The Strangers' Gallery (30 page)

Among the survivors was Lanier Walter Phillips, humble Mess Attendant, Third Class, US Navy, not one of Lester Freeborn's illustrious visitors, but as worthy a candidate for an archive-of-the-soul fonds as ever set foot on these shores—perhaps surpassed only by one Philip Riteman, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, who came here in 1946. Riteman's entire family had been among the more than six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

A descendant of one of the more than six million slaves transported to the New World in the eighteenth century, Phillips was born in the cotton fields of Georgia in 1923, one of the states in which the lynching of blacks was most common. Terrorized and dehumanized by the Ku Klux Klan as a child, he joined the Navy as a teenager, only to find that he had escaped from one racist milieu and fallen into another. Sailors were unofficially classified as officers, men, and mess attendants, and blacks, of course, could serve only as mess attendants. He had to stand up to eat, wash the officers' underwear, and shine their shoes.

As noted before, one of Lester Freeborn's mysterious and illustrious visitors was the Reverend John “Amazing Grace” Newton, as Lester refers to him. Not to take Lester's word for it, but we do know for sure that John Newton wrote the words to “Amazing Grace.” There is a copy of Newton's
Olney Hymns
in the Rare Book Vault; it contains the untitled redemption hymn that would only later be called “Amazing Grace.” The origin of the music, however, is unknown. Hymn books in Newton's time didn't have music. The
Olney Hymns
looks more like a book of poems than a hymn book. Some musicologists have speculated—dredging for irony, obviously, Newton having been a slave trader in his youth—that the tune we now sing to “Amazing Grace” may have been sung by slaves in the southern US before emancipation, or even earlier, aboard the slave ships on their way to the New World. If Lester Freeborn had told Lanier Phillips's story, no doubt he would have placed Phillips's great-grandfather aboard one of the three slave ships captained by John Newton himself.

Perhaps it was while aboard one of these ships on the way back to England, caught in a winter storm off the Newfoundland coast in 1748, that the self-proclaimed wretch and blasphemer John Newton had been “miraculously saved from a watery grave,” as Lester had put it in
Mysterious and Illustrious Visitors
.

So had Lanier Walter Phillips almost two hundred years later. But if Phillips had begged the Lord for mercy during his ordeal, as Newton had done, he too must have wondered, if for different reasons, “What mercy can there be for me?”

On the night of the shipwrecks, February 18, 1942, Phillips at first thought that they had struck the coast of Iceland—it looked bleak and icy enough—and this was why he expected the worst. One of the conditions in the agreement allowing the US to establish a naval base in Iceland was that no blacks would be allowed on Icelandic soil. If he did manage to get ashore, he expected to be lynched.

He not only survives, however, but his life is changed completely and forever, and all because he is treated like a human being for the first time in his life, and not as an outcast, a leper, an untouchable, a nigger. Symbolically immersed in a cold, vile, viscous liquid the colour of his own skin, he is not just rescued, but saved, brothers and sisters, in the most profound sense of the word—transformed, redeemed, no repentance required, for, unlike John Newton, he had nothing to repent.

In Lanier Phillips's account of his experience, it is his description of the tender nursing care given him by the women of St. Lawrence that is most astonishing. He lays great emphasis on the power of touch in restoring his lost humanity: hands, white hands, the hands of white women, touching him, caressing him, this intimate, interracial contact such a taboo in his mind, so forbidden, that it initially puts the fear of God in him. Sick and semi-conscious, lying naked on a large table, he half-watches, in agonized wonder, as they bathe his chilled black body, covered with congealed oil from the broken fuel tanks of the ship. Even the white men have turned black; the oil has seeped into the very pores of their skin. He confirms the reports, thought apocryphal, of the women trying to scrub the blackness off him, thinking it is oil, none of them ever having seen a black man before. Lanier's eyes are almost glued together like a baby's.

“They were holding me in their arms like an infant,” he says.

I am not a religious man, but who could doubt that it is a rebirth he is describing.

