The Assault

by Harry Mulisch

  He laughed at Anton, who sat across from him. His cheerfulness was evidently meant to be of help, but his laughter faded when he saw the look in Anton’s eyes. He put the napkin down next to his plate, beckoned with his head, and stood up. Anton followed him. Sandra also rose, but Mrs. De Graaff said, “Stay here.”

  The two men came to a stop by the side of a ditch full of duckweed that separated the yard from the meadow.

  “How are things, Anton?”

  “I’ll be all right, Father.”

  “That damned fool Gijs. What a first-class blunderer! During the War he was tortured and never said a word, and now he’s shooting his mouth off all over the place. How in heaven’s name did you end up next to him at the table?”

  “In a way, it was the second time our paths crossed,” said Anton.

  De Graaff looked puzzled. “Yes, I suppose so,” he said when he understood.

  “But that’s why it fits. I mean … It completes the picture.”

  “It completes the picture,” De Graaff repeated, nodding. “Well, well, you speak in riddles, but I suppose that’s your way of getting it off your chest.”

  Anton laughed. “I don’t quite know myself what I mean.”

  “Yes, but then who’s supposed to understand? Never mind; the important thing is to keep it under control. Perhaps it was a lucky thing for you that it happened this afternoon. We’ve been suppressing it all these years—and now come the problems. I hear it from all sides. Twenty years seems to be a kind of incubation period for our disease; all that unrest in Amsterdam must have something to do with it.”

  “I can’t say you give the impression of having any problems.”

  “Yes …” said De Graaff, digging with the tip of his shoe at a pebble stuck between the weeds. “Yes …” Unable to loosen the stone, he looked up at Anton and nodded. “Let’s go back to the table. Don’t you think that’s best?”

  After the De Graaffs had driven off to Gelderland, Saskia and Anton took turns going to the bathroom and returned in beach clothes. Having completed this metamorphosis, they drove to Wijk-aan-Zee.

  At the end of the narrow road through the dunes, where old bunkers, the former Atlantic fortifications, were still scattered here and there, the sea stretched out smooth and tamed as far as the horizon. Since it was an ordinary school day, the beach was occupied mostly by mothers with small children. They walked on bare feet through the hot sand and the brittle, sharp row of shells between the tidemark and the first line of waves. Not till there did it finally cool down.

  Saskia and Sandra immediately stripped to their bathing suits and ran to the lukewarm tidal pool in front of the first sandbank. Anton tidied their belongings: spread out the towels, tucking a detective story beneath them, folded the clothes, set out a pail and shovel, and put his watch in Saskia’s pocketbook. Then he entered the water slowly, walking toward the deep.

  Beyond the second sandbar, where he no longer touched bottom, the water became really cold. Yet it was a strange, unpleasant cold that seemed to rise out of the still, dead deep, penetrating his body without refreshing it. He swam about for a while. Though less than two hundred meters offshore, he no longer felt as if he belonged to the land. The coast—dunes, a lighthouse, low buildings with high antennas—stretched out in silence to the right and left, a world fundamentally different from the one he was in now. Suddenly he felt tired and alone, and his teeth began to chatter. He swam back as fast as he could, as if to escape a terrible danger that lay beyond the horizon. Gradually the sea grew warmer, and as soon as he touched ground he waded to the shore. Near Saskia and Sandra it was as warm as bath water. Here he stretched out on his back on the hard ridges of sand, spread his arms, and gave a deep sigh.

  “It’s cold farther out,” he said.

  Back on the beach he pulled his towel a few meters higher up where the white sand was hot. Saskia sat down next to him and together they watched Sandra, who herself was eyeing a little girl her own age building a sand castle. After a while Sandra too began to dig. The other girl pretended not to notice.

  “How do you feel?” asked Saskia. He put his arm around her shoulders.

  “Fine.”

  “Can’t you forget it?”

