In Europe

watch
Mezzo
, TV5 and
Arte
, they read
Le Soir
and discuss French politics and literature. They live the same lives, eat the same bread, but their world of thought is attached to a completely different cultural system.
    Every language stands for a world of its own; those worlds shift and groan, and merge only with the greatest of difficulty. The Roodsestraat in Nethen is something Eurocrats prefer not to think about.

Chapter FIFTY-TWO
Amsterdam
    ‘ ALL THOSE PROUD WOMEN ON THEIR BICYCLES.’ ‘THE ORDERLINESS , with that thin layer of anarchism.’ ‘Not a single paving stone out of place.’ ‘The variety, the languages.’ ‘They are all so tall, especially the young people!’ ‘Those enormous, prosperous bodies one sees everywhere.’ ‘And their teeth, their teeth, so lovely and strong!’
    In the Hotel Astoria in Budapest, György Konrád had mused endlessly about faraway Amsterdam and everything that strikes a foreigner about it. He had just written an ode to that city, and he read part of it to me out loud. His Hungarian eyes saw bicycling female derrières, husky blonde mothers and children, ‘sturdy and compact, like mature cheeses’. They saw a city that stood out by virtue of its ability to be ‘an ant by day, a cricket by night’. And they saw, above all, a calm, uninhibited people. ‘The concept of the “national curse” is unknown to them. In front of them the sea, behind them dubious Europe. Germans? Russians? In whom ought they to have confidence, except in themselves?’
    Now, for the moment, I am back in my own town. I am at the cheese shop, and I hear one of Konrád's pretty girls beside me saying: ‘I want to try something wild with pastrami and pine nuts.’ Nowhere else do you see so many people eating out of rubbish bins as you do in Amsterdam, which has to do not only with the uninhibited nature of Dutch junkies, but also with the outstanding quality of Dutch rubbish.
    I read in the daily
De Volkskrant
that, in 1999, fifty-three per cent of all Dutch fifteen-year-olds have a television in their own room, twenty-four per cent have their own computer, thirteen per cent have a mobile phone, five per cent own a weapon. The newspaper runs a special feature about the ‘hippest couple’ in Holland, a computer artist and his girlfriend. Theyspend most of their time on Ibiza. He describes his life as ‘the total integration of life, events, art and parties’. She says: ‘For me, just being liberating comes first, no matter what I'm doing.’ An amazing country, the Netherlands, especially when you have been anywhere else in Europe for a while.
    In September 1965, as an eighteen-year-old student, I moved from the provinces to wild and woolly Amsterdam. The canals lay dreamily in the autumn sunlight, thousands of new experiences awaited, I was free and happy, and everything was possible. With a small group of friends, I explored this new world. We went to strange and unfamiliar cafés, bought our first foreign newspapers, met up at the municipal museum, watched the newest French films with mouths agape.
    We also noticed that something unusual was going on in the city. Cigarette advertisements were everywhere being defaced with slogans like ‘
Gnot!
’ and ‘
Hack, hack!
’ A deathly silence settled over the student cafés when images of the war in Vietnam appeared on TV. There was a herb going around, marijuana, that produced the strangest visions. In the square at the Spui, around the statue of the street urchin called the
Lieverdje
– a gift to the city from the Hunter tobacco company in 1961 – so-called Provos were holding demonstrations.
    In my attic I still have a few cardboard boxes full of newspapers and pamphlets from those astonishing years. I wriggle them out from beneath layers of dust and, sneezing as I go, begin to leaf through them. It is as though I am holding newspapers from 1910 or 1938, or some other long-gone era.
    I pick up the narrow, rectangular magazine
Provo
, compiled by the anarchistic student Roel van Duijn, the working-class boy Rob Stolk from Zaandam and a group of writers and theatrical artists; a golden combination in hindsight. ‘
Provo
is aware that it will, in the long run, be the loser,’ they wrote at the start, and they bravely pasted one little red exploding cap into every copy of the first edition.
    They also produced
Hitweek
, the ‘Professional journal for teenagers, 38 cents.'The circulation was, for those days, enormous: somewhere