OLIVER’S QUESTION HAD disconcerted me all the same. He had been here for almost a year and stepped into the scholarship to study the violin for which he had always longed. It was a resolution for him. He was an habitué. By imitating the citizenry he had begun to belong. He was anchored, his life shaped by the routines of study and familiarity with Amsterdam’s labyrinth of curving canals and streets, what I saw as the city’s lack of geometry.
During the day when I was on my own and left to my own devices I would quickly lose my way when I went out walking. I would get confused by the curvature of the grachten, the lack of squared-off corners that linked streets. I’d stand at a hemispherical street junction turning my tourist map this way and that trying to find the angle that would bring it all into perspective. Instead I lost myself, discovering the city randomly.
If I missed South Africa, it was not in a visceral way. I had stopped thinking, being content just to exist. For the first time in my life I had no choices to make. I was in limbo, stateless. I was not allowed to work until my refugee status was granted and I knew that that could take months. I had no idea what my future would be, whether, like Oliver, I would study or whether I would find work. And after the urgencies of politics back home, I had grown to enjoy it, this lack of responsibility, the freedom to wander without obligation, no claim on me other than Oliver’s friendship, no imperatives to political action, no lover’s sexual compulsion, no order to the day.
I survived on my bijstand which, pooled with Oliver’s student stipend, allowed us the occasional meal downstairs at the Ankara or in an Indonesian eatery, with the luxuriousness of a rijstafel, now and then a bottle of whisky, or a throw from a Third World shop that would further brighten our home.
At the free classes of Council-sponsored Dutch language lessons I attended, my classmates were an unhappy collection of Eritreans, Indonesians, Turks, Moroccans, Hungarians and Poles. Before the start of each lesson we drank strong Dutch filter coffee and without a common unifying language we engaged in a monosyllabic, stilted conversation of meaningless social niceties.
The course had originally been designed for Turkish migrants. We would repeat sentences of stupefying simplicity like “Ik ben Osman; ik woon in De Pijp” over and over again until our instructor was satisfied with our intonation. He was a long-suffering man. Over coffee one day he confided to me, “At least you are a genuine refugee. These Poles are car thieves and the rest are economic migrants trying to get onto bijstand.”
His cynicism startled me. He was a type I would later come to recognise more readily once I was more familiar with the country – jaded by Dutch liberalism and the welfare state, resigned to high taxation and the fall of the inner city to the corrosive decay of ethnic minorities.
I found no meaning at the classes in spite of the implicit solidarity we might have had. Mostly I left as soon as the coffee had warmed me. I was also drinking too much. The winter disconcerted me. Not so much the chill, which could be invigorating, but the gloom, the way the clouds pressed in low and sealed out the light. I comforted myself with the odd bright, cold, clear days when a watery sun hung over the city. On these days I would spend as much time as I could outdoors in this clarity of light, wandering under the black branches of the trees in the Vondelpark.
“You stop noticing after a while,” Oliver had told me once when I brought up the subject of winter with its low, dark sky, which I regularly did in the beginning. “It becomes a part of the background, of life here. It’s an interior life really, most of the year. People take refuge in socialising, in culture, in perfecting their homes. It’s relieved by spring and summer, which can be beautiful if the rain holds off. There is nothing more perfect than a European spring, Matt, you’ll see.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said moodily. I did not believe him.
When the cold started creeping in under the charcoal secondhand coat I had bought at the Waterlooplein market, I took refuge in the bruin cafés, where I sat drinking jenevers and trying to make sense of the Dutch newspapers. These were kept in hanging wooden racks, attached to rods, and you could take them down and read them while you drank. Otherwise I watched the ubiquitous football matches on the television sets, played out on icy fields under bright stadium lights, the players slipping and scudding, emerging scuffed and mud covered to play on. I understood nothing and took my cues from the locals, who cheered, thumped the bar or groaned according to their loyalties.
From these bars I would emerge numbed and make my way back to De Pijp, asking directions along the way, playing the role of lost tourist. Once home I would sink into the sofa and listen to Oliver practising his scales.
