11
Chance furnishes me with what I need. I’m like a man who stumbles; my foot strikes something, I look down, and there is exactly what I’m in need of.
JAMES JOYCE, on writing Finnegans Wake
Stories take on their own lives, drawing you along, often oblivious, in their wake. So when I accepted an invitation to a lunchtime lecture on antipodean food at the Australian embassy, I wasn’t thinking about my grandfather’s presence in Paris.
The lecture by a respected food historian was followed by a coctel, with canapés proposed by her and cooked by the ambassador’s own chef.
“There’ll be meat pies,” she confided, “and lamingtons. And even Iced VoVos.”
Iced VoVos! Offering Proust a madeleine from Combray would have had just as electric an effect. These pink-frosted cookies were one of my childhood’s treasured treats: islands of sweetness in the sludgy swamp of Australian cuisine.
As for the rest, I was in no hurry to be reintroduced to either meat pies or the lamington, a confection made by dipping stale cake in chocolate sauce and rolling it in desiccated coconut. Instead I drifted away from the post-lecture crowd into the exhibition area next door, where, by chance, two collections of photographs from World War I were on show.
One image immediately caught my eye. It showed an Australian and three French poilus excavating a pit in which to bury a bloated and stinking dead horse. Though one can’t photograph a stench, the distaste on their faces and the fact that one man wore a gas mask told the story all too well. In the background, a leafless tree incongruously supported the skeleton of an aircraft. On that account, explained a caption, the troops called this Plane Corner.
The photograph captured one of those moments when war ceases to be a matter of brute forces in opposition, and becomes, if only by accident, art. The man made anonymous by the gas mask, another’s jaunty slouch hat, the bulk of the dead animal, the aircraft in a tree, gave to the image a quality of collage, as if someone had cut details from other photographs and juxtaposed them in a Max Ernst–like pastiche. André Breton conceived of surrealism while treating psychiatric casualties whose nightmares were more real than anything in the observable world. But sometimes, as in this photograph, daily existence achieved the strangeness of those tormented dreams. . . .
“John Baxter?” someone said at my elbow.
The man only came to my shoulder. His pale face, gray tweed jacket, and neatly pressed flannel trousers made him seem monochrome, a figure from one of these photographs. One could imagine him strolling along the rutted clay of the road to Plane Corner, glancing at the soldiers burying the horse, then stepping down into the room to join me.
“Peter van Diemen,” he prompted.
“Of course.” I took the thin hand. “It’s been a long time.”
The skin of his face, stretched tight across the skull, erased wrinkles and made his mouth look lipless. It twitched at the corners. Was that a smile or a grimace?
“You live here now?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. More than ten years. And you for longer, I think. Almost twenty?”
“Twenty-one.”
He knew more about me than I did about him. But one expected no less. Peter van Diemen attracted information the way iron filings cling to a magnet. “The facts are out there,” he told me once. “You just have to let them in.” He would have made a perfect spy.How did I know he wasn’t?
“My grandfather was here in 1916.” I nodded toward the photograph. “He could easily have been one of these men.”
“What was his regiment?”
“I don’t know. In fact, I hardly know anything about his war service.”
“Really?” Air sensing a vacuum could not have been more eager. “Well, if there is anything I can do . . .” He handed me a business card. “I’m retired, but still . . .” Again, that twitch of the lips. “The old fire horse, you know?”
Outside, I looked at the card. Just his name, with an address in the fourteenth arrondissement. Near the Santé Prison.
“So how was it?” Marie-Dominique asked when I got home.
“Oh, the lecture? Very good. But you’ll never guess who I met. Peter van Diemen.”
“The publisher from London?”
“Yes. We got talking about some World War I photos. He offered to help if I wanted to find out more about Archie. Military research was always his field. I’m quite tempted, actually.”
Marie-Do closed one eye and scrunched up her face, as if looking at something in the middle distance and puzzling over its significance. I knew the expression. It indicated skepticism.
“Always remembering he’s a murderer, of course,” she said.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Always remembering that.”