The Holland of the Mind
PAMELA ZOLINE
The loss of six hours on the flight from New York to Amsterdam meant that night had rushed to meet them as they curved across and above the Atlantic. The water solid wreath them was a sheet of hammered metal, and the clouds, many-colored and substantial, provided the landscape, seemed the actual ocean. The closed, lighted capsule of the plane’s interior, suspended in all that space, was just another of the tiny islands carved out of the ignorant universe; wrapped in the frailest of membranes against the darkness, like the hairy men around the first fires, wolves calling in the cold air, keeping to the edge of that circle of light.
Graham and Jessica sat, shifting the child occasionally from one lap to the other, her warm limbs loose, asleep. Americans amongst the other Americans filling the plane, the traditional journey away and back. Graham smoked steadily, plane nerves, he said. I can always see the skull beneath the stewardess’s smile. They ate food out of the portioned containers, Rachel woke, two spoonfuls of mashed potato, refused the peas and lamb, and fell asleep again. They ate, drinking, feeling out what it meant, now that it was actual, to be leaving home and all the various complicated pieces of their lives, though how much they carried with them, how much and what kind of baggage could not yet be determined.
The bald man in front of Jess had shifted back his seat and was asleep, his mouth open, his naked, gleaming head almost in her lap. It was like a world, that head, continents of freckles on the sea of bright skin. Jess threatened to trace their journey in lipstick on the man’s skull. Doris Day flickered through a movie on the multiple screens, still young in soft focus; a time lag produced by some quirk of the mechanism showed the same action taking place a few seconds later on each succeeding screen, making a whole small crowd of pasts and futures visible the length of the airplane. They yawned and slumped with the particular fatigue of sedentary travel. The woman behind them was talking of buying diamonds in Amsterdam, a Texas accent, there was a blurb on Dutch flowers in the chair’s pocket; tiny salt and pepper containers, motors, the maps and air sickness bags and postcards of just such silver planes in just such cerulean spaces; all hanging, buzzing, through that great vault of sky.
The land began again beneath them, clumps of light, humps, puddles, and Europe spread out below like a map. The airport suddenly, a game board, they landed on the flat field amidst the red and green lamps. Fluorescent light poured through the airport building, down from the ceiling and up from the polished floors, filling the space through which they and the other travelers moved, stunned, like tired fish through bright water.
CITY ON THE WATER
Amsterdam has been called the “Venice of the North.” It is laced by sixty canals, which are crossed by more than 550 bridges, and the city is a composite of ninety islands! The capital’s center had grown around a series of concentric canals which were first dug more than 300 years ago and served as a principal means of transportation.
In the coach, moving towards the town, the difference of the place, the look of things, surrounded them. I don’t like traveling by plane, Jess said. It’s too fast and it outruns my sense of displacement. I arrive places feeling slightly sick, the way you feel in a fast elevator, my ears popping, my mind blank.
The child pressed her face towards the glass, watching the city, and Graham, watching her, saw its reflection on her smooth skin, the colors gliding over that surface. Your nose is green, he said. We’re here, he said.
the toilet dS-wee-SEE de W.C. Where’s the toilet? waar iz-de-wee-SEE? Waar is de W.C.?
It’s (to the) right. hSt-is-rechts. Het is rechts.
It’s (to the) left. het-is-LiNKS. Het is links,
straight ahead. rechTUiT rechtuit
Go straight ahead. ghaa-rech-TUiT. Ga rechtuit.
It’s here. hfit-is-HiER. Het is hier.
Walking through the streets to the hotel, gray stone, the rough textured narrow passage ways, the canals repeated the clouded sky, rejecting light and so supplying a luminous horizontal to the city. The meat-faced proprietor, polite, rented them two rooms on the top floor. Carrying, dragging their baggage they climbed the steep stairs, two small rooms and very clean, suddenly, exhausted, they were asleep.
The ground plan of the innermost center of Amsterdam is still the same as it was in the Middle Ages when the town first came into existence.
