The Assault (9 page)

It was as if she wanted to try once more to involve him in the conversation, and Mr. Beumer’s nodding head seemed to be a sign of agreement, an assertive nodding that would not end till he died—how strange. He hadn’t been offered
any coffee, no doubt because the cup would be empty before it reached his mouth. She must be feeding him when there was no company.

“Nine years we were neighbors,” said Mrs. Beumer. “We went through the whole War together, and then suddenly they disappear without a word. I’ll never quite understand people. For days there was a pile of aquariums left standing on the doorstep, to be cleared out by the garbage collector.”

“Those were terrariums,” said Anton.

“Those glass things. Ach, he was a very unhappy man. He came by here a few times right after the death of his wife. Do you still remember Mrs. Korteweg?”

“Vaguely … not really.”

“That was in about forty-two or forty-three. How old were you then?”

“Ten.”

“There’s a nice young couple with two children living there now.”

Those terrariums. He remembered Korteweg as a big, surly man who would barely say hello to him. As soon as he came home, he would take off his jacket and roll up his shirt sleeves in a peculiar way—toward the inside, so that they looked like puffed sleeves gathered around his hairy arms. Afterwards he usually went upstairs to do something mysterious that aroused Anton’s curiosity.

Karin often sat sunning herself in a deck chair, her dark-blond hair piled on top of her head and her skirt raised way above the knees, so that sometimes he even caught a glimpse of her underpants. She had pale-blue, somewhat protruding eyes and nicely shaped calves, which reminded him of the cross-section of a plane’s wings as pictured in
Flyer’s World
. At night when he lay thinking about her in bed, he often had an erection. He had no idea what to do about it, however, and would end by falling asleep. Whenever he crept through the hole in the hedge into the Kortewegs’ garden, Karin was willing to interrupt her sunning to
play a board game with him. She was just a bit cross-eyed, which was very attractive.

One day, after she had sworn him to secrecy, she showed him her father’s hobby. Upstairs in the back room, ten or fifteen terrariums with lizards in them stood about on small tables. Weirdly silent, their bodies S-shaped, their small hands holding onto tree bark, the creatures stared at him out of a past as deep and immovable as themselves. Though some of them seemed to be grinning broadly, their eyes spoke a different language, of a gravity so immovable and undisturbed as to be almost unbearable.

Anton set his teacup on the mantelpiece next to the clock. From the way Mrs. Beumer talked about Korteweg, he concluded that she had no idea what had happened with Ploeg’s body. Apart from the Kortewegs themselves, he was probably the only one who knew. He had not even told his uncle and aunt, perhaps because the fewer the people who knew how absurd it all had been, the less absurd it would actually be.

“And next door?” he said.

“Mr. and Mrs. Aarts. They’re still living there, but they’ve never even said hello to us. You never went there either—remember? They keep to themselves. The other day, too. Mr. Groeneveld wanted to get something done about all those weeds next door—”

“Groeneveld?”

“The family that’s living at the Kortewegs’ now. You must have noticed all the stuff that’s growing where your house used to be.”

“Yes,” said Anton.

“All those seeds blow over to their place and into our garden; it’s impossible to keep up with the weeding. He thought the community should do something about it. He wrote a letter, and we signed it, but Mr. Aarts pretended he wasn’t home. Can you imagine? It wouldn’t have been any trouble.” She looked at him, offended.

Anton nodded. “It certainly is amazing, all those weeds.”

From his tone Mrs. Beumer apparently got the impression that she had not been very tactful. Suddenly insecure, she said, “I mean …”

“I understand, Mrs. Beumer. Life continues.”

“You’re such an understanding boy, Tonny,” she said, glad that he had taken the problem away from her. She stood up. “Another cup of coffee?”

“No thank you.”

