Neither Here Nor There - Travels In Europe Part 3

In the evening I went looking for a restaurant. This is often a problem in Germany. For one thing, there's a good chance that there will be three guys in lederhosen playing polka music, so you have to look carefully through the windows and question the proprietor closely to make sure that Willi and the Bavarian Boys won't suddenly bound onto a little stage at half-past eight, because there is nothing worse than being just about to tuck into your dinner, a good book propped in front of you, and finding yourself surrounded by ruddy-faced Germans waving beer steins and singing the 'Horst Wessel Lied' for all they're worth. It should have been written into the armistice treaty at the end of the war that the Germans would be required to lay down their accordions along with their arms.

I went up to six or eight places and studied the menus by the door but they were all full of foods with ominous Germanic names Schweinensnout mit Spittle und Grit, Ramsintestines und Oder Grosser Stuff, that sort of thing. I expect that if ordered they would turn out to be reasonably digestible, and possibly even delicious, but I can never get over this nagging fear that I will order at random and the waiter will turn up with a steaming plate of tripe and eyeb.a.l.l.s. Once in Bavaria Katz and I recklessly ordered Kalbsbrann from an indecipherable menu and a minute later the proprietor appeared at our table, looking hesitant and embarra.s.sed, wringing his hands on a slaughterhouse ap.r.o.n.

'Excuse me so much, gentlemens,' he said, 'but are you knowing what Kalbsbrann is is?'

We looked at each other and allowed that we did not.

'It is, how you say, what ze little cow thinks wiz,' he said.

Katz swooned. I thanked the man profusely for his thoughtfulness in drawing this to our attention, though I dare say it was a self-interested desire not to have two young Americans projectile-vomiting across his dining-room that brought him to our table, and asked him to provide us something that would pa.s.s for food in middle America. We then spent the intervening period remarking on what a close shave that had been, shaking our heads in wonder like two people who have stepped unscathed from a car wreck, and discussing what curious people the Europeans are. It takes a special kind of vigilance to make your way across a continent on which people voluntarily ingest tongues, kidneys, horsemeat, frogs' legs, intestines, sausages made of congealed blood, and the brains of little cows.

Eventually, after walking some distance, I found an Italian restaurant called Capriccio just around the corner from my hotel on Theaterstra.s.se. The food was Italian, but the staff were all German. (I could tell from the jackboots only joking!) My waitress spoke no English at all and I had the most extraordinary difficulty getting myself understood. I asked for a beer and she looked at me askance.

'Wa.s.s? Tier?'

'Nein, beer,' I said, and her puzzlement grew.

'Fear? Steer? Queer? King Leer?'

'Nein, nein, beer beer.' I pointed at the menu.

'Ah, beer beer', she said, with a private tut, as if I had been intentionally misleading her. I felt abashed for not speaking German, but comforted myself with the thought that if I did understand the language I would know what the pompous man at the next table was boasting about to his wife (or possibly mistress) and then I would be as bored as she clearly was. She was smoking heavily from a packet of Lord's and looking with undisguised interest at all the men in the room, except of course me. (I am invisible to everyone but dogs and Jehovah's Witnesses.) Her companion didn't notice this. He was too busy telling her how he had just sold a truckload of hula hoops and Leo Sayer alb.u.ms to the East Germans, and basking in his cunning.

When he laughed, he looked uncannily like Arvis Dreck, my junior high school woodwork teacher, which was an unsettling coincidence since Mr Dreck was the very man who had taught me what little German I knew.

I had only signed up for German because it was taught by a walking wet dream named Miss Webster, who had the most magnificent b.r.e.a.s.t.s ever and b.u.t.tocks that adhered to her skirt like melons in shrink wrap. Whenever Miss Webster stretched to write on the blackboard, eighteen adolescent boys would breathe hard and let their hands slip below the table. But two weeks after the school year started Miss Webster departed in mysterious circ.u.mstances mysterious to us anyway and Mr Dreck was drafted in to take over until a replacement could be appointed.

