The Assault (2 page)

His mother’s blond tresses were coiled over her ears like two ammonite shells. Now and then she stopped and took a sip of her cold tea substitute, made with melted snow from the backyard because the pipes were frozen. She had a cavity in her tooth that couldn’t be treated just then; to relieve the pain she had found a leftover clove in the kitchen to put on the sore spot, just as her grandmother used to do. She sat up straight, but her husband across the table was bent over, reading a book. His dark hair, turning gray, grew in a semicircle like a horseshoe around his bald pate. From time to time he blew into his hands, which were large and clumsy, though he was not a laborer but a clerk at the district court.

Anton wore his brother’s hand-me-downs, while Peter was dressed in an oversized black suit of his father’s. Peter was seventeen, and since he had begun to grow fast just when there was less and less to eat, his body looked as if it had been put together with sticks of kindling. He was doing his homework. He had not set foot in the street for two months, because he was old enough to be rounded up by the police and sent to a labor camp in Germany. He was still only in his second year of high school, for he had failed twice. Now he was being taught by his father, homework and all, so he wouldn’t fall behind even more.

The brothers didn’t look anything alike; neither did their parents. Some couples have a striking resemblance to one another (possibly this means that the wife looks like her husband’s mother, and the husband like his wife’s father, or something even more complicated, which no doubt it is). The Steenwijk couple, however, were two distinct entities. Of the sons, Peter had the blond-and-blue coloring of his
mother, Anton his father’s dark-brown complexion, even to the way their nut-brown skin grew darker around the eyes.

Anton wasn’t going to school just then either. He was in the sixth grade, but because of the coal shortage, the Christmas vacation had been extended until the end of the freezing weather.

He was hungry, but he knew that he wouldn’t get his sticky gray sandwich spread with sugar beet syrup until morning. That afternoon he had stood in line for an hour at the central kitchen in the nursery school. The pushcart, its pans guarded by a policeman with a rifle on his back, had not entered the street till after dark. Once Anton’s tickets had been punched, four ladles of watery soup were dished up into the pot he had brought along. On his way home across the lots he had tasted just a little of the warm, sour concoction. Luckily he would be going to bed soon; in his dreams there was always peace.

No one spoke. Outside too, all was quiet. The War had lasted forever and would last forever. No radio, no telephone, nothing. The flames hissed. Now and then they sputtered softly. Wrapped in a scarf, his feet stuck into a foot warmer that his mother had made out of an old shopping bag, Anton was reading an article in
Nature and Mechanics
. For his birthday he had been given a secondhand bound copy of the 1938 edition: “A Letter to Posterity.” A photograph showed a group of well-fed Americans in their shirt sleeves looking up at a large, shiny capsule shaped like a torpedo that hung vertically above their heads. The capsule was about to be lowered into a hole fifteen meters deep. In five thousand years it was to be dug up and opened by posterity, which would then learn what human civilization had been like at the time of the World’s Fair in New York. Inside the capsule, made of amazingly durable “cupalloy,” was a fire-resistant glass cylinder filled with hundreds of objects: a microfilm containing a survey of science, technology, and
the arts in ten million words and a thousand illustrations, newspapers, catalogs, famous novels, the Bible, of course, and the Our Father in three hundred languages. Also messages from famous men, movies of the terrible Japanese bombings of Canton in 1937, seeds, an electric plug, a slide rule, and all kinds of other things—even a lady’s hat that was in fashion during the autumn of 1938. All the important libraries and museums in the world had received a document specifying the location of the cement-covered capsule, so that it could be retrieved in the seventieth century. But why, Anton wondered, would they have to wait until precisely the year 6938? Wouldn’t it be of interest long before then?

“Papa, how long is five thousand years ago?”

“Precisely five thousand years,” said Steenwijk without looking up from his book.

“Yes, I know that. But was there already … I mean …”

“Say what you mean.”

“Well, did people, just like now, have …”

“Civilization?” asked his mother.

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you let the boy formulate it himself?” asked Steenwijk, looking at her over the top of his glasses. And then to Anton, “Civilization was still in its infancy, in Egypt and in Mesopotamia. Why do you ask?”

