NL.07 — I Miss Lena, part II (Schultzy Shops)

I Miss Lena, part II. Schultzy Shops.

Greetings! Like it’s predecessor, I Miss Lena, this post can be heard. Audio-telling just above.

A bright sunny day not far from the Grote Markt in Groningen, in the northeast of the Netherlands. Schultzy, a smooth-haired dachshund —middle-aged, his coat a deep reddish-brown with a smattering of grey— has spent the morning communing with a bird outside his window.

This inquisitive jackdaw arrives like clockwork, favouring a perch atop a pollarded tree that affords him the perfect vantage for observing the dog and his coffee. Schultzy calls him Jesper.

The bird of morning cranes his head and neck around, causing Schultzy to wish he himself were more interesting. The pigeons, and the wheeling herring gulls, are doing far more of interest than him. Just behind Jesper, he reflects, are buildings which, like the flat in which the dachshund is staying, were part of a massive reconstruction of this part of the city in the 1950s and 60s.

This whole neighbourhood was levelled by heavy urban combat in mid-April, 1945. The Second Canadian infantry and other allies destroyed the buildings on this side of the square to root out machine gunners and snipers, part of the remaining German occupying force.

◇◇◇

It’s time for a walk.

People are out and about, everywhere, gently sociable —along the street, on the curb, on boats in the canals— greeting the sun’s warmth after a long wet winter.

Schultzy is dachshund-trotting down Oude Ebbingestraat when he suddenly slows and then stops. Outside a shop , almost at the waters of Turfsingel, a man in a denim apron sits in the sun on a chair in front of a shop. The man's bent over what looks to be a leather coat. He pulls at the two sides of portion after portion, stretching the leather and stitched seams over his lower thigh and knee.

Schultz hadn't known he was in the market for a leather jacket. Particularly with summer approaching now. But there is something about this man working in the sun in front of his shop, something that asks him to alter his path.

Schultzy may have just been paid, but he can’t afford a major purchase. And yet it’s equally true that he has been feeling a little drab of late, a little devoid of style. And then there’s the fact that the new summer hat to which Schultzy had treated himself earlier that same day oughtn’t be left on its lonesome.

What sartorial renaissance was ever accomplished in a single step?, he asks himself as he takes a left turn, past the man, and into the shop.

‘Zaal Leatherwear,’ a sign outside reads, ‘celebrating 75 years.’ And inside doesn't disappoint. Way in the back, past a labyrinth of racks and displays, Schultzy appreciates the work bench and all manner of shapely tools, old cupboards all full of leathers, snaps and buttons and studs of various sizes and shapes lining the walls.

“Can I help you?” It's the man in the apron, come inside, standing beside our ponderous dachshund.

“Something light. In black. A little ‘biker,’ but not too much,” says Schultzy, recalling the revving motorcycle engines that had kept him up last night. No, it hadn't been enough to celebrate FC Groningen's victory and return to the top Dutch football league with shouts; motorcycle mayhem had also been required.

“These ones are light, sleek and black,” says the shopkeeper, fingering a pair of jackets on their hangers, as if to give them their due. “But they're over-priced. A brand-name thing, if you ask me ….” He pauses, checking to see if Schultzy is alive to this bit of insider-leather intell. But he's also taking the opportunity to size up our hero's particular stature, and his general vibe. “Over twice the price of this one, for instance,” he says, drawing out another jacket as if from a quiver. He lays it out with a flourish, displays it alone atop a rack of rank others.

“Pretty cool,” mumbles Schultz, “but I don't know. Bit of a step, a step up for me.” The leatherman allows a few heartbeats to pass. He watches as Schultzy slips into the jacket, and examines his side and rear in the mirror on the back of a door. Not too ‘biker’?, the dachshund thinks to himself.

“You're in the city now,” the shopkeeper quietly observes, “good time to kick things up a notch.” How the Amsterdammers would chuckle to hear this man’s characterisation of Groningen, Schultzy thinks.

But the Grunneger is right. And his attitude is salutary. The work-a-day wonk I'm becoming, Schultzy reasons, it has to go. Fate-in-miniature has presented me with this leatherman in the sun, presented me with him today.

And there, before a mirror in a leatherwear shop in Groningen, Schultzy feels assuaged even as he still broods. I'll wear this jacket, and the new hat, to IJmuiden the weekend after next, he thinks. Good to look well put together at the showdown.

The “showdown.” He and the others will be meeting up with their adventurous friend, a golden retriever named Lena. Princess, a particularly conciliatory brown and white English setter, has assured everyone that, with respect to Lena, things are looking up. The retriever has at least agreed to leave her lair in Hilversum to meet them, Schultzy reflects.

“Clear the air,” the black and white English setter Widgeon had pronounced upon hearing of the assignation, “and not before time.”

“We’ll have a jolly good chin-wag,” says shrewd beautiful Molly, another setter. It's Molly who's chosen what seems to Schultz the worst possible place for the dog’s reunion and heart to heart. They are due to meet in some posh fish restaurant in IJmuiden, down by the harbour. The friends — the two daschunds and the three setters— have all booked rooms in town, anticipating the need to collapse after the event rather than hop buses and trains. I miss Lena, Schultzy relfects. No one knows of Lena’s plans apart from her agreement to show up.

◇◇◇

“It's a beautiful little shop you've got here,” Schultzy observes, returning to the external world, checking the mirror one more time. Now that the vision of himself in his new jacket and hat has taken up residence between his floppy ears he’s finding the purchase hard to resist. “I appreciate the time you've taken,” he adds. The shopkeeper smiles, and tells a tale of how his grandfather's local leatherworks had ended up his own.

“I try to enjoy my life and to like my job,” the leatherman seems to conclude. The dachshund has paid and is about to depart with his new, not-too-’biker’ leather jacket. But the shopkeeper continues. “‘Ah Berthil,’ my ex used to say —and I really don't know if this works in English— ‘Ah Berthil,’ she used to say, ‘you live your life like someone eating his way through the middle of a giant, never-ending cream cake.’”

I appreciate you listening, reading, seeing.

* photographs and watercolours by Kenneth Mills

** My thanks to Dora Longo Bahia and my other fellow fellows in Amsterdam for the initial spark, to Melinda Mills and Johan Woltjer for sharing their flat in Groningen, to Berthil Zaal of Zaal Leatherworks, to another local merchant-son whose name I don’t know, this one in H. Witting & Zn. on Oosterstraat, and to the bartender in Hooghout Proeflokaal, under whose patient eye the germ of this post was scribbled on a couple of coasters yesterday afternoon.