The Assault

  Translation Copyright © 1985 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the Netherlands as De Aanslag by de Bezige Bij. Copyright © 1982 by Harry Mulisch, Amsterdam. This translation first published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1985.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Mulisch, Harry, 1927–

  The assault.

  Translation of: De aanslag.

  1. Netherlands—History—German occupation, 1940–1945—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PT5860.M85A6313 1985 839.3′1364 84-22623

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80186-9

  v3.1

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Harry Mulisch is Holland’s most important postwar writer. Born in 1927 in Haarlem to a Jewish mother whose family died in the concentration camps, and an Austrian father who was jailed after the war for collaborating with the Nazis, Mulisch feels a particularly charged connection with the Second World War, frequently the subject of his work. He has received Holland’s highest awards for his novels, plays, poems, and essays. The Assault has been translated and published to great critical acclaim throughout Europe and in the United States.

  “By then day had broken everywhere, but here it was still night—no, more than night.”

  Pliny the Younger

  Letters, IV, 16

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  First Episode: 1945

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Second Episode: 1952

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Third Episode: 1956

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Fourth Episode: 1966

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Last Episode: 1981

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  PROLOGUE

  Far, far back during the Second World War, a certain Anton Steenwijk lived with his parents and his brother on the outskirts of Haarlem. There four houses stood close together along a quay that bordered the water for about a hundred meters. After a gentle curve, the quay straightened out and became an ordinary street. Each house was surrounded by a garden and had a little balcony, bay windows, and a steep roof, giving it the air of a modest villa. The rooms on the top floor all had slanted walls. The houses were somewhat dilapidated and in need of paint, for their upkeep had already been neglected during the thirties. Harking back to lighter-hearted days, each bore a brave sign with its name: Hideaway, Carefree, Home at Last, Bide-a-Wee.

  Anton lived in the second house from the left, the one with the thatched roof. If it had not already been called Carefree when the family rented it shortly before the War, his father would have preferred to name it something like Eleuthera, written in Greek letters. Even before the catastrophe occurred, Anton used to think that Carefree meant a place where cares entered freely, not a place free from cares; just as someone could think priceless meant without cost, rather than beyond price.

  The Beumers, an ailing retired attorney and his wife, lived in Hideaway. Anton sometimes dropped in on them for a cup of tea and cake, in the days when there were still such things as tea and cake—that is to say, long before the beginning of this story, which is the story of an incident. Sometimes Mr. Beumer read him a chapter from The Three Musketeers.

  Mr. Korteweg was the neighbor in Home at Last, on the other side of Anton’s house. Formerly a second mate in the merchant marine, he was out of work now because of the War. After the death of his wife, his daughter Karin, a nurse, had moved back home. Anton sometimes dropped in here also, through an opening in the backyard hedge. Karin was always friendly, but her father paid no attention to him.

  There wasn’t much socializing on that quay. The most aloof neighbors of all were the Aartses, who had lived in Bide-a-Wee since the beginning of the War. It was said that he worked for an insurance company, though no one was really sure.

  Apparently these four houses had been intended as the beginning of a new development, but nothing more came of it. They were surrounded by fallow fields overgrown with weeds and bushes, and even some tall trees. It was on these undeveloped lots that Anton spent most of his time, playing with other children from a neighborhood further away. Occasionally in the late twilight when his mother forgot to call him in, a fragrant stillness would rise and fill him with expectations—of what, he didn’t know. Something to do with later, when he’d be grown up—things that would happen then. Something to do with the motionless earth, the leaves, two sparrows that suddenly twittered and scratched about. Life someday would be like those evenings when he had been forgotten, mysterious and endless.

  The cobblestones on the road in front of the house were laid in a herringbone pattern. The street did not have a sidewalk. It petered out into a grassy bank that sloped gently down to the towpath, where it was pleasant to lie on one’s back. The wide canal’s uneven, winding bank showed that it had been a river at one time. Across the water stood a few farmhands’ cottages and small farms; to the right, where the bank curved, was a windmill that never turned. Behind the farms, the meadows stretched out to the horizon. Still further lay Amsterdam. Before the War, his father had told him, one could see the glow of city lights reflected against the clouds. Anton had been there a few times, to the zoo and the Rijksmuseum, and to his uncle’s to spend the night.

  Lying on the grassy bank and staring into the distance, he sometimes had to pull in his legs because a man who seemed to step out of another century came walking along the trampled towpath. The man had one end of a pole several yards long attached to his waist, while the other end was fastened to the prow of a barge. Walking with heavy steps, he pushed against the pole and thus moved the boat through the water. Usually a woman wearing an apron, her hair in a knot, stood at the wheel, and a child played on deck.

  At other times the man remained on deck and walked forward along the side of the barge, dragging the pole behind him through the water. When he reached the bow, he planted the stick sideways in the bottom of the canal, grasped it firmly, and walked backwards, so that he pushed the boat forward beneath his feet. This specially pleased Anton: a man walking backwards to push something forward, while staying in the same place himself. There was something very strange about it, but it was his secret that he didn’t mention to anyone. Not till later, when he described it to his children, did he realize what primitive times he had witnessed. Only in movies about Africa and Asia could one still see such things.

  Several times a day sailing barges, heavily laden ships with dark-brown sails, appeared silently around the first bend and, driven solemnly onward by the invisible wind, disappeared around the next.

  The motorboats were different. Pitching, their prows would tear the water into a V shape that spread until it reached both sides of the canal. There the water would suddenly begin to lap up and down, even though the boat was already far away. Then the waves bounced back and formed an inverted V, which interfered with the original V, reached the opposite shore transformed, and bounced back again—until all across the water a complicated braiding of ripples developed which went on changing for several m
inutes, then finally smoothed out.

  Each time, Anton tried to figure out exactly how this happened, but each time the pattern became so complex that he could no longer follow it.

  1

  It was about half past seven in the evening. The coal stove had been purring softly, fed by a few bits of wood, and then gone out again. Anton was sitting at the table in the back room with his parents and Peter. A zinc cylinder about the size of a flowerpot was standing on a dish. A thin pipe stuck out on top, split in two like a Y, and from little holes at its tips emerged two pointed, blinding-white flames that were aimed at each other. This gadget cast a dull light through the room. Silhouetted against the deep shadows, the much-darned and -mended laundry was hung up to dry. The light also revealed mounds of unironed shirts, a box to keep the food warm, and two piles of books from his father’s study: the row on the dresser to be read, the stack of novels on the floor to light the emergency stove on which the cooking was done, whenever there was anything to cook. Newspapers had not appeared in months.

  Except for sleeping, all daily life took place here, in what used to be the dining room. The sliding doors were kept closed. Behind them, on the street side, the living room had not been used all winter. Even in daytime its curtains remained closed against the cold, so that the house looked uninhabited from the quay side.

  It was January, nineteen forty-five. Almost all of Europe had been liberated and was once more rejoicing, eating, drinking, making love, and beginning to forget the War. But every day Haarlem looked more like one of those spent gray clinkers that they used to take out of the stove, when there had still been coal to burn.

  A dark-blue sweater lay on the table in front of his mother. She had already unraveled half of it. In her left hand she held the growing ball of wool around which her right hand quickly wound the sweater’s yarn. Anton watched the yarn speeding back and forth while the sweater vanished from the world. The sleeves, spread out flat, looked as if they were holding on, resisting this transformation into a ball with all their might. His mother gave him a fleeting smile, and he lowered his eyes to his book.

  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!”

  For I was born with bad luck

  And I’ll die with bad luck …

  “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:

  Just as when rivers, swollen with rain and melting snow, streaming down from the mountains to a valley basin and welling up out of abundant springs, gather in their hollow beds—and far away in the mountain the shepherd hears their muffled roar—so sounded the shouting and the painful struggle of the soldiers engaged in a hand-to-hand battle.

  “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.