39 | MATTHEW

MANDLA WAS NOT impressed by my recounting of the skirmishes around Herengracht 51. In fact he was suddenly angry – an emotion I had not yet encountered in him – and was swift to admonish me.

“M. has told me about this,” he said. “Are you a complete amateur? Do you want to compromise your refugee status? Do you want to compromise this – our work?” He pointed to the papers spread out on the table in front of us. We were meeting in the Paramaribo and he had ordered mojitos. “Matthew,” he said, “this is an anarchist movement, using violence against a democratic state.”

I interrupted him, but I felt cowed all the same. “Only one strand of it is anarchist,” I protested. “It is a broad-based movement.”

“But the anarchists set the tone,” he said sternly. “Don’t you think that it is under surveillance by Dutch intelligence? They are watched. You will be watched too.”

The image of the exploding petrol bomb came into my mind; and of the plainclothes cops who had emerged from the crowd of shoppers to snatch a squatter leader and bundle him into car.

Mandla went on. “We don’t want you to be the subject of interest by the Dutch; it is enough of a problem staying off the radar of South African security.”

“What should I do?” I asked. “I am a squatter, after all. I am bound to support the actions of the movement. I owe it to them – they’re the reason I have a place to live.” I said nothing about my passion for Mauritz, my erotically idealised activist.

“I know, I know,” Mandla replied. He was well versed in the shortage of accommodation in Amsterdam and had been the one who connected me to M. in the first place. Accommodation wasn’t easily found in London either. He had once described his small room behind King’s Cross to me. “We need to find you a respectable abode.” His tone was ironic. The anger had gone. “But first let’s go through your report. God forbid there’s an anarchist trend in South Africa.”

Sex with Mauritz was addictive. Our relationship was anchored in sex and I was obsessed with him. It was as if we read off each other’s skins, a script to the power of sensual experience. In the aftermath of our fucking we were always exhausted, mute. Then Mauritz would disappear back to his own squat and be uncontactable. After two or three days without him I’d be agitated, pacing the room in expectation of his arrival. He had never invited me back to his place but that didn’t bother me.

By happenstance mostly, Mauritz and I always seemed to land up at my place – probably, or so I thought, because my squat was central while his was located on the outer edges of the grachtengordel. After a night in the city centre’s bars and clubs, hungry for each other, we’d make for Singel 500. Mauritz liked my room. Over time I had transformed it into a home. There was a second-hand Persian rug on the floor, and the spoils of regular grofvuil scavenging: burgundy velvet curtains, pictures and prints on the walls, a sofa that sagged in the middle, my desk, of course, and, finally, a double bed. I had also graduated from M.’s sleeping-bag, which had been restored to its owner. I had put up some shelves for my books and LPs. My interests were so different to Mauritz’s that we might spend an entire evening, drinking beers with jenever chasers, over some book or piece of music of mine. I had made my retreat warm and welcoming. It was my bolthole from the greyness of winter. I had candles on the floor and the light from the flames of the kachel licked the walls.

After having been the one to “intrude” on another’s space, when I had moved in with Oliver when I arrived in Amsterdam, first as my only friend in exile and then as my lover, I found I liked having it the other way round – where Singel 500, with its angels on the ceiling, and my sedentary pigeon neighbours, was my space, my home.

It was in the sex that I read the unravelling, but only with the benefit of hindsight. At the time it seemed part of a complexity of response. There were times, more and more frequently, when Mauritz would arrive at my place, languid, tired out by his day. He would collapse on my bed. I would fold my body into his, not necessarily intent on sex, and after a while would all but succumb to the urge to sleep. Then he would turn to me and we’d begin kissing. There was a fervour to his embraces that was new. I’d move into the next stage of the ritual – begin to undress him, peel off his shirt to reveal that alabaster skin I never tired of looking at, tug at his jeans so that I could have him perfect and naked before me.

