WITH PAPERWORK SORTED, and a job to go to at the music store every day, my life in Amsterdam took on structure and meaning. I quickly got used to the rhythms of Allegro. I was assigned my own table where I sorted the stock. Wim, our resident expert, advised me on which labels were of special value or appeal, usually bakelites, pre-war labels, produced by Jews annihilated in the concentration camps of the Second World War, companies that had faded into the twilight of liquidation and debt. Others that produced only the recorded works of particular musicians, pianists, violinists and cellists.
Toon fielded calls and orders, in German, French and English, and asked me to package them. I’d wrap the LPs in padded cardboard sleeves and brown paper, addressing each to some newly apprehended city or town in a Europe I was yet to explore, places with arcane, guttural names, with medieval inflections. I’d weigh the parcels and then attach the appropriate postage. There was a strong fishy taste to the postage stamps. Then once a day I would step from the warmth of the shop, get on my bicycle and head off through the concentrations of pedestrians and careless beer drinkers at pavement cafés and shoppers to the vaulted post office building in the city centre, where I dropped them off at an ornate marble counter. Then they would find their way, through Europe’s tracery of interconnecting flight paths, roads and railways, across ancient boundaries, to collectors in deeper Europe.
Janneke travelled regularly to the closed countries of Eastern Europe, buying up Soviet and East German stock, and afterwards deciphering the Cyrillic lettering on the Soviet labelling so that eventually the names of Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and others would emerge, as distinct, on typed up labels from the more complex alphabet on the sleeves.
There was an easy democracy in the shop. During the course of a day it became a pattern that each one of us, perhaps intrigued by the illustration on a record cover, or some undiscovered composer or a soprano from an earlier age, would take an LP to the turntable at the back. The room was filled with music all day long. Toon and Wim took smoke breaks on the pavement outside. Janneke was usually in the back office, hunched over the leather-bound account ledgers, filling in figures in pencil, muttering, and erasing errors with a misshapen grey eraser. She filed invoices and waybills into ring-binders. The tedious methodical admin tasks made her irritable and afterwards she would bring a pot of strong Douwe Egberts filter coffee to the tables at the back of the shop and we would drink this (with brandy chasers if it was a Friday and we closed early) and relax for a few minutes together; or she would cross the road to the bakery opposite and come back with a freshly baked loaf, dense with seeds, that we’d eat with slices of komijnekaas or cured raw osseworst washed down with ice-cold Amstels.
Slowly, my knowledge deepened. I became adept at finding rare recordings in the stacks, especially that first summer when collectors from Europe came to Amsterdam. No matter how broken, accented or halting, English became the lingua franca of the shop. It was the language most common to all. Sales were conducted as a combination of half phrases in English, borrowings from other languages, much gesticulation and exaggerated friendliness. “Enescu, yes, ja. This way here. Follow me. That’s right, this way, watch out for that box, careful. Achtung, achtung! Here they are.”
On Fridays we closed early and the four of us would go off to Het Pompenhuis, so called because it was frequented by firemen from the nearby station on Sint Antoniebreestraat. There we would monopolise one of three wrought-iron café tables on the narrow pavement. When the season turned colder, we occupied a banquette inside near the open fireplace. We drank Tripels, strong honey-flavoured Belgian beers that were surprisingly intoxicating. My work colleagues had become fond of me and I of them. My probation date came and went, never commented upon. It seemed I was now part of the Allegro family.
During most of our time spent together the talk was practical, domestic: how to price a batch of records that might have been bought as part of an estate from a widow in the Jordaan at an auction; Janneke asking for suggestions about how displays could be pitched for an upcoming performance by Alfred Brendel at the Concertgebouw; how yet another floorboard was lifting from the ancient floor and needed to be nailed down.
Our conversation passed amiably in a mixture of Dutch and English, punctuated by sips and comments on the beer – with the next order we might try another brand, a Duvel or a Trappist, which were beers brewed by Belgian monastic orders, as Toon was happy to explain to me.
This kind of discourse was new to me and something of a revelation. There was no politics to it, none of the constant social contextualising I’d been used to among my friends in South Africa. My colleagues, it seemed, were automatically liberal and progressive in the way that Amsterdammers were. One’s politics was a received wisdom, not debated, argued over, or fought for. They had set opinions about the Third World struggles of the time – South Africa, Nicaragua and El Salvador – and unquestioning solidarity. They all donated money to NOVIB.
When it came to their own country they dismissed the politics of the centre right government and viewed its cuts to social welfare as “schandalig en onverantwoord”, causing rising unemployment and new poverty the country could ill afford. Van Agt, the prime minister, was an arsehole – “conservatieve klootzak”. Each belonged, in what seemed to me a desultory, unengaged way, to a series of left-liberal parties and they were content to remain politically correct, never to be moved to action.
Only once did anyone react with passion during one of our political conversations. In the context of a random discussion one Friday evening, Janneke made an observation about the hard rudimentary lives she encountered among our contemporaries in the East. I said that negative portrayals of the Soviet Union or the German Democratic Republic were propaganda, perpetuated by a capitalist Western press inimical to the progress of socialism. Back in South Africa we admired them, these countries, I said. They gave succour to our struggle.
It was a throw-away comment, didactic in its repetition, and one that would have earned nods of agreement among student activists around a table in far-off Cape Town. In Amsterdam, when I encountered it, I ascribed the disdain of most Dutch intellectuals for “real existing socialism” as a product of the split between Stalinist communists and the non-aligned socialists that characterised the country’s small Communist Party.
My casual contribution to the conversation caused Janneke to turn on me, her eyes flashing sudden anger. “How can you be such a fool – someone as obviously intelligent as you?” she said. “To be so taken in. You have no idea what life is like there. I have been there. It is no workers’ paradise, that I can promise you! The people’s lives are hard. The most talented musicians in the world, trapped in their countries, unable to travel, queuing for hours for food – under the watch of spies and agents. Good food a privilege only for the party apparatchiks. Be grateful that you have found refuge in a democracy.”
Janneke’s vehemence took me completely by surprise and her words stung. I swallowed back my intended retort. I had assumed always in my rare political discussions with the Dutch that my experience of repression, my part in the South African underground, gave me the unassailable edge, a moral authority to which they would defer in debate. Now I felt cowed and ashamed. I thought of how Janneke had indulged my complaints about the pain of exile – which could veer towards the maudlin over Friday night jenevers – and how of course she was right. There was plenty of misery in the world. I had no special claim to it.
After this brutal rebuff, I retreated. Politics as idle Friday evening conversation now became dangerous ground. I withdrew into Amsterdam’s less challenging pleasures.