16. THE BLUE PETER

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

—T. S. Eliot, “Gerontion”

T
he winter has
settled in, and so has Anton. After Miranda returned to work, he came back home. “I'm
home
”
were his very words of greeting
when I came home from work one day, just a few days after New Year's. My God, I thought, he's here for good.

Instead of the snow-rain-frost-snow-rain merry-go-round that is our usual winter wonderland ride—see-saw temperatures, freezing and thawing, slop-walks of slush changing overnight into treacherous slag-paths of crusty ice and snow—serious snow began falling in mid-December and continues to come down. After several winters with hardly any snow to speak of—the temperature one year hitting twenty degrees in February, but balancing that the next year with a snowstorm in October—my colleagues are now forecasting a real old-fashioned winter. Anton, of course, says global warming is to blame, and his
bête noire
, the automobile, is mainly to blame for that. In less than a hundred years, it has taken over the earth. In the years ahead, he warns, we will experience even more extreme variations in the weather. Global temperatures are rising, the ice caps are melting, oceans currents are shifting, and sea levels are rising. His country will be the first, he says, to be swallowed by the sea.

On a minor note, the sidewalks have already been buried in snow, but the walking trails around St. John's are well travelled, the snow thick and hard-packed. Anton sets out on the trails almost daily, usually around the time I leave for work, with a pair of snowshoes that he found in the basement. He carries them strapped to a knapsack on his back so he can leave the trails and explore the woods. Some days after work, if he hasn't tired himself out walking during the day, we set out together for a walk before supper, usually around five o'clock, when the sun has already set and the late-afternoon darkness is closing in.

On one of those walks, on Old Christmas Day, he began to talk about his mother, with whom he'd re-established a relationship the year before she died. It was her death that had finally brought him here. He'd already told me everything he knew about his father, which, of course, wasn't very much.

We were walking along the reclaimed, or “daylighted,” section of Kelly's Brook, appropriately enough, when we looked up to see a cold white moon shining through thin drifting clouds, and, still visible behind them, a stark blue sky. The effect was startling, for it was practically dark. I had never seen anything like it before. This quarter-mile section of the brook runs along a part of the trail that feels like the lowest piece of land in all of St. John's. Although it might have been just the unexpected sight of a sky that blue at night—a dark, saturated, melancholy blue—something about the whole scene must have affected the circuits of Anton's brain and the currents of his blood, made him feel a little homesick, stirred some dark and deep-rooted memories. Perhaps it was the slow, tame water winding through its artificial channel like a drainage canal traversing a polder, or the below-sea-level feel of the lay of the land. As if he were just continuing a conversation he was having with himself, he said, plaintively:

“The night Moeder saw the blue moon she knew for certain he was not coming back. It was late September 1950, almost five years to the day he left. I was only four at the time, back home in Rotterdam with my grandmother, who I thought was my mother. Jule—Moeder's name was Juliana, but we called her Jule—was with her sister, Mina, at her summer place in Noordwijk. Uncle Claus was in England at a medical conference, and Mina asked Jule to come and stay. She hated to be left alone. It was a cool clear night, and the blue moon rose over the North Sea. She said even the sea and the sky were blue. She saw it first through her bedroom window. She and Mina stared at it for so long on the verandah she thought she saw a small white moon in the middle. It was the Blue Peter she was seeing again, the blue flag with the white spot in the centre that's raised when a ship is leaving port. It was, as I let you know, the name of the ship I came on, too. The day I saw it at the dock in Rotterdam, I knew that the time for my voyage had come.

“My father explained the flag to her. Maybe he was just planting a seed in her head, getting her used to the idea of him going away. They spent a lot of time walking around the old docks in Rotterdam, the docks the Nazis nearly destroyed before they left, watching the ships come and go, while he waited for his ship to take him home. Leaving was slow, there was a shortage of ships. There was a point system among the soldiers that no one seemed to understand. He was one of the last to leave. But when he did leave, he left quickly, without warning, without even saying goodbye. Perhaps he didn't have time to let her know. Of course, she thought she would be going with him. But she was left behind on the dock, staring at the Blue Peter as his ship sailed away.”

