The Assault (7 page)

In the hall too they laughed at him, the little boy with his helmet and oversized coat, but soon an officer who was about to climb the stairs put an end to their teasing. He wore shiny high boots and all kinds of braid and badges and ribbons, and around his neck hung the Iron Cross. Perhaps he was actually a general. He came to a stop, four younger officers remaining a few steps behind him, and asked what was going on. Anton could not understand what the driver, who had snapped to attention, answered, but clearly it was about the plane attack. As he listened, the general took a flat Egyptian cigarette out of a package and tapped it on the lid, where Anton read Stanbul. One of the young officers instantly offered a match. He tipped his head back briefly, blew the smoke straight up in the air, and dismissed the driver with a wave of the hand. Anton had to follow him up the stairs with the four young officers, who laughed and whispered among themselves. The general’s back, straight
as a ramrod, leaned forward in at least a twenty-degree angle, Anton guessed.

They came to a large room. With an irritated gesture he ordered Anton to remove those ridiculous garments. Anton looked like a ragamuffin from the ghetto of Bialystok, he said, at which the officers smiled. Anton did what he was told, and the general opened a door and snarled something into a side room. The younger officers remained in the background; one sat down elegantly in the window seat and lit a cigarette.

As Anton took a chair in front of the desk, a pretty, slender girl in a black dress entered. Her blond hair was pinned up on the sides but hung down in the back. She set a cup of coffee with milk in front of him; on the saucer lay a piece of milk chocolate.

“Here you are,” she said in Dutch. “I bet you like that.”

Chocolate! Only by hearsay did he know that it still existed. This was very like paradise. But he wasn’t given a chance to taste it, for the general wanted to hear what had happened from beginning to end. The girl functioned as interpreter. The first part of his story, about the assault and the fire, made Anton cry a little (but it was so long ago by now). The general listened unmoved, however, now carefully stroking his smoothly brushed hair with the palm of his hand, now caressing his smooth, shiny jaw with the back of his fingers. But as the story proceeded, he seemed unable to believe his ears. “
Na, so was
!” he exclaimed when he heard that Anton had been locked in a cell below a police station. “This is incredible!” Anton kept it a secret that someone else had been in there too. That he should have been brought to the Ortskommandantur afterwards the general said was unheard-of. “
Unerhört
!” Weren’t there any homes for children in Haarlem? The Ortskommandantur! That was really the limit. And the Ortskommandant had sent him to Amsterdam with a military convoy? When he knew perfectly well there were strafers everywhere? Had
they all gone crazy in Haarlem? It boggled the mind. “It has all been a series of appalling mistakes!” He raised his arms and let them fall flat-handed onto the desk. The officer in the window seat burst out laughing at his colorful indignation, and the general then said, “You may laugh all you like.” Had the gentlemen in Haarlem had the courtesy to give Anton any messages? His paper, for instance, just to name an example?

“Yes,” said Anton. But in a flash he saw the sergeant stuff the letter into his inside pocket, the very spot where the dreadful wound had opened half an hour later.

When he began to cry again, the general stood up, annoyed. Take him away and calm him down and call Haarlem at once. Or not, after all. Let them stew in their own juice. Call the uncle and have him pick up the boy.

The girl put a hand on his shoulder and led him out.

When his uncle appeared an hour later, he was still sobbing in a waiting room. The corners of his mouth were brown with chocolate, and on his lap a copy of
Signal
lay open at a dramatic drawing of air combat. His uncle threw it to the ground, knelt in front of him, and silently held him close. Then he stood up and said, “Come, Anton, let’s get out of here.” Anton looked up at him and saw his mother’s eyes.

“Did you hear what happened, Uncle Peter?”

“Yes.”

“I have a coat somewhere …”

“Let’s get out of here.” Holding onto his uncle’s hand, without a coat but wearing the two sweaters, he walked out into the winter day. He was sobbing but hardly knew why, as if his tears had washed away his memories. His other hand felt cold. He stuck it into his pocket, where he touched something he could not place. He looked: it was one of the dice.

All the rest is a postscript—the cloud of ash that rises into the stratosphere from the volcano, circles around the earth, and continues to rain down on all its continents for years.

In May, a few days after the Liberation, having received no news yet of Anton’s parents and Peter, Van Liempt left early in the morning for Haarlem to try and find out what had happened. Apparently they had been kept under arrest, though this was not customary during such reprisals. But even if they had been taken to a concentration camp in Vught or Amersfoort, they should have been freed by now. Only the survivors of the German camps had not yet returned home.

That afternoon Anton went into town with his aunt. Amsterdam looked like a dying man who suddenly flushes, opens his eyes, and miraculously comes back to life. Everywhere flags at windowsills in need of paint, everywhere music and dancing and crowds rejoicing in the streets where grass and thistles grew between the pavement. Pale, starved people laughingly crowded about fat Canadians wearing berets instead of caps, dressed not in gray, black, or green, but in beige or light-brown uniforms that did not encase them tightly like armor, but hung loose and easy, like peacetime clothes, showing hardly any difference between soldiers and officers. Jeeps and armored cars were being patted like holy objects. Whoever could speak English not only became part of the heavenly kingdom that had come down to earth, but perhaps even received a cigarette. Boys his own age sat triumphantly on top of car radiators marked with white stars surrounded by circles. Yet he himself did not take part. Not because he was worried about his parents or Peter, for he never thought about that, but more because none of this was really a part of him or ever would be. His
entire universe had become that other one which now fortunately had come to an end, and about which he never wanted to think again. Nevertheless it was part of him, so that all in all, he didn’t have much left.

