‘Do you remember that you wanted to stay here?’ Marianne asks.
When we were sixteen we went to the same school for a year. My stepfather, Andries, who had lived in Utrecht for sixteen years, returned for a sabbatical and brought his new family – my mother, my younger sister, and myself. Now, fourteen years later, I visit the city again. Marianne and I walk along the Oude Gracht, past the buildings of our former school.
‘You didn’t want to leave,’ she says. ‘I remember that at one point you were thinking about being adopted by Andries, so that you could stay.’
Above the rooftops, the sky is clear, except for a single cloud.
‘I think it was loyalty to your father that made you decide not to do it.’
I observe the fine lines that have formed around her eyes; the angle of the cheekbones that has become more pronounced.
‘You don’t remember?’ she asks.
In a bay window between the new school building and the old, I see the same silhouette that I saw fourteen years ago, walking between classes. In front of us, a tall, thin man holds the hand of a small girl, intensely concentrated as she balances on a skateboard. He pulls her along the cobbled road. Apart from her bright pink shoes, they are both dressed in black.
‘I don’t remember,’ I say.
*
The bedroom of the Schalkwijkstraat apartment is below ground level. I lie enveloped by the feather duvet. Each time the alarm goes off I press the snooze button. I wear the eye mask from the aeroplane; put the pillow over my head.
When I get up, I see the light from the small window under the ceiling play on the white sheets. The stairs to the living area are so steep that when I stoop slightly I can touch the ones in front of me. It is as if I am crawling.
I sit down to write about my memories of the city. After a while I get up. There is no food in the house. In the Albert Heijn on Nachtegaalstraat I watch as people select cheeses, and breads, and fruit. They do so with ease, because they understand the order that governs rituals of eating: the ordinary foods eaten at ordinary times. Eventually I choose a green pepper and some quark, so as not to leave with nothing.
I call my mother and Andries. There is no answer. I remind myself that our dog – wild and nervous – will deter intruders.
*
One afternoon I ask Marianne to walk with me, and to tell me what she sees in the city. I record her as she describes the old buildings of the museum quarter, the bright green of the young leaves along the Singel, the wharf cellars and the parks and the stairs of the Stadhuis packed with people enjoying the first sun.
After some time Marianne stops and asks me what I see. Thinking that I am pressing ‘pause’ on the dictaphone, I press ‘record’. And so when I listen to the tape later in the evening, I hear only my own voice.
‘Nothing,’ I reply.
*
I have one memory of the period in which we lived in Utrecht: it is a meal time. Andries is chewing, and I watch him swallow. He has asked me something, and I don’t respond.
*
In the evening I walk along a route that links various light installations in buildings around the city. It is Sunday, and the city centre is deserted. Outside the Sint-Janskerk, speakers project a sound like the howling of a wolf. Inside, the space is lit up: flashing orange light, like fire. Then blue ripples, like reflections in water. Then different colors: green, and yellow, and red. There is something frightening about the empty space bathed in light: as though it makes more vivid the return to darkness.
On Mariaplaats, a man barks out of a window; then laughs at my surprise.
I walk from little light arrow to arrow, set amongst the cobblestones, delineating the route. Each arrow brings relief, and structure in the darkness.
*
Susan, an old friend of Andries’s, invites me to come for supper at her house. She prepares a salad (the first salad of the spring), and chats enthusiastically about her new relationship. She truly did not know that such a thing was possible, at her age. It is like being given a new life.
‘How did you and Andries become friends?’ I ask later, as we are eating dessert.
They met through a mutual friend, Marcel, she says, who was terminally ill at the time. At the age of twenty-five Marcel was diagnosed with a brain tumour and given eight years to live. Towards the end of his illness, she and Andries looked after him on different days. Afterwards, one of them would visit the other to speak about how the day had been. It was during this time that she and Andries became close. In the end they were both also there when Marcel died.
She frowns. Golden light casts shadows in the furrows of her face.
‘It shook my sense of control over life,’ she says. ‘I don’t know how it was for Andries, but I was very Dutch in the sense of having control over things. That was the first time that I deeply realised that one doesn’t choose.’
