Remembering Germain Kalmykoff
(5)
Our walk across the Burrard Street Bridge was one of many walks across different parts of Vancouver that GK and I would take whenever he would return to Vancouver on summer visits. They extended over a period of several years.
This particular one was exceptionally memorable, however, for he had planned it with a destination singularly important to himself in mind. Our annual walks tended to be what Samuel Johnson termed “rambles”: impromptu and directionless, though occasionally specific, such as a visit to the Vancouver Art Gallery to see what was being exhibited. This time, however, the walk not only had a specific destination, but one that clearly meant much to GK. He wanted to return to a significant place, it turned out, which he had not revisited in a long time. In hindsight, I am honoured that he asked me to accompany him. Had he not, a very important part of his earlier life in Vancouver would not have been glimpsed, or glimpsed so clearly. I had heard fragments of the story from a third party, but only fragments.
The destination in question took us to a part of Vancouver which, in the 1960's, had once been Vancouver's Haight-Ashbury. Writ small.
If Vancouver’s Haight centred around 4th Avenue, the vestiges that were still left by the turn of the decade faded as one proceeded south towards Broadway, which we did as we continued ascending Vine. Evidences of the Greek community that had long ago settled there tended to replace any hints of San Francisco.
Once we arrived at the destination GK had intended, he showed me a house that had once brought him much happiness, and then enormous sadness. We stood at the gate for a long time as he silently took it in again. He had prepared me for this as we crossed the bridge, and the story he told me was as follows.
He had fallen in love with a young Greek-Canadian woman, and they had planned to marry. But then her parents opposed the marriage. Hers was a very conservative family - Greek Orthodox, I believe - and a refusal of parental approval was enough to end any prospect of a wedding. No negotiations about the matter proved possible. The fact that GK was active in the Russian Orthodox church was apparently not enough to convince the parents that this was the match they wanted for their daughter.
The exile to Siberia, and the other moves that would follow it, at the very least freed GK from associations that could only have conveyed repeated painful memories had he continued to live in Vancouver thereafter, instead of visiting it occasionally, as would happen in the years following his departure from the city.
In the long walks I would take with him in those later years, much more would also emerge in our conversations that would help me further to understand GK. Unlike the story that shaped the walk to Kitsilano, however, these would be but small details. Nevertheless, as Samuel Johnson once remarked, it is in such apparently insignificant details that hidden dimensions of character often appear. And, he added, that is why such details should always be included in any biographical account, for such accounts are paintings, really, and the details guide the painter when it comes to questions of lines, light, and shade.
If I were cite two or three of such details, learned while tramping the streets of Vancouver with GK, I would probably say that his utter delight in the name of the British pop-rock group "Herman’s Hermits" would have to be one of them. He clearly enjoyed thinking of himself as Herman the Hermit, playing not only on the band name but at the same time on the Anglicized pronunciation of his own name. It's hard to think of anything he enjoyed more than repeating the name of that band - or that more accurately predicted, as would one day become apparent, his future life. I think that Herman’s Hermits became a subject of conversation, however passing a subject, every year on some walk or another.
What evoked his outright laughter, however, as opposed merely to his quiet delight, were panhandlers' requests for "spare change." "Spare change!" he would cry, almost choking with laughter. As if any change would ever be spare to one who saved every penny. Not avariciously, but to finance travels around the globe that already had become, and would continue to be, grand in their sweep: almost eighteenth century, in the tradition of grand tours, though oddly plebeian rather than patrician, as will be explained.
One might also cite his stated refusal to turn clocks backwards, as he mentioned one day. My recollection is that we were in front of the Hudson’s Bay, across the street from the Birks clock at Granville and Georgia, and the sight of that clock might have been what evoked this statement from him, although I might be confusing the occasion since it was around that very place that panhandlers often targeted him and had him laughing. In any case, he disclosed to me that when he had to reset a clock or watch, he would never turn the dial backward: "only forwards!"
He did not like to go back - which is what made our walk to the house on Vine Street such an exception to our usual rambles. The small detail about resetting clocks brings out this facet of his character, and of his life. For him, any attempts to go back - whether to Australia, to Vancouver, or to conventional life - were abandoned almost as soon as attempted.
There was to be no going back.