by Jim Shepard
“Is the currency stable?” I asked.
After that she gave up on me. After a few minutes of silence, the taxi driver made a remark, and she answered in a way which evidently made him sad.
JOHAN CRUYFF WAS political. The same day I was introduced to Dutch politics, I was introduced to Dutch football. I sat between the club president and my interpreter and watched an Ajax home game against PSV Eindhoven. I drank many beers. I noticed their left-winger, a blank-faced beanpole with endless stamina. He ran for ninety minutes and looked at the end as if he could have run to Maastricht and back. And he ran with purpose: he continually set up Ajax’s offense, flew down the wing, touched off chaos in PSV’s penalty area, created space for himself and his teammates. He was envisioning whole geometries while his opponents scurried about like moles. He was a Pythagoras in shorts. I was told he was nineteen. Then I was told I needn’t worry about him, because left wing was the position of the club’s best player, who wasn’t playing at the moment. I stood and started to leave. I told the interpreter, “Tell the president that if they have anyone better than this guy, they don’t need me.” They caught up to me halfway up the aisle and returned me to my seat. I met with Cruyff after the game.
He had the same blank expression while he toweled off. His teammates were showering. His towel was the size of a facecloth. At that point the players still had to wash their own kits and provide their own towels and shampoo.
I heard the interpreter mention Partizan Belgrade. Cruyff nodded. He led me back out to the pitch, intercepted a ball boy heading in with a net full of balls, and lined them up at the eighteen-yard mark from the goal. There were nine of them. The interpreter and club president trailed along behind us, making remarks that he chose not to answer. While I watched, he tucked his hair behind his ears and struck each of the first five balls in line precisely against the crossbar. Then he stepped away. In my street shoes, I did the same with the four that were left. Blank-faced Cruyff smiled and the interpreter and club president burst into applause.
When they stopped, Cruyff turned his attention to the club president. They talked, and I felt the need for more beer. The interpreter explained that Johan was always agitating for something.
“What’s he want?” I asked.
“Oh, you know,” she said, embarrassed. “It’s always something.”
Cruyff spoke to her in a low voice. They looked at one another.
“He wants me to tell you what they’re talking about,” she said miserably.
It turned out he was asking why officials were insured on foreign trips and players weren’t. Why coaches got meal money and players didn’t. She seemed aware that this was a poor strategy for attracting me to change teams. He had what he called his List of Grievances, she confided.
His willingness to be a pain in the ass appealed to me. And only the Dutch had a short transfer period in those years, so they were my ticket to the West.
The club president knew that, as well, so after sitting around a rented room for three days, I signed a contract for half the sum for which I’d been asking.
The Dutch carried on like the Sermon on the Mount but their hearts were ledger books. Merchants squeezed each guilder while giving change. Does it make you nostalgic? my brother wrote. It makes me feel like I’m home, I wrote back.
He worked twelve-hour days on one of the recently consolidated collective farms to the south. His career had been destroyed by a clumsy tackle.
That first morning out on the practice pitch with the rest of Ajax, long-haired boys nodded greetings and included me in their warm-up drills. The sun warmed the little canals and cows in the distance. When the coach arrived and blew his whistle, the long-haired boys formed two lines and proclaimed their objective with a little poem:
Open game, open game
You can’t afford to neglect the wing.
And then went back to what they were doing. A handprinted translation was provided for me on an index card. I was introduced. Practice began.
Few remember that before Ajax became Ajax, Holland’s football record in internationals had been the equal of Luxembourg’s. It took all of us—coach, communist, and long-haired boys—all of thirty minutes that first day to realize that what we’d collected was a group of people who thought about space. The ultra-aggressive football in which players switched positions and rained attacks from every angle was worked through and worked out on that pitch over the next three years. It was a collective. During rest breaks we all talked. We all listened. Suppose we tried this? What happened when we tried that? We started letting midfielders and defenders join in attacks, and saw the ways in which forwards would have to support such flexibility by flowing back to cover. Position-shifting came easily and provided opponents, once we started playing matches, with a chaos of movement and change with which to deal. The first Dutch word I really learned to speak was switch.