But lately it was as if he was burning up. He’d be seized by my kisses and then groan as if possessed. He retreated from my fingers as if they were etched with acid, reeling in my embrace. And then, at a tentative stroke of his groin, he’d come astonishingly quickly, the cum shooting out of him while he cried out, bucking, making a tangle of the sheets.

I, unrequited, was bemused but also flattered by my sensate command of him.

If only I had known.

At other times we’d resume our usual long, languid lovemaking. I put the change in pace down to the mystery of men and their differing repertoires of response.

Then there were times when Mauritz would be moody, times when he appeared to be drained of energy. He would excuse himself to go off and sleep. Or else he would be agitated and distracted and his hands shook. I could not account for it and when I expressed concern he said only that he was stressed and tired. One afternoon at the tea garden in the Vondelpark he abruptly stood up and announced that he had to go. Without another word he went striding off into the park’s mid-distance. He offered no explanation, then or later. A yellow tinge, which I interpreted as the tiredness he constantly referred to, developed beneath his eyes.

It seemed to me that Mauritz had the flu. Toon had had a bout and so had Cas. For days Mauritz walked around red-eyed, rheumy, his nose streaming, his body feverish. One evening he told me he was putting himself to bed. I promised to stop by the next day and check on him, perhaps bring him some bruine bonen soup from the worker café below his squat. He didn’t respond. I took it as part of the crabbiness that had come with his illness.

As it turned out, I was kept busy for several days at the store and with a series of meetings for Mandla and sought him out only towards the end of the week. I knew that he lived in De Groote Keijser, one of the larger squats, known for the radicalism of its inhabitants. This was a group within the larger movement whose balaclava-wearing members were always ready to turn out for a confrontation with the police. They were schooled in the art of the urban guerrilla skirmish, as I had recently experienced, and they had a detailed knowledge of Amsterdam’s back alleys.

De Groote Keijser was a series of decaying seventeenth-century herenhuizen and right now it was obviously under siege. The squatters had bolted the bases of beds over the windows, ingenious obstacles, the striated bed-springs barring entry. Inside the squatters had broken through adjoining walls, linking passages and staircases that spanned a whole block. There was only one way in: a formidable wooden door at one end of the street, reinforced with steel plating. All the other doors along the street had been bolted shut.

I was standing in the street contemplating how I might get in – entry was only by arrangement and Mauritz was not expecting me – when the door swung open and Gus stepped out. Gus was a friend of Mauritz’s and a fellow fan of Einstürzende Neubauten. We had met at De Melkweg. He waved me in and I asked him where Mauritz’s room was. The directions were complicated. They involved the negotiation of a series of passages and the ascent of a staircase to the third floor to a room at the back of the building. In contrast to the austerity of the building’s exterior, inside I saw episodic homeliness. The passages were dark, utilitarian routes through the building. Bicycles were stacked against the walls and bundles of old newspapers piled up. Here and there were small heaps of discarded builders’ rubble. But through the open doorways of some of the rooms I saw warm interiors, a profusion of pot plants on the sills, tulips in vases, cats asleep on couches. In one room a woman was practising the flute; in another two men were playing chess. I came across a common area, a coffee lounge, with the scent of roasted beans delicious on the air.

The door to Mauritz’s room was slightly ajar. I hesitated, then knocked. There was no response so I pushed it open. If I had expected a similar scene of domesticity, I was in for a sharp surprise. The air in the room was dank and there was a strong, unpleasant odour of human sweat. Mauritz was curled up on his side, asleep on a mattress on the floor beneath the window, under a meagre blanket, no sheets. There were no curtains over the window. It was a large room with very little in it in the way of furniture. The floor was dirty and unvarnished. In various places strips of ugly beige wallpaper were peeling away from the wall and in one corner I could see a spreading patch of damp. Unwashed clothes lay everywhere, as did newspapers and magazines. There was an empty jenever bottle beside the mattress and cigarette stubs littered the floor. The only concessions to order were a small bookcase, with some volumes and Mauritz’s precious German cultural magazines on it, a clothes rail and an artist’s easel. A stack of half caved in cardboard boxes in one corner held, I suspected, the rest of his possessions.

