The Assault (14 page)

“Mr. Takes,” Anton interrupted him. “Am I right to assume …”

“Call me Gijs.”

“… that you are sitting here justifying yourself for my sake? I’m not criticizing you, after all.”

“I’m not justifying myself to you.”

“To whom, then?”

“I don’t know,” he answered impatiently. “Certainly not to myself, or to God, or some such nonsense. God doesn’t exist, and perhaps I don’t either.” With the same index finger that had pulled the trigger, he now flicked away the cigarette butt and looked out over the cemetery. “Do you know who exists? The dead. The friends who have died.”

As if to announce that someone was in command after all, a small cloud crept over the sun, making the flowers on the new grave look bleached, as if they were repenting, while the gray of the gravestones became dominant. But the next moment, everything was once more bathed in light. Anton wondered whether the sympathy he felt for the man sitting next to him had an ambiguous source. Through him, Anton was no longer simply a victim; now he was vicariously taking part in the violence of the assault. A victim? Of course he had been a victim, even though he was still alive. Yet at the same time, he felt as if it had all happened to someone else.

Takes had lit another cigarette.

“Good. So we knew there would be reprisals, right? That one of the houses would be set on fire, and that some of the hostages would be shot. Is that a reason for not doing it?”

When he kept silent, Anton looked up.

“Do you expect
me
to give you an answer?”

“Sure.”

“I can’t do that. I don’t know about that.”

“Then I’ll tell you: the answer is no. If you should tell me that your family would still be alive if we hadn’t liquidated Ploeg, you’d be right. That’s the truth, but no more. If someone were to say that your family would still be alive if your father had rented another house in another street, that too would be the truth. Then I might be sitting here with someone else … although it might have happened in that other street, because maybe Ploeg too might have lived somewhere else. Those are the kinds of truths that don’t do us any good. The only truth that’s useful is that everyone gets killed by whoever kills them, and by no one else. Ploeg by us, your family by the Germans. If you believe we shouldn’t have done it, then you also believe that, in the light of history, the human race shouldn’t have existed. Because then all the love and happiness and goodness in this world can’t outweigh the life of a single child. Yours, for instance. Is that what you believe?”

Anton, confused, looked at the ground. He didn’t quite understand it; he had never really thought about these things. But perhaps Takes never thought about anything else.

“So we did it. We knew …”

“You mean that it
does
outweigh it?” Anton asked suddenly.

Takes threw the cigarette at his feet and crushed it with his shoe so thoroughly that only a few shreds remained. These he covered with gravel. He did not answer the question.

“We knew that probably at least one of those houses would get it. The Fascist gentlemen were rather consistent as far as that goes. But we didn’t know which house. We had chosen that spot because it was the most secluded and the easiest to get away from. And we had to get away, for we had a few more scum like that on our list.”

Anton said slowly, “If your parents had lived in one of those houses, would you have shot him there?”

Takes stood up, took two steps in his sloppy pants, and turned to him. “No, dammit,” he said. “Of course not. What do you mean? Not if it might as well have been done somewhere else. But that same night, you know, my youngest brother happened to be among those hostages, and I knew this. And would you like to know what Mother thought of that? She agreed that I was right to do it. She’s still alive; you can ask her. Would you like her address?”

Anton tried to avoid looking at his left eye. “You keep at me as if it were my fault. I was twelve years old and reading a book when it happened, for goodness’ sake.”

Takes sat down again and lit another cigarette. “It’s just a stupid coincidence that it happened in front of your house.”

Anton eyed him sideways. “It didn’t happen in front of our house,” he said.

Slowly Takes turned to face him. “I beg your pardon?”

“It happened in front of a neighbor’s house. They put him in front of our house.”

Takes stretched his legs, crossed his feet, and put one hand in his pocket. Nodding, he surveyed the cemetery. “Better a good neighbor than a distant friend,” he said after a while. He was shaking with something, perhaps laughter. “What kind of people were they?”

“A widower and his daughter. A seaman.” Takes once more nodded his head.

