The Assault

The narrator begins this chapter with: “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 [Anton] one last time in his life” (163).

On a Saturday in the latter part of November 1981, Anton awakes with an unbearable toothache. His dentist, Gerrit Jan Van Lennep, agrees to treat it—on the condition that Anton attends a demonstration against nuclear armament with him. Liesbeth also recommends that Anton put a clove in his tooth in order to relieve the pain, which does nothing. On the way to Van Lennep’s office, Anton sees an assortment of people, including “warrior types wearing turbans, wide pants, and sword belts, with only the pistols and scimitars missing” (165). He ventures a guess that these people are “displaced Kurds” (165).

After Van Lennep successfully treats Anton’s toothache, Anton begrudgingly goes to the demonstration. Anton reminds Van Lennep that at a party, Van Lennep once urged Anton to “volunteer to fight in Korea, in the battle of occidental Christianity against the Communist barbarians” (167). Van Lennep tells Anton that his memory is too good and that Van Lennep has not become a Communist—if that’s what Anton was implying. Van Lennep simply believes that “each new wave of [nuclear] armament” (168)—while it is posed as a reaction to opposition—is merely a manner of shifting blame while the weapons, which will ultimately be used, pile up. This is why he feels it is urgent and vital to demonstrate against nuclear armament.

Van Lennep, his wife, and Anton join the demonstration, which is composed of “hundreds of thousands of people” (168), holding placards and banners and marching. Peter arrives at the demonstration, and, while Anton remains indifferent to the demonstration itself, he is nonetheless moved by the utter mass of people and that his son is a part of that mass. He is also struck by a small placard that reads: “JOB: WE ARE WITH YOU” (169). He points out the placard to Peter and explains who Job was.

Anton also runs into Sandra, now nineteen, and her boyfriend, Bastiaan. Bastiaan is “a handsome young man wearing blue jeans, sneakers, a Palestinian kaffiyeh around his neck, and a gold ring in his left ear” (170). Although Anton does not particularly like him, he is about to become the father of his grandchild, as Sandra is pregnant. Bastiaan points out that the crowd is “stiff with police” (170).

A group of soldiers is greeted with applause, and some people in the crowd are unable to control their tears at the sight of the uniforms: “A daisy chain of boys and girls surrounded[the group of soldiers] protectively (170), and Anton cannot believe his eyes. Anton asks Bastiaan if those soldiers were ordered to be there, but Bastiaan clarifies—he points to a man in a windbreaker who is filming the soldiers and says that he is a policeman. Bastiaan entertains the notion of tearing the camera out of the policeman’s hands, while Anton chides that that kind of action is just what the police need in order to crack down on the demonstration. Sandra, sensing a familiar conflict, decides to go her own way with Bastiaan. Anton also notices an older woman staring at him, and he assumes that she is an old patient and ignores her.

On the roof of a parked car sits two fifteen-year-olds holding a banner that reads: “DROP THE FIRST BOMB ON WASHINGTON” (172). At this, people clear their throats politely yet embarrassedly.

“Halfway to the Stadhouderskade, [Anton is] suddenly pushed aside by a file of black, masked figures with rattles, fluorescent skeletons painted on their bodies, who [force] their way through the crowd—figures of terror, like medieval victims of the plague” (172). He mistakenly bumps into the older woman who was staring at him earlier and excuses himself. Then she asks: “Tonny? […] Do you remember me?” (172). The woman is Karin Korteweg.

“In a flash, the tall, blond woman from Home at Last changed into the little old lady at his side” (172). Karin Korteweg offers to go away if Anton does not wish to speak with her. Anton struggles to maintain composure as that night in 1945 rushes back to him. A series of questions about Ploeg races through his body, as an “old […] inexhaustible bitterness” (173)wells up inside of him.

Karin tells Anton that she has always known that they would meet again and asks him what his profession is. She also seems almost more upset than he. When Anton confirms that Karin has just seen him talking to Sandra, his daughter, Karin tells Anton that she can tell by Sandra’s eyes that the girl is pregnant. She also tells Anton that she never married or had children. When Anton asks her if her father is alive, he realizes that the question could be perceived as sarcastic. She tells him that her father has been dead for a long time.

Anton can tell that although Karin wishes to speak in detail about the events of the night of the assault, she is not daring to bring it up. He thinks of Peter, who though he would be 55, remains forever 17. He reflects about the way that Karen’s once-shapely legs used to excite him, and muses that Karin may have been the last person Peter saw before he died.

Anton then directly asks Karin to explain what happened that night and whether Peter ran into her house. Karin answers that Peter did indeed run into her house and that he had a gun. She also reveals that called her and her father “monsters”(175) and said that he was going to kill them. Karin tried to get him to put down the gun so that they could hide it. She recalls that Peter stood, not truly in possession of himself, while he listened for noises outside. Karin’s father told her to “shut up” (175). Karin believes that her father did so because if the Germans were to arrive at their house, the Kortewegs could spin it as though Peter was threatening them, as to not be branded as “accomplices” (176), should the gun be hidden and then found. Karin states that in the intervening years, she wondered why Peter didn’t shoot them, as he had nothing to lose. She offers that perhaps Peter knew that the murder of Ploeg wasn’t their fault and that they “didn’t deserve” (176)to bear the burden of having the body in front of their home any more than any of their neighbors did. Anton interrupts, saying that he is “not so sure about that” (176) conclusion, as Peter had entertained the possibility of dumping the body in front of the Beumers’.

