The Assault

by Harry Mulisch

  After this he had a few more spells, but less intense each time. Finally they did not return, as if they had been intimidated by his tearing up the prescription, his making it clear who was master.

  The only permanent victim of this incident was his house and the terrace view. From that afternoon they lost something of their perfection, the way a beautiful face is blemished by a scar.

  Time passed. His hair turned gray prematurely, but he did not grow bald like his father. As the proletariat was vanishing, the appearance of people all around him grew more proletarian, but he himself continued to wear English tweed jackets and checked shirts with a tie. Gradually he reached the time of life when he met old people whom he had known at the age he was now. This was a strange experience. It made him look differently at both old and young, and himself as well. One day he became older than his father had ever been, and he felt as if he were trespassing and deserved a scolding: Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi! He had always avoided using old saws such as “What’s done cannot be undone,” or “Let well enough alone,” or “When you own the store, you never have any fun.” But now he had reached the age where these sayings seemed to express things exactly. He had come to discover that they were not just embarrassing clichés, but summed up the essence, the concentrated experience of entire generations. Usually they were rather discouraging truths, of course, rather than slogans expressing the wisdom of revolutionaries, for revolutionaries are not wise. But he had never been a rebel; it was not to be expected, in view of his experience.

  After the death of his aunt, he placed her framed photograph next to his uncle’s on his desk at the hospital. De Graaff also died, in the second half of the seventies, and at his cremation there were considerably fewer people than at the funeral ten years earlier, where Anton had met Takes. Henk was there, his mustache now gray, and Jaap, with snow-white locks, but the minister and the burgomaster had died, and so had the clergyman, the poet, and the publisher. Takes, whom Anton had not seen again, was also missing. When he inquired, however, everyone assured him that Takes must still be alive, even though no one had heard of him for years. A few weeks later his former mother-in-law died too. For the second time he stood in the crematorium next to Sandra, Saskia, and her husband and saw the coffin sink into the fiery pit. He was surprised that no one had thought of depositing her shiny black cane with the silver handle on top of the lid, as they would have done if she had been a general.

  The War, though periodically revived in books and TV programs, had gradually become a thing of the past, if one can say such a thing. Somewhere behind the horizon, the murder of Ploeg was rusting away until it became a minor incident that almost no one but Anton remembered much about, a frightening fairy tale from long ago.

  When Sandra was sixteen, she announced one day that it was time she saw where her grandfather and grandmother and uncle had met their end. Both Saskia and Liesbeth thought this a bad idea, but Anton found it perfectly reasonable, and so one Saturday afternoon in May he took his daughter to Haarlem. They drove along a four-lane highway through endless neighborhoods of apartment buildings where the peat diggings had once been, and over bridges three stories high that had swallowed the canal traffic. He hadn’t been back here in a good quarter of a century. He hadn’t even shown the spot to Saskia and Liesbeth.

  The spot. He burst out laughing. The missing tooth had been replaced by a golden one. Where his house had once stood now rose a low white structure in the style of the sixties, with wide windows, a flat roof, and a built-in garage. By the fence around the impeccable lawn was a sign: For Sale.

  He noticed that the Beumers’s house had been remodeled. Now there was a single large area downstairs, with a new skylight on one side. The Aarts’s house, farthest to the right, had a sign in the yard announcing the presence of a notary public. None of the three older houses still carried the boards with their names. He couldn’t remember which one had been called Hideaway and which Bide-a-Wee, but he did know that the other neighbors, the Kortewegs, had lived in Home at Last. Cottages had been built on both sides of the four houses, and on the empty lots behind them a new neighborhood had sprung up, streets and all. Across the water where the meadows used to reach clear to Amsterdam, a whole new suburb now lay in the sun, with apartment buildings, offices, and wide, busy avenues. Only a few of the little old houses, and the mill further on, remained at the water’s edge.

