Ode to Sjuwke Kunst | There is the visible city, and there is the invisible city

Dear Sjuwke, dear grandmother,

I may have been the last person to see you in the flesh. It was on a Sunday afternoon. You had come a long way. You were sleeping on your side. You didn't realize I was there. I hardly realized you were there either. I whispered hello and I whispered goodbye.

That was the end of your years in the Vondelstede, where on the one hand you felt at ease because you could see the swaying trees of the Vondel Park and you sometimes imagined that you were “escaping” to the Veerhuis, home, but where on the other hand you also felt like a stranger among all those old people, who contentedly spooned their mole-sweet porridge and stared out dully - they were already giving in. In your room the radio hummed, classical music, very occasionally a gamelan CD. There were figurines you had carved, mostly fish, and folders full of sketches you had once made, when your eyes still worked.

Once upon a time, for me, you were mostly part of the indestructible concept pairs of Grandpa & Grandma and Geurt & Sjuwke. In these you were the subordinate element. Grandpa came before grandma, Geurt came before Sjuwke. Only after his death - he had a heart attack in his beloved society Arti, one of the many Amsterdam buildings he saved from demolition - did you break away from him. I had mistakenly assumed that you would not know what to do without him, as if you were bobbing on the high seas without a North Star. But you peeked. You used more Indonesian words than before (such as 'oeroesen', which means something like 'scurry around and clean up in the meantime') and turned out to be funnier, more naughty and more roguish than I had thought possible, and eventually you grew into a lady who kept her sunglasses on during the collective Vondelstede meal and called her neighbors 'old berries'. 

When I think back to who you were when Geurt was alive, I can barely access memorable images. We once swam in a cold stream in the Ardèche, I was afraid of snakes, you thought that was nonsense. But what I see most of all: you, in his shadow. You sat next to him. Next to him at the table in your dining room in the Veerhuis, next to him when he was fêted by some alderman who admitted that all those years ago, when it became fashionable to demolish monumental buildings and build new ones in their place, the city council had really been wrong; Geurt Brinkgreve had been right. He liked hearing that, and people liked telling him that, now that the war for the inner city had subsided and we had all turned out to be victors.

According to my mother, your daughter, he had been an occupied father, someone who, in her words, seemed to care more about buildings than people. You kept the family going - which consisted of four children you had delivered at a brisk, post-war pace - while he threw himself fervently into meetings and correspondences. I had wanted to ask him once, why he felt it was so important that the old Amsterdam stay the old Amsterdam, why that struggle seemed so existential. But he died when I was twenty-five. I didn't use the word “existential” back then.

But there is something else I would like to ask him: whether he didn't find it difficult that by devoting his life to his holy mission, he left you no choice but to be secondary. You had to support him and raise those four children, and with no money, you sewed their clothes, you even sewed my mother's wedding dress. Saving the inner city was not a lucrative business. Hardly any money was coming in. All right, there were the donations from lazy people who thought he was doing such important work, but it wasn't much. 

There is a picture of you, from before the struggle, from before the children. You were a young artist, on your way to a rich and intuitive life. You were sitting on a chair set down on a table so you could better see what you were drawing. A dangerous constellation; if the chair legs slid back slightly you would fall backwards mercilessly hard. You were capable of strange, dangerous choices. Then you fell in love with that passionate, stubborn, loyal man who had lost his brother in the war, the resistance hero, shot in the back by the Kraut. Your life's course took another turn, leading to children, to grandchildren, to me. Had you turned away from him and, to speak in today's parlance, “chosen for yourself,” I would not be here now, and I could not have written you this letter. The reason I always get wistful when I see that picture of you is not that I know you made the wrong choice, but because I suspect it was not entirely your choice.

Near the Waag is a bridge. A small bridge, across which not crazy many people walk. The Geurt Brinkgreve Bridge. I still remember the grand opening, how proud the family was. I, too, was proud. Today that pride is split - it is still there, but it also leads to inner resistance, to sulking. Where is your bridge? Without you, he wouldn't have lasted his crusade for another month. If you walk through the city, every now and then you come across signs saying “Mr. so-and-so laid the foundation stone here. Then I feel the same bitter feeling coming up in me: and who laid the second stone? Does that stone sometimes carry less weight? Has that stone been less necessary?

There is the visible city, and there is the invisible city. There are the visible lives, and there are the invisible lives. The former do not exist without the latter. Sometimes the most beautiful, honorable way to dwell on what we see is to delve into what we do not see. People loom in the fog, people you don't perceive until you learn to look through your eyelashes. I don't have to tell you this. You drew those people before I saw them.

Love,

Your grandson Daan