Each day is full of tasty, expensive food. We buy a fried maize pastry and a crispy pocket full of veggies at the Indonesian place beneath Vin’s apartment, where we later return for tempeh and vegetables with boiled eggs in spicy over a box of hot white rice. One lazy night we order pizzas and eat them with creamy garlic sauce. We stop at a Surinamese shop where Vin gets a sandwich and I buy a savory donut type thing. We eat them sitting beside a canal, watching the black ducks dive and resurface. Another evening Vin brings home tasty red curry with tofu and vegetables, and he takes me to an “American” bakery for red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and blueberry muffins. One morning he whips up what he calls a “poor Vietnamese meal,” with boiled eggs and rice and a tasty garlic sauce. We eat it with tangy kim chee. We have Malaysian tea in little metal mugs—it’s foamy and delicious, almost like Chai—and then eat fried rice heaped with chilli sauce.
We buy Asian pears and green apples to munch on with salt and chilli pepper. One night Vin invites a friend over and wraps up shrimp and tofu with noodles and zesty cilantro in translucent rice paper. We eat the summer rolls with a dark sweet and salty sauce and a little hot sauce, too. He takes me to get French fries with Amsterdam’s famous joppy sauce; a sweet, tangy, yellow sauce that reminds me of sweet mustard. On several occasions we stop into a shop for Turkish pizza—a thin pizza, with spinach and feta, in my case, wrapped up with lettuce and vegetables and condiments. It’s heavenly. We follow it with sticky baklava. Another night we buy packets of space cake from a coffeeshop and eat it covered in whipped cream. Once it kicks in, we munch on cold cream puffs and toffee walnut spiced cake. We drink cans of Heineken beer with a side of coke and chat with Vin’s friend Robin about childhood, drugs, moderation, parenting, the future, education systems. We talk about how we’d make new people, differently. It feels important.
On a particularly gray day we stroll to a flea market. It’s cold out and I look half-heartedly for a hat to buy, but nothing seems suitable. Instead I linger on ornate little tins, a beautiful tree tapestry, an adorable summer dress, knitted hand warmers… Across the street is a Hell’s Angels shop and a man and woman are filming it with a big camera on a tripod as a burly old man with long hair rides up. Vin says he’s a leader within the European Hell’s Angels, which in and of itself sounds contradictory and kind of hilarious to me.
I find Adam in the museum quarter, and we take him to New Times, and then visit the Anne Frank house, climbing up narrow stairs to peer at the mostly unfurnished rooms, the grainy portraits, the pages she’d written and corrected in her girlish hand. She’d pasted up photos and pages from magazines on the walls, collages to make the hideout more cheerful. I find her collages somehow haunting. I collage. Later we watch videos, Anne’s childhood friends with quaking German voices and loose skin and distant nightmarish memories. We see the bony bodies piled up. Outside, the moon is full and the black canals glimmer with orange and yellow lights. The windows in Amsterdam are always open.
That night we stick little pieces of paper with tiny dancing bears on our tongues. The crooked room stretches out and in, shrinking on one side and sloping down the other. Adam paces, scribbling notes all across a to-do list. It’s all about perspective, he keeps saying. Maybe I’m just on drugs, he comments, but maybe in the morning I’ll wake up and be the next Kerouac. We watch polar bears running and sliding through the snow, shimmering white and majestic. We watch schools of fish flicker and dart through dark waters in big baffling choreographies. We laugh at each other’s gaping faces. As the sun rises, smoke gathers in a long beam of sunlight streaming through the window. It looks like a beautiful dragon against the blood red curtains. I peer out the windows and watch as the city shudders and stretches. The last prostitutes finally close their red curtains.
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