  He described what it used to look like, but he could tell that Sandra had trouble imagining it, just as he was unable to recreate the meaning of that winter of starvation. Standing on the other side of the street with its herringbone pattern, he tried to tell her what Carefree had looked like, to resurrect the ghost of the old house with the thatched roof and the bay windows, when a bare-chested man in blue jeans appeared out of its stylish replacement. Could he be of any help? Anton said he was showing his daughter the place where he used to live, and the man replied that they were welcome to step inside and have a look. His name was Stommel. Sandra gave her father a questioning glance; after all, this wasn’t the house where he had lived. But Anton pursed his lips and lowered his eyes, from which she concluded that it was better to leave it at that. He realized that Stommel had interpreted his story as the alibi of a prospective buyer. As they crossed the street, Anton let his gaze wander toward a certain place near the sidewalk, but he was no longer able to locate it precisely.

  Inside, everything was bright and airy. In place of the hall, the living room, and the dining room with the table beneath the lamp, a pale-blue carpet now reached from the paneled kitchen-dinette on one side, to the white piano on the other. In a corner two boys lay on their stomachs in front of the TV and never looked up. As he was showing them the sunny bedrooms in back, Stommel explained that he had bought the house only five years ago. Now, unfortunately, he had to sell because of unforeseen circumstances, but he was willing to take a loss. They walked a few steps in the garden. The hedge through which he had crept so many times no longer existed. The neighbors in what was formerly Home at Last, a tanned elderly gentleman and a white-haired Indonesian lady, were sitting under an umbrella in their yard. It took Anton a while to realize that this was the nice young pair with the two small children. Now Mrs. Stommel appeared, wearing lots of makeup, and introduced herself. Much too eagerly she offered them something to drink, but Anton thanked them for showing the house and took leave. Before shaking hands, Stommel quickly wiped his palms on the sides of his pants, removing only some of the dampness.

  He and Sandra walked arm in arm to the monument at the end of the quay. The towpath had been replaced by a wooden partition. The rhododendrons had grown into a massive wall covered with heavy clusters of blossoms, between which the stylized Egyptian statue of a woman had weathered. Unbelieving, Sandra looked at her family name on the bronze plaque. Clearly she would never quite be able to understand what had happened here. Anton, on the other hand, read the name below his mother’s: “J. Takes.” He remembered Takes saying that his youngest brother had been one of the hostages, but it had never occurred to him that the name would also be recorded here. He nodded, and Sandra asked what was the matter. He said that nothing was.

  Somewhat later they sat on the crowded terrace of a restaurant in the Haarlemmer Hout, former site of the Ortskommandantur garage (a new bank building had replaced the Ortskommandantur itself). Realizing that he had never before returned here and never would again, he told Sandra about his conversation with Truus Coster that night in the cellar under the police station in Heemstede. Sandra couldn’t understand why he spoke of Truus with such warmth. Hadn’t she been the cause of all that had happened? Anton felt a great weariness. He shook his head and said, “Everyone did what he did, and not anything else.”

  And at that instant he knew for certain that Truus Coster had told him the same thing, word for word, or almost. Then all of a sudden, almost thirty-five years later, he heard her voice, faint and distant: “… he thinks that I don’t love him …” Frozen, he listened, but
all grew silent once more; nothing followed. Tears came to his eyes. Everything was still there, not a thing had disappeared—the peace and light between the tall, straight beeches, a row of smaller trees where the trench had been. Here he had gotten into the truck with Schulz, while it was raining icicles. He felt Sandra’s hand on his arm and covered it with his own, but he was afraid that he might start to cry and didn’t face her. Gently Sandra asked whether he had ever visited her grave. When he shook his head, she suggested that they do it now.

  Sandra wanted to buy a red rose with her own pocket money, but she came out of the flower shop with one that was purple, almost blue. The red ones were sold out. They drove to the military cemetery in the dunes and parked the car near some others standing in the half-empty parking lot. Then they walked along a winding path toward the flag waving on top of the dune. All they could hear was the buzzing of insects in the bushes, and later the flapping of the flag.

