Dutch T(h)reat
 
Chapter 2

A lemon-drop sun was working its way up a pale-blue sky when my plane left Detroit Metro for New York at 11 AM the next Saturday. By the time I caught my connecting flight at JFK, it was midafternoon and still sunny.

When we touched down at Schiphol Airport, eight hours and a six-hour time difference later, it was Sunday morning, and, on that side of the Atlantic, slate-gray clouds threatened rain and the sun was having trouble clearing customs.

I haven’t had occasion to do an awful lot of flying in my 24 years, so I haven’t seen an awful lot of airports. Those I have seen have all been pretty interchangeably awful, and Schiphol was no exception. Newsstands, duty-free shops, hordes of faceless people lugging luggage and renting Hertzes and either joyeously greeting or tearfully taking their leave of the hordes of faceless friends and relatives who were either joyeously picking them up or tearfully dropping them off. It wasn’t until I’d collected my first entry stamp in my brand-new rush-job passport and rescued my backpack from the carousel and walked beneath the green "Nothing to Declare" sign and out of the terminal that it really sank in that I was in Holland, in Europe, on soil more foreign than Canada for the very first time in my life.

Prof Harriman – that dear old benevolent soul, towards whom I was now feeling positively chummy – had made all kinds of arrangements for me, and all I had to do was find my way into town and check into my hotel.

There were a half-dozen off-white taxis pulled up outside the terminal doors, and I tapped meekly on the driver’s window of the first one in line.

The old-timer behind the wheel looked up from his newspaper and rolled down his window a couple inches. "Ja?"

"Ah, ‘scuse me. Do you, ah, do you speak English?"

He made a face. "No, young man. I do not speak English," he said, in perfect English. "This is Holland. I'm a Dutchman. I speak Dutch."

I ducked my head, embarrassed. "Right, stupid question, sorry. Listen, I need a ride downtown. Are you. . . ?"

He narrowed his eyes at my backpack. "You can better go with the KLM bus," he said. "It’s only six guilder to the Central Station."

Ever the practically bankrupt college student, I came this close to asking him to point me to the bus stop – but then I remembered D.S. Harriman was picking up the tab. "Well, okay," I said doubtfully, "if you don't want the fare. . . ."

He straightened up at that, tossed his paper on the passenger seat beside him and reached around to open the back door for me. "Of course I want the fare! You need a ride, I have a taxi. Jump in, young man, jump in!"

I shrugged out of my pack and swung it inside and climbed in after it.

"Where downtown?" the old guy said, as he dropped the cab into gear and pulled away from the curb.

The good professor had booked me a room at a place his travel agent had recommended, just a couple minutes’ walk from where I was going to be doing his research for him. "The Nova Hotel," I said, "in the" – I dug a slip of paper with the address on it out of my wallet – "oh, God, in the Nee-you-weh – "

"Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal." The cabbie nodded his approval. "Very nice. Not the Hilton, but nice. If you can afford there, you can afford the 30 guilder for the ride."

Thirty guilders sounded like a hell of a lot, but I did a rough mental calculation and figured it came out to about 19 bucks, a little less than I’d paid in New York for the transfer from LaGuardia to JFK.

"Does everybody here speak English?" I leaned forward and rested my elbows on the back of the driver’s seat, so I could talk with the cabbie over the hum of his engine and the steady drone of highway noise.

He lifted his right hand from the wheel and made one of those comme çi comme ça gestures. "Now, everybody? Not really. The kids don’t get it on school until they’re a year of 13, and the farmers don’t bother with it much, but city people know at least a little, sometimes a lot. We’re a small country, only 14 million of us. The rest of the world’s not going to bother learning our little kikker language, so we have to learn everyone else’s if we want to be able to communicate. English, French, German – we can overcharge you in lots of languages."

After maybe 15 minutes of flat farmland, we hit the outskirts of town. The old guy pointed out an enormous white convention center – the RAI, he called it, as proudly as if he’d built it himself – and later on the twin brick-and-slate steeples of the ornate Victorian Rijksmuseum. Then we started twisting through a maze of one-way streets, past endless rows of narrow four- and five-story brick houses with oddly shaped gables, over stubby bridges spanning a confusion of intersecting green canals. "A thousand bridges," the cabbie told me, "a hundred kilometers of canals. Some people call Amsterdam the Venice of the North, but they’re wrong. Actually, Venice is the Amsterdam of the South."

At last we pulled up in front of the hotel, across the street from the Scientology and Dianetics Center and next door to the Tingel Tangel Jazz Club. Half the signs in Amsterdam seemed to be in English, which was about half comforting and half disappointing. I paid off the driver with a bright orange-and-yellow banknote with a glorious sunflower on it, so pretty compared to our drab American greenbacks that I almost hated to part with it. He made change, and I tipped half of it back to him and asked him for a receipt. He scribbled out something about as legible as my doctor’s prescriptions, waved goodbye and tootled off, and I shouldered my pack and clambered down a couple stone steps to the Nova’s semi-sunken glass front door.

