The Strangers' Gallery (21 page)

We left the restaurant, walked down the steps past the Crow's Nest tavern, and stood patiently at the foot of the War Memorial, at the Water Street level, while the dignitaries and veterans were giving speeches and laying wreaths at the upper level, on Duckworth Street. We were standing in front of a plaque that bears an unsigned inscription, though Miles attributes it to Rudyard Kipling. Commemorating our valiant war dead, you would expect. But no. “Close to this commanding and historic spot,” it reads, “Sir Humphrey Gilbert landed on the fifth day of August 1583, and in taking possession of the new founde lande in the name of his sovereign Queen Elizabeth thereby founded Britain's overseas empire.”

There is no documentation to prove that Kipling actually wrote this inscription, but try convincing Miles that someone other than “Old Kippers” might have written it. He said that Kipling had also composed the inscription for the Great War Stone, the British war memorial, erected in London in October 1918, and the 1924 ceremonies in St. John's had begun with the singing and playing of Kipling's “Recessional,” each stanza of which ends with the immortal words: “Lest we forget—lest we forget.” Though whoever had written the words for that commemorative plaque had already forgotten, and Miles made a point of appearing at the site every July 1 and November 11 to remind us.

At the conclusion of the official ceremonies, as the crowd dispersed, Miles stood in front of “the Kipling plaque” on the Water Street sidewalk and recited, as if in retort, E. J. Pratt's “Before a Bulletin Board (After Beaumont-Hamel),” a poem he knew by heart. (He knew a lot of poems by heart.) A small crowd gathered around him, and when he finished there was such a hush that he began to recite the poem again. Then he quickly moved on to Hardy's “The Man He Killed” and Owen's “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” almost spitting out the last two lines:

The old Lie:
Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

“It is sweet and fitting to die for the fatherland.” It is sweet and fitting to recite for the fatherland, at least, to speak for the fatherland's fallen dead, even if Miles himself, on at least one occasion, had almost died in the breach. It was a July 1 about five years ago, and he'd had a severe asthma attack. A larger than usual crowd had gathered, and he became “a bit overheated,” as he described it later at the Grace Hospital Emergency Room after a two-hour session on the ventilator. I had accompanied him there in a Jiffy Cab with emergency lights flashing.

Ned Pratt, as Miles called him, had told him that just by chance he found himself back home in the first week of July 1916, some of the darkest days in Newfoundland's history. He had come home to attend his brother Calvert's wedding. It was the first time he'd been back since he left to attend the University of Toronto in 1907. During the days following the Beaumont-Hamel massacre on July 1, when only 68 of the 801 men who had gone into battle answered the roll call the next day—733 men killed, wounded, or missing in action—Pratt and hundreds of others had fearfully scanned the casualty lists displayed on the bulletin board at the St. John's Post Office. Among the victims were not only old friends and distant relatives, but his brother Arthur—not
k
or
m
, killed or missing, but
w,
wounded, though not critically. Pratt had expressed his anxiety and grief in one of his most emotional, most apocalyptic, poems. His own normally dry, black ink had turned to red and flowed for a whole lost generation of his countrymen. I imagined him standing there, in front of the bulletin board at the St. John's Post Office, on the dark Monday of July 3, 1916, when the first reports started to come in.

God! How should letters change their colours so
A little
k
or
m
stab like a sword;
How dry, black ink should turn to red and flow,
And figures leap like hydras on the board?

After Miles's performance in front of the War Memorial, we walked up the steep steps and headed west along Duckworth Street. The only certainty from then on was a stop at the gravesite of the Founding Father, Dr. William Carson, who was buried in the Anglican Cathedral churchyard. Coincidentally, the regular tourist Haunted Hike began on the steps of this cathedral, for its cemetery, once known as the Burying Ground, was the oldest in the city—and perhaps the smallest. Closed in 1849, it contained, our Haunted Hike leader had told us, five thousand corpses stacked on top of one another more than three times over—a democracy of the dead, indeed. Death makes strange bedfellows, I thought, and I considered asking Miles if he knew who was stacked in the same plot with Carson, but I thought it better to leave that stone unturned.

At the end of Harnett's Haunted Hike, after stops at several more memory sites, we had a pint and a rest at the new Travers Tavern (est. 1946) at the west end of Water Street, before the long climb back up the tiered hills. The return walk began obliquely as well, and on the flat. But after dodging halfway down Water Street, then along the waterfront, Miles suddenly made a beeline for the Upper Levels. From here on, I knew there would be no more tacking allowed.

