The Assault (16 page)

Alone, he lay on the sofa in his underwear, the doors of the balcony wide open to the summer evening. The room was lit only by the late twilight and the street lamps. Only now did the deep sunburn on his face and the front of his legs begin to show. It was unusual for his slightly olive complexion to burn at all, but he was as red as if he’d had a terrible beating. When Sandra had shaken him awake at the beach, he’d been asleep for more than an hour. In sleep the blood circulates more slowly, whereas in the sun it is supposed to move faster to counteract the heat—and so sleepers get sunburned. He had awakened with a splitting headache, but in the back of the car, in the soothing shade, it had almost disappeared. No doubt the wine at lunch had something to do with it.

The continuous murmur of traffic sounded in the distance, but from the street itself came only the voices of some people sitting on a balcony or downstairs on the stoop. A child was playing the recorder a few houses away. Because Sandra couldn’t get to sleep, Saskia put her down on their double bed after dinner and lay down next to her. Then Saskia too immediately fell asleep.

Stretched on the sofa, Anton stared straight ahead. He was thinking of Takes, of how everything comes to light sooner or later, and is dealt with and then laid aside. How long ago was it that he visited the Beumers? Some fifteen years, more than the age he had been in 1945. No doubt Mr. Beumer now lay in his coffin, and Mrs. Beumer as well. He hadn’t been to Haarlem since. And Fake, God knows where he was; it didn’t matter. Perhaps he was running the business in Den Helder by now. But with Takes it was different: they had wept together. It was the first time that he had cried over what had happened, yet it wasn’t because of
his parents, or Peter, but because a girl had died. He had never seen Truus … Truus what? He raised himself and tried to think of her last name, but couldn’t. Shot in the dunes; blood on the sand.

He closed his eyes to recall the darkness of the cell, her fingers softly caressing his face. He covered his face with his hands and peered wide-eyed through the bars of his fingers. He breathed deeply and brushed his hair back with both hands. He shouldn’t be doing this, it was dangerous. There was something wrong with him. He should go to bed. But he crossed his arms and went on staring straight ahead.

Takes had a picture of her. Should Anton go to him and identify her? She had been Takes’s girl friend, his great love, apparently, and obviously he had the right to a last message from her. Anton couldn’t remember anything she had said, only that she had talked a lot and touched his face. All he would accomplish by going would be to eradicate that great anonymous presence and reduce her to a particular face. Was that what he wanted? Wouldn’t it diminish what she still meant to him? It didn’t matter whether her face would be beautiful or ugly, attractive or unattractive or whatever, but if he saw her picture it would acquire one definite aspect and no other. Now he had no image of her at all, only an abstract awareness, such as Catholic children have of their guardian angel.

And then what happened was this: Moving the way a weightless trapeze artist rises from the safety net into which he has fallen, he rose from his prone position onto his knees. There he confronted the photograph he had been staring at all this time without realizing it. It stood, framed, together with his collection of sextants on the mahogany cabinet decorated with brass. In the deep twilight it was difficult to make the picture out, but he knew it well: Saskia in a black dress down to her ankles, her belly big with Sandra, who would be born a few days later. It was not true that he had never imagined what the woman whose name seemed to be
Truus looked like. From the very beginning he had imagined her looking like this and not otherwise—like Saskia. This was what he had recognized in Saskia at first sight that afternoon at the Stone of Scone. She was the embodiment of an image he must have been carrying about in his head, without knowing it, since he was twelve. Her appearance revealed it to him—not as something remembered, but as immediate love, immediate certainty that she must remain with him and carry his child.

Worried, he began to pace the room. What kind of thoughts were these? Perhaps it was true, perhaps not, but if it should be true, wasn’t he doing something peculiar to Saskia? She was, after all, someone in her own right. What was her connection with a girl from the Resistance who had been shot long ago? If she was not allowed to be herself but represented someone else, then wasn’t he in the process of breaking up his marriage? She would never have a chance, for she couldn’t be someone else. In a sense, he was involved in murdering her.

