a gallimaufry

Reading De aanslag, by Henry Mulisch: Tweede episode 1952

(Soup kitchen in Amsterdam; © Beeldbank WO2/Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam/Sem Presser/J. de Jong; from Anne Frank’s Amsterdam)

In May 1945 the Netherlands are finally liberated. In the first few days, Anton’s uncle cycles off to discover what happened to the missing Steenwijks. Almost immediately he learns that Anton’s parents were executed that same night along with twenty-nine hostages (? my dictionary translates gijzelaars as ‘hostages’ but I’m not sure that’s the right word here); some weeks later they discover that Peter was shot dead that same night.

Anton grows up with his uncle and aunt; childless, they treat him as their own son. He does well enough at school and goes on to study medicine at university. He does not return to his home town. In the summer of 1952 he is invited to a party there, in Haarlem, and rather reluctantly he goes. Disturbed by the memories the place evokes in him and irritated by his friends’ discussion of the war in Korea, he leaves and walks back to his old home, now an overgrown, weed-filled patch between the two neighbouring houses, like a missing tooth. The straggly trees are ‘just like those which can be seen sometimes in sixteenth-century paintings, with an angel on a hill and a crow which stares malignantly at a monstrous little man’ (zoals die soms op zestiende-eeuwse schilderijen te zien zijn, met een engel op een heuvel en een kraai die kwaardaardig naar een monsterachtig mannetje staart; mannetje can mean ‘stag’ or ‘bull’ as well as ‘little man’ and I’m not quite sure what’s meant here, especially since extensive searches with Ms Google have yielded examples of no such paintings). Anton is also reminded of something his uncle told him about northern France, where farmers plough around certain spots because they are mass graves from the Great War. He imagines that beneath the nettles some bricks and fragments of his old home remain.

As he stands there, he sees old mevrouw Beumer waving to him from her window; he shrinks away, but she is calling him in. She is kind and motherly, gently scolding him for staying away so long, making him a cup of coffee. Meneer Beumer sits in a chair, his eyes cloudy with dementia and unable to recognise Anton. Mevrouw Beumer chatters about the new neighbours – meneer Korteweg and his daughter moved away shortly after the Liberation – and her sadness at the tragedy which befell Anton’s family, especially the death of Peter. Then she tells him that she saw her mother ‘fly at’ one of the men that night. Horrified, terrified, Anton starts to flee, but not before mevrouw Beumer has added that there is a monument with his family’s name on it ‘where it happened’ (waar het gebeurd is), which he pauses to see. His parents’ names among those of the gijzelaars moves him: apart from a couple of photographs his uncle possesses, this is all that remains of them. That and himself.

Back at home Anton accuses his uncle of failing to tell him about the monument, but aunt and uncle are amazed because they clearly remember not only what they said but his response: ‘You said that these stones could be stolen from you’ (Je zei dat die stenen je gestolen konden worden; in other words, he said that he didn’t care).

The house was the last place that Anton saw his family alive; for him it is their grave even though their bodies do not rest there, the place where they all died even though they were killed elsewhere. But Anton also gives the site a sort of context, in the art of the Old Masters, in the mass graves of the First World War. To do this, he has to step outside his emotions to some extent and regard their deaths through his intellect; it may make them easier to bear. After all, for the past seven years Anton has coped with his terrible loss by utterly suppressing it:

His family was consigned to a place of which he seldom thought but from where at unexpected moments a fragment emerged: when he was looking out of the classroom window, or standing at the back of the tram: a dark place of cold and hunger and shots, blood, flames, screams, gaols, somewhere deep inside himself and almost hermetically sealed up there. In these instances it was as if he remembered a dream, but less what he had dreamed than that he had had a nightmare. Only in the heart of that hermetic darkness shone sometimes a blinding point of light: the fingertips of that girl on his face.