This was a catastrophe. Mr Dreck knew slightly less than b.u.g.g.e.r-all about German. The closest he had come to Germany was a beerfest in Milwaukee. I'm sure he wasn't even remotely qualified to teach the language. He taught it to us from an open book, running a stubby finger over the lines and skipping anything that got too tricky. I don't suppose he needed a lot in the way of advanced degrees to teach junior high school woodwork, but it was clear that even there he was operating on the outer limits of his mental capabilities. I learned more German from watching Hogan's Heroes. Hogan's Heroes.

I hated Mr Dreck as much as I have ever hated anyone. For two long years he made my life h.e.l.l. I used to sit during his endless monotone lectures on hand tools, their use and care, genuinely trying to pay attention, but after a few minutes I would find my gaze romping around thirty-six adolescent girls, all wearing little blue pleated skirts that didn't quite quite cover their pert little a.s.ses and my imagination would break free, like a dog off its lead, and scamper playfully among them, sniffing and panting around all those long, tanned legs. After a minute or two I would turn back to the cla.s.s with a dreamy leer tugging at my lips to find that everyone was watching me. Mr Dreck had evidently just launched a question in my direction. cover their pert little a.s.ses and my imagination would break free, like a dog off its lead, and scamper playfully among them, sniffing and panting around all those long, tanned legs. After a minute or two I would turn back to the cla.s.s with a dreamy leer tugging at my lips to find that everyone was watching me. Mr Dreck had evidently just launched a question in my direction.

'Pardon, Mr Dreck?'

'I said what kind of blade is this, Mr Bryson?'

'That's a sharp blade, Mr Dreck.'

Mr Dreck would emit one of those exasperated sighs that stupid people reserve for those happy occasions when they chance upon someone even more stupid than they, and say in a wearied voice, 'It's a fourteen-inch Hungarian dual nasal borer, Mr Bryson.' Then he would make me stand for the rest of the hour at the back of the room holding a piece of coa.r.s.e sandpaper to the wall with my nose.

I had no gift for woodwork. Everyone else in the cla.s.s was building things like cedar chests and ocean-going boats and getting to play with dangerous and noisy power tools, but I had to sit at the Basics Table with Tubby Tucker and a kid who was so stupid that I don't think we ever learned his name. We just called him Drooler. The three of us weren't allowed anything more dangerous than sandpaper and Elmer's Glue, so we would sit week after week making little nothings out of offcuts, except for Drooler who would just eat the glue. Mr Dreck never missed a chance to humiliate me. 'And what is this this?' he would say, seizing some mangled block of wood on which I had been labouring for the last twenty-seven weeks and holding it aloft for the cla.s.s to t.i.tter at. 'I've been teaching shop for sixteen years, Mr Bryson, and I have to say that this is the worst bevelled edge I've ever seen.' He held up a birdhouse of mine once and it just collapsed in his hands. The cla.s.s roared. Tubby Tucker laughed so hard that he almost choked. He laughed for twenty minutes, even when I whispered to him across the table that if he didn't stop it I would bevel his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es.

The waitress brought my beer and I became uncomfortably aware that I had spent the last ten minutes adrift in a little universe of my own, very possibly chuckling quietly and murmuring to myself in the manner of people who live in bus stations. I looked around and was relieved to see that no one appeared to have noticed. The man at the next table was too busy boasting to his wife/mistress how he had sold 2,000 Jason King video tapes, 170 Sinclair electric cars and the last 68,000 copies of the American edition of The Lost Continent Lost Continent to the Romanians for loft insulation. His companion meanwhile was making love with her eyes to a man dining alone across the room or rather masturbating with her eyes, since the man was too busy struggling with three-foot-long strands of tangled spaghetti to notice that he was being used as a s.e.x aid. to the Romanians for loft insulation. His companion meanwhile was making love with her eyes to a man dining alone across the room or rather masturbating with her eyes, since the man was too busy struggling with three-foot-long strands of tangled spaghetti to notice that he was being used as a s.e.x aid.

I took a big draught of my beer, warmed by my reminiscences, and quietly jubilant at the thought that my schooldays were for ever behind me, that never again for as long as I lived would I have to bevel an edge or elucidate the principles of the Volstead Act in not less than 250 words or give even a mouse-sized s.h.i.+t about which far-flung countries produce jute and what they do with it. It is a thought that never fails to cheer me.

