The Pen Friend

by Ciaran Carson

  Then in 1944 Vogue, Brogue that is, make her their official war correspondent, they send her to France to cover the period after D-Day. She photographs Saint-Malo being bombed, and the rubble of the aftermath, tall chimneys standing alone giving off smoke from the burning remnants of their buildings at their feet. She’s the only woman war correspondent in Paris when it’s liberated, what must it have been like? you said. I used to put myself in her shoes, the long graceful avenues crowded with flags, girls, bicycles, kisses and wine, and around the corner sniping, a bursting grenade and a burning tank, the bullet-holes in the windows like jewels, the barbed wire strung like decorations in the boulevards, urchins playing in the wrecked German war machines. And the smell has changed, it used to be a combination of patchouli, urinals and the castor oil burned by motorcycles. Now it’s air and perfume wafting across a square or an avenue, and everywhere the dazzling girls, cycling, climbing up tank turrets – full floating skirts and tiny waistlines – the GIs gawping, they think their dreams of wild women in Paris have come true, the girls in high wedge-heeled platform shoes and pompadour hairstyles, blowing kisses everywhere. And whenever I’m in Paris I imagine I see it through Lee Miller’s eyes, I see photographs on every street, I think my eye is a camera, and I have only to blink to capture it, you said. Which one? I said. Which one? you said. Which eye? I said. This one, you said. And you winked at me with your amber-flecked eye.

  I was interrupted just now by the postman ringing the doorbell. This was not the letter post, which brings your postcards, and sometimes pens, if they’re in sufficiently small packages, but the parcel post, which comes later. The postman had a package for me to sign for, a substantial cardboard box typical of meticulously responsible eBay sellers, which contained, I knew from the sender’s New York address, just one pen. I signed for the package and brought into the kitchen, where I slit it open with a chef’s knife. Inside, cocooned in bubble-wrap surrounded by crumpled newspaper, was the pen, described by the eBay seller as a Conway Stewart Duro in Golden Pearl Basket Weave laminated plastic. The pattern is also known as Tiger’s Eye, but it’s very different to the Tiger’s Eye of the Onoto I used in an earlier letter. To be finicky about it, I knew in advance that this was not a Duro pen: from its eBay photograph I knew it to be a Conway Stewart 58, made in the early 1950s, and not, like a Duro, in the early 1940s: the seller had been misled by the fact that 58s usually come, as this one does, with a Duro nib. But 58 is clearly marked on the barrel. No matter: it is a beautiful pen, in near mint condition. The laminated body twinkles and glows with deep ambers and golden browns, like spiral-twist, translucent toffee, when I revolve it in the light. I filled it from a bottle of Conway Stewart black ink, tried it out by writing my name and address on a piece of scrap paper, and found that it wrote beautifully, with a confident wet firm line. So I’m laying down these words on the page with it now, delighting in the feel of a new instrument.

  I was about to throw the packaging in the bin when a headline word in the crumpled newspaper caught my eye: GUNMAN, it said. I smoothed it out on the kitchen table. CHURCH GUNMAN, it read in total, there must be more, I thought, and then I realised that this must be one half of a double-page spread; the other half was missing. The newspaper was the New York Post of 18th July 2005, last Monday. ‘Many cops rely on St Michael the Archangel, the patron saint of police officers, for protection, but Dominick Romano and his NYPD colleagues have also a back-up – their bullet-resistant vests. Romano was shot nine times in the back by a crazed gunman – and eight of the buckshot pellets were stopped by his bulletproof vest’, one paragraph read. And the story, which I pieced together from the newspaper account and a little research on the Internet, went more or less as follows.

