by Bill Bryson
Once they had arrived at a kind of agreement in principle, the VVV person would make anything up to twenty phone calls to outlying hotels, with a look of infinite patience and low expectations – most hotels weren’t even bothering to answer their phones by now – before announcing that nothing was available in that price range. So then they would have to discuss another more expensive or more distant set of options. It all took so long that you felt like applauding whenever anyone left the window and the queue pushed forward six inches.
The one lucky thing was that the VVV girl at the head of my queue was beautiful – not just extraordinarily good-looking, with the sort of bottom that made your palms sweat when she went to the filing cabinet, but intelligent, sweet-natured, patient, sympathetic, and with that exquisite, dusky Dutch accent that simply melts your heart. She dealt with every customer gracefully and expertly, and switched effortlessly between French, German, English and Dutch – all with that delectable accent. I was infatuated. I freely admit it. Stuck in a line that was going nowhere, there was nothing I could do but just stare dumbly at her and admire everything about her – the way she hooked her hair behind her ear, the way she wrinkled her nose when she looked in the phone book, the way she dialled the phone with the eraser end of her pencil. By the time I reached her window it was all I could do to keep from blurting, ‘Can we have sex a few times and then talk marriage?’ But all I did was shyly ask for a hotel room somewhere in the northern hemisphere. She found me one in Haarlem.
Haarlem was very pleasant. People ahead of me in the line had been falling into swoons when told they would have to leave Amsterdam to get a room, but I was rather pleased. Haarlem was only twenty minutes away by train and it was a handsome little city with a splendid cathedral and cosy cathedral square, and lots of good restaurants that were cheaper and emptier than those in Amsterdam. I had a steak the size of a hot-water bottle, went for a long walk around the town, stood impressed in the shadow of the cathedral, returned to the hotel, showered steamily and went to bed a happy man.
In the morning I returned to Amsterdam. I used to love walking in cities on Sunday mornings, but it gets more and more dispiriting. All the things left over from Saturday night – vomit slicks, litter, twisted beer cans – are still lying around, and everywhere now there are these depressing grilles and iron shutters on all the shop fronts. They make every street look dangerous and forbidding, which is just absurd in Europe. On an innocuous pedestrian street called Heiligeweg almost every store front was completely hidden behind a set of iron blinds – even the Aer Lingus office. What on earth is anyone going to steal from an Aer Lingus office – the little model aeroplane in the window?
I found my way to the canals – the Singel, Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht – and things were immediately better. I roamed along them in a happily random way, shuffling through leaves and litter, cocooned by the tall narrow houses and old trees. Along its canals Amsterdam is an immensely beautiful city, especially on a Sunday morning when there is almost no one about. A man sat in a patch of sun on his stoop with a cup of coffee and a newspaper, another was returning from somewhere with a bottle of wine, a young couple passed entwined in a post-coital glow, and the occasional unhurried cyclist crossed from one side street to another somewhere up ahead, like extras employed to lend colour to the scene, but in two hours of wandering around I saw not another soul but them.
Again and again, I found myself leaning on a railing on a small humpbacked bridge just gazing into the shimmering green water, lost in a simple-minded reverie until a tour boat would chunter by, full of tourists with cameras, slicing through the mirrored street scene below me to break the spell. In its wake there would always be a little festival of bestirred litter – a Fairy Liquid bottle, some cigarette packets, assorted cartons from McDonald’s and Burger King – and I would be reminded that Amsterdam is also a dirty city. It’s full of dog shit and litter and graffiti. The graffiti is everywhere – on phone boxes, on park benches, on the walls of almost every building, even on the marbled vaults of the passageway that runs like a tunnel beneath the Rijksmuseum. I have never seen so much graffiti. And it’s not even good graffiti. It’s just random squiggles, sprayed by people with brains the size of a Cheerio. The Dutch seem to have a problem with mindless crime. You may never get mugged in Amsterdam, but I’m told you can’t park a car on the streets anywhere in the centre of the city in the evening without a strong probability of someone scoring the paintwork from end to end with a screwdriver.