[Zijn familie was ontweken naar een domein, waar hij zelden aan dacht maar waar op onverwachte momenten soms een flard van opdook: als hij op school uit het raam keek, of op het achterbalkon van de tram: een donker oord van kou en honger en schoten, bloed, vlammen, geschreeuw, kerkers, ergens diep in hemzelf en daar vrijwel hermetisch afgesloten. In die ogenblikken was het of hij zich een droom herinnerde, maar minder wat hij gedroomd als wel dat hij een nachmerrie had gehad. Alleen in het hart van die hermetische duisternis schitterde soms een verblindend lichtpunt: de vingertoppen van dat meisje over zijn gezicht.]

He has avoided all references to the war, poems and novels about that period; he shuns Haarlem for years until the party. Does this make the visit there all the more traumatic? In choosing to return to his old home, it seems as if Anton is deciding to open himself up to the ghosts. It is perhaps too soon, and when mevrouw Beumers reveals that she knows something more of what happened, Anton retreats, closes up again, asks nothing. After he has confronted his uncle, he thinks about boring into the earth in a flameproof suit until just his feet protruded out of the other side; then he would pause for a moment before retreating back into the earth and floating weightlessly at its centre which seems the only safe place to think about these events.

(Bomb damage in the Von Zesenstraat; © Beeldbank WO2/NIOD/J.A.J. Rikkert; from Anne Frank’s Amsterdam)

Reading De aanslag, by Henry Mulisch: Eerste episode 1945, 4

 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)

Some thoughts on reading in a foreign language

Poring over De aanslag for the last few weeks, I’ve been forced to consider how different and strange reading in another language is. It’s very slow (for me anyway) and jerky, for a start, skipping between text and dictionary. Sometimes I have to look up the meanings of a whole row of Dutch words and then, because the syntax is one I don’t know, I arrange and re-arrange the meanings in my mind until they fall into a pattern which makes sense in English. Sometimes, especially with hay-fever medication, I feel lazy and gaze vacantly out of the bus window instead. I am finding that there’s a tension between my desire to find out what happens next and to ‘untangle’ the Dutch, and my laziness. I enjoy the intellectual exercise of reading the Dutch – and those passages for which I don’t need the dictionary, I don’t need to consciously think about what the words mean, they just fly into my brain, those are moments of magic! – but at the same time I resent how it slows me down and puts something between me and the book. This is an ambivalence I haven’t really experienced reading English novels. I am still regarding this exercise as a novel-reading exercise rather than a language-improving one.

And then there’s the question of style. I read a word; this is what it means. It has no nuance for me, because nuance is acquired from lots of associations and I don’t have them yet. I can’t ‘read against the grain’. Subtle ironies, unacknowledged quotations, phrases which are consciously arcane or stilted – all these pass me by. The colours I read in are stark colours. And all those little words – ‘nog’ and ‘al’ and ‘pas’, for instance – which have so many different meanings depending on context – I am never really sure of them, the treacherous little things. But then, because I am reading so slowly and often looking up the same term several times before I learn to remember it, I notice when words recur a lot. In one chapter, there were a lot of diagonals – sloping ceilings, characters standing diagonally across from one another. In the chapter I’m reading currently, Mulisch has suddenly started using a word, ‘blijkbaar’ (‘apparent’) quite frequently, and it’s a word which he hasn’t really used before (I’d say he hasn’t used it at all but I can’t be sure of that). I don’t think that these things are significant but observing them give me a small pleasure. I feel as if Mulisch, writing, and I, reading, are travelling at a comparable pace; normally I know I’m reading much faster than the author could write. (Don’t write and tell me that of course Mulisch didn’t write as fast as even I read! I know that really! It’s just my comfortable little delusion.)

Then, when I wrote about how painful I found the separation of Anton from his parents two posts ago, litlove responded in the comments:

I wonder whether the meaning wrested from a book in a second language (particularly when it has to be struggled out of the words, and I speak from much experience here!) feels that bit more intense. You can’t stand back from the words and skim them, as you can in your own language. You have to be right up close.

And Iris added:

I think litlove’s observation rings true. I can’t help but imagine me reading these same chapters in Dutch and not seeing as much detail at all. Perhaps once you feel at home with a certain language you start to pay less attention, in a way?

