Amsterdam

Sitting onachair in a wheatfield,watching the crows fly, Vincent van Gogh shothimself in the chest. He didn’t die straight away, but staggered home to collapse in his bed, where he died a two days later. His brother, Theo, to whom he had just written an unsent letter noting that he felt “in a mood of almost too much calmness,” was there. His last words, spoken to Theo, were, “the sadness will last forever.”

Standing in the luminous Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, the sadness is visceral. Wheatfield with Crows, one of his last works (some call it a suicide note on canvass), is a dark, thick painting of deadly skies swollen black with brooding crows. Nearby is the same view of the same field, called Wheatfield Under Thunderclouds – but the clouds are white, the sky blue, and the crows have yet to come.

A trip to this museum is a must on any stop in the capital of the Netherlands. Van Goghs, with their 3D brushstrokes, are uncanny creations that live only in the flesh – posters of his work are akin to reading Beethovan’s Fifth.

Amsterdam is a curious city, full of canals and empty of motor vehicles, creating a calm, pleasant atmosphere. Or maybe that’s just the marijuana. Camus once compared its concentric canals to the inner circles of Hell, but then, he was French, and maybe a bit jealous.

A visit to this flat land is a disjointed thing, even if you steer clear of the legendary brown cafes, where pot is sort of legal. In the day, you may find yourself in Anne Frank House, where the diarist spent her last years before betrayal and Bergen-Belson. The house itself is eerily empty, as though freshly looted by Nazis. Pictures on the wall show what it looked like when Frank and her family hid there for two years.

Outside, the tourists breeze past on canal boats. Floating low along the streets, cameras snap the tulip-laden gables and the pulleys hanging of each building. Houses in Amsterdam are tall and skinny. Going up stairs often feels like climbing a ladder. Imagine trying to push a piano and your bed up them as you move in. The Dutch did imagine it, and opted to go with the pulleys and big windows, so when the Dutch move, everything goes up and in.

When the sun goes down, the red lights go on.

The Red Light District, an area of busy pedestrian streets, contains every sexual thing that one human (or more) can do to another human (or more), as well as most of the things you can do that involve animals, plastics, rubber and leather. Shop windows put the goods upfront for all to see.

This includes women, sitting, pouting and purring in windows, wearing little more than your imagination. Veteran workers, women in the forties, take a smoke break together, chatting, wearing unseeable unmentionables.

The Netherlands is also home to one million Muslims, out of a land of 16 million. The Muslim community tends to be conservative and immigrant, the rest of the population, not so much.

This grinds across the country like tectonic plates, and it erupted in 2004, with another Van Gogh, Theo Van Gogh, a decendent of the painter and a controversial film maker, was shot dead he bicycled to work one November morning. His killer, a Dutch citizen and Muslim extremist, then nearly decapitated his body and used a knife to stick a letter attacking the West into his chest.

And the sadness will last forver.

First published in the Halifax Daily News August 18 2007