IT WAS EARLY. IN THE distance the hollow metallic implosion of church bells marked the hour and from somewhere came the clang of a tram. The city was beginning to move. I lay on my back in the sleeping-bag for a while, resisting wakefulness, hoping to be reclaimed by sleep. When it was clear this wasn’t an option I opened my eyes and took in the room and the pale light at the window.
Slowly coming to consciousness, I gazed up at the high ceiling above me. For the first time I took it in properly: I saw a startling rococo extravagance of winged, naked Renaissance angels in flight, embossed in gold leaf. They formed a bright and luminous crescent looking down into the greyness of the small room. I sat bolt upright, my head back, scarcely breathing, just taking in what I recognised was yesterday’s faded splendour.
This discovery jolted me into doing something about the dreariness of my new quarters. I looked around, at the mattress on the floor, my few books beside it, and my clothes heaped untidily into my suitcase.
That weekend I bought some off-white paint (it was labelled “ivory” at the HEMA) and set about eliminating the grey pallor of the walls. I began by washing them down with sugar soap, or at least I tried to. The walls just seemed to soak up the suds. Frustrated, I watched the surface buckle under my wet cloth. Then I noticed a seam in the smoothness of the wall. I picked at it with my fingernails and suddenly a panel of wallpaper came loose in my hands. Underneath the plain wallpaper was another layer – this one a wheat colour with a pattern of fleur de lis embossed in gold velvet down the length of it. I was intrigued – how old exactly was this wallpaper and what did this heraldry signify? I kept going. Behind the wallpaper was a crumbling sheet of hessian and as I stripped more of the wallpaper away I saw that the hessian had been tacked onto beams, attached at intervals to the original irregular red-brown clay brickwork. When I ran my fingers over the surface they came away pink with dust. There was no way I was going to be able to paint the walls. Later, when M. came round to help me paint as he had promised, he was amazed at what I had done with the room, which was now stripped to roughly alternating panels of exposed brickwork and the fleur de lis wallpaper. Somehow the combination brought a dusty grandeur to the room. “A Renaissance boudoir,” said M. Instead of painting, he helped me scrub the wooden floors, which were black with age, and install a rail across the room to hang my clothes on. My suitcase I converted into a bedside table and surface on which to stack my books.
A few days later, driving a van borrowed from a friend of his, M. and I headed out into the wealthier suburbs in the south of Amsterdam. Here we picked up some rudimentary furniture from the grofvuil piled on the corners – an armchair, a standing lamp, a desk and a serviceable chair.
Slowly my room became habitable and it began to feel warmer. As I found things in the skips around the city, I added to the decor. I bought some prints of sixteenth-century Amsterdam at De Slegte in the Kalverstraat and put them on the wall beside my desk beneath the window. I had brought my typewriter from the store and this was where I now worked on my briefings, clattering away at the keys, time passing to the irregular cooing of the pigeons across the way.
There were perhaps fifteen people living at Singel 500. Most were students at the University of Amsterdam, which was only a few blocks away. If I had hoped to find companionship, however, it was not forthcoming. It was a curiously anonymous place, the occupants’ comings and goings marked by the creaking of floorboards and the nocturnal coursing of water in the building’s ancient pipes embedded in the walls. Occasionally I’d encounter someone in a passage or squeeze by them on the stairs and exchange a perfunctory greeting – “Hoi” or “Dag” – or when waiting to use the communal shower that had been installed in the attic. Here one would stand under the showerhead, soaping oneself in the always lukewarm water, with the lights of Amsterdam below, reflected through a filigree of cracks in the slanted floor-to-ceiling windows.
Once a week a meeting was held in the basement kitchen to discuss cleaning and repairs. There was usually a quiet social ease to these occasions but they sometimes became fractious when Bart, the chair, reported back from the leadership committee of the squatter movement, to which he had been elected as a delegate for Singel 500. He would provide details on buildings newly squatted, those that were under threat from knokploeg attack and how it was proposed that protection be provided. It was here, too, that differences emerged. Some of the residents favoured passive resistance; others argued for confrontation, for meeting violence with violence. It became clear to me by degrees that the squatter movement was ideologically riven. The anarchists were in control. As I attended more of these meetings I also began to notice the demography of the room. Social democrats and communists slouched in one corner on the sofa and armchairs around the coffee table. The anarchists, more purposeful and alert, gathered around the huge kitchen table. And others, like myself, undecided or bemused, hung back, leaning against the kitchen cupboards or walls.
Sometimes there would be beers and coffee afterwards. Some people were clearly friends already, their conversations given to intimacies or private jokes; others were more formal in their interactions, and protective of their independence. Their social lives were lived elsewhere. At these meetings I usually stayed close to Joyce, who lived across the passage from me. She had introduced herself outside the shower room one morning as I stepped out naked, embarrassed, trying to hold my skimpy towel around myself.
“Joyce,” she had said, proffering her hand.
“Matthew,” I’d replied, then added, “Joyce? That’s not a Dutch name.”
“It’s my squatter name,” she responded, before disappearing into the shower room.
Joyce had a cat named Mitzi, who was promiscuous in his affections. Sometimes I came home to find him sleeping on my mattress or sitting on my windowsill mewing in frustration at the pigeons across the well. I fed him when Joyce was away. She was studying law and also worked in a café to earn extra cash. Sometimes she’d bring home leftovers, which we’d share over a bottle of red wine in the basement kitchen. Mostly our interaction was confined to niceties. She showed no curiosity that I was a South African. She talked about the university, I about my work at Allegro. More a follower of the punk rock bands of the time, she had little interest in classical music, but she was warm and friendly and in the practised anonymity of the squat I needed that.