Then Again: Travels in search of my younger self. Irma Kurtz

But it would surprise you, child, as it surprised me to find myself equally delighted in Amsterdam by Malevich, Newman, Stella, especially Rothko, and others at the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art as I was by the tale-telling paintings of the Rijksmuseum. Have we grown up at last, you and I, and learned to look through image to meaning? Past signs to significance?

      ‘July, 1954: I can see why rich men hire art thieves to steal masterpieces for them. There are always so many people surrounding me at museums. I’d love to know how it feels to stand in front of a Vermeer or a Rembrandt all by myself.’

      Sweetheart, I am glad to tell you that by a fluke of demographics you will be privileged one future day – just the other day – to stand alone, all by yourself, for a full three minutes in front of the self-portrait of young Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum. What fun! I took out my pad and pen to jot down a few words about his eyes, evenly spaced, ever so slightly Mongoloid, and the tussling copper filaments of his hair.

      ‘Excuse me,’ hissed an angry American woman’s voice behind me. ‘Do you speak English?’

      ‘Yes, I speak English. Can I help you?’

      ‘Your bag is open,’ she snapped, outraged that an Anglophone tourist could so let the side down as to tempt foreign pickpockets.

      ‘And so is your mouth,’ I thought. But I said ‘Thank you’, slipped the pad back into my bag, zipped up and hurried away from young Rembrandt’s seeing face.

      Every city is big to itself. As impressive as the unfolded street map of Amsterdam may be, practically everything I wanted to see was in easy walking distance for someone used to London’s patchwork sprawl, and that was as well because I could not get my head around the ticket system for local trams. The way Flavia’s fine English dissolved when she tried to explain the routine made me think the problem was not just due to my own senile obtusity; she herself did not seem all that sure just how to fold the travel card over to the correct date and distance before inserting it into the franking machine. Transport police frequently board trams to parade down the aisle imposing stiff and immediate fines, generally on hapless tourists. I felt safer entering by the front and paying the driver directly with coins.

      ‘But that works out much more expensive than a travel card,’ said my Dutch friend, Annette, who had travelled in from the country to lunch with me in Amsterdam. ‘It’s a waste of money.’

      I pointed to what was translated into English on the menu as ‘Dutch Pee Soup’. ‘In for a penny, Annette,’ I said, taking advantage of an earlier observation that the Dutch are so pleased to laugh that even the feeblest joke or most glancing innuendo is hilariously received.

      Four days alone in a strange city is a little lifetime. Patterns are formed, routines established. Within an hour or so I had sniffed out my Amsterdam bar, a big one with a terrace, and my restaurant, a small one with seafood on the menu and windows on the street. My hotel room was so narrow I could span it with outspread arms; it was soon familiar, even welcoming, to return to Simon Schama and the absence of a TV set after sightseeing and an early dinner. Every morning before going down to breakfast I stood at my window to watch the woman across the street see her boy off to school on his bike; I knew – I remembered – how she was going to wait in her doorway, looking in his direction for a few minutes after he was out of sight. My penultimate morning in Amsterdam I awoke from a dream of comfort and found a phone number, 743–3874, floating at the front of my mind. It took a moment to recollect that it belonged to the first home I had owned in London, a terraced house in Shepherd’s Bush I sold nearly twenty years ago and the place where my son grew up. Then I made the daily walk to the underground supermarket at the Museumplein to buy my usual bottle of chilled water. Around me Dutch women shopped briskly, from memory. Outside, clouds, rain, faint sun and bright shifted constantly over the Museumplein so the vast plain seemed to unroll through several seasons in the twenty minutes it took to stroll across it.

      On my last full day in Amsterdam, returning to the hotel in the late afternoon, I stopped on a bench to watch Dutch children at play. Some of them showed ethereal beauty that would be swallowed by adolescence. A little boy, whose mother was not in evidence, danced in and out of the fountain oblivious to the chilly north breeze; he was laughing and water was pouring from the yellow sleeves of his jacket. Tourists from Japan took pictures of him, others carrying ubiquitous bags and boxes decorated with Van Gogh’s sunflowers stopped to smile. Earlier while rambling around town near the station I had come upon a street redolent of marijuana where someone was singing ‘I’d rather be a hammer than a nail …’ I could not stop humming the silly tune softly. On a bench near me sat a woman dressed in flowing layers of thin weave, mainly salmon pink. She wore strings of beads, her grey hair was straggling out of a tousled chignon. Now, there was a gal who could explain why it was better to be a hammer than a nail, a preference that has always eluded me. The sun came out and suddenly I remembered an outing to Amsterdam more than thirty years ago with Tony.

      ‘July 1954: After lunch today Tony gave me a gin. It was vile but I pretended to like it. I love Tony. In an English sort of way …’

      No. No. Not that Tony. You will discover, child, there are many more than one Tony on earth. I am referring to another sort of English Tony who was going to be our son’s father. I’ll confess to you that on our trip to Amsterdam he and I were caught and fined for inadvertently fare-dodging on the very first tram we took. Otherwise, I could not recollect that we did anything special except be in love. And Tony bought himself a black leather coat at the market in Rembrandtplein. That must have been at the end of the 1960s; it remains a jolly street market. I had browsed it that very morning on my way to the Jewish Museum, chosen over the Anne Frank House with its discouraging queue of tourists, including many nuns and clerics. The house where that poor child suffered has become a big, glossy memorial to her martyrdom that simplifies the event and makes it too sentimental for my taste. An image that kept returning on the boat bus back from the Jewish Museum and for hours thereafter was of two yellow stars of cloth exhibited in a cabinet; why was one bright and unused, the other ragged and faded? Had one belonged to a father and the other to his child? A woman, laughing and scolding, appeared at last to pull the little boy out of the fountain. He was drenched to his skin and left wet footprints on the path when she dragged him away. I tried to feel in love again, I knew the words; I could not remember the tune. Clearer, sharper, I remembered Tony’s coat. My son’s father is not a Jew: had he been one in the open season, however, it would have been awfully hard to stitch a yellow star on to a garment as tough as that coat. I wondered if he still had it. A coat like that was made to last a lifetime.