On the other hand, never again would I experience the uniquely satisfying sensation of driving a fist into the pillow-like softness of Tubby Tucker's abdomen. I don't wish to suggest that I was a bully, but Tubby was different. G.o.d put Tubby on earth for no other reason than to give other kids someone to beat up. Girls beat him up. Kids four years younger than him beat him up. It sounds cruel it was cruel but the thing is he deserved deserved it. He never learned to keep his mouth shut. He would say to the toughest kid in the school, 'G.o.d, Buckley, where'd you get that hair-cut? I didn't know the Salvation Army offered a hair-styling service,' or 'Hey, Simpson, was that your mom I saw cleaning the toilets at the bus station? You ought to tell her those cigarette b.u.t.ts would smoke better if she dried them out first.' it. He never learned to keep his mouth shut. He would say to the toughest kid in the school, 'G.o.d, Buckley, where'd you get that hair-cut? I didn't know the Salvation Army offered a hair-styling service,' or 'Hey, Simpson, was that your mom I saw cleaning the toilets at the bus station? You ought to tell her those cigarette b.u.t.ts would smoke better if she dried them out first.'

So every time you saw him he was being given a Chinese burn or having his wobbly pink b.u.t.t mercilessly zinged with damp towels in the locker-room or standing in his underpants beneath a school-yard oak endeavouring with a long stick to get his trousers down from one of the branches, where they had recently been deposited by a crowd of up to four hundred people, which sometimes included pa.s.sing motorists and the residents of nearby houses. There was just something about him that brought out the worst in everyone. You used to see pre-school kids chasing him down the street. I bet even now strangers come up to him on the street and for no reason smash his hot dog in his face. I would.

In the morning I went to the station to catch a train to Cologne. I had half an hour to kill, so I wandered into the station cafe. It was a little one-woman operation. The woman running it saw me take a seat, but ignored me and instead busied herself tidying the shelves behind the counter. She was only a foot or so from me. I could have leaned over and used her b.u.t.tocks as bongos, but it gradually dawned on me that if I wanted service I would have to present myself at the counter and make a formal request. It would never occur to her to conclude that I was a foreign visitor who didn't know the drill and say to me in a pleasant voice, 'Coffee, mein Liebschen?' or even just signal to me that I should step to the counter. No, I was breaking a rule and for this I had to be ignored. This is the worst characteristic of the Germans. Well, actually a predilection for starting land wars in Europe is their worst characteristic, but this is up there with it.

I know an English journalist living in Bonn who was phoned at work by his landlady and instructed to come home and take his was.h.i.+ng down from the line and rehang it in a more systematic manner. He told her, in so many words, to go f.u.c.k herself, but every time he put was.h.i.+ng out after that he would return home to find it had all been taken down and rehung. The same man came in one weekend from cutting the gra.s.s to find an anonymous note on the doormat informing him that it was illegal to mow one's lawn in North Rhine-Westphalia between noon on Sat.u.r.day and 9 a.m. on Monday, and that any further infractions would be reported to the lawnmower police or whatever. Eventually he was transferred to Bogota and he said it was the happiest day of his life.

Cologne is a dismal place, which rather pleased me. It was comforting to see that the Germans could make a hash of a city as well as anyone else, and they certainly have done so with Cologne. You come out of the station and there, at the top of an outdoor escalator, is the cathedral, the largest Gothic structure in the world. It is awesome and imposing, no question, but it stands in the midst of a vast, windswept, elevated concrete plaza that is just heart-numbingly barren and forlorn. If you can imagine Salisbury Cathedral dropped into the car park of the Metro Centre you may get the picture. I don't know what they were thinking of when they built it. Certainly it wasn't people.

I had been to Cologne briefly once before, the summer I travelled alone, but I could remember little of it, except for the ma.s.sive presence of the cathedral, and staying in a guesthouse somewhere on a back street in the permanent shadow of an iron bridge across the Rhine. I remembered the guesthouse much better than the city. In the hallway outside my room stood a table stacked high with German weekly magazines, all of which seemed to be concerned exclusively with s.e.x and television, and since television in Germany seemed also to be concerned almost exclusively with s.e.x, s.e.x was something of a feature in these publications. There was nothing p.o.r.nographic about them, you understand. They just covered s.e.x the way British magazines cover gardening. I spent much of an afternoon and a whole evening travelling between my room and the table with armloads of these diverting periodicals for purposes of cultural study.

