The Assault (20 page)

Sandra laid her blue rose on the gravestone. Side by side they stood looking down at it. In the silence, the flag flapping, the rope hitting the mast, were more mournful than any music. Deep down there, beneath the sand, it was much darker than it had been in the cell, thought Anton. He looked around at the mathematical precision of the plots, all that was left of the chaotic misery of the War. He thought, I should look Takes up, if he’s still alive, and tell him that she loved him.

But when he went to the Nieuwe Zijds Voorburgwal on the afternoon of the next day, he found that The Otter had been torn down—apparently some time ago, for the advertising placards were already layers deep on the green-painted scaffolding. Since he couldn’t find Takes in the telephone book either, he left it at that.

Not until two years later, on May 5, 1980, did he see Takes by chance on television, on a commemorative program that was almost over when he turned it on. An old man with a white beard and an impressive, ravaged face that Anton recognized only because the name was flashed on for an instant:

“Cut out the nonsense,” Takes was saying to a man sitting next to him on a sofa. “The whole thing was one big mess. I really don’t want to hear any more about it.”

On the other hand, Anton often saw a small white panel truck driving through the city, with red lettering that said:

FAKE PLOEG SANITATION INC
.

And just as the sea finally casts ashore the debris that ships throw overboard—and beachcombers furtively retrieve it before daybreak—so the memory of that night during the War in nineteen forty-five plagued him one last time in his life.

On a Saturday in the second half of November, nineteen eighty-one, he woke up with such an unbearable toothache that something had to be done at once. At nine o’clock he called the dentist who had been treating him for over twenty years, but the office didn’t answer. After some hesitation, he called the home number. The dentist told him to take an aspirin, because he wasn’t about to do any work that day, he was going to the demonstration.

“A demonstration? Against what?”

“Against nuclear arms.”

“But I can’t stand the pain.”

“How did that happen, all of a sudden?”

“I’ve been feeling it coming on for a few days.”

“Why didn’t you call sooner?”

“I was at a conference in Munich.”

“Don’t your fellow anesthesiologists know how to relieve pain? And by the way, shouldn’t you be at that demonstration?”

“Come on! You know I don’t go in for that sort of thing.”

“Oh, really? But you do have toothaches, don’t you! Look here, friend, I’m demonstrating today for the first time in my life. I’m willing to help you out, but only on condition that you join us.”

“Anything, as long as you help me.”

It was settled that Anton should be at the office at eleven-thirty. Even though the assistant wouldn’t be around because she was also demonstrating, the dentist would see what he could do.

And so nothing came of the weekend in Gelderland which he had been looking forward to after Germany. He told Liesbeth to go alone with Peter, but she wouldn’t even consider it. As if she were a nurse, she handed him, on a little platter, a tiny, dry, brown twig about a centimeter long, its diminutive chalice with a rounded end lying in the middle of a white coffee filter.

“What’s that?”

“A clove. Put it inside your tooth; that’s what they used to do in the Indies.”

It seemed to her a bit excessive, the way he embraced her almost in tears.

“Come on, Ton, don’t overdo it.”

“Unfortunately I don’t have a hole in my tooth—I don’t know what’s the matter with it. But I’ll eat this.”

It was no help at all, however; chewing was out of the question. Watched over by Peter, he paced through the house, his mouth wide with pain, like those yawning faces on the signs that hang outside apothecaries in Amsterdam. He was thinking about the peace demonstration he would have to join. He had read about it and knew it would be the largest in Europe, but it wouldn’t have occurred to him either to take part or not to take part. He had simply noted it as if it were a weather report. It was merely a symptom: the year two thousand was approaching and fear of the millennium was in the air, just as it had been a thousand years ago. Atom bombs were produced as deterrents not to be used, but to safeguard the peace. If such paradoxical weapons were abandoned, then the chances of conventional warfare would increase and eventually lead to the use of atom bombs anyway.