“Did he tell her his name?” I asked. “Did her parents know about him?”

“William was the first name he gave her. William the Conqueror! Prince William of the House of Orange! William the Silent, Father of the Netherlands! He became William Peter, or Peters, later on. Blue Peter, she called him. She met him in secret, unbeknown to her mother, met him at an army club—only women were allowed in—knew him only a few weeks and he was gone. He did tell her he wasn't a Canadian, that he came from another country, Newfoundland, and that his country was occupied, too.”

“Ah, a fellow traveller, your father. Have you mentioned this to Miles?” I asked, but Anton was too intent on telling his story to reply.

“William and Juliana of the House of Orange! Moeder was called after Queen Wilhelmina's daughter, and Mina, or Wilhelmina, was called after the Queen. I was named after Chekhov and Rilke—Moeder was a great reader of books—but the Queen's enemy was named Anton, too. Anton Mussert, leader of the Dutch Nazi Party. Collaborator lapdogs named their kids after him during the war. Jule joked about that before she died. She confessed, then, said she knew but didn't care. She loved Anton Chekhov so much. Maybe more than she loved me! The war was over, she said. She had lost all her friends. She wanted to forget about all that. But she was away working when I went to school, and Grandmother used Grandfather's name for me, Gustav, which became Gust. I changed it back when I went to university. Anton Mussert had long been forgotten by then.

“I thought Jule was my sister till I was twelve years old. It was too late then to call her Moeder. She didn't want that, anyway. When I found out, she went away to Amsterdam to work. She used to go there sometimes, but now she stayed away for good. Grandmother sent me to Deventer to live with Aunt Mina and Uncle Claus, for I became, as they say, too hard to handle. Grandfather died in the last year of the war, in the Hongerwinter, one of the coldest we ever had. He died of hunger edema, starved to death, for there was no food left, and the old and the young died first. More than twenty thousand people died of cold and hunger. They were eating tulip bulbs. They smell like chestnuts roasting but don't taste so good. Eating dogs and horses, too. Jule and Mina bicycled a hundred kilometres into the country, to the farms, to find food. The farmers had barbed wire around their fields, like the Nazis did around their compounds. Sometimes they came back with nothing at all, or the German sentries took what they had. In the end, they took their bicycles, too, and then they couldn't go anymore.

“Grandmother threatened to put me in—how do you call it?—reform school. I now felt nobody wanted me, not even Mina and Uncle Claus, who wanted to take me when I was born. In Deventer, I was back in the house where I was born. Uncle Claus was a doctor, and he delivered me. In a clinic that was attached to his house. But though they wanted to take me then, Jule refused to give me up. Thirteen years later they still had no children of their own, but Uncle Claus didn't want me now. One evening Mina said to him, right in front of me—she was very emotional, and sometimes depressed—that it's so strange the way things are. It didn't make any sense to her. The people who want children, she said, can't have them, and the people who don't want them have no trouble at all. She was crying and drinking—she drank a lot—but he just sat there, not saying a word. I wasn't sure I knew what she meant, but I knew who she was talking about. The people who didn't want children didn't want me—my own father, mother, grandmother, and now my uncle and aunt.

“I think it was right then and there, at that very early time in my life, when I was just thirteen, sitting in that cold empty house, as Claus stared into Mina's bitter, teary face and I stared into his dark unfeeling face, that I saw the face of the man who left me behind, the father I never knew, and I felt I had been an orphan, a homeless person, all my life, even though I always had a home.”

When the trail reached the Parkway, we came out of the woods into a festive dazzle of Christmas lights still strung from the trees on both sides of the road, all the way from the university to Confederation Building. Anton's face lit up and his mood lightened, as it had when we'd first seen those lights, on the fifth of December, Dutch Christmas Eve. But on this particular evening, his mood did not stay light for long. Too many bad memories of Uncle Claus—I wondered if that was his real name—and his not-so-happy workshop still filled his Christmas stocking, like the proverbial lumps of coal.

