Free The Assault by Harry Mulisch

was all wrong, and he resolved never to come back again, even if he were offered a job here at a hundred thousand gulden a year. But since he happened to be here, he wanted to say goodbye once and for all—now, immediately.
    “And you, young man?”
    Startled, he looked up into the face of his host. A short man with gray hair brushed to the side, wearing an ill-fitting suit with pants too short for him, as was the fashion with a certain element of the Dutch upper classes. Beside him stood his wife, a refined lady with a crooked back, so frail, all in white, that she looked as if at any moment she might fly away in a puff of dust.
    “Yes, Mr. Van Lennep,” he said with a smile, although he had no idea what the question was.
    “Are you having fun?”
    “I’m doing my best.”
    “Good for you. Though you don’t look very happy, my friend.”
    “Yes,” he said. “I think I’ll take a tour around the block. Please don’t mind me.”
    “Oh, we don’t mind anything. Free and easy. Go ahead and stretch your legs, it clears the head.”
    Between tea-drinking family members sitting in white garden chairs, he found his way into the house and out to the street. He turned into a side street and walked along the pond. When he had crossed to the other side, he looked back at the party on the lawn. The music that drifted over the water sounded even louder from here. At that moment Gerrit Jan noticed him.
    “Hey, over there, Steenwijk, you asshole. The recruiting office is in the other direction.”
    With a wave of his hand Anton let him know that he got the joke. After that he did not look back again.
    He didn’t take the path across the lots, but went along the street which, around the bend, turned into the quay. This was all wrong, what he was doing; it was a mistake. “The criminal returns to the scene of the crime.” With sudden excitement he recognized the herringbone pattern of the brick pavement. He had never noticed it in the old days, but now he saw it and realized that it had always been there. When he came to the water, he kept his eyes focused on the other side. The farmhands’ cottages, the little farms, the mill, the meadows; nothing had changed. The clouds had vanished, the cows grazed peacefully in the evening sun. Beyond the horizon, Amsterdam, which he now knew better than Haarlem, but only in the way one knows someone else’s face better than one’s own.
    He crossed to the sidewalk that had since been laid out along the embankment, walked on a bit, and only then jerked his face away from the water, in the other direction.

3
    The three houses. An open space between the first and second, like a missing tooth. Only the fence was still there. It surrounded a thick vegetation of nettles and bushes with a few slender trees among them, like in some sixteenth-century paintings that have an angel on a hilltop and an ill-tempered crow staring at a monstrous little man. Many more weeds grew there than on the empty lots in back, perhaps because the ashes made it especially fertile. According to his uncle, in the hills of northern France there were places like this among the fields, places the farmers left unplowed because they were mass graves from the First World War.
    In the shade, under the nettles, there were probably still some bricks, fragments of walls, foundations; and down in the earth, the cellar (his old scooter no doubt stolen out of it), everything filled with rubbish. Even though he had not thought about them, these ruins had been here all these years, without interruption.
    Slowly, tilting his head a bit to the side, tossing his hair back now and then, he walked toward the spot where he had sat in the car, and once more looked at the empty space. While sparrows made a racket in the small trees, he saw the house rise up in front of him, built out of transparent bricks, the windowpanes and the thatch as he remembered them, the bay window and above it the little balcony of the bedroom, the pointed