I was only beginning to come to terms with what it meant to be in exile. Thus far it was meaningless, arbitrary meandering through a city.
I was aware that there was an anti-apartheid movement in the Netherlands, but only vaguely. One afternoon I encountered a demonstration – a surprisingly large group – on Dam Square. There was a big banner denouncing the Dutch prime minister, Dries van Agt: “VAN AGT’S BELEID, LAF BELEID. SANCTIES TEGEN ZUIDAFRIKAANS MOORDREGIEM NU.” Van Agt’s policy is a coward’s policy; sanctions against the murderous South African regime now. My heart lurched. Suddenly here was some evidence of my homeland. I took a leaflet from one of the demonstrators. From my limited grasp of the Dutch it seemed concerned with some lapse of Dutch foreign policy on South Africa that amounted to appeasement of the apartheid regime.
The crowd began chanting, their animation and noise disturbing the pigeons on the square, which ascended in an untidy dark flurry, circling over the cobbles in several loops before relocating to the slate-grey tiles of De Nieuwe Kerk, the tall graceful cathedral that loomed over the northern edge of the Dam.
The possibility of finding kindred spirits or at least being able to discuss South Africa, have some news of home, made me look at the demonstrators more closely, but the spark of expectation was extinguished as quickly as it had flared. In fact I was intimidated by the group. There was something studied, liturgical even, about the chanting. It lacked emotion, withheld a more primal identification.
“Hun strijd onze strijd! Internationale solidariteit!” Your struggle is our struggle. International solidarity!
And indeed, as I later became part of the city’s political life, attending demonstrations in solidarity with Third World struggles, I encountered many of the same activists, chanting the same slogans with the same studied duty, never mind the cause. The cause didn’t seem as important as the ritual massing.
At the back of the demonstration was the banner of the FNV, the trade union federation, and in the ranks of protesters I could see a few men who looked like they could be genuine workers, in the charcoal overalls of stevedores from the black cold-water docks to the north. But most of them were younger people. It seemed that the counter-culture of the mid 1970s still lingered in Amsterdam. They were all long haired and dressed in the ubiquitous jeans of the time, baggy jumpers or shapeless anoraks, and sheltering in Palestinian keffiyehs for warmth, their footwear heavy Doc Martens. Some had a seemingly deliberately constructed bulky scruffiness. Provocative unkemptness worn as a badge of honour.
An image floated up in front of me of the street protests in Cape Town the year before, during the uprisings of 1976, of the struggle songs, the deep resonance of the males’ bass undertone, the ululation of the women above, the emotional tug of the song echoing between the buildings … “Senzenina, Senzenina” … And the way the youths had danced, taunting the police lines, gesticulating at the snarling bared-fanged Alsatians straining at their leashes. A choreography of courage, it was beautiful.
Frankly, this noisy demonstration here on the Dam was ugly. There was no heart to it. Suddenly I was seized by a pang of emotion. It shot sharply through me, a visceral pain in my chest. I recognised it for what it was: I was longing for home.
A man at the edge of the demonstration hoisted a megaphone and began making a speech. A small group of onlookers gathered to listen. What he was actually saying, in rapid Dutch, which I heard as strident and coarse, eluded me.
I retreated into De Nieuwe Kerk. The vaulted ceiling arched high over the wooden pews below and in the vestibules votive candles glowed in the gloom. In the recesses stood marble statuettes of saints, and on one wall was a large Renaissance painting of Christ, abject in his near nakedness, his face constricted in pain. In a vestibule below, I lit a candle for Paul, in prison back in South Africa, and for my friends’ subterfuge lives there.
An organist was practising a section of Handel’s Messiah with the choir for the Easter Mass. I stood in the cool grey light of the cathedral, absorbed by the music. The deep male voices resonated in the dark vaulted space.
Suddenly I found myself weeping.
And that was how it began. It arrived, my sense of disquiet, uninvited and unexpected, in the middle of a clear cold day with a hint of spring in the air. I began to sense that, by coming to Amsterdam, I had made a terrible mistake.