The Strangers' Gallery (27 page)

Then he looked even higher up and pointed his long, bony index finger toward the ceiling, like “the inexorable finger” of “the spectral hand” of Dickens's own mysterious visitor, the Ghost of the Future. It was a bit hard to pick out, but directly above the Speaker's chair, Lester said, Pindikowsky had designed a pedestal and scroll, on which he had depicted a dying swan.

“The bugger put a curse on us,” he said, “for taking just a month off his fifteen-month sentence. How else can you
splain
what happened in '33? And not just in the House—the whole bloody country was under a spell. We were mute, silent as swans. Come up…come up where you can see it better; there's one above the Strangers' Gallery as well.”

It was too late to grab the phantom's hand, to clutch at his raglan, to whine and moan, to plead to have our fate reversed, to sponge away the writing on the stone, to ask if these are the shadows of things that only might be. For they already had been; this was no dream, and there would be no redemption: the Moving Finger had writ, or painted, and moved on. And so had Lester.

Up in the Strangers' Gallery, we were close to the ceiling and could see Lester's dying swan, or ailing swan, much more clearly, languishing on its pedestal and scroll.

In 1832, in the Strangers' Gallery of the British House of Commons, as one of Dickens's biographers had related, the young parliamentary reporter, still unpublished, had “sat at his task day after day and night after night in the dark rear row,”
had witnessed the passage of the first Reform Bill, which had doubled the size of the voting population. He may also have witnessed, that same year, the passage of the bill that granted self-government to the Colony of Newfoundland. A House of Assembly would be elected in the fall. The country's last election would take place one hundred years later, in 1932, and Lester was certainly right in saying that in 1933, the year of our country's demise, we had all been silent as swans. Our official swan song, from the Assembly, had been little more than a sigh. Perhaps we had been under a spell, lured by the siren song, as Miles had put it, of that old colonial lullaby.

Miles, who was perhaps ailing himself, for he too had been remarkably silent, quieter than I had ever known him to be, was also sitting in the dark rear row of the gallery. It was from there that I heard a great heaving sigh. It seemed to float in the air like fog or incense, to drift over us, over the gallery railing, and merge with the haze of light from the old chandeliers that hung over the silent, empty chamber. Then, after what seemed like a long, formal, ceremonial silence, as if we, the strangers in the House, the unelected, had been unconsciously respecting Strangers' Gallery rules, Miles spoke for the first time since we'd left Government House, in a hoarse, half-hearted, ironic whisper.

“
Quod erat demonstrandum,
Mahoney.”

“
QED,
buddy
.
It has been proven
.
”

“‘For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.'”

In Miles's voice perhaps there were, as the wine tasters say,
notes
of forgiveness—or was it just a wine drinker's desire to forget, to drink from the still, sweet waters of Lethe?

Part Four

December 1995–February 1996

15. FATHERLAND

They sat them down upon the yellow sand,
Between the sun and moon upon the shore;
And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland,
…but evermore
Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.
Then someone said, “We will return no more”
And all at once they sang, “Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.”

—Tennyson, “The Lotos-Eaters”

D
rear, dark December
weather: wind and a cold rain, a driving rain. It beats against the window overlooking the garden. The trees, grim spectres, are black with rain. Too much wind to light a fire. Churning in the fireplace chimney in the living room, it sounds like an angry untuned cello. Anton's endless pedagogical talk has filled my head with musical motifs.

But, to be honest, I usually like the rain, being one of the sedentary, scholarly tribe. Where do you go, what do you do, when the sun is always calling you? In summer it stirs an aimless longing deeper than this winter chill in the bones.

Confined like shut-ins, we are listening to music, or, to be more precise, Anton is delivering a musicological talk. He has reactivated my old manual turntable, which hasn't been working for a couple of years, and has begun to dip into what he calls my “vinyl.” As I sit in the wingback chair with a notebook on my lap, he repositions the stylus, for perhaps the thirty-second time, over a recording of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 32, Opus 111—his last, composed in 1822—and carefully places it down at the beginning of the second movement. The Italian Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, whom Anton calls the greatest pianist of the twentieth century, is at the keyboard. I was completely unaware that I had so distinguished a performer in my collection, a motley assembly of several hundred records culled haphazardly, but painstakingly, over the past twenty-five years from discount bins in record shops and department stores, perhaps half of them in the past five years, when shopkeepers were eager to get rid of them to make room for CDs. I had continued to collect them out of habit, even after the turntable shuffled off its mortal coils.