In the morning he woke first, Jess, buried in pillows and her massive dark hair, holding stubbornly to sleep. The room in the daylight was small, finely proportioned, bare. It took its shape from the necessity of roof fitted on to wall, and the ceiling sloped down over the bed. A single window gave a view of shingled roofs, streets with people going to work. The air had a new taste, fresh, slightly bitter, the light special quality: it was, without doubt, a different place. She stirred in the bed and he said to her, we’re in
Holland. Smiling, with her eyes still closed, Amsterdam, she said, do you feel Dutch?
THE INFLECTED FORM IS USED WHEN THE ADJECTIVE
PRECEDES THE NOUN
een grote tuin—a large garden
oude bomen—old trees
de rode daken—the red roofs
het warme continent—the warm continent
The plan was to spend some time in Holland and from there visit Belguim and Italy, but the schedule was undetermined. They had even talked of settling somewhere, not going back, at least not for a while. Graham had some photographic work set up with several magazines, but without particular deadlines. They would feel their way.
After eight years of marriage, Graham found it difficult to look back along the tube of weeks and months and recognise himself at the other end; a tall gawky young man from Oregon finding New York and New Yorkers aggressive and exciting, trying to put together himself and the city out of the hundreds of photographs he took, going slightly night-blind from hours in the dark-room. He and Jess, Jessica Gebhardt, doing post-graduate work in art history, had gone to the same party one Christmas Eve and had awakened Christmas morning, the bells from the city’s churches sounding in their ears, in her apartment, hung over, Jess’s red dress a puddle of brilliance on the bare floor, the small Christmas tree, which they had apparently taken to bed with them, odorous and prickly under the sheets.
He was tall, very tall, naked he was awkward, thin, loose hinged, pale, slightly rounded, a shallow chest and a deep, knotted navel. It was a strangely anonymous body, unmarked by his particular life or character. His experiences seemed concentrated in his head and face, an off-sphere pumpkin, an underinflated balloon, a large, compact globe on a slender neck, webbed already with fine lines, blue eyes, a soft, opaque skin. He wore, at times, large round glasses with fine steel frames. The lenses looked like big, shallow bubbles set on his face. He had pale, blunt hands discolored by photographic chemicals and cigarettes; long, soft feet.
The ground plan of the innermost center exposure.
The exposure of a film or plate is the combined product of two things:
1. The amount of light which passes through the lens, and is controlled by the aperture used, together with
2. the period during which the light passes, known as the exposure time.
They spent the first days walking around the town, fucking, eating, visiting museums. Rachel was still of the age at which their presence, and that of a particular stuffed blue pig, were the main signs of continuity she required from the world. Late spring, and the town was already filling with tourists; Americans, English, German predominating. They all moved through the city, pointing, tasting, peering. Myself, said Graham, after one worthy but deadening tour, I always think of Amsterdam as the Venice of the North.
Graham’s camera was a more complicated and precise machine eye than theirs, but he and Jess were joined with the other tourists in that peculiar state of pure observation. To tourists everything is a potential view, a possible object of holiday interest, everything is to be seen and reflected upon without participation. At whatever lev
el, the cooing at a pair of wooden shoes or a Vermeer, aesthetics take over from the usual exigencies. The real Dutch who lived in the place were like a slightly different species, set apart by the jobs, dishwashing, appendicitis.
In the strange city, the foreign country, amidst all the alienness, their bodies were the only familiar territory. The corporeal landscape, the topology of flesh, was their only point of reference.
The nights were long and dark and had the nature of journeys. In the small bed they slept wrapped close to each other, folded against each other and interwined. Each was aware of the other’s least movement, and they surfaced into consciousness several times during the night. In the mornings, waking, it was as though they had not been separated into personal voyages of sleep, but had traveled together.
