The Strangers' Gallery (29 page)

“Isn't it strange,” he says, “that Germany never had a nationalist composer. Wagner, you say? An aberration.”

This is said without malice, without rancour, without anger or bitterness of any kind.

“As if they needed one,” Anton retorts. He has not forgiven them for occupying
his
vaderland
for five full years before he was born, nor has he forgiven his countrymen for not really resisting the invaders. There were over one hundred thousand active collaborators, he claims, one for every murdered Jew, but only twenty-five thousand active resisters.

Anton, for his part, said he had always actively resisted the realization, philosophically troubling for him, that if the Germans hadn't been occupying his country and carrying out their unforgivable deeds, the heroic Canadians, his Newfoundland father among them, never would have come to liberate it, and he never would have been born. He said he sometimes wished he had never been born, had never been liberated from non-being, from nothingness, by the heroic father—the forsaking, deserting, heroic father.

Anton's head is cocked as if in mock imitation of the rca dog listening to His Master's Voice.

“The voice of the Wandering Jew,” he says sadly. “The whole culture of tired old Europe in it.”

But it is not only the voice of the Wandering Jew, the Old World, that I hear, though I can see why Anton is so fascinated with that. He is a weary, wandering European himself, and though not a Jew, he seems to carry more than his share of his nation's guilt over his murdered countrymen. Far beyond that, though, I hear another, more ancient voice—the voice of the wandering soul, the orphaned soul, the mythical wayfaring stranger, the soul that has never had a fatherland, the voice of a spiritual diaspora that has been wandering since the dawn of time.

And why, I ask myself, does this émigré to the Lotus Land of the New World keep returning to the cultural capitals of the Old? To look for what? Much more than music, it seems. The world-weary, all-knowing voice—an intimate, inviting, smiling voice—tells me that his is a sacred mission of some sort. What has he discovered? What does he have to tell us? What is he smiling about? You can almost hear it—a triumphant smile, a last laugh.

Is it that the music, the art, of his homeland, his
spiritual
homeland, all the nobler impulses of the human spirit—for him the glorious music, especially—have outlived, and will outlive, all the autocrats, kings, czars, and führers; the gulags and concentration camps; the purges, cleansings, genocides, and holocausts; all the regimes, empires, and Reichs—even the one that tried to impose a final solution on his people?

And maybe even the murderers themselves were aware of this, diligently collecting art and consoling themselves with music while going about their grisly business.

“Let me tell you a story,” our host says, as the third movement of
Ma Vlast,
“From Bohemia's Meadows and Groves,” canters to a close. “A very short story. The entire tale we'll perhaps relate at another time. When Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, who created the Nazi Gestapo, the secret police, was awaiting trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity, in Nuremberg in the fall of 1945, he learned that he'd been the victim of an outrageous swindle.”

“Ha!” says Anton, anticipating what is coming.

“The Nazis, you see, didn't
steal
everything; they quite generously paid for some of the priceless art they hoarded. In this case, however, they made a small mistake, and in 1942 Herr Goering paid the greatest art forger in history, Han van Meegeren, 1,650,000 guilders for a fake Vermeer, a ‘Vermeergeren,' as it was called. That's over a million Canadian dollars, a stupendous sum of money for that time. The painting,
The Adulterous Woman
, was found in Goering's house at the end of the war, along with the bill of sale, with both Goering's and van Meegeren's names on it.”

“Not his house,” Anton says, “in a salt mine.”

“When Goering first learned that his priceless treasure was a fake, that he had been the victim of a criminal act, this is what one of his jailers reported: ‘At that moment he looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world.'”

“Ha, ha,” Anton says. “Evil in the world.” He pauses, his eyes widening, lost in thought. “In Deventer,” he continues, “where we come from, van Meegeren and me, outside the Wagg Museum there is a big cauldron hanging from the wall. Not for boiling witches, like you would think when you first see it, but forgers, counterfeiters, who spoil our art, our money. That might tell you something about us. But I think we would boil Goering in there before van Meegeren if we got our hands on him. He was sent to death at Nuremberg, but he killed himself in his cell. Van Meegeren got a year in prison, but in two months died of heart failure in his cell.”

I almost died in my cell as well. Just before Christmas, I was waylaid by a “mutating virus,” which robbed me of all health and strength, kept me captive for over a week. This was Anton's diagnosis; he's an authority on viruses along with everything else. First came tropical fevers and arctic chills, then hammering headaches, blocked sinuses and ears, mutants (if such they were) with razor blades at work on my throat, and finally what Anton called a “gravedigger's cough.” I never did get out to see Hubert's workshop, or my orphaned nieces, Deirdre and Terese.

One of Anton's old girlfriends had caught a virus from a parrot. She also had alternating fevers and chills, then came down with viral pneumonia, which he was worrying me about. There were no parrots of my acquaintance in the immediate neighbourhood, but Anton had met a painter with a parrot at an art gallery café three weeks ago. His girlfriend's parrot didn't actually have pneumonia, he said, but a contagious viral disease called psittacosis, which turns into pneumonia when transmitted to human beings.

Dr. Facey arched his eyebrows and stretched his face with both hands when I mentioned Anton's diagnosis, but reserved comment. He is a taciturn man and prefers action, which usually involves writing a prescription. He wrote one for a round of antibiotics, while at the same time saying that I probably did have a virus, so the medication wouldn't do me much good. It was worse than he thought. I had an allergic reaction: broke out in a rash all over my body. He put me on a different antibiotic, which seems to be working, though I'm so tired from coughing some days I can hardly move.

Anton spent all of Christmas and New Year's at Miranda's, though they came over to check on me almost every day. Throughout it all I was able to eat and drink, if not be merry. No nausea or violent discharges of any kind. They brought me broth and brandy, delicate Christmas cookies with cheery sprinkles, several plates of cold turkey and bowls of turkey soup (they'd cooked a twenty-pounder for two), and carafe-thermoses of Japanese green tea. Very high in antioxidants, Anton said.

Elaine, of course, did not appear on my doorstep, looking for her bread pans or anything else. There had been talk, in the first few months or so after she left, of retrieving her piano and her car, but nothing ever came of it.

In this sparsely furnished music room-cum-dining room, which overlooks the back garden, the soundboard of the piano resonates when I cough. “The soul of the instrument,” the piano tuner used to say. The sound seems to echo inside my head—a hollow distant voice, like someone moaning, some kindred spirit left to be my companion. It fills the silence in this room and the spaces between my thoughts. Elaine used to play the piano every day, but she had given it up long before she left. Anton tinkles with it now and then—he said he's had no formal training—just variations of the same tune, in a minor key, dark arpeggiated chords, broken chords, the same ones played with both the left and right hand.

It is twelve-thirty on a stormy, freezing Saturday night. The back garden is a wasteland of snow and ice—wave-banks of snow, crests frozen in mid-air. A bitter wind is blowing right through the house. Anton and Miranda are snuggled up in bed now, no doubt, the only comfort on a night like this. Oh, how our warders warned us against the pleasures of the flesh, the sins of the skin, even bad thoughts, when we were young and thoughtless and had no need of the touch of another's hands to comfort us. There is no hunger like the desire for another's touch, no comfort like the closeness of flesh, the warmth and softness of skin. I feel this even more now that the power of the intellectual pleasures has diminished. I'm not talking about lust—or even love. Perhaps I mean loss, regret, grief. Forgive me, I'm weak, still feeling feverish. Is there such a thing as viral longing? Anton would know, for sure. Can longing
kill
? Heart trouble, heart failure of a different kind.

In the third-floor apartment we once shared in a crazy-gabled, moss-shingled old Queen Anne on King's Bridge Road with dormer windows, clay chimney pots, weather-vaned turrets, and ornamental rooftop fences, Elaine and I loved to sleep together on weekday afternoons when our off-shifts coincided. On long, cold winter afternoons when everyone else was working, we would lie in bed together under the down duvet with the shades drawn, the telephone disconnected, far away from the world and all its cares: blue blinds in the hooded dormers of a yellow house; the large bedroom filled with the cool underwater light of a winter sun; no clock in the room, but the big old cast-iron radiator ticking away. On drowsy winter afternoons in the Archives, I still find myself daydreaming about those times.

On the day I began to feel ill, I brought home some files from the fonds I've been slowly working my way through at work, for the purpose of writing a finding aid. The
Wilkes
-
Truxtun
-
Pollux
Fonds contains a copy of the unpublished proceedings of the US Naval Court of Inquiry held at the Argentia Naval Base in February and March of 1942. On the night of February 18, three American warships, the destroyers USS
Wilkes
and USS
Truxtun
and the cargo ship USS
Pollux
, ran aground in a fierce storm on the south coast of Newfoundland. The ships were in convoy to Argentia from Portland, Maine, on essentially the same route as our present-day, summer-season passenger ferries between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. They were navigating by dead reckoning, however, weather conditions being too bad for accurate celestial navigation. The
Wilkes
had an obsolete form of radar, but even that was not working properly. Strong winds and currents carried them off course and onto the rocks between Lawn Head and the sheer granite cliffs of Chambers Cove, a cove in name only.

In the Court of Inquiry transcript, in a Memorandum to the Secretary of the Navy, Rear Admiral A. L. Bristol says, “It is impossible to describe the scene of the catastrophe unless one has been there. It is some of the worst terrain that I've ever encountered. The physical effort necessary in the rescue operations is almost beyond comprehension.” He proposes the construction of a hospital as a “lasting tribute” to the rescuers, whom he describes as “a hardy race of English and Irish descent, quiet, dignified, and reserved; also, hard to know and very sensitive. Almost without exception they are poor and with few possessions.”

The
Pollux
and
Truxtun
were battered and broken apart by the wind and the waves, and though 186 American sailors were rescued that night, 203 were lost. All navigation records aboard these two ships were also lost. The
Wilkes
, however, was refloated and suffered no loss of life. She also retained a complete log of the voyage, and the inquiry found her officers and crew to be mainly responsible for the shipwrecks. Her two commanding officers were subsequently court-martialled.

By far the most interesting, the most moving part of this fonds, however, is not the documentation relating to the cause of the shipwrecks and the attribution of blame, but the evidence given by some of the survivors and their rescuers. The men of St. Lawrence and Lawn, the two communities closest to the bleak, uninhabited Chambers Cove, climbed down over ice-covered cliffs in a vicious wind and sleet storm to rescue men immersed in heavy oil and icy water, then brought them to a makeshift infirmary, where the women nursed them back to life.