Staalsraat

STAALSTRAAT

In Amsterdam, in the old harbour district, on the corner next to a bridge over one of the narrower canals, stood a seventeenth century house. The sidewall was heavily shored up with timber beams to stop the house from collapsing before it could be restored. One day, one year? The neighbours got used to seeing a weathered wooden sign nailed to the building: 'onbewoonbaar verklaard' – declared uninhabitable - or as they said: 'onverklaarbaar bewoond' - inexplicably inhabited – and accepted it as the normal state of affairs.

The small shop in front was let on the quiet to a lady who made a living repairing nylon stockings. Nylons were expensive and laddered easily, so she had plenty of customers and sat all day behind the counter with her buzzing little machine, working her way through stacks and stacks of stockings.

The large kitchen behind the shop and the first floor were let to another young lady, a lady with long black hair who worked in a small basement bookshop not far away.

The gas ring in the kitchen worked well, the toilet in the corner did not, and had to be flushed with a bucket of water, the cellar underneath the kitchen was permanently flooded with seepage water from the canal across the road. From the kitchen a spiral staircase led to the living room upstairs and a few steps up again to the storage space above the shop. That storage space was actually a very nice room if you didn't mind ducking between the heavy oak ceiling joists: there was ample headroom between the joists.

The lady with the long black hair called the storage space 'front room' and, to help pay her rent, she decided to sublet it to a young man with a bushy red beard, a zoologist who had aspirations to become a painter.

The man loved the place and a room-warming party was in order. He invited friends: artists, some students, a nurse, and a young art teacher with wavy black hair and a short black beard. That day the art teacher was only teaching till 4 o'clock and asked his friend: ' Will you be home by then?'

'No, but that's no problem. Come whenever suits you. My landlady may not be home yet either, but then the stocking lady in the shop can let you in. Make yourself at home upstairs.'

When the art teacher walked into the shop the stocking lady told him: 'I think she might be in already, just knock on that door.'

A young lady let him in. He introduced himself: 'You don't mind me waiting here in your home?'

'Of course not. I'm Karen. My boarder won't be long, so we might as well have dinner together. Can you cook liver?'

'Sure.'

'Here, you cut the onions while I start the potatoes.'

They talked while he fried the liver and onions and she prepared the vegetables. They talked about their love of music and their interest in books and writing and about the young man's plans for an exhibition of his lithographs and other artwork in an exclusive upstairs art gallery in the city. He told her the director of the Stedelijk Muzeum, Jhr. Sandberg, had taken a personal interest in him after some of his work had been on display there, and she told him she also knew Jhr. Sandberg, and they talked about the Conservatoire, where she had studied music, and Bach's St Matthew Passion, which he loved and in which she had sung.

The boarder with his red bushy beard and short russet hair came home, but they hardly noticed him. After dinner, the room-warming guests arrived and much later went home again, and they still didn't notice much.

Late that evening both were convinced love at first sight was real, very real, in that old house in the Staalstraat, and the date was 7 April 1956.


PS
We married on 19 September the same year, and are still happily married.