Postcard from Amsterdam: through a half-opened window

Spiegelgracht, Amsterdam (Image author’s own)

It’s a strange sentiment,  to feel an affinity with a place you left long ago, and not unlike that intangible bond that comes about with a university town. You may no longer stumble home in the dark down familiar streets; the bedroom where you spent so many hours, thinking, drinking and sitting in idle togetherness will have passed through innumerable hands, but everywhere you turn are the amorphous memories of an adopted home.

Though I left the Netherlands when I was 7, some small part of my mind always seems to be resting there, among the eaves of the slanting mosaic of canal houses or in the shade of the stately, tree-lined avenues by the Vondelpark. This splitting of my identity is partly involuntary, a product of spending formative years in a foreign place, despite not sharing language or nationality, and partly deliberate: cajoling memories - some of which aren’t my own - into a half-baked sense of belonging. Though I can trace the web of the canal ring in my mind and pick out that distinctive, accented English across a crowded tube, any Dutch I spoke has gone, as have most of the friends I knew. 

But the old centre of the city ushers you in, hemmed between tall rows of buildings, beautiful in their daring precariousness. Through some peculiarity of Dutch history and culture, a serendipitous mixture of Calvinism and window taxes, large windows without curtains are everywhere to be seen.  You are afforded a smorgasbord of domestic voyeurism, snapshots of still life to rival those on display in the magisterial Rijksmuseum. In contrast to the austere Protestantism which led to this urge to keep one’s home on display, one feels let into a secret, or rather scores of secrets, in those intimate hours either side of dusk. Huge rectangles of warm amber hold out against grayscale stone, coming into shimmering communion with street lamps reflected in the canals. In the younger districts of De Jordaan and De Pijp, these shafts of light conspire with laughter and voices just above head height, enough to make any stranger feel at least fleetingly welcome, and romantic even on bitter winter nights when the lowland city huddles under a blanket of cloud and drizzle. 

Rebecca Nolten

Scenes like these will always draw me back to the city that shouldn't exist, surrounded by a patchwork of dykes and polders, bound up against the sea. Unlike the relationship I have with the languages I study,  an interest and affection raised on an unsteady scaffold of declensions and verb tables, with the Netherlands I have only a small but meaningful inscription of birthplace in my passport. Sitting on its plinth of lofty bureaucratic authority, this designation acts a salve for a Zweig-esque European-in-exile, albeit in far less tragic circumstances.

And combined with Amsterdam’s eternal charm, this feels like enough for now. Enough to wander around deceptively familiar squares, to sound out street names and try to wrap my head around odd pronunciations. To revel in the liminal space between what I came to know from within, behind the glass panes of those human triptychs, and what I’ve learned from without. And ultimately to hope that, one day, that tenacious mental bond might draw me back to the canals to build from those faint foundations.

See also The CLC Guidebook to: Amsterdam