The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  “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.

  “How was it?” I asked.

  “Very goot,” he said emphatically, as if he were deliberately mimicking himself. Then he refilled his coffee cup and picked up the thread of his story.

  “Jule had been sent to Deventer, too, to avoid scandal, but of course everybody knew. Everyone in Holland knew about bastards. Black tulips they called us behind our backs—they were silent on the subject, very discreet. It was probably no different anywhere else. We Dutch may be famous for our tolerance, but not so famous perhaps for our tolerance of bastards. Catholic or Protestant, it was all the same. Bastardy was a sin, a stigma, a scar, a big secret that everyone knew but you. Like Kafka’s Joseph K., I was guilty of something, but I didn’t know what. They might as well have put yellow stars on our clothes like they did with the Jews. Perhaps orange stars. After the war, the women who slept with German soldiers—some had Nazi bastards!—were put on display in the public squares. Their heads were shaved and painted orange. Jule said they might as well have done that to her. She said my father might just as well have been a Nazi. If you’d been a Nazi baby, she said to me, I’m sure it wouldn’t have been much worse. I would make her laugh with my Anton Mussert salute.

  “Sieg Heil!” he shouted, and his arm shot out, startling me and all the other patrons. He turned his head toward them and smiled. “Just joking,” he said.

  “Yes,” he continued, “perhaps for the moeders it was worse. Black tulips were the flowers of disgrace and shame. They were not displayed at home in a vase. They were hid away, sent away to homes and convents, to grandmothers, aunts and uncles. In the convents they gave birth with their faces behind screens so they never saw their babies. They were quickly snatched away.

  “Jule was fourteen when the Germans invaded, nineteen when they were driven out, when she met my father. Hail, the prince, the conquering hero! He came on a tank bedecked with flowers, on a glorious morning in May. When the Canadian soldiers entered our cities, our starving crazy people poured out to greet them. Over three hundred thousand people in hiding. The carillon played ‘O Canada.’ No one had heard church bells for years. Jule said she saw him on that very first morning. She threw her bouquet to him over the heads of the crowd—not tulips, but lilacs, her favourite flowers, which forever after for her had the scent of sadness. But it was late summer before she saw him again, if for sure it was the same man. Everyone was delirious in those first few days.

  “During the May Day celebrations last spring, the fiftieth anniversary of the Liberation, when the Canadian soldiers marched through the streets of Amsterdam, one of them turned and laughed at a woman carrying a sign saying, ‘Are you—?’ I forget the name. ‘Are you my father?’ He laughed and pointed to the man behind him. Some of them think it’s a joke. I wanted to grab him by the collar, but he was a grey-haired old man, a smirking old man with medals on his chest, being honoured by my countrymen. For them, Canadian soldiers are heroes, salt of the earth. They laid wreaths on the grave of the Unknown Soldier. The Unknown Soldier has a different meaning for me, for the thousands of us left behind. We were abandoned, rejected by our fathers, and most of them knew they had abandoned us.

  “Of course, you can imagine what it was like, what a time and place for sowing wild oats, as they say. I would have sowed wild oats myself. The soldiers entered a country empty of men. They were sent to labour camps—some women, too—the Jews to concentration camps. The young girls climbed on top of the tanks, kissing and embracing the soldiers, giving them flowers, as they made their victory ride into the liberated cities. They were expected since September, when the south of Holland was freed, but they were stopped at the Arnhem bridge, couldn’t get across the last river.”

  “Wasn’t there a movie about that?” I asked, and it struck me as a trite, unfeeling question as soon as I had asked it, as if the mere existence of some Hollywood spectacular could somehow compensate for all that pain.

  “A Bridge Too Far may be the one you mean,” he said. “But there was a better one made at Arnhem right after the war, with real soldiers from the Arnhem battle in it. Three hundred thousand of our people died in the war, a third of them Jews. Some of Jule’s friends were Jews. They all died, every one of them, more than two-thirds of all Dutch Jews. Anne Frank was only the famous one. Amsterdam was called ‘Jerusalem of the North.’ There were no ghettos. The Jews were part and parcel, as you say, of our society. We are a country of merchants, after all. And Jews, of course, are very good merchants, the soul of business, some people say. But this is anti-Semitic, no?

