SUMMER HAD ARRIVED with startling suddenness. The previous weeks had been grey and wet but in the past few days the temperature had risen by ten degrees. There was birdsong in the streets and the leaves of the grand elms along the Ceintuurbaan shimmered and danced.
Mauritz and I lay on the grass in the Vondelpark, soaking up the sun, as were thousands of Amsterdammers like us. With the advent of warm weather everyone had taken to the parks – and even traffic islands – with their deck-chairs and blankets, and people lay worshipping the sun in states of near unconsciousness, celebrating that the seemingly endless winter was over. They made an occasion of it: there were picnic hampers, bottles of chilled white wine coming out, children playing in the spray of the fountain, shrieking wildly. On the bandstand by the lake a rock band had started up. Doors standards, but translated into Dutch.
“God, that’s awful,” I remarked to Mauritz.
“Shut up,” he said. “Enjoy the sun. Watch the clouds.”
I laughed. Mauritz had taken off his shirt and was spread-eagled on the grass, trying to entice some colour into his skin. He was so beautiful, I thought, lying there, completely at peace.
Looking around me I was struck by how carelessly complacent we were back in South Africa where the sun was simply there in the sky just about every day.
Today it was a little bit humid and I was sweating. So was Mauritz. A rivulet of moisture travelled down his collar-bone. I followed its progress with my finger and arrived at his nipple, a corrugation almost black against his fine pale skin. I ran my fingers over it.
“Stop it,” he implored. “You’re making me horny.”
“How unusual,” I responded and he chuckled. “Fuck it,” I said. I leaned into him and tongued his nipple.
Mauritz sat upright, gasping, completely waking from his somnolence. “We can’t fuck here!”
“Who said anything about fucking?”
I closed over him, pulling him to me. A layer of sweat formed between our skin. We lay there, lazy in the sun. His body was an imprint against mine. After a while I drifted off into sleep.
Later, when the sun was starting its descent, we strolled across to the tea garden. It was full, animated with sun worshippers who now had the same thing in mind as we did. We ordered cold beers and sank back down onto the grass. Wispy white clouds passed overhead and a column of ducks, intent on a pond, made their way over the lawn.
This was the day Mauritz began to tell me about his life.
He was born and brought up in Eindhoven, a modern industrial town established in the early 1960s and the base of electronics multinational Philips, which had brought TV and modern appliances to Holland’s burgeoning social democracy. The houses there were post-War, modern and uniform – two bedrooms, a bathroom and a laundry – with a pocket-sized garden behind. They were all set in culs-de-sac planted with islands of conifers. They were the engineered achievement of a working class content with itself, a petit bourgeoisie in the making.
Mauritz’s family were Calvinists, the descendants of the austere, hardworking labourers who had built the North Sea Canal – in the midst of frozen winds and icy water that numbed them, and numbed their resentment – and the dykes that prevented the aggressive sea from overwhelming the mainland. They lived by God and necessity and had now arrived, after the War, in a place less harsh. Order – that was all. His parents were pillars of the community, his father an electrical engineer and well regarded in the factory, and his mother a housewife. The rules in his home were clear. You lived by decorum and no excess. You lived by the Lord. That was all.
In Eindhoven on Sundays the church bells rang out on the hour. The order of the day, the solemnity of it, began with the family attending the morning service. Afterwards they would walk home and then, at 11 o’clock, repair to the living room, where coffee was passed around in small cups, followed by the biscuittrommel. Each family member was allowed a small biscuit or piece of cake and then the trommel was returned to its place in the sideboard. On the wall a clock – an heirloom – ticked away the hours. Then the small talk began. The details of neighbourhood life were discussed and little witticisms exchanged, but nothing that smacked of gossip, nothing too risqué or uncharitable. The clock on the wall ticked on and on. Then later the lunch – broiled beef, steamed potatoes, a sour cabbage salad. That was about it. Modesty, self-sacrifice, order. These were the things they lived by.
The sill of the living room window overlooking the street was planted up with nondescript waxy-leaved plants which gave bloom sporadically. The curtains were never drawn so that passers by could look in on their domesticity and admire the neat, orderly room and its furnishings. The hand-embroidered lace anti-macassars on the arms of the sofas and chairs were his mother’s especial pride.
Mauritz was the youngest child, the first son in a family of three daughters, and regarded as the future scion, but he knew from a very young age that he was a disappointment to his father. His effeminate mannerisms, his interest in the arts and music, his preference for the company of his sisters instead of other boys – each of these his father saw as the deficits of his masculinity. His ineptitude at football, where he was always hanging off to the side, avoiding the visceral, muscular confrontation of the game, made his father particularly angry.
He demonstrated his anger regularly, marching his son up the stairs to the zolder of the house, where old paint tins and redundant furniture and clothes that had been outgrown were stored. Here his father’s perverse ritual of punishment was to order Mauritz to strip off his shirt, after which he laid about the boy’s bared shoulders and trunk with a barber’s razor strap, beating him into corners, forcing him to shelter behind stacked piles of suitcases. I imagined the welts, flaring red and violet on his immaculate skin. I imagined him cowering, whimpering. I wanted to hold him, to make it good.
Life was frugal in Mauritz’s household. His parents neither drank nor smoked. They visited restaurants only to celebrate birthdays. They did not partake of Eindhoven’s cultural life, limited as it was, but listened instead to classical music concerts on the radio. They shunned magazines and read only the conservative daily, De Telegraaf. The children were not allowed pets.
School was little different. Each day would start with a Bible reading, a service and hymns in the school gym. The boys and girls were segregated as they queued to go into class, and they were seated at separate desks. The teachers were disciplinarian, didactic. Much of the study was by rote. As he grew older and passed through the grades, for Mauritz there was some solace to be found in Dutch literature, art and history, and the teachers of these subjects were more empathetic. He spent a lot of time in the local library, where he buried himself in the novels of Jan de Hartog and Harry Mulisch. In the writings of Gerard van het Reve he recognised himself as a boy who might love men. He read secretly in the park across the road from his house, lest his father, who had strong views on the decadence and immorality of modern Dutch literature, find another reason to beat him. He also immersed himself in the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust and occasionally wondered if his father might have been one of those people who had stood by as Dutch Jews were sealed off into ghettos and then transported to the concentration camps.
But it was the history of the Dutch Resistance that resonated most strongly with him. The strike by the workers of Amsterdam against the deportation of the Jews in the streets around Waterlooplein, and the role of the Dutch communists in sabotage against the Nazi occupation he found especially compelling. From there he had gone on to an exploration of left-wing and radical politics, finding in anarchism the answers to his rage and a means to counter what he saw as the petit bourgeois smugness of Dutch society.
At school the wide boys in the playground deemed Mauritz effete, mocking him as a flicker, a homo. They tripped him up in the corridors, pushed him under cold showers in the change room, and even put out their illegal cigarette butts on the skin of his upper arms when they had dragged him behind the bicycle shed. A greasy-haired thug once forced him to his knees and pushed his crotch into his face, shouting, “Suck it, suck it!” while his friends laughed. Mauritz had managed to struggle free. To avoid these confrontations he spent school breaks in the library, but out on the streets when he was cycling home he was easy prey, often toppled from his bicycle, and having to contend with empty cans and beer bottles being hurled at him. He would seek out longer and ever more circuitous routes, circling the industrial plants on the outskirts of Eindhoven, just to get home safely.