When I was twenty I liked Amsterdam – indeed admired it passionately – for its openness, its tolerance, its relaxed attitude to dope and sex and all the other sins that one can’t get enough of at twenty. But I found it oddly wearisome now. The people of Amsterdam were rather stuck with their tradition of tolerance, like people who take up a political stance and then have to defend it no matter how untenable it gets. Because they have been congratulating themselves on their intelligent tolerance for all these centuries, it is now impossible for them not to be nobly accommodating to graffiti and burned-out hippies and dog shit and litter. Of course, I may be completely misreading the situation. They may like dog shit and litter. I sure hope so, because they’ve certainly got a lot of it.
Here and there I would pass a house braced with timbers, awaiting urgent repairs. Amsterdam was built on a swamp, and just keeping the canalside houses from sinking into it is an unending task. My Times colleague’s brother bought a house on one of the lesser canals and discovered after moving in that the pilings on which it had been built three hundred years before were rotting away and the house was sinking into the underlying ooze at a rate that would make most of it basement within a short while. Putting new pilings under several tons of existing structure is not the easiest job in the world and it cost him almost twice as much to have the house shored up as it did to buy it in the first place. This was almost twenty years ago, and he still wears socks with holes in them because of the debt.
I suppose the same experience has been repeated in countless buildings all over the city, so you have to admire the good people of Amsterdam for keeping the houses standing, and even more for having the sense to keep the canal streets residential. In Britain the ground floors would long ago have been filled with kebab houses and building-society offices and Sketchley dry cleaners, all with big picture windows, as if anybody in the world cares to see what’s going on inside a dry cleaner’s or a building society.
I’ve never understood this. The first thing a building society does when it acquires a Victorian building in Britain is gut the ground floor and put in a lot of plate glass. Why? As you may have noticed, building societies have nothing to put in their windows. So they make a fan-shaped arrangement of brochures informing you that you can borrow money there – ‘Christ, thanks, I thought you sold sausages’ – and insert some dreadful watercolours by the manager’s wife. So I am full of admiration for the Dutch for preserving their finest streets and insisting that people live on them.
The one problem is that it makes the occasional catastrophe all the more unbearable, as I discovered with a cry of pain as I reached the far end of Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. There, where once a fine gabled house must have stood, squatted a new Holiday Inn, a building so ugly, so characterless, so squat, that it stopped me in my tracks, left me standing agog. Everything about it was cheap and unimaginative – the cardboard-box shape, the shit-brown bricks, the empty, staring windows, the acrylic canopy over the entrance, the green plastic signs, the wall-mounted video cameras peering at every passer-by. It looked like a parking ramp. Not the tiniest effort had been made to give it any distinction.
It would have been painful enough out by an airport, but this was in the heart of one of the great cities of Europe on a street otherwise lined with handsome, patrician houses. How could an architect walk through such a city and allow himself to design a building of such utter indistinction? How could the city authorities let him? How could anyone sleep in it? I found mysel
f turning dumbstruck to people passing on the sidewalk as if to say ‘Do you see this building here?’, but they all just hunched past, quite unmoved by its existence. I just don’t understand the world.
Evening came. A light rain began to fall. Pulling my collar round my ears, I walked to the dark streets of the red-light district and squinted through rain-spattered glasses at the goods on offer. The red-light district had changed since my day. In 1973, the most outspoken thing was a club with a sign that said, ON STAGE – REAL FOCKY-FOCKY show. Now everything was much more explicit. The shop windows were filled with a boggling array of plastic phalluses, vibrators, whips, video tapes, unguents, magazines, leatherwear and other exotica not to be found in your average Woolworth’s. One window contained a plastic, life-size, astonishingly realistic woman’s reproductive region, complete with dilated labia. It was awful. It looked like something that would be used in an anatomy lesson, and even then you could imagine students fainting.