Immortal music, maybe, but maddeningly mortal technology. Within a decade, the vinyl record and the turntable have all but disappeared from the marketplace. I would have thought that someone from the land where the compact disc was invented would have no interest at all in this obsolete technology, but Anton claims that he prefers to listen to vinyl. He says it has a “more natural ambience,” and he is not at all irritated by “cracks, snapples, and pops.” I had stopped using the turntable because in the middle of a piece of music it would emit a minor sonic boom, an electrostatic burst so loud it made me jump, even woke me up if I had dozed off. Anton said the problem, which he fixed, was with the belt drive. The rubber belt that turned the platter was so old and worn it had developed a metallic sheen that was acting as a conductor of electricity instead of an insulator. Even the technician at Higher Levels Electronics had been unable to sort that one out. He seemed surprised that I even came back to claim the turntable, and had a hard time locating it in what he called “the graveyard,” a small, shadowy back room half-lit by one naked, flickering, fluorescent light and stacked with ancient, dust-covered console TVs, radios, and stereos, many other turntables resembling mine, along with eight-track players and gigantic tube amplifiers.

For someone who professes to be interested mainly in theory, Anton displays remarkable practical skills. He is as much a tinker as a thinker. He has also fixed the doorbell (corroded wire), the electric can opener (clogged with crud), one of the large burners on the stove (a blown fuse), and the radiator in the hallway (blocked with air and needed to be bled). I should have had some of these things repaired long ago. When I try fixing them myself, I usually end up making things worse, sometimes even making myself bleed. And the last time I called in a plumber, to fix a clogged sink, he bled me sixty dollars for about ten minutes' work.

There is much of the pedant and the pedagogue in Anton, but, at the same time, even more of the sheer delight and astonishment of a child on Christmas morning, which for him is only a few days away. The fifth of December, he told me, is Dutch Christmas Eve—St. Nicolaas, or Sinterklass, Eve. He said he's going mummering, or “belsnickeling,” as he calls it. On St. Nicolaas Day, Dutch children receive their gifts. The Sinterklass tradition, he said, has no religious meaning, even though St. Nicolaas, the patron saint of sailors and children, had been a bishop of the early Christian church and was known for giving gifts to the poor and performing good deeds. Thus it became the custom for men in every town to dress up in a red-and-white bishop's robe and mitre and pretend to be St. Nicolaas. They went from house to house, asking children if they'd been good and giving them presents.

Anton claimed that a New Yorker named Clement Moore had stolen the legend of Sinterklass from Dutch immigrants. (New York was originally called New Amsterdam, he reminded me.) A classical scholar who most likely thought the world would remember him for his monumental
Hebrew and English Lexicon,
Moore achieved immortality instead by writing
A Visit from St. Nicholas
(now known as
The Night Before Christmas)
for his children, single-handedly inventing our modern-day Christmas. The robed and mitred bishop-saint was replaced by a jolly old elf who coursed o'er the rooftops with reindeer and sleigh, and came down our chimneys with a sackful of gifts.

“Listen to it, listen to it,” Anton says, genuinely amazed, as the music changes suddenly and dramatically and Michelangeli tackles a romping, staccato musical motif, like a cowboy running alongside and jumping onto a bolting horse.

“Just listen to it, it's
jass
, it's really
jass
. In
eighteen hundred and twenty-two.
”

A bit theoretically problematic, I know. Jazz in the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1822? But Anton can be very convincing, and sometimes as persistent as a stout.

Also in 1822, he reminds me, our own William Cormack walked across Newfoundland and later wrote a detailed account of the trip. Anton read his famous
Narrative
of a journey across the island of Newfoundland, the only one ever performed by a European
not long after he arrived.

“And
A Visit from St. Nicholas,”
he adds. “Clement Moore, remember? That also was in
1822.”

I don't think Anton is suggesting synchronicity, some kind of significant connection among these three diverse
performances
; it is just that he is always amazed at the infinite variety of things that human beings are up to, simultaneously, in such far different places, from a cultural capital like Beethoven's Vienna to what might be called Cormackia, a natural capital, in the unknown interior wilderness of the obscure Colony of Newfoundland.

