Cannibals and Missionaries (50 page)

Envoi

A
ILEEN AND FRANK WERE
taking the plane—KLM—to New York. They had been the only ones to survive without serious injury when Jeroen blew himself and the house up. Most had been killed instantly: Jeroen and Greet, Archie and the Senator, the Germans, Carlos, Denise. Two of the Arabs had died from burns before they could be evacuated; the cookstove, run on propane, had caught fire. Ahmed had died two days later in the hospital; his lung had been punctured by a falling joist, and transfusions could not save him. Sophie was in a
kliniek,
having lost an arm. Henk was at home now, still in bed; he had had a concussion and gone into deep coma. For a time it had been feared that his brain, if he lived, would be affected. He had also lost a good deal of blood from splinters of glass that had pierced his neck and hands and had had to be removed by surgery.

He and Sophie had been unconscious and bleeding badly when the military were finally able to enter what was left of the house, in time to put out the fire, which had spread beyond the kitchen to the entry hall and was just licking at the stairway. Frank and Aileen, making their way through the debris, had found the two of them under a pair of children’s bicycles before the guardsmen came and had not known what to do: whether it would be more dangerous to move them or to wait for help. They had lifted the bicycles off them and waited, with Frank praying his heart out and Aileen counting to a hundred, while they smelled the smoke and listened to the nearing crackle of the fire. Outside there was nothing but rubble, which had had to be partly cleared before the stretchers could enter. All the pictures had been blown to pieces, except for Lily’s water-colors—though sections of the floor had caved in, the upstairs was not much damaged, apart from broken windows. In the yard, even the chickens had perished. Yet Frank and Aileen, though dazed and shaken and temporarily deafened, had emerged with only superficial cuts and bruises. They had been strong enough to visit the mortuary and identify the bodies, and Frank, after a physical, had been allowed to give a pint of blood to Ahmed.

Identifying the bodies had been an ordeal they could not yet describe. Some were horribly dismembered; they had known Jim Carey principally by his silver hair. Yet Jeroen, who had been at the very center of the explosions, as if in the eye of a hurricane, had hardly been touched, so far as one could see. His glasses had been broken, and his chest had been crushed by a beam, but that was not visible under the sheet. On the slab he looked peaceful, though he must have died in a fury of rage, because his orders had been disobeyed.

They had learned from Ahmed what had happened. In the hospital he had been too weak to have visitors, but he had talked to them on the medical helicopter that had come to take the living to Amsterdam. And he must have talked to the police at some point, since the whole story was in the papers. Frank and Aileen had read it in the
Herald Tribune
and in the London
Times
while staying at the house of the U.S. Consul General, who had contrived to keep the press away. They had brought copies to Sophie, for when she would be up to reading about it; the amputation had caused her a great deal of pain, and she was still under sedation. The stories had carried all their pictures and a drawing of the interior of the house showing the wiring system and where the fuses had been. The
Times
had found an old photo of Greet in her KLM hostess uniform, just like the two girls today. But they did not have a good picture of Jeroen.

In the medical helicopter, Ahmed had been very sad. It was not just that so many lives had been wasted, though he was sorry about his comrades and had shed tears when he heard about the Senator, who had encouraged him to recite Arab poetry. Rather, it was that he had wanted to die himself—a warrior’s death—with Jeroen. Jeroen, he said, had not decided on the spur of the moment. He had been thinking of it for a long time. He had not told Ahmed, but Ahmed had known. He had come upon him one day in the parlor with the detonator—no bigger than a little pencil—in his hands, sitting there quietly with the Vermeer. But even if Ahmed had not seen the detonator, he would have understood what was in Jeroen’s mind. Greet had begun to guess too, he thought, because she loved him, though with a woman’s love, which was more interfering than a brother’s. She had always mistrusted the paintings. Bending to catch Ahmed’s words, Aileen and Frank had nodded. It must have been a sudden suspicion that had driven her back to the house that fatal afternoon, to frustrate Jeroen’s design.