We built our moves from the back; the goalkeeper only rarely kicked the ball long, instead clearing it to our defenders, and the team moved in set and improvisational patterns from there: if someone came back for a pass, someone else broke downfield. In possession we made the pitch as large as possible, spreading play to the wings and seeing everything as a way to increase and exploit space. If we lost the ball, the same thinking was used in reverse. We talked about space in a practical way. How could you play for ninety minutes and remain strong? If you were the left back and you ran seventy meters up the wing, it wasn’t so good if you then had to run back to your starting position. If the midfielder took your place, it shortened the distances. Even then I could see that it was very Dutch to look for the simple solution. And to find the biggest thrill in the even simpler solution.
Cruyff was the genius at this. Good players always found ways of receiving the ball in space, but Cruyff while playing saw where everyone should be, or go. He was three moves ahead and the moves were all about shaping space. From above—from up in the press box—it was a lesson in architecture.
When we spaced ourselves properly, it suddenly became very quiet. No noise. You heard only the wind. And the ball: the sound it made on the foot, the sound that made clear where it was going, how hard, how low, and how fast.
Suddenly football was not about kicking each other’s legs anymore. Fans at our matches came away feeling they’d seen something they could see nowhere else on earth. You guys really have something going, my brother wrote back, after I wrote him about what was happening.
MY PARENTS: they were political. Their Partisan unit during the war had both an antitank rifle and a mimeograph machine, and my mother had lost two frostbitten fingers dragging it over some ridge-lines in heavy snow to keep it from German hands. God forbid. The whole tide might have turned. They each produced for me a wry little smile when I came home, a wildly excited seventeen-year-old, to announce I’d be playing for Belgrade. I hadn’t understood why until I realized that they were smiling at the Partizan on my shirt.
When I was ten, I asked to be included in the confirmation classes which my uncle, a pastor, was going to conduct for my brother and two cousins. I think I believed that that, at last, would make me a part of the family, or at least a part of a common cause. My uncle agreed to interview me, to measure my suitability. The interview was held in the presence of my grandmother. I failed to answer a single question. My collapse caused my uncle and brother considerable amusement, and my grandmother none at all.
When the Germans came my parents enlisted in the first Slovene brigade to be named after a poet, in their case, Cankar. (“The people will write their destiny alone / Without tuxedoes, or the beads of priests.”) They fought illiteracy by giving begging children pencils and paper instead of money or candy. They disseminated periodicals like Death to Death! and Today’s Woman. They lectured on the relation between spontaneity and ideology. They used doors for blackboards. They stayed frozen and hungry. They stopped at doorways from Stajerska to Koruska and sang the old Slovene songs to pry some bread out of the shutter
ed homesteads. Sometimes they were allowed to sleep in the barn.
My grandmother was my mother’s mother. Her father had been a minor railway official and had died of typhus. Her mother had been widowed with six children, my grandmother the last of the six. By the time I knew her, she had her little bit of jam each morning in a spoon that had to be cleaned just so the night before.
She described her son-in-law as someone with a good memory, but no depth. Our father always smiled when she said so. It was hard for us to imagine him as having shot Germans. He was pleasant and gentle, if not always direct.
Before the war, he’d worked late into the night, under a feeble lamp, to enable imprisoned comrades to mull over the most recent literature and prepare themselves for the battle outside. My mother had made lists and tea and helped him with the phrasing. They saw themselves as in battle with the medieval darkness and fury in the souls of our backward peasants. They believed the Party and the movement were very special, and that people within the Party and the movement were very special. They were convinced that they had a scientific ideology. Misery and despair were all around them, and the more unbearable life became, the closer they were to the new world. Implementing decisions was not sufficient. Anyone could do that. They had to transform themselves so that at any time all of their actions could be measured in terms of the interests of the revolution. The role of history’s observers had seemed undignified once history had pointed the way to final freedom and brotherhood among men. A PERSON ABOUT TO LEAVE prison suddenly becomes loved by everyone. And he feels the same about those he is leaving behind. Quarrels and hatreds are forgotten and forgiven, and he says good-bye warmly and directly, as if nothing had ever happened.