She poured herself some. “You remind me of that poor Peter,” she said. “You don’t look like him at all, but he was just as understanding. Always friendly, always helpful …” She let the lump of sugar, which she had been holding in the claws of the silver tongs, fall back into the sugar bowl. “You know … I thought his fate was the worst, somehow. That sweet boy. Your father and mother too, of course, but Peter … He was even younger than you are now. I thought it was so awful when I heard about it. I saw him try to help that man—Ploeg, I mean. After all, it wasn’t certain that he was dead. Of course he was a scoundrel, I’m quite aware of that, but still he was human. A boy like Peter, with a heart of gold … it cost him his life.”

Anton lowered his head and nodded. With his hands he caressed the brown leather of the stool made from the camel saddle. It too would have gone up in flames if Peter had had his way … If everything had happened according to Peter’s plan, everything in this house would have been reduced to ashes. Mr. Beumer’s armchair, Mrs. Beumer’s kitchen, the crucifix, the macabre chairs around the dining table. In that case the troublesome weeds would have been growing on this spot, whereas his parents would still be living next door in Carefree. Mr. and Mrs. Beumer would probably have been too old to be shot, but what would have happened to Peter? He would have had to do his military service. In forty-seven during the police action in Indonesia, he would have been part of the Seventh of December Division. Maybe
he would have set villages on fire; maybe he would have died there. Unimaginable, all that. Peter had never been more than seventeen years old, three years younger than Anton now, and that too was hard to imagine. He, Anton, was forever the younger brother, even if he should live to be eighty. It all was inconceivable.

Mrs. Beumer made the sign of the cross. “It’s always the best ones,” she said softly, “that God calls to him first.”

Then Fake Ploeg was the best of us all, thought Anton.

“Yes,” he said.

“God’s ways are unfathomable. Why should he have been killed in front of your house? It might just as well have happened here, or at Mr. Korteweg’s. We’ve often wondered about that, my husband and I. He always used to say that God had spared us, but how should we take that? Because that would mean that he didn’t spare you, and why shouldn’t he have spared you?”

“And then your husband answered,” said Anton, feeling that perhaps he was going a bit too far, “that it was because we were heathens.”

In silence Mrs. Beumer plucked at the tablecloth with the sugar tongs. For the third time tears welled in her eyes.

“That darling Peter … that sweet father and mother of yours. I can still see him, your father, in his black coat, with his bowler hat and rolled-up umbrella. He always looked down at the ground. When he went out with your mother, he always walked one step ahead of her, the way the Indonesians do. They certainly never did anyone any harm.”

“Pickles are just like crocodiles,” Mr. Beumer said suddenly.

His wife and Anton looked at him, but he stared back at them innocently.

Mrs. Beumer once more lowered her eyes to her hands.

“What they must have experienced! Surely your uncle told you about it. When your mother flew at that fellow … Simply slaughtered, like beasts.”

It was as if an electric shock passed through Anton from his neck to his tailbone.

“Mrs. Beumer,” he stammered. “Could you please …”

“Of course, my boy, I understand. It was all so terrible.”

He must leave at once. He looked at his watch without noticing what time it was.

“Goodness, I have to go. I hope you don’t mind. I just came by for a second …”

“Of course, my boy.” She stood up and smoothed the front of her dress with both hands.

“Is this really the first time that you’ve been back to Haarlem, Tonny?”

“Really.”

“Then you should walk by the monument and have a look.”

“Monument?” he said, surprised.

“There,” said Mrs. Beumer and pointed to a corner of the room where on a small table stood a vase of tall, whitish plumes like ostrich’s feathers, or perhaps they were ostrich’s feathers. “On the place where it all happened.”

“I never heard about it.”

“How is it possible?” said Mrs. Beumer. “It was unveiled about three years ago by the burgomaster. Lots of people were invited. We had so hoped to see you then; my husband was still quite all right at the time. But I didn’t see your uncle either. Shall I come along?”

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather …”

“Of course,” she said and took his hand in both of hers. “You need to be alone with it. Goodbye, Tonny. It was so wonderful to see you again, and I’m sure it was for my husband too, even though he can’t show it now.”

Hand in hand they looked at Mr. Beumer. Exhausted, he had closed his eyes. She told Anton that his hands were just as large as his father’s; then they took leave of each other. He promised he would return soon, but he knew that he
would never see these people again. He would never come back to Haarlem.