The magazines were even grosser. They showed every conceivable variety of couple doing messy and urgent things to each other – heterosexuals, gays, sadomasochists, grotesquely fat people (a little comic relief, I guess) and even animals. The cover of one showed a woman providing – how shall I put this? – a certain oral service to a horse that a horse wouldn’t normally expect to get, even from another horse. I was astounded. And this was just the stuff in the windows. God knows what they keep under the counters.
The whores were still there. They sat in luminous body stockings in windows lit with a pinkish glow, and winked at me as I passed. (‘Hey, they like me!’ I thought, until I realized that they do this for everybody.) Behind them, I could sometimes glimpse the little cells where they conduct their business, looking white and clinical, like someplace you would go to have your haemorrhoids seen to. Twenty years ago the prostitutes were all Dutch. They were friendly and sweet-natured and often heart-breakingly attractive. But now all the prostitutes were Asian or African, and they looked mean and weathered, even when they were pouting and blowing kisses in their most coquettish come-hither manner.
There was a whole street of this stuff, several blocks long, with a spill-over into neighbouring side streets. I couldn’t believe that there could be that many people in Amsterdam – that many people in the world – requiring this sort of assistance just to ejaculate. Whatever happened to personal initiative?
I spent the morning of my last day in the Rijksmuseum. ‘The Night Watch’ wasn’t on view because a few days earlier some crazy person had attacked it with a knife, and both he and it had been taken away for rehabilitation, but the museum is so massive – 250 rooms – and so filled with wonderful pictures that there was plenty else to look at.
Afterwards I strolled on to the Anne Frank House on Prinsengracht. It was packed, but moving none the less. Eight people spent three years hiding in a secret flat above Otto Frank’s spice business, and now an endless line of visitors shuffles through it every day, to see the famous bookcase that hid the secret entrance and the five rooms in which they lived. The tragic part is that when the Franks and their companions were anonymously betrayed and finally captured in August 1944, the Allies were on the brink of liberating Holland. A few more weeks and they would have been saved. As it was, seven of the eight died in concentration camps. Only Anne’s father survived.
The Anne Frank museum is excellent at conveying the horror of what happened to the Jews, but it is a shame that it appears not to give even a passing mention to the Dutch people who risked their own lives in helping the Franks and others like them. Miep Gies, Otto Frank’s secretary, had to find food each day for eight people, as well as herself and her husband, for three years at a time of the strictest rationing. It must have been extremely trying, not to mention risky. Yet this was hardly a rare act: twenty thousand people in Holland sheltered Jews during the war at considerable peril to themselves. They deserve to be remembered too.
What must it have been to be a Jew in Europe in the 1930s? From the beginning they were subjected to the grossest indignities: forbidden to sit in parks or cafés or to ride on trams, required to give up their cars and bicycles, even their children’s bicycles. If it had ended there, it would have redounded to Germany’s shame for ever, but of course it grew unspeakably worse, as the photographs and documents in the museum’s other rooms gruesomely testify – people being herded onto cattle trains, piles of stick-like corpses, the gaunt faces of the living dead, all the pictures you have seen a thousand times.
One picture I hadn’t seen transfixed me. It was a blurry photo of a German soldier taking aim with a rifle at a woman and the baby she was clutching as she cowered beside a trench of bodies. I couldn’t stop staring at it, trying to imagine what sort of person could do such a thing.
It probably wasn’t the best picture to look at just before heading to the station and catching a train to Germany.
9. Hamburg
I travelled to Hamburg, by way of Osnabrück and Bremen, and arrived in the early evening. I hadn’t been to Hamburg before. Katz and I passed through it by train on our way to Scandinavia, but it was late at night and all I recalled was a dark city and a dark station where we stopped for half an hour while more carriages were hooked on. The station was much as I remembered it, vaulted and echoing, but brighter and busier at six in the evening. People were everywhere, hurrying to catch trains.
