The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  “How are you feeling today, Mr. Lowe?” he says to me. He has been talking to me like this since he was six, like an insincerely empathetic adult, but he only sounds insincere because he isn’t an adult. He is a four-foot-ten, ninety-pound preteen dressed in oversized clothes and costume jewelry who requires a willing suspension of disbelief, and I don’t know whether the grey hair helps or not.

  Mr. Lowe is feeling a bit low, a bit gloomy, a bit melancholy, Conrad, I think of saying. To tell the truth, I feel the dreaded longing coming on.

  At the breakfast table this morning, Anton told me, apropos of what I can’t recall, that there is an asteroid called Eros, discovered about a hundred years ago, which at a certain point in its orbit comes closer to the earth than any celestial body except the moon. Is there anything he doesn’t know? I wonder. Or does he just make these things up? Perhaps he also told me, and I missed it, that Eros is at that very point in its orbit right now. That might be the reason I’m feeling this way.

  Yes, to tell the truth, I fear if Conrad were Elaine standing there in front of me now, having had second thoughts—no, not about us, but about her bread pans or some other forsaken material thing—

  I would put my arms around her and welcome her home. I would lead her right upstairs to our old bedroom and remove her clothes, get under the goose-down duvet and curl up together in a comforting, dual fetal position in semi-sleep, my hands around her breasts and my Sunday stubble gently massaging her back, her most erogenous zone, as I only indirectly found out. We would make love, drift away, awake, make love again, stay in bed the rest of this dark dreary day, the rest of this dark and dreary month, with Anton van Eros performing DJ duties on the turntable downstairs. Slowly working his way through my vinyl—no agitating classical-jazz crossover music, but a long-chain medley of lulling andantes and adagios—he would lull and lead us through the whole month of December: the days getting shorter and colder; the shadows lengthening; the sun sinking lower and lower in the sky, barely registering on the bedroom blinds; the tiresome Christmas shopping passing us by. On, on, through the twelve days of Christmas, the shadow on my face lengthening into a ticklish Father Christmas beard.

  After I find the bread pans and bring them to the door, over Conrad’s glistening, grey head, I see Miranda, in a hooded yellow raincoat in her driveway across the street, struggling to remove a large white box from the trunk of her car. It looks like a whole trunkful of white boxes, in fact, but surely not Christmas gifts just yet. Young Conrad the Empathetic turns his head to see what I’m staring at just as Miranda drops the box, and he rushes to the rescue, arms and bread pans swinging. The bottom-half of the box—the top is still in her hands—has hit the car bumper and tipped over, spilling bright oranges out into the dark December afternoon, like magic Halloween balls out of a magician’s black hat. They roll slowly down her driveway, into the gutter and on down the street. Conrad chases after them, picks them up and puts them in the bread pans he’s laid on the sidewalk.

  I put on my raincoat and walk across the street to help, but Miranda and Conrad have already collected most of the oranges. I hand her two more oranges and she lays them in the open box on top of several other boxes in the trunk. Fundraising fruit, I realize now, grapefruit and oranges from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, sold only on Sundays. She buys them a few weeks before Christmas every year to make fruit baskets for gifts, even one for me.

  I spot one last orange beneath the Japanese hedge, and when I pick it up and hand it to her, her voice rings with the single word honeybells. It sounds like some kind of coded message. I am struck, disturbed, but surely not for the first time, by the thought of just how beautiful she is, her face glowing like a round pale translucent fruit, not a honeybell but a honeydew, beneath the black branches of the trees in the rain, a Madonna in a hooded yellow cloak by one of our modern-day Madonnieri. Then, as the orange moves from my hand to hers, it becomes the apple handed to me last week at the supermarket checkout by a deathly pale young woman in a black coat, which fell to just inches above a pair of ankle-high red sneakers with yellow stars. She had streaked hair, orange and green, and silvery rings, pins, and studs in every part of her face except her ears: her eyebrows, nose, cheeks, lips, and between her lips—in her tongue. I was buying a half-dozen apples, three different kinds, which I like to keep in my desk at work, and when the sales clerk activated the counter conveyer belt, one of them, a pale yellow Golden Delicious, rolled out of its thin open plastic bag onto the floor.

  “Eve,” I said, “thank you,” as she courteously picked the apple up off the floor and handed it to me. I thought it was a good joke on the spur of the moment, but perhaps not, now that I think of it, for I was easily old enough to be her father. She didn’t smile or say a word, though her mouth was open and her pierced tongue—a small silver dagger or barbell—was visible between her lips and teeth. Her stern expression, however, may not have been intended for me. Her face, topped by the electric frizz of her hair, looked as if it were wired into a permanent, steely-eyed frown.

  Conrad has carried the four boxes of fruit, two at a time, into the house and said his goodbyes.

  “I think we got all of them,” I say to Miranda, but she is distracted now, smiling and looking past me as if I’m not even there, her small hand waving like an activated compass needle toward my house. I turn to see Anton standing in the window and waving back. I am struck then by a second thought, as certain as the first, as disturbing as the first, though in a very different way. This one is not exactly an epiphany, either, just something that has been in the back of my mind all along, and has now moved forward. Anton and Miranda have become lovers. Marooned in this magnetic field and feeling, simultaneously, like some invisible but yet conspicuous obstacle to attraction, to desire, I think, congestedly: of course, of course, stupid, stupid me, too stupid, as they say, to come in out of the rain.

  When I do come in out of it—“the strange English tongue,” as Anton sometimes refers to it, reflecting exactly how I feel—Anton has settled into his seat in a coach on “The Transcontinental,” an imaginary train on a musical journey from cbc Radio-Lotus Land to the fatherlands, motherlands, and cultural capitals of Old Europe: Vienna, Prague, Salzburg, Leipzig, Paris, Moscow, Rome, Berlin. Our host-cum-conductor, a European émigré to Canada, seems afflicted by a permanent homesickness, and one that goes far beyond mere nostalgia and geography. It seems to have afflicted Anton as well, and he takes this trip every Sunday without fail. Indeed, he has become more than enamoured of this Old World voice; he is bewitched, entranced, hypnotized. It has an incantatory quality and the tone of a lament—a sweet lament, an uplifting elegy, a soothing reverie. It is a journey not just out of place but out of time.

  Like the mythical Odysseus, our genial conductor has strayed far from his fatherland and stayed a long time in the province of the Lotus-Eaters, but, like Odysseus again, he has resisted eating the fruit of the lotus, and is not afflicted by a dreamy forgetfulness. On the contrary, he wants to return to his native land, and he wants to take us time-travellers with him. It is a dreamy remembrance that haunts him, and, like Miles Harnett, he has not forgotten a single thing.

  He introduces today’s special passenger, Fritz Wunderlich, “sweetest of the German tenors,” almost a wunderkind, in fact, who, he says, was very good at songs expressing “a certain kind of longing.” I listen attentively, curious to find out just what kind of longing this might be. But before Herr Wunderlich has a chance to sing, our host describes his tragic end—at thirty-six, on the night of September 17, 1966, while staying with a friend in Heidelberg. He had been unable to sleep, full of that certain kind of longing, perhaps, and got up to get a book from the library. He neglected to tie up the laces of his shoes, trod on one of them, fell forward, grabbed the handrail rope on the stone stairway to catch himself, but it came away from the wall and he fell headfirst down the stairs and onto the flagstone floor below. Fritz’s first song expressed
a longing so intense he might have been yearning for his earthly home, das Vaterland, from beyond the grave.

  We are somewhere in Germany, a nation that had given excessive love of fatherland—though love, in this case, must be the wrong word—a bad name. “A small town,” our conductor informs us (Heidelberg, perhaps), “not much to see: a picture gallery, a small museum, half a palace, and then you are through with the entire thing and can enjoy yourself.” His solemn, lugubrious voice belies a dry, or “d-wry,” sense of humour, as Anton unintentionally but appropriately pronounces it. For our host, enjoying yourself means avoiding the tourist sights as much as possible and spending your days and nights at concerts and recitals, with before-and-after visits to cafés and restaurants. He can recite by heart entire concert programs and café menus from another lifetime, another century, another age.

