Belladonna

by Daša Drndic

  It is with these thoughts, almost forty years later, in February 2010, that Andreas Ban lands once again on Dutch soil.

  In Amsterdam it is raining, it is cold and windy, Andreas Ban cannot get his umbrella out because his hands are occupied, for a long time he has wished for a third hand, like some kind of third eye, one that would protrude at his waist in the shape of a hook, on which he would be able to hang various objects, nutritional and professional. As soon as he gets home he will buy one of those shopping carts that all better-off old ladies drag back from the market, even if he has nothing to put in it. His hair is as wet as if he had surfaced from water, which he has, he has surfaced from dreariness croatica and come up into — he has yet to see what. Andreas Ban takes a taxi to Spuistraat, pronounced Spaustraat, he is met — with a bottle of chilled wine and white roses on the windowsill — by lovely Fleur van Koppen (herself like a flower) with abundant red hair, bright-red-painted lips, all transparent and smiling, a more beautiful version of Hanna Schygulla as he remembers her from “The Marriage of Maria Braun.”

  Perhaps he should describe the apartment. Previous residents on the Writer-in-Residence Program of the Dutch Foundation for Literature do that pedantically, enchanted. The apartment is beautiful, in the very center of the city, spacious and light, on two levels, fashionably and minimally furnished. It is warm inside, Andreas Ban goes barefoot, singing (?!) as he walks up and down the polished white wooden stairs that lead to the gallery where the bedroom is, while outside it snows. The apartment is on the third floor, high up, on one side Andreas Ban has a view over the whole of Spui Square, where there are bookshops and a great deal of activity, in fact it is a square of books (on the ground floor is the famous Athenaeum bookshop), on the other side he looks out at “his” broad, noisy Spuistraat, studded with little cafés and restaurants, a street that cuts across the medieval cobbled lanes, dark and mysterious, in which footfalls roll along quietly until they step onto the bridges and canals, where they become silent. But the windows, the windows in the apartment and windows in Amsterdam entirely satisfy Andreas Ban’s fetishism, his enchantment with glass. In the apartment, windows fill the entire length and almost the height of the two long living-room walls; it is as though Andreas Ban is in a glass box out of which he can fly whenever he wishes.

  Andreas Ban did not write in Amsterdam. It would be a shame to write in Amsterdam, a waste of time, fiddling about with the unimportant when one was caught like this in a three-week-long embrace with an unknown host. In Amsterdam Andreas Ban tries to forget, to erase old images, what was left of them, with new ones. Amsterdam — an opportunity for approaching extinction.

  Andreas Ban does not have time to research the whole city, its peripheral areas, open spaces and parks. He circles around the center, revolves around its core. Like a spider’s web, the eight-hundred-year-old trajectories linked by bridges and canals catch the walker in their labyrinths, sometimes constricting the lungs so that Andreas becomes breathless. That shortness of breath, that rhythm of short breaths, that breath of short breaths, that breath shortness, that short breath of breaths, that short inhalation, exhalation, will like a tedious cat slink behind Andreas Ban throughout his stay in Amsterdam.

  In the center of the city one enters into amazing, concealed past times, familiar or dreamed, painless, into slow-moving time that flows over reality and at night moves behind the looking glass. Unlike Camus’s hero Clamence who follows the concentric circles of Amsterdam down to his (own) ninth circle, below sea level, Andreas’s twenty-six-day surf through Amsterdam is neither deep nor probing, but horizontal and random, more like a curveball. It narrows and stretches, entirely in keeping with the new century, disoriented but monotonous and flat, leading nowhere. (That other journey, Clamence’s and Camus’s, into the center of the absurd, is long since over for Andreas Ban.)

  The stairways are narrow, their ceilings low. The stairway in Andreas’s building is also spiral, large suitcases barely make it. Furniture is taken into buildings with cranes and winches — through the windows. The inner spaciousness is at odds with the narrow, constricted outer space.

  In an irritatingly fast and noisy age in which it seems that only pedestrians roll along lazily, in a time of hysterical convulsions, Andreas Ban sinks, like an untreated and incurable epileptic, into a miraculously dense timelessness, into a misty past, there on the third floor of the building at 303 Spuistraat, surrounded by glass.

  And after a long time, almost twenty years, Andreas Ban seems to have arrived. Home. And after a long time (almost twenty years), he buys flowers for his refuge. Andreas Ban surrounds himself with roses. A bier or feast day?

  The television channels keep showing the same advertisement for pommes frites. In this persistent advertisement members of a family aggressively and euphorically produce loud crunching noises as they munch little potato sticks. Andreas Ban turns off the set. He finds a radio channel with music, a good background for that month-long production, that February show, that little winter dream. (There is no sun, heavy sky, trees with bare branches, snow and sleet, wind, deserted neighborhoods and parks, canals filled with brackish water, bridges covered with moss, days of sticky dampness.) The Middle Ages, semidarkness and mystery, surface out of everyday life. Closed circular orbits destroy the illusion of continuity, around them gapes the surreal emptiness of abandoned reality. Time disappears, erasing history.

