Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

  I wandered into galleries of furniture: like parodies of settled, domestic rooms, but not yet cluttered enough by living people. There were dollhouses, small lives sliced open.

  I walked past paintings that I used to think were glories and lessons, because I used to let myself admire and revere. But now the paintings hung inert on the walls, a line of facts of oil, canvas, board.

  I stopped in front of a painting by Frans Post. This at least should have some grand significance: it was painted, I knew, on the same expedition that produced the Liber Principis. The books were the catalog of wonders and this big canvas was a window dresser’s version of them all.

  I saw a panorama, caught in a great carved frame of strangling vines. I saw: breadfruit clustered on a tree, scarlet birds, a louche monkey lolling, a pangolin snouting at a gourd, a great frog, a pineapple, all making a chorus line of specimens arranged on swags of bush in front of the big, wide stage of the picture; and on the stage, ruins of a cathedral and assorted visitors, whites ahead, blacks in respectful ranks; and beyond that, blue ripples of hills merging up into a sky the same, faintly purplish blue. I could see each item, one by one.

  But I wanted to be lost in the picture, to feel a prickle of excitement on my skin. Instead, my mind turned over like some card index. I picked out facts: Post was the first trained, official landscape artist to go to the New World; he painted this panorama in Holland when he came back, a propaganda piece; he’d taken the brilliance of a bird’s wing and made it just a flourish in a provincial mind.

  Post took to drink soon after. I knew that.

  I stood there long enough to start the guard fretting.

  If I couldn’t read the picture for myself, perhaps I could read the picture as someone else would have done, say a Dutchman in the 1660s: proud the Dutch controlled this rich Brazilian coast with all its wonders, prouder still the Dutch had burned out the Portuguese who used to be there and ruined a Catholic cathedral in the Protestant cause. But I was stuck on the dusty surface, among dates and facts.

  I wanted to touch the frame. I suppose that was obvious.

  The guard stood up and paced a bit. She used her telephone. She made long passes across the gallery, each one coming closer to me.

  I was flattered she thought I was still capable of obsession.

  I tried to look at other pictures, a contorted swan, a famous face, a landscape of fields and picturesque woods, but the Post drew me back. I had such a hopeless need to feel, and I felt nothing.

  I panicked. I walked away.

  The guard followed me into the next room, talking again on her telephone. Two guards appeared on either side of the far door.

  I walked steadily, carefully, not wanting to provoke the guards, but my self-consciousness worried them even more. Then I could not see them for the tears.

  I had the pictures from the Liber Principis spread out on the bed.

  There was a butterfly, and a parrot flying away, the butterfly black and folded with pink flourishes on its wings, the parrot looking over its dark shoulder with sharp eyes; and a long, plated armadillo painted as if in a sunset. There was a strangely mottled horse with the face of a medieval saint. There was a man, gray-haired and yellow-pale with a little belly, sitting naked on a rock with a pipe in his hands; the rock had been chalked or carved with the picture of an ox.

  I couldn’t sell the elder. For a start, he was too obviously someone out of the Amazon; he needed explanation.

  I bought a plastic case to fit the pictures, and I took the armadillo first.

  I tried a dealer in a street of stamp shops. He had a store almost without light, dusty frames of prints; and he was faded, short, indistinct in a corner with a rolltop desk full of papers. He frowned a lot, but that may have been his pince-nez. He liked the picture, obviously, saw it in the window alongside the tinted maps of Amsterdam.

  “Fair condition,” he said. “Looks seventeenth century. Nice subject. But there’s a lot of this stuff about, you know. They bake the paper. They use the right paints. They turn them out in a studio somewhere.” He looked at the edges of the paper. “The paper looks right, though.” Then he grabbed back his bargaining position. “I’d need to know a bit more,” he said.

  “It’s a family thing,” I said.

  “But it’s not framed,” he said. “Families frame things.”

  “I was told,” I said, “by my grandfather that it was painted by—”

  Then I stopped. It wasn’t shame at selling something stolen. Shame comes and goes, especially when you’re frightened. This was habit, something so fixed it felt more like an instinct: I couldn’t separate one image from the others. I had built a career on the proprieties of keeping sets together, of knowing origins and provenance in an unbroken chain back to the day the paint dried; so I could never be the one to take the significance away from this paper and reduce it to something pretty.

  I didn’t have principles. I had habits. That was a disconcerting lesson.

  “Well,” the man said. “Families tell one another a lot of stories. A scholar, your grandfather?”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s pretty,” he said. He named a price: three weeks in that small

  hotel room, some decent meals.

  I took back the picture.

  “If you don’t have a provenance,” he said, “I can’t go higher. Too much risk. It looks like someone cut one edge.”

  “Do I look like a thief?”

  “I wish I knew what thieves looked like,” he said.

  I stood outside the shop for a moment. There was a print dealer next door, one across the way, a book dealer I remembered just across the next canal.

  It was almost dark. I took the tram back to the hotel and slept in sweaty starts, as if I had a fever.

  The whole next day needed killing.

  I wanted no more reminders of what I had lost, but that meant I had to stay away from everything that would usually have been kind or exciting or absorbing, just in case I had lost the power to respond. I was on an iced sea, drifting with my eyes closed, in my mind.

  Only I was in a city bar: coffee, coffee cream, orange juice, tiny glass of water, wrapped biscuit, cigarillo smoke in my eyes, a middle-aged couple reading a newspaper at the next table, handing each other the world page by page. A very thin, very blond girl left her bicycle against the window.

  It didn’t seem enough to anchor me to reality. I thought that if I had lost the ability to respond, to fancy the girl, to taste the coffee, to see a picture, then I had nothing to lose by dying.

  I wondered how, in an orderly city like Amsterdam, you arrange your own death. I thought there must be a form to fill.

  The middle-aged man at the next table slammed down his water and the glass cracked open loudly. The middle-aged woman looked briefly at the spreading water and the chunks of ice and glass, and went back to the news from Algeria.

  I couldn’t sit and indulge myself this way, like some mooning adolescent, like someone entitled to the privilege of meditating on death instead of fighting it off in the obligatory, commonsensical way. I had killed a man. I didn’t have privileges.

  I could see the Arkenhouts. I could tell them about Martin. I could close the story for them.

  It seemed like such a luminous idea at the time, because I had no other ideas: a mission of mercy, in a way.

  I had the name of his parents’ town; Arkenhout had given me that. I took the train there, over wet flatlands that lay in the shadow of enormous stormy skies. I checked the phone book in a station booth.

  “Mrs. Arkenhout?” I said, although there was no doubt.

  “Yes.”

  “My name is”—and I was unsure for a moment—“Christopher Hart.”

  Silence. Mrs. Arkenhout was just a silence at the other end of the line.

  “I have a photograph of Martin—”

  “I know all about photographs.”

  “It’s a photograph from two months ago.”

  “Oh.”
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  “I would have sent it to you, but I didn’t want it to be a shock.”

  “You don’t think it’s a shock when someone rings you up like this?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, well,” said Mrs. Arkenhout, but she did not put down the phone.

  “I’m at the railway station—”

  “You want to look out for pickpockets. There are pickpockets at the railway station.”

  “I could get a taxi. If you could spare me a half-hour? An hour?”

  “I can’t stop you coming. I might not open the door, but you can come.”

  I should have said “Thank you” as though this were an ordinary conversation.

  The price of the taxi was three times what I expected, although we hardly left the town. I paid, got out, and felt the cold cut at me.

  I walked through a garden of autumn wreckage, neatly tied. I rang the doorbell.

  “It’s me, Christopher Hart,” I shouted.

  The taxi driver stayed waiting. There were lights in the house, and somebody to take in this foreigner, but he didn’t want to take chances.

  Mrs. Arkenhout said, “I’m not sure?”

  “I just wanted a private talk.”