As he stepped out of the front door, he was struck by the brightly lit open space to his left where his house used to be. Across from the wilderness he saw the new owners in the garden of the former Home at Last, a thin blond man with a little Indonesian wife, both about thirty-five. The man was playing soccer with a little boy as she looked on with a baby in her arms.

It was the lilac hour. The sun had just gone down, the quay and the meadows were bathed in a light that belonged neither to day nor night. It came out of another world where nothing ever moved or changed, and it lifted everything out of the ordinary. At the other end of the quay, where the road parted from the water, he saw a man-high hedge skirting the sidewalk that had not existed seven years ago. There was no traffic, and he crossed the road on a diagonal toward the monument.

The hedge, about a meter wide, was made of rhododendrons, whose leaves glistened in the magic light. It surrounded a low cement wall. On the square central base stood a grayish statue of a staring woman, hair hanging loose and arms reaching out. It was carved in a somber, symmetrically static, almost Egyptian style. Underneath was the date, with the words

To left and right on two bronze plaques at the sides were the names of the dead in four rows. The last row read:

Anton’s eyes were riveted on the names. There they were, recorded and preserved in a bronze alphabet, the letters not even made of bronze, but in a bronze negative: the men who had jumped handcuffed out of the truck, his mother the only woman, his father the only one born in the last century. This was all that remained of them now. Except for a few photographs still preserved by his uncle and aunt, nothing was left but these names, and himself. Their graves had never been found.

Perhaps the provincial war monuments committee had debated whether their names really belonged here. Perhaps some of the officials had pointed out that the Steenwijks were, after all, not among the hostages, and were not really killed by a firing squad but simply murdered like animals. At which the officials of the central committee may also have questioned whether they deserved to be on the monument. At which, as a concession, perhaps the officials from the provincial committee had managed to obtain the exclusion of Peter. He belonged, at least in a broader sense, to those who had died as armed resistors, for whom there were other monuments. Hostages, members of the Underground, Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals—they shouldn’t just be mixed up together, for God’s sake; the end result would be a total mess.

The towpath was still there; the water was no longer frozen. When he saw that Mrs. Beumer still stood watching him behind the bay window, he did not return the way he had come.

Neither did he return to Van Lennep’s party; he took the first train to Amsterdam. When he got home his aunt and uncle were still at the table, just finished with dinner. The
lamp was lit. A bit put out, his uncle asked why he hadn’t called to say he’d be late.

“I went to Haarlem,” said Anton.

His uncle and aunt exchanged glances. The table was set for him and he sat down at his place. He picked up a piece of lettuce with his fingers, and tilting his head backwards, dropped it into his mouth.

“Shall I fry you an egg?” asked his aunt.

He shook his head, swallowed the lettuce, and asked his uncle, “Why didn’t you ever tell me there’s a monument standing on our quay?”

Van Liempt set down his cup of coffee, wiped his mouth, and looked him straight in the eye.

“I told you that, Anton.”

“When did you?”

“Three years ago. It was unveiled in forty-nine. There was an invitation and I asked you if you wanted to go, but you didn’t.”

“I remember exactly what you said.” Mrs. Van Liempt filled a plate with salad and put it in front of him. “You said they could go to hell with their monument, for all you cared.”

“Don’t you remember?” asked Van Liempt. Anton shook his head and kept silent. He looked at the white tablecloth and slowly drew four lines in it with his fork. For the first time he felt a kind of fear, something sucking him in, a deep hole into which things fell without reaching the bottom, as when someone throws a stone into a well and never hears it land.

At a time when he still thought about such things, he had wondered what would happen if he drilled a tunnel right through the center of the earth and then jumped in, wearing a fireproof suit. After a certain amount of time that could be determined mathematically, he would arrive, feet first, at the antipode, though he would not quite reach the surface.
He would come momentarily to a standstill. Then he would disappear once more, upside-down, into the depths. After many years, also mathematically calculable, he would at last stop and remain floating, weightless, at the center of the earth, where he would be able to reflect upon the state of things in eternity.