Yet at the same time, he too had felt ill at ease when the old man in America had announced that limited nuclear warfare was not out of the question, and that it would take place in Europe, where it would be total. He had been somewhat reassured when the old man in Russia had disagreed, replying that it was indeed out of the question because he would then make sure that America was totally destroyed. But in either case, the implication was that atomic armaments should not be abandoned.

He drank the camomile tea which Liesbeth brewed for him, and sitting on the sofa, tried to pass the time by doing one of those pun-and-anagram crossword puzzles.
Can’t the Sun God give you a more precise definition for this heap of ruins
? Six letters. It was as if being unable to bite made him incapable of thinking. He stared at the sentence. Though it looked as if it ought to be easy, he found no solution.

Since the dentist’s office was not far from his house, at ten-thirty he decided to go on foot. The weather was cool and overcast. With pain drilling in his jaw he walked through increasingly crowded streets. A helicopter circled in the distance. Further ahead all car and trolley traffic had stopped; apparently the center of the city had been closed off. Even the main arteries were full of people walking in the same direction, many of them with placards held high. There were foreigners, too. He saw a group of warrior types wearing turbans, wide pants, and sword belts, with only the pistols and scimitars missing; displaced Kurds, perhaps, who marched, laughing and singing, with the supple tread of nomads, behind a banner covered with Arabic characters. Whether this proclaimed the jihad, the Holy War, nobody would ever know. Soon the streets were more crowded than they had been since May, 1945. People were streaming from all directions toward the Museumplein. The prospect of having to join this mob later made his tooth ache all the more. God knows what could happen if panic broke out, if agitators should get involved! Anything was possible nowadays
in Amsterdam. Luckily, except for the helicopter in the sky, no police were in sight.

At the dentist’s office he rang, but no one answered. Shivering with cold or whatever, he stood waiting in the doorway. The Sun God was Ra, of course; that was obvious, Racket? Raphael? Rattles? Those would be to evoke the God. Ra-pens. Those would be the writing tools of the Sun God, with which he would record his definitions … In the distance an endless stream of people was crossing the side street on which he stood. When the dentist finally arrived, imping on his clubfoot, his wife on his arm, he burst out aughing.

“You look very fit.”

“Go ahead and laugh, Gerrit Jan,” said Anton. “You’re a ine healer, you are, blackmailing your patients.”

“It’s all in the service of humanity, all in the spirit of Hipp?crates.”

He had dressed for the occasion in feudal hunting costume: a green loden jacket and underneath, green knee breeches and long dark-green socks. This made his huge shoe more visible than ever. As they entered the operating room, the telephone rang.

“I don’t believe it,” said Van Lennep. “Not another one!”

It was Liesbeth. Peter had said he wanted to go to the demonstration. In that case he’d better ride over on his bicycle and wait for him outside, Anton said.

Van Lennep had thrown his coat over the assistant’s desk. “Let’s have a look, friend. Which one is it?”

While his wife went once more to the bathroom—because later it would be impossible—he aimed the lamp at Anton’s mouth and touched the tooth with his finger. Pain ricocheted through Anton’s head. Van Lennep took a slip of gray paper, laid it on the tooth, and told him to close his jaws carefully and gently move them back and forth. He examined the paper once more, then took the drill off the hook.

“Professionally speaking,” said Anton, “I would appreciate an injection.”

“Are you out of your mind? It’s nothing. Open your mouth.”

Anton crossed his fingers and kept his eyes on the other’s gray hair brushed to one side. Two or three seconds of pain and noise followed, after which Van Lennep said, “Okay. Close your mouth.”

The miracle had happened. The pain receded behind the horizon and disappeared as if it had never existed.

“How is it possible?”

Van Lennep shrugged and hung the drill back. “A slight pressure. It had come to the surface. Often happens with age. Just rinse, please; then we’ll go.”

“Finished already?” asked his wife in surprise when they entered the room.

“Now I suppose he thinks he can forget his promise,” said Van Lennep with a sly smile. “But that’s where he’s wrong.”

“Do you realize, Gerrit Jan,” said Anton as they stood outside waiting for Peter, “that this is the second time you’ve expected a political commitment from me? The difference is that this time you’re making it too.”

