AFTER THE BREAK-UP with Oliver, living in Singel 500 gave me a different entry point into the life of the city. I took to it like a patient emerging from an enervating illness, like someone rediscovering the pulse of physical vigour. My political work with Mandla continued without interruption, but for some reason it made me feel lonely and the enduring, subliminal emptiness of exile remained an underlying sadness.
Belying its publicly stated anarchism, the squatter movement constituted an entire urban sub-culture, a network not only of squatted buildings, but cafés and bars dotted throughout the city, left-wing bookshops and rudimentary cinemas. These were darkened rooms with plastic chairs in rows and screens improvised from sheets, where retrospective seasons of Fassbinder and von Trotta were shown. Then there were the organic food shops, and the vegetable allotments out alongside the railway line in the north-west of the city.
I took to exploring squatter bars in different neighbourhoods and in this way got to know parts of the city previously unexplored. On the Prinseneiland I found an archipelago of red-brick warehouses and industrial barges rocking gently in the pivoting currents as the tide ebbed and flowed. I was drawn by the industrial blandness of the island, the serried brickwork of the warehouses, and the wide unimpeded view of Amsterdam Noord across the flat black water of the North Sea Canal. I was fascinated by the giant cranes, the way they loomed, sculptural and skeletal, out of the early morning mist lifting off the sea. In the distance fog-horns warned against the lack of visibility, joined in an ethereal orchestration of bleakness by the shrieking of gulls clothed in the mist that constantly threatened to enclose everything visible.
In the cellar of one squat was a pub called De Nieuwe Anarchist. Its décor was that of a turn-of-the-century living room, with worn old couches and armchairs arranged together around pools of low light. The space was lit by candles and brass lamps, and beers and jenevers were served from trestle-tables at the back of the room. Dutch torch-songs pumped ironically from the sound system. The walls were characteristically dark, painted a streaky black through which a previous indeterminate colour showed, although much of the wall space was obliterated by political posters and portraits of Bukarin and Trotsky and the anarchists’ insignia. The place attracted a crowd of committed activists. The uniform of the movement – workmen’s trousers, thick jumpers over T-shirts and the ubiquitous keffiyeh – was much in evidence. The conversations were intense, sometimes combative. The room’s warm gloom, the melancholic strains of an East German protest singer in the background, and the smoke of Drum roll-ups rising up in a haze towards the ceiling all contributed to a sort of anarchist gezelligheid.
In other parts of the city there were more elaborate pubs, with café tables, restored bar counters, gilt mirrors, brass-handled draught pumps and other paraphernalia of traditional bruin cafés. In these the only concession to the squatters’ movement were the political posters, the flyers stacked in neat piles on the bar counters, and the frisson of illegality. The clientèle in these places was also more eclectic. Students from the University of Amsterdam preferred them. The beer was cheaper than in the mainstream cafés and the music more contemporary.
I traversed the city on my bicycle, my keffiyeh pulled close against the damp, making these warm, tobacco-redolent interiors my own, finding in them a way to integrate in what had previously been an inhospitable terrain.
Interaction was easy. The politics and events in the squatter movement were a given topic of conversation, so that asking someone for a light could lead easily into a discourse on the latest evictions, or a traded analysis of the strategy adopted to defend a threatened squat. People often picked up on my accent and I found myself revealing that I was South African. This elicited a curiosity among the more politically literate squatters about the “third world” and an automatic solidarity. The fervour of the squatter activists, their concerns with the detail of strategy, and their immersion in left-wing anti-capitalist ideologies was poignant. It reminded me of home and the people I had left there – although it was not quite the same. While I could identify with them and their struggle to find places to live, it was not “my” struggle. And there was a level of abstraction in how they saw the developing world, the unquestioning solidarity, the assumed affinity of struggles the world over, from which I felt detached.
Mostly, I stayed for the warmth of the bars’ interiors and the subterfuge that characterised the squatter sub-culture, and the ersatz air of revolution that seemed to give a meaning to my exile existence.