They were expecting me, and the receptionist checked me in and sent me on up in the elevator to a small but cozy room on the third floor. It had a single bed with a decent mattress and a reading light clipped to the headboard, it had a sink and towels and a closet and a miniscule bathroom with a toilet that if I sat on it my knees pressed up against the beige tiled wall, it had a drain set into the bathroom floor and a showerhead at eye level, which I guess was what the girl at the desk must have meant when she assured me there was a douche in the room. It wasn’t much, room 214 – that "2" threw me for a minute, until I remembered reading somewhere that what we Americans call the first floor the Europeans call the ground floor, and what we call the second floor they call the first floor, and so on, so that my third-floor quarters were on the European second floor, whence 214 – but it was clean and it was quiet and Professor Harriman was paying for it, so I’d be delighted to call it Home Sweet Home for the next two weeks.

I probably ought to have been jetlagged and groggy from all the travelling, but I was too excited about being in Amsterdam to sleep, so I unpacked my pack and cleaned up a little and caught the elevator back down to the lobby.

I’d read up on the city during the week it’d taken to push through my passport, and there was plenty I wanted to see, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to start out by getting my bearings, so I’d be ready to commence work in the morning.

The receptionist told me all I had to do was turn right and follow the tram tracks for a couple minutes, then make a left at the pianos, and I’d see a sign for the Begijnhof on the wall about 20 meters ahead on my left.

So I went out the door and up the steps and to my right, and followed the tram tracks past a cluster of little stamp shops on one side and the Amsterdams Historisch Museum on the other. One of the stamp shops, at the corner of Rosmarijnsteeg, was in a building that must have been close to collapse; it had been shored up with five thick logs with the bark still on them, bolted to a wooden platform 18 inches out from the side of the building at ground level and clamped to the brick wall six feet above my head with rusted iron braces. A bass-ackwards way of doing things, I thought – and yet the results seemed sturdy enough, and a damn sight cheaper than ripping the whole building down and starting over again.

A long yellow streetcar rumbled past, blue sparks spitting from its overhead wires. It stopped briefly to discharge and pick up passengers, and, when it rattled off again, I spotted the piano shop on the corner behind it.

Swinging around the corner, I found myself in a big, bustling square with a street sign telling me it was the Spui – although how that was supposed to be pronounced was completely beyond me. Spwee? Spewie? Spoy?

Whatever it was called, it was a lively place. First thing that caught my eye was the sea of white tables shaded by colorful Cinzano umbrellas spilling out across the sidewalk from a cafe to the east. An assortment of bookstores and restaurants lined the southern and western sides of the square, dominated by a bulky gray Universiteit van Amsterdam building. The Spui’s northern boundary, on my left, consisted of a row of 10 brick houses, and the tallest of them – five stories of red brick with a dozen white-trimmed windows and a pointed gable – had a stone bas-relief of a tall woman in a flowing white gown above its arched doorway and, off to one side, a blue-and-white sign reading "Begijnhof" with an arrow pointing to the door.

"Dis mus’ be da place," I concluded. And decided that, as long as I was in the neighborhood, I might as well stop in and introduce myself, if anyone was to home. There was no doorbell, though, and no knocker, and I was debating the advisability of pounding on the tall wooden door with my fists when a sweet old lady wheeling a battered all-white bicycle down the sidewalk stopped just behind me.

"Moet U d’rin?" she asked, or at least that’s what it sounded like.

"I’m sorry," I said, "I don't speak Dutch. Do you – ?"

She flashed me an understanding smile and broke in on me in heavily accented English: "You want to go inside, yes?"

"Yes," I agreed, "but, uh, how do I – ?"

"It isn’t locked," she said, that last word coming out lock-Ed. "You can go ahead in."

"Ah, it isn’t locked," I nodded. "But I – "

"No, it’s good, don’t worry. Go in, go in!"

I looked around the square, and no one was paying any attention to us. Shrugging, I tried the iron door handle. The old lady was right: it wasn’t lock-Ed.

"Go in," she said again, pushing air away from her with gnarled white hands.

It didn’t feel right, walking into somebody’s house unannounced like that, but the old girl didn’t seem especially senile, so I figured, hey, maybe she’s the cook or something, just do it.

Had I But Known at that moment what would happen over the next couple days, would I have gone on in, I wonder – or would I have turned around and collected my pack and caught the next plane back to the land of the free and the home of the Whopper?

Doesn’t matter, really. I didn’t know what was waiting for me within the walls of the Begijnhof, so I pushed open the wooden door and set foot into Wonderland.

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