The Easy Chain Page 2

  By his first December in Amsterdam, Lincoln had learned to skate, and it quickly became his soul’s sparkler. As many as four afternoons a week, he would make his way to a cavernous rink in a converted municipal-pool building a quick step from the Museumplein, where he would lace up his ankle-immobilizing Bally Patiners and start to oval, usually to piped-in Lehar waltzes. He would continue until eighteen minutes before his family’s 6:30 dinner, milking every moment, adoring the overdriving, hellbent forward mobility that came from reducing his resistance to one narrowest line of contact. And the side-benefits!: the whistling air chilling the middle of his lips, the intense timelessness, the finespray of snow as he rounded turns or changed gears …

  But his greatest fun in Holland, he said, was the Elfstedentocht, a midwinter ice-skating marathon that ran for over 200 kilometers up north in Friesland. Starting in Leeuwarden, the course cut through frozen canals and rivers and lakes, past hundreds of thousands of vapor-seeping spectators in Sneek and Stavoren and Hindeloopen and Dokkum and other Friesian villages, before looping back to Leeuwarden. It was, he said, stunning fun: Lincoln and his folks, bundled in down and woolen hats and unending grins, would pack into their car and runabout from town to town, catching blurry glimpses. Maybe 17,000 bladers would slit by, every one skittering into checkpoints to have passcards stamped – in each town! And by hand! And along the way: brass bands, and thousand-voiced singalongs, and frostbite doctors ready to treat fingers – and worse – tested by the unrelenting twenty below …

  The strongest skaters clocked in at around seven or eight hours, but the event didn’t offer much of a prize – beyond finding your correct shoes among the mountain of 34,000 at finish – and many people did it just to do it, not in competition. It had always been like that: the race had its origins, Lincoln learned, in a centuries-old local tradition of the journey. It began to be codified in the 1890s, and the first official Elfstedentocht was run in 1909, in a contest won by the daughter of the country’s largest manufacturer of skates. Thrillingly, the race took place during the first two Februaries that Lincoln spent in the Netherlands – hail van Benthem, victor eternal! And then it stopped. The race disappeared. The reward of the winter was gone. There were no trips up north. The rumble car stayed in its slot. The regional council said the ice wasn’t thick enough. Someone had determined that, for safety reasons, the course had to maintain a minimum thickness of fifteen cm throughout, and for year after year it just didn’t. Some folks tried filling the holes in the ice, others even performed what they called ice transplants. And while a regionful of people waited week after week for good news, winter after winter, Lincoln worked on his own skating at an indoor rink in Amsterdam.

  —Lincoln says the Dutch are not a people who complain.

  —Y’know, I mean, Lincoln – he says he likes, he really appreciates something about the Dutch – y’know he speaks freely about this stuff, about his background, it’s like nostalgic, it’s like he’s living it all over again, for the first time – and one thing he says he likes is Dutch directness, this like no-beating-around-the-mulberry-bush quality they have. Like he says when he wanted to ask a girl out, like when he’d meet someone on a grocery line or at a bar or something, and he’d ask her out, he’d smooth up with the usual gloop about a drink or a record or a movie, he’d like sweat and gulp and work up the nerve to launch the question, and the girl’d just go:

  “No.”

  And that’s it! He says they’d tell you off just like that! One fucking – or non-fucking – word! No nicety sauce about Well I’d like to but or Thanks for asking but or I got a boyfriend, just straight-out Take a Walk. And Lincoln, I mean, he says he loved that. He says in Holland he preferred the rejections to the acceptances.

  —He had friends in Amsterdam, sure he did. His best buddy, he says, was a kid named Klaas, who lived around the corner – around the canal-corner – with his folks. Klaas had tow-hair and liked to punch, but he spoke English – his father did international sales – and they spent most of their time playing football or looking at Klaas’s magazines about American hot-rods – Klaas loved American hot-rods. He had posters all up and down his bedroom walls.