“Well, I must say … I hadn’t thought of that possibility: one can always help fate along a bit.”

“And is that morally justifiable?” asked Anton, realizing instantly that it was a childish question.

“Justifiable …” repeated Takes. “You’ll have to ask the clergyman about that. I believe he’s still wandering around here somewhere. Some people simply take justice into their own hands. Go tell them they’re wrong to do it. Three seconds later it would have happened in front of your door.”

“I’m only asking,” said Anton, “because my brother then
tried to move him up one house further, or to put him back where he was … I’m not sure, because the police arrived next.”

“Jesus, now I’m beginning to understand!” cried Takes. “That’s why he was outside. But how did he get hold of that gun?”

Anton looked up at him in surprise. “How do you know about the gun?”

“Because I looked it up after the War, of course.”

“It was Ploeg’s gun.”

“What an
instructive
afternoon,” Takes said slowly. He puffed on his cigarette and blew the smoke out of the corners of his mouth. “Who was living in the next house further down?”

“Two old people.” The trembling hand reaching for him. Pickles are just like crocodiles, Mr. Beumer had said. Anton had repeated this once to Sandra, but she didn’t laugh; she just agreed.

“Yes,” said Takes. “Of course, if he’d put the body back, there would have been a fight.” And then right away, “My, my, my, what a clumsy mess. A bunch of fools, all of you, traipsing up and down with that body.”

“What else should we have done?”

“Taken it in, of course!” snarled Takes. “You should have dragged him into the house at once.”

Anton looked at him, perplexed. Of course! Columbus’s egg! Before he had time to say another word, Takes continued, “Just think: they’d heard shots somewhere in the neighborhood. What could they possibly have done about it if they hadn’t seen anything on the street? It wouldn’t occur to them that a man had been rubbed out, would it? They’d think that one of the militia had taken a shot at someone, maybe. Or were your neighbors collaborators who might have given you away?”

“No. But what would we have done with the body?”

“How should I know? Hidden it. Under the floorboards,
or buried in the garden. Or better yet, eaten it up right away—cooked it and shared it with the neighbors. After all, it was the winter of starvation. War criminals don’t count, as far as cannibalism is concerned.”

Now laughter shook Anton. His father the clerk baking a police inspector and eating him for dinner!
De gustibus non est disputandum
.

“Or were you under the impression that such things never happened? Forget it; everything has happened. The weirdest things you can think of have happened, and weirder yet.”

The people strolling back and forth to the grave eyed them in passing, two men on a stone bench under a tree (one younger than the other), still mourning their lost friend while the others were sitting in the bar, exchanging memories: do you remember the time that he … As they walked by, they fell thoughtfully silent.

“It’s easy for you to say,” said Anton. “You thought of nothing else but this sort of thing—and it seems to me you still do—whereas we were sitting at home, reading, around the dining-room table, and then suddenly we heard those shots.”

“I still would have thought of it at once.”

“Maybe, but then you were part of a gang. My father was a clerk who never took action; he just wrote down the actions of others. We wouldn’t have had time, anyway. Although …” he said, looking up suddenly into the leaves overhead, “we had a kind of quarrel …”

In spite of the brilliance of the day, a scene flashed through his mind. Some obscure activity taking place in total darkness, in a hall; an exclamation, as if Peter were stumbling over some branches, something about a key … It disappeared like the shred of a dream briefly remembered the next morning.

He was brought back to reality by Takes, who drew four lines in the gravel with his heel, making this design in the bare earth:

“Listen,” he said. “There were four houses, weren’t there?”

“Yes.”

“And you lived in the second house from the left.”

“You’ve got a good memory.”

“I go back there now and then. Heroes always return to the scene, it’s a well-known fact. Although … quite probably I’m the only one, at least as far as that quay of yours is concerned. Now, as far as I knew he was lying here, in front of your house. At which neighbor’s was he shot—this one, or this one?”

“This one,” said Anton, and pointed with his shoe to the second house from the right.

Takes nodded and looked at the stripes.