Rachel had been born on a rainy day in April; they were staying with Jess’s family in St. Paul, and the baby had been two weeks early. Jess came in from the grocery store, her arms full of packages, tears and rain running down her face. She was one of the women who look most beautiful pregnant, the swell of her belly marking a tense, great curve into the air. The baby’s hair, blonde at first, had later turned brown, and now she was as dark as her mother, his wife.
bread broot brood
water waater water
meat vlees vlees
potatoes AARappelen nardappelen
coffee KOFFie koffie
milk melk melk
beer bier bier
Do you want coffee? wilt-uu-KOFFie-drinken?
Wilt u koffie drinken? How much is it? hoe-veel-is-et? Hoeveel is het?
Dear Mother and Dad, We arrived in Amsterdam safe and well, and although Ray has a little cold now it’s nothing serious and are all fine. This city is splendid, small enough to comprehend, with a coherent, rhythmic structure based on concentric canals. How are you both? Will you be able to get away to the lake early this summer or are you, Dad, going to bj teaching summer school again? Jave you heard anything from Sally? I’ve written to her, but no word as yet. I hope Aunt Kate is better soon, have the doctors said what’s the matter with her? Is it anything serious? The proprietor of the hotel has taken to Ray and keeps giving her chocolates every time we go out, so we wander around the city always with a smeary faced but happy little girl. There is an immense sense of community here after the facelessness of New York. The people are terrifically nice, clean, the bourgeois virtues uppermost and the marks of former greatness. History is lying around in great lumps everywhere. Graham and Ray join me is sending love, xxx Jess.
THE JEWISH BRIDE
For all its richness and splendor, the matiere of painting is never an end in itself with Rembrandt, but a means of embodying his innermost thoughts. Such is the case with the Jewish Bride in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After countless attempts to explain this picture, its exact meaning remains a riddle. The magnificent, old-world garments worn by the couple are oriental in character. Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, Tobias and Sarah have all been suggested as the theme. Perhaps it is simply a double portrait. Yet the posing of the figures in their glittering garments of scarlet and gold against the dim background of an abandoned park, and the ritual gesture of the man, laying his hand on his wife’s breast, seem to point to the fulfilment of a biblical destiny. The human element of such a portrait is so deep and universal in significance that living models, contemporaries of the artist, are turned into the timeless heroes of the Old Testament and symbolise eternal spiritual values.
They both smoked too many cigarettes, invited death? Jess’s grandparents, the Illinois pair, had both died of cancer. Jess had long hair, dark, wavy, a trap for light. Her face, they recognised her in Titus, was strongly marked, seemed full of experience, and went straight from a near ugliness to an occasional beauty without ever passing through prettiness. She bitched at the weather.
What were the myths that they had learned, as children in America, about Holland? Hans Brinker and the silver skates, cheese, tulips, the boy with his finger in the dyke saving the town, windmills, wooden shoes.
REMBRANDT VAN RIJN
1606-1669 covers with his life the greater part of the period of true magnificence in Dutch painting, and within half a century of his birth falls the birth of almost every other Dutch painter of pre-eminence. His contemporaries and pupils form a galaxy of a brilliance hardly equalled in so short a space of time in any other age or place. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born at Leyden in the house of his father, a well-to-do miller of the lower middle class who encouraged his son’s artistic bent by apprenticing him to a local “Italianist” painter, Jacob van Swanenburgh.
By 1631, he was in Amsterdam with an established reputation, and from 1632 dates his first masterpiece, the Anatomical Lecture, now at The Hague. In 1634 he married Saskia van Ulenborch, daughter of the burgomaster of Leeuwarden, and his fortune and happiness seemed secure. Of Saskia’s four children, however, only Titus, the youngest, survived childhood; and Saskia herself died in 1642. Meanwhile Rembrandt was the leader of a flourishing and profitable school; in 1639 he bought and partly paid for the house in Jodenbreestraat which now contains a collection of his etchings, and the debt incurred was never fully paid off. Rembrandt’s vogue as a fashionable portraitist seems to have begun to wane about 1642, the year of the so-called Night Watch, a masterpiece of free portraiture which sacrificed individual likeness to balance of composition and may on that account have given offence. At any rate, in July 1656, he was declared bankrupt and his effects, including the collection of art treasures he had amassed, were sold. However, with the loyal assistance of Titus and of the faithful Hendrickje Stoffels, his model and mistress and perhaps his second wife, Rembrandt continued painting with undiminished skill and ardor until his death in 1669.