  At 2 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, 17th July, a man wielding a spear and a tyre iron – or a sword, or a machete, according to other accounts – was seen attacking the statue of St Anne and the Virgin Mary outside the Roman Catholic church of Saints Joachim and Anne in Queens, New York. The police were called, by which time the man had hacked off the left arms of St Anne and the Virgin Mary, and was now firing at the head of St Anne with a shotgun. The statue was decapitated. As the two police officers, Dominick Romano and David Harris, attempted to apprehend him, he turned the shotgun on them. Romano was grazed on the head and eight pellets were embedded in the back of his bulletproof vest; Harris received five shots in the leg, and suffered a broken femur. A passer-by, Tyrone Murphy, who happened to be a registered nurse, struggled from his car – he was on crutches, following an automobile accident some weeks previously – and applied a tourniquet made from his own T-shirt to Harris’s leg, possibly saving his life. It transpired that the attacker was one Kevin Davey, otherwise known as ‘Gambit’, a 25-year-old New Yorker with a history of psychiatric problems. According to some, he held strong anti-immigration views and had got particularly worked up in the wake of the London underground terrorist bombings the week before. Davey was shot four times by the police officers, in the right arm, shoulder, ankle, and side, and was brought to the nearby Hospital of Mary Immaculate.

  His mother told reporters that he was just sick, a good kid with some mental problems. His brother Keith, however, said he understood ‘the logic involved’ in the attack on the police, whom he branded as ‘devilish’ and he spoke with contempt of the ‘white’ statue, which suggested that the Daveys were black, though at first I had presumed it to be an Irish name. It transpired that their father was a subway preacher who had issued a homemade DVD which included rants against the Bush administration, the police, and white people in general. The parishioners were particularly upset because the attack occurred on the first day of a Novena – nine days’ solemn prayer – to St Anne, who is specially revered as the mother of the Virgin Mary; St Joachim, the other dedicatee of the Queens church, is her father, and together they are a holy family, precursors of the Holy Family of Joseph and Mary and Jesus. A poignant photograph in the New York Post showed the parish priest, Monsignor Joseph Malagreca, cradling the decapitated head of St Anne, whose lips and jaw had been shot off. I have this head in my room, he said, I picked it up out of the bushes, and what am I supposed to do with it?

  As I read this bizarre account of modern iconoclasm I was reminded of the icon of the Holy Family – a Nativity scene – which I bought when I was with you in Paris, Nina. You remember? We had wandered into the Marais, which at that time was not the fashionable quarter it has recently become. Down a crooked alleyway we found an antique shop, or junk shop. A bell tinkled as we pushed open the door. The proprietor, an old man in his seventies or eighties, gloomily returned our ‘Bonjour, monsieur’. The place was crammed with the usual stuff, moth-eaten Persian rugs, brass kerosene lamps with etched glass chimneys, old tobacco tins, biscuit tins, rickety cane-backed chairs, kitchen implements, wooden printing blocks, scuffed leather-bound books. I lifted a rust-pocked enamel sign for Ricard pastis from a shelf and behind it I discovered the icon: a pocket-sized wooden panel some five inches by four, featuring the Holy Family and the Three Wise Men, done in dark ambers and blue-greens and blacks that seemed to glow in the dark shop interior, the Holy Infant at its centre swathed in a creamy white cocoon of supernatural light. The paint was wrinkled with age, its layers worn away in some areas to reveal the underlying smolt-grey and ochre ground, its three-dimensional quality palpable when I brushed it gently with my fingertips. It exuded mystery, reverence, antiquity. It’s beautiful, I whispered to you. But I hesitated to buy it; I felt there was something immoral in buying icons, pieces which had very probably been looted or stolen from those who held them dear for reasons which had little to do with our modern conceptions of art. And, as if to confirm my unease, the proprietor suddenly said, Not for sale. It is a personal thing, you know? And we began to make some small talk with him.

  When he discovered I was from Ireland, though, his attitude changed. Now his story was that he was waiting for the right person to buy it, he’d been waiting years. But most people, he sa
id, were tourists, they did not appreciate these things, they did not esteem their proper value, which was not monetary, it was not even artistic, but spiritual. And he knew the Irish to be a spiritual race. You are Catholic? he asked. I nodded and shrugged uncertainly. Of course he’s Catholic, you said. He brought me to Easter Sunday Mass in Saint-Eustache, and you waxed lyrical to the old man about the ceremony, the incense and the music, the shafts of sunlight falling through the gloom from the tall high windows. And you are not Catholic? he asked you. No, you said, but I’m thinking of becoming one, it’s such a beautiful religion. Such a true religion, I mean, because it is true to our feeling that there is a world beyond this one, it has the beauty of truth, you said. Yes, said the old man, you will be a Catholic, and you will marry this fine man, and your first child will be a son, and may the Holy Family look kindly on his birth. Alas, I never married myself, he said, and I have been waiting for this moment, for such a fine couple to discover this icon. And by now I was so implicated that I had to buy it, and I was happy to find an excuse to do so. The old man named a price: it did not seem exorbitant for something that was priceless, and I didn’t haggle. And when we examined it together in the light of day, its colours seemed to glow even more, with an undeniable authenticity, and we were proud of ourselves at having been the recipients of such a gift.