I think these are both absolutely true. De aanslag is a short book but I feel that I have lived in it for a long time now, crawling through it. Actually, I think I know it in the way that I knew my GCSE and A-level texts at school. I have deconstructed and examined each sentence and put it back together, clumsily and roughly it is true, now I am thinking of Picasso’s The Snail (which is neither clumsy nor rough of course!) beside a Dutch still-life, although that’s rather off the point; anyway, I have paid very close attention to everything which Mulisch wrote, despite my limitations, and I think that I am seeing the structure of the novel more clearly than I would with a novel in English. Litlove is right, I can’t slide over the bits I find boring (not that I have found any) or upsetting, so they are as much in my face as the rest of the book. But I had not thought of it from the other perspective, as Iris put it, that in your native language you get a bit lazy. For me, nothing in Dutch has hardened into cliché yet. Furthermore, I’m wondering if reading in a second language will alter how I read in English: will it make me more attentive? Those of you who read in more than one language, have you found this to affect how you read in your native tongue?

(Images: Henri Matisse, The Snail, collage, 1953, at the Tate; Balthasar van der Ast, Still-Life with Shells, oil, c. 1640, at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen)

Reading De aanslag, by Henry Mulisch: Eerste episode 1945, 3

Het is allemaal zo afschuwelijk ... de wereld is de hel, de hel, ik ben blij dat het nu gauw afgelopen is, ik kan niet meer. (It is all so awful ... the world is Hell, Hell, I am happy that it is now almost over, I can’t go on any more.)

Sitting in the darkness of the cell, Anton hears a woman’s voice, soft, asking him why he’s there. In a very short time, he is curled up beside her on a ‘brits’ (not sure what that is exactly, could anyone enlighten me? Some sort of camp bed?), her arm around him, and they talk. She won’t tell him her name and she is injured and her heart beats too fast; it seems likely she is a member of the Resistance. There’s only a faint strip of light, which shines from under the door; yet, although the two discuss metaphorical dark as evil and light as good, in this place the pitch-black of the cell offers them a temporary refuge while in the light outside they can hear another prisoner being dragged away, roaring. In such circumstances, Anton and the young (I think she’s young, she swears a couple of times and she tells Anton not to call her ‘mevrouw’ or madam) woman can only comfort each other as best they can.

(Still from Powell and Pressburger’s wonderful One of Our Aircraft is Missing; shamelessly pilfered from here)

The woman says to Anton, ‘Wie het gedaan heeft, heeft het gedaan, en niemand anders’ (‘The person who did this, did it, and nobody else’), a phrase which strikes me (actually a lot of what she says in this chapter struck me but I can’t cram it all in here) as something which will have a bearing later.

Each tells a story of being lost while in the familiar. The woman remembers the night of the last full moon when she had stayed at a friend’s house long after the curfew (why? What were they discussing so late?) and she took off her shoes and crept home through the snow, feeling her way along the houses (while she sits in the cell she feels Anton’s face to understand what he looks like) until suddenly she felt something strange and realised she was lost. Unable to go any further, she sat down on some steps right there and waited for dawn – when she discovered she was sitting on her own doorstep. Anton in turn tells of a time at his uncle’s house when he got up to go to the loo and couldn’t find the door, and where the wall should have been was a gaping void. Is this how they feel now, the world turned against them, the safe no longer trustworthy?

Then the woman says to Anton that they have spoken enough of darkness, now they should talk about the light:

het soort licht, dat je vlak na zonsondergang soms tegen de bomen ziet hangen: van dat toverechtige licht ... dat is het licht, dat in iemand zit die van iemand anders houdt ... (the sort of light which you sometimes see among trees just after the sun has set: that magical light ... that is the light, which is in anyone who loves someone else ...)

This light reminds me of the summer evenings described in the prologue, when Anton dreamed away the hours before bedtime. Hate is darkness, but the fascists are darkness and so must be hated. Because we hate the hate, our hatred is better than theirs, but to defeat them we must first break ourselves, change ourselves, a little. The danger is that we change ourselves too much. Love is light. If you love someone, they are beautiful to you but in fact it is you, the one who loves, who is made beautiful by the love.

