No art news yet. I’ll do the galleries tomorrow. Who needs art when you have landscapes like this? I love you.
The Waag is a huge round building looming like a Gothic castle on the north side of the square at Nieuwmarkt. Witch-hat towers rise up above it, studded with Hansel and Gretel windows. In its south side, facing towards Sasha’s building, there’s a red door which looks as though it shouldn’t open sideways but be lowered from above, like a drawbridge. There’s no moat around it — but, Sasha explained to Nick as they dragged his bags from the station down the Geldersekade, until the turn of the century the square was full of water, a large holding pool. Ships from all around the world would arrive in the harbour, and their cargoes of spice, tobacco, silk, diamonds and livestock would be transferred to smaller vessels, carried to this pool, weighed and recorded right there in the Waag — and, natuurlijk, taxed to the hilt before being carried onwards to the traders’ shops along the various canals. Nothing entered Amsterdam without being processed first.
Old habits die hard, it seems: Nick spent most of his first two weeks here being processed himself, trekking from Belastingdienst to Vreemdelingenpolitie to Bevolkingsregister. As a foreigner, even a European one, you need three ratified, stamped forms to fart in this town. Dutch people don’t have it much better: if he goes downstairs to borrow sugar or a dustpan from Frankie and Jessica any time before lunch, he finds them doing their administratie, hunched over their kitchen table chewing biros as they wade through correspondence with the Herhuisvesting, arguing, instalment by instalment, their case for getting urgentiebeweis and woonvergunningen, or with the Informatiebeheergroep, telling them whether or not their status has altered since last week, or crossing boxes on their uitkering and sollicitatieplicht papers. They’re like love letters, all these forms, both nurturing and ritualizing the cradle-to-grave relation ship all individuals in Holland seem to enjoy with social institutions.
“You want to start a revolution here, like they had in Prague?” boomed Sasha a few days ago, overflowing with contempt for the Dutch system. “Then you have to go to the relevant offices, fill in a form, and they’ll give you a small grant to sit around like you had no balls, doing nothing. You know how artists here make their living?”
“No,” replied Nick. They were drinking coffee in the Italian place two doors down from their building.
“They get a Basis Stipendium when they leave art schooclass="underline" same salary as a civil servant’s. They get this whether or not they make any art.”
“So where’s the incentive to …”
“Exactly!” he banged the counter by the window as he said this. The other customers turned round — to look, Nick presumed, at this loud Yugoslavian — until he saw ten or so uniformed officers burst out of the police station that floated like a houseboat in front of the café. Five peeled left, passed the strange blue-and-red mushroom benches on the Nieuwmarkt’s edge and raced down the Kloveniersburgwal’s far side; the other five ran to the right, crossed the bridge by De Hoogte, then cut back left so they, too, were running down the far bank of the Kloveniersburgwal, straight towards their pals. Between the two bunches of cops a small South American man was pulling himself out of the canaclass="underline" no sooner had he stood up than they were on him, wrestling him to the ground.
“Did you hear the splash?” asked Sasha, all excited.
“I heard something.”
“That man has jump out of the police station.” Has jump: Nick was back with Mladen for an instant. He and Sasha went to school together: must have had the same English teacher. “He has jump out of the window into the canal, and swum to the far side. The police have captured him again, but I take my hat off to this man. He’s won a moral victory.”
Sasha’s in his second year as an art student. He’s got refugee status, like Mladen. He’s very with it: listens to Laibach, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine. Over the last six months he’s been working on a performance piece involving windows: he and two collaborators bang and scrape on windows, producing sounds. He’s played a tape of one of his concerts to Nick and invited him to come to the next one, maybe even write it up for Art in Europe. On his first night in Amsterdam Nick froze because Sasha had removed, just prior to his last concert, the glass pane from one of the windows in the attic room which he’d persuaded the others in the house to let Nick live in. The next day he took Nick out to get a new one from a glazier on De Clerqstraat. When they stepped onto a tram to carry the pane home, the driver refused to leave the stop until they got off. Neither of them understood at first: the tram just stood there and a message came over the tannoy which didn’t seem prerecorded like in Prague, and all the other passengers were looking at them angrily. Eventually one of them said something to them; they told him they didn’t understand him so he said in English:
“You may not travel with the glass.”
“Why not?”
“It’s dangerous to other passengers. If there’s an accident, the glass might injure us.”
Us. As they walked the whole way back to Nieuwmarkt, taking it in turns to carry the pane, Nick remembered how Ivan had acquired this sudden interest in Frieda Kahlo around the time he was painting that odd icon painting, just before he died. He’d told everyone who came to the atelier about her accident: the tram’s pole that skewered her, the gold bag. Nick told Sasha the story, which as it turned out Sasha knew already:
“This is my point absolutely!” He spat in disgust as the tram disappeared towards the Marnixstraat. “No risk; no beauty. Holland will never have a Frieda Kahlo.”
Art in Europe has its offices on the Leidsegracht, above the centre of the Euthanasia Society. Even death is regulated here. The fourth floor’s corridor is full of stacked-up back issues of the magazine — which, it struck Nick on his first day here, can’t be a good sign, because if they’re there it means they didn’t sell. The office itself is a long room with five desks in it. There’s Julia’s, then Lucy’s, then Johanna’s, then Nick’s, then a fifth one no one uses but is still all decked out with in- and out-trays and a computer. Elijah’s, Nick called it on his first day here, which no one got.
Julia Emerson’s strange: cold and engaging at the same time. She’s from Woolwich, working class and on the rise. She’s edited other magazines before and probably won’t be with this one for too long. Lucy’s the one Nick spoke to on New Year’s Day. She must be about two years older than him: twenty-four, twenty-five. His picture of her in the broken phone box wasn’t that far off: she’s well organized and smart. She has dark, shoulder-length hair and wears velvet skirts and thick black tights that Nick would kind of like to get inside but probably won’t: she’ll end up with a gallerist, all jackets and sports cars and weekends in the country, maybe the odd sniff of coke. Johanna’s in her thirties, same as Julia. Dutch-American, a mid-Atlantic accent. She dresses even more smartly than Lucy, in shoulder pads and high-heeled boots: a professional woman. Her interest in art is sociaclass="underline" she knows all about relations between galleries, who’s feuding with whom, what Paris thought about the way Fuchs hung the Picasso paintings lent him by the Pompidou, why So-and-So in Brooklyn won’t lend Golubs to Berlin. Lucy has a debutantish enthusiasm for art, and gushes about colour and movement from time to time. Julia’s got no interest in art at all.