When we reported what had happened, the bike-rental manager appeared to be less affected than I thought he would be.
Noelle translated for me while he went for the papers for us to sign. “He said this happens more than you would think. It’s usually cars that go in the canal. At least once a week. Someone forgets to set the parking brake, or they come home drunk. With no railing what can you do? Into the canal you go.”
I was surprised to hear that cars plunged into the canal. Then I found out how much we would have to pay for our accident, and I was bummed. Noelle insisted we split the fee.
“It was no one’s fault. They just fell in together. If anything, it was my fault because I should have thought to have you move your bike closer to mine by the road rather than for me to move mine over and rest it on yours.”
All told, it took us about two and a half hours to get on with our day. Instead of renting any more bikes, we opted for tram passes and lots of walking.
First stop was still the Van Gogh Museum. The modern building looked like a big gray box. We had to wait in line to get in, and when we did, the lines were long as we wound through a display of the progression of the artist’s work.
I spent the most time examining one of his famous sunflower paintings. In some places on the canvas, the paint was so thick it peaked like crests of orange and yellow waves. In other places, no paint had been applied at all, and the fine, woven texture of the canvas showed through.
His work showed his uniquely vibrant use of colors and the way he aggressively bent the perspective with his curved lines. The background information on his struggle with mental illness and his sense of failure really got to me. This brilliant artist created hundreds of works, yet only sold one piece in his lifetime.
When we reached the portion of the exhibit that represented the era of his life when he mutilated and cut off part of his earlobe, I felt deeply sad for him. I wasn’t sure I wanted to finish walking through the display. I knew he took his own life. The final pieces he painted demonstrated a depth of depression and pain beyond anything I could imagine.
We left the museum quiet and somber.
Noelle suggested we find a place to eat before we attempted to appreciate the works of Rembrandt and Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum. That proved to be good advice because the expressions of art we viewed next were mind-boggling. Particularly the enormous Night Watch by Rembrandt. The painting took up an entire wall. The perfection of balance and color, contrast and light, made it feel as if the subjects could walk right off the canvas in their seventeenth-century garb.
We meandered our way into the next exhibit room, and I whispered to Noelle, “I had no idea this would be so overwhelming.”
“What is overwhelming to you?”
“The art. All these masterpieces. I’m such a novice. Everything is brand-new to me. I mean, I recognized the Van Gogh sunflowers painting, but I don’t know anything about Rembrandt or these other artists.”
“You know about Vermeer. We haven’t gone to the display of his work yet. You said you still had the postcard I sent you of his painting the Kitchen Maid. Or I guess, according to this brochure, the correct name for that painting is The Milkmaid?
“What I’m trying to say is that I don’t feel as if I’m appreciating all of this sufficiently.”
Noelle’s expression softened. “Appreciation of beauty isn’t work. All you have to do is look. Open your eyes, your mind, your heart. Take in whatever it is you see. Let the painting do all the work. Just listen with your eyes, and the painting will tell you its story.”
I nodded, ready to try that approach. It could have been that, in my insecurity over my inexperience with such great works of art, I felt the need to form an opinion or to evaluate everything I was looking at. My shoulders relaxed. I was an observer, not a critic.
We slowly moved around the next room, looking at a number of portraits Rembrandt had painted. Each canvas captured the life of a person who lived hundreds of years ago.
One painting was of a woman with a round, cherubic face and tiny brown eyes like two buttons. The more I looked into those brown eyes, the more I wondered about who she was and what had happened during her life. How did she die?
Then, when I observed the rise in her cheekbones and the soft glow of her hair, the moist touch of health on her lips, I thought the better question to ask was, how did she live?
For a fraction of a blink, it seemed as if the woman in the painting had raised her eyebrow slightly and was asking the same question of me. Not how was I going to die, but how was I going to live?
“Fully,” I answered in my head and in a whisper.
She’s so small,” I said a few moments later as we stood in front of Vermeer’s painting The Milkmaid. The entire painting, frame and all, couldn’t have been more than two feet tall and a foot and a half wide. The painting’s petiteness was even more amazing because of the detail Vermeer managed to include.
Noelle commented on how Vermeer chose for his subject a simple-looking young woman. She was carrying out the everyday task of pouring a stream of milk from a pitcher into a bowl on a cloth-covered table. A loaf of bread, complete with tiny seeds and fresh-baked cracks, sat in a detailed woven basket on the table. The milkmaid was dressed in common clothing for the sixteen hundreds, and yet the blues and yellows in her garments seemed textured and vivid, down to each fold.
“The milk looks real,” I said. “As if it’s actually being poured out of the pitcher. How did he do that?”
“Look at the broken pane in the window and the faint shadow on the nail in the wall. Such minute details. Amazing. It seems more like a photograph than a painting, doesn’t it?”
“What are those designs at the bottom of the wall at the floor line?” I asked.
“Delft tiles. That’s where he lived. The town of Delft was famous for its hand-painted ceramics, especially tiles. We should go there tomorrow. I think you would like it.”
“Look at her. She appears to be concentrating hard on her task. So determined and yet so calm. She’s at peace in the sacredness of the everyday.” I looked over at Noelle’s profile beside me. “She reminds me of you.”
“It must be the buxom figure.” Noelle stuck out her less-than-ample chest.
We hadn’t realized another observer had entered the room and was standing only a few feet behind me. Noelle saw him when she turned toward me. I heard the man shuffle behind me and realized why Noelle’s skin had taken on a sudden rosy tint.
“Moving on,” Noelle urged under her breath.
We made the rounds of the room, marveling at each demure oil painting. Vermeer completed only about thirty-five paintings in his career. Each seemed crafted with extraordinary care for the smallest details. Light and shadows were his strengths.
“What are these paintings saying to you?” Noelle asked as we neared the end of the collection on display.
“What are they saying to me? I’m not sure. They’re probably speaking Dutch.” I grinned.
“No, I think they’re speaking a universal language. Home and people and… What was it you said about the holiness of the everyday setting?”
I didn’t remember saying anything about holiness, so I shrugged and nodded for her to go on with her interpretation.
“It’s the light, isn’t it? I was admiring the light coming through the window in each of the paintings.”
We stood together, focusing on the light that poured through the unlatched window in the painting in front of us. The glass panes were thick and slightly distorted. An orderly set of lines ran through the pane, dividing the glass into individual boxes. Each pane seemed to have its own vibrancy and variation of light.
We made another slow walk around the room and noticed how often Vermeer used the same window, always on the left side, and how often the subject was presented facing the window. Even though the details in the windowpane and frame varied, the use of the light from that window was clearly a tool this artist liked.
&nbs
p; I didn’t know what that meant, but then I remembered Noelle’s words about observing and admiring instead of trying to explain or evaluate.
Before leaving the museum, we stopped at the gift shop and bought postcards and note cards. I also purchased a book on Vermeer. As I stood in line to pay, I shuffled through the postcards of the paintings we had seen and said to Noelle, “So you really don’t remember sending me this postcard ages ago?”
She shook her head. “I did remember the painting when we were standing there looking at it. And I do remember writing to you from Amsterdam, but I don’t remember which postcard I sent you.”
She reached for the postcard of The Milkmaid in my stack.
“What if I hadn’t moved to Holland? What if you and I had found a way to go to New York instead?”
“We would have had very different lives.”
Noelle nodded and handed the postcard back to me. “I like the way things turned out.”
“So do I.”
The sky had changed dramatically from when we first had entered the museum. Plenty of daylight remained, but the ever-busy clouds had been pulled taut and smoothed out into sheer sheets of white, as thin as a wedding veil. Strips of the wedding-veil clouds, cut with rounded edges and long trains, were scattered here and there over Amsterdam like remnants on the cutting-room floor of a master wedding gown designer. God was the Dutch master of the sky over Amsterdam.
My feet were tired, my head was pounding, and I was ready to wind down. Noelle talked me into taking a canal tour inside a long, low, covered boat. We bought some bottles of water, which helped with the headache.
As we peered out the windows, the guide described in three languages the different parts of the city we were cruising through.
The view in every direction was enchanting. Out the front of the tour barge, we watched the light from the late afternoon sun as it played on the water. In the same way that Vermeer had brought vibrancy to his paintings with unobtrusive dots of white at the corner of a mouth or an eye or in the sheen of a pearl earring, God’s touches of pure light on the water and through the green leaves of the trees brought life and peace.
Each footbridge we floated under was alive with bikes, pedestrians, and baby strollers. The houses on either side of the canal continued to amaze me with their steady posture, chin-up attitude, and ample windows.
“This is a little different from our earlier float down a canal,” I said, “although I have a feeling I enjoyed our first trip quite a bit more than you did.”
“I couldn’t believe how relaxed you were in the midst of all the drama.”
“I was just enjoying the ride. Even though I float through the canal of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”
“You’re getting pretty good at those paraphrases.”
“Thanks. Or should I say ‘bedankt’?”
“Listen to you! You’re practically fluent in Dutch.”
The tour guide came on the speaker and drew our attention to a bridge that led to a street as charming as all the others we had passed. He pointed out that was the direction of the red-light district.
“Someone always asks where it is,” he said. “So there it is. And before you ask about the famous coffee shops of Amsterdam, I will emphasize that marijuana and other soft drugs are not legal in the Netherlands or in Amsterdam. But they are, as we like to call it, ‘officially tolerated.’ You may order them from a menu at these coffee shops, but you cannot order coffee there. For coffee you must go to a café or a restaurant. And if you want a handgun for your own private use, you won’t find it in Amsterdam. You’ll have to go to the U.S. for that.”
I looked at Noelle, checking her expression to make sure what the guide had said wasn’t an attempt at a bad joke.
She gave a small nod, as if she knew what my eyes were asking. Soft drugs and prostitution were “officially tolerated” in Amsterdam, but guns were not.
I thought of the different views of the world and of life that had confronted me since arriving in this unassuming country only a few days ago. The Netherlands was brimming with images, experiences, and ideas that never had touched me when I was home in my safe and protected corner of Ohio. I needed time to sort everything out and to decide how I felt about this wider view of how other people in the world lived.
We disembarked from the tour boat, and Noelle asked if I would like to see more of the city. “We could stop for something to eat at a café or keep exploring.”
“It would be one of the cafés that serves real coffee,” I added in view of the comments the guide had made on the canal boat.
“Yes, of course.” She gave me an odd look, as if she wasn’t making the same connection to the café that I had.
“Does it ever bother you that the government looks the other way on drugs and the red-light district?”
She nodded, not so much in agreement, it seemed, but more in recognition of where my train of thought was headed. “One thing I learned early on living here is that Dutch people have a strong tolerance for differences. Freedom is highly valued here.”
“Individual freedom, right?”
“Yes, you could say that. The mind-set of this pragmatic culture is along the lines of ‘live and let live.’ When individual freedoms are honored, peace prevails.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about some of the things Noelle said, but I didn’t have the brain space to sort out my opinions at the moment. I didn’t know enough about how politics were set up in a country such as the Netherlands, where the country’s figurehead was a queen and the decisions were made by parliament. Politics weren’t my idea of a great topic to pursue, so I circled back to her earlier suggestion that we find a café.
“Food sounds like a very good idea.”
What happened next is the sort of thing that occurs in any country when a gathering of family or friends includes everyone who is too tired or too hungry—or both—to think clearly. Neither of us could pull off a suggestion that sounded appealing, so we opted to take the train and head to Noelle’s.
By the time we had wound our way back to the beautiful, brick central train station, it was commute time once again, and the area swarmed with business travelers. Even so, both of us were content with our decision to call it a day rather than meander around Amsterdam without a clear objective.
The only disagreeable part was that we were both very hungry. While Noelle figured out our return train tickets, I stood eying the possibilities inside an extensive vending machine. It was a cafeteria-style rotating food selector rather than the candy bar vending machines I was familiar with. Rotating cubicles with plastic dividers held sandwiches and other food selections for purchase.
“What are those?” I asked Noelle, pointing at what looked like fat, breaded fish sticks.
“Kroketten. You don’t want one.”
“I don’t?”
She made a face and shook her head. “They are typically Dutch, but, no, you don’t want one. They are sort of like eating a deep-fried sausage made of who-knows-what—horse hoofs? Not recommended. Let’s get some stroopwafels instead. Come. They have a good place for them down at the other end of the station. They’re fresh and hot.”
The lunch wagon—style grill just outside the station looked questionable to me. I couldn’t imagine that the food that came from the trailer would be better than the food offered inside the station in the industrial-looking dispenser.
Noelle ordered for us, and I didn’t even ask her what a stroopwafel was.
It turned out to be a cookie, or at least what I would call a cookie. They were warm, as promised, and delicious. Just like the hint in the name, the stroopwafel looked like two mini, flat waffles pressed together. In between the wafer-thin layers was a sweet, drippy syrup. I still could smell the brown sugary scent of the treat after we were on the train.
Jelle had dinner ready for us when we shuffled into the house. He had made pasta and salad and in his self-effacing way pointed out it wasn’t on caliber with his fish
from my first night. Noelle lit the candles, and we gathered at the table.
Reserved Jelle had no idea what to do with us once we got a bit of dinner in us and felt our spirits revive. He made the mistake of asking, “What did you do while you were in Amsterdam?”
We recounted for him silly detail by silly detail of how the two of us led the Sisterchicks in Wooden Shoes parade down the canal.
“She waved at people,” Noelle playfully tattled on me.
Jelle looked from his wife to me without changing his expression. It seemed he was trying to decide what to believe.
“It’s true. While your wife risked her life to grab the rescue rope and save us, I waved to the people. It was the most fun I’ve had in a long time.”
“There’s more,” Noelle said. “Tourists were taking her photo.”
“Our photos.” I motioned to the two of us. “We were in this together, you know.”
“Oh, trust me, I know.”
“What do you think these people are going to do with your photos?” Jelle asked.
Noelle and I looked at each other, and I said, “Show their friends, I imagine. I told Noelle this would be our fifteen seconds of fame.”
Jelle pushed back from the table, his pasta finished. “Before we have coffee, I must check on something.” He was on his way up the stairs when he called down, “I stopped at the bakery and bought stoopwafels for dessert. I thought Summer would like to try them.”
Noelle and I exchanged glances. Neither of us volunteered that we had stopped for warm ones a few hours earlier.
While Noelle started the coffee in the modern-looking espresso machine, I cleared the table. She set up the serving tray with the cream, sugar, and coffee cups and handed it to me. “Let’s have coffee in the living room. I’ll bring the ‘very special’ dessert.”
We exchanged grins. I had just placed the serving tray on the coffee table when Jelle came down the spiral stairs with an open laptop in his hands. “Noelle, come. Have a look.”