The Assault Quotes

Not till later, when he described it to his children, did he realize what primitive times he had witnessed.

“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.

This moment—his father cut out in black against the snow, his mother outside on the terrace under the starlight—became eternal, detached itself from all that had come before and all that would follow, It became part of him and began its journey through the rest of his life, until finally it would explode like a soap bubble, after which it might as well never have happened.

Not till much later when he was in college did Anton learn that the man thought he could tell by her walk whether she was Jewish.

Listen, they’ll try to make you believe all kinds of things, but you must never forget that it was the Krauts who burned down your house. Whoever did it, did it, and not anyone else.

Hate is the darkness, that’s no good. And yet we’ve got to hate Fascists, and that’s considered perfectly all right…. But that’s why it’s more difficult for us. For them everything is very simple, but for us it’s more complicated. We’ve got to become a little bit like them in order to fight them—so we become a little bit unlike ourselves.

Inexplicably , they had suddenly changed into human beings, just ordinary men, all naked, white bodies with brown faces and necks, arms that were brown up to the elbows…. Such menace there, all that violence at rest.

Never again would anything taste as good. Not even the most expensive restaurants in the best restaurants in the world…. A man who has never been hungry may possess a more refined palate, but he has no idea what it means to eat.

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.

Not until 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 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.

Mrs. Beumer made the sign of the cross. “It’s always the best ones,” she said softly, “that God calls to him first”

Then Fake Ploeg was the best of us all, thought Anton.

He was fascinated by the delicate equilibrium that must be maintained whenever the butchers planted their knives in someone—this balancing on the edge between life and death, and his responsibility for the poor human being, helpless in unconsciousness.

“We’re in the same class, your parents are shot, but you’re doing medical studies all the same, whereas my father was shot and I repair water heaters.”

[….]

“If it really is your opinion that social justice caused this difference between us… then you should have been a Communist instead.”

“Why can’t you love your father without trying to white-wash him?” asked Anton. “After all, it doesn’t take much to love a saint. That’s like loving animals. Why don’t you simply say: my father was definitely a collaborator, but he was my father and I love him.”

Not till six months later, one warm evening in Athens, where De Graaff was ambassador, did he tell the whole story to his future father-in-law. Having heard him out, De Graaff remained silent and gazed from the darkened room into the brilliant, perfumed garden, vibrant with the chirping of crickets, where a small fountain murmured as it spouted up into the air. A servant in a white jacket clinked some pieces of ice together on the terrace. Saskia and her mother were sitting out there. The Acropolis could be seen in the distance between cypresses and pine trees. All De Graaff said after a while was, “Even the good has its evil side in the world. But there is still another side.”

How in heaven’s name could he compare the Vietnamese Liberation Front to the Nazis? The trouble was that he thought Americans were still the same as in World War Two. But actually it was the Americans who had changed and who should now be compared to the Nazis.

The only truth that’s useful is that everyone gets killed by whoever kills them, and by no one else. Ploeg by us, your family by the Germans. If you believe we shouldn’t have done it, then you also believe that, in the light of history, the human race shouldn’t have existed. Because then all the love and happiness and goodness in this world can’t outweigh the life of a single child. Yours, for instance. Is that what you believe?

Anton stared at him, and suddenly all the pent-up emotion washed over him. Putting his face in his hands, he turned away and began to sob. She was dying. For him she died at this very moment, as if twenty-one years were nothing. Yet at the same time she was resurrected together with all she had meant to him, hidden there in the darkness.

The world is hell, he thought, hell. Even if we had heaven on earth tomorrow, it couldn’t be perfect because of all that’s happened. Never again could things be set right. Life on this planet was a failure, a big flop; better that it should have never begun. Not until it ended, and with it every single memory of all those death throes, would the world return to order.

His eyes fell on the white table lighter with dice markings, a present from Liesbeth’s parents. Restless, he began to wander through the whitewashed, irregularly shaped rooms and went up and down the spiral staircase with the uneven steps. Now and then he tried to sit down, but this made it so much worse that he stood up at once.

“Everyone did what he did, and not anything else.”

And at that instant he knew for certain that Truus Coster had told him the same thing, word for word, or almost. Then all of a sudden, almost thirty-five years later, he heard her voice, faint and distant; “…he thinks that I don’t love him…” Frozen, he listened, but all grew silent once more: nothing followed. Tears came to his eyes. Everything was still there, not a thing had disappeared.

Peter arrived and locked up his bicycle. Seeing him here, with the drone of the helicopter overheard 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.

[….]

What moved him was the presence of all the people here, and he and his son being part of them.

Though at first Anton was aghast, his horror was soon replaced by a feeling of acceptance and peace, as if he had finally been vindicated. Thirty-three years ago Peter’s death had already been avenged. What would Takes have said to that? Three years after he had aimed at Ploeg, there had still been another victim.

The Aartses, whom nobody could stand because they kept to themselves: they had saved the lives of three Jews, and those Jews, with their presence, had saved their own. In spite of everything, Korteweg had been a good man! So this was why Ploeg’s body had landed on the other side, at their own door, so that… Anton couldn’t take it anymore.

But what does it matter? Everything is forgotten in the end. The shouting dies down, the waves subside, the streets empty, and all is silent once more. A tall, slender man walks hand in hand with his son in a demonstration. He has “lived through the War,” as they say, one of the last, perhaps, to remember…. With a quick gesture he tosses back his straight graying hair, dragging his feet a bit, as if each step raised clouds of ashes, although there are no ashes in sight.