“Your uncle's real name was Claus?” I said.

“His name was Nicolaas,” Anton said, “but he spent so much time in London he picked up the English nickname Claus. Jule used to call him Sinterklass, but I can tell you he was no St. Nick.”

“Nickname or not,” I said, trying to lighten things up.

“Yah, he didn't believe in Christmas. His house, his home, was a strict regime. Every trait of the Dutchman I hated was in him. I had to do all the work he had no time to do. He was at the hospital then—he had closed his clinic—working twelve hours a day. Sometimes he would not come back until the next day.

“Mina tried her best to mother me, but she had problems of her own. Claus was one, as you can see. I had no father, but I had lots of mothers—sister-mothers, aunt-mothers, grandmother-mothers. My psychoanalyst says I am clinically gay, but, truth to tell, I have no interest in men at all, not even as friends, begging your pardon, though I am supposed to need them as substitute fathers. Perhaps I am afraid of men. If ever I have a child, I hope it's a daughter. A son needs a father who had a father. I think I would be afraid of a son.

“Uncle Claus never gave gifts for Christmas, but Mina always gave me two or more. There's one I still keep, a radio set hidden in a telephone book. The pages were cut out in the centre, leaving a deep hole. Our family used it during the war, when radios were forbidden in our homes. Queen Wilhelmina and the government were in exile in England, and Radio Orange was broadcast on bbc. It let people know what was going on. That radio was the friend of my teenage years. Mina gave it to me that first Christmas in Deventer, when I spent a lot of time alone in my room. I listened to American rock and roll: Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins. Elvis Presley, of course. Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. Roy Orbison, too. The Big ‘O.' Heartache, bel canto—he was singing for me.”

“For me, too,” I said. “I loved Roy Orbison. I still do. The Everly Brothers, too.”

It was six o'clock and we had “done the circle,” as Anton usually described our walk. We were standing at the edge of a bleak-looking Churchill Park. Across the snow-covered field, a bitter wind was blowing. On the other side of Elizabeth Avenue, in Churchill Square, the Christmas lights of Vincent's café were still glowing and beckoning. Spotting them, Anton invited me there for supper, and I was glad to accept. The new cook, Fryderyk, Anton told me as we tramped across the snow, was a Polish marine biologist and the world's foremost authority on the seal penis. He had come here to do post-doctoral research in the hope of landing a job in Canada.

Anton has become an habitué of this new café in the Square. Although it isn't the Café Les Deux Magots or the Café de Flore, or even an old homey Amsterdam brown café, Anton doesn't seem to mind. That old café philosophy still has him in its spell. With a video store on one side and a pizza parlour on the other, Vincent's, named after Anton's most famous countryman, is decorated with murals on the outside and poster-prints on the inside—reproductions of Van Gogh's most well known works. Any other Dutchman might have scorned such an ersatz place, but its cheerfully tacky ersatzness, I think, is what attracts Anton.

In the few months of its existence, Vincent's has had more cooks than customers, an international array of exiles: students, unemployed immigrants, refugees. Besides the Polish marine biologist, there's been a Bulgarian painter, a Cuban science fiction writer, and a Chinese poet who survived the massacre at Tiananmen Square. None of them had been trained as cooks, but they were able to make a decent sandwich, toast a bagel, and whip up a standard dish or two from the cuisine of their native land. In temporary, or perhaps permanent, exile himself, Anton had made friends with all of them. One Friday night, in the late hours, when the café was filled to the brim, we heard the Chinese poet read his poems in Chinese, accompanied by a stand-up bass player and a simultaneous translator. The owner had yet to hire a Dutch cook, but if Anton stayed here long enough, there was sure to be an opening for him. In his repertoire, limited though it was, was an Indonesian rijsttafel as elaborate as the Trinity cake, and a sailor's stew he called
lapskaus
.

No seal on the menu tonight, fortunately; Fryderyk was serving perogies and sour cream as his daily special, and we both ordered that, it being the only hot item available. Anton downed the perogies quickly, and with relish, before I was even halfway through mine.