  “I have forgotten.” He turned over on his stomach. “The sun feels good.” He hid his face in the hollow of his arm and closed his eyes. With a chill he felt a trickle running onto his back and side, and then Saskia’s hands oiling him …

  A little later, lifting his head with a start, he knew that he must have dozed off. He sat up again and watched Saskia on her knees rubbing oil into Sandra, who paid no attention. The sun was at its hottest. A ball was being tossed back and forth in the water, and two boys were playing the guitar under a canvas awning. Tiny children ran in and out of the sea and poured their pails of water into holes in the sand, with the unshakable conviction that the water would eventually stay. Anton picked up his book and tried to read, but without sunglasses, he was blinded by the glare of the paper, even when it was shaded by his head.

  Sandra began to whine, and Saskia took her back into the water. When they emerged they walked, dripping, to a crowd that had gathered farther down, but a minute later Sandra came running in tears to Anton. Boys over there, she told him, were hacking with shovels at a purple jellyfish as big as a pancake, and the jellyfish was unable to fight back.

  With a determination like her mother’s, Saskia began to gather her possessions. “I’m going shopping with Sandra in the village, and after that we’ll go home. She’s dead-tired. First the church, then the burial, and then the visit to the widow’s house …” Crouching, she rubbed Sandra dry till the child stood shaking on her little legs.

  “Let me come along, then.”

  “No, please. Stay here; otherwise, it’ll just take longer. We’ll drink something and then come back to fetch you.”

  He followed them with his eyes in order to wave at them once more, but they trudged up the beach without turning back. When they had disappeared he lay down on his back, glistening with sweat, and closed his eyes.

  Gradually the sounds of the beach withdrew to the outer rim of a bowl as wide as heaven. He himself was floating like a dot at its center, in an empty, rose-colored space that was rapidly receding from the world. Something was beginning to pulse underground somewhere, and yet there was no ground. Space itself was pulsing, thumping. It grew darker and cloudy, as when a drop of ink falls into a glass of water: a gradual mingling which will not blend, a spreading like plasma, a transformation, so that a vague hand turns into an old-fashioned professor’s face with a goatee and a monocle, and then into a harnessed circus elephant riding a flatbed. The thumping becomes that of a train in a railroad station full of switches; the train vanishes in waves of music, rippling the wheat. All grows darker as night dribbles down. Above the feathered helmet of a suit of armor, a flame still flickers. Then everything grows hard, indestructible, and the light returns, a giant, rose-colored crystal door, not lit up by the light, but the source of it. Above it, two angels with garlands of lobed leaves, also made of crystal. The door has been locked with built-in or melted-in iron bars, painted pink. Nothing has changed in all these years, he notices. He is home again in Carefree. Though the doors are barred, he enters, but the rooms are empty. Everything has been transformed; there are multitudes of statues, sculptures, ornaments. It is silent, as in the depths of the sea. He wades through the rooms (which have grown into vast halls) with difficulty, as if he is being held back by something. With a flash of recognition he comes upon his father’s small study at the back of the house. But where the slanting wall used to be, there is now a glass addition like a large hothouse or winter garden, and inside it is a little fountain and the elegant, chalk-white facade of a Greek temple …

  Alone, he lay on the sofa in his underwear, the doors of the balcony wide open to the summer evening. The room was lit only by the late twilight and the street lamps. Only now did the deep sunburn on his face and the front of his
legs begin to show. It was unusual for his slightly olive complexion to burn at all, but he was as red as if he’d had a terrible beating. When Sandra had shaken him awake at the beach, he’d been asleep for more than an hour. In sleep the blood circulates more slowly, whereas in the sun it is supposed to move faster to counteract the heat—and so sleepers get sunburned. He had awakened with a splitting headache, but in the back of the car, in the soothing shade, it had almost disappeared. No doubt the wine at lunch had something to do with it.

  The continuous murmur of traffic sounded in the distance, but from the street itself came only the voices of some people sitting on a balcony or downstairs on the stoop. A child was playing the recorder a few houses away. Because Sandra couldn’t get to sleep, Saskia put her down on their double bed after dinner and lay down next to her. Then Saskia too immediately fell asleep.

  Stretched on the sofa, Anton stared straight ahead. He was thinking of Takes, of how everything comes to light sooner or later, and is dealt with and then laid aside. How long ago was it that he visited the Beumers? Some fifteen years, more than the age he had been in 1945. No doubt Mr. Beumer now lay in his coffin, and Mrs. Beumer as well. He hadn’t been to Haarlem since. And Fake, God knows where he was; it didn’t matter. Perhaps he was running the business in Den Helder by now. But with Takes it was different: they had wept together. It was the first time that he had cried over what had happened, yet it wasn’t because of his parents, or Peter, but because a girl had died. He had never seen Truus … Truus what? He raised himself and tried to think of her last name, but couldn’t. Shot in the dunes; blood on the sand.

  He closed his eyes to recall the darkness of the cell, her fingers softly caressing his face. He covered his face with his hands and peered wide-eyed through the bars of his fingers. He breathed deeply and brushed his hair back with both hands. He shouldn’t be doing this, it was dangerous. There was something wrong with him. He should go to bed. But he crossed his arms and went on staring straight ahead.

  Takes had a picture of her. Should Anton go to him and identify her? She had been Takes’s girl friend, his great love, apparently, and obviously he had the right to a last message from her. Anton couldn’t remember anything she had said, only that she had talked a lot and touched his face. All he would accomplish by going would be to eradicate that great anonymous presence and reduce her to a particular face. Was that what he wanted? Wouldn’t it diminish what she still meant to him? It didn’t matter whether her face would be beautiful or ugly, attractive or unattractive or whatever, but if he saw her picture it would acquire one definite aspect and no other. Now he had no image of her at all, only an abstract awareness, such as Catholic children have of their guardian angel.

  And then what happened was this: Moving the way a weightless trapeze artist rises from the safety net into which he has fallen, he rose from his prone position onto his knees. There he confronted the photograph he had been staring at all this time without realizing it. It stood, framed, together with his collection of sextants on the mahogany cabinet decorated with brass. In the deep twilight it was difficult to make the picture out, but he knew it well: Saskia in a black dress down to her ankles, her belly big with Sandra, who would be born a few days later. It was not true that he had never imagined what the woman whose name seemed to be Truus looked like. From the very beginning he had imagined her looking like this and not otherwise—like Saskia. This was what he had recognized in Saskia at first sight that afternoon at the Stone of Scone. She was the embodiment of an image he must have been carrying about in his head, without knowing it, since he was twelve. Her appearance revealed it to him—not as something remembered, but as immediate love, immediate certainty that she must remain with him and carry his child.

  Worried, he began to pace the room. What kind of thoughts were these? Perhaps it was true, perhaps not, but if it should be true, wasn’t he doing something peculiar to Saskia? She was, after all, someone in her own right. What was her connection with a girl from the Resistance who had been shot long ago? If she was not allowed to be herself but represented someone else, then wasn’t he in the process of breaking up his marriage? She would never have a chance, for she couldn’t be someone else. In a sense, he was involved in murdering her.

  On the other hand, if this were the truth, he wouldn’t be married to Saskia now if he hadn’t met that girl under the police headquarters. Then the two women had become indistinguishable, that is to say, his imagination was still busy combining them. For probably Saskia didn’t look like Truus, since he had no idea what Truus looked like. Besides, Takes would have reacted differently to Saskia, and he had paid hardly any attention to her. Saskia only looked like the image which Truus had aroused in his, Anton’s, imagination. But where did this image come from? Perhaps it originated with a much more ancient source; perhaps it came—in the manner of Freud—from the image he had of his mother while he was still in the cradle.

  He stood on the balcony and looked out unseeing. Whenever he was told in the hospital that a new colleague with such-and-such a name would be arriving the following day, he would begin immediately to visualize that person. The imagined image never agreed with the person’s actual appearance, was forgotten the moment of meeting, but where did these notions come from? The same was true with famous authors and artists: when he saw their photographs for the first time, he was often terribly surprised. Without being aware of it, he’d had a preconceived notion of their appearance. Sometimes he lost all interest in the person’s work after seeing the photograph. This was the case with Joyce, for instance, and not because he was ugly. Sartre was much uglier, but his portrait had increased Anton’s interest. Apparently the preconceived notion was sometimes more accurate than the reality.