“Because here it says that more than …”

“Ready!” said Peter and looked up from his dictionaries and grammar. He pushed his homework over to his father and came to stand beside Anton.

“What are you reading?”

“Nothing,” said Anton, bending over the book, hiding it from his brother with his chest and crossed arms.

“Stop that, Tonny,” said his mother and pulled him upright.

“I’m never allowed to look at his!”

“Quiet!” Steenwijk called out and slapped the table with the flat of his hand.

That his name should be Anton, like the leader of the Dutch Nazi Party, was a nuisance of course, and the cause of much teasing. During the war, Fascists often called their sons Anton or Adolf, sometimes even Anton Adolf, and proudly sent out birth announcements decorated with Germanic runes, or with the emblem of the Dutch Nazi Party, a wolf trap. Later, whenever he met someone with either of those names, or with the nicknames Ton or Dolf, he’d try and find out if they had been born during the War. If so, it was a sure sign that their parents had been collaborators, and not just by half. The name Anton became acceptable again ten or fifteen years after the War, which goes to show how insignificant Anton Mussert actually was. For of course the name Adolf still won’t do. Not until people are called Adolf again will the Second World War be really behind us. But that means we’d have to have a third world war, which would mean the end of Adolfs forever.

As for the jingle that Anton had been singing in self-defense, it too has become meaningless. It was a nasal refrain sung by a radio comedian called Peter Pech, at a time when radios were still allowed. In Dutch, Pech means bad luck. But there are many more things about those times that have become meaningless today, especially to Anton himself.

“Why don’t you come and sit next to me?” said Steenwijk to Peter, taking up the homework. In a solemn voice he began reading the translation aloud:

“How beautiful this is,” said Steenjwijk, leaning back and taking off his glasses.

“Sure, great,” said Peter. “Specially after I’ve been working on it an hour and a half, that lousy sentence.”

“It’s worth a day’s work. Look at the way he evokes nature, but only obliquely, in comparison. Did you notice? What one remembers are not the fighting soldiers, but the image of nature—and that goes on existing. The battle has vanished, but the rivers are still there, one can still hear them, and then one becomes, oneself, that shepherd. It’s as if he wanted to say that all of existence is a metaphor for another reality, and that the whole point is to grasp that other reality.”

“Then that other reality must be the War,” said Peter.

Steenwijk pretended not to have heard.

“Very well translated, my boy. Except for
one
mistake. They are not rivers, plural, that come together, but two rivers.”

“Where does it say that?”

“Here:
symballeton
, that’s a duality, the coming together of two things, two. Now the two armies also make sense. This is a form you find only in Homer. Remember the word ‘symbol,’ which comes from
symballo
, ‘to bring together,’ ‘to meet.’ Do you know what a
symbolon
was?”

“No,” said Peter in a tone implying that he couldn’t care less.

“What was it, Papa?” asked Anton.

“It was a stone that they broke in two. Say I am a guest
in another city, and I ask my host whether he would be willing to receive you too. How can he be sure that you really are my son? We make a
symbolon
. He keeps one half, and at home I give you the other. So then when you get there, they fit together exactly.”

“That’s great,” said Anton. “I’m going to try that someday.”

Groaning, Peter turned away. “Why in God’s name should I learn all that?”

“Not in God’s name,” said Steenwijk, peering at him over his glasses. “In the name
of humanitas
. You’ll see how much pleasure it will give you for the rest of your life.”

Peter slammed his books shut, piled them up, and said in a strange tone of voice: “Who looks at man, laughs if he can.”

“Now what has that got to do with anything, Peter?” asked his mother. With her tongue she pushed the clove back in place.

“Nothing.”

“I’m afraid so,” said Steenwijk. “
Sunt pueri pueri pueri puerilia tractant.
”

The sweater had disappeared, and Mrs. Steenwijk stowed the ball of yarn in her sewing basket.

“Come, let’s play a game before we go to bed.”

“To bed already?” said Peter.

