The Assault

In September 1952, while Anton is in his second year of medical school, a classmate invites him to a birthday party in Haarlem. On the way there, Anton feels like “someone going to a whorehouse for the first time” (58). He observes the small changes to the landscape from the train window. Here, the narrator also describes Anton. He is twenty years old and has “sleek, dark hair, […] dark eyebrows, and a smooth, nut-colored complexion,” [which is]“somewhat darker around the eyes” (59). He has a habit of tossing his hair across his forehead.

Anton joins a conversation of young men at the party. One man, Gerrit Jan Van Lennep, tells another that if he had any guts, he’d “not only join the army, but volunteer to go to Korea” (60). Van Lennep asserts that “the barbarians are storming the gates of Christian civilization” (60) in Korea and that the Fascists are “mere boys” (60) compared to the Koreans. He also offers the information that former SS soldiers are taken into the army and issued a clean slate based on their service.

Anton, disengaged, peers at the opposite shore of the pond where people bicycle as one person walks a dog. He knows that somewhere beyond the people lies a “nursery school where he used to stand in line” (60) for soup. A little bit beyond that lies the site of his old family home. When Van Lennep tries to pull Anton into the conversation, Anton takes his leave of the party. Anton feels that it was a terrible mistake to come to Haarlem and resolves never to come again—but not without saying goodbye to his former home once and for all.

As he approaches the site of his old home, Anton “recognize[s] the herringbone pattern of the brick pavement,” and while he had “never noticed the pattern in the old days,” he now “realize[s] that it had always been there” (62). Beyond the horizon lies Amsterdam, “which he now [knows] better than Haarlem, but only in the way one knows someone else’s face better than one’s own” (62).

Anton arrives at the three houses—although an open and empty space now lies in the middle of them—"like a missing tooth” (63). In the place of his former home, there is a fence and a thick vegetation of nettles and bushes with a few thin trees. Anton knows that beneath the vegetation there must still lie bricks, wall fragments, foundations, and the rubble of his former life. He transposes his memory of the home against the leaves, trees, and birds that presently take its place, and especially remembers the sign bearing the word “Carefree.” The sign at the Kortewegs has been painted over, while Hideaway and Bide-a-Wee’s signs still stand.

Anton looks at the spot where Ploeg once laid and feels alarmed by his desire to touch it. He does, however, cross the street, and espies Mrs. Beumer waving from her window. She immediately recognizes him and invites him in, and Mr. Beumer, ostensibly suffering from dementia, greets him with the name “Hans.”

Mrs. Beumer fixes Anton a cup of coffee. She asks Anton why he has not come to visit sooner and tells him that Anton has hardly changed at all. She tells Anton that although Mr. Beumer saw Anton being driven away that fateful night, the couple had never been sure of whether Anton had survived. Anton muses that she “probably [thinks] that he [is] terribly disturbed by the past, [that he dreams] of it every night, but the fact [is] that he almost never [thinks] about it” (67). He asks if Mr. Korteweg still lives in his old home, and Mrs. Beumer tells him that the Kortewegs left shortly after the assault, without saying goodbye. Within their conversation, Anton also remembers the terrariums that the “surly” (68) Mr. Korteweg kept. Within these terrariums were lizards: “Weirdly silent, their bodies S-shaped, their small hands holding onto tree bark, the creatures stared at him out of a past as deep and immovable as themselves. Though some of them seemed to be grinning broadly, their eyes spoke a different language, of a gravity so immovable and undisturbed as to be almost unbearable” (69).

The narrator also intimates that at night when Anton lies thinking about Karin Korteweg in bed, his remembrance of her “pale-blue [...] eyes and nicely shaped calves”(68) is often accompanied by an erection. Anton concludes that based on the way Mrs. Beumer speaks of the Kortewegs, she has no idea what truly transpired that night.

While Mrs. Beumer pontificates about Peter’s youth and virtues, Anton muses how ironically, should Peter have gotten his way that night, the Beumers’ home would now lie in rubble, and while Mr. and Mrs. Beumer would probably not have been shot due to their advanced age, Peter would have had to do his military service and would likely have been part of the Seventh of December Division. Peter probably “would have set villages on fire” (71) during the invasion of Indonesia and could possibly have died there. Anton also ruminates how even though he is now three years older than Peter was at the time of his death, “Anton was forever the younger brother (71).

Mrs. Beumer laments that her husband feels as though “God had spared [them]” (71) that night—because she then questions why the Steenwijks were not also spared. Anton sardonically replies that Mr. Beumer’s rejoinder was, doubtlessly, that the Steenwijks weren’t spared because they were “heathens” (71). Mrs. Beumer also exclaims: “What [your parents] must have experienced! [...] When your mother flew at that fellow. […]Simply slaughtered, like beasts” (71). At this point, Anton must stop her from speaking.

Mrs. Beumer informs Anton that a monument “on the place where it all happened” (72), which bears the names of his parents, went up three years ago, and she is flabbergasted by his complete ignorance to this fact. She offers to accompany him to it, but he states that he would rather go alone.

When he arrives at the monument, it is “the lilac hour” (73). The sun, which has just gone down, leaves the quay and meadows bathed in an indecisive, surrealistic, and magical light. The monument reads: “THEY FELL FOR QUEEN AND FATHERLAND”(73). Among the names of the 29 hostages, his parents’ names are also written: “W.L. Steenwijk, b. 17. 9. 1896, and D. Steenwijk-Van Liempt, b. 10. 5. 1904” (73).

Anton is riveted by the names, their letters “not even made of bronze, but in a bronze negative: the men who had jumped hand[cuffed] off the truck, his mother the only woman, his father the only one born in the last century” (74). He contemplates the provincial war monuments committee and concludes that it probably debated whether his parents’ names really belonged on the monument since they were not “killed by a firing squad” like the hostages but “simply murdered like animals” (74). He muses that officials of the central committee had probably managed to exclude Peter from the monument as well, as Peter was technically an armed resister—and there were separate monuments for those such as he. Anton ruminates: “Hostages, members of the Underground, Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals—they should just be mixed up together, for God’s sake the end result would be a total mess” (74). When Anton begins to make his way back, he sees Mrs. Beumer watching him from her window, and he decides to take an alternate path.

Anton bypasses the party and takes the first train back to Amsterdam instead. When he arrives home, his aunt and uncle are a bit annoyed that he did not call to say that he’d be home late. When he tells them that he went to Haarlem, they exchange glances. Anton asks why they never told him that there was a monument on his old quay. His uncle says that he did tell him, and his aunt recalls that Anton said that “they could go to hell with their monument” (75), for all he cared. Anton has absolutely no memory of such a thing happening: “For the first time he [feels] a kind of fear, something sucking him in, a deep hole into which things fell without reaching the bottom, as when someone throws a stone and never hears it land” (75).

The narrator reveals that “at a time when he still thought about such things,” Anton would sometimes “wonder what would happen if he drilled a tunnel right through the center of the earth and then jumped in, wearing a fireproof suit” (75). After a time he could mathematically calculate, Anton projected that he would arrive at the antipode and come to a momentary stop. He would then disappear into the depths, and, after many years, “he would at last stop and remain floating, weightless, at the center of the earth, where he would be able to reflect upon the state of things in eternity” (76).