STRANGELY ENOUGH, IT was Mandla who came to the rescue when I mentioned that I was looking for a place to live. The shortage of accommodation in Amsterdam was acute and a month on Janneke’s sofa had not improved my mood. She said I was welcome to stay while she went off to an auction of a deceased estate in Belgium; Wim and Toon told me to make things right with Oliver and go back to the apartment. I knew I couldn’t do either. The break with Oliver caused me a great deal of pain, but I knew that the hurt I was causing him was far worse and it haunted me.
M. was a Dutch comrade from the anti-apartheid movement and Mandla arranged for us to meet in the rooftop garden of his squat early one evening after work. The roof garden was utilitarian. There were a couple of deck-chairs and a coffee table, from which the varnish was rapidly flaking, revealing a dull grey sheen beneath. The gable of the building loomed over us, buttressed by a series of heavy beams propped diagonally against the structure. Over the centuries the ancient buildings in the district had slipped and leaned, coaxed into angular asymmetry by the shifting of the piles driven into the sea bed on which this inner core of the city was built. Indeed, in this part of the city facades listed dangerously, door and window frames skewed into hexagons, as if defying the city’s gravitational pull.
A potted bruidsluier had taken hold of a beam here on the rooftop and the thick stem snaked up the wooden expanse, its spring leaves a radiant lime-green in the sunlight striking off the top of the gable. In the lower stems I could see a dusting of delicate white blossoms. The ubiquitous grey pigeons that flocked on Dam Square during the day and roosted in the rough gaps of the brickwork of the gables in the evening set up a rhythmic cooing above us.
But the real magic of the spot was the view. From high up above the streets and canals and the green of new leaves on all the elm trees, the city gleamed below us. It was a beautiful sight. The symmetry of the grachtengordel was etched into shadow cast by the foliage – four canals the mezza luna of the city’s inner core with the shining copper spire of the Central Station at its apex, and then the black water of the North Sea Canal and the docks with their geometry of cranes and behind them the dark hulks of ships.
M. thought my habit of drinking jenevers with fresh orange juice was bizarre. “That’s what vodka is for,” he said. “Jenevers are chasers – like so.” He gulped down the entire contents of his shot-glass and slammed it down on the table. Then he took a long sip from his glass of wit bier. “Delicious!” he declared.
The two of us had all but drained a six-pack of Hoegaarden and Bols jenever in its distinctive terracotta clay bottle. M. had laid out a platter of Dutch-style snacks – strips of komijnekaas dipped in Dijon mustard and slices of osseworst; like Tartar Americain, its subtle peppery aftertaste was addictive. I followed M.’s example and knocked back a shot-glass of Bols, then took a hefty swig of Hoegaarden. My head swam; it was a surprisingly strong combination.
“Jesus – this could get you into trouble!” I said.
“Hence the weaving bicycles when the bars close for the night,” M. answered, smiling.
M. had spent the last couple of hours explaining the rituals of the Amsterdam squatter movement to me. There was a desperate shortage of accommodation in the city, as I had discovered, especially for students and young people who could not afford rents in privately owned buildings. The public housing stock was vastly over-subscribed. The city council had invested little in new accommodation. The average current waiting period for housing was two years.
Property developers speculating on slow rises in the value of properties had bought buildings across the city but allowed them to stand empty because renting them out embroiled them in the complex laws favouring tenants. The council, its budget constrained, might board up public housing rather than renovate it. It was in response to this speculatie that the squatter movement had arisen. People took occupation of these empty buildings and also, with shipping in decline, on the Entrepotdok and the eastern outreaches of the harbour, in the many old abandoned warehouses.
They turned them into communes. This was largely how radical youth and students found a way to stay in the city. A squatters’ movement of some several thousand people committed to defending their space had grown rapidly.
“You need,” said M., “to know what you are letting yourself in for.”
Owners tried to use the law to evict the squatters but for this they needed the name of an illegal occupant. In the movement, therefore, everyone used only their first names or even – as M. called it – a nom de guerre (“Hence my name M. Short, simple.”). Eviction attempts were no joke, M. said. Some of the owners hired private detectives to follow squatters. You might find one behind in you in the queue at the post office as you collected your mail or were depositing a cheque. They would be trying to read your surname off the deposit slip. Or else they would try to get hold of your mail, finding on your bills or your personal correspondence the vital information that was needed to serve an eviction order against you. “So it is a life of … of a kind of subterfuge. You need to be aware of who might follow you. Be wary of someone calling your place of study, for example, to try to elicit your name. There is a need for vigilance.”
I couldn’t help but be struck by the irony – the subterfuge of my interaction with Mandla and the cells in South Africa and now the need to do the same here. Well, I was well schooled in subterfuge. I was sure I could cope.
“M.,” I said, “I think these are things I can deal with.”
“Okay,” he said, “but then there is the physical danger.”
“What?” I had had my fill of physical danger.
He went on to explain how, when the owners’ legal recourse failed – and the tenaciousness and good strategy of the squatters’ movement made this likely – the less scrupulous among them would hire knokploegs to do their dirty work. These were anonymous gangs of burly hard men who, for a price, would simply invade a squat, kick down the doors if need be, and manhandle the squatters onto the streets. Then they would rip out the electrical wires, weld the valves of the water supply shut, and board up the building with heavy sheets of plywood. They were usually armed with clubs and weren’t afraid of using them to maximum effect.
But the squatters, M. said, were well organised. Whenever a squat was under threat they would rally, turning out in numbers to confront the knokploegs. There had been many such confrontations in the city in the last few months and the success rate of keeping the knokploegs at bay was impressive. The squatter movement was rooting itself in Amsterdam. It was becoming a political force to be reckoned with, one that was highlighting the failure of the council to house its citizens.
M. was passionate about the cause and I think expected me to be more enthusiastic than I might have been. But the more I listened to him and tried to absorb what he was telling me, the more alone I felt. I missed Oliver. I missed home.