  Andreas Ban hears the clatter of clogs on cobbled streets, the swift steps of fair-skinned women moving in their long, wide skirts, heads lowered, through the radial, dark alleys he hears the hoofbeats of draft horses distributing barrels of beer, the flutter of the wings of white Dutch caps.

  It was on Spui Square, beneath the windows of the building in which he is staying, from 1965 to 1966, that the Provo movement, said by some to be the precursor of the student protests of 1968, seethed, gathering around the statue of the Amsterdam orphan, Het Lieverdje, nowadays visited by tourists who first stare at it, then at their maps, for the most part either blessedly ignorant of the recent past, or not interested.

  The not exactly monumental little statue of the cheerful orphan caught executing a dance step, the work of the sculptor Carel Kneulman (1915–2008), was in fact the stimulus for the ludic and seemingly apolitical Provo movement, that began as an antismoking campaign after a tobacco company had donated Het Lieverdje to the city. Today, when the desires and dreams of the young are turned toward a somewhat less extravagant but more existential consumerist reality, passion, perceptiveness and originality seem to have sunk into the porous, sandy Dutch soil, into the polluted waters in which the planet Earth floats. As well as initiating provocative happenings that mocked authority, the monarchy and the obedient masses, the Provo movement began as a nonviolent organization that demanded what were not even especially radical social changes: the white chicken plan called for the Amsterdam police (known as blue chickens) to become social workers; the white bicycle plan asked for white-painted bicycles to be left unlocked for public use; the white homes plan pushed for the legal occupation of abandoned living spaces, including the empty royal palace on Dam Square, to house young people and solve the problem of squatters. As an anarchist movement of the young inspired by Marcuse, Provo set Holland alight by demanding a higher level of tolerance toward minorities, national and sexual, and other marginalized social groups, becoming the first European postmodernist antiauthoritarian movement to promote the freedom of the individual. Then, in May 1966, after increasingly frequent police arrests, beatings and threats, Provo sank into compromise. Artists and philosophers staged their happenings at midnight, usually on Saturdays, gathered around Het Lieverdje on Spui Square under Andreas’s very window, where now at midnight it is quiet and deserted. But around the corner outside Café Hoppe, into the small hours and regardless of weather conditions, there gather dreamers, former anarchists, now aging, gray-haired and paunchy, nonviolent but noisy, who sing, sometimes even dance, and exchange w
orn-out dreams that disintegrate into shreds. Café Hoppe, founded in 1670, is exactly opposite the building in which Andreas Ban lives, not twenty steps from one entrance to the other. Café Hoppe is well known in that it was regularly frequented by the beer magnate Freddy Heineken, until in 1983 he was kidnapped with his chauffeur and released for a ransom of some sixteen million euros in today’s money. At that point, he stopped going there, then, in 2002, he died. Freddy’s empire, worth around three billion euros, is now run by his daughter Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken, reputed to be the richest woman in Holland. She does not go to Café Hoppe. Café Hoppe is one of the innumerable noisy, crowded bruine cafés scattered through Amsterdam, so called because of the layers of cigarette smoke that seeped from the walls. In the next-door café, smoking is permitted from 6 p.m. until closing time, and Andreas Ban would go there with Ljerka or Leo (who came for a week’s stay) for a glass of wine, sometimes he would go alone and stand at the bar or sit beside a low window that looks onto Hei Steeg, an alleyway redolent of the aroma of freshly baked cakes, espresso and marijuana. There was magic in the possibility of taking a leap from one world into another. While in Rijeka, the postmidnight unarticulated weekend yelling of our young people engenders an arrhythmic beating of his heart and a rhythmic clenching of his jaw, the Amsterdam celebration makes Andreas Ban smile and prompts a strange, displaced yearning.

  Marcuse died more than thirty years ago. Andreas Ban has two copies of his One-Dimensional Man, one from 1968, the other from 1970 with Andreas’s mother’s signature, which Andreas finds in 1978 when the family clears out Marisa’s belongings, a store of treasures from her life to them unknown. Both copies of One-Dimensional Man are scribbled over with notes, comments, exclamation marks, question marks and underlined passages. Today Andreas Ban sees that his mother Marisa, a doctor, a neuro­psychiatrist, led a double life, one part remains to him forever closed. Marcuse too got lost somehow, he has settled in one of those remote little chambers of Andreas’s brain, on the tiny doors of which is written “picnics in the desert” and which open almost conspiratorially quietly, unexpectedly. Thus, when on Spui Square, in the Academic Cultural Center, the historian and culturologist Professor Frank van Vree, Professor Guido Snel and Andreas Ban had spoken before some hundred people about history and about his book, a small room in which for thirty years now Marcuse, Marisa and some others had been hanging around, voices, soft or agitated, opened up and Andreas Ban heard, he saw, emerging from that room, first on tiptoe, then with ever surer steps, in almost military formation and lining up in front of them, figurines, statues, torsos, heads, smiles, which then took over the stage. Instead of the story of his book, a different story occupied the podium. The story of a technologically advanced, so-called free democratic society in which institutions exist to limit freedom, suppress individuality and creativity, blur exploitation and prevent, even punish, the acquisition of new experiences, identities. They talked about the way society is in fact controlled through the imposition of false needs, and how criticism of society is effectively and systematically suppressed by being infiltrated into institutions. They spoke of a closed technological society which creates a new totalitarianism, and in it there is no place for those outside the process of production. About the fact that the only way out of the comfortable, rationalized, undemocratic freedom offered by developed industrial civilization is through rebellion. About the fact that revolution is possible only through awareness, but that awareness in itself demands revolution. Then Eric Visser, director of De Geus publishing house from Breda, invited a dozen of those present for beer and snacks and the whole din quietened down, the spirits returned to their cells, snow fell.

