Odd Jobs (114 page)

T
HE
E
UROPEANS
, by Luigi Barzini. 267 pp. Simon and Schuster, 1983.

The author of
The Italians
and
O America
here takes on the Continent; this book of wide-ranging observations and dazzling aperçus is given its focus by the theme of European unification, which Mr. Barzini believes to be highly desirable and far from imminent. Drawing upon fifty years’ experience as an Italian journalist and world traveller, he presents in successive chapters vivid historical and psychological portraits of the major members of NATO and the EEC—England, Germany, France, Italy, and Benelux—with a fond and shrewd sketch of the United States added for good measure. He has little to say of Scandinavia, Iberia, or Eastern Europe, to the reader’s loss, for he is a master geopolitical essayist. By his account, the immense British prestige of the nineteenth century changed the color of male dress to black, which percolated down from the continental aristocracy through all classes in homage to England’s supremacy in the age of coal and iron and empire; this success, Mr. Barzini suggests, derived from the convenient circumstance that all Englishmen had a mere “seven ideas” in their interchangeable heads. The resilience of the constantly teetering Italian state is linked to an underlying longing for
buongoverno;
in recent decades the economically disastrous creation, at American urging, of a center-left coalition, was stopped short of collapse into Communism by prodigies of private enterprise: “Naples exported five million pairs of gloves a year, in spite of the fact that there was not one glove factory in the city.” Smaller nations, like the Dutch, tend to favor a United States of Europe, but have grown unrealistically pacific under the American nuclear umbrella. The key to European unity, as Mr. Barzini sees it, is “the mutable Germans,” who have shown their neighbors so bewilderingly many faces in the century since Bismarck; the central obstacle is the French insistence on living by the light of a vanished
gloire
. Whatever the author’s conclusions, getting there, by a route mixed of personal reminiscence, historical learning, and debonair generalization, is a delight made all the more palatable by his elegant adopted English.

T
HE
A
SSAULT
, by Harry Mulisch, translated from the Dutch by Claire Nicolas White. 185 pp. Pantheon, 1985.

T
HE
S
EA
-C
ROSSED
F
ISHERMAN
, by Yashar Kemal, translated from the Turkish by Thilda Kemal. 288 pp. Braziller, 1985.

The chance of birth gives a writer his language; if the language is a small one, like Dutch, which is spoken by scarcely more than twenty million people and sits squeezed between its big brothers English and German, the writer must be more than merely good to receive international attention. Though the Dutch are a busily literary people, the modern writer in their language whom Americans know best is a fourteen-year-old diarist, Anne Frank. Harry Mulisch was born in 1927 and is, we are assured flatly (and not without bias) by his jacket-flap biographer, “Holland’s most important postwar writer”; but he has waited until now to be published in the United States. His debut, a short novel called
The Assault
, is a brilliant one. A kind of detective story emanating from a violent incident in World War II, the novel combines the fascination of its swift, skillfully unfolded plot with that of a study in the psychology of repressed memory. Its hero, Anton Steenwijk, is twelve years old when, in January of 1945 (Holland, we may need to be reminded, continued to be occupied by the Germans until their final surrender, in May), a collaborationist Dutch policeman is shot on the street where Anton lives in Haarlem with his parents and his older brother, Peter. The body falls in front of their neighbors’ house, but these neighbors, mindful of the German tactics of reprisal, quickly move the body so it lies in front of the Steenwijks’, and before it can be moved again the Steenwijks are taken prisoner and their home is burned down. The house was one of four in an isolated row on a quay, surrounded by vacant lots; the qualities and secrets of all four sets of inhabitants figure in the sudden events of that nightmarish night, which Anton, soon safely moved to Amsterdam in the care of his uncle, tries to forget. He attends
Gymnasium
and medical school and becomes—fittingly enough—an anesthesiologist; he marries twice, has two children, and acquires no fewer than four homes. But the postwar decades fitfully bring him reminders
of “the assault” and cast new light on that night’s confusion; not until a day in November of 1981, when all Amsterdam is demonstrating against nuclear arms, does Anton, now gray-haired and about to be a grandfather, at last come, through a chance encounter, to understand exactly what happened on the quay in 1945, when he was twelve.

Mr. Mulisch is identified, in reference works, as an “absurdist”; but there is nothing absurd about this economically and thoughtfully worked-out novel except, perhaps, the wartime reality that serves as its premise. The surreal abruptness with which fateful events develop is stunningly rendered. The family are sitting quietly in their cold, blacked-out house at seven-thirty in the evening: Anton is reading about the time capsule buried at the New York World’s Fair; Peter is translating from the Greek; the father, a court clerk and an amateur classicist, is helping him; the mother is unravelling a sweater and soothing a toothache with a clove. Shortly before the eight o’clock curfew, they sit down to a board game, and while they are rolling dice six shots ring out. The tame little details of this last moment of domestic peace—the dice, the clove—reverberate throughout Anton’s life, awakening the trauma. About ten years later, for instance, he becomes sick, “overcome by a sense of something dreadful,” while attending a performance of Chekhov, “during a scene where a man sat at a table with bowed head while a woman outside on a terrace shouted at someone.” He has repressed the memory, but a parallel configuration on a terrace was impressed upon him in the jagged, out-of-control sequence of images that followed the shots:

A quality seems evoked, of disconnection and eternity, that is present in all experience but noticeable only in crisis. As the night tumbles on, and the Germans arrive to exact their cruel and random vengeance, and the child is thrust here and there in the dishevelled machine of wartime administration, a remarkably rounded impression of occupied Holland accumulates. The German rule is harsh, but the soldiers are only human,
and themselves rather desperate, as defeat closes in; the Ortskommandant of Haarlem, turning fatherly, confides to Anton, “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.” For an hour, Anton is placed in an utterly dark cell with a wounded female prisoner who strokes his face, leaving traces of blood from a wound she has suffered. Next morning, a kindly sergeant called Schulz feeds the boy and dresses him in cut-down Army clothes and is fatally strafed while escorting him to Amsterdam. On this trip the texture of war dawns upon the child, torn from the stringent haven of his freezing, darkened house:

Of course, we have been through this war many times, in newspapers and newsreels and novels and movies whose clichés have preëmpted the fading reality. The author is put to the trouble of proclaiming cliché the truth: “The German was about forty years old and actually had that lean, hardened face with the horizontal scar beneath the left cheekbone—a type no longer used except by directors of comedies or grade B movies. Today only babyish Himmler faces are still artistically acceptable; but then it was not an artistic matter, then he really did look like a fanatical Nazi, and it wasn’t funny.” From
Hogan’s Heroes
to
Gravity’s Rainbow
, art has transformed World War II into something we too readily understand. As the Napoleonic convulsions gave the nineteenth century its epic, World War II, in its European theatre, has supplied our central saga, our one eruption and defeat of unambiguous evil, and its vast emergency measures the extremes of human possibility for us. Its black-and-white imagery—blackout, bursts of light, rubble and gritty faces, curved helmets and sweeping searchlights—and its costumes and accents haunt films down to
Star Wars
and its spin-offs; even the galaxies must be cleansed of the swastika, over and over.

Also, we have seen, in postwar movies beyond counting (Italian, German,
Russian, Polish), the claustrophobic intensity and insane destructiveness of this conflict yield to the weirdly tranquillized terrain of peace, which the contrast somehow reveals to be another kind of absurdity—self-seeking, petty, quickly jaded, and self-despising. War’s chasms of heroism and pain make other human behavior seem shallow, even phantasmal. “All the rest,” the author of
The Assault
tells us, “is a postscript—the cloud of ash that rises from the volcano, circles around the earth, and continues to rain down on all its continents for years.” Anton moves through the anti-nuclear march “as if each step raised clouds of ashes.” He looks upon children raised in freedom and plenty, upon young men and women never asked to kill and be killed in the service of Dutch resistance, with something like incredulousness. He cannot take the politics of postwar Europe and its protests seriously: “Everyone knew that 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.” His personal focus is upon anesthesia and order; he is a crossword-puzzle addict, and lets others accidentally fill in for him the puzzle of the four houses on the quay, where one neighbor’s reclusiveness and another’s pet reptiles turn out to be crucial clues to the shape imposed, in one white-hot night of forging, upon his own life. With the cool passion of a scientist, Mr. Mulisch scrapes rust from the Forties’ steel hell and gives violence its anatomy. May more of his work come into English.

On the other side of Europe, Turkish is spoken by forty-five million people; Yashar Kemal, another jacket flap assures us, “is internationally acclaimed as Turkey’s leading contemporary writer.” Opposite the title-page of
The Sea-Crossed Fisherman
, ten other titles in English are listed, of which
Memed, My Hawk
may strike a memory chord for bookish Americans. Mr. Kemal’s present offering comes garlanded with picturesque praise: A. B. Mojtabai calls him “a storyteller in the old style, and a very grand and spacious style that is”; the London
Times
circumspectly asserts that “the richness of writing and breadth of canvas have caused Kemal to be compared with Hardy and Tolstoy”; and John Berger claims, “He writes fearlessly, like a hero.” Like a hero, however, who, in the manner of an old-fashioned British explorer, has only the foggiest idea of where he’s going and takes few provisions save his bravery. One wants to like
The Star-Crossed Fisherman
, for its exotic milieu and for its
flavor of headlong, open-air narrative. It begins with a gust of wind: “The roughhewn door was kicked wide open, letting in a dusty blast from the mad south wind that was churning up the sea that day, and Zeynel appeared on the threshold, a gun in his hand. He hesitated, but only for a moment. Then, with slow deliberate aim, he pointed the gun at Ihsan and fired shot after shot. The men in the coffee-house froze in their seats.”

A tall fisherman called Selim stands up, takes the gun from Zeynel, and repeatedly slaps him. We are off to the roaring start of nearly three hundred pages tracing the intertwined destinies of Zeynel, who is to become a criminal legendary throughout Istanbul, and Selim, who is “sea-crossed” by his love for, first, a blond nurse from his youth and, second, a friendly dolphin from his mature days fishing in the Sea of Marmara. The author seems to have a good idea for the framing and elevation of his material: the myth-making capacity of gossip—teahouse gossip as refracted upwards into newspaper accounts, which magnify the frightened and harried Zeynel into a national menace, a tabloid bogeyman. The Greek chorus seems reborn in the novel’s pages of communal rumor, as it spirals and spins its own reality. And some of the novel’s descriptive excursions, whether of the shifting colors seen from a boat at sea or of the congested modern Golden Horn, are worthy of a canvas by Delacroix or a diatribe by Céline, complete with Céline’s mannerism of triple periods: