Return to Amsterdam
The plane manoevred for its landing run at Schiphol airport. It suddenly came out below ragged brown tanned clouds into a rainy space, above the flat irregular grid of Amsterdam and Alec saw Bijlmer Park below him. He had forgotten until that moment that the planes came over Bijlmer whose multi-story flats were laid out in geometric shapes which, seen from above, looked just like the original planners maps. But the flats had disappeared behind, and below, before he could try to look for where Yolande lived.
His journey from the airport to Bijlmer took longer than the flight from Gatwick and by the time that he had got there the autumn sunshine was shining bright and hot. It had been hot just after Easter too. It always seemed that way here when he came. It was like returning home, returning for a holiday, returning to the life he had started so unexpectedly, not so very long before.
This time he had no other commitments, no one was with him, nothing could go wrong this time, nothing at all. For when he had come before with Graham, on a work trip in which both had intended to take some time off for a holiday, things had not gone at all the way that e had expected. For a start, although in a very well intentioned way, their work hosts had nearly messed up their holiday.
He remembered a conversation in the back of the car, on the way from Utrecht.
"As you are staying in Holland you must see the Institute for Rehabilitation in Maastricht. We had not known that you were here for a whole week." Pieter Frik said.
And Alec had replied: "Yes, that would be good." It was much to the annoyance of Graham.
"Why didn't you say that we were taking some days off?" asked Graham when Pieter had left them at the door of their hotel.
"...because they were so enthusiastic..and anyway...we ought to didn't we? I mean we owe it to our clients to get as much information as we can now we are here. From what they were saying it's clear we haven't got the full picture......Anyway, if you thought differently why didn't you say...."
Graham was not having that. It was the same old Alec and there were times when it really got on his nerves
"Come off it....we've already done one more workshop than we planned. You worked late last night preparing it instead....We already work well over our hours, and you do especially. That's why we needed this break. And now you're wanting to give up an extra two days that we could spend in Amsterdam. I was trying to think of how to say no to them when you opened your big mouth..."
"We'd still have the next two days here."
"You've got to give yourself a proper break, not just a weekend. Besides there's Martje..."
Martje Van der Molen was someone Alec had met the year before on a French campsite. Graham was envious of his friend and had made it clear from the start. Martje had blond hair with a touch of red in it, cherubic cheeks and blue eyes.
"Mmm...Milk maids and Dutch cheese....I don't understand how you could even consider giving up your time with her" Graham continued, "Buy me a big packet of condoms. I'll stay and you go to Maastricht."
"She's not a sex object, she's a whole person...Besides we owe it to our clients to find out about Maastricht."
"I never said she was not a whole person. Your earnest anti-sexism, Alec, makes a terrible combination with your sexual hang ups. God knows how you got off with her......"
Then he asked as an afterthought "......You did get off with her in France didn't you?"
"We're going out tonight, so let's make the most of it."Alec replied.
"That's not answering my question."
"Mind your own business."
They met Martje at the English pub near Leidse Plein which was close to the hotel and caught a tram up to Dam Square. In the clear warm evening, two weeks after Easter, the bars were packed with people, overflowing onto crowded streets. In one such bar, with brown cladded walls their second of many glasses of beer was served by a waiter in waistcoat, a cigar gripped between his teeth. It was a long wait. Alec, whose round it was, was incapable of catching the waiter's eye. A band, with an electric organ and a variety of people playing brass and wood instruments, played jazz, singing in English and Dutch. After finally getting the drinks Alec's eyes, that had been tracking the waiter, were anywhere and everywhere except in the direction of Martje. She was puzzled. Graham sensed the embarrassment and began to feel it too.
"Something is wrong?" Martje asked, looking at Graham.
"We've been asked to go to look at a project in Maastricht and that means two days less holiday" Graham told her. Then, after a pause, he went on "Though I've decided that I'm not going."
Alec registered that Graham was smiling at Martje in a way that seemed......