I remember a painting that Andries made in our garage in Stellenbosch, soon after he had returned to South Africa, and met my mother. It was of the cast of a man’s head, with a diagram drawn on it – a plan for surgery. It could not have been long after Marcel’s death.
After we have had coffee, Susan suggests that we take a stroll. ‘We can look at Andries’s old house,’ she says. ‘It’s just down the street.’
The door of the house is several metres away from hers. We stand looking at it in the last light. The evening is perfectly tranquil. There is one small cloud in the sky. I know that at the time that Andries sold the house, having returned to South Africa, he could not have predicted how valuable it would become. The width of a window and a door, it is less than half the size of the house that he and my mother now own in South Africa, but worth more than twice as much.
Suddenly cold, I excuse myself, and leave.
As I cycle down Kruisstraat I think of the property on which Andries and my mother live. I think of the bitter smell of the leaves in the garden, and the dog that guards the periphery, with her black-rimmed eyes.
*
When I first met Andries he often spoke of two Dutch girls, the daughters of friends of his. He said that they sometimes made breakfast for him when he visited their house. At the time I pictured it very vividly – the image of the girls bringing him porridge and toast – and I fantasised that I was one of them.
In the middle of the night, in the Schalkwijkstraat apartment, I suddenly have the sensation that my chest is empty, and my heart gone.
*
I meet with two writers at a café under a tall sycamore tree on the Lange Nieuwestraat. Both of them have long faces and large teeth. The one, who is blonde, laughs delightedly at my comments as though they were particularly sharp-witted. ‘Wonderful!’ he exclaims when I tell him that I don’t consider myself to be a writer, since I have nothing to write. ‘That’s exactly what you need to qualify as a writer, to feel that you have nothing to write! It must be a struggle!’ He pulls a tortured face; then collapses into laughter.
I notice that the other young man, who is dark, is making a list on the back of the bill. He is writing carefully, tapping his pen on his lips as he pauses to think.
‘What is that?’ I ask.
‘I’m just making a list of nice things that you can do while you are in Utrecht,’ he replies.
I feel suddenly and acutely grateful to them both.
Later, in the basement bedroom of the Schalkwijkstraat apartment, I read an essay by a South African writer scheduled to appear later in the week in Utrecht. The writer lists the crimes that occur within his close circle of acquaintances while he visits South Africa. ‘If a young South African were to ask me whether he or she should stay or leave,’ he writes, ‘my bitter advice would be to go. For the foreseeable future... if you can stand the loss, if you can amputate yourself, then go...’
There is nothing in the house to be afraid of, but I lie listening for sounds in the dark.
*
The first thing on the list of nice things to do in Utrecht is a boat tour of the city. I sit with my notebook open, pen ready. We move below the level of the street; looking up at the trees and the buildings. I try to listen to the recorded voice detailing the history of the structures that we pass, but all I hear is the sniffing of the boatman, and I wonder if he is crying.
*
The voices of the people on the grassy banks of the Maliesingel are like the calls of birds: ‘Dag, doeg, doei, johoe!’ Flocks of bicycles pass; riders whistling, or singing, or leaning far back in their saddles, relaxed.
The sky is like a perfect dome, as if one could get up and step outside of it. It is clear, but for the single cloud that appears to have been cut out and pasted on top of it, as though part of a different world.
A second memory: a sense of walking in the same light with Andries, his hand resting awkwardly on my shoulder, hoping that it will not be pushed away.
*
An appendix to the list of nice things to do in Utrecht is an interesting thing to do. ‘Since you’ve seen the oldest part of the city, you should also see the newest part,’ the dark young man had said. Next to the words ‘Leidsche Rijn’ he had scribbled the number of a woman who lives and works in the area, and who, he was sure, would be happy to show me around.
Maria picks me up along the Maliesingel. She has full eyes and lips, a short body, and a quick, sudden laugh. As she drives she speaks. She tells me about Leidsche Rijn. It is a vast new development on the outskirts of Utrecht, she says. Ten years ago, the entire area was farmland. Now, amongst some of the old farmhouses and apple orchards that have been retained, a range of new suburbs has emerged.
At first there were great hopes for the area, she explains. It would provide a way of living that combined access to the atmospheric centre of Utrecht with more spacious, affordable living. Soon it became apparent, though, that these expectations fell short of the experience of new inhabitants.
