The Assault (10 page)

Anton continued in medical school as a fair-to-middling student. A new stage in his life began in 1953, when, having passed his first exams, he left the house on the Apollolaan and rented an apartment in the center of town. In this small, dark place above a fish store, on a little street between the Prinsengracht and the Keizergracht, where only five or six meters separated him from his neighbors across the way, the Haarlem of 1945 sank even more into the background. The process of putting Haarlem behind him resembled the changes a man goes through when he divorces. He takes a girl friend to forget his wife, but just doing that prolongs the connection with the wife. Possibly things will work out only with the next girl friend—although the third one has the best chance. Boundaries have to be continuously sealed off, but it’s a hopeless job, for everything touches everything else in this world. A beginning never disappears, not even with the ending.

Every few months or so he suffered from a daylong bout of migraine that forced him to lie down in the dark, though it hardly ever made him vomit. He read a lot, but never about the War, and once he published a few poems about nature in a student magazine, under the name of “Anton Peter.” He played the piano (with a preference for Schumann) and enjoyed attending concerts. He had avoided going to the theater ever since, for incomprehensible reasons, he had felt indisposed during a splendid performance of Chekhov’s
Cherry Orchard
directed by Charof. During a scene where a man sat at a table with bowed head while a woman outside on a terrace shouted at someone, Anton was overcome by a sense of something dreadful, something elusive but so overwhelming that he had to leave at once. Outside in the street, with the crowds, trolleys, and cars, his symptoms disappeared quickly and completely; a few minutes
later he wondered if there had been anything to them.

Every week he went to the Apollolaan on his motor scooter with a bag full of dirty laundry. Usually he stayed there for dinner, and as time went by he began to notice the extreme orderliness of this well-to-do middle-class life, the way everything was in its place, nothing ever broken, unpainted, improvised, or second-rate. Food was served in dishes, wine in decanters; jackets were never removed or ties loosened. Whenever his aunt or uncle happened to come to his apartment, he could tell by their faces that it gave them the opposite impression. Then his uncle would say that he too had been a student once.

In 1956 he passed his final exams and began to serve his internship in several hospitals. He had already decided to specialize in anesthesia. He knew that he could earn twice, even three times, as much if he became an internist or cardiologist with a private practice. But then he would have less time to himself and would probably develop an ulcer or heart disease, whereas an anesthesiologist could close the hospital doors behind him after an operation was finished. So could surgeons, of course, but surgery was only for butchers.

And there were not only negative reasons for his choice of anesthesiology. He was fascinated by the delicate equilibrium that must be maintained whenever the butchers planted their knives in someone—this balancing on the edge between life and death, and his responsibility for the poor human being, helpless in unconsciousness. He had, besides, the more or less mystical notion that the narcotics did not make the patient insensitive to pain so much as unable to express that pain, and that although drugs erased the memory of pain, the patient was nevertheless changed by it. When patients woke up, it always seemed evident that they had been suffering. But when he spoke of this theory once to his colleagues, who were talking about yachting, the way they looked at him suggested that he had better
keep his thoughts to himself if he wanted to remain in the club.

And then there was politics. The talk went on forever, but he hardly bothered to follow it, especially on a national level. Though he read the headlines, he forgot them at once. When an English colleague questioned him about the Dutch system of government, Anton knew very little, no more than about the German or French. As to the newspaper, he spent most of the time trying to solve the daily crossword puzzle; he couldn’t resist them and had become an expert. Whenever he found an unsolved puzzle in a paper in some waiting room, it became his ambition to decipher the clue that had stymied the previous person. After he had filled all the blanks, he surveyed the completed square with satisfaction. The fact that most letters had a double function in both a horizontal and a vertical word, and that these words were paired in a mysterious way, pleased him no end. It had something to do with poetry.

But during that same year, 1956, the time came for him to vote in the elections. At his weekly dinner in the Apollolaan his uncle asked him which party he would endorse. He said it would probably be the liberals. When his uncle asked why, Anton had no better reason than that his friends did. This was the worst possible reason, according to Van Liempt, who managed to change Anton’s mind in a few minutes. Present-day liberalism, he said, combined a fundamental pessimism about social solidarity with the idea that the individual must remain as free as possible. But a person is either a pessimist who favors enforced order, or an optimist who favors freedom. It is impossible to be both at once. One cannot combine the pessimism of socialism with the optimism of anarchy, and yet this is what liberalism does. Therefore it is very simple, he said; you have only to decide whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. Which is it? Anton looked up at him briefly, lowered his eyes again, and said, “Pessimist.”

And so he voted for the Social Democrats like his uncle, who was one of those important party leaders from whom burgomasters and ministers are chosen. Only later did Anton realize that almost nobody voted rationally, but simply out of self-interest, or because he felt an affinity for the members of a certain party, or because the leading candidate inspired confidence. It was physiobiological, in a way. In a subsequent election he voted somewhat more conservatively, for a newly founded party which claimed that the difference between right and left was obsolete. Still, national politics meant little to him: about as much as paper airplanes would mean to the survivor of a plane crash.