Karin continues her story. She guesses that the Germans must have seen Peter, waving the gun, through the curtain, so they shot out the window and broke down the door. Karin believes that Peter was shot by the time the Germans entered her home, but once they came in, they shot him several more times, “as if they were finishing off an animal” (177). Then, the Kortewegs were dragged out onto the street and taken to the Ortskommandantur. In the distance, she heard the explosions as the Steenwijk house was blown up. As she recalls the memory, Karin begins to choke up with tears.

Anton feels “in total disorder, like a room that has been ransacked by thieves” (177). And yet, a wave of pleasure washes over him when he remembers the glass of warm milk and the sandwich with Schmaltz that he was given that night. The pleasure vanishes when he remembers his last sight of Schulz: “turned over near the running board of the truck” (177). He squeezes his eyes together tightly, and then re-opens them.

Karin then reveals that she was questioned that night, separately from her father, and that she told them the truth: about Ploeg’s murder, about the act of dragging Ploeg’s body to the Steenwijk’s door, and about Peter threatening herself and her father with the gun. She remarks that her testimony of the truth left her questioners unmoved. Anton wonders whether to believe her, and also factors in the fact that, at that point, Karin did not know that Anton’s parents had already been rendered unable to tell their side of the story. He reflects that he himself could have also testified to the truth, but that no one asked him.

Anton asks Karin whether she was afraid that they would set her house on fire too. She answers that she wishes that they had done so. At that moment, she had only one desire: to be shot by them or by Peter. Anton can tell that she means what she is saying. She tells Anton that she “was questioned by a Kraut in civilian clothes” (179), and Anton asks if the man had a scar on his face, in an attempt to ascertain whether the man who questioned him was the same one that came into his house and hauled his parents away for their slaughter. Karin does not think that the man had a scar on his face. Karin also states that when she and her father were allowed to go home the next morning, her father declared that they would never speak of the matter of the assault and the ensuing events of that night ever again. Even after they arrived home and saw the smoldering remains of the Steenwijk home, and the Beumers informed them of the execution of Anton’s parents, her father never spoke of that night again.

Karin and her father moved to New Zealand because her father was afraid of Anton: he did not want to face Anton and was afraid that Anton would exact “revenge” (180). Anton exclaims that such a thing never occurred to him. Karin reveals that in 1948, her father committed suicide in New Zealand. Although Anton is initially horrified by this information, a feeling of “acceptance and peace” quickly replaces his “horror” because he realizes that “Peter’s death had already been avenged” (180). He simultaneously counts Mr. Korteweg as another victim of that night.

He asks Karin why her father committed suicide. Karin concedes that her father did, after all, move the body in self-defense, but considers that he may have committed suicide for Anton and “to help[ ] fate along a little bit” (180). Karin and Anton have been moving along with the crowd of demonstrators throughout the conversation, but at this point, the crowd comes to a standstill. Karin intimates that it never occurred to herself or her father that the Nazis would shoot all of the inhabitants of the home in front of which Ploeg’s body was found and that they had only felt their lives to be in danger when Peter pointed the gun at them. She also reveals that his only concern that night was for his pet lizards and what might happen to them if Ploeg’s body was found in front of their home.

She ruminates on the fact that she never knew what grand significance those pet lizards held for her father, why they held him in such thrall, and why he labored so hard to keep them alive during that “winter of starvation” (110): “Possibly [my father’ was more attached to those animals to me. They had become his only reason for living”(181). However, after the night of the assault and the murder of Anton’s family, the lizards changed back into ordinary animals, and Mr. Korteweg trampled them to death: “Maybe that’s what he couldn’t face, that three people had lost their lives because of his love for a bunch of reptiles, and the thought that you might kill him if you ever got the chance” (182). Anton insists that he didn’t know any of this information at the time. Karin responds that her father knew and that that was enough impetus for him to drag her across the world: “But in the end, he didn’t need you to kill him. He was possessed by you”(182).

Anton feels sick: the full story is worse than the partial one that he has been carrying all these years. But still, he must ask her why the Kortewegs chose to dump Ploeg’s body in front of his house that night, instead of the Aartses. Karin reveals that her father refused to dump the body in front of the Aartses because the Aartses were hiding Jews.

Anton thinks:

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 is why Ploeg’s body had landed on the other side, at [Anton’s] own door (183).

Anton, finding the situation unbearable, excuses himself, and then turns away into the crowd, darting this way and that, as if in an attempt to make sure that Karin can never find him again.

As he finds himself being pushed along by the crowd, Anton comes to his senses. Suddenly, he feels a hand on his and discovers Peter smiling up at him. Wordlessly, he kisses his son’s head. Peter begins to chatter, but Anton scarcely hears him. He ruminates on all of the information Karin has just given him and wonders if everyone is “both guilty and not guilty” (184).

As the crowd comes to the Westerkerk, or the Western Church, a dreadful howl of the mob, originating at a place in front of where Peter and Anton stand, ripples towards them. The people around them become frightened, as the howl is clearly one of fear. However, when the howl reaches them, nothing happens, and suddenly everyone, including Anton and Peter, begins to scream without reason. Around the bend of the Raadhuisstraat, the howl dies down. Peter tries to revive it, without success. Anton realizes that the howl is moving through the entire city: “[The howl] circles about, everyone shouting and laughing at once, and yet it [is] a howl of fear, the primal scream of mankind rising from all of them” (185).

The novel ends with an image of Anton tossing his graying hair across his forehead as he lets himself be carried by the crowd to “the place where he began” (185). Anton drags his feet a bit, “as if each stem raised clouds of ashes, although there are no ashes in sight” (185). The narrator continues:

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. He has joined it against his will, this demonstration, and there’s an ironical look in his eye, as if he finds the situation amusing (185).