"You're not going? But you can't not go! We've an appointment with Pieter Frik in three days time. He's arranging a schedule of appointments, people to meet, things to see...It would be..it would..what will they think at the Disablement Foundation after having spent all that money sending us here, arranging everything....."
"Tough" Graham interrupted him, "You can go if you want. I'm not working on my time off. That's a matter of principle. I've thought it out...I'm not going."
"I thought that you were saying longer, Alec. I was to say that you can stay with me at Bijlmer Park and save hotel expenses too. You must stay longer....And you must also stay there too, Graham." The last remark seemed like an afterthought, and she smiled at Graham as she said it.
"Are you sure that's no trouble?" Graham asked.
"Of course not." She held Grahams gaze for a moment, then she turned to Alec.
"Graham is right. You are on holiday. I have a friend you must meet, Alec. Yoland was a food aid worker. She felt guilty to eat when in Ethiopia...perhaps I should not talk about her...but if she had not eaten she could not could not have distributed food aid, do you understand?"
Alec looked blank. He did not understand at all what she was talking about.
"You must have, I do not know to say in English, what I would call 'enjoyment food'".
"It's hardly the same situation" he replied to her.
"You must replenish your spirit too. If you are miserable how can you help anyone? Yes?" He sought for something to say but could find none and she said "Now forget it. Let us go. Yes?"
As the night became drunker, noisier and darker the lights of thousands of coloured electric bulbs and neon tubes which were both left permanently on, or were flashing on and off, in successions, in rows, or at random, slithered and broke across ripples in the water of the canals. Graham and Martje's eyes were spending more and more time together.
Alec did not know what to say or do now and was aware how little he figured in their conversation. He became aware of his face in a mirror and saw his hangdog expression. Through his drunkenness the mirror picture of himself made him conscious of how he was feeling and he began to glare into space. It suddenly became embarrassing and tense. He went to the loo, partly to walk away from the tension and he returned to see it out. As he returned to the table unexpectedly soon he saw Graham looking startled and heard Martje, who had her back to him saying:
"Oh yes, I know he hoped to sleep with me but he has too little joy. It is sad but...."
Alec completed her sentence for her "It is sad but......'Girl's just want to have fun'." Martje swung round.
The bar they were in was vibrant with flashing lights, jazz and joints, beer coffee and a loud hussle of music and conversations but in their corner it was silent...
"I am sorry." Alec apologised, "I am ever so sorry. I think I had better go."
"No, there's no need......"Martje said buy Alec was already going through the door.
It was cold now. The blanket of depression that descended did not keep him warm.
At the hotel he sat alone in the dining room buying beers from the hotel receptionist wondering if Graham would come back. By 2.00 in the morning he knew that he would not and went to bed. The next morning Graham had still not returned and he went out for a walk.
When he returned Graham was leaving with his luggage.
"What happened to you? Did you stay with her?" Alec asked the question with an affected air of unconcern.
"Yes, we slept together."
"Congratulations."
Graham shrugged off his sarcasm. "Are you still going to Maastricht. I just rang Pieter Frik. He really doesn't mind if we don't go. Why don't you stay and meet Martja's friend Yolande?" He asked.
"I'll think about it."
After Alec had met Martje in France they had corresponded and this was supposed to have been his opportunity to spend time with her. He had thought about her for months. He hadn't thought it could possibly happen the way that it had with Graham. He knew that other men had a way with women that eluded him, that was a mystery to him, but this situation had evolved so quickly. It was almost as if, having barely met, Graham and Martje shared some sort of secret in their glances that he was not a party to. It seemed a replay of a too familiar story, the story of his life which he could not, somehow, find another way of playing. Its only consolation lay in its familiarity, as if there were beauty, as if there was comfort, in the replay of a tragic part that he could so incredibly well. It was what he would always be. But the perverse comfort in the familiarity of depression left an emotional hole that had to be filled. This hole he experienced like a thirst of a hunger and he felt deeply ashamed of it - but it was a feeling which would not be denied. He felt no control over it. He would have to satisfy it somehow.
