2 | MATTHEW

IN THOSE FIRST MONTHS, as autumn became my first European winter, I lived with Oliver in his fourth-floor apartment on the edges of De Pijp, the city’s migrant quarter. The apartment looked out over a gracht. Like most of the buildings in the crowded architecture of this part of Amsterdam, in their serried asymmetry of ancient grey and red brickwork, his block was tall, deep and narrow. The apartment itself was small. It was a single room, L-shaped. Under the high window, framed by the skeletal black branches of an elm tree denuded of leaves, was a stained, faded sofa, a grofvuil find, and this was where I slept. There was not much else – a table and music stand, a tall shelf stacked with Oliver’s music scores and an ageing cassette tape player with rudimentary, outmoded speakers, and a turntable.

Oliver had curtained off the recess as his bedroom. Opposite was a kitchen galley and, beside it, a dank, cramped shower room.

A wooden jenever crate held Oliver’s collection of music, the tapes and LPs carefully categorised by period and composer, each labelled in his neat hand. For this was what he had become, beloved Oliver. Ordered and absorbed, dapper in his clothing, quintessentially calm. In South Africa as a military deserter he had lived a furtive life. Although we – I and my activist friends – had sheltered him in our bohemian communal house, he had found no succour in the dogma of our politics and had existed on a strain of apprehensiveness and alienation.

Our lives, of necessity, were constricted. Paul, my lover, was a banned person. Under the terms of his banning order he could meet with only one other person at a time. The front curtains of our house were permanently drawn against the surveillance of the security police car parked opposite. The publications we produced for the student movement were routinely prohibited, our offices periodically raided and our pickets and demonstrations broken up. On occasion a colleague would disappear into detention. So life had its edge and a claustrophobic lack of ordinariness. Seeing Oliver now, in his new environment, brought home to me even more forcefully just how out of his element he must have been.

Here Oliver seemed whole, comfortable with the daily certainties of European city life, its small routines of shopping in the neighbourhood, which was fragrant with the scents of Turkish bakeries and grocery shops with their stacks of flat-bread and Levantine fruits piled in baskets on the pavements.

He had learnt to speak a sparse but heavily accented Dutch, swallowing back the guttural pulse of the language and eliding the sharp consonants – as I later would, but in my case underscored by an atavistic longing for the soft eases of English, a resistance to becoming Dutch.

Despite the cramped confines of the apartment, we lived in easy intimacy. We kept the place neat, I out of deference to the new, ordered Oliver and he out of habit. I kept my clothes in the single suitcase with which I had arrived and folded my sheets and blankets away each day on rising. My small store of books and English-language newspapers I pushed under the sofa.

Despite its sparseness, its wooden furnishings unadorned and burnished by use, the room had an interior warmth. There was a Turkish rug, patterned in red and black, on the wooden floorboards. A throw with similar patterning covered my sofa during the day. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling, although we saved on electricity by lighting the space with candles against the winter gloom. There were no pictures on the walls – I wanted to change that – but always a bowl of flowers on the table, a concession to colour and artifice.

At night I’d hear the creaking of Oliver’s bed behind his screen as he turned in his sleep, and the gentle, slowly altering register of his breathing as he settled back into the bedclothes. I found it comforting.

Oliver had constructed a new life in Amsterdam, that most beautiful of cities. And I did find it beautiful. The water in the grachten glinted in the raw sunshine, framed by elm trees whose ancient girth loomed over the cobbled streets and the tall gabled buildings of old. From everywhere came the whirr of bicycle wheels, a sound almost as insistent as that of the summer cicadas hidden in trees in the country of our childhood.

On weekends we trawled the streets, imitating the apparent aimlessness of Amsterdam’s citizens, buying the English newspapers (or in Oliver’s case, BBC Music) and reading them over coffee in the dimly lit bars – a thread of civility and warmth in the fabric of the busier city. There was no limit, it seemed, to the time one might spend in these places, progressing from coffees to beers chased down by astringent jenevers that burned the throat but warmed the body for the chill of the streets, the afterglow merging into the mild conviviality and the gentle social rhythms that seemed to mark life in Amsterdam.

Oliver inducted me into this new pace of things. Sometimes we’d just stroll the streets together, stopping in a bookshop or one of several second-hand music stores. Oliver had struck up relationships with the sales staff in these stores, who were all music aficionados, many of them students like he was from the music school at the Utrecht Conservatory. They knew his tastes and predilections and would often keep new arrivals or unusual recordings for him. Sometimes they’d converse intimately over the counters; sometimes Oliver would lose himself in a corner booth, the music piped through headphones, oblivious to the passing of time.

The sun dropped early here and the streetlights would come on. Water and soft lights combined to make the inner city, with its burnished red-brick buildings, quite ethereal.

On our way home we’d usually traverse the kilometre long Albert Cuyp market, which appeared to sell everything from live eels to bicycles. The sour, salted scent of pickled herring hung in the air. From the market we’d buy Turkish bread, humus and olives for our evening meal.

As it grew dark we’d window shop, marvelling at the displays of the local florist, which stocked scarlet roses imported from Turkey, and which dazzled with light in the winter dullness. We’d walk home through the Sarphatipark, sometimes linking fingers in oblivious intimacy. In the greater darkness of the park the water of the lake could be discerned only through the faint sounds of a rippling in the reeds as small waves were driven across its surface by the ever-present chill breeze.

It was a life of predictable rhythms, completely unlike the darker pulses of South African urban life, with its heat, its underlying political tension, the houses shuttered against intruders, the density of the aggressive, urgent traffic on the roads. In contrast, Amsterdam’s streets teemed with pedestrians, people engaging in careless conversation, leaning into prams, wheeling their bicycles and shopping trolleys over the cobbled pavements, running for trams in an improbable – or so it seemed to me – democracy of the streets.

But although these were Oliver’s regular pursuits in his new country, they were not his sole attachments. He also had a life to which I was not privy. In the morning, wrapped in a scarf and coat against the cold, he’d leave early for his courses at the Conservatory. Usually, I would sleep through his departure, and he was always solicitous, holding the door against its spring so that it did not bang when he left.

No doubt he had friends at the Conservatory, perhaps among the coterie of devotees to Shostakovich’s angular music, but he didn’t tell me much about them. Sometimes he’d mention names, social constants that recurred in everyday conversation about the music school, but in the apartment in De Pijp we were alone. No one called. He met no others for drinks in the evening bars. It was just us two.