THERE WAS A PRICE TO being a part of the squatter movement. The unsettling sense of surveillance by the spies of property owners came with the territory but the committee that ran Singel 500 had also adopted a rule that all residents had to turn out to defend other buildings in the event of them being attacked and to participate in the movement’s demonstrations and rallies.
One Saturday morning as I was about to leave my room in the squat for the tea garden in the Vondelpark, where I hoped to bask in the weak spring sunshine over a paperback and a few beers, the communal phone at the end of the passage rang. I picked up and a voice at the other end of the line informed me tersely that a squatted apartment on the Herengracht had been attacked by a knokploeg earlier that morning. The apartment was barricaded and the knokploeg had gone to fetch reinforcements. I was instructed to activate our telephone tree.
A list of telephone numbers of nearby squats was taped to the wall above the phone box. Following the instructions which Bart had taken us through, I phoned five other squats in quick succession and delivered the same urgent message. It took more than half an hour. In some squats the phone rang in a void while others who did answer struggled to follow my halting Dutch. By the time I arrived at the Herengracht myself I was drenched with sweat. I had cycled there furiously, the dappled sunlight filtering through the leaves of the overhanging elms flashing under the wheels of my bicycle.
A small group of squatters was gathered outside the door of Herengracht 76 – another typical herenhuis given to dilapidation. The windows on the ground floor were broken and the gable, although buttressed by beams, leaned at a precarious angle over the street. There were some familiar faces – Bart, the gruff, politically astute chair of the committee at Singel 500, and stocky, black-haired, blue-eyed Cas, whose careless beauty always unnerved me. Madeleine was there too. She was a thin, shrill activist, with a voice like a distressed parakeet, who seemed always on the edge of an admonition. She made me feel callow and I disliked her. All of the squatters wore balaclavas and some were armed with metal pipes and baseball bats. They were awaiting the return of the knokploeg. There was an air of precision to their strategy. A squatter alighted from his bicycle. He had apparently gone to report the attack to the police at the Marnixstraat police station where the desk sergeant had proved laconic, you could say unenthusiastic. A patrol car would be sent, he said, but there was no sign of it so far. A squatter was positioned on each corner of the street to scan the slowly moving current of shoppers and pedestrians, mostly women at this time of the day, for the more heavy-set features of the knokploeg. Another two stood on the bridge over the gracht, scanning in opposite directions, while a sentry on the roof of the building looked out over the trees.
“There they are!” the sentry on the roof called out and we all looked up. He pointed down towards the bridge. The squatters around me peered urgently in that direction.
“Waar, verdomme?” a girl next to me called out in a strident but shaky voice. She looked up at the man on the roof beseechingly.
“There – on the other side of the canal!” he shouted. He went down on one knee, precariously close to the edge of the roof, and leaned out, pointing again. The view of the canal was obscured by the thick foliage of the trees. Then I saw them through the branches. I grasped the girl’s arm and pointed.
Four men were getting out of a van. Two of them had shaven heads and wore leather jackets. Another had his long hair tied back in a ponytail, a white singlet revealing broad, tattooed shoulders. All four were ominous in their bulkiness. They were busy unloading tools from the back of the van. I saw crowbars and a crude metal battering ram shaped like the barrel of a cannon.
The look-outs on the bridge came running over to the squat and our group, which was now about ten strong, fled into the dark ground-floor lobby of the house. Once we were inside some of the squatters manoeuvred the heavy wooden door shut and others began piling a collection of furniture against it – bed-frames, a wardrobe, some painters’ trestle-tables and a pile of bicycles. The sentry shouted down that the knokploeg had crossed the bridge. We took refuge in an apartment on the third floor, where it looked like the inhabitants had only just moved in. We discovered that there was pitifully little with which to barricade the apartment door, so we used an up-ended dining-room table and an unmade bed, the base of which was improvised from wooden pallets and some unpacked boxes of books and LPs.
Just then there was a hollow implosion in the base of the building and a tremor ran under the floor. The women screamed. I guessed this was the battering ram I had seen, and a couple of seconds later it crashed against the door again. This time a window cracked. Fear rose in my throat. The squatters were all shouting at each other in a rapid-fire Dutch that I couldn’t follow, other than to make out a series of panicked expletives. We crowded around the window and looked out. Down below the knokploeg were taking it in turns, two at a time, to swing the battering ram at the door, while the others were busy prising open the ground floor windows with crowbars. The sound of shattering wood and the scent of pine dust rose up from the street. The whole building shook. A hairline crack in the plaster above the window frame took to life and forked up the wall like a darting lizard.
Finally, the door gave way and the knokploeg began pulling shards of wood from its frame, piling the shattered planks in the gutter. They moved on, levering the bed-frame into the street and making light work of the trestle-tables.
I stood in the middle of the room, my heart racing. I looked from one squatter to another, still confounded by their staccato Dutch. Someone handed me a length of metal pipe. I imitated Bart by standing behind our pathetic barricade of packed book-boxes and adopting the stance of a cricket player about to engage the ball, aware even in my fear of the absurdity of it all.
Then one of the women called out from her post at the window. “The pigs are here!”
The promised police patrol car had finally arrived. We made our way down into the street where two policemen were remonstrating with the knokploeg. Up close they were a stereotype of masculine menace, moustachioed, dark glasses pulled up against their hairlines, thick muscled. One of the men, straining inside the denim of his jeans, spat at me and I jumped to avoid the spittle.
“Primitive apes!” Bart shouted.
“Flikker kut,” our adversary responded. Faggot cunt.
The police officers asked us to stand to one side, shepherding us to the doorway of a nearby café, where a small group of patrons had left their beers to come and observe the fracas.
One squatter was almost hysterical with anger. “Arrest them!” she admonished a policeman before turning to the crowd of onlookers. “They should arrest them, not let them go,” she implored.
The onlookers were largely unsympathetic. Once the knokploeg, gesturing obscenely at us in parting, had been persuaded to move off, they went back to their beers and carried on chatting. The police conferred with the young couple who had squatted in the apartment, checking the details of how they had obtained entry and supposedly that their actions complied with the arcane regulations that permitted squatting.
I stayed to help Bart and Cas put the door together again. A man I knew only as Pieter and two of the other squatters went off in search of planks from builders’ skips in the streets behind and we reinforced the sagging door as best we could.
Madeleine insisted that the door was not strong enough but by then I had had enough. Not even the presence of Cas, shirtless now, rivulets of sweat tracing his chest and abdomen, his skin turning to a smooth terracotta in the early evening light, not to mention his careless brushing against me as we manoeuvred the door into place, could keep me there any longer.
At the tea garden in the Vondelpark I allowed myself a double vodka with freshly squeezed orange juice. It was delicious. Gradually, the tension of the morning began to lift.