The Winter Vault (22 page)

In the newly built towns of Ingleside and Long Sault, the inhabitants whose houses had been moved continued to wake and dress and eat each day; and although an observer would have said that everything about these houses was exactly the same, those who lived there – distressed, sleepless – knew that it was not. At first, one could not discern the cause; it was simply a feeling. Someone described it as the sensation of being watched, another as if the pages of one's mind were stuck together – that there was another, very different image beneath what was visible that one couldn't reach and, although the thumbnail of one's mind picked repeatedly at the sides of the thin page, it never separated. Another believed it was simply that the light was different, it did not fall across the table or across a book or through the curtains in the same way. Or maybe it was a trick of the wind, an unfamiliar breeze across one's face. Some felt it in the church that had been moved, stone by stone and, after the Sunday sermon, walking in the little graveyard, though in this case it was the feeling not of being watched, but instead the opposite, that no one was watching now, an abandonment. There was a feeling that the new towns were the ones that were “lost” and not the ones that had been left behind to be dismembered, burned, drowned. That postcards of “the lost villages” should depict instead the gleaming new subdivisions. It was an intuition, like that possessed by war pilots and navigators on the bombers, who had lost most of their hearing and yet could still, as veterans on the ground, feel the presence of a plane long before it could be seen. Some said it was like the difference between a man and his corpse, for what is a corpse if not an almost perfect replica.

Builders know that there is a grain in wood and a grain in stone; but there is also a grain in flesh.

Eighteen months after Avery's work on the salvage had begun, Ramses' face, with his one-metre-wide lips, was sliced just before his ears. He then suffered the indignity of a workman injecting him with a nasal spray of polyvinyl acetate. His visage, Block #120, held by the steel rods that had been inserted in the top of his head, was slowly winched into the sky.

Standing next to Avery, Jean could feel the heat radiating from his body and suddenly his shirt flashed into wetness only to dry instantly in the overpowering sun. Avery felt even the inside of his mouth was unbearably hot, felt even his teeth were sweating.

All work ceased as the huge head of Ramses slowly ascended on wires invisible in the sunlight. As thirty tonnes of stone seemed to ascend, hover, float in the air, the entire camp, three thousand men, stood silent and watched.

Avery finished writing in his shadow-book, just as his father had taught him, the personal record to be kept alongside the one maintained for his employer; their last night at Abu Simbel.

Every action has a cause and a consequence …

I do not believe home is where we're born, or the place we grew up, not a birthright or an inheritance, not a name, or blood or country. It is not even the soft part that hurts when touched, that defines our loneliness the way a bowl defines water. It will not be located in a smell or a taste or a talisman or a word …

Home is our first real mistake. It is the one error that changes everything, the one lesson you could let destroy you. It is from this moment that we begin to build our home in the world. It is this place that we furnish with smell, taste, a talisman, a name.

II

The Stone in the Middle

W
hen Gregor Mendel – the monk who grew pea plants and became the father of genetics – was twenty-two years old, he was sent to study at the university in Vienna. Perhaps in the early mornings or in the long summer twilight, as he walked along the Danube, he first considered the succession and end of generations. Perhaps he sought consolation for his aloneness by sitting with the ghosts of the river-dead, whose bodies were interred in a small graveyard on the banks. Perhaps he felt it was a cruel choice of resting place for those who'd drowned, to be laid to rest within the sound of the river; those whose last wish – perhaps the last wish even of the suicides – was for the maternal embrace of land. So close were the graves to the river that again and again over the years, the rising water threatened the dead until finally the little cemetery was moved to a field behind the new dam, where there would be no danger of flooding. A small chapel was built and hedges planted. In the site of the old cemetery – where perhaps Gregor Mendel first contemplated the mechanisms of heredity – a small grove grew up among the nameless dead who were left behind. Today no one picnics in the thought-full grove nor in the grass of regret on that side of the river. Although there is no sign to indicate the site was once a cemetery, perhaps something in the light seems to forbid such pleasures. But if one wishes to visit the dead, one simply takes Tram 71 to the end of the line at Kaiser Ebersdorferstrasse. From there one must walk. It is not very far.

