The real city of Amsterdam lies down two narrow streets with four different names across three canals filled with flower-laden houseboats. It will have a local bar, with a cat named Joep. There will be a crowd of regulars, and their golden retrievers. People will be smiling and nodding, because they have managed to be sitting outside for the two hours the sun has been shining this week. You’ll see it just as you turn the corner, a flash of sun illuminating a whole picture. Amsterdam is a city that winks at you.
The Dutch are rather like tulips themselves, long and thin, clean, spare, heads bright against the hanging grey sky. I’m all in love with half of them, or half in love with all of them. I try not to stare.
I decide to take care of the flowers myself. I step out my big blue door into a July day in Holland. My sweater isn’t thick enough, and I briefly debate returning upstairs for my umbrella. Deciding that it will probably stop raining, and, also, remembering that umbrellas are no use against rain blown sideways, I pull the door shut behind me.
Walking down Beethovenstraat, I pretend I never have to leave this city, its tall straight-backed people on old Gazelles, the fragrant corner flower stalls. Everything here is expensive except flowers. I buy fifty white tulips for five euros.
This particular block of Beethovenstraat is such a typical slice of Amsterdam: a Gall & Gall, a tobacco store, a newsstand, an albert hijn, four cafes, an etos, a slagerij, a vishandel, a kaswinkel. It is no wonder that people get lost easily and constantly here. All this block needs is a Heineken sign and some bewildered tourists, and it would be absolutely indistinguishable from 2000 other blocks in Amsterdam.
I’ve reached a certain stage of familiarity with the city. Namely, I know where I’m going just about when I get there. I take circuitous routes because I have to piece the city together from sensory memory each time—this is the block with the chocolaterie, and I know that one block this way is the place with the best apple pie, which means that I’m four blocks from the store that I actually set out to go to in the first place.
It’s true that the Dutch in Amsterdam speak English easily and well, with a certain endearing enthusiasm. There is none of the smoldering we-refuse-to-be-good-at-this ressentiment of the French. (Yesterday, I heard the stock boy at the Albert Heijn showing a British person the “ethnic food” section: “And I’m afraid that this is all we have, for the moment…”) Because of this, foreigners, especially Americans, feel at home in Amsterdam. What is hard to see, unless you look for it, is that Dutch is the language of the real city, of the hidden, gezellig rooms behind the open, stern modernity. Dutch is a behind doors and just-between-us language. Outsiders are thus kept at a proper, Calvinistic distance. You are welcome to come and stay; we are happy to speak English with you; you don’t actually know us at all. Imagine a city in which everyone seems to be smiling at each other behind your back (or, in my case, over my head) and that’s something like the feeling of being a stranger in Amsterdam. It’s not malicious, and not mean-spirited. You just don’t speak the language of life here.
There seems a surprising number of tanning parlors, until I think about the number of days that the sky is that particularly Dutch shade of grey. Perhaps because Amsterdam is still an enigma to me, I hardly notice the weather. Even rainy days are wonderful because they are so typically Amsterdam. It’s exactly as it is with a new love, when their habit of dropping socks on the floor and leaving the toilet seat up seem but charming aberrations in an otherwise perfect person.
Yesterday, biking home after a late movie—about 1 a.m.—we swerved around a taxi that had precipitously pulled up onto the bike lane (something only done under severe duress). Leaning out the window was a young man—possibly Dutch, in that the taxi driver was imploring him to “buiten steppen”—vomiting milky, bile-y vomit out the open taxi window. Still—will it be believed?—this only added to the atomosphere of the night, the charm of the lights on the canals and the exhilarating feeling of biking home, late at night in a city full of flowers.
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