  In other words, there was nothing wrong with Saskia’s looking like his idea of Truus. Truus had, under those circumstances, aroused an image in his mind to which Saskia seemed to respond, and that was fine, for it was not Truus’s image, but his own, and where it came from was unimportant. Besides, maybe the whole thing really worked in reverse. Saskia had touched his heart at first glance, and perhaps this was why he had decided that Truus must have looked the same way. But in that case he was being unfair to Truus, and thus it was his duty to know not only her name, but also what she actually looked like: she, Truus Coster.

  It was cooling off. Police sirens sounded in the distance. Something was happening again in the city, as things had been happening for almost a year now. It was ten-thirty, and he decided to call Takes at once. He went upstairs to the bedroom. Here too the curtain was still open. The blankets were thrown back, and Sandra lay sleeping under the sheet with her mouth wide open. Saskia, half undressed, lay on her stomach, one arm around the child. He stood watching them for a moment in the warm silence filled with sleep. He had the feeling of having just skirted something fatal, something that now seemed to him a dangerous confusion, dizzying cerebral cobwebs caused by sunstroke. He must forget them and go to sleep.

  Instead, he went to look for his jacket, which Saskia had thrown over a chair. With the vague sense that he was still courting danger, he used two fingers to fish the slip of paper out of his breast pocket.

  5

  “Anytime,” Takes said. “Why not come right now?” When Anton excused himself because he had a slight headache, Takes answered, “Who doesn’t?” The next day Anton would be on duty till four, so they made a date for four-thirty.

  The heat continued. He had trouble concentrating on his work. When it was over he was glad to get outside and walk to the Nieuwe Zijds Voorburgwal. The sunburn on his face and chest was still painful. While Saskia had been thoroughly oiling him once more that morning, he had wondered whether to tell her about his appointment, but decided against it. On the Spui stood a detachment of blue police squad cars. Tension hung about the city, but it had become routine. The mayor and the minister would take care of it.

  Takes lived behind the Royal Palace on the Dam, in a shabby, narrow house that he could r
each only by slipping between delivery trucks. The house dated from more prosperous times, and on its gable was a stone relief representing a kind of mythical beast with a fish in its mouth. The inscription underneath said THE OTTER. On the front stoop it took a while before Anton found the right name among all the different offices and private apartments. Takes’s was penciled on a scrap of paper thumbtacked under a bell, along with instructions to ring three times.

  When Takes opened the door, Anton saw at once that he’d been drinking. His eyes were watery and his face blotchier than the day before. He was unshaven: a grayish film covered his jaws and neck down to his open shirt. Anton followed him through a narrow hall with peeling plaster, parked bicycles, boxes, pails, and a half-deflated rubber boat. Behind closed doors, the clatter of typewriters and a radio. An ancient, winding oak staircase came down at an angle into the hall. Sitting on one of the steps an old man wearing a pajama top over his pants was dismantling a bike pedal.

  “Did you read the papers?” asked Takes without looking back.

  “Not yet.”

  In the back of the house through a door at the end of the hall, Takes entered a small room that served as bedroom, study, and kitchen. It contained an unmade bed, as well as something like a desk covered with letters, bank statements, newspapers, and magazines. Jumbled among the papers were a coffee cup, an overflowing ashtray, an open jam pot, and even a shoe. Anton could not bear this confusion of unassorted objects; at home he was unhappy if Saskia left a comb or glove lying on his desk for a minute. The room was littered with pots, pans, unwashed dishes, even suitcases, as if Takes were on the verge of leaving. Above the sink an open window overlooked an untidy yard, where more music was playing. Takes took up a newspaper that was spread out on the bed and folded it over and over until nothing was visible except one front-page article.