The Strangers' Gallery (5 page)

My closest childhood friend had been my cousin Charmaine, the much-travelled, constantly out-of-touch “Charmaine of
Chatelaine
,” as she liked to call herself. She was a travel writer, a “loose stringer” for
Chatelaine
. They had taken most of her travel pieces and paid her well, but she also freelanced for other, strictly travel, magazines. She was the only one of our extended family to have achieved a small measure of fame, though she wrote under the pen name “Axa Loomis.”
Charmaine
, she said, sounded too much like “outport pre-Liberation.” She wanted something with a bit more feminist chop.

Charmaine was our first cousin and an only child, so my brothers and I had adopted her as our unofficial sister. She was a real tomboy though, more of a brother than a sister, competing with us and beating us at our own games. In the summers, she had practically lived at our house; she didn't seem to have any friends except us. I might even have been in love with her in my teens—no doubt some of our physical contact was just sex-play in disguise—but first cousins are separated, as well as connected, by blood.

We were almost the same age, born in 1949, Year One of the Smallwood historical calendar, but on opposite sides of the Great Divide: March 31, 1949. I'd been born a Newfoundlander, that is, and she, a Canadian. She saw this as the reason for the difference in our temperaments. I was inward-looking, she claimed, and perhaps she was right. Except for my brief sojourn in Paris, I'd spent my entire life in Newfoundland. She was outward-looking, she said, and had travelled the world. There was, in fact, no place on earth she hadn't been, and that included the ends of the earth, Antarctica and the North Pole, and such near-ends as Siberia, Greenland, and Patagonia.

I hadn't seen her for several years—the last time was at her father's funeral—and our connection, sadly, had now become merely an archival one. Over the years I had conscientiously collected her “papers.” In the Research Library at the Archives, I'd placed copies of all her travel articles—some, handwritten manuscript drafts—in a vertical file, which I took pleasure in fattening. (Some day it might even overtake Miles Harnett's in girth.) She had completed a journalism degree at Carleton and was one of the first—this would have been in the early seventies—to write articles on the Basque whaling station in Labrador, the Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows, and the Ediacaran fossil discovery at Mistaken Point. More recently, and much farther from home, she had written about the world's only advancing glacier, the Pius XI glacier in Patagonia.

When Charmaine was in town, she usually stayed with her mother, and perhaps once a year I would call Aunt Olive on the off chance that Charmaine was around. I would have a better chance of winning the lottery, I thought. The last time I telephoned I noted that she had moved to a new address, a condominium, but was still listed under Alfred Lowe. Now this sort of statistic might not be accurate to within plus or minus 3.1 percentage points nineteen times out of twenty, as the pollsters say, but if my extended family is anything to extrapolate by, then about a quarter of the people listed in the phone book are dead.

Uncle Alfred was dead, to begin with. Like Jacob Marley, Charmaine's father had died on Christmas Eve, about three years ago, but, unlike old Marley, he had a thousand mourners instead of one. He'd been a taxi driver for almost fifty years, and knew half the town. He began driving the week after he returned from the war.

I scanned the rest of the Lowes, about a dozen or so, and found another dead uncle, Uncle Medouph, now downsized to an “M,” from whom I had received my unspellable and unpronounceable middle name. “M. Lowe” was my mother's sister-in-law, Aunt Esther. Mother was now listed as “N. Lowe.” The “N” was for Ned—full name, Edward, though he never used it—my dear-departed father. At the bottom of the list, appropriately enough, was Wescott Lowe, a distant cousin, but not distant enough for my mother. As far as she was concerned, in fact, he was dead as well. “The lowest of the Lowes” was how she always referred to him. Though he'd earned a master's degree in business administration from McGill, he'd embarrassed both his immediate and extended family by administrating the first strip joint-cum-topless restaurant downtown.

The other Lowes among the living were a widely dispersed clan, a small diaspora of extended family and complete strangers who had virtually recolonized southern Ontario, northern Alberta, and the Boston States.

I lay in bed that night unable to sleep, thinking of the plastic bag full of enraged hornets under the dogberry tree. Anton said that he'd once seen a million-year-old wasp, a fossil specimen, in an Amsterdam museum. It was sealed in amber, perfectly preserved, and looked to be almost alive. I must have lain there for an hour or more. Anton, still worn out from his long journey perhaps, had gone to bed early and I could hear him snoring away. As I was finally dozing off, I was startled awake by an almost preternatural caterwaul, the tone and intensity of which I had never heard before. It was not the usual fighting or mating sounds, rising and falling again and again, but a single piercing screech that entered the house like a bolt of lightning and went right through my head. I lay quietly, half-rigid, in its wake, then drifted slowly and apprehensively off to sleep.

In the morning, we discovered that a tomcat, most likely, had attacked the moving bag of wasps, had torn the double bag right open in fact, and God knows what had happened after that. Perhaps it was lying dead somewhere in the bushes with over a hundred stings on its furry little corpse, or drugged and stretched out on a bed in some veterinary ward, with eight of nine lives lost in just one night of prowling. But maybe it had miraculously escaped unscathed.

After breakfast, Anton attached a two-tier carryall to the back of the bicycle, made from thin wooden tangerine boxes that he found in the shed. Elaine had used them as trays for her seedling pots. I watched from the verandah as he took a test spin around the block.

Anton rode this anachronism everywhere around town. He never walked, except on the hiking trails. He laid it down anywhere and everywhere, just got off and dropped it at his feet. He never secured it with a lock, and no one ever stole it, not that it would have been much of a prize. He rode without a helmet, in good weather and bad, and in whatever clothes he happened to have on. His wide pant cuffs were snared with the horseshoe clips above his only pair of shoes. They reminded me of dance shoes—a soft, smooth leather, black as licorice, that looked as if it had been moulded around his feet.

3.THE LOST VERMEERS

It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration, just as it left the painter's studio! And what a picture!…[W]e have here a—I am inclined to say—
the
masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft…

—Abraham Bredius, “A New Vermeer”

I
'd met Anton Aalders
at the Paris Alliance française. I was there on a study term to resuscitate my French—they needed someone in the Archives with at least a modicum of the language—and Anton, who already spoke quite decent French, was there, he said, simply to meet women and have fun. I could have gone to Quebec City or Ottawa for free, but I surprised myself by choosing Paris and paying half the cost. It was the fall of 1980, two years before Elaine and I were married.

Our cheerful little multicultural group conversed daily in cheerless classrooms in our shaky, multi-accented French, mostly about the practicalities and difficulties of living in Paris, not the least of which was the uni-accented antagonism displayed toward us by Parisians offended by our innocent torturing of their language. But we were told not to take it personally, for it was even directed at their own countrymen from the provinces.

By noontime, however, we would all be tired of conversing, Anton included, and he and I were only too glad to leave the talking to his friend from Turkey, whom he met frequently at a bistro for lunch, and who was almost pathologically talkative. Perfectly fluent in both French and English, he switched quickly and frequently between the two, sometimes in mid-sentence. Both his appearance and his name, an ugly- and fierce-sounding name, at least in its English associations, belied the fact that he was one of the warmest and most generous souls I'd ever met, single-handedly cleansing all the ethnic prejudices that had accumulated in my mind, in the racial memory of the isolated tribe from which I'd sprung, and attached themselves like limpets to that fierce-sounding word “Turk.”

Ogre Arsol, from Ankara, was studying law at the Sorbonne, where his brother, father, and grandfather had studied before him. In the afternoons, he gave us an insider's look at Montmartre and Montparnasse, the Sorbonne, and the Île Saint-Louis, where he had a little flat that had been in his family for over a hundred years. Silkscreen protest posters lined the walls, with slogans from
les événements
of May 1968—
Debut d'une lutte prolongée
—when student protests had shut down the entire city and three million people, including workers, took to the streets. His brother, whom he called
un soixante-huitard,
had been at the Sorbonne at the time. Students had occupied the university, the police had moved in and arrested hundreds of them, and the Sorbonne had been closed for the first time in its seven-hundred-year history. Though most of the law students were notoriously conservative, Ogre said, and had not joined the protesters until the very end, when they moved to the streets, his brother was among the first on the barricades.
Voici votre scrutin—
“Here is your ballot” (a cobblestone!)—as another poster read. When the demonstrations ended, Ogre said, the cobblestone streets in the Latin Quarter were paved over.

In the evenings, we hung out in what he called the “Triangle.” In its corners were the Café de Flore, the Café Les Deux Magots, and the Brasserie Lipp. For the price of a coffee, though not cheap, we could sit for hours watching jugglers, fire-eaters, flugelhorn players, whole theatre companies and circuses, but mostly the other people in the cafés. These three cafés, Ogre told us, had been there for over a hundred years, mythical second homes to Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Joyce, Wilde, and Hemingway. Sartre was still active in 1968, Ogre said, and de Gaulle had considered arresting him for encouraging the protesters.

It didn't matter to us that we were latecomers, sitting elbow to elbow with tourists instead of writers and philosophers. We sat around our closely guarded table and gawked shamelessly and spouted that old café philosophy as if it were the 1920s or the 1940s.

Throughout the fall, as his contribution to the guided tours, Anton showed us every Dutch painting there was in Paris and introduced us to the Dutch Golden Age, his speciality. Though Anton had a degree in art history and seemed to be more enthusiastic about art than anything else, his ten-year art history career, he said, was over. He was now working as a truck driver, a “cheese driver,” back in Holland. He'd taken the odd truck-driving job during his art history career and discovered that this work was more to his liking.

But he would go on to have other careers: “freelance archivism,” as he described the work, specializing in the depiction of documents in art; town planning, which involved the “esthetic reconstruction” of urban heritage areas; and freelance theorist, specializing in the deconstruction of just about everything. As he said himself: it was not a career he was searching for, but a calling.

He took us to the Louvre, the Pompidou Centre, the Jeu de Palme, and to many obscure, out-of-the-way private galleries that housed priceless paintings and sculptures. At one of them I was startled by a life-size Giacometti sculpture installed in the foyer so that the stark emaciated figure pointed right in your face as you came in the door. It was like encountering some high-minded philosophical concept in the flesh—Sartre's “bad faith,” perhaps—which we thought we had left safely behind in the cafés.

Anton's favourite gallery was La Galerie des Étrangers, which specialized in forgeries. By a great coincidence that fall, or perhaps Anton had come to Paris for that very reason, it had an exhibition of work by Han van Meegeren, the most successful art forger of modern times, perhaps of all time. All eleven of his “Vermeers” were on display, painted between 1932 and 1945. (I have a copy of the catalogue in my files.) They had been gathered from collections all over Holland, and one in particular,
The Young Christ Teaching in the Temple
, painted in prison in the summer of 1945,
from as far away as Johannesburg. It was the first time all the pictures had been displayed in one place since they were used as evidence at his trial in the fall of 1947. He'd been arrested in May 1945, but it had taken more than two years to investigate the case.

Van Meegeren was charged with collaborating with the Germans, who had occupied Holland during the Second World War, because another of his Vermeers,
The Adulterous Woman
, along with a bill of sale with both his and Hermann Goering's name on it, had been found in a salt mine near Salzburg, along with almost seven thousand other works of art, most of which had been looted. To avoid the charge of collaboration—selling a national treasure to the enemy—he had confessed to the lesser crime of forgery. To defend himself, he offered to paint another Vermeer to prove that he could do it. So, in the summer of 1945, before police witnesses, van Meegeren painted the last of his Vermeers,
The Young Christ Teaching in the Temple
. It took him two months to complete it, and, as Anton pointed out to me years later, when he came to visit, the production of this painting coincided with his conception. The coincidence seemed to have great symbolic significance for him.