“Excuse me, but in that case there’s a mystery. Why did the seaman deposit him at your doorstep and not here, at his other neighbor’s?”

Anton too looked at the stripes. “No idea. I’ve never wondered about it.”

“There must be a reason. Did he dislike you?”

“Not as far as I know. I used to go there sometimes. I should think they would have been more inclined to dislike the people on the other side, who ignored everybody else on the street.”

“And you never tried to find out?” asked Takes, surprised. “Don’t you care at all?”

“Care, care … I told you, I don’t feel any need to go over all that again. What happened happened, and that’s all there is to it. It can’t be changed now, even if I understood it. It was wartime, one big disaster, my family was murdered, and I stayed alive. I was adopted by an aunt and uncle, and everything turned out all right for me. You were right to kill the bastard, really; I have no complaints about that. You just
convince his son! With me that’s not necessary, but why in God’s name do you want to make it all logical? That’s impossible, and who cares? It’s history, ancient history. How many times has the same sort of thing happened since? It may be happening right now somewhere, while we’re sitting here talking. Could you swear, your hand in the fire, that at this very moment someone’s house somewhere isn’t being set on fire by a flamethrower? In Vietnam, for instance? What are you talking about? When you took me outside just now, I thought maybe you were concerned about my peace of mind, but that doesn’t seem to be the case—at least, not altogether. You’re more upset than I am. It seems to me that you can’t leave the War alone, but time goes on. Or do you regret what you did?”

He had spoken fast but calmly, yet with the vague feeling that he must be careful, that he must control himself so as not to hit the other.

“I’d do it again tomorrow, if necessary,” said Takes without hesitation. “And maybe I will do it again tomorrow. I’ve rubbed out a whole rat’s nest of that scum, and the fact still gives me great satisfaction. But the incident on that quay of yours … there was more to it. Something happened there.” He clasped the edge of the bench and shifted his position. “Let’s just say that I wish we hadn’t gone through with it.”

“Because my parents were killed as well?”

“No,” said Takes roughly. “I’m sorry to say that’s not the reason. That couldn’t have been foreseen or expected. It probably happened because they caught your brother with a gun, or because of something else, or for no reason; I don’t know.”

“It probably happened,” said Anton without looking up, “because my mother flew at the leader of those Germans.”

Takes was silent and stared straight ahead. At last he turned to Anton and said, “I’m really not torturing you just to satisfy my nostalgia for the War, in case you’re wondering.
I know people like that, but I’m not one of them. Those people spend all their holidays in Berlin and would just love to hang a portrait of Hitler over their beds. No, the problem is that something else happened over there in Haarlem.” A light went on in his eyes. Anton saw his Adam’s apple bob up and down a couple of times. “Your parents and your brother and those hostages were not the only ones who lost their lives. The fact is that I wasn’t alone when I shot Ploeg; there were two of us. Someone was with me—someone who … Let’s just say she was my girl friend. But never mind, leave it at that.”

Anton stared at him, and suddenly all the pent-up emotion washed over him. Putting his face in his hands, he turned away and began to sob. She was dying. For him she died at this very moment, as if twenty-one years were nothing. Yet at the same time she was resurrected together with all she had meant to him, hidden there in the darkness. If he had ever thought about her in these twenty-one years, he would have wondered whether she were still alive. But just now, he realized, he had been looking for her, in the church and later in the café—and in fact it was the reason why he had come to this funeral where he had no need to be.

He felt Takes’s hand on his shoulder. “What’s this about?” He dropped his hands. His eyes were dry.

“How did she die?”

“They shot her in the dunes, three weeks before Liberation. She’s buried there in the memorial cemetery. But why should you care so much?”

“Because I know her,” Anton said softly. “Because I talked to her. I spent that night with her in the cell.”

Takes looked at him in disbelief. “How do you know it was her? What’s her name? Surely she didn’t tell you who she was.”

“No, but I’m quite sure.”

“Did she tell you that she was involved in the assault?”

Anton shook his head. “No, not even that. But I’m quite certain.”