Graham sat on bed talking Rachel to sleep, the room half dark, his cigarette a single point of red. When I was six or seven I learned to swim. In Oregon? Yes. My father took me and my brothers and sister down to a swimming pool, a salt water pool near the ocean. They were older and could all swim already. The water was very warm and blue and for a while we all just played in the water, splashing, ducking each other. The little girl shifted in the bed, her eyes just open, her fine profile and shallow nose dusky against the pillow. Then my father took me down to the deeper end, he was a very big man, taller than I am now, and he showed me how to move my arms and legs. I was frightened, but he held on to me and then, when I understood the movements, he began to back away from me, a foot at a time, talking to me and telling me to swim to him. Every time I would almost reach him, he would move further away. I was scared, I think I was crying, but I swam, he moved away, I swam to get to him, until we reached the other side of the pool. The child was asleep now, her fingers curled, her mouth slightly open. Graham went on to finish the story, talking, softly, to himself. We all played some more before we went home, there was an inflated dragon that floated in the water, a beach ball, and, playing around, I discovered that, big as he was, in the salt water I could lift my father up and carry him around the shallow end of the pool. He pulled the blanket up over the child. We stopped in our wet suits and had ice cream cones on the way home.
“. . . the Girl in a Turban in The Hague, could take its place beside a Bellini Madonna, the Petrus Christus portrait of a young woman in Berlin, and perhaps even Piero della Francesca . . . And it comes as no surprise that in recent years an affinity has been repeatedly observed between the visual approach of Vermeer and that of Jan van Eyck: the lenslike vision, the luminous ‘positive’ color, the calm devoted attitude before still, silent objects—these are qualities common to both artists.” Vitale Bloch, All the paintings of Jan Vermeer.
Amsterdam had them caught and they stayed on week after week, a little charmed by their own indulgent freedom. Getting to know some people they began to break through the almost complete wrapper of English with which English speaking visitors to Amsterdam are protected. Dutch fell against their ears plosive and slightly comic. Without the hate memories
of German to reinforce its gutturals, and with the surprising double vowels, it seemed sometimes a kind of clown English. A new language unravels metaphors back to their first excitement and reacts back on one’s own language so that one examines those natural stones.
They ate, walked. They had endless arguments” about painting, talking and talking. Rembrandt, Vermeer. Somehow they set up these two painters in opposition to each other, Rembrandt and the subjective, the emotive, the lover. Vermeer the cool, the objective, the eye.
Bad news from America. More riots, more public deaths. They read the newspaper with a thrill of guilt, a feeling that St. Louis burning was real, had a claim on them, that this fine city, the paintings, the parks, did not.
spiegeling—reflection
lenig—supple, pliant
goochelkunst—juggling art, prestidigitation
spietsen—spear (fish); pierce (man); impale (criminal) water—water
sight, vision—gezicht, aanblik; vertoning; bezien-
swaardigheid, merkwaardigheid
fish—vis
storten—spill (milk); shed (tears, blood); shoot,
dump (rubbish); pay in (money)
sex—geslacht, sekse, kunne; seksualiteit; adj, seksueel helder—clear, bright, lucid, serene; clean.
Eating oranges in the room, they make love. Oh dearest darling fat, thin, lovely, love, oh kip, oh sweet wet vork. Breast, skin, kaas, oh lovely slippery love, wet, mouth, mond, vis, breathing hard in this room full of oranges and the smells of oranges, the seeds slide down the creases of your skin, the juices glaze your silver sides, oh my fish love, my vis, bubbles rise to the ceiling, burst and break against the light bulb as you move, puff, pant and sniff the air from the water.
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