8. Amsterdam

Arriving at Amsterdam’s Centraal Station is a strange experience. It’s in the middle of town on a sunny plaza at the foot of the main street, the Damrak. You step out of the front door and there in front of you is – gosh! – every hippie that’s left. I had no idea there were still so many of them, but there were scores, if not hundreds, lounging around in groups of six or eight, playing guitars, passing reefers, sunning themselves. They look much as you would expect someone to look who has devoted a quarter of a century to lounging around in public places and smoking dope. A lot of them seemed to be missing teeth and hair, but they had compensated somewhat by acquiring large numbers of children and dogs. The children amused themselves by frolicking barefoot in the sun and the dogs by nipping at me as I passed.

I walked up the Damrak in a state of high anticipation. Amsterdam had been Katz’s and my favourite European city by a factor too high to compute. It was beautiful, it was friendly, it had excellent bars and legal dope. If we had lingered another week I could well be there yet, sitting on the station plaza with an acoustic guitar and some children named Sunbeam and Zippity Doo-Dah. It was that close.

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The Damrak was heaving with tourists, hippies and Saturday shoppers, all moving at different speeds: the tourists shuffling as if their shoelaces were tied together, looking everywhere but where they were going, the hippies hunched and hurried, and the shoppers scurrying around among them like wind-up toys. It was impossible to walk with any kind of rhythm. I tried several of the hotels along the street, but they were all full, so I dodged behind the prison-like royal palace at Dam Square and branched off into some side streets, where I had vague recollections of there being a number of small hotels. There were, but these too were full. At most of them it wasn’t even necessary to enquire because a sign in the window announced NO VACANCY in half a dozen languages.

Things had clearly changed since my day. Katz and I had stepped off the train at the height of summer, asked our way to the Sailors’ Quarter and got a room in the first hotel we came to. It was a wonderful little place called the Anco, in a traditional Amsterdam house: narrow and gabled, with steep, dark staircases and a restful view of the O.Z. Voorburgwal canal four floors below. It cost $5 a night, with an omelette for breakfast thrown in (almost literally), though we did have to share a room with two slightly older guys.

Our first meeting was inauspicious. We opened the door to find them engaged in a session of naked bed-top wrestling – an occurrence that surprised the four of us equally.

‘Pardon us, ladies!’ Katz and I blurted and scuffled backwards into the hallway, closing the door behind us and looking confounded. Nothing in twenty years of life in Iowa had quite prepared us for this. We gave them a minute to disengage and don bathrobes before we barged back in, but it was clear that they considered us boorish intruders, an opinion reinforced by our knack, developed over the next two days, of always returning to the room in the middle of one of their work-outs. Either these guys never stopped or our timing was impeccable.

They spoke to us as little as was humanly possible. We couldn’t place their accents but we thought the smaller one might be Australian since he seemed so at home down under. Their contempt for us became irredeemable in the middle of the second night, when Katz stumbled heavily from his bed after a gala evening at the Club Paradiso and, with an enormous sigh of relief, urinated in the waste-basket.

‘I thought it was the sink,’ he explained, a trifle lamely, the next morning. Our room-mates moved out after breakfast and for the rest of the week we had the room to ourselves.

We quickly fell into a happy routine. We would rise each morning for breakfast, then return to the room, shut out every trace of daylight and go back to bed for the day. At about four o’clock we would stir again, have a steaming shower in a cubicle down the hall, change into fresh clothes, press our hair flat against our heads and descend to the bar of the Anco, where we would sit with Oranjebooms in the window seat, watching the passing scene and remarking on what fine people the Dutch were to fill their largest city with pleasant canals, winsome whores and plentiful intoxicants.

The Anco had a young barman with a Brillo-pad beard and a red jacket three sizes too snug for him who had clearly taken one toke too many some years earlier and now looked as if he should carry a card with his name on it in case he needed to remember it in a hurry. He sold us small quantities of hash and at six o’clock we would have a reefer, as a sort of appetizer, and then repair to an Indonesian restaurant next door. Then, as darkness fell over the city and the whores took up their positions on the street corners, and the evening air filled with the heady smells of cannabis and frites, we would wander out into the streets and find ourselves being led gently into mayhem.

We went frequently to the Paradiso, a nightclub converted from an old church, where we tried without success to pick up girls. Katz had the world’s worst opening line. Wearing an earnest, almost worried look, he would go up to a girl and say, ‘Excuse me, I know you don’t know me, but could you help me move something six inches?’

‘What?’ the girl would reply.

‘One and a half fluid ounces of sperm,’ Katz would say with a sudden beam. It never worked, but then it was no less successful than my own approach, which involved asking the least attractive girl in the room if I could buy her a drink and being told to fuck off. So instead we spent the nights getting ourselves into a state of what we called ACD – advanced cognitive dysfunction. One night we fell in with some puzzled-looking Africans whom Katz encouraged to foment rebellion in their homeland. He got so drunk that he gave them his watch (he seemed to think that punctual timekeeping would make all the difference in the revolution), a Bulova that had belonged to his grandfather and was worth a fortune, and for the rest of the summer whenever I forgot and asked him the time he would reply sourly, ‘I don’t know. I have a man in Zululand who looks after these things for me.’ At the end of the week we discovered we had spent exactly half our funds of $700 each and concluded that it was time to move on.

* * *

The Dutch are very like the English. Both are kind of slobby (and I mean that in the nicest possible way): in the way they park their cars, in the way they set out their litter bins, in the way they dump their bikes against the nearest tree or wall or railing. There is none of that obsessive fastidiousness you find in Germany or Switzerland, where the cars on some residential streets look as if they were lined up by somebody with a yardstick and a spirit level. In Amsterdam they just sort of abandon their cars at the canalside, often on the brink of plunging in.

They even talk much the same as the English. This has always puzzled me. I used to work with a Dutch fellow on The Times, and I once asked him whether the correct pronunciation of the artist’s name was Van Go or Van Gok. And he said, a little sharply, ‘No, no, it’s Vincent Van – ’ and he made a sudden series of desperate hacking noises, as if a moth had lodged in his throat. After that, when things were slow around the desk, I would ask him how various random expressions were said in Dutch – International Monetary Fund, poached eggs, cunnilingus – and he would always respond with these same abrupt hacking noises. Passing people would sometimes slap him on the back or offer to get him a glass of water.

I’ve tried it with other Dutch people – it’s a good trick if you’ve got a Dutch person at a party and can’t think what to do with him – always with the same result. Yet the odd thing is that when you hear Dutch people speaking to each other they hardly hack at all. In fact, the language sounds like nothing so much as a peculiar version of English.

Katz and I often noticed this. We would be walking down the street when a stranger would step from the shadows and say, ‘Hello, sailors, care to grease my flanks?’ or something, and all he would want was a light for his cigarette. It was disconcerting. I found this again now when I presented myself at a small hotel on the Prinsengracht and asked the kind-faced proprietor if he had a single room. ‘Oh, I don’t believe so,’ he said, ‘but let me check with my wife.’ He thrust his head through a doorway of beaded curtains and called, ‘Marta, what stirs in your leggings? Are you most moist?’

From the back a voice bellowed, ‘No, but I tingle when I squirt.’

‘Are you of assorted odours?’

‘Yes, of beans and sputum.’

‘And what of your pits – do they exude sweetness?’

‘Truly.’

‘Shall I suckle them at eventide?’

‘Most heartily!’

He returned to me wearing a sad look. ‘I’m sorry, I thought there might have been a cancellation, but unfortunately not.’

‘A smell of petroleum prevails throughout,’ I said by way of thanks and departed.

There were no rooms to be had anywhere. In the end, despondent, I trudged back to the station plaza, to the office of the VVV, the state tourist bureau, where I assumed there would be a room-finding service. I went inside and up some stairs and found myself in a hall that brought to mind Ellis Island. There were eight straggly lines of weary tourists, with at least thirty people in each queue. The VVV staff were sending people all over – to Haarlem, to Delft, to Rotterdam, to The Hague – because there was not a single hotel room left in Amsterdam at any price. This was only April. What on earth can it be like in July? They must send people to Iceland. A big sign on the wall said NO TICKETS FOR THE VAN GOGH EXHIBITION. SOLD OUT. That was great, too. One of the reasons I had come when I did was to see the exhibition.

I took a place in one of the lines. Progress was glacial. I was hot, I was sweaty, I was tired, I was hungry. My feet hurt. I wanted a bath. I wanted a large dinner and several beers. There wasn’t a single part of me that was happy.

Almost every one of us in the room was an American. Upon reaching the front of the line, each new customer had to be interviewed regarding his or her requirements in terms of toilet facilities, breakfast arrangements, room amenities, accessibility by public transport and price. This took ages because of all the permutations involved. Then almost invariably the customer had to turn to his or her mate – who had been standing there all along seeming to take it in but evidently not – and explain all the possibilities all over again. This would prompt a lengthy discussion and a series of supplementary questions – Can we get there by bus instead of by train? Are there any vegetarian restaurants near the hotel? Does the hotel have no-smoking rooms? Will there be a cab at the station when we get there or do we have to call one, and if we have to call one can you give us the number? Is there a laundromat in Delft? What time does the last train run? Do you think I should be taken outside and shot for having such an enormous butt and asking so many stupid questions? It just went on and on.

Once they had arrived at a kind of agreement in principle, the VVV person would make anything up to twenty phone calls to outlying hotels, with a look of infinite patience and low expectations – most hotels weren’t even bothering to answer their phones by now – before announcing that nothing was available in that price range. So then they would have to discuss another more expensive or more distant set of options. It all took so long that you felt like applauding whenever anyone left the window and the queue pushed forward six inches.

The one lucky thing was that the VVV girl at the head of my queue was beautiful – not just extraordinarily good-looking, with the sort of bottom that made your palms sweat when she went to the filing cabinet, but intelligent, sweet-natured, patient, sympathetic, and with that exquisite, dusky Dutch accent that simply melts your heart. She dealt with every customer gracefully and expertly, and switched effortlessly between French, German, English and Dutch – all with that delectable accent. I was infatuated. I freely admit it. Stuck in a line that was going nowhere, there was nothing I could do but just stare dumbly at her and admire everything about her – the way she hooked her hair behind her ear, the way she wrinkled her nose when she looked in the phone book, the way she dialled the phone with the eraser end of her pencil. By the time I reached her window it was all I could do to keep from blurting, ‘Can we have sex a few times and then talk marriage?’ But all I did was shyly ask for a hotel room somewhere in the northern hemisphere. She found me one in Haarlem.

Haarlem was very pleasant. People ahead of me in the line had been falling into swoons when told they would have to leave Amsterdam to get a room, but I was rather pleased. Haarlem was only twenty minutes away by train and it was a handsome little city with a splendid cathedral and cosy cathedral square, and lots of good restaurants that were cheaper and emptier than those in Amsterdam. I had a steak the size of a hot-water bottle, went for a long walk around the town, stood impressed in the shadow of the cathedral, returned to the hotel, showered steamily and went to bed a happy man.

In the morning I returned to Amsterdam. I used to love walking in cities on Sunday mornings, but it gets more and more dispiriting. All the things left over from Saturday night – vomit slicks, litter, twisted beer cans – are still lying around, and everywhere now there are these depressing grilles and iron shutters on all the shop fronts. They make every street look dangerous and forbidding, which is just absurd in Europe. On an innocuous pedestrian street called Heiligeweg almost every store front was completely hidden behind a set of iron blinds – even the Aer Lingus office. What on earth is anyone going to steal from an Aer Lingus office – the little model aeroplane in the window?

I found my way to the canals – the Singel, Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht – and things were immediately better. I roamed along them in a happily random way, shuffling through leaves and litter, cocooned by the tall narrow houses and old trees. Along its canals Amsterdam is an immensely beautiful city, especially on a Sunday morning when there is almost no one about. A man sat in a patch of sun on his stoop with a cup of coffee and a newspaper, another was returning from somewhere with a bottle of wine, a young couple passed entwined in a post-coital glow, and the occasional unhurried cyclist crossed from one side street to another somewhere up ahead, like extras employed to lend colour to the scene, but in two hours of wandering around I saw not another soul but them.

Again and again, I found myself leaning on a railing on a small humpbacked bridge just gazing into the shimmering green water, lost in a simple-minded reverie until a tour boat would chunter by, full of tourists with cameras, slicing through the mirrored street scene below me to break the spell. In its wake there would always be a little festival of bestirred litter – a Fairy Liquid bottle, some cigarette packets, assorted cartons from McDonald’s and Burger King – and I would be reminded that Amsterdam is also a dirty city. It’s full of dog shit and litter and graffiti. The graffiti is everywhere – on phone boxes, on park benches, on the walls of almost every building, even on the marbled vaults of the passageway that runs like a tunnel beneath the Rijksmuseum. I have never seen so much graffiti. And it’s not even good graffiti. It’s just random squiggles, sprayed by people with brains the size of a Cheerio. The Dutch seem to have a problem with mindless crime. You may never get mugged in Amsterdam, but I’m told you can’t park a car on the streets anywhere in the centre of the city in the evening without a strong probability of someone scoring the paintwork from end to end with a screwdriver.

When I was twenty I liked Amsterdam – indeed admired it passionately – for its openness, its tolerance, its relaxed attitude to dope and sex and all the other sins that one can’t get enough of at twenty. But I found it oddly wearisome now. The people of Amsterdam were rather stuck with their tradition of tolerance, like people who take up a political stance and then have to defend it no matter how untenable it gets. Because they have been congratulating themselves on their intelligent tolerance for all these centuries, it is now impossible for them not to be nobly accommodating to graffiti and burned-out hippies and dog shit and litter. Of course, I may be completely misreading the situation. They may like dog shit and litter. I sure hope so, because they’ve certainly got a lot of it.

Here and there I would pass a house braced with timbers, awaiting urgent repairs. Amsterdam was built on a swamp, and just keeping the canalside houses from sinking into it is an unending task. My Times colleague’s brother bought a house on one of the lesser canals and discovered after moving in that the pilings on which it had been built three hundred years before were rotting away and the house was sinking into the underlying ooze at a rate that would make most of it basement within a short while. Putting new pilings under several tons of existing structure is not the easiest job in the world and it cost him almost twice as much to have the house shored up as it did to buy it in the first place. This was almost twenty years ago, and he still wears socks with holes in them because of the debt.

I suppose the same experience has been repeated in countless buildings all over the city, so you have to admire the good people of Amsterdam for keeping the houses standing, and even more for having the sense to keep the canal streets residential. In Britain the ground floors would long ago have been filled with kebab houses and building-society offices and Sketchley dry cleaners, all with big picture windows, as if anybody in the world cares to see what’s going on inside a dry cleaner’s or a building society.

I’ve never understood this. The first thing a building society does when it acquires a Victorian building in Britain is gut the ground floor and put in a lot of plate glass. Why? As you may have noticed, building societies have nothing to put in their windows. So they make a fan-shaped arrangement of brochures informing you that you can borrow money there – ‘Christ, thanks, I thought you sold sausages’ – and insert some dreadful watercolours by the manager’s wife. So I am full of admiration for the Dutch for preserving their finest streets and insisting that people live on them.

The one problem is that it makes the occasional catastrophe all the more unbearable, as I discovered with a cry of pain as I reached the far end of Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. There, where once a fine gabled house must have stood, squatted a new Holiday Inn, a building so ugly, so characterless, so squat, that it stopped me in my tracks, left me standing agog. Everything about it was cheap and unimaginative – the cardboard-box shape, the shit-brown bricks, the empty, staring windows, the acrylic canopy over the entrance, the green plastic signs, the wall-mounted video cameras peering at every passer-by. It looked like a parking ramp. Not the tiniest effort had been made to give it any distinction.

It would have been painful enough out by an airport, but this was in the heart of one of the great cities of Europe on a street otherwise lined with handsome, patrician houses. How could an architect walk through such a city and allow himself to design a building of such utter indistinction? How could the city authorities let him? How could anyone sleep in it? I found myself turning dumbstruck to people passing on the sidewalk as if to say ‘Do you see this building here?’, but they all just hunched past, quite unmoved by its existence. I just don’t understand the world.

