The Strangers' Gallery Read Online Free

house. The back garden was littered with the limbs of other trees. Soon a large new house would replace the old one. Perhaps a friend had called to tell him that his house was gone. As I stood on the sidewalk behind him, he turned and looked at me with sad, startled, disbelieving eyes.
    â€œMr. Kenny…how are things with you?” I said, with not exactly forensic forethought.
    He just shook his head and turned his gaze back to the gaping hole in the ground, and I felt as if I had invaded the privacy of someone staring at a crime scene, or into a grave.
    These houses were built right after the war, some of them to accommodate returning servicemen and their families. It’s ironic to think that Anton’s father might have been one of them, that he might have lived in this neighbourhood, on this street, in this very house. I never did mention this crazy notion to Anton, though the thought may have occurred to him as well.
    In the basement, on the original sheet-metal ductwork of the hot-air furnace, is a scrawled message:
First lit on November 8, 1946
. It looks as if it had been written with a nail. Anton came across this script himself while prowling around down in the basement. I had never noticed it, but then I rarely went down to the basement. I was usually in my study unless I was eating or asleep. The basement had always been Elaine’s domain, where she hung her flower seeds in paper bags, nursed her seedlings in small plastic pots, fed shredded newspaper to her worms. I imagined Anton’s father writing this message after lighting the new furnace for the first time, the fire burning like some sad eternal flame in the underworld.
But if any flame had burned in Anton’s father’s heart, Anton’s mother had never been aware of it. After he left Holland in the fall of 1945, she never heard from him again.
    Anton was much amused by the fact that this house had been built the year he was born, but on the other side of the treacherous North Atlantic. According to the Norse Sagas, which he had read in the original Icelandic, the first man to cross this ocean—or Sea of Darkness, as it was known at the time—and to set eyes on this cold and barren land had only been looking for his father.
    Bjarni Herjolfsson, a Norwegian trader, had left Norway in AD 986 with a shipload of supplies, as he did every second summer, bound for the colonies in Iceland, where he usually spent the winter with his father, Herjolf. When he arrived, however, he found that his father had left for a new Icelandic colony established by Erik the Red, who had been outlawed from Iceland. Though little more than a solid block of ice, it had been called Greenland by Erik, who had discovered it, for he said it would make men long to go there if it had a fine name.
    Herjolf was one of those taken in. Bjarni sailed on to Greenland to find him but got lost in the fog and sailed on past the island, all the way to North America. When the fog lifted, he found himself staring at the forbidding shores of the New Founde Lande. A cautious and sensible man, he did not go ashore, but for this he was afterward reproached by his countrymen. He sailed north along the coast, then east again, and after four more days’ sailing he found Greenland and the place where his father lived.
    About fifteen years later, Leif the Lucky, son of Erik the Red, was to discover the New Founde Lande—Vinland, “the land of grapes”—perhaps our L’Anse aux Meadows of today, though you’d be hard-pressed, if you’ll excuse the pun, to find anything there resembling that particular fruit. Not so, said Elaine, who once posited the large, high-bush blueberry, the dusky pearl of blueberries, as the most likely suspect, claiming that it was even bigger than the wild grape of a thousand years ago.
    Some say, though, that Vinland was not a real place but an imagined one, like “Newfoundland Waters” for sixteenth- and