The night before my departure for the West I wept and waited for the dawn. While I made tea and watched the sun rise, my mother and father brought my belongings—a suit and a few other things, packed and creased and smelling of mothballs—to the door. My lawyer came with me to get a big shot to sign the necessary final papers. In the corridor where we waited there were several frantic young men. I registered little of the train trip to the airport. Willows and alders along clear streams.
Colors and smells overwhelmed me when I stepped off the plane at Schiphol. Women in spring coats and hats, strange fashions. My translator met me with a hug, though she was a pretty young woman. I rode to the city in a stupor. A far-off bridge, suspended on an invisible thread. A university. A square in front of it.
I was left in my new flat to tidy up after my trip. I wandered to the back garden. A branch full of purple blossoms hung over the wall, and from the window of the house next door a young woman was shaking rugs. In my own language, I told her I was a persecuted student. I asked if she would lend me a rug to lie on. She smiled.
My eyes filled with tears for my father. What hadn’t he thrown underfoot and sacrificed? He’d built himself a life which, for the sake of an idea, had buried itself. A life surrounded by spite in a godforsaken, frightened little town. They thought they were doing it for us, and for our children. But this was the world of their imagination, and they’d pictured it falsely to us, and we at first hadn’t wanted to believe things to be different.
MICHELS WAS THE PERFECT COACH for me. He required fantastic discipline. Even with the assistant coaches he was like an animal trainer. He told me I was his favorite player because I couldn’t ask him questions. He told us all that when we came to the stadium, we were the numbers on our backs. When we left, we became people and he could talk to us.
Each night I went home satisfied to my flat with its one chair. I never understood why you’d play a game in which you lost four kilos of your body weight for nothing. When you put on the shirt and laced up the boots, you had to win. Otherwise you might as well stay at home and watch the television.
With such an attitude I was very helpful to the Dutch, who were not naturally ferocious. If there was an art to defending, they were blind to it. They prized Technique and Tactics. Courage, will to win, speed, size: none of that aroused much interest.
So during training sessions Michels did all he could to develop aggression. We played games in which he acted as the referee from hell, calling the fouls with such enraging one-sidedness that our nickname for the matches became the Bloodbaths. He made sure we lived only football: he got our salaries raised, so that Cruyff could leave the printing works, Keizer the tobacco shop, Swart his haberdashery.
Understand, though: he never scored the goals. He did his part, and we did ours.
We couldn’t believe, ourselves, what we held in our palms. Against MVV Maastricht in our first game we won 9–3 and I scored five goals. A defender! We scored 122 goals in the League season.
Johan Cruyff, Piet Keizer, Barry Hulshoff, Ruud Krol, Gerrie Mühren: they were all unleashed, with me, on Liverpool in the fog in the second round of the European Champions’ Cup on the 7th of December, 1966. Together we remade the football globe. Liverpool barely deigned to look over at us during the warm-ups; the side was stuffed with demigods from their World Cup Champion team of the previous summer. While we stretched, the fog rolled in, and the game was played in such a murk that the scoreboard operator, who sat near our bench, needed runners to let him know what was happening down the ends of the field. He demanded confirmation when told we’d scored the first goal, and then confirmation when told we’d scored the second, and then, when the third went in, less than ten minutes into the match, he shouted at his runners, “Come on, boys, don’t make up stories!” His words were reprinted in all the Dutch newspapers the next day. One front page, in letters large enough that there was room for nothing else, proclaimed: AJAX 5–1! Everywhere we went—shops, cinemas, schools, restaurants—those two numbers appeared.
