arrogance. “What is more beautiful and uplifting to the soul than the Palace of Soestdijk by night? All the windows lit, black limousines driving in and out, orders ringing out over the lawns, gentlemen wearing gala uniform with shiny swords, ladies in evening dress with glistening jewels walking up the steps to the front terrace, being greeted by handsome young officers in the marines. Inside, the glitter of chandeliers, lackeys with large silver trays full of glasses of champagne, and perhaps even a glimpse of a member of the royal family; if God be willing, perhaps even Her Majesty the Queen. And far away, in the drizzling rain, behind the gates guarded by military police, the grim populace …”

  “I actually think you mean it, by God,” said the poet who had predicted that this would be an interesting conversation. “Jesus Christ, if I were as much of a bastard as you, I wouldn’t ever get a single word printed again.” Some spit flew out of his mouth and ended up on De Graaff’s dark-blue lapel, not far from the decoration in his buttonhole.

  “Which, according to some of our more distinguished scholars, would be a blessing for our nation’s literature,” said De Graaff.

  “Don’t let it get you, man!” said He
nk to the furious poet.

  De Graaff pulled out his handkerchief and wiped away the white spit bubble. The knot of his gray tie was perfectly centered and disappeared with an elegant curve inside his vest. Jaap too had to laugh. The man sitting on the other side of the poet, a prominent publisher, rubbed his hands and exulted:

  “A fierce afternoon!”

  “The grim populace,” said Henk, “has recently been bombarding your beloved royal family with stink bombs.”

  “Stink bombs …” said De Graaff with mock contempt.

  “And that will cost you your head,” Henk continued to someone standing behind Anton.

  Anton turned around. He realized that the heat he had felt on his neck all this time came from the powerful Calvinist rump of the cabinet minister. The latter had apparently been following the conversation.

  “Possibly,” he said.

  “And then?”

  “Then I’ll have another drink.” He lifted his glass of Dutch gin, exchanged a glance of complicity with De Graaff, and turned away.

  Suddenly silence fell at the table. Only the two men sitting on Anton’s left were still involved in a subdued private conversation that they had been carrying on all the time.

  Anton caught the following sentence: “I shot him first in the back, then in the shoulder, and then in the stomach as I bicycled past him.”

  3

  Far away, deep inside the tunnel of the past, Anton heard the six shots ring: first one, then two, then two more, and finally one last shot. His mother looks at his father, his father at the sliding doors, Peter lifts the lid of the carbide lamp …

  Anton turned to the man he had been sitting next to all this time. Before he knew what he was doing, he had already asked: “Wasn’t there a fourth and a fifth shot? And then one more, a sixth?”

  The other looked at him with half-closed eyes. “How do you know?”

  “Are you talking about Ploeg, Fake Ploeg in Haarlem?”

  A few seconds went by before the other man asked slowly, “Who are you? How old are you?”

  “I was living there. It happened in front of our house. At least …”

  “In front of your …” The man caught his breath. He had understood at once. Only on the operating table had Anton seen anyone lose all color so rapidly. The man had had the swollen, blotchy-red complexion of someone who drinks too much. As if the light had changed, he now turned as pale and waxen as old ivory. Anton began to tremble.

  “Oh oh!” said the man two chairs away. “Now you’re in trouble.”

  Everyone at the table noticed at once that something was wrong. The silence deepened; then confusion set in, with everyone talking at once, some standing up. De Graaff wanted to come between them, explaining that Anton was his son-in-law, but the man insisted on handling it himself. Then, to Anton, as if he wanted to fight it out, “Come outside.”

  He took his jacket from the back of his chair, grabbed Anton by the hand, and pulled him along through the crowd as if he had been a child. And that’s how it felt to Anton, the hot hand of that man twenty years his senior, dragging him along—something he had never felt with his uncle, only sometimes with his father. In the other part of the café no one was aware of what was going on. Laughing, they let the two pass. “It’s been a hard day’s night …” the Beatles were singing on the jukebox.

  Outside, he was struck by the silence. The village square lay shimmering in the sun. Here and there groups of people were still standing about, but Saskia and Sandra were nowhere in sight. “Come,” said the man, having surveyed the scene. They crossed to the cemetery and entered through the wrought-iron gate. Villagers had gathered around the open grave to read the inscriptions on the ribbons and cards that accompanied the flowers. Chickens from a neighboring farm walked about the paths and the other graves. Near a stone bench in the shade of an oak tree the man stood still and held out his hand.

  “Cor Takes,” he said. “And your name is Steenwijk.”

  “Anton Steenwijk.”

  “They call me Gijs,” he said, tossing his head in the direction of the café, and sat down.