He started at Baird's Cove—the upward grade began even there—then crossed Water Street and took the steep Court House steps leading up to Duckworth Street. Anton, being an avid hiker and biker, was having no trouble keeping up; but at the top of the steps, lolling about to catch my breath, I have to admit I considered a ruse: heading off down Duckworth on the pretense of having some business to conduct in one of the shops. I remembered it was Remembrance Day, though, and none of them were open.

Miles took out his asthma inhaler and sucked in a couple of steroidal puffs. He put it back in his raglan pocket and, while his hand was still down there, tucked in his hernia, which was making a sound like a broody pigeon. He crossed Duckworth and turned up towering Cathedral Street to conquer the next tiers—Gower Street, Bond Street, and Queen's Road—then took the giant steps alongside Garrison Hill to the last tier, Military Road, leaving Anton and me in his wake.

We crossed Military and climbed to the crest of Bonaventure Avenue. Here the land flattened out for a stretch before the road descended into the valley of Kelly's Brook; but what we gained in ease by not having to fight altitude, we lost in having to butt into a strong northwest wind, which hit us like a fully antlered bull moose defending its territory as soon as we claimed the crest of the hill.

It was a climb that could surely qualify as an Olympic event, part of a triathlon, perhaps, or a compassionate (no drug testing required) Special Olympics challenge for resolute asthmatics on steroids. What we needed in St. John's, I often thought, was a
funicular
.

Back in Churchill Park, Miles asked us to wait on the steps of his house while he went inside.

“Just be a minute,” he said.

He came back out bearing gifts. For the Research Library, a most generous one indeed: a signed copy of Pratt's first book of poems,
Newfoundland Verse
, in which the Beaumont-Hamel anti-war poem had first appeared. Inscribed “To a fellow Newfoundlander,” it had been given to him by Pratt himself, in 1951, at the University of Toronto. Miles gave Anton a 1968 Newfoundland licence plate, though in mint condition, as if it had been received but never used. I could understand why.

“Canada's Happy Province,” it said, below the plate number. Anton looked amused, and perhaps a little confused, as he contemplated it. A lot more amused, no doubt, than Miles had been when the plate had made its first appearance. It was replaced, however, the very next year.

“Welcome to Nederland, b'y,” Miles said. “And you thought you'd left.” With one hand he clasped Anton by the shoulder, and with the other gave him a clap on the back.

When we got home, Anton attached it to the front bumper of the car.

12. THE TOWERS

Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed
The lighthouse top I see?
Is this the hill? is this the kirk?
Is this mine own countree?

—Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

F
or the first part
of our lunch, at least, Anton really
didn't seem to mind sitting in the sunlit atrium cafeteria on the tenth floor of the Hibernia Tower, one of three “high-risers,” as he called them, at the far eastern end of Duckworth Street. The view from the tower was panoramic and seductive, and Anton looked temporarily seduced, or at least lulled, by a brief spell of harmless pleasure. I could tell by the sated and self-satisfied look that Hubert always had on his face when I joined him here for lunch that he had been permanently seduced.

Anton seemed to have a love-hate relationship with pleasure, or an approach-avoidance conflict, as the psychologists would say. Though he was an ascetic at heart, he tried, like the rest of us, to avoid pain and discomfort, but he seemed overly suspicious of luxury and ease, idleness, satisfaction, even joy. All too soon he would become uneasy, wary, sad and withdrawn, as if happiness was something he didn't really deserve. He was now gazing quietly out the window, but I could tell that he was not just admiring the view.

It was a dizzying bird's-eye view of the whole downtown—the old town, the harbour, and the Southside Hills—that the tenants of this tower, mostly lawyers, accountants, and oil industry executives, could luxuriate in without exposure to the elements or the populace at large. The large-framed, blue-tinted, floor-to-ceiling windows seemed to limit, but at the same time, to enlarge, the view, as if it were magnifying glass that we were looking through.

Anton had finished his fish and brewis, had gobbled it up, as usual. Acutely aware, even after more than two months among us, of being what he called a “guest of the republic”—he proudly wore his Republic of Newfoundland T-shirt to social events—he always made a point of relishing every indigenous dish. He had even tried his hand at preparing one himself—Soup 'n' Sunkers, pea soup and dumplings, on which my stomach had come to grief.

He had turned his chair toward the windows and was looking as distant and reflective as a figure in a Vermeer, though the vista before us looked more like Bruegel; “Peasant Bruegel,” that is, to distinguish him from his painter sons, “Hell Bruegel” and “Velvet Bruegel.” The scene brought to mind his
Fall of Icarus
. A large rectangle of glass framed two ships crossing paths far below us in the harbour, one heading back into its sheltering arms, the other, out into the cold North Atlantic. In Bruegel's painting, Icarus, in unnatural flight, has just fallen from the sky straight down into the water, but unobserved by everyone around: the sailors on the ships, the fisherman on the bank, the shepherd with his flock, the farmer tilling his terraced field.

With his scarecrow straw hair sticking out in all directions from beneath his authentic Basque beret, Anton looks like Bruegel himself, in the self-portrait I'd seen in
Painters of the Netherlands
. It was a folio edition, and one so large that, going against his environmental principles, Anton had to take a taxi to get it home from the university library. He was intent on resuming my education in the history of Netherlandish art that he'd begun in Paris some fifteen years ago.
In the self-portrait, titled
The Painter and the Buyer
, Bruegel is holding a paint brush or an engraver's tool and sizing up a work in progress with a look of grim concentration; or is it contemptuous consternation? Either he is lost in the labyrinth of some artistic problem, or he senses that the real problem is at his back. A vulturish-looking buyer is eyeing the painting, his hand already halfway into his purse.

The expression on Anton's face had now changed to consternation as well, but, unlike his countryman's, it was a calm, thoughtful sort of consternation, which I was beginning to think was his characteristic look. It took on a kind of incandescence at times, more like amazement than anxiety or dismay. In his line of vision were two working lighthouses: one at Fort Amherst, at the entrance to the harbour; the other, farther out, at Cape Spear. But perhaps he was thinking of the lighthouse at Cape Pine, a light not just at the most southerly point in Newfoundland, but at the far reaches of the human imagination. Or so it had, just last night, been proclaimed.

Anton had already infiltrated the local art scene and was aware of even the most obscure goings-on. Last night he'd taken me along to “a short philosophical talk about art,” as the poster had described it. I was thankful that it was very short, as it was riddlingly philosophical, delivered in aphoristic brush strokes by a conceptual artist who'd just made his home permanently in Newfoundland after spending most of his life in Texas. He'd originally come for a short residency sponsored by a local benefactor of the arts, but, like so many artists who come here, had been bedazzled by the light and the landscape and stayed.

“Atomic Reality and Events of the Most August Imagination” was the title, but it was rather hard to gather the threads of his theme. Anton, however, had come away from the talk with his consternation glowing, though he had nothing directly to say about it at all. No one else had anything to say either. “Can you tell us about the lighthouse?” was the only question asked.

The artist told us that he had moved to Newfoundland not only to practise his own art, but to become a benefactor himself. He wanted to pay back, as he put it, everything that life had given to him. To do this, he'd purchased a decommissioned lighthouse at Cape Pine, at the end of a ten-mile stretch of gravel road at the southernmost tip of the Avalon Peninsula. Here was the Newfoundland he had imagined, beyond the puffins, icebergs, and whales—our tulips, windmills, and wooden shoes.

Perched at the top of a three-hundred-foot sheer cliff, the lighthouse towered above the tower we were in now. It stood at what had once been the shipwreck epicentre of the Island, perhaps of the entire navigable world, judging by an old map the artist displayed on the wall with an overhead projector. “The graveyard of the North Atlantic,” the area had once been called, and the lighthouse loomed like a giant headstone over it. The map had been made in 1903 by an inspector of lighthouses, and I remembered once seeing the original in the Archives.

From the Cape Pine lighthouse, a litany of names of lost ships and the years they were lost fanned out on the map in a wide semicircle all around the coast, from the SS
Palestrina
off Bay Bulls in the east to the SS
Roland
in St. Mary's Bay to the west. Lines connected the names of the ships to the coastal crags, shoals, sheer cliffs, and sunkers on which they'd foundered. Among the wrecks was the SS
Robert Lowe
, named after a distant ancestor of mine, perhaps. It was one of the few without a year attached.

In answering the only question he was asked, the artist initially lapsed once again into the abstract, conceptual vein. The lighthouse, if I got it correct, in this dangerous, isolated, elemental place, an epicentre of stress and force and collision, was to become an experimental chamber of consciousness, a workroom for the most august imagination, an accelerator, or collider, chamber for imaginative particles that would serve the same purpose for artists, especially conceptual artists, as it did for theoretical physicists.