Evening came. A light rain began to fall. Pulling my collar round my ears, I walked to the dark streets of the red-light district and squinted through rain-spattered glasses at the goods on offer. The red-light district had changed since my day. In 1973, the most outspoken thing was a club with a sign that said, ON STAGE – REAL FOCKY-FOCKY show. Now everything was much more explicit. The shop windows were filled with a boggling array of plastic phalluses, vibrators, whips, video tapes, unguents, magazines, leatherwear and other exotica not to be found in your average Woolworth’s. One window contained a plastic, life-size, astonishingly realistic woman’s reproductive region, complete with dilated labia. It was awful. It looked like something that would be used in an anatomy lesson, and even then you could imagine students fainting.

The magazines were even grosser. They showed every conceivable variety of couple doing messy and urgent things to each other – heterosexuals, gays, sadomasochists, grotesquely fat people (a little comic relief, I guess) and even animals. The cover of one showed a woman providing – how shall I put this? – a certain oral service to a horse that a horse wouldn’t normally expect to get, even from another horse. I was astounded. And this was just the stuff in the windows. God knows what they keep under the counters.

The whores were still there. They sat in luminous body stockings in windows lit with a pinkish glow, and winked at me as I passed. (‘Hey, they like me!’ I thought, until I realized that they do this for everybody.) Behind them, I could sometimes glimpse the little cells where they conduct their business, looking white and clinical, like someplace you would go to have your haemorrhoids seen to. Twenty years ago the prostitutes were all Dutch. They were friendly and sweet-natured and often heart-breakingly attractive. But now all the prostitutes were Asian or African, and they looked mean and weathered, even when they were pouting and blowing kisses in their most coquettish come-hither manner.

There was a whole street of this stuff, several blocks long, with a spill-over into neighbouring side streets. I couldn’t believe that there could be that many people in Amsterdam – that many people in the world – requiring this sort of assistance just to ejaculate. Whatever happened to personal initiative?

I spent the morning of my last day in the Rijksmuseum. ‘The Night Watch’ wasn’t on view because a few days earlier some crazy person had attacked it with a knife, and both he and it had been taken away for rehabilitation, but the museum is so massive – 250 rooms – and so filled with wonderful pictures that there was plenty else to look at.

Afterwards I strolled on to the Anne Frank House on Prinsengracht. It was packed, but moving none the less. Eight people spent three years hiding in a secret flat above Otto Frank’s spice business, and now an endless line of visitors shuffles through it every day, to see the famous bookcase that hid the secret entrance and the five rooms in which they lived. The tragic part is that when the Franks and their companions were anonymously betrayed and finally captured in August 1944, the Allies were on the brink of liberating Holland. A few more weeks and they would have been saved. As it was, seven of the eight died in concentration camps. Only Anne’s father survived.

The Anne Frank museum is excellent at conveying the horror of what happened to the Jews, but it is a shame that it appears not to give even a passing mention to the Dutch people who risked their own lives in helping the Franks and others like them. Miep Gies, Otto Frank’s secretary, had to find food each day for eight people, as well as herself and her husband, for three years at a time of the strictest rationing. It must have been extremely trying, not to mention risky. Yet this was hardly a rare act: twenty thousand people in Holland sheltered Jews during the war at considerable peril to themselves. They deserve to be remembered too.

What must it have been to be a Jew in Europe in the 1930s? From the beginning they were subjected to the grossest indignities: forbidden to sit in parks or cafés or to ride on trams, required to give up their cars and bicycles, even their children’s bicycles. If it had ended there, it would have redounded to Germany’s shame for ever, but of course it grew unspeakably worse, as the photographs and documents in the museum’s other rooms gruesomely testify – people being herded onto cattle trains, piles of stick-like corpses, the gaunt faces of the living dead, all the pictures you have seen a thousand times.

One picture I hadn’t seen transfixed me. It was a blurry photo of a German soldier taking aim with a rifle at a woman and the baby she was clutching as she cowered beside a trench of bodies. I couldn’t stop staring at it, trying to imagine what sort of person could do such a thing.

It probably wasn’t the best picture to look at just before heading to the station and catching a train to Germany.