I was particularly fascinated by a regular feature in, I think, Neue Review, Neue Review, which focused on a young couple each week a truck mechanic from Duisburg named Rudi and his dishy librarian wife Greta, that sort of thing. Each week it was a different couple, but they all looked as if they had been squeezed from the same tube of toothpaste. They were all young and good-looking and had superb bodies and dazzling smiles. Two or three of the photographs would show the couple going about their daily business Rudi lying under a DAF truck with a spanner and a big smile, Greta at the local supermarket beaming at the frozen chickens. But the rest of the pictures treated us to the sight of Rudi and Greta without any clothes on doing things around the house: standing together at the sink was.h.i.+ng the dishes, sharing a spoonful of soup from the stove, playing Scrabble b.u.t.tocks-up on a furry rug. which focused on a young couple each week a truck mechanic from Duisburg named Rudi and his dishy librarian wife Greta, that sort of thing. Each week it was a different couple, but they all looked as if they had been squeezed from the same tube of toothpaste. They were all young and good-looking and had superb bodies and dazzling smiles. Two or three of the photographs would show the couple going about their daily business Rudi lying under a DAF truck with a spanner and a big smile, Greta at the local supermarket beaming at the frozen chickens. But the rest of the pictures treated us to the sight of Rudi and Greta without any clothes on doing things around the house: standing together at the sink was.h.i.+ng the dishes, sharing a spoonful of soup from the stove, playing Scrabble b.u.t.tocks-up on a furry rug.

There was never anything overtly s.e.xual about the pictures. Rudi never got a hard on he was having much too good a time drying those dishes and tasting that soup! He and Greta looked as if every moment of their existence was bliss. They smiled straight at the camera, as happy as anything to have their neighbours and workmates and everyone else in the Federal Republic of Germany see them chopping vegetables and loading the was.h.i.+ng machine in their birthday suits. And I thought then what curious people the Germans are.

That was about all I could remember of Cologne, and I began to fear, as I lingered on the precipice of the cathedral plaza looking down on the grim shopping streets below, that that was about all that was worth remembering. I went and stood at the base of the cathedral and gazed up at it for a long time, impressed by its sheer ma.s.s. It is absolutely immense, over 500 feet long and more than 200 feet wide, with towers that soar almost as high as the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument. It can hold 40,000 people. You can understand why it took 700 years to build and that was with German workers. In Britain they would still be digging the foundations.

I went inside and spent a half-hour looking dutifully at the contents, but without feeling any of that sense of exhilaration that the vastly smaller cathedral at Aachen had stirred in me the day before, then wandered back outside and went to the edge of the terrace overlooking the Rhine, broad and brown and full of long fleets of barges. This done, I wandered over to the main shopping street, Hohe Stra.s.se, a long, straight pedestrian artery which is one of the two most expensive streets in Europe on which to rent retail s.p.a.ce (the other is Kaufingerstra.s.se in Munich). It's more expensive even than Bond Street in London or the Rue du Faubourg-St-Honore in Paris. Bernard Levin wrote glowingly of Hohe Stra.s.se in To the End of the Rhine, To the End of the Rhine, but to me it just looked like any shopping street anywhere a succession of C&A-type department stores, shoe stores, record stores, places selling cameras and video recorders. It was aswarm with Sat.u.r.day shoppers, but they didn't look particularly discerning and nothing like as well-dressed as the citizens of Aachen. I could have been in Milton Keynes or Doncaster. but to me it just looked like any shopping street anywhere a succession of C&A-type department stores, shoe stores, record stores, places selling cameras and video recorders. It was aswarm with Sat.u.r.day shoppers, but they didn't look particularly discerning and nothing like as well-dressed as the citizens of Aachen. I could have been in Milton Keynes or Doncaster.