But then this conceptual artist did a simple, concrete, but most extraordinary, thing: he turned off the lights and turned on the overhead projector again, on which the black-and-white transparency of the map still sat, and with a sea-blue marker began to draw directly upon it, transforming the broad, fanlike image of the map into a peacock's tail, its eyelike spots like the eyes of drowned sailors looking up out of the deep
. Full fathom five thy father lies…Those are pearls that were his eyes
…And all his
concepts
were as bilge water released into the sea.

It was unlikely that Anton would ever go to the lighthouse at Cape Pine, or even express a wish to go there; but the idea that it was there, that it existed for the purpose the artist had described, was important to him. It was, in fact, all that mattered.

“Will it work in theory?” as he liked to say, repeating a “jest,” as he called it, but perhaps for him much more than a jest, that had made the rounds of an international symposium entitled “Memory: The Question of Archives” that he had attended in London just last year. The keynote address, “Mal d'Archive,” published in English as
Archive Fever
, had been given by the French deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida. Perhaps that was why, according to Anton, there were no archivists in attendance; as a group, I have to admit, we are notoriously
un
theoretical,
un
philosophical, perhaps even
anti
-philosophical. No archivists but Anton, that is, or freelance archivist, I should say.

“Nothing is less reliable,” declared Derrida, “nothing is less clear today than the word ‘archive'…Nothing is more troubled and more troubling. The trouble with what is troubling here is undoubtedly what troubles and muddles our vision…what inhibits insight and knowledge, but also the trouble of troubled and troubling affairs…the trouble of secrets, of plots, of clandestineness, of half-private, half-public conjurations, always at the unstable limit between public and private, between the family, the society, and the State, between the family and an intimacy even more private than the family, between oneself and oneself…”

A bit of translation trouble, too, perhaps,
but I think I know what he means. I'm sure Miles would know what he means. Anton is certain that he knows, too. Derrida's talk, he said, had deconstructed his whole archival cosmos, had sent him back to truck driving for a living. The archive, the noble archival calling, had failed Anton, had let him down—not theoretically, not professionally, but personally.
Trouble of troubled and troubling affairs…trouble of secrets…of clandestineness…
The archive fever that Derrida had spoken about was as much a fever for forgetting as remembering. “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory,” declared Derrida, and Anton had been made painfully aware of that fact. The Dutch government and the Canadian government had conjointly, every year, celebrated the liberation of the Netherlands by the Canadian Army; but they had also conjointly—and collaboratively, Anton claimed—withheld information about, and from, the seven thousand so-called children of the liberation that the Canadian liberators had left behind. Coincidentally, as Anton had pointed out many times, one child had come into the world for each of the seven thousand soldiers lost in the campaign.

Before lunch, Hubert Lowe, CGA, Controller, Noble Drilling and Exploration, Ltd.—as his embossed, black-and-gold business card read—had received us in his office on the floor below. The company occupied the entire ninth floor, whose walls, including those of Hubert's office, were covered with what he called “investment art,” Newfoundland paintings and photographs arranged in thematic groupings: resettlement, the seal hunt, the cod moratorium, the oil boom, drill rigs. He pointed out his company's drill ship far below at the dock. Hubert's office had a resettlement theme: black-and-white photographs of children with sad, wounded, perplexed faces standing on stony beaches watching their half-submerged houses being towed out to sea. It revealed the soft side of his personality, which he didn't usually show.

He had invited us here today because Raymond was home from Vancouver for his annual pre-Christmas holiday, and Hubert wanted the three of us to meet for a chat. But there were four of us, even more than the proverbial crowd, and he seemed annoyed that I had brought Anton along. When Hubert used the word “chat,” he usually meant a private chat, but I'd been distracted on the telephone and quickly forgot. Anton's proposed two-week visit had stretched into two months, and a lot of things I usually remembered I had begun to forget. Hubert was taking out his annoyance on Raymond, razzing him mercilessly about his plans to go over to the west coast, near Gros Morne Park, to buy a house and a few acres of land, or just some land to build a house on, before all the “big German investors,” as Raymond described them, bought it all up. He had seen it happen on Prince Edward Island—“big American investors”—when he lived there during the construction of the fabled bridge and, most recently, on the west coast of Canada. There, “big Asian investors” had sent the price of real estate skyrocketing, and the ordinary person could no longer afford a home. Raymond Lowe pronounced “home” with a long, plaintive sound, like some sad, lost animal lowing. Perhaps he was not as happy in Vancouver as he claimed to be.