At dinner time they returned home and he went to his room, where he was quite comfortable by now. His uncle and aunt were childless and treated him as if he were their own son—or really with more consideration and less friction than if he actually had been their real child. At times he wondered what it would be like to go back to live with his parents in Haarlem, and this thought confused him so much that he quickly put it aside. He liked being at his aunt and uncle’s house on the Apollolaan precisely because he did not feel like their son.

His uncle had the habit of always knocking before he entered. When Anton looked at his face, he saw at once the news he had brought. The steel clamp that had protected his uncle’s pants leg on the bicycle was still around his right ankle. He sat on the desk chair and told Anton to be prepared for very sad news. His father and mother had never gone to prison. They had been shot that night, along with the twenty-nine hostages. Nobody knew what had become of Peter, so there was still hope for him. His uncle had been to the police, but they didn’t know about anyone except the hostages. Then he had gone to the neighbors on the quay. No one was home at the Aartses’ in Bide-a-Wee. The Kortewegs were home but refused to receive him. Finally it was the Beumers who told him the news. Mr. Beumer had seen it. Van Liempt did not go into details: Anton did not ask for any. He sat on his bed with the wall on the left, and stared down at the flamelike shapes in the gray linoleum.

He had the feeling that he had known it all along. His uncle told him that the Beumers were very glad to hear he was still alive. Van Liempt pulled the clamp off his ankle and held it in his hand. It had the shape of a horseshoe. Of course, he said, Anton would continue to live here.

Not till June did they learn that Peter too had been shot on that same evening. By then it seemed like a message from prehistoric times, hard to imagine. For Anton that distance of five months between January and June, 1945, was incomparably longer than the distance between June of 1945 and the present day. It was on this distortion of time that he later blamed his inability to explain to his children what the War had been like. His family had escaped from his memory, had retreated to a forgotten region of which he had only brief and random glimpses—as when he looked out of the window in school, or out of the rear platform on the trolley car—a dark region of cold and hunger and shooting, blood, flames, shouts, prison cells, hermetically sealed somewhere deep inside him. At such moments it was if he remembered a dream, but not so much what the dream had been about, as simply the fact that it had been a nightmare. Yet at the core of that hermetic darkness now and then flashed a single source of blinding light: the fingertips of the girl caressing his face. Whether she had had anything to do with the assault, and what had happened to her, he did not know. He had no desire to know.

He finished the gymnasium as a fair to middling student and went on to medical school. By then a lot had been published about the Occupation, but he didn’t bother to read any of it, or any of the novels and stories about those days. Nor did he go to the State Institute for War Information, where he might have found out all that was known about the death of Fake Ploeg, and exactly how Peter had met his death. The family of which he had been a member had been exterminated once and for all; it was enough to be aware of this. All he knew was that the assault had never been brought to trial, for in that case he would have been questioned.

And the German man with the scar in the long coat had never been tracked down. (But perhaps he had already been removed by the Gestapo. Never mind; he is the least important
character in this drama.) He must have acted more or less on his own initiative. To set houses on fire in places where Nazis had been shot was not unusual, but to execute the inhabitants as well—that kind of terror had been practiced only in Poland and Russia. In those countries, however, Anton would have been killed too, even if he had still been in the cradle.

But things don’t vanish all that easily. In September, 1952, while he was in his second year of medical school, a fellow student invited him to a birthday party in Haarlem. He had not been back since he left seven years before with the German convoy. At first he didn’t plan to go, yet all day he kept thinking about it. Suddenly after lunch he grabbed a novel by a young Haarlem writer that would do for a present, though he had actually meant to read it himself, and took the trolley to the station. He felt like someone going to a whorehouse for the first time.

Beyond the sandy embankment, the train passed under a huge steel pipe that was vomiting a thick, steel-gray mud onto the former peat diggings on the other side of the street. The burned-out truck had been removed. He watched the traffic on the street, his chin resting in the palm of his hand. The trolley too was running again. As he passed Halfweg he saw the silhouette of Haarlem, still very much the way Ruysdael painted it—although in those days there were woods and fields where laundry lay bleaching, where Anton’s house later stood. But the sky was the same: massive Alps of clouds with beams of light leaning against them. What he saw was not just any city like so many others in the world. It was as different as he himself was from other people.

Anyone watching him sitting on the pale wooden bench in third class, peering out of the compartment window of a train confiscated from the Reichsbahn, would see a twenty-year-old with sleek, dark hair that kept falling over his forehead, which he would toss back with a brief movement of the head. For some reason this gesture was attractive, perhaps because it was repeated so often that it implied a certain amount of patience. He had dark eyebrows and a smooth, nut-colored complexion, somewhat darker around the eyes. He wore gray slacks, a heavy blue blazer, a club tie, and a shirt whose pointed collar tips turned upward. The smoke that he blew with pursed lips at the windowpane clung to the glass in a thin mist for a moment.

He took the trolley to his friend’s house. The friend too lived in Haarlem South, but since his family hadn’t moved there till after the war, they wouldn’t question Anton about the past. When the trolley swerved into the Hout, he caught sight for a minute of the former Ortskommandantur. The trench and barbed wire had disappeared; there was nothing left but a dilapidated abandoned hotel, its windows nailed shut. The garage (a restaurant before the War) was now in ruins. Probably his friend had no idea what kind of establishment this had once been.

“So you came after all,” he said as he opened the door.

“Sorry I’m late.”