He had planned to die alone with the “Girl” he had fallen in love with—like a bride, Ahmed said. After the others had gone out walking, he had sent Ahmed away too, ordering him to follow them and not linger around the house. But Ahmed had been determined to die with him; it was a privilege he wanted for himself which the others would not share. He had crept back through the front entrance, which no one used, and observed Jeroen’s arrangements: the time device ticking to activate the battery, and the sticks of dynamite wired to the joists as usual—Yusuf had tested the wiring, as a matter of routine, that morning. Hiding in the pantry, Ahmed had known that he would not have long to wait; Jeroen would have timed the blast to allow ten or perhaps fifteen minutes for the others to be well away. But Greet, woman-like, had destroyed her man’s plan and herself as well. Absorbed in his thoughts, Jeroen could not have noticed them returning across the field. The first Ahmed knew of it, in the windowless pantry, had been the sound of voices, a door banging, and in the same moment, a fierce startled yell from Jeroen. Yelling angrily in Dutch, he had sought to drive them back, out of the house, where they had no business. But they had not understood, losing valuable seconds in mystification, though in fact that had not mattered. It had been too late anyway.

“I can’t get that picture out of my mind,” Frank confided as they unfastened their seat belts. “Him standing there with that wild look and his arm raised, to expel us, like the angel with the flaming sword, at Eden’s gate, you know. It was all so darned Biblical.” “Lot’s wife,” Aileen said. “Greet. Turning around in that field to look back. Lot’s wife was disobedient too. A pillar of salt. Could you
face
Greet’s remains in that mortuary? Barely identifiable.” Frank shook his head to dispel the memory. “I keep thinking of Samson, Aileen. I guess that comes the closest to our big strapping fellow….” “Pulling down the temple,” she agreed. “On himself and all the Philistines. But Jeroen didn’t
intend
to kill anybody but himself. I think we have to accept that. Himself and the pictures. It was more like suttee in a way.”

The hostesses circulated menus. “I still don’t understand what drove him to take his life,” Frank resumed after a cursory look. Henk, they had discovered, took the blame on himself. When they had visited him—sitting up in bed and mournfully eating a piece of smoked eel—he had told them about his last interview with Jeroen. Even then, it seemed, he had sensed that he was doing wrong to make him see that their enterprise had no future. It was true, but he should not have demonstrated it, not at that juncture, when Jeroen’s own people had been turning against him. He had let his love of reasoning carry him away. Frank had tried to reassure him: according to Ahmed, Jeroen was going to blow himself up anyway. Henk had been interested to hear that, but he still held himself responsible; whatever Jeroen’s intentions, their talk had been the precipitating cause. “You think you triggered it,” Aileen had summed up. He did not take to her verb, Henk had answered, making a wry face, but, yes, he was persuaded that the impulse to sudden action had come from him. Despair—the ultimate sin against the Holy Ghost—had resolved Jeroen, and he had been the source; he had despaired
for
Jeroen, and Jeroen had known it. He had not had the right to take hope away.

“It was peculiar, Reverend,” Aileen said now. “I suppose he can’t help blaming himself for Sophie’s arm. He hasn’t seen the poor girl yet, of course. But, aside from that, from the way he talked I almost got the feeling that he
sympathized
with his
kapers
and their project. As though he grieved for them and wished for their own sake that he hadn’t disillusioned them. That’s crazy. You have to take hope away from dangerous criminals, show them they can’t win, don’t you?” Frank guessed that was true. “But Henk’s conscience may tell him that he should have added some positive suggestion. I wonder myself why they never thought of surrender. Wouldn’t that have been the logical thing?” “You’ve said that before,” Aileen reminded him. “But I don’t see Jeroen as the type to surrender. Can you picture him marching out with a white flag? And the Arabs were planning to kill us all anyway—the
kamikaze
idea. Henk said so. If Jeroen had tried to surrender, they would have started shooting, don’t you see? I wish we’d asked Ahmed about that.”

“The
needlessness
of the slaughter,” Frank continued after a moment. “I keep coming back to that. It must trouble Henk too. I gather he feels that if Jeroen had been left to himself he might have planned his own destruction better, not to endanger other lives.” “He tried. We have to give him that,” said Aileen. “He put too much faith in technology,” Frank decided. “Modern man. I ask myself, Aileen, why didn’t he use a plain old-fashioned gun? That rifle of his. I wish somebody would clarify that for me.” Aileen sighed. “Here they come with the cart. Let’s order a drink.” “You mean I ought to use my imagination,” said the Reverend. “But I’m a down-to-earth sort of cuss, if you can believe it of a man of my calling. In temporal affairs I have to have my
i
’s dotted and my
t
’scrossed.” “Ahmed explained it,” she said. “As much as anyone can. He empathized with Jeroen.”

“C’était un poète, madame,”
the poor Arab, very dignified, had told her in the helicopter, choking out the words as he tried to raise himself on the stretcher. They had not realized then what had happened to his lung. He meant, apparently, that Jeroen had designed a poetic end for himself, like a Viking’s funeral. He had intended to go down with his ship ablaze.
“Il fallait tout détruire.”
All his plunder.
“C’etait un homme du Nord, vous savez. Je l’aimais beaucoup. Je l’ai compris. Même sa deuxième demande.”
To a Palestinian, she could see, NATO was not all that important, but Ahmed had gone along, knowing that to Jeroen his second demand meant everything.
“Mais les tableaux, Ahmed. Pourquoi?”
Like a muezzin, he repeated:
“Il fallait tout détruire, tout sacrifier.”
But Jeroen had loved the pictures, she protested, or at least the Vermeer. Why, then, destroy them? One must sacrifice what one loves, Ahmed had answered.
“Le geste sublime d’un grand révolutionnaire.”
Blood rose to his lips; he spat and before their eyes lost consciousness, falling back onto the stretcher.

The hostess reached across the Reverend and set a bourbon on Aileen’s tray, beside a plastic glass filled with ice-cubes. “Civilization,” Aileen commented, winking back a tear. “Poor Ahmed. I grieve for him, I must say.” She unscrewed the little bottle. “He was the only one in the end who didn’t want to kill us. Not counting Jeroen and Greet, of course.
That
was a surprise, wasn’t it? I mean, the change in Greet.” “We were all changed, Aileen. Don’t you sense it in yourself?” She considered. “Not really.” She raised her eyes to his and lifted her glass. “Cheers. No, I don’t feel changed and, frankly, I don’t notice any difference in you. We’re the same as ever. Maybe that says something. We’re the ones that nothing happened to, physically or morally.”

He was startled. His face fell. “That’s a harsh judgment, Aileen. And a snap judgment. You’ll learn better when you’ve digested this experience. I’m still struggling to encompass it myself. Maybe we both have a bit of ‘survivor guilt,’ which in your case leads you to fear that there may be a lack of depth in yourself if you’re alive and well when the others—” “There
is
a lack of depth and in you, too. Well, we have to live with that. We’re two-dimensional, Reverend.” “But, Aileen, surely you feel sorrow.” “Not much. Only superficially, like with our cuts. Yet you could say”—she laughed—“that I lost two matrimonial prospects in the great explosion. Did you know Archie was a widower? His wife died of cirrhosis of the liver. An alcoholic, isn’t that terrible?” “But who was the other? Why, good heavens, you must mean Jim. A great tragedy, that, and for the country. He had so much to give.” “He’d given it,” she said shortly. “There was nothing left. It was obvious. That page had already turned.”

Frank felt chilled. Women of her age with the misfortune of being childless could have an unnecessarily bald way of passing judgment. They drank for a time in silence. “After lunch,” said Aileen, brightening, “shall we look at Sophie’s journal? There’s not much left of it, but it will help pass the time.” Pages from Sophie’s notebook had been found in the rubble, blown to the four winds; the authorities had come upon a few, semi-intact, in the rabbit run. They had been turned over to Sophie after Aileen had identified them. “Poor Sophie,” Aileen said. “She wanted me to destroy them. But I made her see that they constituted a valuable document. Somebody might want to use them for a history of terrorism or she might use them herself if she decided to write a book about the polder events.” “That could be a good project for her,” Frank admitted. “If it didn’t stir up too many memories…With her handicap, I suppose she can dictate.” “I told her that. But she wants to be reeducated to do everything with her left hand; she even thinks she can learn to type with it.” “They have special keyboards,” Frank remembered. “So much is done nowadays to help victims of accidents to adjust to the machines we all depend on.” “Well, she’s brave,” Aileen said. “Wasn’t it strange to hear her laugh about the wooden arm she’d get with movable fingers?” Frank thought that she had been on a “high” that day from the opium or whatever it was they gave her: she had also spoken, gaily, of designing bathing dresses for herself that would have balloon sleeves and full skirts to go with them—she had always loved swimming, she told them.