ONE DAY MAURITZ hit upon an idea. To his father’s chagrin, he joined the school dramatic society which met after school when the bullies had long since gone home. He enjoyed it, immersing himself in roles, escaping into character and the opportunity of a parallel life eliding the misery of his own. He relished taking on roles with masculine emphasis such as the street-wise tough boy in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and Romeo in Romeo and Juliet. The drama teachers were amazed at the transformation of this soft-voiced, shy boy, with his habit of sheltering deferentially behind his glossy black locks, who glanced off to his side when he was addressed, into a carefully crafted rendition of machismo.
What they did not realise, even as he became the star turn of the dramatic society – he was once profiled in the local newspaper – was that it was bitter parody. Mauritz was playing back to them all that he hated about the overtly masculine order of things, underpinned by the violence, as he saw it, in the sporadic beatings he received from his father, the aggression in the games and sports he was forced to take part in at school, and the posturing of the playground toughs.
It was in the dramatic society that he met Kees, the barman at Het Breekijzer. With unruly blond hair, a lithe body and skin smooth and pale where he pulled aside his school tie, Kees seemed to have an ever-present erection in the pocket of his grey flannels. They kissed backstage, hidden by the thick red velvet drapes of the heavy curtains, amazed at the sensation of each other’s tongues in mutual exploration, the sinuousness of each other’s bodies and the potent power of arousal.
If discovered, Mauritz was fully aware that this would have invited opprobrium, expulsion and more violence from his father. He was more convinced than ever that he did not belong in Eindhoven and so, when he had completed secondary school – achieving outstanding results in literature and history, mediocrity for the rest – he fled. He packed a haversack of clothes, books and music and took the train to the Sodom and Gomorrah of Amsterdam (which was what his father called the city) where he lost himself in the squatter movement.
I found Mauritz’s rage seductive. It was a constant, a febrile tension within his compact frame, a moistness – as though he was always close to tears – in his blue, blue eyes. For me it was a part of his beauty, this intensity of feeling. It drew out a protectiveness in me, a need to shield him, this fragile creature, from the world. It was the essence of my love for him.
Mauritz had his idiosyncrasies. They delighted me. He loved Brecht and pre-War German theatre. This meant a monthly excursion to De Bijenkorf, the huge department store on the Dam. Although I never let on to Mauritz, who despised the excesses of what he called “conspicuous consumption”, I loved the store’s brightly lit interior. On grey days in Amsterdam, a soft chill rain falling outside, I’d go to the café on the ground floor and read the newspapers over coffee. The huge chandeliers suspended in the height of the domed interior took the greyness from the day. The bookshop on the third floor was small but comprehensive in its range of new Dutch literature, which I could now read fluently. It also stocked a broad range of international magazines and it was here that Mauritz bought his expensive German cultural magazine that was published monthly.
One afternoon on the escalator rising up into the splendour of De Bijenkorf’s stacked merchandise, Mauritz seized me and kissed me passionately, his tongue deep in my mouth, searching out mine. I leaned up against him, taken by his sudden intensity. Then we were at the top of the escalator, needing to step off. Mauritz disengaged himself from me and, triumphant, looked around. If he expected outrage, there was none. Shoppers, mostly women, well dressed and well groomed, pushed past us, gazes averted, embarrassed rather than shocked. We stood at the top of the elevator, isolated, alone.
“Bourgeois trash!” Mauritz hissed under his breath.
At that moment I loved him utterly.
Mauritz and I were good for each other. I was engaged by the otherness of him, this brave, shining youth let loose on the streets of Amsterdam, profoundly damaged, deeply intriguing. He was equally intrigued by me, by my exile status, my reports from another front, as he saw it. He was incredulous at my experience, fascinated by my stories about South Africa. He would get animated and enraged. How could this be happening in the twentieth century, he would often ask rhetorically.
Mostly, though, he was a soul mate. Our lives worked well together: my intelligence work for the movement and his forays into the radicalism of the squatter movement. Clandestine worlds. Secrecy. We were both bred to it. With Mauritz there was none of Oliver’s cloying possessiveness. No drama. Ours was a loose commitment. Days might go by when we didn’t connect at all or, when we did, it would be late in the evening in a bar. Cold beers, jenevers, vodka with orange juice. Then, inebriated, our skin tingling for each other, we’d go to my room where we would have ecstatic sex. The next morning we’d indulge in some aspect of domesticity – coffee and an uitsmijter at a working-class café near the station, or simply weak black tea, Dutch style, and toast in my bed.
I loved him for this ease, this simple flow of our time.
Mauritz had studied art at school and he had told me he painted, although I had never seen any of his work. In cafés and bars he’d draw me caricatures of the patrons: effete preening boys comparing clothes, robust working-class women downing Heinekens, an elderly man with his dog. His sketches were witty, clever, not like my clumsy attempts. I pasted some of them on the wall beside my bed.
We had our differences, though. Mauritz did not so much hate classical music as associate it with the violent regime of his childhood home – the Sunday afternoons with his parents by the radio, listening to some classical repertoire, followed by an arbitrary beating from his father for some unknown misdemeanour. He could not listen to it. He allowed me my solitary attendance at the Concertgebouw on occasion, once to hear an exquisite rendition of Dvorak’s folk dances. I’d sit there in the stalls, taken up by the music, and feel a tug, an undertow, and recognise it as the absence of Oliver. I’d usually come away from the concerts with a profound feeling of sadness.
Mauritz’s anarchism led him to the outer edges of new music. He dragged me to a concert by Einstürzende Neubauten, a punk-influenced German band that eschewed instruments and whose repertoire was delivered through an orchestration of found industrial objects – sheets of metal, heavy pipes crafted from iron, oil-drums, clapboard, thick panes of glass. Through an ensemble of energetic percussion, they produced an enthralling, pounding, rhythmic, atonal symphony, apocalyptic and haunting in its portent of doom. I hated it.
At the bar in the dark confines of De Melkweg one evening Mauritz introduced me to his comrades from the squatter movement. They were all similarly dressed in cargo trousers and donkey-jackets or workmen’s coats. Many of them had the elaborate crested hairstyles of the punk generation. We exchange perfunctory handshakes, but their scatter-gun Dutch, heavily accented by the Amsterdam neighbourhoods from which they came, eluded me. I retreated to a seat high up in the bleachers and watched with sociological interest the way the audience engaged in dance, a concentration of truncated movement, limbs hugged close to themselves as if dealing with pain, hopping to the Neue Welle on the speakers, curling in on themselves.
Afterwards I told Mauritz that I found the music nihilistic and joyless.
“There is no joy in this world,” he answered. Mauritz was given to calculated nihilism.
Later back at my place I forced him to listen to Handel. After a while we fell into sex. When he had climaxed he lay back, sleep seeking to claim him, listening. “It makes me want to cry,” he said.