On July 19th, ten weeks after he had been buried in the little town of Driehuis, just outside Amsterdam, Pim Fortuyn was dug up again. The disinterment was scheduled for 7 p. It started clawing at the ground, gradually producing a large mound of sand. Certainly, in an American idiom much of what Fortuyn had to say sounded racist.
Yet, at the same time, Fortuyn maintained that he was revolted by bigotry, and his own career definitely would have tested American notions of tolerance. Fortuyn spent two and a half months in the ground in Driehuis, and during that time it was estimated that a hundred and fifty thousand mourners visited his grave.
After his casket had been removed, cemetery workers lowered box upon box of farewell notes into the empty pit, a process that was also broadcast live. No one I spoke to in Holland seemed to find the televised exhumation in any way odd; nor did anyone comment on the fact that Fortuyn, for all his Dutch nationalism, was being dug up so that he could be reburied near his summer house in northern Italy.
I finally caught up with Fortuyn, as it were, the day after his exhumation, in his home town of Rotterdam. His corpse had spent the night at the airport, and by the time I got there, at 8 a. A pair of fire trucks sprayed water high into the air, creating a rainbow.
Everyone clapped, and several people standing near me began to weep. Rotterdam lies at the mouth of the Rhine and the Maas Rivers, in a tangle of waterways so complex that even many who live in the city cannot say exactly which is which. Central Rotterdam was bombed twice during the Second World War, once by each side, and rebuilt, in postwar style, with broad glass office buildings and open pedestrian plazas.