  Inside a walled, rectangular area lay the neatly arranged rectangular plots of some hundred graves. They were surrounded with immaculately raked gravel. A man was watering with a hose. Here and there old people brought flowers to the graves or sat whispering on the benches. A few people rested in the shade of a high wall on which names were inscribed in bronze. Anton, surprised at not recognizing anyone, realized that he had half-expected to meet Takes here. Sandra asked the gardener if he knew where Truus Coster’s grave was, and he pointed out the plot next to them.

  CATHARINA GEERTRUIDA COSTER

  16.9.1920

  17.4.1945

  Sandra laid her blue rose on the gravestone. Side by side they stood looking down at it. In the silence, the flag flapping, the rope hitting the mast, were more mournful than any music. Deep down there, beneath the sand, it was much darker than it had been in the cell, thought Anton. He looked around at the mathematical precision of the plots, all that was left of the chaotic misery of the War. He thought, I should look Takes up, if he’s still alive, and tell him that she loved him.

  But when he went to the Nieuwe Zijds Voorburgwal on the afternoon of the next day, he found that The Otter had been torn down—apparently some time ago, for the advertising placards were already layers deep on the green-painted scaffolding. Since he couldn’t find Takes in the telephone book either, he left it at that.

  Not until two years later, on May 5, 1980, did he see Takes by chance on television, on a commemorative program that was almost over when he turned it on. An old man with a white beard and an impressive, ravaged face that Anton recognized only because the name was flashed on for an instant:

  Cor Takes

  —Resistance Fighter

  “Cut out the nonsense,” Takes was saying to a man sitting next to him on a sofa. “The whole thing was one big mess. I really don’t want to hear any more about it.”

  On the other hand, Anton often saw a small white panel truck driving through the city, with red lettering that said:

  FAKE PLOEG SANITATION INC.

  2

  And just as the sea finally casts ashore the debris that ships throw overboard—and beachcombers furtively retrieve it before daybreak—so the memory of that night during the War in nineteen forty-five plagued him one last time in his life.

  On a Saturday in the second half of November, nineteen eighty-one, he woke up with such an unbearable toothache that something had to be done at once. At nine o’clock he called the dentist who had been treating him for over twenty years, but the office didn’t answer. After some hesitation, he called the home number. The dentist told him to take an aspirin, because he wasn’t about to do any work that day, he was going to the demonstration.

  “A demonstration? Against what?”

  “Against nuclear arms.”

  “But I can’t stand the pain.”

  “How did that happen, all of a sudden?”

  “I’ve been feeling it coming on for a few days.”

  “Why didn’t you call sooner?”

  “I was at a conference in Munich.”

  “Don’t your fellow anesthesiologists know how to relieve pain? And by the way, shouldn’t you be at that demonstration?”

  “Come on! You know I don’t go in for that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, really? But you do have toothaches, don’t you! Look here, friend, I’m demonstrating today for the first time in my life. I’m willing to help you out, but only on condition that you join us.”

  “Anything, as long as you help me.”

  It was settled that Anton should be at the office at eleven-thirty. Even though the assistant wouldn’t be around because she was also demonstrating, the dentist would see what he could do.

  And so nothing came of the weekend in Gelderland which he had been looking forward to after Germany. He told Liesbeth to go alone with Peter, but she wouldn’t even consider it. As if she were a nurse, she handed him, on a little platter, a tiny, dry, brown twig about a centimeter long, its diminutive chalice with a rounded end lying in the middle of a white coffee filter.

  “What’s that?”

  “A clove. Put it inside your tooth; that’s what they used to do in the Indies.”

  It seemed to her a bit excessive, the way he embraced her almost in tears.

  “Come on, Ton, don’t overdo it.”

  “Unfortunately I don’t have a hole in my tooth—I don’t know what’s the matter with it. But I’ll eat this.”

