The Assault (15 page)

“How can you be, for God’s sake,” Takes said crossly. “What did she look like?”

“I don’t know. It was pitch-dark.”

Takes thought for a while. “Would you recognize her if you saw a picture?”

“I never really saw her, Takes. But … I’d very much like to see her picture.”

“But what did she say? You must know
something
!”

Anton shrugged. “I wish I did. It was so long ago … She had been wounded.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

Tears came to Takes’s eyes. “It must have been her,” he said. “If she didn’t even mention her name … Ploeg took a final shot at her, just as we were about to turn the corner.”

When Anton saw Takes’s tears he began to weep himself.

“What was her name?” he asked.

“Truus. Truus Coster.” Now the people around the grave were watching them, discreetly but steadily. They must have been surprised to see two grown men so much affected by the death of a friend. Some may have wondered if they were showing off.

“There they are, the silly fools.” His mother-in-law’s voice. She entered the gate, Saskia and Sandra in her wake—two figures in black and a child in white against the blinding gravel. Sandra called “Papa!” dropped her doll, and ran toward Anton. He picked her up and held her in his arms. From Saskia’s wide-eyed look he could tell that she was worried about him, and he nodded to her reassuringly. But her mother, leaning on her shiny black cane with the silver handle, would not be fobbed off that easily.

“Good Lord, are they actually crying?” she asked angrily,
at which Sandra looked up at Anton. Mrs. De Graaff pretended to gag. “You two make me positively ill. Can’t you stop carrying on about that rotten War? Tell me, Gijs, do you enjoy torturing my son-in-law? Yes, of course, you would.” She gave a strange, mocking laugh and her wobbly cheeks shook. “This is impossible, the way you two stand there like two exposed necrophiliacs, and in the cemetery, of all places. Stop it at once. Come along, all of you.”

She turned about and walked away, pointing at the doll that lay on the gravel, not doubting for a minute that she would be obeyed. And so she was.

“Isn’t she amazing?” said Takes, also with a peculiar laugh. It was evident that he’d dealt with her before, and at Anton’s puzzled look he said, “Queen Wilhelmina.”

As they walked back to the square, the child told them that she had gone with her mother to the house of that dead man and had been given two glasses of orangeade. The café was emptying. At the entrance stood the car with the official insignia, its driver stationed by the back door. Anton was being closely observed, but no one bothered him. Sandra and her mother went into the café to fetch De Graaff. Saskia, the doll in her hands, said that Sandra absolutely must have something to eat. She had already suggested to Mrs. De Graaff that they have lunch together somewhere in the country.

“Just stand still a minute,” said Takes.

Anton felt Takes scribbling something on his back. Saskia was once more observing him with a worried look, and he closed his eyes for an instant to signal her that he was all right. Takes tore a sheet out of his diary, folded it, and put it in Anton’s breast pocket. In silence they shook hands. He nodded to Saskia and went into the café.

By the sidewalk Jaap was starting up his scooter. Just as he managed it, the minister and De Graaff came out. The
driver took off his cap and opened the door. But first the minister went to Jaap and shook his hand.

“See you soon, Jaap.”

“Yes,” said Jaap. “Until next time, I guess.”

Sandra, of course, wanted to ride in the car with Grandma and Grandpa, so as their car followed Anton’s along small country roads to a restaurant he had heard of, he could have talked undisturbed with Saskia about what had happened. Yet he sat behind the wheel in silence. Saskia, who had been brought up not to ask questions when people who had been through the War turned up, inquired only whether it had been some sort of reconciliation scene. “Something like that,” he answered, even though it wasn’t really true. He kept his eyes on the road. Feeling as if he had soaked too long in a hot bath, he tried to go over his conversation with Takes. But he was not quite ready for it yet, as if so far there were nothing to think about. He remembered the piece of paper that Takes had slipped into his pocket. Pulling it out, he unfolded it with the fingers of one hand and saw a scribbled address and telephone number.

“Are you going to look him up?” asked Saskia.

He put it back in his pocket and smoothed his hair to the side.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“But you’re not throwing it away.”

He smiled at her. “True, I’m not.”

About ten minutes later they reached the restaurant, a converted, steep-roofed farmhouse of a solidly provincial pretentiousness. Inside it was dark and empty. Meals were being served in the shaded orchard by waiters in tailcoats.

“I want french fries,” Sandra cried as she came running from the other car.

“French fries!” repeated Mrs. De Graaff and once more she pretended to gag. “I find that vulgar.” And to Saskia, “Can’t you teach the child to call them
pommes frites
?”

“Let the poor kid eat french fries,” said De Graaff, “if she doesn’t like
pommes frites
.”

“I want french fries.”

“You’ll get your french fries,” De Graaff said, covering her head with his hand as if it were a helmet. “With scrambled eggs. Or do you prefer
oeufs brouillés
?”

“No, scrambled eggs.”

“Come on, Dad,” said Saskia. “That’ll do.”

De Graaff seated himself at the head of the table and again clasped its edge with outstretched arms. When the waiter handed him the menu, he pushed it aside with the back of his hand.

“Fish for the man. French fries and scrambled eggs for the young lady, and some Chablis in an ice cooler frosted on the outside. When I look at you in your hot uniform, I’ll enjoy my wine all the more.” Waiting till his wife suppressed a giggle, he draped the napkin over his lap. “You know the anecdote about Dickens, don’t you? Every Christmas Eve he gave a party for his friends. The fire was lit, the candles burning, and as they sat around their roast goose, they would hear outside the window, in the snow, a lonely wanderer stamping his feet and waving his arms to keep warm. Every now and then the poor man would exclaim, ‘Ho hum hum, what bitter cold!’ He was of course hired for the purpose, to emphasize the contrast.”

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 …