  —Lincoln and Klaas occasionally went to concerts at the bandshell in Vondelpark on Sunday afternoons, but one day Klaas showed up with a pair of tickets to a football game: we’re talking Dutch football here, you know: soccer. The tickets had come from a friend of Klaas’s father, Lincoln said, but that Sunday neither the Klaas-friend nor the Klaas-friend’s father could go. So Klaas hiked Lincoln, they’re about 13 or 14 now, out to De Meer stadium, and they got pretty good seats: one-third of the way up, about mid-field. It was a blustery day, it’s November, and crowded, and the game was pretty intense: Feyenoord, a team from Rotterdam, was playing Ajax, the crew from Amsterdam Oost. Well, you can imagine: cheers and razzes and jump-ups and beer spills all over the place.

  —So Lincoln’s sitting there watching the game, he said, chomping on some crunchy-fried-cheese-cylinder-thing he’d copped from the local purveyor of crunchy-fried-cheese-cylinder-things – apparently there’s a lot of them there in Holland – and people are getting into the game, hollering and such, and talking and all jumping around, and then, just into the second half, Lincoln notices something he hadn’t noticed before: that he’s like hissing when one team’s got the ball—

  —And he realized, he said, that he’d been doing it since about halfway through the first period. When Ajax had possession, he would hiss at them. And then, he realized, he wasn’t the only one, but that practically everybody in the stands would start to give off a gassy hiss the second Ajax got the ball. Well, it was funny as hell, everybody just doing this thing quickly, automatically, every time the players were running one way. It became a kind of stadium-wide joke, a loosening goof, and he looked forward to it coming round again. And it did, ev-er-y time—

  —Finally, a few minutes into the second period, he said, during a field-englobing hiss that kept up steam during a 60-meter rush, Lincoln hit the limits of his lung capacity. So he dropped out and, as Klaas was leaning into his escaping sound, Lincoln poked him in the shoulder, through blue parka. Klaas turned, and smiled, and Lincoln finally asked him what the hell was going on—

  —And Klaas, after finishing the 60-meter hiss, and then a last few chews of a Three Musketeers, he leaned over and told Lincoln that the Ajax team was owned by a Jew. Then Klaas smiled. Well, of course, Lincoln thought about this, then asked what that had to do with anything …

  Klaas smiled again. Little souvenir of Buchenwald, he said …

  Lincoln looked at him all scrunched …

  Familiar sound there, man …

  And Klaas smiled again, Lincoln said, and turned back to the game. The score was close.

  —So this like now wo. Lincoln winced, he said, and turned away from the action. And it was like What and What could and How could and How did and What kind of people—

  —And he wondered: Could this be part of Dutch directness … ? Part of what he liked about them … ? Lincoln was not Jewish – C of E all the way – but what the…? It seemed to come so easily to them, he said – he spoke about this freely – they did it so casually, without a single backhiss of objection. In their Dutch-direct way, they made this monstrousness seem altogether natural …

  So Lincoln would be direct as well. He turned to Klaas. Hey: how can they do that … ? Klaas: Come on. It’s just fun. Lincoln stared at him. Klaas: Come on, man. I mean, what do you want? It’s what they think. And it’s the only time they get to let it out – to do what they want to, what they really mean …

  Well, it was an answer, and a direct one. But Lincoln was peeved. He had asked about they.

  —When Lincoln finally turned back to the field, it was an entirely different game. Same players, same goals, different game. So when Ajax next acquired possession, and the release of sibilance followed – each time, as if a switch had flicked – Lincoln started hissing as well. But now, he said, he was
using his breath against the hissers. He was hissing them, and using their hiss for cover.

  —He did this for a while, he said, as strongly as he could, even lifting from his chair as he added thoracic passion to his protest. And he wondered if anyone understood that now they were the targets of the foul sound—

  —But soon he stopped. He made himself stop, he said, because no one was turning around, no one had realized that they were now the object of violence. And eventually he understood that all he was doing was adding volume to the general hiss itself.

  —As for the rest of the game … Well, Lincoln said, the last thirty minutes were longer than the others.

