by Michael Pye
“I’m not sure the Museum would say that. I’m sure the Museum would say it cannot by law part with objects in its collections, however they arrived; that makes almost everything easier. But in this case, the Museum would particularly like not to say anything at all.”
“Family secrets,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“For the record,” I said, “I suppose we ought to review the history of the Liber Principis?”
“Do we really need to?”
“For the record,” I said. I wanted as much distance as possible from any future awkwardness. I wanted the deputy director to handle the Museum’s honor, while I attended to the art. “The paintings were made by Albert Eckhout for Prince Maurice of Nassau. Maurice ran short of funds and decided to sell them—which he did, to two German princelings. Maybe each one thought he was getting the whole collection. At any rate, each bound up his own albums of the paintings, and each called the albums the Books of the Prince. The albums all stayed in Germany.”
“Yes, yes,” the deputy director said.
“Sometime early this century, the Prussian National Library acquired both sets. War broke out. The holdings of the Prussian National Library were sent out for safekeeping in case Berlin was razed. The Libri Principis, along with some Mozart autographs and so forth, disappeared. It’s a matter of public record that one set turned up in Cracow, and decades later the Polish government admitted that they had it and let in the scholars.”
“A mistake,” the deputy director said. “Books would live forever if nobody saw or moved them. We could keep the whole universe of knowledge in perfect safety.” He coughed, a little embarrassed at parodying his deepest instincts.
“Of course,” I said, “it was easy to see how some books left in Saxony might make their way to Cracow. It is a little more difficult to explain how the other set arrived in London.”
“Enterprise. Spoils of war. Most museums owe everything to enterprise and spoils of one war or another.”
“Until now,” I said, “there has been no public acknowledgment that we hold the Eckhout paintings. I suppose unkind people would ask how we acquired them in the first place. They might talk of theft.”
“Or transfer. The Museum taking responsibility when the Prussians failed to look after things.”
The books had a presence in the room: the embarrassment of something wounded on the sideboard. I lifted a volume and spread its pages with indecently bare fingers: they had a delicate smell of paper dust and perhaps some kind of old, scented pomade, as in the library of some grand house.
“Unfortunately,” the deputy director said, “we live in an age where everyone is supposed to be open, and everyone apologizes for history. We don’t send the Elgin Marbles back. But we don’t hide them, either. So the director, in his wisdom, thought one younger scholar should be allowed to look at the Eckhouts. A confidential matter.”
I considered the pages. Each had a net of captions, but only the odd-numbered pages had pictures, sometimes more than one: the album was a plan for something more ambitious than itself.
“We can hardly bring the police in,” the deputy director said. “And it’s hard to avoid the inference that whoever stole these pages knew that very well indeed. It is an embarrassment to lose things. It is worse to lose something you should never have had.”
“Only one person outside the Museum handled the books. Christopher Hart.”
“You’re perfectly sure there could be no question of some insider at work?”
I shrugged. “I’m not a detective,” I said.
“This is very unfortunate. The Museum values its relations with younger scholars. The Museum depends on them. But it was Hart, definitely, and only Hart?”
Evidently some of the pictures had never been set in place, because the paper was evenly discolored. I turned the pages like a policeman at first, noting the few places where the gaps were shockingly bright inside a weathered frame, where a painting had long protected the paper on which it was mounted. Then my eye caught on a page that had been cut close to the spine. The insult to the album brought the object alive for me, took it out of the inert category of evidence. I felt anger for the integrity of a perfect thing that had been spoiled.
I was not supposed to feel this. It was politically incorrect. It was historically dubious, too, since the albums were an arbitrary assembly of what survived, what patrons liked, what nobody had managed to steal or ruin over long years, including whoever found the books in Germany and then thoughtfully dropped them off at the imperial storehouse of the Museum.
But I found myself falling into the bright, exact pictures. “Perhaps you could talk to Hart,” the deputy director said.
“He’s in Holland, on sabbatical, so his department says. He hasn’t been seen for a while. He told everyone he might go to Portugal, but there’s no forwarding address.”
“God,” the deputy director said.
A tiny nameless insect, jagged crimson and black, crawled up the page. A snake, gold underneath, black above, like a player come up to the footlights in a melodrama. Three snakes on a page: diamond-backed, splashed with red, saddled in black, all writhing to break the frame.
The deputy director said, “The bugger wouldn’t publish, would he?”
Goats, I saw, warm and a little nervous against mottled grounds, ears and horns turned in. Llamas with the faces of cartoon politicians. An anteater had proved so astonishing that it was a mass of uninvestigated brown hair ending in a snout. There were gorgeous cats, a monkey whose features—tired eyes, worn teeth, low ears—looked human and scared. I have never understood how people can pull back from the seduction and presence of paint, its physical depth and crust, and look only at slides, use abstract nouns, throw concepts and theory around instead of looking with passion. Paint is food to me.
“I don’t have to emphasize discretion, I hope,” the deputy director said. “Except for the record,” he added, mocking me. I should have put the books down. I should have concentrated on this exchange, however empty and pompous it was. Instead, I was looking into a round, kind face at the front of the album, someone with a thatch of hair, shining cheeks, a faint suggestion of stubble above wide lips, eyes just out of focus as though the artist could not quite meet them, or perhaps the man was drunk.
The album was not a set of pretty things, a carnival of oddities: it was a new world seen with wonder. Instead of conventional assemblies of root, flower, insect, and memento mori, the kind of overstuffed images the Dutch also made in that century, this was precise and astonished, and deeply personal. It was like a grandfather’s stories of discovery.
A woman, bare-breasted, holding a root up like a torch, a vermilion sash about supple brown legs. Then a soldier, bare with a bow and arrow and a ring of crimson around his head, absurdly like medieval millinery. A chief, mitered and robed like a bishop. A mother, a tiny baby clinging to her neck.
“The Germans tried to get the albums back from Cracow, I think. That could be trouble,” I said. “We’re not very plausible heirs to the Prussians.”
“The law does not permit the Museum to alienate anything in its collections. Anything. So of course we insist on keeping them.”
Reluctantly, I left the woman with the sash. I felt I had been in her company a moment, that I could turn back and ask her things: how the cold of a vault felt after the forest.
“It’s possible,” I said, “that whoever stole the pages simply wanted to sell them. He wouldn’t find it hard. They’re rare, portable, exquisite, and anyone could appreciate them. There’ll be some sausage king of Saxony who has them in his private safe. Or some banker.” I withdrew my hands reluctantly, as though the books had been touching me back. “You could hang them in your drawing room quite safely, too—nobody ever published them, and almost nobody has seen them for the past fifty years.”
“Perhaps.” The deputy director tumbled his fingers against the desk. “I did wonder something else. I wondered if the pages were mean
t to be sources for an argument, Hart’s argument,” he said. He was outlining a crime he wanted to commit, I could see that. “Perhaps he wants to control them, so he controls the story he’s telling.” The offense changed: from a theft, something banal and greedy, to an affront to everything the Museum was supposed to represent.
“Perhaps he wants to destroy them, so nobody can argue with him,” I said.
The idea stood in the room for a moment, as shocking as a leper.
“This is a community of scholars,” the deputy director said. “I suppose we must acquire the habit of suspecting one another. Body searches as you enter, body searches as you leave. Metal detectors and X-rays. Warrants for everyone’s libraries. But I would have thought from Hart’s reputation, from the papers I’ve read, that I knew him.
“We really must talk to Professor Hart.”
I knew the “we” included only me.
Christopher Hart, so Arkenhout told me, bought his rail ticket from Amsterdam to Cologne with his credit card. No problem. He had his passport with him, but nobody needed to see it at the German border.
He caught the tram to the end of a suburban line in Cologne, and walked up three flights of stairs to an apartment where an Indian with bloodshot eyes took his papers away. There was no receipt, nothing written.
He nursed a beer for four long hours.
When he went back, his face matched his name. The Indian—and his two cousins—mended identities like shoes, and with the same professional indifference. He paid in cash. The Indians accepted most currencies.
On the way back to Amsterdam, the dull, gray border station at Emmerich acquired something like glamour: a place of ordeal. He could see gray-uniformed policemen on the long, empty platforms. He wanted to show his passport to one of them, to be examined and searched and proved to be Christopher Hart, professor. Nobody came.
Then he asked himself: Did I really give a name to my mother? Did I really say out loud that now I am “Christopher Hart”?
I left early, through a fire door into the public museum. Crowds roared at me, on their way to shop for cultures, gods in the nude, all those unbiddable spirits of river and earthquake and birth that we hold behind strong, official glass. Occasionally, someone would be stopped by the huge brown eyes of—say—a Coptic portrait, would stand against the crowd for a moment; and then would scuttle on to the next obligatory sight.
I watched the guards watching all this. They were older men who certainly drank beer and ate pies, who had been dutiful in the army and would not answer back, who paraded through the galleries at night and shut them down. They tolerated cameras and sensors and the mumbo-jumbo of security, but only because they knew in the end it came down to their nightly ceremony of big iron keys.
I thought they belonged to the same world as my father: people who ate Marmite, knew the name of Max Jaffa, knew what they meant by “tradition.”
My father was on my mind, anyway. He had left messages on the answering machine, all starting uncertainly as though he felt self-conscious talking to himself this way with only a vague hope that someone would sometime find the message. I called him, but he was out. He liked to spend the late afternoon in the Portuguese cafes along Ladbroke Grove, talking without the nagging burden of perpetual translation. He’d be drinking little coffees, and eating cakes with eggs and almonds. I don’t know what he discussed.
Anna wasn’t home yet.
My father’s story is an old one. He came to Britain as a laborer, became a waiter, polished himself up until he was running a hotel restaurant. All this time, he made sure I would never be him. He turned me into a dark, nostalgic Englishman, attached to cricket and kings and chestnut trees like nobody English could ever be again.
But my father, I came to realize, did not like the process. With his friends, he still spoke Portuguese. When I came home from school, even my “Hello,” my “Good afternoon,” the word “Dad,” were betrayals of true, Portuguese language. Fish fingers, gobstoppers, stuck him in the heart. But he couldn’t say anything about betrayal. He had already slipped across enemy lines and into the bed of the English-woman who became my mother.
She died of a cancer so quick it was like a special effect, as though she’d briefly relaxed and all her defenses crashed at once. I was ten. I know now what my father did. He made me safe at all costs. The highest of those costs, to him, was Englishness. Other families went back to Portugal when the girls were thirteen, just when Englishness might get between their legs; but I was his son, his only child, and I could stay on to become an alien myself.
I went to university, which nobody in my family ever did before. My father was proud, soft and nervous. I got my higher degree, because I was to be proofed against digging or serving for a living.
I can’t imagine how my father explained all this to friends who ached for home.
My father was back at half past six. He said he wanted to go to Essex on Saturday, to take a boat out fishing for dabs. I knew there was no way to refuse him.
Anna still wasn’t home. I felt her absence, a coldness where she should be occupying a chair or standing at a window. She was preoccupied, of course. Her life went by the rhythms of the college where she taught—breaks, exams, committee crises—and to the frequent, brutal pain in her head that beat her down. But she was more preoccupied than usual. I thought she was wholly involved in something, someone else, and she could not even pretend that things were normal. It was more comfortable than admitting to the distance between us.
Anna came home, but I still felt her absence.
I have the police file here, copies, anyway: neat reports, no paragraphs, sometimes a note in the margin. The file says that, around this time, Inspector Van Deursen and Sergeant Visser went out from Amsterdam to interview the Arkenhouts. One or other of them has scrawled at the bottom of the first page: “Nice people.” And then: “artificial fire in hearth. gave off no heat at all.”
They asked if Martin Arkenhout had tried to contact his parents. His mother said, “No, actually.” I think she must have said it with shame.
“You haven’t moved in the past ten years?”
“No.”
“And this man on the tram—he gave you some other name?”
“He said he was Hart. Christopher Hart. He said it in English, but, you see, I’d spoken to him in Dutch.”
“You’re quite sure you could not be mistaken?”
“Yes.”
“You know there are penalties for wasting police time?”
At the end one of the policemen had made a light penciled note: “Very practical. Very distraught but couldn’t show it. Drugs?” His colleague had annotated the note: “Prescription drugs. Husband a doctor.” He had underlined the word prescription fiercely.
My father took the oars while I pushed the rowing boat out onto the flat estuary water. I couldn’t have stopped him. He was seventy-six, wiry still, proud that he could wear the same suits as at fifty. His hair was a white, immaculate helmet set on a Brylcreem boy grown old. The tendons of his arms looked thin, though, and they were wattled with spare flesh.
He fell asleep once on the drive down from London. He was bright, almost young, when he was animated; but I looked sideways at him, his mouth gaping, and I saw the skull exposed beneath the skin.
But at this moment he was heroic, his eyes bright with a kind of exasperation.
“Hurry up,” he said.
I didn’t know if we were about to miss the fish, the tide, or perhaps some imaginary train going home. He couldn’t wait any longer; he had lost the resigned patience of middle age.
I jumped into the boat, and he pulled away. Occasionally, the oar feathered the water, but usually his muscles remembered as acutely as his mind. After a dozen strokes, he said, “You can row later.”
I said, “Oh. Thank you.”
He rowed into the channel. The mud bottom slipped away under us. The skies were enormous and pale, and there was a mean little wind and a burning sun all at once. I
could see the marshlands around us: vetch in bloom, salt channels cut in the mud and rushes.
He was going out to sea. The strokes were already an effort, but he concentrated hard. He didn’t speak, so as not to show that his breath might be short, and he didn’t smile.
I said, “Isn’t it a bit late in the day for dabs?”
He said nothing. I looked back at the flat shore, the fence of reeds. A gray heron sat in an attitude at the edge of the water.
He put down the oars quite abruptly. I wondered if he had run out of energy, or if his heart was troubling him, but he looked strong and bright.
“Get the lines,” he said.
We hooked and baited the lines, then cast them over the side. The little rowing boat was caught in their grid, and we stayed put on black water, waiting.
I knew better than to talk. I sometimes used to talk on walks in Surrey when I was a kid—Green Line bus, a few hours in the forest—and it was my fault the cuckoo or redstart or fieldfare or siskin flew away and never came back the whole day.
“We came out too late,” my father said, accusingly.
“I was afraid of that,” I said. “Aren’t we too far out, anyway?”
We had both set our backs to the monument on the estuary: the towers and blocks of a nuclear power station. We were determined to see only water and marsh.
“I have this account. Poupança Emigrante,” my father said.
“I don’t understand.”
“A bank account in Portugal. For emigrants.”
“But you’re English.”
“I’ve sold the house,” my father said.
I didn’t, for a moment, know where to look. The marsh was a black line in the bright light. The sky was washed pale. There was no particular cloud in which to find faces or a map, as I used to do as a child with my father. There were no other boats out on this kind of eccentric expedition.
“I said, I sold the house.”
“I heard you,” I said.
“I’m leaving next month.”
“You’re leaving?”
“I’ve been building this house in Portugal. I want your advice on it.”