When we traveled to Liverpool for the second leg, everyone said that now we had their attention. Their coach predicted they’d win 7–0. We drew, 2–2. An Amsterdam headline read AJAX WINS, 2–2.
Was there a connection between cultural and football revolutions? Reporters wanted our opinions. Keizer said no. Hulshoff said no. Krol said no. Mühren said no. I said no. Michels refused to answer. Cruyff said it was an intriguing idea. He spent postgame interviews talking about the Provos’ White Plans. What did he think of Luud Schimmelpeninck’s plan for free bikes, all over the city? Poor Michels sat in his office, his elbows on his desk and his hair in his fists.
He came out every so often to throw a Provo out of the locker room. They were easy to spot, all in white. And they loved Cruyff, who attracted reporters.
“What’s he on about?” Michels would ask someone standing nearby, jabbing a thumb toward a Provo.
“He’s saying that under New Babylonic circumstances, the lust for aggression will be sublimated into the lust for playfulness,” Cruyff would explain.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Michels would say.
Cruyff didn’t spout such stuff, but you could see he believed in parts of it, kept an eye on it. He was intrigued by his own uniqueness. Whenever we set foot on a pitch, he was interested in revolutionizing the game. The rest of us were happy to settle for winning it.
And yet at night, lying in my bed and hearing my neighbor still shaking her rugs, I’d envision my parents’ faces and wonder if this were in some strange way their gift to me: Partisan tactics, Partisan strategies. In their war, there’d been no front lines or rear, and encirclements had emerged and dissolved fluidly on both sides; superiority had been achieved not by numerical strength, but by tactical resourcefulness. Survival as a Partisan had meant being creative about space.
“Fascinating,” Michels had said when I mentioned this to him. I’d brought it up on a bus when he’d complained to me about Cruyff. My Dutch was by that point sufficient for semicomic conversation.
But all was well as long as we kept winning. We were becoming something majestic and invincible. One moment we’d be marked by two defenders, the next, completely free. One moment the pitch before us was crowded and narrow, the next, huge and wide. The bri
lliance of our passing was unassuming: the white and black of the ball against the blue of the sky. Against the green. Beautiful in its precision, and quiet and modest. No one danced or took off their shirts after such passes.
Bad weather or rotten pitches meant different kinds of advantage. Keizer in a swamp of a pitch produced a goal by lobbing a high ball into the thickest mud where Turkish defenders, expecting a bounce, found themselves wrong-footed when the ball stuck. A Kuwaiti Emir in the stands was so moved that after the match he gave Keizer the gold watch from his wrist. Against Panathinaikos in a downpour we spent the match playing passes into the areas of poorest drainage, knowing the balls would stop while the Greek defenders continued to overrun them.
Following Cruyff’s lead, we built castles in the air, while he appeared where most needed, always pointing, pointing, pointing: you go there; you belong here. He would have been happy on a pitch two kilometers long with no goals, and nothing but beautiful waves of movement, streaming up and streaming down.
Our perfection seemed to be automatic. Our instincts intimidating. We brought to bear on our opponents calm minds, immaculate technique, and visionary passing. The beauty of Ajax at its peak was like the beauty of thought.
Cruyff became the young Amsterdammers’ hero. “Our John Lennon,” Keizer told me after a match.
“Who’s John Lennon?” I asked him back.
I got furniture for my apartment. I sent money home. My brother was twice denied permission to visit.
Cruyff’s opinion was consulted on every conceivable subject: science, culture, technology. The present, the future, even the past. Modern youth needed to know what he thought of the past. Two months before I’d arrived, Holland’s princess had married a German who’d served in the Wehrmacht. All of Amsterdam had found this the end of the world. One afternoon I found Cruyff giving an interview about that. Who knows with whom. Should the protestors have carried out their threat to put LSD into the water supply? he was asked.