  With Smetana’s Ma Vlast, “My Fatherland,” blasting a path before us, and our conductor philosophizing endearingly en route, we roll on into Czechoslovakia, his fatherland as well, but one which he and his Jewish family had to abandon in 1939 when the Germans occupied it. We move through his beloved Bohemia, once “the conservatory of Europe,” through its meadows and groves, up Die Moldau, with a pit stop in Prague, his birthplace seventy-five years ago. We press on through Poland, home of “the Pole”—Chopin, I assume he means—and on toward today’s final destination, Moscow, or Moskva, as he pronounces it. He talks about the old kingdoms, the old empires, the old regimes, the old fatherlands, the nationalist composers of Russia and Bohemia who changed the face of nineteenth-century music.

  “Isn’t it strange,” he says, “that Germany never had a nationalist composer. Wagner, you say? An aberration.”

  This is said without malice, without rancour, without anger or bitterness of any kind.

  “As if they needed one,” Anton retorts. He has not forgiven them for occupying his vaderland for five full years before he was born, nor has he forgiven his countrymen for not really resisting the invaders. There were over one hundred thousand active collaborators, he claims, one for every murdered Jew, but only twenty-five thousand active resisters.

  Anton, for his part, said he had always actively resisted the realization, philosophically troubling for him, that if the Germans hadn’t been occupying his country and carrying out their unforgivable deeds, the heroic Canadians, his Newfoundland father among them, never would have come to liberate it, and he never would have been born. He said he sometimes wished he had never been born, had never been liberated from non-being, from nothingness, by the heroic father—the forsaking, deserting, heroic father.

  Anton’s head is cocked as if in mock imitation of the rca dog listening to His Master’s Voice.

  “The voice of the Wandering Jew,” he says sadly. “The whole culture of tired old Europe in it.”

  But it is not only the voice of the Wandering Jew, the Old World, that I hear, though I can see why Anton is so fascinated with that. He is a weary, wandering European himself, and though not a Jew, he seems to carry more than his share of his nation’s guilt over his murdered countrymen. Far beyond that, though, I hear another, more ancient voice—the voice of the wandering soul, the orphaned soul, the mythical wayfaring stranger, the soul that has never had a fatherland, the voice of a spiritual diaspora that has been wandering since the dawn of time.

  And why, I ask myself, does this émigré to the Lotus Land of the New World keep returning to the cultural capitals of the Old? To look for what? Much more than music, it seems. The world-weary, all-knowing voice—an intimate, inviting, smiling voice—tells me that his is a sacred mission of some sort. What has he discovered? What does he have to tell us? What is he smiling about? You can almost hear it—a triumphant smile, a last laugh.

  Is it that the music, the art, of his homeland, his spiritual homeland, all the nobler impulses of the human spirit—for him the glorious music, especially—have outlived, and will outlive, all the autocrats, kings, czars, and führers; the gulags and concentration camps; the purges, cleansings, genocides, and holocausts; all the regimes, empires, and Reichs—even the one that tried to impose a final solution on his people?

  And maybe even the murderers themselves were aware of this, diligently collecting art and consoling themselves with music while going about their grisly business.

  “Let me tell you a story,” our host says, as the third movement of Ma Vlast, “From Bohemia’s Meadows and Groves,” canters to a close. “A very short story. The entire tale we’ll perhaps relate at another time. When Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, who created the Nazi Gestapo, the secret police, was awaiting trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity, in Nuremberg in the fall of 1945, he learned that he’d been the victim of an outrageous swindle.”

  “Ha!” says Anton, anticipating what is coming.

  “The Nazis, you see, didn’t steal everything; they quite generously paid for some of the priceless art they hoarded. In this case, however, they made a small mistake, and in 1942 Herr Goering paid the greatest art forger in history, Han van Meegeren, 1,650,000 guilders for a fake Vermeer, a ‘Vermeergeren,’ as it was called. That’s over a million Canadian dollars, a stupendous sum of money for that time. The painting, The Adulterous Woman, was found in Goering’s house at the end of the war, along with the bill of sale, with both Goering’s and van Meegeren’s names on it.”

  “Not his house,” Anton says, “in a salt mine.”

  “When Goering first learned that his priceless treasure was a fake, that he had been the victim of a criminal act, this is what one of his jailers reported: ‘At that moment he looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world.’”