  “Yah…we admire our merchants more than our artists, though that is not how we are seen to be. But the poor painter shivering in his garret is a fact. There is the well-
known drawing by Pieter Bloot. We were taken to see it at the British Museum when we did our grand art history tour. And when do you think this work was done? Why, in 1640, at the height of our Golden Age, in the midst of what someone called our “embarrassment of riches,” cultural riches. The poverty of our artists is more embarrassing for me, and the wealth of our merchants. Poverty for the Dutchman is not a virtue. The riches we admire most are money, gold, filthy florins. We all know now what Van Gogh’s paintings are worth. In 1990, his Dr. Gachet fetched the highest price ever paid for a painting, $82.5 million US. And what did he get for his paintings, two hundred and fifty years after Pieter Bloot? Nothing at all. No one would buy them.

  “The Golden Age was full of hungry painters, and not just unknown ones like Bloot. Even Rembrandt, our greatest, was bankrupt at the end of his life. He ended up an employee of his mistress, Hendrika, and his son, Titus, who were art dealers. Art dealers made a lot more than painters, who were only tradesmen, artisans. They were often the sons of masons and millers, cobblers and weavers, and earned the same wages, maybe even less.

  “Vermeer died bankrupt, too, in 1675, seven years after Rembrandt. He owed the baker over six hundred guilders. He made only two hundred guilders a year. Delftware painters made four times more. An art historian who searched records for the Golden Age in the archives of Delft, Vermeer’s city, painted a different View of Delft. He said the average price of a painting was seventeen guilders. Ordinary people were patrons. Everyone bought art because it was cheap, but not just for the art. Paintings were objects of exchange, speculation, a form of currency. Painters themselves could buy anything with them, and used them to pay the butcher and the baker.

  “In Bloot’s The Poor Painter Shivering in His Garret, not only the painter is shivering, but his wife and child, too. They all look wretched, cold, hungry, staring at him as he paints, wondering if the painting will sell. When Vermeer died at forty-three, he left a wife and eleven children. When Rembrandt died, all he owned was his clothes, his canvasses, his paints and brushes. The artist at the easel in Pieter Bloot’s picture looks just like Rembrandt van Rijn.”

  “Is that the actual title of the painting?” I asked.

  “The drawing, yes, The Poor Painter Shivering in His Garret. You can see it in The Story of Art, a very famous book, a very interesting book, by the Englishman Ernst Gombrich. As an art history student, I had to read it. It was already in twelve editions, and in Dutch and every other language, when I first read it twenty years ago. It begins, I remember—it made a big impression on me—‘There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.’ Art with a capital ‘A’ he calls a fetish.

  “Bloot’s drawing, I remember, is at the very end of the chapter on Dutch seventeenth-century art. But it’s strange. There is no reference to it in the book, no mention of it at all. It just hangs there, a small, black-and-white picture at the bottom of the page, like a footnote to art history for which there is no explanation. Why is it there? What does it mean? If there are only artists, what about Pieter Bloot and all the other poor painters shivering in the garrets of the Golden Age?

  “But that is art history for you,” he concluded—at least I thought he was concluding—as we were on our way out the door of Vincent’s café. “As you can see, it’s like any other history. The forgotten outnumber the ones we remember. And we forget a lot of other things, too. You have heard of tulpenwoede?

  “Tulip wood?”

  “No, no…not trees. Flowers…tulips…tulip fever. The Golden Age was more about gold than art. Tulip fever was gold fever, a Dutch gold rush. At the height of the Golden Age, people were more crazy for tulips than paintings, though they traded in paintings, too. Painting is a sort of currency among us, as someone said about your country’s fish. But they paid for tulips much, much more. The richest tulip, Semper Augustus, sold for five thousand florins, more than Vermeer earned his whole life. Sixteen hundred was the most Rembrandt got for a painting. Tulip trading was so intense, so crazy, through the whole country that the government put a stop to it.

  A decree was issued saying that fifty florins was the most anyone could charge for a tulip, any tulip. So tulpenwoede came to an end, just like that. But now there were hundreds of varieties, and fifty florins was still three times as much as the average price of a painting.”

  We went out through one door and in through another, the entrance to the video store next door. I don’t watch movies or TV much anymore; my mind wanders, looking for something to do. Anton is not a big fan, either, but he has a lot of time on his hands and sometimes rents a movie to fill it. He loves to browse in the video store, reading the empty sleeves on the shelves as closely as he reads covers in a bookstore. He is very discriminating, seems always to be searching for a certain thing, and can easily spend an hour or more trying to find it. More often than not, though, he comes away with nothing at all.