  After Paris you had to go to London for a few days; I went on to Belfast, and the next morning I wrapped the icon in a silk handkerchief, put it in my pocket, and brought it to Beringer for him to see. I never told you this until now. Without saying anything, I took off the silk handkerchief, and handed him the precious object. Mm, he said, and looked at it carefully. Very nice, very nice indeed, he said, and he took out his loupe and went over to the light of the window, and looked at it again, examining it in detail. Then he looked at the back, and at the front again. Yes, he said, lovely, masterly, I might say. Beautiful work. I was smiling proudly. But of course, he said, and he paused before delivering the blow, it’s a fake. The smile fell from my face. Oh, don’t be too hard on yourself, Mr Gabriel, it’s still a lovely piece of work. Whoever made this, he did everything right, proper techniques, done in the old style, well, except for a few little things. And he held the icon up. See the way the panel is convex? Yes, that’s because it was cut from an oak barrel-stave, I said. It was one of the things which had convinced me about it. Oak barrel-stave, correct, said Beringer, that’s what it is. But look at this, he said, and he showed me the back of the panel. What? I said. Well, said Beringer, if you look at the saw-cuts, they’ve been made with a modern power-saw, a circular saw, and they didn’t have saws like this in when, oh, 1700 or so, whenever this might have been made, were it the genuine article. And here’s another thing. He turned the panel over to show the image. See this strip of paint running around the edge? Yes, I said. I’d loved that little detail, a strip of dark rust red that framed the scene and somehow lifted it into another dimension.

  Well, said Beringer, and he took a long, nicotine-stained thumbnail to it, and lifted off a tiny piece of the paint – Don’t worry, he said, the whole thing’ll come off by itself anyway in a matter of months, here, feel this, he said, and he passed me the tiny rust-red flake. Feel it, he said. Doesn’t it feel like a plastic film? Yes, I said reluctantly. That’s because it is, said Beringer, it’s modern acrylic paint. But outside of those little details, why, it’s a lovely piece of work, you have to admire the man that made this, oh, he knew what he was doing. And for all we know, maybe it was made for a genuine market, for a true believer. What does it matter if it’s old or new, so long as it’s done in the right way? I nodded ruefully. And might I ask, Mr Gabriel, how much you paid for it? I named the price. Oh, good price, good price. Though of course were it the real McCoy, you could maybe multiply that by ten. Or twenty. Still, you can consider it a bargain. You’ve got yourself something special. You’ve gone with your instincts, and that’s what you should always do, you have to trust yourself, said Beringer, even if you’re wrong. Because if you don’t trust yourself, who will?

  I have the icon before me as I write, Nina, the icon that we placed against the mirror of the vanity unit in Room 412 in Hôtel Scribe, admiring it at intervals throughout our week in Paris. Lee Miller had stayed in Room 412, David Scherman was next door, 410 or 414, you didn’t know which. Though I expect it must have changed since then, you said, and in any event, maybe this 412 is not what 412 was then, because when you asked the concierge if this was Lee Miller’s room, the Lee Miller who was here during the liberation, he shrugged, and said, Who knows? The Liberation was a long time ago. But try and picture it as it was then, you said, pretend it is Lee Miller’s room. There’s her camera case hanging on the door knob, can’t you see it? It’s a Rolleiflex case, the camera itself is on the dressing table, over there, among the jars and bottles of perfume and chemicals, and there’s a table in the middle of the floor with a Hermes Baby typewriter on it, and a half-empty bottle of cognac, and a full ashtray, and piles of paper, there’s all sorts of junk overflowing from the drawers and wardrobes, cases of K rations piled up against the walls, cases of cognac and fine wines, the whole lot buried under cartons of flash bulbs, you said, and I began to join in the game. There’s loot everywhere, I said, everything from lace to leather, the iron bed is strewn with books and German military crests and silver ashtrays with swastikas on them, and binoculars and pistols and bayonets, and there’s a pair of jackboots in the corner, and a silver candelabra. And there’s half-a-dozen jerrycans of petrol out on the balcony. Petrol? you said. Oh, I am sorry, Lee, I meant gasoline, I said. I’d been putting on an American accent. I guess I’ve been too long away from good old Uncle Sam, I said. And who might you be? you said. Why, if you’re Lee Miller, then I must be David Scherman, I said. Don’t be too sure of that, you said, Lee Miller had a lot of lovers. And for a moment I was piqued. Then I caught the mischief in your expression, and I said, Well, can I be Monsieur X, then? And you said, Who shall I be then? Madame Y? No, you can keep on being Lee Miller if you like, I said. Snap, you said, and you winked at me with your left eye. The L’Heure Bleue you’d put on earlier had faded, and we went to bed in an imagined aura of cognac, photographic fluids, cardboard boxes, gasoline and gunmetal. Parfum Exotique.