‘It became clear that you don’t just place people in an area, and then expect them to feel at home, or feel as if they belong,’ she says.
We drive across the yellow bridge, connecting the old city and Leidsche Rijn.
‘What does it mean to feel at home in a place, or to belong?’ I ask.
She glances at me; focuses again on the road.
‘Well, it’s a sense of having a history in a place. Having a culture that you share – rituals of ordinary things, done together.’
The first attempts to foster a sense of rootedness in Leidsche Rijn focused on the creation of artworks within the public domain. Such works, it was hoped, would stimulate a sense of a vital cultural life. One artist invited residents to donate precious belongings that related to their stay in Leidsche Rijn, which she would bury in little transparent urns in the soil, as though literally to create an archaeological history of people’s lives in the area.
‘Maybe there is no substitute for time spent in a place, and the process of developing a sense of home can’t be rushed,’ Maria says. ‘Whatever it may be, the sense of dissatisfaction remained. And so now there has been a shift in approach, and rather than spending money on so-called ‘high’ art, there is investment in simple cultural events that will draw people into the public space around daily activities like eating, drinking, playing with the children. And presumably the sense of history will develop as these experiences accumulate: ordinary, shared experiences.’
I keep my eye on a small cloud on the horizon, drawing closer.
When we ate supper in our flat in Utrecht, my mother lit a candle in the centre of the table. I sat silently, watching as Andries ate. I had a past with a different father, and a home somewhere else.
*
My mother and Andries call to tell me that our dog has died. She had been ill for some time, but they did not want to distress me with the news. Her condition deteriorated very quickly. The vet came and they sat with her on the sundeck overlooking the trees. He stroked her ears. He said: ‘Shame my girl,’ and then injected her.
They sat with her for a while longer. The wind sent a slight ripple through her coat – a movement along the delicate edges of the ear, as though it still contained life. Then they wrapped her in her blanket, and took her down to the bottom of the garden. They put her in a grave that had already been dug for her by the gardener some days before. There they sat for some time, and then took turns covering her with soil.
I remember taking her for a walk as a puppy. I remember that when she saw a stranger at a distance, she would startle and turn to run back to where we came from. I remember her legs flying in all directions as she ran down the hill with only one thing in mind: home.
She was a skittish dog, wild and unpredictable. She kept strangers at bay. Sometimes I lay next to her on the sundeck, looking into her yellow eyes.
Sitting in the underground room of the Schalkwijkstraat apartment, I have a sudden sense of the wet earth where she lies, and the moisture in the air. It is as if, for the first time, I am rooted there, in that sprawling property, amidst the bitter smell of the trees.
*
I catch a bus back to Leidsche Rijn. I don’t know what it is that I am looking for. It is my last day in the city.
Opposite me on the bus sits a girl with a headdress pinned to a bun with a small pearl. She has blue eyes, ivory skin, and perfect chiseled features. To her right sits another girl with a long ponytail of artificial hair who wears tight pale jeans, a patchwork patent leather jacket, glittery sandals, a charm bracelet, large sunglasses, and pink hoops in the bottom holes of her studded ears. To the left of the girl with the bun sits a bleached blonde woman in a tight black skirt and furry leopard print tights. Her mascara has formed thick clumps, and her black lip liner bleeds into the wrinkles of her pale pink lips. Behind me, two women in brown, with bare faces and limp hair, sit with their necks craning forward.
They all want a normal life – a bit of eating; a bit of drinking; a bit of fun. They want café’s in the neighborhood. They want a place they can call their own. They want to know what will happen next.
We cross the yellow bridge. I get off at a stop along the road. There is a large building in the distance, incomplete. Around it, in a field, is some scaffolding, bulldozers, and heaps of sand. I walk for a while, along the side of the road. I look for a sign of life. Nothing passes. Nothing moves, apart from the wind in the grass. Later, I return to the bus stop, to catch the bus on its way back.
Death sits with me on line twenty-eight richting Centraal Station. His tongue shakes just above his lower lip. His eyes look out of the window, trapped in his body. One hand rests on the other. His nails are long. He doesn’t speak. There is a large wart on his chin.
Apart from the two of us, the bus is empty.