  “We’ll go,” he said softly, coming up behind me and putting his hand on my shoulder. I had stopped pretending to browse after about ten minutes and spent another ten looking out through the window at the snow swirling across the park and listening to the loud and over-solicitous young woman at the counter—Gemma, perhaps—helping her customers with their picks. Gemma’s Top Ten Picks were listed on a sheet of bristol board on the wall. Speaking as if from a script, she had the same lines for every customer’s question.

  “Oh, it’s bittersweet, one of those movies you either love or you don’t.” She always did. “Oh, it’s sooo good. I really loved it. I’ve seen it three times.”

  She called out to us as we were leaving. “Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked.

  “Yah, I think so,” Anton replied with an air of dubious certainty. Same question as the last time we were here, same puzzling answer. Leaving without it, even though he had found it.

  In the porch he stopped abruptly to read a poster on the door, a message for those who were scurrying home with their video treasures thinking that everything was right with the world. It transfixed him like an ominous crow against a bank of freshly fallen snow.

  “Lost Children/Les enfants disparu,” it said. Below this were two black-and-white, passport-like photos: one of a boy eight years old, born the same month and year as Anton, May 1946, who had disappeared in October 1954—lost, or dead, for more than forty years. The other photo was of the same boy as a fifty-year-old man, a computer-generated likeness, a computer-generated hope.

  “Verloren hoop,” Anton whispered, one of those Dutch phrases that sounded so close to English I thought I knew what it meant. Or was I just hearing the sound of a thought inside my head? There is no end to hope, forlorn or otherwise.

  I would come across this phrase again, not long after Anton left, in a new book on General Haig. (A devastating exposé. Miles, unfortunately, never got a chance to read it.) A historian discussing Haig’s part in the Battle of the Somme, and Beaumont-Hamel in particular, had used the phrases verloren hoop and les enfants perdus to refer to the “lost troop” of Royal Newfoundland Regiment volunteers, just children, really, over eight hundred of them, sent to their deaths in France by General Haig on the first of July 1916.

  He had examined and compared the war records in the archives of every country in the Commonwealth, as well as those in Washington, DC, and concluded that there had been a systematic cover-up and falsification of the records. Not only had Haig falsified the record of his own military career, he said, going so far as to rewrite, after the war, an already finely spun war diary, but the official historian himself, an old friend of Haig’s, had produced a multi-volume work, History of the Great War Based on Official Documents, that was also nothing but propaganda, fiction, and lies. He had altered original documents, extracted and destroyed others, documents that later might have revealed the cover-up.

  “One of the great archival scandals of the century,” declared a reviewer of this book in our own scholarly journal.
“The implications are extremely troubling,” he concluded.

  Double, double toil and trouble. Archive fever, twofold, it seems to me. (No need to call in Dr. Derrida.) The will to remember as strong as the will to forget.

  17. THE HILLS OF OLD WYOMING

  It is a well known fact that there is often more interesting

  history in the Songs of a country than in its formal political

  records and State documents.

  —Gerald S. Doyle, Old Time Songs and Poetry of Newfoundland

  I was back at the Dewey files again this morning. Another slow Saturday, knee-deep in January, but perhaps not the old-fashioned winter everyone was expecting. After a month of cold temperatures and constant snow, the weather has turned warm again. Old two-faced Janus has given us a springlike weekend, temperatures in the teens, and our two-faced colleague, taking advantage of the fine weather, perhaps, was off on another mental-health holiday.

  There was hardly a soul around, in fact, and without micro-manager Milton looking over my shoulder, I had time for a bit of leisurely reading. I became immersed in a paper on “the Doyle Songbook,” as most of us refer to it, which I was copying for the files. Two songs in particular, Otto Kelland’s “Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary’s” and Art Scammell’s “The Squid-jiggin Ground,” were the subject of the paper by folklorist Dr. Olaf Skinner, delivered at a recent Learneds Conference in St. John’s. It got me thinking about my father, who had worked for Gerald S. Doyle in the late forties and early fifties. Doyle was the legendary collector of Newfoundland folk songs and creator of the eponymous songbook, formally known as Old Time Songs and Poetry of Newfoundland.