Twilight in Dordrecht

Bob and I just had the strangest experience, like an episode of the Twilight Zone, like a dark video game.

The ship docked at Dordrecht for the night. Dordrecht is a very old port town, one of Holland’s oldest. Many of it’s street are still made of brick, and like many European towns, it has a gothic church. There is an 18th century (19th?) painting by Turner, of a ship in Dordrecht, which I like very much, and I felt compelled to walk about to get a feel for the place, a better sense of history.

After having dinner aboard ship, Bob and I went for a walk. It was about 9:30 at night, and the last of the late April light had left, leaving the sky a deep purple, then black. High clouds moved in to cover the moon.

We soon noticed we were the only ones in sight. No one else from the ship was walking the streets and more strangely, there didn’t seem to be any townspeople out and about. Nine-thirty on a Sunday night, and the town seemed to be deserted. Well-tended boats were moored in the canals, but nobody on them either.

Like so many towns in Holland, the streets are paved with brick, worn unevenly over the years. We walked toward the old church, the “Grote Kerk”, which dates from the 13th century. The iron gates were open so we walked into the courtyard and tried to go inside the church itself, but the doors were locked, so we went back out to the street.

It was there we saw, across the inky canal, to the next street. Somebody at last, moving. Maybe dancing. Round and round, bathed in light.

Drawn to the light like moths, we went to check it out. We soon discovered we were looking through a vacant room, like a bullet, through two sets of windows, across a deserted street into another window. On a dark, winding street, this window was lit up, as was the room behind it. In the window on a moving pedestal two manikins, lavishly dressed in flowing folds of aubergine material whirled around and around, as if dancing. They had long hair and their bodies were bent and twisted. Behind them in the room many other manikins, and parts of manikins, all with long tresses and singular expressions and odd, fanciful clothes, seemed to watch the dancers. These were not ordinary store manikins. And this was no ordinary street, no ordinary town. It seemed to be deserted. Where were the people?

I was fascinated by the twirling figures, the supporting cast of manikins watching them from the depths of the room. But they gave me the creeps. Was this a store? An artists workshop? A vampire’s ball? These manikins weren’t like store manikins. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. These manikins had personalities, they had intentions. They had past lives.

Further along, a few blocks down, I looked up and saw a manikin in a second story window, looking down on the street. By now we wanted to go back to the ship, as it was getting ready to leave. But we had lost our way. Where was the church steeple? We took an alley and saw a person, a man walking two black dogs. We came out on another street and found the canal, followed it to the church. The whole time I felt like we were being followed, I kept looking over my shoulder. Such a dark town, and where were the people?

The image of those manikins haunted me all night. The next day in Middleburg, some distance away, I saw another, in a second story window, looking out over the canal, the bustling street, this one filled with people. It was broad daylight and I snapped a photo. And now that I am aware of them, I will be on the look-out for more. And watching my back.