IT WAS A LATE SUNDAY afternoon. At the Central Station the arriving trains all had snow-capped roofs, the harbinger of deep winter still to come. Oliver and I had returned from the city, first stopping, as had become our habit, in the Ankara, the Turkish restaurant on the street below the apartment, to buy an assortment of meze for dinner.
Oliver had pulled up a chair and was absorbed in practising scales on his violin, stopping only occasionally to sip from a glass of red wine. I lay back on the sofa beneath the window, drinking jenevers diluted with orange juice, as we had been doing in the bars earlier in the day. From my initial reticence when I’d first arrived in Amsterdam, I was drinking regularly again, but I was keeping it under control. This evening, though, sobriety had left me and I was pleasantly lulled by Oliver’s repetition of scales. I felt completely at peace. Candles blurred the edges of the room. I contemplated Oliver leaning over his violin in concentration, his dark hair catching the muted, mustard light. The skin on his neck and in the recesses of his collar-bone gleamed like pale treacle. He was beautiful, sometimes, Oliver, this newly European man.
I turned and gazed out of the window into the darkness. Moisture was condensing on the panes, trickling down the full length of the glass. The heavy wooden frames of the ancient sash windows, rickety and buckled, had been pulled shut. Oliver kept the gaps plugged with newspaper to trap the warmth inside, which was mainly produced by the small metal gas kachel in the centre of the room. As we did with the electricity, we also rationed the gas to save on his student stipend. He checked every evening to make sure the stops of coarse paper in the frames had stayed in place.
It was very dark outside, a damp, concentrated blackness that hugged the city streets. The elms were barely visible, save for a lime green scattering of phosphorescence where a branch hung low over the streetlight below. But across the gracht the grey-brick exteriors of the apartments opposite were a geometric honeycomb of light, the uncurtained interiors of De Pijp’s apartments blazing with old chandeliers, candles, oil lamps and naked bulbs. Mediated by the movement of branches, the light fell refracted in densely patterned filigree, gold and ruby-hued, in the dark, still water of the gracht.
The street below our apartment was deserted except for a man walking a dog on a leash, both of them breathing clouds of white vapour.
Behind me Oliver ceased his scales. I turned. He was packing his violin into its case. I watched him as he went over to the shelf and inserted a tape into the cassette player. Costa Diva. Callas. The rich haunting timbre of her voice filled the room. Oliver turned the volume down slightly. The plaster walls in these old buildings were thin and fibrous with age, and the neighbours were only feet away. He poured himself another glass of the blood-red wine. I turned back to the window. A wave of languor swept over me.
Below, a swan, startlingly white against the black current of the gracht, came into view. It cut a razor trail of light through the ebony water as it sailed along. The motion set up a ripple and the pattern of light in the water swayed and then broke up into sequins. Then, as the ripples receded, the surface returned to the stasis in the previous symmetry.
“Do you miss South Africa?” Oliver asked.
The question startled me from my musing. Why had he asked that question, now, after I had been in Amsterdam more than a month? Perhaps this afternoon when we had dropped into the Bruna bookshop on the Leidsestraat on our way home, he had noticed me browsing the small foreign-language section at the back, seeking out new titles from Africa. But that had less to do with homesickness than finding something to read that I could understand. Or was I out of touch with my emotions? Had Oliver divined something unplumbed from my couch-bound listlessness?
“Not especially,” I answered. “It’s a relief to have left. Anyhow, if I’d stayed I would now be in an army uniform illegally invading Angola or in jail for refusing to serve. Not great options. I couldn’t do what you did, Oliver, when you took yourself out of the army. I couldn’t run or hide, like you did. I don’t have the same mettle.”
Oliver didn’t say anything. I heard him strike a match to light a cigarette.
“I love this city now, or at least I think I do,” I said. “I love the calm, the absence of fear.” I looked down at the retreating swan. “And you?” I asked him.
“What?” Oliver replied, confused.
“South Africa,” I said. “How do you feel about it now?”
“I hate the place!” he said with vehemence. “I will never go back. It’s brutal. Europe is my home.”
I did not want to argue with him. We were different people. In exile, even though I had only been in Amsterdam for a relatively short time, I acknowledged a feeling of rootlessness and I missed the cloak of identity that activism had given me. I felt the tug of my own country and, truthfully, something about Oliver’s fierce alienation dismayed me. But it wasn’t a strong tug yet, and we shared enough for friendship.
I sighed and knocked back another jenever. “Let’s leave it there, Ol,” I said.
Oliver noticed. He turned up the Callas. I smiled across at him. He came over to me with his glass of wine and sank into the couch beside me. I lay against him and after a minute allowed my head to sink into his lap. He ran his fingers through my hair. I closed my eyes and listened to the music.