The Assault (19 page)

It was the kind of despair he had so far experienced only when a patient died under his hands. Suddenly a human being would change into offal. Anton would straighten up, the others in the operating room would draw themselves up in silence, the machines would be turned off. With one hand he would remove the mask from his mouth, with the other he’d pull off his cap and, dragging his feet, his head to one side, he’d walk out of the operating room.

One hot day in Italy, he suddenly found himself in the midst of a crisis which proved to be not just the climax but also the end of those months filled with anxiety. Because the village butcher never had anything but veal, Liesbeth had gone shopping in Sienna with Peter. Anton usually did the marketing in town himself, if only to hang around the
café terraces on Il Campo, the incomparable age-old, shell-shaped square which showed that no progress had been made in architecture, either. But that morning he had felt unwell and decided to stay at home. He had been reading a little, and suddenly he looked up, disturbed by the silence. His eyes fell on the white table lighter with dice markings, a present from Liesbeth’s parents. Restless, he began to wander through the whitewashed, irregularly shaped rooms and went up and down the spiral staircase with the uneven steps. Now and then he tried to sit down, but this made it so much worse that he stood up at once.

What was getting worse? He didn’t hurt anywhere, he had no fever, everything was all right; yet at the same time everything was all wrong. He wanted Liesbeth and Peter. They must come back
at once;
something was happening to him that he didn’t understand. Frantically he walked to the edge of the terrace, but the country road stretched empty into the distance until it disappeared around the mountain with the collapsed mill. He went inside, then out the front door. He climbed the steep steps to the road, which passed at the level of the roof. Perhaps they had returned and gone for a walk; but the car was not in its place. The square, treeless and much too big for the village, looked as if it had been flooded with boiling water. Crossing it were an old man and an old woman, two charred figures in the blinding sun. Meanwhile a few old men sat in the black shadow of the church.

And now, as he stood there, a gray mountain rose up, a tidal wave that broke all about him. He ran downstairs two steps at a time, slammed the door behind him, and looked all around, trembling. The motionless whitewashed walls screamed their whiteness into his face; the curve of the staircase, the rough-hewn beams, everything had become so menacing that something wrenched loose in his head. The rock broke through the plaster and through his brain. Clasping his chest with both hands, he went out on the terrace.
The cypresses were flames of black fire everywhere on the hills. His teeth were chattering like those of a small child coming out of the sea, but there was nothing he could do. Something was wrong with the world, not with him. The crickets chirped. Gasping, he entered the house and stepped on the red tiles. Above the fireplace hung his old mirror, the one with the putti. The black eyes of the dice! He knew that he should control himself and breathe regularly, so it wouldn’t get the better of him. He sat down at the table on a straight-backed chair, one of those slightly undersized Italian chairs with a rush seat, buried his nose and mouth in his hands, closed his eyes, and tried to calm down.

Liesbeth found him this way, motionless but trembling, like a statue during an earthquake. When she saw the look in his eyes she didn’t ask him if she should call a doctor, just called one. Anton looked at Peter and tried to laugh. Then his eyes fell on the full shopping bag Liesbeth had left on the table. On top lay a package. Its paper wrap came undone, unfolded like a flower, and revealed a bloody hunk of meat.

The doctor came at once and assured him that this sort of thing was to be expected, that one should not be surprised by such symptoms. He gave Anton an injection, after which he slept for fifteen hours. The next morning he woke up refreshed. The doctor also left a prescription for Valium to be taken if the symptoms should return, but Anton tore it up at once. He could have written his own prescription, but he knew that if he once began taking tranquilizers, he would never stop.

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.