  “Ha, ha,” Anton says. “Evil in the world.” He pauses, his eyes widening, lost in thought. “In Deventer,” he continues, “where we come from, van Meegeren and me, outside the Wagg Museum there is a big cauldron hanging from the wall. Not for boiling witches, like you would think when you first see it, but forgers, counterfeiters, who spoil our art, our money. That might tell you something about us. But I think we would boil Goering in there before van Meegeren if we got our hands on him. He was sent to death at Nuremberg, but he killed himself in his cell. Van Meegeren got a year in prison, but in two months died of heart failure in his cell.”

  I almost died in my cell as well. Just before Christmas, I was waylaid by a “mutating virus,” which robbed me of all health and strength, kept me captive for over a week. This was Anton’s diagnosis; he’s an authority on viruses along with everything else. First came tropical fevers and arctic chills, then hammering headaches, blocked sinuses and ears, mutants (if such they were) with razor blades at work on my throat, and finally what Anton called a “gravedigger’s cough.” I never did get out to see Hubert’s workshop, or my orphaned nieces, Deirdre and Terese.

  One of Anton’s old girlfriends had caught a virus from a parrot. She also had alternating fevers and chills, then came down with viral pneumonia, which he was worrying me about. There were no parrots of my acquaintance in the immediate neighbourhood, but Anton had met a painter with a parrot at an art gallery café three weeks ago. His girlfriend’s parrot didn’t actually have pneumonia, he said, but a contagious viral disease called psittacosis, which turns into pneumonia when transmitted to human beings.

  Dr. Facey arched his eyebrows and stretched his face with both hands when I mentioned Anton’s diagnosis, but reserved comment. He is a taciturn man and prefers action, which usually involves writing a prescription. He wrote one for a round of antibiotics, while at the same time saying that I probably did have a virus, so the medication wouldn’t do me much good. It was worse than he thought. I had an allergic reaction: broke out in a rash all over my body. He put me on a different antibiotic, which seems to be working, though I’m so tired from coughing some days I can hardly move.

  Anton spent all of Christmas and New Year’s at Miranda’s, though they came over to check on m
e almost every day. Throughout it all I was able to eat and drink, if not be merry. No nausea or violent discharges of any kind. They brought me broth and brandy, delicate Christmas cookies with cheery sprinkles, several plates of cold turkey and bowls of turkey soup (they’d cooked a twenty-pounder for two), and carafe-thermoses of Japanese green tea. Very high in antioxidants, Anton said.

  Elaine, of course, did not appear on my doorstep, looking for her bread pans or anything else. There had been talk, in the first few months or so after she left, of retrieving her piano and her car, but nothing ever came of it.

  In this sparsely furnished music room-cum-dining room, which overlooks the back garden, the soundboard of the piano resonates when I cough. “The soul of the instrument,” the piano tuner used to say. The sound seems to echo inside my head—a hollow distant voice, like someone moaning, some kindred spirit left to be my companion. It fills the silence in this room and the spaces between my thoughts. Elaine used to play the piano every day, but she had given it up long before she left. Anton tinkles with it now and then—he said he’s had no formal training—just variations of the same tune, in a minor key, dark arpeggiated chords, broken chords, the same ones played with both the left and right hand.

  It is twelve-thirty on a stormy, freezing Saturday night. The back garden is a wasteland of snow and ice—wave-banks of snow, crests frozen in mid-air. A bitter wind is blowing right through the house. Anton and Miranda are snuggled up in bed now, no doubt, the only comfort on a night like this. Oh, how our warders warned us against the pleasures of the flesh, the sins of the skin, even bad thoughts, when we were young and thoughtless and had no need of the touch of another’s hands to comfort us. There is no hunger like the desire for another’s touch, no comfort like the closeness of flesh, the warmth and softness of skin. I feel this even more now that the power of the intellectual pleasures has diminished. I’m not talking about lust—or even love. Perhaps I mean loss, regret, grief. Forgive me, I’m weak, still feeling feverish. Is there such a thing as viral longing? Anton would know, for sure. Can longing kill? Heart trouble, heart failure of a different kind.