I stopped outside one of the many electronics shops and looked over the crowded window, idly wondering if the goods on offer would be German-made, but no, they were the same j.a.panese videos and cameras you see everywhere else, apart from the odd Grundig slide projector or some other relic of a simpler age. Having grown up in a world dominated by American goods I used to get patriotically chagrined seeing j.a.panese products appearing everywhere and I would read with sympathy articles in magazines about how these wily little orientals were taking over the world.

Then one time, while I was flying on a Boeing 747, I plugged in a pair of earphones that offered the audio quality of a paper cup at the end of a length of string and watched a film that looked as if it were being projected onto a bath mat, and I had a shocking thought namely, that this was as far as American consumer electronics ever got. We got up to about 1972 and then just stopped. If we had left the field to RCA and Westinghouse and the other American companies we would now all be wheeling around personal stereos the size of suitcases and using video recorders that you would have to thread yourself. And since that moment I have been grateful to the j.a.panese for filling my life with convenient items like a wrist.w.a.tch that can store telephone numbers, calculate my overdraft and time my morning egg.

Now my only complaint is that we have to live with all the embarra.s.sing product names the j.a.panese give us. No one ever seems to remark on this on what a dumb and misguided name Walkman is, for instance. I've never understood it. It doesn't walk, it's not a man. It sounds like something you'd give a blind person to keep him from b.u.mping into walls ('You want to turn up the bleeper on your Walkman, Harry'). If it had been developed in America it would have been given a name like the SoundBlaster or MuzixMaster or Dynam-O-Box or something with a little zip to it. But these things aren't developed in America any longer, so we have to accept the sort of names that appeal to j.a.panese engineers the Sony Handy-Cam, the Panasonic Explorer, the Toyota Tercel. Personally, I would be embarra.s.sed to buy a car that sounds like a new kind of polyester, but I imagine that to the j.a.panese these names are as exciting and stellar as all-get-out. I suppose that's what you have to expect from people who wear white s.h.i.+rts every day of their lives.

I returned to the station, where I had left my bag in a locker, and couldn't decide what to do with myself. My intention had been to spend a couple of days in Cologne going to the museums it has some excellent ones but now I couldn't muster much enthusiasm for the idea. And then I saw something that gave me an instant urge to get out of there. It was a non-stop p.o.r.no cinema, and quite a gross one at that to judge by the candid glossy pictures on display by the ticket booth. The cinema was in the station, one of the services permitted to travellers by the thoughtful management of Deutsche Bundesbahn. I don't know precisely why, but I found this hugely repellent. I have no especial objection to p.o.r.nography, but in a station? There was just something so seedy about the idea of a businessman stopping off at the end of the day to watch twenty minutes of heaving bonking before catching the 17.40 to his home and family in Bensberg, and there was something seedier still in the thought of a national railway endorsing it.

Just then the huge timetable board high above me went chickata chickata chickata chickata in that appealing way of theirs, announcing an express train to Amsterdam. 'Hold that train!' I muttered, and scurried off to the ticket window. in that appealing way of theirs, announcing an express train to Amsterdam. 'Hold that train!' I muttered, and scurried off to the ticket window.

8. Amsterdam

Arriving at Amsterdam's Centraal Station is a strange experience. It's in the middle of town on a sunny plaza at the foot of the main street, the Damrak. You step out of the front door and there in front of you is gos.h.!.+ every hippie that's left. I had no idea there were still so many of them, but there were scores, if not hundreds, lounging around in groups of six or eight, playing guitars, pa.s.sing reefers, sunning themselves. They look much as you would expect someone to look who has devoted a quarter of a century to lounging around in public places and smoking dope. A lot of them seemed to be missing teeth and hair, but they had compensated somewhat by acquiring large numbers of children and dogs. The children amused themselves by frolicking barefoot in the sun and the dogs by nipping at me as I pa.s.sed.

I walked up the Damrak in a state of high antic.i.p.ation. Amsterdam had been Katz's and my favourite European city by a factor too high to compute. It was beautiful, it was friendly, it had excellent bars and legal dope. If we had lingered another week I could well be there yet, sitting on the station plaza with an acoustic guitar and some children named Sunbeam and Zippity Doo-Dah. It was that close.