“When was the first time, then?”

“It was at that party in Haarlem, when you thought I ought to volunteer to fight in Korea, in the battle of occidental Christianity against the Communist barbarians.”

Van Lennep stood staring at him in silence while his wife suppressed her laughter. A few streets further down, a voice was shouting through a loudspeaker.

“Do you know what the trouble with you is, Steenwijk? Your memory’s much too good. As far as that goes, you’re the one who’s the blackmailer. I certainly haven’t become a Communist, if that’s what you’re implying. How could I? You’ll never make a dime out of a quarter. But those atomic weapons, they’ve become the greatest menace to humanity. They should be seen as a sort of assault from outer space;
it’s not who controls them, it’s the other way around. Each new wave of armament is always presented as a reaction to the opposition, which in turn reacts to that. And so they keep putting the responsibility on each other, and the things keep piling up. And one day they’ll use them for sure. It’s statistically unavoidable, as inevitable as Adam and Eve’s taking a bite of that apple from the tree of knowledge. We’re going to have to get rid of those apples.”

Anton nodded. He was dumbfounded by this argument. But then, dentists were crazy, a well-known fact in medical circles. But perhaps there was something to it after all. Peter arrived and locked up his bicycle. Seeing him here, with the drone of the helicopter overhead and the roar of the crowd in the distance, a strange, gentle feeling suddenly came over Anton, connecting him somehow to what was happening in the city.

They made hardly any progress along the last stretch of road to the rallying point. Between the Concertgebouw and the Rijksmuseum, under a huge black balloon shaped like a falling missile, stood tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, with placards and banners up to ten meters wide. More people were streaming in from the streets on all sides. Through loudspeakers hanging from the trees and lampposts rumbled a speech that was apparently being given on the rostrum in the distance, but Anton was indifferent to what was being said. What moved him was the presence of all the people here, and he and his son being part of them.

Soon he lost sight of Van Lennep, but it didn’t occur to him to give up and go home. A minute later this became impossible in any case. The two of them stood like two stalks in the midst of the human wheat field, with the scythe of the reaper over their heads. Anton’s anxiety and panic had totally disappeared. Besides Peter, the people around him—against him, rather—were an elderly lady from the provinces wearing a transparent plastic rain hood over her
hairdo, a burly fellow in a brown leather jacket with a fur collar who had a wide mustache and sideburns, and a young woman carrying a sleeping baby in a sling on her breast. That’s who was there, and no one else. Among the slogans against nuclear arms, he was struck by a small placard that read

He pointed it out to Peter and explained who Job was.

The loudspeakers announced that in the last half hour two thousand buses had entered Amsterdam. This meant another hundred thousand people. Cheers, applause. The voice announced that thousands more were streaming in from the station, brought by special trains. All the streets leading to the Museumplein were impassable. Yet, thought Anton, the fact that the human voice could be amplified so much was itself related to the existence of atom bombs. Neither the one nor the other would have been possible forty years ago. Perhaps what was happening in the world was even more terrifying and insoluble than anyone imagined.

He couldn’t tell how long he stood there. Peter had spotted a classmate and disappeared some time ago. For an instant Anton remembered the bunkers that had once stood here, the Wehrmachtheim and the German administrative headquarters in the villas all around. Now the square held the American Consulate, the Russian Trade Legation, and the Société Generale. Politicians were being hailed, others jeered at, and finally, step by step, the crowd began to move. Apparently not everyone would fit along the official route, for several different demonstrations began to enter the city from various directions. A curious euphoria pervaded Anton, a state not agitated or anxious, but dreamlike, connecting him with something far, far back that had existed before the War. He was no longer alone, but a part of all these people. In spite of the commotion, a great stillness hung over them. Their presence seemed to have changed everything,
not only inside him but also in this backdrop: houses whose windows were hung here and there with white sheets, as in a city that surrenders; gray clouds flying overhead; the black missile balloon blown back and forth, sometimes being snapped by the wind, then straightening itself once more: