We went to Amsterdam because Irene had shot herself with an army pistol and that concerned us because she was putting up two deserters, Manfred and Buster, in one of her two rooms. Her husband, or lover as it turned out, a Trotskyist of the Pablist tendency, had gone to Rotterdam for the funeral and told us that Irene’s sister, Piam, would continue with the deserter work. Piam was a provo, a provocateur, like her sister, along with about five hundred other Dutch youth, in a movement that no one outside of the country had heard of two years earlier
-- I’ll tell you how I heard of it, Max said. I picked up a girl on the way to Holland last June, going to a geophysical congress--me, not the girl--and she told me there were riots in Amsterdam. I laughed. Riots in Amsterdam! Everybody knows the Dutch are happy and contented and grow tulips to put in their windows. Particularly in Amsterdam. I’ll show you. The windows are all scrubbed clean with tulips in the window boxes. None of that seemed to me to fit in with the riots. But when I reached the center of Amsterdam where my hotel was, I saw that the atmosphere was really very excited. As I got out of my car, a young Dutch man with long hair stopped me and told me I should take the car farther away from the Dam because it might get bust. I decided he was a provo because he had long hair. I thought this was very white of him because where I come from they don’t care if the cars get bust. So I moved the car to where it seemed to me to be out of danger and walked back to my hotel.
--White? I repeated. White of him?
Max laughed.
--Black is beautiful came later, he said. Don’t forget, I grew up in England, in the white world. Black was a bad word. You had a black soul, remember?
I didn’t, but I did not bother to say so. In the New York of the middle thirties and forties where I grew up, no one talked about souls.
--White is good, Max was going on. I’d stomp a guy who said I jewed him out of something but me too, I’ll say “white of him” without thinking. In any case, the provos are as unracist as you can get in a country like Holland, and they wanted to use white positively. They began with a whole thing about whiteness as opposed to the filth of cities. They wanted a white Amsterdam, white bikes, white wives, white mothers. The color really didn’t matter, you know. You could be Indonesian and a white mother
This was about five or six o’clock in the evening, he continued. I had a very good view from my hotel room window. I could see the Rokin and the Dam. The Dam is the big central square and war monument. This whole area was filled with young men and girls. The police would come through every now and then on tri-cycles--motor bikes with sidecars--and hit people with swish sticks. You know what a swish stick is? It’s a long stick about one meter ten but flexible, like a rubber stick. It was a mistake for the cops to use them because they don’t put anyone out of commission. They just hurt and make people mad. The provos were no exception. They retreated when the tricycles went by but came right back when they left. After a while they began to pry up pavement bricks with sticks. The provos would pry the bricks up, bust them in pieces, and let fly at the motor cycles. It was very effective. You can’t run a motor cycle against flying pieces of brick. It depends, of course, on the ratio of motor cycles to bricks; ten or twenty motor cycles against one hundred, two hundred bricks are riding into a death trap. So the motor cycles stopped coming, and the police put a line up across the Dam. The provos started building a barricade. And I noticed a funny thing. They didn’t use the cars after all! I mean to say, not only had one of them warned me to move my car, but they left the cars alone that hadn’t been moved. Prejudiced car driver that I am, it gave me a very good impression of provos. The cars were lining the streets, just waiting to be piled into a barricade. I assure you that where I come from, they would have been.
When I went downstairs and out into the street, I met two Turkish girls. One was Turkish anyway. A typical third waver, she used to sell me the Herald Tribune and had recognized me. I don’t know what her friend was. They asked me what was going on. We walked up the Dam to see what was happening. The provos had started throwing bricks again. I got hit in the shoe with one when we were crossing the police line on the Dam. I was limping for the rest of the Congress. I mean to say, a flying brick thrown at a distance of thirty yards can be a pretty nasty weapon. On the other side of the line, the restaurant owners were all trembling for their plate glass windows. Standard restaurant owner behavior. We went in an Indonesian place and I bought the two girls a rice taffel. That’s where I met Kosje Koster. She was sitting on a sort of stone phallus outside the restaurant handling out leaflets. The leaflets explained why the provos were rioting, and they also condemned the Communist Party which had taken a position en retraite. I bought Kosje Koster a rice taffel too, and then she took us all over to the cellar where they had the printing press. The Turkish girls were confused and didn’t understand too much what it was all about, but they brightened up when they found they could sleep in the cellar. Till that point they had been making pointed remarks about sleeping in my car. I was very happy to leave them there and limp back alone to my hotel.
On the way I noticed something else that never happens in Paris. The Dutch people came and watched. Thousands and thousands of them stood around the Dam and looked on. By that time police were firing bullets “into the air.” Thirty people were wounded. Paris has a long history of political disturbances, so people are inclined to take the opposite direction when they see police or an angry crowd. It’s like the difference between a French dog and a Spanish dog. If you pick up a stone, what does a Spanish dog do? He runs away because he thinks you are going to throw it at him. A French dog comes and wags his tail because he thinks you are going to throw it for him. It’s a question of what you are used to. For the Dutch, a demonstration was a novelty. They used to call it generations. What did they call them in the twenties? The lost generation?
--That was Gertrude Stein’s car mechanic, I said, glad to be of help. He didn’t have her car ready on time and his boss said, “Vous êtes tous une géneration perdue.”
--It sounds like something a French boss would say, said Max. But I like the image of waves better. A wave begins and rises and is already followed by another wave before it has run itself out. Since I started in politics, there have been four quite different waves. Would you like to hear about them?
...To be continued
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