The Damrak was heaving with tourists, hippies and Sat.u.r.day shoppers, all moving at different speeds: the tourists shuffling as if their shoelaces were tied together, looking everywhere but where they were going, the hippies hunched and hurried, and the shoppers scurrying around among them like wind-up toys. It was impossible to walk with any kind of rhythm. I tried several of the hotels along the street, but they were all full, so I dodged behind the prison-like royal palace at Dam Square and branched off into some side streets, where I had vague recollections of there being a number of small hotels. There were, but these too were full. At most of them it wasn't even necessary to enquire because a sign in the window announced NO VACANCY NO VACANCY in half a dozen languages. in half a dozen languages.

Things had clearly changed since my day. Katz and I had stepped off the train at the height of summer, asked our way to the Sailors' Quarter and got a room in the first hotel we came to. It was a wonderful little place called the Anco, in a traditional Amsterdam house: narrow and gabled, with steep, dark staircases and a restful view of the O.Z. Voorburgwal ca.n.a.l four floors below. It cost $5 a night, with an omelette for breakfast thrown in (almost literally), though we did have to share a room with two slightly older guys.

Our first meeting was inauspicious. We opened the door to find them engaged in a session of naked bed-top wrestling an occurrence that surprised the four of us equally.

'Pardon us, ladies!' Katz and I blurted and scuffled backwards into the hallway, closing the door behind us and looking confounded. Nothing in twenty years of life in Iowa had quite prepared us for this. We gave them a minute to disengage and don bathrobes before we barged back in, but it was clear that they considered us boorish intruders, an opinion reinforced by our knack, developed over the next two days, of always returning to the room in the middle of one of their work-outs. Either these guys never stopped or our timing was impeccable.

They spoke to us as little as was humanly possible. We couldn't place their accents but we thought the smaller one might be Australian since he seemed so at home down under. Their contempt for us became irredeemable in the middle of the second night, when Katz stumbled heavily from his bed after a gala evening at the Club Paradiso and, with an enormous sigh of relief, urinated in the waste-basket.

'I thought it was the sink,' he explained, a trifle lamely, the next morning. Our room-mates moved out after breakfast and for the rest of the week we had the room to ourselves.

We quickly fell into a happy routine. We would rise each morning for breakfast, then return to the room, shut out every trace of daylight and go back to bed for the day. At about four o'clock we would stir again, have a steaming shower in a cubicle down the hall, change into fresh clothes, press our hair flat against our heads and descend to the bar of the Anco, where we would sit with Oranjebooms in the window seat, watching the pa.s.sing scene and remarking on what fine people the Dutch were to fill their largest city with pleasant ca.n.a.ls, winsome wh.o.r.es and plentiful intoxicants.

The Anco had a young barman with a Brillo-pad beard and a red jacket three sizes too snug for him who had clearly taken one toke too many some years earlier and now looked as if he should carry a card with his name on it in case he needed to remember it in a hurry. He sold us small quant.i.ties of hash and at six o'clock we would have a reefer, as a sort of appetizer, and then repair to an Indonesian restaurant next door. Then, as darkness fell over the city and the wh.o.r.es took up their positions on the street corners, and the evening air filled with the heady smells of cannabis and frites, we would wander out into the streets and find ourselves being led gently into mayhem.

We went frequently to the Paradiso, a nightclub converted from an old church, where we tried without success to pick up girls. Katz had the world's worst opening line. Wearing an earnest, almost worried look, he would go up to a girl and say, 'Excuse me, I know you don't know me, but could you help me move something six inches?'

'What?' the girl would reply.

'One and a half fluid ounces of sperm,' Katz would say with a sudden beam. It never worked, but then it was no less successful than my own approach, which involved asking the least attractive girl in the room if I could buy her a drink and being told to f.u.c.k off. So instead we spent the nights getting ourselves into a state of what we called ACD advanced cognitive dysfunction. One night we fell in with some puzzled-looking Africans whom Katz encouraged to foment rebellion in their homeland. He got so drunk that he gave them his watch (he seemed to think that punctual timekeeping would make all the difference in the revolution), a Bulova that had belonged to his grandfather and was worth a fortune, and for the rest of the summer whenever I forgot and asked him the time he would reply sourly, 'I don't know. I have a man in Zululand who looks after these things for me.' At the end of the week we discovered we had spent exactly half our funds of $700 each and concluded that it was time to move on.

The Dutch are very like the English. Both are kind of s...o...b.. (and I mean that in the nicest possible way): in the way they park their cars, in the way they set out their litter bins, in the way they dump their bikes against the nearest tree or wall or railing. There is none of that obsessive fastidiousness you find in Germany or Switzerland, where the cars on some residential streets look as if they were lined up by somebody with a yardstick and a spirit level. In Amsterdam they just sort of abandon their cars at the ca.n.a.lside, often on the brink of plunging in.

They even talk much the same as the English. This has always puzzled me. I used to work with a Dutch fellow on The Times, The Times, and I once asked him whether the correct p.r.o.nunciation of the artist's name was Van Go or Van Gok. And he said, a little sharply, 'No, no, it's Vincent Van ' and he made a sudden series of desperate hacking noises, as if a moth had lodged in his throat. After that, when things were slow around the desk, I would ask him how various random expressions were said in Dutch International Monetary Fund, poached eggs, c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s and he would always respond with these same abrupt hacking noises. Pa.s.sing people would sometimes slap him on the back or offer to get him a gla.s.s of water. and I once asked him whether the correct p.r.o.nunciation of the artist's name was Van Go or Van Gok. And he said, a little sharply, 'No, no, it's Vincent Van ' and he made a sudden series of desperate hacking noises, as if a moth had lodged in his throat. After that, when things were slow around the desk, I would ask him how various random expressions were said in Dutch International Monetary Fund, poached eggs, c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s and he would always respond with these same abrupt hacking noises. Pa.s.sing people would sometimes slap him on the back or offer to get him a gla.s.s of water.

I've tried it with other Dutch people it's a good trick if you've got a Dutch person at a party and can't think what to do with him always with the same result. Yet the odd thing is that when you hear Dutch people speaking to each other they hardly hack at all. In fact, the language sounds like nothing so much as a peculiar version of English.

Katz and I often noticed this. We would be walking down the street when a stranger would step from the shadows and say, 'h.e.l.lo, sailors, care to grease my flanks?' or something, and all he would want was a light for his cigarette. It was disconcerting. I found this again now when I presented myself at a small hotel on the Prinsengracht and asked the kind-faced proprietor if he had a single room. 'Oh, I don't believe so,' he said, 'but let me check with my wife.' He thrust his head through a doorway of beaded curtains and called, 'Marta, what stirs in your leggings? Are you most moist?'

From the back a voice bellowed, 'No, but I tingle when I squirt.'

'Are you of a.s.sorted odours?'

'Yes, of beans and sputum.'

'And what of your pits do they exude sweetness?'

'Truly.'

'Shall I suckle them at eventide?'

'Most heartily!'

He returned to me wearing a sad look. 'I'm sorry, I thought there might have been a cancellation, but unfortunately not.'

'A smell of petroleum prevails throughout,' I said by way of thanks and departed.

There were no rooms to be had anywhere. In the end, despondent, I trudged back to the station plaza, to the office of the VVV, the state tourist bureau, where I a.s.sumed there would be a room-finding service. I went inside and up some stairs and found myself in a hall that brought to mind Ellis Island. There were eight straggly lines of weary tourists, with at least thirty people in each queue. The VVV staff were sending people all over to Haarlem, to Delft, to Rotterdam, to The Hague because there was not a single hotel room left in Amsterdam at any price. This was only April. What on earth can it be like in July? They must send people to Iceland. A big sign on the wall said NO TICKETS NO TICKETS FOR THE VAN GOGH EXHIBITION. FOR THE VAN GOGH EXHIBITION. SOLD OUT. That was great, too. One of the reasons I had come when I did was to see the exhibition. SOLD OUT. That was great, too. One of the reasons I had come when I did was to see the exhibition.

I took a place in one of the lines. Progress was glacial. I was hot, I was sweaty, I was tired, I was hungry. My feet hurt. I wanted a bath. I wanted a large dinner and several beers. There wasn't a single part of me that was happy.