Later that year he became more aware of Communism, and at the same time of international politics. For the second half of 1956 provided a veritable orgy for newspaper readers: unrest in Poland, scandals within the royal family, the French and English attack on Egypt, the revolution in Hungary and the intervention of the Soviet Union, the landing of Fidel Castro in Cuba. A few weeks before this bravura performance in the Caribbean, the rumble of the Russian tanks which had rolled into Budapest still echoed within Holland, and nowhere more audibly than around the corner from Anton’s apartment. There, in a large eighteenth-century building called Felix Meritis, were the headquarters of the Communist Party. Unruly mobs roamed the city, destroying everything that had anything to do with the Communists, from their bookstore to the windows of their homes. The crowds were aided by the press, which published addresses under the pretense of objective reporting. A paper would announce that the home of this or that Party leader on such-and-such a street had been only slightly damaged—and the next day the damage would be more
extensive. After completing all this work, mobs of thousands gathered in front of the Felix Meritis building on the Keizergracht and besieged it continuously for forty-eight hours.

By then the building had become a fortress. Downstairs the windows were boarded up. None of the second-floor areas were still undamaged, and men in helmets were visible on the roof. Women too could be seen at times, and the crowds jeered at them with hostility. People who wanted to go in or out of the building made sure they had police protection. Policemen with rubber-tipped clubs and drawn guns tried to hold the crowd to the opposite side of the canal, but the police too were in danger from stones flying through the air. The men on the roof were throwing back the stones that had landed inside the building. Now and then they aimed fire hoses at small groups that came too close. A gray police boat patrolled the canal to fish out people who had fallen in the water.

Anton was totally uninterested in all this. He would never have taken part; he even avoided conversations about it. Somehow he couldn’t help thinking that though it was all pretty terrible, it was only child’s play, really. Besides, he got the impression that in a way, many people were delighted with what had happened in Budapest because it confirmed their opinions about Communism.

The worst problem for him was the constant racket. Since his own narrow street provided access to the back of the Felix Meritis building, on the Prinsengracht, demonstrators also gathered there and even threw Molotov cocktails, as the fishman told him. In desperation one evening he went to the movies, to see
The Seventh Seal
, and when he came home he put on loud music, Mahler’s Second Symphony. But the noise didn’t let up all night, and he decided to spend the following night in the Apollolaan, where everything was peaceful. When the time came, however, he couldn’t believe that the uproar would go on for another night, so he went home as usual after work.

It was dusk, and candles were burning at many windows. The flag hung at half-mast from countless houses. He parked his scooter a few blocks away so it wouldn’t be damaged by the mob, and walked to his little street.

The tumult had grown, if anything. He had trouble getting to his house through the crowd, and just as he reached the doorway, all hell broke loose. Police cars from the Keizergracht suddenly appeared and drove into the mob with blasting sirens and blazing lights, stepping on the gas, slamming on the brakes, then revving up again. Policemen on horseback with drawn swords now invaded the street, and motorcycles with sidecars rode up and down the sidewalks while helmeted policemen leaned out of them and hit people with the handles of long black poles. Panic broke out, but to his surprise Anton noticed that he, in contrast, became calmer. He had felt upset at first, yet now, with shouting and screaming everywhere, people being trampled, people bleeding and trying to reach safety, he was pervaded by a strange indifference. His doorway, which also led to the entrance of the fish store, was only about two meters square. Now a dozen people stood in it, crowding him against his front door. He already had his key in his hand but he realized that even if he could turn around, he mustn’t open the door. If he did the staircase and his rooms would be invaded within minutes, and when the people left all his possessions would have disappeared.

In front of him stood a big fellow whose strong back was crushing Anton against the door with all its might, but of course it only seemed that way, for the man was being crushed himself. His hand gripped a big gray rock, which he had to hold up over his shoulder for lack of room. To protect his nose and in order not to suffocate, Anton turned his head to the side, but from the corner of his eye he saw the man’s dirty nails and the calluses on his fingers.

Suddenly everyone ran out of the doorway. The man in front turned around briefly—perhaps to see who he had felt
at his back all this time—stepped out into the street, turned around again, and stood still.

“Hello, Ton,” he said.

Anton looked into the wide, coarse face. Suddenly he knew.

“Hello, Fake.”

For a few seconds they eyed each other, Fake with the stone in his hand, Anton with the key. There was still movement on the street, but the center of the violence had shifted to the Prinsengracht.

“Come on up,” said Anton.

Fake hesitated. He looked to right and left, as if reluctant to leave the excitement, but understood that he could not very well avoid it.

“Just for a minute, then.”

When Anton heard the heavy footsteps following him on the stairs, he could hardly believe it was happening. He had never thought about Fake Ploeg again, yet Fake too had gone on existing and was still present in this world. They didn’t shake hands. What were they supposed to talk about? Why in hell had he invited him in? He switched on the light and drew the curtains.

“You want a drink?”

To his horror, Fake put the stone on the grand piano Anton had been given for his birthday. He didn’t slam it down, but Anton could hear that it had scratched the lacquer.

“A beer, if you’ve got it.”

For himself, Anton poured a glass of wine out of the bottle left from last night. Ill at ease, Fake tried to get comfortable in the canvas chair that looked like a huge butterfly. Anton sat on the black couch with the worn-out springs.

“Cheers,” he said, and wondered what to say next.

Fake briefly lifted his glass, then emptied half of it. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he looked at the bookcase and the shelf with the sextants.

“Student, I suppose?”

Anton nodded. Fake nodded back. He shifted, straightened, and tried to get more comfortable.

“No good?”

“What a lousy chair,” said Fake.