  In Holland, the word for cinema is bioskoop and people kiss three times.‖

  Garbage is put out on Tuesdays and Thursdays — Andreas is told — in front of one’s building, and left on the sidewalk. It looks horrendous. Paper and glass go in special containers on Koningsplein (a six-minute walk away). So Andreas Ban fills a big black bag with vast quantities of discarded paper and drags it to Koningsplein, in the rain. There he finds a square metal box about a meter high (smaller than the dimensions of Andreas’s black plastic bag), with a slit like those on mailboxes. Andreas cannot believe what he is supposed to do. He leaves the bag to soak in the rain and after that he no longer separates anything. Yet another absurd case of wasting time on the unimportant. Gathering grains of sand in the desert. But people are obedient, they like to separate their trash, to recycle the debris of their own and other people’s lives. Following a diktat, they fly to embrace goodness, which they shift around in their pockets the way men scratch their balls, then they sleep soundly.

  Fleur invites Guido, De Geus editor Ilonka Reintjens, who arrives from Breda by train, and Damir Šodan, who comes by train from The Hague where he has spent more than ten years at the ICTY¶ translating those endless, tedious documents, what a shame. Throughout Holland people mill and buzz around, slithering as though they had a grasp on time, not the other way around. They go to Brasserie Harkema, which prides itself on its domestic system for purifying and bottling drinking water in their own Harkema bottles, and the menu includes a description of the process of its filtration, the addition of mineral components and treatment with ultraviolet rays. That is why, they stress at Harkema, the water at Harkema is not water from a tap, but mineral water, of markedly better taste. But, if you wish, they recommend at Harkema, you may always order a glass of ordinary water, which is free of charge. After dinner Andreas Ban takes Damir Šodan to his local bar, where they smoke and drink cognac, then around midnight Damir jumps onto a tram, from the tram onto a train to The Hague, while Andreas totters up the spiral staircase to his garret. Good, simple activities, stress is presumably lurking elsewhere. Damir did not talk about his poems, Damir Šodan is an excellent poet, so he does not need to talk about his poems, but Andreas, standing with him at the bar, in the smoke and din, in Amsterdam, in Spuistraat, listened to Damir’s lines, voices, whispers steal out of a book on the shelf of his Rijeka room, slip out of Damir’s letters to wild wanderers, nomads, once to a migratory nightingale that “drives away more powerful and important birds . . . although in essence there is nothing to see,” he listened to words knocking against buildings (Spinoza’s and others’) in the black nights, followed them from Bombay to Brioni, from Lisbon to the forests of Norway, from Nečujam on the island of Šolta to Saint Petersburg, he watched them travel along “black meridians,” sail in old boats, and he felt fine, even if he does not remember whether he and Damir talked at all or simply smoked and drank. Like Šodan’s Bakunin, that night Andreas dreamed about “little weasels in the snow” under which he crawled wondering whether the time had perhaps come to die.

  The following day Andreas Ban discovers that hollandaise sauce has nothing to do with Holland, that it is a French dressing, and once again his days pass peacefully.

  Cooking shows have long been universal hits. It might be worth asking why. Particularly since they are becoming increasingly tedious, unwatchable and indigestible. Since there is an ever-greater number of poor people, particularly those for whom TV shows are their only mental superstructure, these shows are also offensive. Lively performances by smiling chefs take place in elegant kitchens where high-quality pots and pans are used, the ingredients are expensive and often exotic. As Andreas fears that when he retires his nutrition will be reduced to chicken wings and innards and that he will, heaven forbid, go to the market just before it is blasted by water cannons to pick up a few rotten apples and discarded salad leaves, he finds this nutrition craze nauseating. There are even shows in which strangers pretend to be friends and dine at one another’s homes evening after evening, stroll through rooms, rummage in cupboards and wardrobes, and taste food, then appraise it or comment on it unkindly. The ambience of the homes is often kitschy, the walls are decorated with framed needlework and puzzles. But alongside that particular trend there are also a number of cooking shows in which dishes a
re produced from wild herbs, except that those wild herbs do not grow everywhere. Such shows are cooked up, their presenters say, to arouse interest in “neglected” vegetables and cheap but healthy food.