She tells Anton that she thinks he’ll be reunited with his parents in the morning, although she’s worried about Peter. Then at last he falls asleep in her arms.

Even though the quiet and the conversation of this chapter do provide a sort of relief from all the violent action of the previous one, it is intensely moving. Behind the conversation lies a world of pain which doesn’t require overt description; I feel tearful again just typing this up. I am sure that the woman’s words form a sort of core to the novel, against which the rest of it will be played out.

(All the translations are mine and thus ropey so please point out any mistakes!)

Reading De aanslag, by Henry Mulisch: Eerste episode 1945, 2

Five shots ring out in the darkness. At last, things are starting to happen and the catastrophe is set in motion, before I grow too fond of this doomed family. The two boys spring to the bay window in the front room and look out into the icy dark: a body is lying in the gutter outside ‘Korteweg’, a neighbour’s house, beside a bicycle, front wheel still spinning. Peter says, ‘They’ve shot someone!’; it’s not clear who ‘they’ might be. He runs out and kneels beside the body before his mother calls him back: the dead man is Fake Ploeg, chief of police in Haarlem and a hated Nazi responsible for many deaths. At the sound of the name, Anton recalls the second day of school when Ploeg’s son, who is in Anton’s class, came into the classroom and sat at his desk wearing the uniform of the Jeugdstorm, and nobody, not even the teacher, would set foot in there with him until Anton saw the boy’s face full of misery and went in and sat beside him. As he gazes out of the window at the corpse, all at once he sees meneer Korteweg and his daughter Karin dart from their house, seize Ploeg and drag him along the street before depositing him outside the Steenwijks’ house, whereupon they run back home.

Pandemonium in the Steenwijks’ house. Peter screams at his parents that they must move the body – back to Korteweg, or to the Beumers’ house, anywhere – because otherwise they’ll suffer the Nazis’ reprisals. The parents maintain that they’ve committed no crime and have nothing to fear; his mother locks the front door to prevent him leaving but when they hear more shots Peter, in a frenzy, dodges out of the kitchen door and runs round into the street. As he reaches the body, three men, two uniformed, turn into the street. One starts shooting. Peter seizes Ploeg’s pistol, fires back and flees into the darkness pursued by one of the men; another leaves to fetch help. Not long after motorcycles, machine guns, trucks, the whole caboodle turn up, interrogate the family, drag them outside and separate Anton from his parents. Then they torch the house and Anton witnesses its utter destruction. He is driven to the police station in Haarlem, and locked in a prison cell with another prisoner for the night.

Perhaps because I’m reading so slowly, it seems to me that the movements and gestures of the family in the house are minutely recorded; who gets up and crosses the room, who turns, where each person is in relation to the others. It’s a little like the actions in a play, and perhaps I think that because it seems to me the literary equivalent of a film happening in ‘real time’, no cuts, no jumps forward in the narrative. But it’s happening as seen by Anton; at one point it’s even remarked that he will always remember his father, sitting at the table as if cut out of snow, and his mother outside in the starlight, calling Peter back. He seems to be consciously memorising this night so that he will not forget.

Little details – the sore on Peter’s left foot which would not heal, and never will now; Anton’s mother, standing by the back door and calling Peter in vain; the horror of losing hold of his mother’s hand; Anton thinking of his collection of aeroplane photographs in flames in the burning house – these are deeply poignant. The soldiers, in contrast, lack any individuality or humanity; they’re extensions of their machines. Their clothes seem more significant than the men within them. The business of dragging the corpse up and down the street might almost be comic; in fact, it’s chilling, terrifying.

Sometimes on the bus I had to stop reading and look out of the window for a while; it was a very intense chapter and a relief to reach the end.