Almost every one of us in the room was an American. Upon reaching the front of the line, each new customer had to be interviewed regarding his or her requirements in terms of toilet facilities, breakfast arrangements, room amenities, accessibility by public transport and price. This took ages because of all the permutations involved. Then almost invariably the customer had to turn to his or her mate who had been standing there all along seeming seeming to take it in but evidently not and explain all the possibilities all over again. This would prompt a lengthy discussion and a series of supplementary questions Can we get there by bus instead of by train? Are there any vegetarian restaurants near the hotel? Does the hotel have no-smoking rooms? Will there be a cab at the station when we get there or do we have to call one, and if we have to call one can you give us the number? Is there a laundromat in Delft? What time does the last train run? Do you think I should be taken outside and shot for having such an enormous b.u.t.t and asking so many stupid questions? It just went on and on. to take it in but evidently not and explain all the possibilities all over again. This would prompt a lengthy discussion and a series of supplementary questions Can we get there by bus instead of by train? Are there any vegetarian restaurants near the hotel? Does the hotel have no-smoking rooms? Will there be a cab at the station when we get there or do we have to call one, and if we have to call one can you give us the number? Is there a laundromat in Delft? What time does the last train run? Do you think I should be taken outside and shot for having such an enormous b.u.t.t and asking so many stupid questions? It just went on and on.

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 s.e.x 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 ca.n.a.ls 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, coc.o.o.ned by the tall narrow houses and old trees. Along its ca.n.a.ls 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+mmering 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, a.s.sorted cartons from McDonald's and Burger King and I would be reminded that Amsterdam is also a dirty city. It's full of dog s.h.i.+t 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 pa.s.sageway 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 pa.s.sionately for its openness, its tolerance, its relaxed att.i.tude to dope and s.e.x 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 n.o.bly accommodating to graffiti and burned-out hippies and dog s.h.i.+t and litter. Of course, I may be completely misreading the situation. They may like dog s.h.i.+t and litter. I sure hope so, because they've certainly got a lot of it.

Here and there I would pa.s.s a house braced with timbers, awaiting urgent repairs. Amsterdam was built on a swamp, and just keeping the ca.n.a.lside houses from sinking into it is an unending task. My Times Times colleague's brother bought a house on one of the lesser ca.n.a.ls 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 sh.o.r.ed 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. colleague's brother bought a house on one of the lesser ca.n.a.ls 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 sh.o.r.ed 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 ca.n.a.l 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 gla.s.s. Why? As you may have noticed, building societies have nothing 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. 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, squat, that it stopped me in my tracks, left me standing agog. Everything about it was cheap and unimaginative the cardboard-box shape, the s.h.i.+t-brown bricks, the empty, staring windows, the acrylic canopy over the entrance, the green plastic signs, the wall-mounted video cameras peering at every pa.s.ser-by. It looked like a parking ramp. Not the tiniest effort had been made to give it any distinction. that it stopped me in my tracks, left me standing agog. Everything about it was cheap and unimaginative the cardboard-box shape, the s.h.i.+t-brown bricks, the empty, staring windows, the acrylic canopy over the entrance, the green plastic signs, the wall-mounted video cameras peering at every pa.s.ser-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 myself turning dumbstruck to people pa.s.sing 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 gla.s.ses 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 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, astonis.h.i.+ngly realistic woman's reproductive region, complete with dilated l.a.b.i.a. It was 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, astonis.h.i.+ngly realistic woman's reproductive region, complete with dilated l.a.b.i.a. It was awful. awful. It looked like something that would be used in an anatomy lesson, and even then you could imagine students fainting. 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 heteros.e.xuals, gays, sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.ts, 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. G.o.d knows what they keep under the counters.

The wh.o.r.es were still there. They sat in luminous body stockings in windows lit with a pinkish glow, and winked at me as I pa.s.sed. ('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 prost.i.tutes were all Dutch. They were friendly and sweet-natured and often heart-breakingly attractive. But now all the prost.i.tutes 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 world requiring this sort of a.s.sistance just to e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e. Whatever happened to personal initiative? requiring this sort of a.s.sistance just to e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e. 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 ma.s.sive 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 pa.s.sing 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 cafes 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 doc.u.ments 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