  It was no help at all, however; chewing was out of the question. Watched over by Peter, he paced through the house, his mouth wide with pain, like those yawning faces on the signs that hang outside apothecaries in Amsterdam. He was thinking about the peace demonstration he would have to join. He had read about it and knew it would be the largest in Europe, but it wouldn’t have occurred to him either to take part or not to take part. He had simply noted it as if it were a weather report. It was merely a symptom: the year two thousand was approaching and fear of the millennium was in the air, just as it had been a thousand years ago. Atom bombs were produced as deterrents not to be used, but to safeguard the peace. If such paradoxical weapons were abandoned, then the chances of conventional warfare would increase and eventually lead to the use of atom bombs anyway.

  Yet at the same time, he too had felt ill at ease when the old man in America had announced that limited nuclear warfare was not out of the question, and that it would take place in Europe, where it would be total. He had been somewhat reassured when the old man in Russia had disagreed, replying that it was indeed out of the question because he would then make sure that America was totally destroyed. But in either case, the implication was that atomic armaments should not be abandoned.

  He drank the camomile tea which Liesbeth brewed for him, and sitting on the sofa, tried to pass the time by doing one of those pun-and-anagram crossword puzzles. Can’t the Sun God give you a more precise definition for this heap of ruins? Six letters. It was as if being unable to bite made him incapable of thinking. He stared at the sentence. Though it looked as if it ought to be easy, he found no solution.

  Since the dentist’s office was not far from his house, at ten-thirty he decided to go on foot. The weather was cool and overcast. With pain drilling in his jaw he walked through increasingly crowded streets. A helicopter circled in the distance. Further ahead all car and trolley traffic had stopped; apparently the center of the city had been closed off. Even the main arteries were full of people walking in the same direction, many of them with placards held high. There were foreigners, too. He saw a group of warrior types wearing turbans, wide pants, and sword belts, with only the pistols and scimitars missing; displaced Kurds, perhaps, who marched, laughing and singing, with the supple tread of nomads, behind a banner covered with Arabic characters. Whether this proclaimed the jihad, the Holy War, nobody would ever know. Soon the streets were more crowded than they had been since May, 1945. People were streaming from all directions toward the Museumplein. The prospect of having to join this mob later made his tooth ache all the more. God knows what could
happen if panic broke out, if agitators should get involved! Anything was possible nowadays in Amsterdam. Luckily, except for the helicopter in the sky, no police were in sight.

  At the dentist’s office he rang, but no one answered. Shivering with cold or whatever, he stood waiting in the doorway. The Sun God was Ra, of course; that was obvious, Racket? Raphael? Rattles? Those would be to evoke the God. Ra-pens. Those would be the writing tools of the Sun God, with which he would record his definitions … In the distance an endless stream of people was crossing the side street on which he stood. When the dentist finally arrived, imping on his clubfoot, his wife on his arm, he burst out aughing.

  “You look very fit.”

  “Go ahead and laugh, Gerrit Jan,” said Anton. “You’re a ine healer, you are, blackmailing your patients.”

  “It’s all in the service of humanity, all in the spirit of Hipp?crates.”

  He had dressed for the occasion in feudal hunting costume: a green loden jacket and underneath, green knee breeches and long dark-green socks. This made his huge shoe more visible than ever. As they entered the operating room, the telephone rang.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Van Lennep. “Not another one!”

  It was Liesbeth. Peter had said he wanted to go to the demonstration. In that case he’d better ride over on his bicycle and wait for him outside, Anton said.

  Van Lennep had thrown his coat over the assistant’s desk. “Let’s have a look, friend. Which one is it?”

  While his wife went once more to the bathroom—because later it would be impossible—he aimed the lamp at Anton’s mouth and touched the tooth with his finger. Pain ricocheted through Anton’s head. Van Lennep took a slip of gray paper, laid it on the tooth, and told him to close his jaws carefully and gently move them back and forth. He examined the paper once more, then took the drill off the hook.