  “My husband isn’t home.”

  “He doesn’t have to know,” I said, thinking that must be what Mrs. Arkenhout wanted to hear.

  After a moment, the door opened.

  Mrs. Arkenhout knew only one Christopher Hart. I was someone quite different.

  I saw the disappointment, then the fear in her face. She tried for a moment to block the narrow hall, her hips between the sideboard and the pictures on the opposite wall, tried to push the door shut so she could lock it properly against ghosts and strangers. But she lost her nerve.

  “I don’t know anything about Martin,” Mrs. Arkenhout said. “Martin left a long time ago.”

  “But you let me in.”

  “Oh, yes. I let you in.” Then she recovered herself, a physical recovery like scooping up a trailing skirt or straightening a slouched back.

  “Would you like some coffee?” she said.

  I almost laughed at her nice manners. I felt obliged to offer something mannerly in return. I took a photograph out of my wallet and showed it to her as some proof of good intentions: a summer picture, Maria and Arkenhout on a wall by a tiled fountain, the light and shadows brilliant.

  “This is Martin, isn’t it?” I said.

  “No.” But Mrs. Arkenhout held the picture like a talisman. “It isn’t a very good picture,” she said. I think she meant it was not the picture she wanted: not crisp and certain enough, not respectable, not tolerable. “I’m entitled to an explanation,” she said.

  “Of course. I’d really like some coffee.”

  Mrs. Arkenhout glared. “I’m getting there,” she said. “Hold your horses.”

  She left the room and I heard the coffee grinder running and running until it could only be sifting the powder. I followed her into the kitchen.

  “I used to love photographs,” Mrs. Arkenhout said, with the machine still running. “Martin on his first tricycle. Martin in his crib. Martin on the beach. He was a perfectly ordinary baby, you know. My husband wouldn’t say so, but I would.”

  I turned off the coffee grinder.

  “You think it’s ready?” Mrs. Arkenhout said. I nodded, and supported Mrs. Arkenhout through the business of putting coffee into a filter into a machine, adding water, moving a switch, like one dancer shadows another’s moves.

  “It’s been very difficult,” she said. “We never saw Martin in America, you see, what they found of him. It was soft ground, very wet, they told me. They cremated him.” She hiccuped. “I never get to talk about him.”

  “Did you ever see him again?” I asked.

  “Oh no,” she said. “Not really.” She put out her hands for the tray, but she was shaking too much to take it; so I carried it into the living room.

  Mrs. Arkenhout said, “You really shouldn’t stay. My husband won’t understand.” She said it with her fingers holding a biscuit as though it were lace. “Was Martin eating properly?”

  “I think so.”

  “Nothing ever seems to touch him,” Mrs. Arkenhout said.

  I told her about meeting Martin, having a house in the same village. “He went swimming a lot. He was very healthy.”

  But I wanted her to explain him.

  “There was a terrible fire,” I said. “Martin was very brave—”

  “Rubbish!” she said. She used the word like a gunshot.

  “The police told us what happened,” she said. She still sipped her coffee, seeming calm and rigid as a matron, but her voice raised up from its deferential quiet into the roar of a church alto. “I don’t want lies. You can go away if you tell lies.”

  I heard the house door open and close then, and a coat rustling in the hallway. Someone coughed.

  Dr. Arkenhout stood in the doorway.

  “Who are you?” he said. And to his wife, he said, “I didn’t know you were having a guest.”

  Mrs. Arkenhout said, “He knows Martin.”

  Dr. Arkenhout said something in Dutch that I did not understand. Mrs. Arkenhout answered.

  I stood, an odd politeness in the circumstances, and he came to stand so close to me I could taste his breath. “I don’t know your name,” he said, with elaborate, daunting politeness. “I’m sorry.”

  “He says he’s Christopher Hart,” Mrs. Arkenhout said.

  “I think you should go,” he said, giving orders without the possibility of refusal, like any doctor.

  “I want to talk about Martin,” Mrs. Arkenhout said.

