GRADUALLY MY DEPRESSION waned. After the rain the clouds lifted above Amsterdam and the greyness of the streets receded. A distilled spring sunshine drew a pale ochre glow from the red brickwork. Here and there crocuses began to show their heads above the earth, a motley spread of white, purple and intensely yellow flowers.
The sharpness of the light belied the chill which still beset the city. As Oliver and I shopped among the stalls of olives, pickles and Mediterranean vegetables – yellow lemons and glowing red tomatoes stacked high – our breath steamed in front of us. I found this ridiculously endearing. I would have liked to have kissed him then, so that the trails of our vapours entwined, but it was too public a place. Turkish women in hijabs embroidered in reds and golds, flashing with sequins, walked by, trailing shopping carts, and gruff moustachioed fishermen stepped into our path showing off their wares – sleek, writhing eels.
Oliver was my new certitude. An unaccustomed domesticity settled over me. Until now I had lived in a kind of benign squalor, allowing books and papers to pile in corners, sleeping in the same sheets for weeks, wearing the same clothes for two, even three days at a time. Oliver was usually too busy to cook and clean. He treated the apartment as a crash-pad between his dawn trips to Utrecht, and often he slept through the weekends to recoup energy and avoid the cold streets.
I recognised that in my depression I had become dishevelled and now I was reclaiming sartorial space as well, trying to bring back the dapper, aesthetic student I had imagined I had been in Cape Town.
I took to cleaning and cooking, using the seasonal produce at the Albert Cuyp market, and imitating what the Turkish restaurants and cafés around us offered on our fortnightly dinners out. I set to arranging Oliver’s small collection of books by category and author. There were no South African titles among them; he favoured modern English writers – Amis, Banks, and Barnes, or the Australian, Peter Carey, and translated Europeans. I also categorised his more extensive collection of cassette tapes, LPs and bakelite 78s, by period and composer. In the quiet of the short spring afternoons, curled against the kachel for warmth, I played them consecutively, by period, reading though Oliver’s textbooks for clues, finding structure in the music’s evolution and discovering new composers and epochs I had missed in my own ad hoc, random exploration of the classics. I began to understand Oliver’s passion for the discipline of music and to appreciate how rich the lexicon was.
The weeks were now punctuated by the rituals of shopping and cycling over to the laundromat on the Vijzelstraat, where I would sit among the housewives and university students, reading English novels as the machines spun, registering the slight tremor on the floor, and allowing the odours of washing powder and fabric softener to invade my senses.
I gave up my aimless wandering of the streets, avoided the news-stands with their fragmented stories about South Africa, and tried to put the home country from my mind. I painted the apartment, choosing shades of cream and, for the wall facing the window, a dark burgundy. In the second-hand furniture stalls on the Waterlooplein I bought a pair of baroque mirrors with chipped gilt frames. These I hung on the wall so that they refracted the light from the windows and reflected back images of the branches of our elm, budding now, outside. In the Turkish shops off the Albert Cuyp market I bought discounted, slightly moth-eaten rugs and arranged them in the room to display their colours and patterns to best effect. Oliver and I tramped the streets of Amsterdam Zuid and other wealthy neighbourhoods on Thursday nights, picking through the grofvuil, the unwanted things Amsterdam’s gentry discarded as they modernised their homes according to the emerging trends of the time. Our pickings delivered some riches: curtains, paintings, two brass desk lamps, a couple of framed antique naturalist paintings of exotic birds and plants, brocaded lampshades, kitchen utensils and even a luxurious armchair – “Amsterdamse stijl,” said Oliver.
As spring took hold in the city, on weekends Oliver and I cycled along the banks of the Amstel out into the lime-green countryside. We drank ice-cold beer and jenever chasers at the riverside cafés along the way, and we collected crockery at the second-hand shops in the sixteenth-century villages we passed through.
Soon our single apartment room was full and could take no more. It had become a den, a mélange of Mediterranean, Asian and prewar Dutch influences. It lost its winter dullness, and was burnished instead by colour and, as spring moved into summer, the stronger light mediated by the branches of the elms. Light poured through the now open windows. On the sills we installed some potted herbs given to us as by our favoured stall-holder at the Albert Cuyp – rosemary, basil and delicate yellow and red chilli bushes. I put out a plate of seed for Amsterdam’s drab sparrows and their shrill chatter and fluttery competition over millet filled the afternoons.
Oliver tolerated all of this in me, quietly enjoying the warm den his perfunctory apartment had become. I migrated from the sofa to his bed. I shared his clothes and shoes, and showered with him, scrubbing the soapsuds from his back, massaging shampoo into his lustrous black hair. He’d press me against the glass wall of the cubicle and kiss me languorously, deliciously, until the geyser emptied and the warm water coursing over our bodies turned cool.
We had an instinctive knowledge of each other. We completed each other’s sentences and thoughts. Ours was a seamless relationship, an abiding and easy friendship, forged in our platonic studenthood and elaborated now by sex and the knowledge of our bodies. Oliver was beautiful to me. In Cape Town he had hidden his body from us in over-large shirts buttoned to the neck, always enclosing his slim frame in a towel at the beach, emerging from the shower apparently fully dressed.
I began to study the detail of him. I found muscle in his abdomen where I had not expected it, noticed a beautiful sheen to his skin that warmed to honey in lamplight, and a trace of fine black hairs running the length of his stomach. I admired the fineness of his wrists, the small bones as they moved when he gestured with his hands. Now, when he practised his scales each evening, his jet black hair falling over his eyes as he leaned into the instrument, I’d watch him, mesmerised. I was captivated by the dusky tones of light in the nape of his neck when he turned his head, and how his perfect shoulders arched in the fabric of his T-shirt.
And I loved fucking him. He took to it with ease, abandon even. For these were the roles we had assumed. I did not want to be fucked by Oliver. He was too solicitous; he shied away from the aggression I craved.
I’d hold his thighs close against my chest – loving the tremor that rippled through him, in synergy with the tenor of my gentle assault upon him, the inevitable orgasm rising through the musculature of his abdomen and waist as he came. He would arch and buck against the bedclothes, his breath coming in truncated gasps, his torso filmed with the sweat of exertion and pearls of cum.
Sometimes I’d come inside him – he said it was like a bud opening, the petals unfurling. Sometimes I’d withdraw and come over him, rubbing our mutual semen into our skin. Then I’d sink into him, kissing him, running my fingers through his hair, falling against him, savouring him, enclosing the heft of him, until we both descended into sleep, the fug of our sweat about us.
I persuaded myself that I was content, that I had found meaning. I had sublimated the pang of home and it was my relationship with Oliver that had allowed me to do this. I was grateful to him for the ease of his love, its unqualified generosity. In our domesticity and routine I had found the certainty that had been absent from my previous relationship back home with Paul. In that relationship Paul had been evasive, ashamed that our homosexuality compromised his standing as a political activist; and because we were dogged by the security police, our sex was often furtive, usually hasty. It was the only evidence of connection.
I was compelled by the physicality of Oliver. Sometimes I would simply hold him, no sex intended, clinging to him for the intimacy I craved. After a while he would admonish me – “Matt, you’re crushing me” – and I’d fall away from him. Then, guilty, he would furl himself around me, place his lips tenderly in the lee of my neck and kiss me there. Held like that, I’d drift into seamless sleep, untroubled, safe, secure at last.
No doubt Paul would have derided our relationship as an imitation of married bourgeois convention. It did not seem that way to me, though. Our friendship had been enriched by sex, not complicated. In fact, it had removed a fine fissure of tension between us.