On the other hand, if this were the truth, he wouldn’t be married to Saskia now if he hadn’t met that girl under the police headquarters. Then the two women had become indistinguishable, that is to say, his imagination was still busy combining them. For probably Saskia didn’t look like Truus, since he had no idea what Truus looked like. Besides, Takes would have reacted differently to Saskia, and he had paid hardly any attention to her. Saskia only looked like the image which Truus had aroused in his, Anton’s, imagination. But where did this image come from? Perhaps it originated with a much more ancient source; perhaps it came—in the manner of Freud—from the image he had of his mother while he was still in the cradle.

He stood on the balcony and looked out unseeing. Whenever he was told in the hospital that a new colleague with such-and-such a name would be arriving the following day, he would begin immediately to visualize that person. The
imagined image never agreed with the person’s actual appearance, was forgotten the moment of meeting, but where did these notions come from? The same was true with famous authors and artists: when he saw their photographs for the first time, he was often terribly surprised. Without being aware of it, he’d had a preconceived notion of their appearance. Sometimes he lost all interest in the person’s work after seeing the photograph. This was the case with Joyce, for instance, and not because he was ugly. Sartre was much uglier, but his portrait had increased Anton’s interest. Apparently the preconceived notion was sometimes more accurate than the reality.

In other words, there was nothing wrong with Saskia’s looking like his idea of Truus. Truus had, under those circumstances, aroused an image in his mind to which Saskia seemed to respond, and that was fine, for it was not Truus’s image, but his own, and where it came from was unimportant. Besides, maybe the whole thing really worked in reverse. Saskia had touched his heart at first glance, and perhaps this was why he had decided that Truus must have looked the same way. But in that case he was being unfair to Truus, and thus it was his duty to know not only her name, but also what she actually looked like: she, Truus Coster.

It was cooling off. Police sirens sounded in the distance. Something was happening again in the city, as things had been happening for almost a year now. It was ten-thirty, and he decided to call Takes at once. He went upstairs to the bedroom. Here too the curtain was still open. The blankets were thrown back, and Sandra lay sleeping under the sheet with her mouth wide open. Saskia, half undressed, lay on her stomach, one arm around the child. He stood watching them for a moment in the warm silence filled with sleep. He had the feeling of having just skirted something fatal, something that now seemed to him a dangerous confusion, dizzying cerebral cobwebs caused by sunstroke. He must forget them and go to sleep.

Instead, he went to look for his jacket, which Saskia had thrown over a chair. With the vague sense that he was still courting danger, he used two fingers to fish the slip of paper out of his breast pocket.

“Anytime,” Takes said. “Why not come right now?” When Anton excused himself because he had a slight headache, Takes answered, “Who doesn’t?” The next day Anton would be on duty till four, so they made a date for four-thirty.

The heat continued. He had trouble concentrating on his work. When it was over he was glad to get outside and walk to the Nieuwe Zijds Voorburgwal. The sunburn on his face and chest was still painful. While Saskia had been thoroughly oiling him once more that morning, he had wondered whether to tell her about his appointment, but decided against it. On the Spui stood a detachment of blue police squad cars. Tension hung about the city, but it had become routine. The mayor and the minister would take care of it.

Takes lived behind the Royal Palace on the Dam, in a shabby, narrow house that he could reach only by slipping between delivery trucks. The house dated from more prosperous times, and on its gable was a stone relief representing a kind of mythical beast with a fish in its mouth. The inscription underneath said
THE OTTER
. On the front stoop it took a while before Anton found the right name among all the different offices and private apartments. Takes’s was penciled on a scrap of paper thumbtacked under a bell, along with instructions to ring three times.

When Takes opened the door, Anton saw at once that he’d been drinking. His eyes were watery and his face blotchier than the day before. He was unshaven: a grayish film covered his jaws and neck down to his open shirt. Anton
followed him through a narrow hall with peeling plaster, parked bicycles, boxes, pails, and a half-deflated rubber boat. Behind closed doors, the clatter of typewriters and a radio. An ancient, winding oak staircase came down at an angle into the hall. Sitting on one of the steps an old man wearing a pajama top over his pants was dismantling a bike pedal.