Jean stood at the gate of her mother's garden, flourishing now in the farmer's soil of Marina's marsh. The dahlias and peonies sagged with shaggy, weary fullness, drunken with heat and sunshine. Marina had taken care of everything; in Jean's absence, a young man had been hired to prune and tie and turn and tend; her tools had been respected, returned to hang on the wall of the shed in careful rows, their blades and prongs wiped clean.

Jean opened the gate. She wanted nothing more than to dig, to blacken her hands. She asked herself what it meant, this desire; it was not to lay claim, she was sure. Perhaps a way to offer herself, as one stands before another, asking to understand. The soil was wet and cold.

From the back porch of the house, Avery watched Jean kneel – the bend of her back, her skirt stretched across her thighs, her hair piled loosely on top of her head, so the breeze would reach the sweat of her nape and shoulders. He saw how differently she moved now, as if she were used to stooping from fatigue, from futility; this new body, of which he had no knowledge. The loss he felt was so sharp he turned quickly and went back inside. Marina was working; her door was shut, the house was quiet. Avery sat with his bare feet cool on the tiled kitchen floor and closed his eyes.

What was needed was a mechanical advantage, he thought, block and tackle. He must become the fixed pulley.

He remembered the months he'd spent in Quebec, how Jean had repacked his rucksack after their weekends together, sneaking in letters for the weeks they would be apart, each to be opened at an appointed hour: poems, stories, photographs. It was a way to domesticate their desire in their apartness, to provide another tributary for that desire. He had believed then, opening those letters –
after dinner, at 3 p.m. on Sunday, just before sleep
– that somehow he and Jean possessed between them, unearned, and made possible only by the other, an aptitude, a calibration for happiness.

Now he would be as one who had witnessed a miracle and would not let himself forget; as a believer who clings to signs and portents; he would refuse doubt. He felt that his father would have understood. For William had taught him the commerce of invisible forces, ions in league across enormous distances and densities. He would continue to desire, to believe, until, as when suddenly one senses someone's gaze across a room, Jean looked up. He sat, in the misery of this resolve.

Jean turned to look back across the field and saw the empty porch and the shaded windows, closed against the heat. She could not explain how native her defeat, her desolation, as if all the years of happiness with him had somehow been only a reprieve, not meant to be hers. His pity: one kind of love unintentionally mocking another. She would work until her hands ached, until the low, intense glow of twilight spread across the garden. She longed for the first clarity of autumn, wondering if the cold could cleanse her. But she knew it could not. She had squandered all the time the child had been alive inside her; she had been beseeching the dead; her ache for her mother; her mother's, for her.

From the window of her studio, Marina watched Avery and Jean, two slight figures slowly crossing the marsh. She saw the distance between them. Avery's loose shirt flapped emptily behind him in the wind.

Since their return, Jean had slept in the little room she'd once shared with Avery, and Avery on the pullout bed in Marina's studio. He felt faint satisfaction to see this bed, the evidence of his separation from Jean, disappear each morning into the sofa, as if all might so easily be restored.

Avery and Jean stood a little apart, always now there seemed space for another between them. Rows of bright lettuce stuttered above the black earth. The marsh was bordered by rain-soaked trees. They had been out of the desert for almost a month and still the smell of wet earth was sharp and strange.

Jean could barely speak.

– Are you saying you want your freedom?

– I'm saying we should both feel free, Avery said, until we know what to do.

In this perversity, he felt certain, was a kind of truth, an integrity at least. As soon as he spoke, he knew it was so. He did not know how to restore her, he was incapable. Jean's despair was as true as everything else about her. He knew one thing with certainty: nothing would heal this way, in this orbit of defeat, this brokenness.

She was so thin now, the only pouches of flesh left of her were her breasts, her sex. The sight of her moved him to the core.