  Only an infinite present

  Leonardo da Vinci observes that if you look at a damp-stained wall long enough, you will begin to see landscapes in it, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, valleys, and so on. And you will also see fleeting figures, and strange expressions of faces, and people dressed in outlandish costumes. The effect, says Leonardo, is like listening to a carillon of bells, in whose clanging you may discover every name and every word you can imagine. So when last night a surveillance helicopter perched itself for some hours in the sky above Ophir Gardens, I could hear the syllables of your name, Nina, repeated in the washing-machine spin-cycle noise of its engines. Then I would hear my own name, Gabriel, then both our names together, Gabriel, Nina, Gabrellianina, till they would become scrambled and garbled back into the meaningless chaos from whence they had come.

  Just after dawn the helicopter swooped away and dwindled into silence. I was left with the not unfamiliar feeling that I had somehow been drained of my identity by this infringement of my acoustic space. And I was reminded again of how, in the 1970s, young Catholic men like me would be routinely stopped by British army patrols, spread-eagled against a wall, and interrogated for some hours as to our identities. Our names. Where we lived. What we did for a living, if anything. Our parents’ names. Those of our relatives, our friends, our colleagues, our associates. We soon learned that these details were already known anyway, as they were checked by a field-radio link to a central database; so these regular interrogations seemed a gratuitously thorough exercise. Some names, though, Irish names, proved difficult for the English soldiers: Fintan, for example, would be pronounced by them as Victor, Ciaran as Karen, and Manus as Menace. Fiach was Fake. Then there were the Irish-speaking zeal
ots who would refuse to respond to questions put in English, though they spoke it better than they did Irish, and would demand an interpreter to be present at their interrogations: but this procedural difficulty was often easily circumvented, as an Irish-speaking companion would provide that service, the two acting as interpreters for each other. I was once forced to become one half of such a double act myself, having been latched on to by a drunk, Irish-speaking acquaintance of my father, on the way home from the pub one night.

  Such episodes were clearer in my memory when I related them to you, back in 1982 and 1983. Isn’t it extraordinary, I’d say, that the Powers That Be seem to know everything about everyone – or at least the Catholic population, I could not speak for the other side, though it did seem their identities were not so thoroughly examined – yet they can’t identify who really is who, and who’s doing what. Well, you’d say, so-called intelligence is one thing; knowing what it means is another, and the same information can be used to draw very different conclusions by different parties, with different vested interests. It depends how you look at it, you’d say. That’s why they invented MO2, because we don’t draw any conclusions, we just exist. The information is what we are. And again I would try to get to the bottom of what precisely you were, or what you and your colleagues did. Let me put it like this, you said. When I was brought up for my differentiation, as they called it, it was a kind of interview, Callaghan was there and he had this side-kick I’d never seen before. Callaghan introduces him as ‘my esteemed colleague Mr Bentley’. Bentley’s this chap in a lovely suit, really dark blue with a faint grey chalk stripe, must be Savile Row, he’s wearing Crocket & Jones black Oxfords, but he’s also got this unconventional touch, floppy-collared linen shirt, light blue with a pink needle-stripe, and quite a stunning tie, deep russet moiré silk, and Callaghan, he’s wearing his usual baggy professorial tweeds.