He made his way back to Dam Square then walked north east. Looking around, his mouth dry and heart pounding, he walked down a narrow alley and stepped quickly into a small cinema. Inside he took his seat in the dark and watched. On the screen a man and a woman conversed in German, they were joined by a another woman who undressed, and another man came in and he undressed. Watched by the dressed couple, the camera focused alternatively on close ups of gasping faces and copulation until the man withdrew and ejaculated on the woman. This was followed by another sex scene with its ejaculation, and another, and then the next - until the whole cycle of short films had run its course. He slipped quickly back into the sunlit street and walked back to the hotel. The memories of what he had seen were mixed with a sense of alarm and of shame. What if he had come out and there had been Martje, Graham or even Pieter Frik passing by in the street? How could he face them again?
Another day passed. He decided not to go to Maastricht. Graham rang him.
"Where did you get to yesterday?" Graham asked
" I just walked around.....are you staying with Martje then?"
"Of course I am....She was serious about introducing you to this Yolande. What about it? Incidentally, you're really not going to upset anyone if you don't go to Maastricht..."
"I've decided not to go...."Alec replied.
"Good...so what about it? Do you want to meet Yolande?"
"I'll think about it."
"Come on man, stop sulking, there's not long now, that's what you said before..."
"Sulking, I'm not sulking. I'll think about it. You just took away Martje.....and now I'm a date for someone else....and now you say.....never mind. I'll let you know." He had his pride...
He did not contact them. There was resignation now. His mood and morale was too down to meet someone else anyway...it would have been embarrassing. He was defeated and it did not seem possible to do anything - certainly not meet someone else who, goodness knows, might be an awful match for him.....Yes, she might be just the person for him, and, then again, very probably not. In any case he could not face the prospect of self consciousness he would feel at the moment of their introduction - with Graham and Martje there. Wasn't that obvious?
Instead he lay on his hotel bed remembering.
After a couple of hours he got up and went out. He returned to the Red Light district. It was not only ludicrous, it was frightening. He could not stop himself going there - there were the same risks of a shameful discovery. But he was prepared to take them. So why could he not take the different kind of risk of meeting Yolande? He might even like her.
Once again he slid into a cinema and watched from the back, this time emerging after three quarters of an hour into bright sunshine. He walked quickly along the the narrow alley, turned the corner and merged into the crowded street. What the hell was he to do now? A pang of guilt made him want to be away from Graham and Martje as possible. Perhaps be going to Maastricht he would be making a sort of penance that would take him away from this place, with it sordid temptations that he could not resist - even though they were so contrary to everything that he thought he believed in. Yes now he had already said that he was not going. He wandered aimlessly, not really thinking where he was going, and found himself in the flower market. He sufficiently recovered his composure to think about bulbs, as a present for his mother, when he saw Graham, Martje, and a small woman with short brown hair and a delicately featured face. She was wearing jeans and a leather bomber jacket.
"Alec! Alec, this is Yolande."
Yolande did not seem pleased to see him. In fact, she seemed positively annoyed.
"Whatever is going on here I do not care. I will not be used for games....I am sorry Mr Allsop my anger is not at you.....This friend Martje she uses me to feel better as her excuse to go with Graham...and I am angry to be used...." Yolande said.
Alec said nothing. He found himself having to turn away. All this had caught him at the wrong time and he turned away as he felt a stinging sensation behind his eyes and he turned away with the tears running down his cheeks.
When he looked back on that meeting the paradoxes no longer seemed as strange - for the world moved along through these paradoxes of human feeling. He could see that now. It was not as strange now he had got to know Yolande, spent time with her, and learned to understand some of those things. It was not so strange now he had, through her, got to understand that there was nothing wrong with the way he felt, neither his lust, nor his confusion, nor his loneliness - but what was wrong was only his shame about those feelings, a shame that made him hide, that made openess seem impossible, that made if difficult to think about them, to talk about them. But somehow all that had began to change at that point - for when at last he turned his tearful face back to them what he saw in the face of Yolande surprised him. It was not contempt but a look of sympathy, of interest and she held up for him the flowers that she had just purchased.
"Take them." She said.
Suddenly the memory of all this, which had been with him from Schiphol to the Centraal Station to the Metro had passed. He was back on the line that led to Bijlmer again and he as looking out of the windows into the sunlit evening. The train clattered into an industrial and suburban landscape. Estates of smaller homes, factories and flats went by and modernity in tall gleaming glass structures. Eventually the train stopped at a grey concrete station smelling of urine and disinfectant. From there it was a short walk to her home in the wooded park of huge flats complexes, up a lift, along a walkway and her door, her embraces, the scent of her bed, her body, her world.
The sound of the cat flap woke him to the early morning light and her cat Sting, a chatterbox with a loud meeow and a rasping purr, jumped onto the bed. Outside the window there was the sound of distant traffic along a motorway across from the reedy canal. The few early cars still had their headlights on but soon the dawn broke and the ripples on the canal were licked with the sparkle of sunlight brushed alng by the lightest of winds. The big window and glass doors that led to the flower filled veranda were facing the outside of the estate and were filled mainly with sky. He sat peacefully in the bedside chair with Yolande asleep, watching the early morning light change imperceptibly, slowly, gently, from night into a bright day, realising the miracle that his life had really begun.
It was the 4th October 1992.
...........................................
On 4th October 1992, at about 6.30 in the evening, El Al flight LY 1862, a Boeing 747-200 crashed into a block of 12-story flats in Bijlmer, on the outskirts of Amsterdam, killing its crew of three, a "non-revenue passenger", and at least 43 people on the ground. Because some of the people in Bijlmer were migrants, who were without documents, the full number of victims remains unknown.
According to Seán MacCárthaigh, of the Irish Times, who arrived shortly after the crash,"The El Al plane had scythed through the top five stories of two buildings; about 40 flats took a direct hit. Then a huge fireball rolled through the complex and apartment after apartment popped into flames.... A giant cloud of choking white smoke engulfed the area."
What this choking smoke consisted of was a mystery. From day one, right up until 1998, the Israeli government insisted that there was "no dangerous material on that plane. Israel has nothing to hide." This did not however explain why, after the crash, over 850 Bijlmer survivors - residents, police and rescue workers - sought treatment for a host of maladies including fatigue, breathing problems, hair loss, neurological ailments, mental confusion, depression, encephalomyelitis and disabling joint pains.
Over several years Dutch newspapers and citizens groups searched for further details in the face of what seemed evidently to be a series of cover ups. Then, on October 4, 1998, the Dutch newspaper, the NRC Handelsblad, published a leaked copy of a page from the plane's cargo documentation. According to the leaked paperwork, Flight 1862 was carrying 10 tons of chemicals, including hydrofluoric acid, isopro-panol and dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP) - three of the four chemicals used in the production of sarin nerve gas.
The DMMP, supplied by Solkatronic Chemicals Inc. of Morrisville, Pennsylvania, was destined for the Israeli Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) in Nes Ziona, outside of Tel Aviv. IIBR is the Israeli military and intelligence community's front organization for the development, testing and production of chemical and biological weapons.
Once again there were lies and a cover up. Israel maintained that the chemicals were to be used to test gas masks - but only a few grams would be needed for such tests. In fact, there were enough chemicals on Flight 1862 to produce 270 kilos of sarin - sufficient to kill the entire population of a major world city.
There was more - once again with lies from the powers that be. In the months following the crash, the Dutch citizens' group Onderzoeksgrep Vliegramp Bijlmermeer (OVB) reported how, "in addition to the cocktail of toxic chemicals that came free during the disaster," traces of uranium, zirconium and lanthanum had turned up in soil samples taken from the crash. Worse, there were traces of uranium in faeces samples taken from survivors.
One year after the crash, the Laka Foundation, an independent Dutch nuclear research group, revealed that the El Al jet - like all Boeing 747s - carried 1,500 kg of depleted uranium (DU) onboard in the form of counterweights in the tail fins, horizontal stabilizers and wings. DU is an extremely dense metallic by-product of the production of U235, the fissionable uranium isotope used to manufacture nuclear weapons and fuel. It contains residual amounts of radioactive U235, the less radioactive U238 and trace amounts of U236.