Jean was thinking hard. At last she said:

– I see. Going back to school will be difficult, you've waited for this a long time, you'll need to work without distraction …

Marina was washing peaches in the sink, the window wide open to the night.

– Jean loves you, she said.

Marina waited, but there was no answer. She turned around and saw Avery, with his soup spoon halfway to his mouth.

Standing behind his chair, she held him. Not one mother-cell forgets the feeling, her child crying.

Marina sat down next to him, crossed her arms on the table, and lay her head there, waiting for him to speak.

The flat on Clarendon was empty, the subleasers gone, and that is where Jean went. The return to Clarendon was terrible. She brought a suitcase of clothes, a box of books, a table and two chairs, a mattress for the floor. Everything else was left at Marina's house on the marsh.

Avery found a basement flat near the School of Architecture, where he was now enrolled, a graduate student. The first night on Mansfield Avenue, he sat at his table, incoherent with the risk he was taking, setting her free. He remembered a story Jean had told him of her parents, one of the first stories she'd told during their night in the cabin by the Long Sault. Elisabeth Shaw had come home late from grocery shopping. Looking flushed and guilty, she'd confessed to her husband that she'd been standing in Britnell's Bookshop in her heavy tweed coat and woollen hat for nearly an hour reading Pablo Neruda. She had no money to buy the book so she went down the street to a jeweller's and sold the bracelet she was wearing. She begged John, “Don't be angry.” “Angry!” he said. “I can't tell you what it means to me that I've married a woman who'd sell her jewellery to buy poetry.” Avery thought about what his own mother had said that very morning, standing at the back door as he'd left her house, “Grief bakes in us, it bakes until one day the blade pushes in and comes out clean.”

It was almost midnight when he telephoned Jean. They lay together with the few city blocks between them, his voice in her ear. He talked about what he would learn: the meaning of space, the consequences of weight and volume. Then he hung up and remembered her. He had not said what he wanted: send me a signal across the river, by lantern light or bird call, come under cover of darkness, I will know you by your smell, come with the rain …

Jean did not understand what her botany meant to her now, nor what to do with it. At Marina's suggestion, she enrolled in the university part-time. Many days, instead of going to her classes, she drove to the marsh to work in her mother's transplanted garden. Then she would cook for Marina while Marina worked. She would set out on the table thick square loaves of bread, round cheeses, vegetables pulled from the black fields. But she herself had no appetite. Marina did not ask questions. Instead she talked to Jean about Avery: “He's so much older than the other students. He keeps to himself. Except for Avery and the professor, everyone else was born on the other side of the war, and those few years have made another species of them … Sometimes, Avery says, he looks to the professor for brotherhood, but the man looks away, ignores him completely, too busy himself trying to squeeze into that lifeboat of youth. He says he feels alien, as if his English were a second language …”

As Marina spoke, Jean could feel Avery, his concentration, his earnestness, his self-restraint.

Marina told stories of Avery's childhood, about her life during the war living with William's sister and the cousins, the seclusion with William gone; and she talked about her work, painting all night, with a magnifying glass, the woven fabric of a child's winter coat against the bark of a tree, as if it were the most important thing to make this imaginary child a proper coat.

Jean always drove back to the city just before dark. The windows of the houses on Clarendon were filled with early lamplight. Dusk was chill, no longer pale; the beginning of a deep autumn blue. If the lobby was empty when she came home, she stood and looked at the ceiling. The constellations continued to float, a golden net, in their zodiacal sea. Afterwards, she lay on her mattress on the floor, watching the shapes of the trees in the window. She imagined Carl Schaefer, painting the stars with the door to the courtyard open to the keenness of the autumn night; and her mother, twenty years old and newly married, coming home under those stars, in her long red coat with the black buttons that Jean remembered from her childhood. She thought about her father. “I adored your mother, I adored her.” She imagined Avery, reading on Mansfield Avenue, his mechanical pencil dangling from his hand; and Marina taking her night walk on the marsh, trying to see in the dark.