"Dutch Master" (1982)
“I change history here and now, Saskia. I paint forgeries of things that would not exist for a generation yet, and now will never have existed.” — "Dutch Master"
Doodkiststraat: A street in Amsterdam where the death-house and Dead Christ Church are located. The name literally translates to “Coffin Street,” reinforcing the chapter's focus on mortality and the blurred lines between life and death. — Half a Sky
After that, Dana and Galopade were following the girl in Doodkisttaat (Coffin Street), a little street that ran back from the waterfront north of the Ij River. Do not look for that street. The Nordseck Canal, which had not yet been digged then, has obliterated that street since that time. — Sardinian Summer
So he took us to Amsterdam. He took us right up the IJ River and disgorged us from his third stomach no more than a block from the dead-body shop of Scheherazade Jokkebrok in Coffin Street. —First and Last Island
“Dutch Master” was a three-chapter OSFW round robin. Lafferty wrote the final chapter and the afterword. It seems unkind to point out how bad the first two chapters are when the whole thing was written for fun. But their dullness makes his contribution stand out all the more. This isn't to dunk on them, but it is worth noting because Lafferty makes their writing part of the story's meaning.
Before getting into that, a little historical background. “Dutch Master” is the title of Lafferty’s chapter, and the Dutch master turns out to be a time-traveling Rembrandt van Rijn. The historical Rembrandt married Saskia van Uylenburgh (1612–1642), who came from a prosperous Frisian family. They married in 1634, as he rose to prominence in Amsterdam. She often appeared as his model in formal portraits, elaborate costumes, and intimate drawings of their domestic life. During their eight-year marriage, they had four children, but only their son Titus survived infancy, a detail that matters to Lafferty’s contribution. Saskia died at twenty-nine, less than a year after Titus’s birth.
The first chapter is Maureen Temple’s “Safe Deposit”; the second is E. Sharon Wilson’s “Whatever.”
Temple supplies the opening predicament. A character named Van Rhyn, not yet Lafferty’s version of Rembrandt, is dumped into an alley. He knows his name but little else about himself. Yet he is certain something nearby will make him rich, and that failing to find it will have unpleasant consequences. In a disgusting garbage can, he finds a locked mahogany box that looks important. Nearby is an open doorway; across the alley, a building bears the words “ENERGY BANK.” He decides to keep the box and find its key. Temple stops there, leaving the next writer a person, an object, and several unanswered questions.
Wilson leans into the science-fiction and fantasy elements. Van Rhyn enters a wrecked office containing a corpse. There he meets a Rogum, a frog-like alien who says he damaged Van Rhyn’s memory during an interrogation. Van Rhyn notices that the creature is afraid of damaging the box and threatens to throw it. Then poof. The scene vanishes, and he finds himself on a scorching plain, choking in deep dust. Suddenly, the box speaks: breaking it might have destroyed Earth. When Van Rhyn asks to be taken to a friend, it deposits him in the bedroom of a beautiful woman with green eyes and blonde hair who evidently knows him. He collapses. Lafferty picks up the story here.
Van Rhyn begins to remember:
“I know that the same three industries still prevail in Amsterdam: espionage, smuggling of gold-and-diamonds, and stealing-or-faking art masterpieces. And I know that I still have a thumb in each of the three. I don’t know how I’d make it with fewer than three thumbs.”
What he does is funny and a little nasty, but it gives the story the life it has lacked. His satire of the preceding chapters begins with the description of Van Rhyn’s adventure as a “half-witted voyage.” Van Rhyn and the woman have been traveling with separate halves of a time machine, and their brains need coupling as much as their boxes do. But “half-witted” is aimed at the preceding chapters as well. Their uninspired writing can now pass for the effects of traveling with insufficient equipment and an inadequate understanding of what is going on. Lafferty has made the story’s shortcomings part of the story.
“Your mahogany box is half of the time machine, Remsie, and with it you’ve made a half-witted time voyage. And I came here with the other half of the time machine, and I also got here by a half-witted voyage, the other half. I think we’re supposed to couple our brain lobes now and join our boxes together (we’ll find that they make a perfect joint); and then we’ll understand the mission that we’ve been Shanghaied on.”
He turns Wilson’s grand mysteries into comic inconveniences. With Van Rhyn’s memory restored, the scorching landscape becomes a succession of hot summers experienced too quickly. The choking dust is the dust of time. The silly toad-creature is a person stranded in time whom Van Rhyn has named after a childhood bogeyman. When he asks about the corpse, a loose end Wilson left for Lafferty, the woman interrupts: “All the little incidents can be explained.” She then changes the subject. The implication is that all that stuff is stupid. It’s a pretty funny use of the final contributor’s freedom to decide which loose ends matter.
Then Lafferty makes a good story. The blonde woman becomes Saskia van Uylenburgh, and Van Rhyn remembers that he is an art forger in Amsterdam. They work for the time-traveling Dutch Mafia, which has sent them into the past to recover masterpieces by the great artist Sebastian Groppi, whom you surely know, before a warehouse fire destroys them. Van Rhyn knows Groppi’s paintings intimately because he has forged them so often. His counterfeiting skill makes him the best agent to send back the originals. Once those originals are recovered, however, a complication may arise. The Dutch Mafia likes to kill its agents after really important jobs to keep them silent, and this is nothing if not that. Lafferty has given the box, Temple’s opening MacGuffin, a purpose and its carrier a good reason to outwit the people who sent him. Finally, we have a little plot versus what he had before: a series of connected incidents pretending to be one.
Saskia recalls her previous assignments:
“One must dispose of the dead bodies somewhere, Remsie. Oh, both missions were highly successful. It is just that, in about eighty percent of the joint-missions for the Dutch Mafia, one or both of the agents has to be terminated when the mission is completed. Weirdly alike, yes: the deaths by long dagger between the fourth and fifth ribs from behind. The police reports said that they were probably done by a left-handed man, but I’m inclined to think that they were done by a left-handed woman. Did you know that I was left-handed, Remsie?”
Van Rhyn’s solution is to complete the job and then change history. He and Saskia recover ten thousand genuine Groppis and send them to the Mafia. He even promises to supply Groppi’s signature wherever the painter neglected to sign. Having delivered the originals, the pair hop farther into the past, to June 22, 1634. There, Van Rhyn lives as Rembrandt and marries Saskia. Two days later, Sebastian Groppi is born upstairs in their new home. Rembrandt starts painting the masterpieces he remembers. Incidentally, they live on Coffin Street in Amsterdam, an extremely important location in the Coscuin Chronicles; it is where one will find Scheherazade Jokkebrok.
Twenty minutes later, Saskia announces a tragedy. The baby Groppi has died. “I suppose that I killed him, but I didn’t mean to,” Rembrandt says. He offers no explanation of how, but immediately sees how to turn the death to his advantage: “I paint forgeries of things that would not exist for a generation yet, and now will never have existed.” The copies survive the destruction of the history that produced their originals. With all the pictures in his head, Rembrandt declares himself the greatest painter who ever lived. Saskia says he is still just a forger.
She also points out what awaits the Dutch Mafia. Its fortune will turn to fairy gold: acorns, cinders, nutshells, and copies of Rembrandt signed with the now meaningless name of Groppi.
Saskia gets the last word:
“You’d never have done yours. You just haven’t the talent for anything except forgeries.”
Lafferty's afterword:
