Since the outbreak of that war I have been amazed at all those Russians in Amsterdam. There are quite a few. Some of them are so-called ‘expats’, but there are still a lot of Russian tourists walking around. I’m having fun eavesdropping on those Russians on the street. Eavesdropping on people is the best thing there is, and because they don’t realize I understand Russian, Russians are easy prey.
What I find so fascinating: I haven’t heard one talk about the war yet. This week I followed a young Russian couple in the Ferdinand Bolstraat. They talked for 15 minutes about the dangers of, I’m not making this up, soft drinks with artificial sweeteners. Aspartame in particular had to pay for it (fortunately that in Russian is just ‘aспартам’, otherwise I would have had to look it up). Nice, guys, and now about Putin, I thought, but nothing. “Shall we have something to eat, my little bird?” the boy finally asked the girl, and they already walked into a wok restaurant.
I also fell short in the Vondelpark. I followed two Russians, with those shrill voices and a child much too wrapped up. One of the women was carrying a purse from the Rijksmuseum. The conversation was about: curtains in the bedroom. One woman wanted it as heavy as possible, otherwise the light would wake her too early. The other woman objected that heavy curtains were ‘stuffy’. Well, who knows, maybe they had already read Putin’s maneuvers over and over and were ‘completely done with it’.
I also heard Russians talking about the weather (‘lovely’) about houseboats (‘cozy’) and about a stolen telephone (‘a nightmare’). Russians, especially the women, think just about everything is a ‘nightmare’, of a torn nail to the price of pork, but so I did not hear about the real nightmare.
Last night I was walking friends’ dog. The beast has a savage passion for my right leg, and because I was fed up with it, I took him outside. He likes that too. While he was taking his forty-seventh pee a woman passed me who was on the phone in Russian. She sounded emotional. And she said, ‘Will you tell Olga she can have my towels? Don’t forget! Yes, all my towels.’
What was going on here? Was this really about the war? Had she run away and left everything behind? She walked fast, and I couldn’t hear her anymore.
I would have loved to listen further, but yes, that dog.