*
My bags are packed and I am ready to go. I receive a phone call: it is one of my hosts. A volcano has erupted in Iceland. An ash cloud has descended over Europe. Schiphol Airport has been closed, because of the cloud. For the moment, I should stay put. Is there somewhere else that I can stay? The Schalkwijkstraat apartment has already been booked.
I cook cauliflower for supper. It burns on the stove. The beautiful living room is filled with smoke. I sit quietly; unmoving.
Then, for a number of seconds, I scream.
*
The next morning, another friend of Andries’s, Tineke, pays me a visit. She is a short woman: solid, and curt. Her hair is dyed bright red and stands out at right angles against her head. She wears round spectacles and her back is very upright. She takes her time to look around the Schalkwijkstraat apartment, giving the occasional appreciative nod. Then she settles on a bench outside in the sun. Since there is not much else that I can think of saying, I mention that I am struggling with a condition of anxiety, focused most recently on the inevitability of death. She doesn’t respond at first. Her face is calm, attentive. Then she speaks.
‘Firstly, I don’t think it’s good for you to wonder every day whether you will leave tomorrow. I think this will make you extremely anxious,’ she says. ‘I suggest that you come to us tomorrow. You can stay with us for as long as you need to. This is absolutely no problem. We will help you to find a new flight. So that means that you just accept now that it will be a few days that you are still here. You enjoy being here, and we arrange for you to get back.’
I want to ask her how she bears the passing of time: loss, aging, the prospect of violent impact to the body, of death. Instead I nod; offer to bring her tea. Her hair is almost orange in the sun, as though there were a curling flame on either side of her head. I watch the fine lines around her eyes and her mouth, watch as they deepen around an unexpected laugh.
Before she leaves, she arranges a time to collect me the next day. ‘What you need now is some social order,’ she adds as she reaches up to give me a brief hug, and a firm pat on the back.
*
Tineke fetches me after lunch. In Tuindorp yellow flowers are in bloom next to the canal. A mother duck with a trail of ducklings cuts through the perfect reflection of the sky: clear, but for a single cloud.
She prepares me for what will happen next.
‘You will sleep in Femke’s room. Now, I will make the bed in which Femke will sleep, and Max will cook. When supper is ready, we will call you.’
Femke is sixteen, as I was when I lived in Utrecht fourteen years ago. She lives in a bright attic room with a yellow carpet and a red duvet. I sit on her bed after I have opened my bags, and I look at the fantasy books on her shelf.
When Femke is called for supper, she calls, ‘Ja, ik kom.’ She chats animatedly over the meal. She is excited about going to Rome on a school trip. She is excited about the upcoming school strijd. She got out of school early today, which is exciting. She loves to read. She loves riding horses. She is very small with sandy blonde curls and a delicate skin that flushes easily.
I offer to help after supper, but the kitchen is too small for more than one person. ‘I will clean up,’ Tineke says, ‘and then we will drink something. Max and I will have coffee, and Femke will have some tea. She will watch TV for half an hour. And then she will go to bed. That seems to be what she needs to sleep.’
After supper, Tineke tells me that she will take the dog for a walk. I offer to join her. It is cool outside. Tineke walks quickly, and very upright. We turn corners, but the streets look the same: rows of terraced, dark brick houses.
Bikkel looks like a dog in a Jan Steen painting. He is smallish, with a long-haired, white and deep brown coat. Tineke explains that Bikkel must be trained constantly, otherwise he forgets. ‘The key is to keep him focused on me,’ she says. ‘Every time that he makes eye contact, that he looks at me, he must be rewarded. Bikkel! Bikkel!’ Bikkel turns, runs back to her. ‘Ja, dat is goed. Dat is goed.’
I remember our dog, snapping at the heels of our guests. Her hair was short and coarse, her eyes guarded. When she had the space to run flat-out she sprinted like a greyhound: sleek and strong in the wind. I remember her in full speed next to a river, charging in and out of the thick undergrowth. We did not have the energy to train her consistently. When visitors came, Sita had to be locked into the kitchen, or onto the sundeck, until she got used to their smell.
Bikkel runs into a hedge. ‘Bikkel! Bikkel! Sit.’ Bikkel must be asked to perform a trick, and then he must be rewarded with a treat. The key is to maintain contact with him.
