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 Yo
ung 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.
The note reads: “The thing I am wearing on my head is a gift from a Japanese friend I meet in Spain. Two Japanese girls I meet in Bremen told me that the letters mean, ‘I will do my best,’ and that is what I did this summer coming up through Europe. I hope that I will some time see you again.”
4. DR. WINS
You can’t tell the mind of a gull.
—Newfoundland proverb
Anton doesn’t seem to sleep at all. When I got up tonight to use the bathroom, which I seem to do more and more these days, his light was on again and he was reading and smoking. Still, he doesn’t sleep in—he is always up before I am—and never naps. But I fear he’ll burn both of us to death in our beds.
I have a great fear of fire, a childhood trauma, though the tragedy was another family’s and not my own. When I was ten years old, I watched our neighbour, Mrs. Foley, being restrained by two men twice her size, as she watched her two children, a four- and five-year-old, burn to death in her neighbour’s house. Mrs. Murphy’s darling boy, my friend Rodney, a veritable Harry Houdini at ten, who already in his short life had escaped death by drowning and electrocution, had poured a container of white gas into the wood stove, turning the kitchen into an instant inferno. The gas, a solvent, was being used by his father in renovating their bathroom, and had been stored under the kitchen sink. The house had literally exploded in flames.
Mrs. Foley had left her children with Mrs. Murphy while she walked down the road to the grocery store. It was a cool and windy afternoon in late August. Fall was already in the air, as was talk of another school year. Mrs. Murphy had just lit the stove for supper, and was out in the garden taking her sheets off the line when she heard the noise and saw the smoke and fire. She called the volunteer fire department from Mrs. Foley’s, but they were slow in responding. Not that haste would have mattered, in any case.
Rodney had miraculously escaped through the basement door, just as he had, the previous summer, miraculously avoided drowning after climbing and falling from the flagpole at the stern of the boat that was taking him to visit his grandmother on Fogo Island. “Landed on the back of a bluefin and he dropped me off on the beach,” Rodney used to say, when, years after the event, people were still asking him about it. Or, “Fucked a mermaid and she carried me ashore,” and other scurrilous variations. The truth was that he was a good swimmer, and a speedboat crossing right behind the ferry, driven perhaps by one of the same reckless kind as himself, had seen him fall and quickly pulled him out of the water.
On Fogo Island, Rodney had also survived an industrial-strength jolt of electricity. He climbed over a ten-foot-high chain-link fence to get inside the compound of an electrical substation, then up a sixty-foot steel tower, from the top of which an electrical charge hurled him unhurt to the cushiony moss below. In a voice quivering with gratitude and disbelief, Mrs. Murphy described these escapes to my mother. Rodney had lived nine years up to that point, every one of them a life, and now, at ten, had one up on the cat.
Though we were the same age, I wasn’t allowed to play “alone with Rodney,” as my mother anxiously put it. I didn’t really mind, for he was a tough little bugger, cruel and tough, with that stereotypical pretty-boy disguise: golden curls like a l
aurel wreath crowning a blue-eyed, small-boned face. But he would knock the wind out of you or punch you in the kidneys without any provocation whatsoever, or, if you did provoke him, during a baseball game, for example, with something as impersonal as a home run, he would kick you in the shins with a workboot as you rounded the bases, then stomp on your foot for good measure in the next inning when he went around. Alone with Rodney, I might have been left behind and burned to a crisp like Mrs. Foley’s children, while he scravelled like a rat out the basement door.
I slept in my mother’s bedroom that night—my father had been dead four years—with what I imagined was the smell of burned flesh in the room. I could still see Mrs. Foley struggling and shouting, screaming out the names of her children. She was sure she could see their faces in the windows of the burning house. For months I would run past that black ruin after dark, the brick chimney still standing in the middle like a tombstone. Her terror is now set like an alarm in my bones, though as a child, of course, I couldn’t even have imagined the intensity of it. It’s just as hard to imagine for a childless man.
Even now, lying awake late at night, I sometimes can smell smoke even when there isn’t any. But on the third night of Anton’s stay, the smoke was real, and it had sent me running to his room and banging on the door. I opened it before he had a chance to answer, only to find him stretched out on the bed in his undershorts, reading a book and smoking a pipe, a nightly routine he was not to break for the entire nine months of his stay.
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