You may have thought I’d given up on this... you were wrong...
An hour or so later, blinded by a lantern, Anton is whisked from his cell with no time to say good-bye to his fellow prisoner. He is taken to a motorcycle and ordered to sit on the back and hold onto the German rider. Clinging on, his study of the German soldier’s uniform has reminded him of an incident a year ago when he lingered in his cubicle in the public swimming pool too long and a detachment of the Wehrmacht came in.
(Hotel den Hout in Haarlem; found here)
Anton wakes up as they arrive at the Hotel den Hout, headquarters of the Ortskommandantur (I think that is district commander?). Dozing in a warm waiting room he sees meneer Korteweg (the neighbour who dragged Ploeg’s corpse over to the Steenwijks’ house) coming out of a room. Later he wakes to be given warm milk and a sandwich and be interviewed by the Ortskommandantur, who establishes that Anton has an uncle in Amsterdam. A convoy is just setting off for that very city, so Anton is wrapped up in a couple of large grey jerseys, over-sized gloves and a scarf and climbs into the first of the trucks. Between Haarlem and Amsterdam the convoy is attacked by a Spitfire and Schulz, the German who had given him food and clothing, is wounded, probably mortally.
The remains of the convoy reaches Amsterdam, and Anton is taken to a villa occupied by the Wehrmacht. Anton weeps as he tells a German general what happened to his family and home. The general is impatient, exclaiming in irritation at everyone else’s ineptitude and interested only in a list of their names and Anton’s papers – all of which Schulz had stuck in his breast-pocket and are now destroyed by blood and bullets – Anton begins to cry again. An hour later his uncle arrives to take him home. Anton tells him he doesn’t even have a coat. As they leave, he feels something in his pocket – the die from the board game the Steenwijks were playing together just a few hours before. What, if anything, should one make of this die, especially when set against the references to the stars and the Moirai which preceded it? Dice suggest randomness; stars predestination.
In this chapter, the tension and emotion of the previous two is dissipated in bureaucracy. The Nazis are revealed as not nightmarish automata but men – the jovial yet uneasy Ortskommandantur; Schulz, whom Anton believes died because he tried to save Anton; the tense and irascible general. In his dream of the swimming pool, Anton hid until the Germans were all in the pool, and saw they were just men, with white bodies and tanned faces and forearms, vulnerable like any other. In the dream he then went to the changing-room and looked at their uniforms, which detached themselves from the pegs and went to a pile of burning branches beneath the porch of a white house. Is Mulisch suggesting that individual Nazis are not entirely culpable for their actions? That the ‘uniform’ takes over, turns them into the inhumane creatures who destroyed Anton’s home? Or that one is more than one’s actions?
(Waffen SS in Haarlem; from here)