‘How do you maintain this contact?’ I ask.
‘Anything,’ Tineke responds, ‘talking. But I must keep it up, otherwise he will go off and do his own thing, and if I need to call him back, he won’t come.’
He mustn’t go too far, Bikkel. He must always be close enough to be called back.
‘Every day, Bikkel needs to be trained again,’ Tineke tells me, ‘otherwise he will forget.’
Through the thin walls, I hear Femke giggling in the room next door. It is a high, gurgling laugh, like bells.
*
‘I remember when you came here first,’ Tineke says. Max has gone to bed, and Femke. She is sitting drinking a glass of wine downstairs. Without her glasses, her eyes look soft, vulnerable. ‘You had always been in the house in South Africa, you had never cycled, and almost immediately you were cycling to the Maarsseveense Plassen! I just thought this was incredible, that you just jumped right into being here.’
‘But then suddenly I withdrew,’ I say. ‘I didn’t want to leave the flat anymore.’
‘I think it was because you had to leave, and you could not fully cope with this.’
I stroke Bikkel’s fur. He lies on his back, stomach exposed.
‘It’s a difficult thing, going back to South Africa,’ she says. ‘It’s a more complicated life. It was a big thing for your mother and Andries at the time, deciding whether to leave South Africa or not.’
‘Deciding whether to leave?’
‘Oh yes. It went on for years. That is why Andries was looking for residencies in other countries – he was trying to explore other possibilities.’
Bikkel jerks, touched in a place he does not like. He gets up and lies somewhere else.
‘I wouldn’t have told you, if I knew you didn’t know,’ she says, then adds: ‘I think it is difficult to grow older in a country where aging makes you more defenceless against crime.’
For Sinterklaas of the year that we spent in Utrecht, my mother, Andries and I prepared poems and gifts for one another. The gifts had to be disguised as something else. I bought Andries a little volume of Greek poetry, which I disguised as a boat.
*
I walk through Utrecht. Street by street, it returns: the memory of being sixteen. On Nobelstraat I imagine that I will catch someone’s eye, and fall in love instantaneously. On the Lijnmarkt I see a pair of boots that will change my life. Along Wolter Heukelslaan I look into people’s houses, and imagine that one of them is my home. At the Berekuil I write letters to my father, telling him that I miss him, and love him, and hope that he is well.
*
Once, in our Utrecht apartment, Andries puts his head down on the table, and weeps. It is the greatest grief of his life, he says, that I do not love him. I don’t know what to say.
*
After a week, the cloud passes. As promised, Max and Tineke help me to book a ticket back to South Africa. The night before my return, I call my mother and Andries via Skype. An image comes up on the computer screen: Andries is painting. There is slight moisture on his brow, from the heat. I ask him why he left the Netherlands, and returned to South Africa.
He thinks for a while.
He says that it came as a shock to him to realise the extent to which he did not fit into Dutch society.
‘In one sense it is a society that is very open to people who are different, but in another sense it also is not. More so than South Africa, it works with implicit rules. In the traffic it is necessary to pass very close together. No matter how much tolerance there is – if you don’t know the codes, it doesn’t work. And the codes are often very subtle.’
Now in South Africa, he tells me, he gets complaints that he speaks too monotonously. But he thinks that it is because when he lived in the Netherlands he was criticized for being too expressive, too emphatic. It was perceived as aggressive.
And so it is a very ambivalent feeling that he has, because while the Netherlands as abstraction feels unwelcoming, he also feels so safe with his Dutch friends.
I ask him what he is painting.
‘Feet,’ he says.
‘And how is it going?’
‘Well,’ he says.
‘That’s good,’ I swallow, and clear my voice. ‘I love you.’
‘I love you too,’ he says.
*
Max and Tineke drive me to the train station. Tineke helps me to carry my luggage onto the platform, and into the carriage. She talks me through the steps of my return journey. I watch as the wind momentarily lifts her hair, so that it frames her head, like a bright red halo.
‘You’ll be okay now,’ she says. She waits with me, standing on the platform outside the train.
Afterwards I remember that as we move off, she stands in the same place, her back straight against the wind.
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