(Jeugdstorm rally in the Grote Markt, Haarlem, from the Nationaal Archief in The Hague; the Nationale Jeugdstorm, to which Fake Ploeg’s son belonged, was a fascist and nationalistic youth movement not unlike the Hitler Youth; more information here)

Reading De aanslag, by Henry Mulisch: Eerste episode 1945, 1

It’s the fateful night in January, 1945. The Steenwijk family is described sitting in the back room together for warmth, around the one lamp on the table. At the end of the war, the Dutch are really suffering its effects: there’s a lack of fuel and above all food. The Steenwijks’ books are divided into those to read and those to be burned in the stove to keep them warm; Anton’s mother has a clove in her tooth to counter the pain from a cavity; Anton is hungry but knows there’s nothing more to eat this evening. There is no radio or telephone; it’s silent outside. Beyond the circle of lamplight, what is there?

The parents are described carefully; it’s a third-person narrative, but it’s all from Anton’s point of view. His mother is unravelling a jersey, which makes me think of Penelope unravelling by night what she had woven by day. This Penelope cheats time by living on in her son’s memory. Or perhaps it’s a reference to the Morai, who spun, measured and finally cut the thread of life. Peter, Anton’s elder brother, is translating a Greek text – perhaps The Iliad – for their father who has taken on the responsibility of his education. The boys bicker. Meneer Steenwijk defines symbolon, symbol. Anton reads an article in a 1938 edition of Natuur en Techniek about the burial of a time capsule in America; it will be opened in 5000 years’ time. Why 5000 years? And what was life like 5000 years ago? They get out a board-game and start to play.

It’s hard to read this chapter calmly because I know that disaster is about to strike; of course the family know nothing and are carrying on as usual, which strikes me as poignant to the point that I feel a bit weepy on the bus reading about them. I feel it all the more because I’m having to read this so slowly. In English I’d whizz on, so the tension wouldn’t be so great. I notice and mentally file away all the references to time.

Reading De aanslag, by Harry Mulisch: Proloog

June is Dutch Literature Month at Iris on Books; very exciting for me as I want to start reading more Dutch literature now I am a leetle bit competent in the language (but not very). To participate in DLM I am reading De aanslag (The Assault) in Dutch and planning to post about it as I go along. But of course I am cheating! I always cheat, if there’s a cheat option! I actually started it in May. And I am reading it so slowly, constrained as I am to bus journeys (because we’ll blame that rather than the fact I have to spend more time with the dictionary than with the actual text, ahem), that I am afraid I won’t finish it by the end of June. I believe I can say with confidence that I shall be reading this book for the rest of my life. This is not the fault of De aanslag, which is both short and brilliant.

All I knew of the book before opening it was that it concerned a man whose entire family was killed by the Nazis during the Second World War as a reprisal for the murder of a Dutch Nazi, whose body was discovered outside their house.

The prologue is short and describes the home of Anton Steenwijk as it was before the horrific night in January 1945. It begins: ‘Ver, ver weg in de tweede wereldoorlog...’ (‘Far, far away in the Second World War...’), a phrase which gives a dreamlike quality which persists in the rest of the prologue. The house is one of four villas built along a canal on a street which was never continued. Around them is flat countryside, open to the skies, and ‘opgespoten veld’, which is land where the mud and water from the canal are sprayed during cleaning; weeds and old trees grow there and the boy Anton likes to play among them, or lie on a bank dreaming. The houses with their ‘burgerlijke’ names seem incongruous in this landscape. Sometimes a man with a stick walks along the canal path pulling a barge behind him; to Anton he seems like a figure from another age and he never speaks to anyone about him. The more usual canal traffic includes motor boats which shatter the peace and create V shapes which distort the surface of the water and make complex patterns. The place is frozen in time as a memory, but there’s also a sense that when the Steenwijk’s house existed it was somehow vulnerable to outside forces like the canal traffic, passive, out of sympathy with the landscape in which it was built, anachronistic even.

(Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriel, A Watercourse at Abcoude, oil on panel, 1878, Rijksmuseum collection, Amsterdam; the Steenwijks lived in Haarlem but Abcoude is not far from there and this is rather how I imagined the landscape to be when I was reading Mulisch’s description)