  Anton sat next to him. He didn’t need any of this. He had said what he did in spite of himself, as a reflex, the way a nerve reacts to the impulse of a tendon. Takes produced a pack of cigarettes, pulled one halfway out, and offered it to him. Anton shook his head and faced him. “Listen,” he said. “Let’s get up and walk out of here and never mention it again. There’s nothing to discuss, really. What happened, happened. It doesn’t bother me, believe me. It happened over twenty years ago. I have a wife and child and a good job. Everything is fine. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  Takes lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and gave him a grim look. “But you didn’t keep your mouth shut.” And after a pause, “So now it happened.” Only at the second sentence did the smoke accompany his words.

  Anton nodded. “Right,” he said. He couldn’t evade the somber, dark-brown eyes staring at him. The left one was different from the right, the eyelid somewhat heavier, its piercing glance leaving him defenseless. Takes must have been about fifty, but his lank, darkish-blond hair was graying only slightly at the sideburns. Under his armpits were large sweat marks. It occurred to Anton as in a fairy tale that this was the man who, that evening in the winter of starvation, had killed Ploeg.

  “I was saying something you shouldn’t have heard,” said Takes. “But you did hear, and then you said something you didn’t mean to say. Those are the facts, and that’s why we’re sitting here. I knew of your existence. How old were you then?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Did you know him, that pig?”

  “Only by sight,” said Anton, but the word pig in connection with Ploeg did sound familiar.

  “I should think so; he came by your house regularly.”

  “And I was in the same class as his son.” As he said this he didn’t remember that boy of long ago, but the big fellow who had thrown a stone into his mirror ten years before.

  “Wasn’t his name also Fake?”

  “Yes.”

  “There were two other daughters besides. The youngest was four then.”

  “The same age mine is now.”

  “So you see, those are not attenuating circumstances.” Anton realized he was shivering. He felt in the presence of a nameless violence such as he had never known in anyone, except possibly in that man with the scar under his cheekbone. Should he say so? He didn’t. He didn’t want to give the impression that he was attacking Takes. Besides, it would be nothing new to Takes; clearly he had put such considerations behind him long ago.

  “Do you want me to tell you what sort of man this Ploeg was?”

  “Not for my sake.”

  “But for mine. He had a whip with barbed wire braided into it that ripped the skin off your bare ass, which he then shoved against the blazing stove. He put a garden hose up your ass and let it run till you vomited your own shit. He killed God knows how many people, and sent many more to their deaths in Germany and Poland. Very well. So he had to be gotten rid of … Do you agree?” And as Anton kept silent, “Yes, or yes?”

  “Yes,” said Anton.

  “Okay. But on the other hand, it was clear to us that there were certain to be reprisals.”

  “Mr. Takes,” Anton interrupted him. “Am I right to assume …”

  “Call me Gijs.”

  “… that you are sitting here justifying yourself for my sake? I’m not criticizing you, after all.”

  “I’m not justifying myself to you.”

  “To whom, then?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered impatiently. “Certainly not to myself, or to God, or some such nonsense. God doesn’t exist, and perhaps I don’t either.” With the same index finger that had pulled the trigger, he now flicked away the cigarette butt and looked out over the cemetery. “Do you know who exists? The dead. The friends who have died.”

  As if to announce that someone was in command after all, a small cloud
crept over the sun, making the flowers on the new grave look bleached, as if they were repenting, while the gray of the gravestones became dominant. But the next moment, everything was once more bathed in light. Anton wondered whether the sympathy he felt for the man sitting next to him had an ambiguous source. Through him, Anton was no longer simply a victim; now he was vicariously taking part in the violence of the assault. A victim? Of course he had been a victim, even though he was still alive. Yet at the same time, he felt as if it had all happened to someone else.

  Takes had lit another cigarette.

  “Good. So we knew there would be reprisals, right? That one of the houses would be set on fire, and that some of the hostages would be shot. Is that a reason for not doing it?”

  When he kept silent, Anton looked up.

  “Do you expect me to give you an answer?”

  “Sure.”

  “I can’t do that. I don’t know about that.”

  “Then I’ll tell you: the answer is no. If you should tell me that your family would still be alive if we hadn’t liquidated Ploeg, you’d be right. That’s the truth, but no more. If someone were to say that your family would still be alive if your father had rented another house in another street, that too would be the truth. Then I might be sitting here with someone else … although it might have happened in that other street, because maybe Ploeg too might have lived somewhere else. Those are the kinds of truths that don’t do us any good. The only truth that’s useful is that everyone gets killed by whoever kills them, and by no one else. Ploeg by us, your family by the Germans. If you believe we shouldn’t have done it, then you also believe that, in the light of history, the human race shouldn’t have existed. Because then all the love and happiness and goodness in this world can’t outweigh the life of a single child. Yours, for instance. Is that what you believe?”