When Beethoven was writing his last piano sonata, Anton tells me, though I'm not sure if this is by way of explanation of the composer's invention of jazz or not, he was deaf, at least in his right ear, and couldn't really hear what he was playing. But if you shouted into his left ear, he could manage a painfully awkward conversation. Unlike all his other piano sonatas, Anton says, the thirty-second has only two movements, like Schubert's
Unfinished Symphony
, instead of the usual three or four. When questioned by one of his servants as to why it was left unfinished, Beethoven replied wearily and derisively that he didn't have time. Perhaps he was just angry at always having someone shouting into his ear, or shouting such ridiculous questions into his ear. As I listen to Anton go on and on, some of that Beethovenian weariness and deafness is now overtaking me, and I stop listening to both of them.

It was not so long ago that I stopped listening to music altogether, or at least to the music that I had learned to listen to, had taught myself to appreciate and enjoy. (And what a patient and persevering autodidact I had been!) I couldn't concentrate on it anymore, couldn't be still enough. Almost overnight, the quartets and quintets, sonatas and symphonies, concertos, operas and cantatas once again became a language that I couldn't understand—an alien, empty, cacophonous sound; a meaningless and irritating pulsing and pounding; a squalling, squawking, grating, and scraping—and all I wanted to hear was silence. Perhaps it was at about the same time that I began to eat my meals standing up, something Anton finds very funny and is continually pointing out to me. Somehow it seems as if this happened years and years ago, but it must have been just before Elaine left, when we were staying together but falling apart, living together but sleeping alone.

The music was a second language, after all, easily scrambled perhaps by emotional distress, easily forgotten from lack of use. Mozart and Haydn, Bach and Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and Mendelssohn—they hadn't exactly been my musical playmates growing up. This was St. John's, not Salzburg or Leipzig. It was the British, not the Austro-Hungarian, Empire, and even before Britain had released its grip, the American Empire had already moved in, bringing jazz (but not Beethovenian jazz), rhythm and blues, rock and roll. Right around the time I was born, in fact, one glacial empire was retreating and the other was advancing, one form of colonization busy replacing another. Newfoundland had fallen into a crevasse and into the waiting arms of Canada—O Canada!—a country with medicare but without music, as Miles had once described it. Of course, the country of Newfoundland had been lost, given up for dead, long before that, though a few quixotic patriots, Miles Harnett among them, like Fernald's rare wildflower relic species, had survived the emotional chill by hiding out in the ice-free peaks of some political equivalent of the Long Range Mountains. Is it any wonder that they kept our history from us, the green and golden children of Confederation? Who needs that kind of heavy baggage on the way to the Promised Land? For us, history began in 1949.

But, I am sometimes heartened to recall, a historic foray into that exclusive Old World musical realm, perhaps even more extraordinary than Beethoven's invention of jazz, had occurred more than a half century earlier. Opera singer Marie Toulinguet, the Nightingale of the North, from Twillingate, a town more famous for swiling than singing, at least bel canto, and as remote a corner of the British Empire as you could find, may have graced the stage of La Scala in 1895. As we've seen, though, her brief career ended in tragedy. Hubris, one might think, a rare case of the appropriation of voice in reverse: the refined cultural voice of the established Old World arrogantly assumed by an upstart from the colonies. Let them eat folk song.

Besides reactivating the turntable, the doorbell, the can opener, the burner, and the radiator, Anton has also unstuck several windows, stopped the flush box from hissing and the kitchen tap from dripping. He has even replaced the full-length screen on the back door, which Pushkin had practically destroyed during his October visit. Anton's first act of reactivation, in fact, involved Pushkin himself. Anton had rekindled the cat's curious eyelash-licking habit, one he'd already acquired when Elaine and I had adopted him as a one-year-old. Though Pushkin is by temperament an outdoor cat, when he comes in the house, especially after the trauma of being splayed on that screen door for a half-hour or more, he usually makes straight for a lap. Anton's was the lap of choice in October, and so were his long, salty eyelashes.

Elaine and I had discouraged Pushkin's eyelash fetish to the point where he had given up on us. He then began all the more actively to solicit strangers, most of whom would not be taken aback by the cat's jumping up into their laps—
Hi, pussy
—even slowly padding his way up their chests—
Nice pussy
—placing his front paws on their shoulders and purring in their faces—
Nice pussy
—but would quickly recoil in alarm when he suddenly and unexpectedly latched on to their eyelashes. Anton, however, seemed to love it. While in the cat's embrace he wore an expression on his face as if he were experiencing a feline mother's sensual pleasure in offering the teat.