The Garden of Unreality – 1. The Promise

Introduction

In the late nineteenth century the city of Amsterdam jumped the bounds of its age-old ramparts and began to encroach the surrounding countryside.
The wealthy denizens of the inner city sought their escape from the daily bustle and reeking canals and built their villas along the southern edge of William’s Park, a newly laid out greening for strolling and horse riding, later to become the Vondelpark.
Within the span of three decades an area of roughly a square mile crisscrossed with ditches and patched with old industries, lumber yards, windmills and vegetable gardens, was transformed into a spacious square with two musea¹ and a concert hall² and a grid of adjacent streets, which was bound to grow into a district called ‘Amsterdam South’.

In one of the earliest streets, Palestrina³ Street⁴, just behind the concert hall, I lived for several decades. Around the year 2000 it was a century old and one of my neighbours decided it deserved a memorial book, which was published in 2004.
I ran a street blog in those days and in the wake of the book the editor and I kept up a lively exchange of posts on the inhabitants of what seems to be the last house of our little street but, actually, is part of the sidewall of a house around the corner.
Our neighbours enjoyed our ‘investigations’ knowing them full well for wholly imaginary.

In the course of our correspondence I invented a find of a bundle of scruffy papers in the trash in front of this spurious dwelling. Peeling them apart I happened on a tale of an enigmatic disappearance of two children.

Part I – The Promise

We were staying with our aunt in Amsterdam. We were seven and nine then, my little sister and I. One day, aunt had to do some shopping and she told us:
“Li’l brother, li’l sister, come and listen to me. Aunt has to go out this afternoon to fit a new dress. There’ll be a gala, shortly, and she’s nothing apt to wear. You two must stay home, but promise aunt one thing: you shall not leave the house or you may go astray and never be able to find your way back again.”
We sincerely promised her to remain inside and after serving us tea and cookies aunt kissed us both and left, locking the frontdoor on the outside.

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¹ The National Gallery (1876-1885), in Dutch, ‘Het Rijksmuseum’, and
the Municipal Museum (1891–1895), in Dutch, ‘het Stedelijk Museum’, its new wing a.k.a. ‘the Tub’ (2012).
² The Concert Building (1883–1888), in Dutch, ‘Het Concertgebouw’.
³ Named after the Renaissance composer Giovanni Pierluigi (c. 1525–1594) from Palestrina, Italy, the ancient Praeneste.
⁴ The last house on Palestrina Street as seen with Google Street View.

Walking home

When I was in my early twenties I worked at a private bank on one of Amsterdam’s famous ‘grachten’ (17th century canals). In the morning I took a streetcar to go to work, but in the afternoon or early evening I used to walk back home, which took the better part of an hour.
That time was well spent, on which I'll dwell shortly.

Passing by the Spiegelgracht (Mirror Canal) I headed for the Rijksmuseum (National Museum),

went through the underpass,

which opens unto Museum Square

that stretches to the southwest as far as the Concertgebouw (Concert Hall).

There I took the street beside it - on the left in the photo -

to continue to where I then lived. Often enough, though, I went by different routes, through the Vondelpark, e.g.,

but those were detours that took slightly longer.

Of course, many sights then were different. The underpass of the Rijksmuseum sported no inside glass panes, but solid brick walls; Museum Square was a broad thoroughfare called, mockingly, ‘the shortest motorway in the Netherlands’ (photo 1992).

No fountain on the grounds, no extension of the Van Gogh Museum in its center,

and no ridiculous ‘bathtub’ eyesore to hide the historic 'Stedelijk' (Municipal Museum) from view.
Read 'The New York Times' art critic, Michael Kimmelman's Dec. 2012 article, Why is this Museum shaped like a tub? Priceless.

Instead, the Stedelijk had a secluded garden, through which I liked to stroll in passing,

with a public sandbox,

a fountain where some mad contraption of Jean Tinguely spurted jets of water into the pool in front of the restaurant terrace and there was this sculpture, 'Open Ended', by Richard Serra

standing in the center of the garden - as you can spot in the aerial photo. When you step inside the structure and look upward, you’ll see a perfect triangle of sky. It really is huge, but now, in its new location - scroll back up to the picture of the Van Gogh Museum - optically dwarfed by the monstrous ‘bathtub’.
On a side note, make a mental effort to flip the triangle to the front of the picture. The graphic impression is even more astounding.

Walking home from the office I took advantage of this spare hour to rehearse the conjugations of classical Greek verbs. Not exactly for fun, though under conditions as splendid any mental activity would have passed for a pastime, but in the course of my taking evening classes to finish grammar school.
Being familiar with Latin and Greek, plain English, to me, was still a very foreign language. It’s hard to imagine, these days, but in my youth French was the language of preference. It was taught on a voluntary basis from the fourth grade of elementary school, but English? Never.

When I was in evening class I read ‘In de Ban van de Ring’ (Lord of the Rings) in Dutch and was enchanted by it. Later, when I stumbled upon a copy of ‘The Hobbit’ in an international bookshop, I decided to take the plunge and read it in English. That must have been my first dip into English literature in the original. Soon I found a copy of Tennyson’s collected poems in a secondhand bookstall in the ‘Oudemanhuispoort’ on the University’s premises.

From it I retained a lifelong dedication to ‘The Voyage of Maeldune’ - which I translated into Dutch in lyrical prose, published as a free iBook, recently - and to ‘The Lady of Shalott’, which I learned by heart, all one hundred and seventy one lines of it. Need I tell you I rehearsed its nineteen stanzas many times while walking home from the office?

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the fields the road runs by
      To many-tower’d Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
      The island of Shalott.

The full poem can be read here.