  —The problem then became, Lincoln said, how to get home. The stadium was far from the Centrum, and Klaas had the bicycle, and Lincoln did not want to get on that thing with him. Revolted, he said, repelled by the guy. But darkness was falling, and, as Lincoln and Klaas walked across the parking lot to the perimeter fence where the bike had been chained, Lincoln raked the crowd to find a familiar face – from school, from anywhere – that might give him a ride. Or for someone whose parents might be there with a car …

  But there was no one. Among all the thousands. And it was getting cold. And it was just too long to walk. He’d never be back before Sunday supper, a thing for his father …

  Besides, he said, he didn’t want to speak to any of them in his, in their, broken Dutch …

  He got on the bike. He was dropped at home. He didn’t say a word on the way back, not a thing about a thing …

  When he got home, and went inside his room, he took off one canvas shoe, the right, and kicked, sharply, twice, the sharp corner of the wooden base of his Captain’s bed. He sat down and, while the ball of his foot and two middle toes throbbed and screamed, he took off his coat, then took off the other shoe. Then he pulled his left foot back and—

  —Lincoln continued to see Klaas in their shared neighborhood, but after he did not return a second of Klaas’ phone calls, things went slack. Klaas never spent himself to ask the question, Lincoln knew gratitude for not having to provide the reply. He took to avoiding Klaas’ street, and just nodded his head when the strategy met its inevitable shortcomings …

  So did things continue between them until Lincoln left for university, in Groningen, in the gold-gray north of the country. By then, Lincoln wanted a bit of distance from Amsterdam, and Groningen’s English-language Embry College, which had an affiliation with Reed in Oregon, seemed both far enough and close. He had also begun to read by then, coming to view books as passports: to Foucault, for his historicist’s fury for reducing action to reaction; to Schenkel, for his need for the proximity of paradise. He also sampled some American work. Lincoln said that, at college, he wanted to study Personal Negative Epistemology – his own ignorance. He was yet to decide upon a major.

  —But after one year in school and three weeks of a second, Lincoln was back in Amsterdam. Just up and quit, he said. Didn’t even hang long enough to see about refunds. Made his folks do that. Neither of which they liked. And you know like one time he said it had to do with a chick, and like other times it had to do with, like, some teacher or some such who got up his craw. Wasn’t too clear. But he wanted to go back.

  —He returned to a fine moment for the household, and for his parents, he said. Shell continued to show its appreciation for Robinson’s gifts, with regular raises and pairs of tickets to the Carré Theater for shows and spectacles. When a promotion to R&D II that Robinson had, in his unobserved moments, thought he might warrant did not materialize, well, the man was blessed with enough native jolliness to keep things in perspective. All his other rewards were surely enough. And Lincoln’s mother had, for the first time, accepted an offer of employment. Decidedly, there was no economic necessity; one day at breakfast, while sitting down to her redfruit muesli and coffee, she said that she’d like to spend a few days per week being more productive. She did not feel that she was contributing all that she might. In short order, she took a position at the Krasnapolsky Hotel, as Manager of Client Relations. She enjoyed having to put on, and purchase, her fine dresses, and it was an easy walk from home; occasionally, the high responsibilities of the position entailed overtime. Indeed, for the family it was a lovely moment.

  —Back in Amsterdam, Lincoln started in on odd jobs. Cleaning this, moving that, you know the deal. Working at a place that rented out rebuilt bicycles, boatpainting, whatever came up. Went on for a few years. Lincoln said it was good for him, to see that side a little.

  —The skater, he said, had turned to treading water.

  —When Lincoln returned from Groningen, another skeet spun up. He began to spend days, then weekends, then more, in Ruigoord, an entirely squatted village half-hour by thumb, twenty minutes by bus 82 from Amsterdam. Without much prodding, the original invocation of Ruigoord – its woodframe homes and steepled church, shaded tree-lanes and summertime hammocks – had emerged in the windy midst of a century-old polder; by the 1950s, it had grown into a community of 600 souls. But starting in the expansionist ’60s, the village faced termination by the Amsterdam port authority. The world’s largest port, Rotterdam, was fifteen kilometers away, but Amsterdam wanted a port of its own and so floated the idea of flooding Ruigoord to get it. First to flow in was outrage and disputation, and three decades later the idea was corked; but in the meantime new wide highways shoved the town like squeegees, and adjacent lands turned to sand. During the Thirty Years’ Standoff, the inevitable happened: residents decamped, houses were hacked down, limbo was loosed. Eventually, in 1973, Ruigoord was abandoned by the few remaining holdouts and taken over by its true natives. The old guard, then numbering seventy, stood in witness as the last Ruigoord priest handed the church keys to two Amsterdam artisans, Hellinga and Plomp, and said Here. And here it was to be …

  Soon enough, every undestroyed house in Ruigoord was occupied by squatters, many seeking space for artmaking, many savoring such space plus room for a gallery up front. Now just a tiny township – a steeple and a streetway or two and outlying fields and not much more – Ruigoord quietly made its way, gaining endearment as the last unadministered place in all Holland. One afternoon, a truck-café unfolded in a field and soon counted Lincoln as a customer. Whenever he could get to Ruigoord he would. With no other purpose, he said, than to see the scragglies put out their hand-lettered signs, and to help out, when called, which always came soon, with hauling and welding. Almost every evening he sought it, someone would provide a mattress, a couch, a bedroll, or a closed door …

  When not in Ruigoord, Lincoln remained in Ruigoord in Amsterdam. He took an interest in squat politics, and handwashed dishes at De Peper, a squat restaurant that sold vegan meals for peanuts – or less, if you didn’t have the shells. He spent frequent evenings at the Bimhuis on Oude Schans, listening to improvisationists like Willem Breuker and Guus Janssen and Piep Knor, and, once, imported from Amherst in America, Archie Shepp – though, above all, he adored Han Bennink, the hooting stomper-drummer who made the world his playpen, and who, for Lincoln, was proof irrefutable that life is worthy, life is joy. And at home, hour upon hour, Lincoln listened to the first, jaunty-jangly tracks of Ornette’s The Art of the Improvisers and Mingus’ prescient, capacious Lock ’Em Up …

  For guilders, he spent two seasons working at a coffeeshop called Global Chillage, selling space cakes and pre-rolleds of White Widow and Silver Haze, ninety percent of which went, in summertime, to twenty-year-old Spanish and Italian tourists. But Lincoln was never part of the drugworld, he said; of course he had taken a few tastes, inescapable in Amsterdam, but now no thank you. Even so, after about fifteen minutes in the coffeeshop, the drift of commerce was so dense that a gentle liftoff became unavoidable …

  Most of all, Lincoln took an interest in the Provos, the loose group of unshackled spirits, now downsized by history, who, with their humored insurrections, foreran the ’60s student movements of Paris, Prague, Columbia, Berkeley, everywhere. Growing from the street perfo
rmances – the original Happenings – of Robert Jasper Grootveld and from the pamphleteering of Roel van Duyn and Rob Stolk, the Provos tweaked and piqued and chided, calling for cars to get out of Amsterdam and Americans to get out of Indochina. They staged mass-rally anti-tobacco cough-alongs and ran for local office under the slogan Vote Provo for Better Weather. Dipping their darts in glee, this was a bunch that saw refusal as affirmation:

  “Provo’s choice is between desperate resistance or apathetic perishing,” wrote van Duyn. “Provo realizes it will lose before long, but it can not let this last chance slip away. Lonely Europe arm yourself!”

  The Provos, in short, had opposition in them, and Lincoln felt it powerfully. He collected some of the movement’s original leaflets and magazines, and visited sites in the Spui and in Dam Square where the action had taken place. He even obtained an interview with Grootveld, who lit like a klieg when asked about those times, and barely dimmed when he spoke of his current project, recycling refuse into landscape art …

  These were all situations in which Lincoln’s lack of workable Dutch did not hinder. But in other ways it did. The gap could be a social hurdle, he said, and left him without substantial friends, either in number or in solidity. But he did not want to exist other than in English. That was his decision.

  —Then came Aelia. And, you know, hoo boy …

  She was Moroccan, you know, and wore a scarf over her hair, which was black-black and couldn’t resist blading into day. And she was rebellious and had this giggle that, like, Lincoln said, was sly. Like she knew …