I threaded my way through the crowds to the tourist information desk and, having had so much trouble finding a room in Amsterdam, gladly paid a handsome fee to have accommodation found for me, and then was chagrined to discover that the Hotel Popp, the establishment to which the pleasant and well-spoken young man directed me after relieving me of a handful of notes and a selection of coins, was directly opposite the station. I could have found it on my own in thirty seconds and applied the money to a night of abandon in the Reeperbahn. Still, it was convenient and had a bar and restaurant, so I couldn’t complain. Actually I could. The room was tiny and depressingly basic, with a twenty-watt bulb in the reading light, no carpet, no television and a bed that could have passed for an ironing board. But at least with a place called the Hotel Popp I wouldn’t forget the name and end up, as I often do in strange cities, asking a cabbie to just drive around until I spotted it.
I went out for a stroll before dinner. Lounging at intervals along the side streets around the station were some of the most astonishingly unattractive prostitutes I had ever seen – fifty-year-old women in mini-skirts and black fishnet stockings, with crooked lipstick and tits that grazed their kneecaps. Where on earth they get their trade from I couldn’t begin to guess. One of them gave me a ‘Hello, dearie’ look and I was nearly crushed by a bus as I faltered backwards into the street. But within a block or two things improved considerably. I had left my city map behind in the hotel so I had no idea where I was going, but it all looked inviting in every direction. It was a warm spring evening, with dusk settling cosily over the city, like a blanket around one’s shoulders, and people were out walking aimlessly and browsing in shop windows. I was pleased to find myself among them.
I had expected Hamburg to be grimmer, a sort of German Liverpool, full of crumbling flyovers and vacant lots – I already knew that it had the highest unemployment rate in Germany, over twelve per cent, half as high again as the national average, so I expected the worst – but Hamburg proved to be anything but struggling, at least on the surface. The department stores along the Mönckebergstrasse, the main shopping street, were bright and spotless and full of fancy goods – much finer than anything on Oxford Street – and the side streets glowed with restaurants and bistros through whose yellowy windows I could see people dining elegantly and well.
I walked through the big town hall square and around the darkened streets of the warehouse district, handsome and silent, then rounded a corner to find one of the more arresting city sights I have ever seen – the Inner Alster, the smaller of the two lakes around which Hamburg is built. I knew from maps that Hamburg had these l
akes, but nothing I had read or seen in pictures had prepared me for just how beautiful they were. The Inner Alster is much the smaller of the two, but it is still large enough to present a great rectangular pool of silence and darkness in the midst of the city. The lakeside is agreeably lined with trees and benches, overlooked by office buildings and a couple of hotels of the old school, the sort of places where the doormen are dressed like Albanian admirals and rich old ladies in furs constantly go in and out with little dogs under their arms.
I sat on a bench in the darkness for perhaps half an hour just watching the lights shimmering on the surface and listening to the lapping of water, then stirred myself enough to walk over to the Kennedybrücke, a bridge across the channel where the two lakes meet. The Outer Alster, seen from here, was more massive and irregular and even more fetching, but I would leave that for tomorrow.
Instead, famished, I strolled back to the welcoming glow of the Popp, where I dined amply and surprisingly well for what was after all just a small station hotel, bloating my cheeks with bread rolls and salad and meat and potatoes till I could eat no more, and then filled all the remaining space inside me with good German beer and read half a book, until at last, at about half-past midnight, I arose from my table, nodded genteelly to the six Turkish waiters who had been waiting hours for me to go and ascended in a tiny slow-motion lift to the fourth floor, where I spent no more than half an hour stabbing at the keyhole with my key before bursting unexpectedly into the room, pushing the door shut with the back of my foot, shedding some clothes (one sock, half a shirt) and falling onto the bed, where I dropped more or less immediately into a deep, contented and, I dare say, grotesquely blubbery sleep.