  “It is not an appropriate subject,” the doctor said.

  He stood between his wife and me, as though he could block talk with his body. I could see he was calculating his strength, and mine.

  “I thought he was all right. He’s always all right,” Mrs. Arkenhout said.

  “I must insist that you leave,” the doctor said.

  But Mrs. Arkenhout talked on, without taking a breath, a great spool of talk that she’d recorded many times and never once had a chance to play. “It happened once before, you see. That’s what they said. They found him in a pool in the park. He was almost drowned, but he didn’t drown. He didn’t drown. He grew up perfectly well after that—”

  “How old was he?” I asked.

  “I shall call the police,” Dr. Arkenhout said.

  “He was four. He was beautiful.”

  “He was very beautiful,” Dr. Arkenhout repeated. “I’m going to call the police.”

  I said, “Tell me what happened.”

  “She doesn’t know,” Dr. Arkenhout said.

  “It’s true,” Mrs. Arkenhout said. “I don’t know. They gave me drugs, so I don’t remember exactly what happened or why. But they found me standing by the side of the pond as though I’d been watching him drown and it was cold and wet and there were no other children playing and he was big enough to wade out of the water and so—”

  She hiccuped again.

  “He always told me,” and she pointed to her husband, “—well, he didn’t tell me so much as he let me know—that I was very sick, that I tried to kill Martin. But you see, I couldn’t have killed him. So I wouldn’t have tried, would I?”

  She picked up the empty coffeepot like a proper hostess, but she poured it into thin air, watching her husband’s eyes.

  “My wife is very distressed,” Dr. Arkenhout said. “She is not well. I don’t know what you hoped to achieve here, but surely you can see—”

  When I didn’t respond, Dr. Arkenhout rushed at me, scrabbled at my coat, pushed me as I walked into the hall. He couldn’t bring himself to break decorum and hit me properly, but he couldn’t stop himself shoving and chivvying, as though I were some inert obstacle to be pushed out of his house. He talked calmly, but in Dutch.

  Mrs. Arkenhout’s whole soft, pretty body, high breasts and neat hips, rose and fell on the ignominy of
a hiccup.

  “We had to send Martin away,” she said, catching her breath, “because how could he ever trust us?” Her voice could have carried an anthem over the flatlands. “He didn’t worry about the dark on the stairs like other children. He worried most when he was sitting with his mother in the light of the kitchen. By the stove. With the smell of cookies. Like in the paintings in an old advertisement.”

  In the rain and the dark, I saw myself in the train windows: alarmed again. The Arkenhouts now knew which one of us had survived the fire, and if the proper Dr. Arkenhout knew, then so would the police, within minutes.

  I had a future, but under arrest. I had a reason to run again. I have to think that this is what I had wanted, a fear strong enough to bring me back to life.

  I had a week of money left, but no name. I could sign on as a trucker’s help, a job with no questions asked, maybe work a Rhine barge up to Switzerland, ship out on some amateur freighter. But sometime I’d need papers, official papers, union papers. I’d be checked.

  From where I stood, in the hollow between lives, Martin Arkenhout’s career began to seem almost reasonable, even inevitable; people can always talk themselves into believing that killing, thieving, and cheating are entirely reasonable in their own tight terms, the only way out and on.

  I needed another entire life.

  I had killed one man already, you see. I had lost the protection of the ordinary moral rules, which stop you killing, thieving, cheating.

  It should have been easy to find a mark in Amsterdam, a tourist town. The French come north to blow a joint on weekends. Queers roister around the streets they can finally own. Onshore tourists cruise the lighted brothel windows as though sin’s no fun when it is licensed and permitted; they’re like kids at a sweetshop with money, who would much rather steal.

  But they were all weekenders, who’d go back to different skins and different ways on Monday morning: in some French ministry, heads officiously cleared, or some English bank, weekend riots covertly admired by less lively colleagues. I could buy at best a few days, a few weeks, before a whole machine began to miss them.