In the spring of 1945, Anton's father, a Newfoundlander who had joined the Canadian Army, and thousands of other (mainly Canadian) soldiers, had liberated Holland and then spent the following months roaming the streets and towns of the country fathering over seven thousand so-called illegitimate children—“black tulips,” as the Dutch referred to them—while they waited for ships to take them home.

Was it also a coincidence, Anton wondered, that about the same number of Canadian soldiers had lost their lives in the struggle to liberate his country? And that he had been born in Deventer, van Meegeren's hometown, and, like van Meegeren, had studied art at Delft, Vermeer's city, and at The Hague Academy? In The Hague, for the first time, he had seen two of van Meegeren's Vermeers, by then in the state collection, one of which was the painting sold to Goering,
The Adulterous Woman
.

Anton went on to study van Meegeren's life and work. An artist
manqué
, if ever there was one, van Meegeren had tried to get back at the art establishment, who, he claimed at the trial, had “systematically and maliciously damaged him.” He developed a technique so brilliant that it fooled Holland's foremost art expert, Abraham Bredius, who called
The Supper at Emmaus
, regarded as van Meegeren's best forgery, Vermeer's lost masterpiece.
Other so-called art experts agreed. Almost ten years after van Meegeren's trial, in fact, a French Vermeer expert insisted that this painting and another one were genuine Vermeers, despite irrefutable scientific evidence to the contrary submitted by a commission of experts appointed by the court.

Anton had become obsessed with the whole idea of forgeries. He wrote his art history thesis on van Meegeren and his counterfeit “lost Vermeers,” exploring the complex esthetic question of the nature of the esthetic pleasure one derives from fakes. If we believe a forgery to be a genuine painting, he asked—in this case, only a perfect copy of the painter's unique style, not of any actual painting—is the quality of our esthetic pleasure inferior to that which we would get from viewing the real thing? A complicated esthetic and philosophical question to be sure.

I had spent a lot of time in Anton's company, but it wasn't until almost the end of term that I felt I was really getting to know him—beginning on December 9, 1980, just after twelve o'clock, to be exact. He was sitting out in the little park-courtyard of the Alliance française when I came out the front door. A dozen or so white, wrought-iron tables and chairs were filled with students eating their lunches and talking in what seemed a very self-conscious, animated way, as if they were imitating
les Français
. Anton was sitting alone, however, reading a newspaper. I went up to his table and intoned, in my own self-conscious but inanimate way: “Excusez-moi, monsieur, cette chaise, c'est occupé?” He responded mutely, barely moved his head, but I laid my clipboard and books on the tiny table, my apple juice, ham-and-cheese baguette, and quietly sat down.

Anton wasn't eating anything, I could hardly see his face, but when he laid the newspaper down I saw that there were tears in his eyes. Then he closed them and began to hum, to moan, began to sing—a dirge, soft and low—tapping his foot on the cobblestones, rapping his thumb on the table, looking as if he were in a trance, immobilized, repeating the same words over and over: “Moeder, you had me, but I never had you. Vader, you left me, but I never left you.”

Then he opened his eyes and looked at me, but he wasn't seeing me. Tears were now running down his face. He got up suddenly, said “Désolé,” and ran out through the large stone gate. I turned over the newspaper, the
International Herald Tribune
, and read the stark headline: “John Lennon Shot.”

I've found the card that Anton sent me the next Christmas, with a note and a small photograph enclosed. It's the only correspondence from him that I can remember. As I said, I never throw anything away. In the photo, he is standing by the roadside with his bicycle. One hand rests on the handlebars, the other on his hip. He is wearing a blue plaid shirt, jeans, and his customary black shoes. Except for his traveller's beard and the camping gear on the back of the bike, he looks as if he's just out for a Sunday cycle, not a grueling trip across Europe. He's wearing a broad white headband with black letters, and a red spot on the front that looks like a wound. Directly behind him is a cluster of old stone buildings, one with a bell tower and a terracotta roof. It looks like a monastery, half-hidden in a grove of thick green trees. Above the bell tower in the near distance are undulating pale brown hills, and beyond them a range of shadowy blue mountains.