A Boeing document has acknowledged that swallowing or breathing DU dust can cause "a significant and long-lasting irradiation of internal tissue." DU has been implicated as a cause of Gulf War Symptom - a series of physical and mental debilities remarkably similar to the symptoms reported by the Bijlmer survivors - as a result of the use of depleted uranium shells in that conflict. Large areas of Iraq have also been contaminated and large numbers of children have died with cancers. DU oxidizes at temperatures as low as 350 C. The fire at Bijlmer, fuelled from the airplane itself, reached 1100-1400 C.
In response to concerns the Dutch government issued a report which assured the public that the counterweights had remained intact and never posed a threat to health. However, LAKA published its own findings that only 163 kg of the 430 kg of depleted uranium on the plane had been recovered. The shock from this rebuttal triggered the demand for a full Dutch Parliamentary inquiry.
The Bijlmer hearings were chaired by Christian Democratic opposition deputy Theo Meijer and was televised weekly. A phone line for psychological counselling was necessary for many viewers.
At the committee hearings it came out that an El Al cargo flight between New York and Tel Aviv touched down every Sunday evening. The flights were never displayed on arrival monitors and the documentation for the flight was processed in a special unmarked room. According to the testimony of the Dutch Attorney General, Vrakking, the El Al security detachment at Schiphol was a branch of Mossad, the Israeli secret service. A Dutch Air Guidance Organization employee told the hearing that the "policy" since 1973 was to keep quiet about all El Al activities. Schiphol workers testified that El Al planes were never inspected by customs or the Dutch Flight Safety Board. Maintenance workers were uncomfortable about clearing Flight 1862 for take off as there were many "carry over items" on the maintenance sheet that were uncorrected - but their supervisors had ordered them to clear it for take off.
The Dutch press reported that security officials had been waving Israeli air cargo through Schiphol since the 1950s. Shipping the kinds of chemicals aboard LY1862 ordinarily would be a violation of the Chemical Weapons Treaty (which the US has signed). By refueling the jets at commercial, rather than NATO airfields, a way was found around the military treaties. "Schiphol has become a hub for secret weapons transfers," according to Henk van der Belt, an investigator working on behalf of the Bijlmer survivors. "Dutch authorities have no jurisdiction over Israeli activities at the airport."
A Televisieproduktie Amsterdam (TVA) report identified Schiphol as one of several European airports that allows El Al to transfer cargo without supervision. TVA claimed that Belgian politicians now fear that "a disaster like the crash in Holland in 1992 is possible at [Belgium's] Zaaventem. This airport is, like Schiphol, under control by the secret police of Israel."
In February, 1998 the Meijer committee uncovered secret tapes of phone conversations between El Al and Schiphol Air Traffic Control (SATC). On these tapes (recorded within minutes of the crash and hidden in a safe for more than six years), an El Al employee warns: "There is poison on board: ammunition and flammable liquids." In reply, SATC personnel are heard promising: "We will keep these things under the lid." The facts were hidden as the authorities ordered workers to clean up the contaminated area without protective clothing. Nor was the Queen Beatrix informed of the danger. Unaware of the risks, she undertook a "sympathy visit" to the crash site the next day.
After the hidden tapes surfaced, Prime Minister Wim Kok suspended three SATC employees for withholding information and threats of dismissal were made against several ministers . At this point Israel agreed to hand over top-secret information on the 20 tons of "missing" cargo aboard the El Al jet - although only one week before they had announced that "the papers are probably destroyed."
Meijer's 2,000-page report, released on April 22, concluded that there was "a direct link between health complaints and the Bijlmer disaster" and accused the health and transport ministers of providing "unclear, incomplete, late or incorrect information." The report also attacked Israel's cover-up as "incomprehensible," especially "given the public concern in the Netherlands over the past six-and-a-half years, the requests for cooperation at a high diplomatic level and the bond of friendship between the Netherlands and Israel."
© BRIAN DAVEY