“We’ve got to save gas. We only have enough for a few days.”

Mrs. Steenwijk pulled the box out of the drawer of the dresser, pushed the lamp aside, and unfolded the game board.

“I want green,” said Anton.

Peter looked at him and tapped his forehead.

“Do you really think green will make you win?”

“Sure.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Steenwijk laid down his book. A moment later the only
sounds were those of the dice being shaken and the pawns being moved across the board. It was almost eight o’clock: curfew. Outside all was as still as it must be on the moon.

In the silence that was Holland then, six shots suddenly rang out. First, one echoed through the street, then two more in rapid succession, and a few seconds later, a fourth and a fifth. After a moment came a kind of scream, followed by a sixth shot. Anton, about to throw the dice, froze and looked at his mother, his mother at his father, his father at the sliding doors; but Peter picked up the cover of the carbon lamp and put it over the flame.

Suddenly, all was dark. Peter stood up, stumbled forward, opened the sliding doors, and peered through a crack in the curtains of the bay window. Freezing-cold air immediately streamed in from the parlor.

“They shot someone!” he said. “Someone’s lying there.” He hurried into the front hall.

“Peter!” cried his mother.

Anton heard her follow. He jumped up himself and ran to the bay window. Unerringly he dodged all the furniture there, which he hadn’t seen for months: the armchairs, the low, round table with the lace doily under the glass plate, the dresser with the ceramic platter and the portraits of his grandparents. The curtains, the windowsill, everything was icy cold. No one had breathed in this room for so long that there weren’t even any frost flowers on the windowpanes. It was a moonless night, but the frozen snow held the light of the stars. At first he thought that Peter had been talking nonsense, but now he too saw it through the left side of the bay window.

In the middle of the deserted street, in front of Mr. Korteweg’s
house, lay a bicycle with its upended front wheel still turning—a dramatic effect later much used in close-ups in every movie about the Resistance. Limping, Peter ran along the garden path into the street. The last few weeks he’d had a boil on his toe that would not heal, and his mother had cut a piece out of his shoe to ease the pain. He knelt beside a man lying motionless in the gutter not far from the bicycle. The man’s right hand was resting on the edge of the sidewalk, as if he had made himself comfortable. Anton saw the shimmer of black boots and the iron plates on the heels.

In a whisper that was surprisingly loud, his mother called Peter from the doorstep to come in at once. He stood up, looked to right and left along the quay and then back at the man, and limped home.

“It’s Ploeg!” Anton heard him say a minute later in the hall, a tone of triumph in his voice. “Dead as a doornail, if you ask me.”

Anton too knew Fake Ploeg, Chief Inspector of Police, the greatest murderer and traitor in Haarlem. He passed by regularly on his way between his office and his house in Heemstede. A big, square-shouldered man with a rough face, he was usually dressed in a hat, a brown sports jacket, and a shirt with a tie. But he wore black riding pants and high boots, and he radiated violence, hate, and fear. His son, also named Fake, was in Anton’s class. From the bay window Anton stared at the boots. He knew those, all right, because Fake had been brought to school a couple of times by his father on the back of that very bicycle. Each time they arrived at the school entrance, everyone fell silent. The father looked about with a mocking glance, but after he left, the son went in with downcast eyes and had to manage as best he could.

“Tonny!” His mother called. “Get away from that window!”

On the second day of school when nobody knew who he was yet, Fake had appeared in the pale-blue uniform and black-and-orange cap of the Nazi youth organization. That was in September, shortly after Mad Tuesday, when everyone thought the liberators were on their way and most National Socialists and collaborators had fled to the German border or beyond. Fake sat all alone at his desk in the classroom and pulled out his books. Mr. Bos, the math teacher, stood in the doorway, his arm against the doorjamb to keep out the other students; he had called back those who had already entered. He announced to Fake that there would be no teaching students in uniform, it hadn’t gotten that far and would never get that far, and he should go home and change. Fake said nothing, did not look back at the doorway but remained motionless. After a while the principal edged through the students and began to whisper excitedly to the teacher, who wouldn’t give in.