Before I could gather my confused thoughts, I was arrested by the canvas on the easel. I caught my breath. It was a self-portrait. Mauritz in blacks and greys, quite exact in its detail of his features, which were captured in a scream like a realist’s rendition of Munch’s The Scream. In the background were objects I recognised from Mauritz’s grim recounting: a cup of coffee, the face of an old clock, stiff-stemmed flowers in plain vases. And descending from the top corner of the canvas unmistakably a razor strap in furious motion.

And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw them – what I came to think of as the accursed objects. They were close to the mattress, partly obscured by the edge of the blanket. A piece of tin-foil, a box of matches and a syringe. The syringe was crusted with brown blood inside.

At that moment Mauritz turned in his sleep and, as if by a second sense, opened his eyes. He began to raise himself on one elbow, startled, staring up at me with bloodshot eyes, squinting against the light. Recognition dawning, he sat bolt upright and the blanket fell away.

“No!” he shouted. “No! Why are you here? Get out! Go away!”

The last minutes had stunned me. I sank to my haunches, dizzy, hands over my face, the blood rushing away from my head. Mauritz was a heroin junkie – not my precious, beautiful Mauritz, but one of those wraiths that stalked the halls and platforms of the Central Station, sweating and trembling, the tell-tale yellow discoloration of their addiction etched beneath their eyes. They begged for money, beseeching people for coins in a paroxysm of agitation, as if insects were crawling over their skin. I had become aware of this community of desperate people when I had first come to Amsterdam and in my own personal moments of deep despair their presence and their desperation pulled at me and filled me with horror.

Mauritz had turned away from me and was feebly pounding his fists into the pillow. “I wanted to keep this from you,” he said. “I don’t want you to see me like this.”

I got down onto the mattress beside him and pulled him over until I was cradling him in my arms. A musty, unwashed smell rose from the bedclothes. “You will hate me now, won’t you?” he said. He was weeping. It repulsed me.

“I don’t think I can,” I replied. A wave of bleakness took hold of me.

Mauritz told me that he had started using just over a year previously, shortly after he had come to Amsterdam from Eindhoven and not long before he met me. It had started somewhere in the squat, a careless passing around of a pipe, in someone’s room, after an aksie. In his innocence he had not anticipated the power of the first hit – the wave of euphoria that had gripped him. He had never experienced joy in his life, just the grey daily tenure of existence in Eindhoven; he had merely surrendered to the blandness of necessary violence. With his first hit he recognised joy – from the way it was described in literature, in music, on the faces of his few friends.

As he came down from the rush, he was overwhelmed by calmness. He felt the fear that was always clutching at the base of his throat receding, the anger less livid in his breast.

And so he had negotiated his new life in Amsterdam, using just occasionally. When we began our relationship, he said, I had grounded him and for a while this took away the craving. But heroin is a seductive lover too and brave is the person to compete for his attention.

After that day I tried and so, to his credit, did Mauritz. He wanted to get clean. He knew in his heart and his rational mind that any chance of true joy lay elsewhere. We talked about him taking his art more seriously, about enrolling for classes at a college not far from the squat. He was enthusiastic, then less so, and then completely dispirited at the prospect of mediocrity. He berated himself far more than I berated him, and when we argued and I pleaded and he promised, we both knew who was winning. The absences between our seeing each other grew longer. I was busy with my work for the movement and took to taking meandering walks on my own until my feet were sore and blistered. I accompanied Janneke on one of her buying trips and, very occasionally, met up with Oliver for a glass of wine.

When Mauritz arrived at my apartment one Saturday morning, his hair freshly combed and wearing a clean Free Mandela T-shirt, with a still-warm seed loaf and coffee in polystyrene cups, it nearly broke my heart.