1 | MATTHEW

SO THIS IS EXILE, I thought – exile – a crude word, with its forbidding intimations of irredeemable separation, aloneness, angst.

I waited for Oliver at the bus station in Amsterdam. My closest friend, he had secured political asylum as a deserter from the South African Defence Force, and was now enrolled at the Utrecht Conservatory where he was completing the violin studies that the army and our fevered Cape Town life had interrupted. He was late. I stood in the mêlée of arriving passengers, nervous and disorientated amidst the snatches of a foreign language all around me.

A flock of black sparrows circled above, throwing a sudden shadow from a lucid sky. They settled, shrilling, in the great trees that shaded the canal in front of the station. The branches of the trees and the mass of neglected bicycles chained in an asymmetry of spokes and skewed handlebars to the railing of a bridge were coated with their droppings, white in the sun, like petrified snow. I imagined that the droppings were ancient, that the accumulated sediment was testimony to countless generations of sparrows whose daily wheeling marked the changing history of the city.

 

I had taken the discounted Luxavia flight from Johannesburg to Luxembourg, and then travelled by bus to Amsterdam from there, dozing intermittently all the way. I woke briefly in Gouda and, looking out of the window, encountered the curious sight of white workers laying sewage pipes in freshly dug ditches alongside the road. This was my first sleepily comprehended sign of life in a society where race did not determine every social interaction or division of labour.

Eventually Oliver arrived. His eyes were glistening behind his glasses, and we hugged each other wordlessly. The familiar sense of his slim body was immediately reassuring. Some of the nervousness in him had gone. In the space of less than a year he had metamorphosed into a clean-cut young man. His hairstyle conformed to what I would quickly recognise was the current fashion in Amsterdam: long, the full length of it swept back so that it fell thick, oiled and glossy over the back of his head. Had we not been exposed to the gaze of the city’s citizenry, I might have run my hand through it. The black-rimmed, thick-lensed glasses that had always given Oliver a myopic appearance had been replaced by a pair with thin, elegant, tortoise-shell frames. His skin still held the glow of a late summer.

He smiled at me. “Ready?” he asked.

Oliver introduced me to the city by stages, and gradually its streets lost their unfamiliarity. I soon stopped looking upwards, a Cape Town habit, where the famous mountain’s bulk always provided the means of navigation. A favourite place of ours became the tea garden in the Vondelpark, where tame sparrows fed on crumbs on the tables, oblivious of arms reaching for cups of tea or bottles of Amstel. There you could watch young dark Spanish and Italian tourists cruising blond Dutch boys, who pulled off their T-shirts to bask in the pale rays of the sun, despite the chill autumn air. The light on their skins, still golden from summer, gave the tea garden a mildly erotic charge.

And as if to confirm this undercurrent of the city’s life, one evening Oliver announced that he was taking me out.

“I want to show you my favourite watering hole,” he said.

With Oliver leading the way, we walked through crowded streets until we reached the Reguliersdwarsstraat, our destination. I realised with a start that we were in a street of gay bars. Men spilled out onto the street in a seamless press of bodies. Some couples kissed openly. I tried not to stop and stare. Oliver drew me through the throng and into the darkness of a bar called De Engel.

Looking at my companion with new eyes, I said, “Oliver, I never realised.”

“Neither did I,” he said.

I recalled our conversations in Cape Town about his asexuality as opposed to my “out” gayness.

“When did you decide?” I asked.

He laughed. “It wasn’t a question of deciding. It was more a case of taking sexuality out of the box I’d confined it to and dealing with it. It was just so much easier to do it here in Amsterdam. No national madness.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m pleased for you.”

I took his head in my hands and kissed him full on the lips. He blushed.

“Are you in love with anyone?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“You,” he answered.

He might as well have punched me. I was winded, without words.

Oliver laughed again. “I was in love with you,” he said, “when you rescued me from the streets of Cape Town. You were different from other men. So easily intimate. But when I saw how embroiled you were with Hudson – how could you stand him? – I buried it. I buried it there, along with all my other secrets.”

Paul Hudson. He was referring to my politically austere former lover, whom I had lost to a prison sentence back in South Africa. It seemed improbable that I would see him again, or at least not for a long time, and in fact our short, alcohol-fuelled affair was fading into memory. Charged though it had been with the discoveries of first sex, our homosexuality, and the furtiveness of the political underground, after Paul’s arrest I had forced myself to focus on the starker choices confronting me, one of which was to follow Oliver into exile to escape conscription into the military. Since arriving in Amsterdam I had allowed the detail of our relationship to blur into indistinctness. Surprisingly, I had not found it too difficult.

Oliver hesitated. “Can I stand you to a double Johnnie Walker?”

“Probably best not to,” I said. “Since I saw you last I’ve been trying to clean up my act.”

Oliver’s blue eyes smiled at me from behind his glasses. “This is a city made for decadence …”

“For old times’ sake then,” I conceded.

“For old times’ sake.”

As I watched Oliver turn to the bar, the iced amber sensation of the whisky was already on my tongue, triggered by memory. He came back with two glasses and we went out onto the street and into the throng of men. I sipped the whisky. It was heavenly.

“And now?” I said to Oliver. “How do you feel now? About us?”

He held my gaze steadily. “Oh,” he said, “we should be friends.”

I felt a pang of regret. “To friendship,” I said, raising my glass, setting the ice clinking.

“To friendship.”

I looked around. Some of the men I could see had rolled up their shirtsleeves. The last rays of sunlight, soft on their skin, glinted in the amber bottles they held in their hands. Many were blond and blue-eyed, betraying their maritime ancestry. Others were dark, southern, Catholics perhaps? Across from me two men were kissing with feeling. They had their arms around each other and their eyes were closed. I thought of Paul, of his soft mouth, the tang of cigarette smoke in his clothes. Was it possible that we had once kissed like that? It all seemed distant now, almost beyond the grasp of memory, like a photograph bleached by the sun.

In the late afternoon sunshine they moved me, those two men. They seemed iridescent, so radiantly young. Oliver saw me looking. Our eyes met and he smiled.