“Did you read the papers?” asked Takes without looking back.

“Not yet.”

In the back of the house through a door at the end of the hall, Takes entered a small room that served as bedroom, study, and kitchen. It contained an unmade bed, as well as something like a desk covered with letters, bank statements, newspapers, and magazines. Jumbled among the papers were a coffee cup, an overflowing ashtray, an open jam pot, and even a shoe. Anton could not bear this confusion of unassorted objects; at home he was unhappy if Saskia left a comb or glove lying on his desk for a minute. The room was littered with pots, pans, unwashed dishes, even suitcases, as if Takes were on the verge of leaving. Above the sink an open window overlooked an untidy yard, where more music was playing. Takes took up a newspaper that was spread out on the bed and folded it over and over until nothing was visible except one front-page article.

“This will interest you too,” he said, and Anton saw a headline:

He knew this much, that Lages had been the head of the Gestapo in the Netherlands, and as such was responsible for thousands of executions and the deportation of one hundred thousand Jews. After the War he was condemned to death, but the sentence had been commuted to imprisonment
a few years later. There had been mass demonstrations, in which Anton had not taken part.

“What do you think of that?” asked Takes. “Because he’s
sick
, our dear little Willy. You’ll see how soon he recovers back in Germany. And yet he made a lot of other people
really
sick—but that’s not so important. All those humane do-gooders with their respect for human life at our expense. The war criminal is sick, oh dear, the poor lamb. Free the Fascist quickly, for we’re no Fascists, our hands are clean. Does this make his victims ill? What a hateful lot, those anti-Fascists—they’re no better themselves! That’s what they’ll say next, you’ll see. And who’ll be the first to approve of this release? All those who kept their hands clean during the War—Catholics in the lead, of course. It’s not for nothing that he converted to Catholicism the minute he went to prison. But if he gets to heaven, then I prefer hell …” Takes looked at Anton and took the paper out of his hands. “You’re just resigned to it, aren’t you? I’ll assume that you’re blushing with shame. Your parents and your brother also came under the jurisdiction of that gentleman.”

“Not the wreck he is now.”

“The wreck!” Takes took his cigarette out of his mouth, and leaving it open, slowly exhaled the smoke. “Just hand him to me and I’ll slit his throat. With a pocketknife, if necessary. The wreck … As if it were a question of his physique!” He threw the newspaper on the desk, kicked an empty bottle under the bed, and looked up with a forced laugh. “But you, your profession is to rescue ailing mankind, right?”

“How did you know?” Anton asked, surprised.

“Because I called up your scoundrel of a father-in-law. A man should know who he’s dealing with, don’t you agree?”

Anton nodded, keeping an eye on him, and a smile crept over his face. “The War is still on; right, Takes?”

“Sure,” said Takes and did not evade his eyes. “Sure.”

Anton felt ill at ease under the scrutiny of that left eye.
Were they playing a game, waiting to see who would be the first to blink? He lowered his eyes. “And you?” he asked, looking about. “I’ve been foolish enough not to call anyone. How do you earn a living?”

“In me you see a distinguished mathematician.”

Anton burst out laughing. “You’ve got a pretty messy office for a mathematician.”

“That mess came with the War. Since then I survive thanks to a pension from the Foundation Nineteen Forty—Forty-five. It was founded by Mr. A. Hitler, who rescued me from mathematics. Without him I’d still be facing the classroom every day.” He took a bottle of whisky from the windowsill and poured some for Anton. “Let’s drink to compassion for the pitiless,” he said and raised his glass. “Cheers.”

Anton knew the lukewarm whisky would not agree with him, but refusing it was out of the question. Takes was more cynical than yesterday, perhaps because of the newspaper article or the drinking, or maybe he had simply decided to get into this mood. He didn’t offer a seat, and for some reason this pleased Anton. Why should people always have to sit? After all, Clemenceau had even had himself
buried
on his feet. They stood facing each other in the small room, glasses in hand, as at a cocktail party.