The Winter Vault (10 page)

– There are so many things, he said quietly, that we can't see but that we believe in, so many places that seem to possess an unaccountable feeling, a presence, an absence. Sometimes it takes time to learn this, like a child who suddenly realizes for the first time that the ball he threw over the fence has not disappeared. I used to sit with my mother in Grandmother Escher's Cambridgeshire garden and we would feel that strong wind from the Ural Mountains on our faces. The wind is invisible, but the Ural Mountains are not! Yet why should we believe in the Ural Mountains that we can't see when we're sitting in a garden in Cambridgeshire and not believe in other things, an inner knowledge we feel just as keenly? Nothing exists independently. Not a single molecule, not a thought.

– ‘A garden must have a path,’ my mother used to say, and she was right. A path that has worn its way into the earth, sunken cobbles, grass beginning to grow through the cracks, said Jean, a path that has been set into the earth through constant use. The way stone stairs over centuries hollow out in the middle. Imagine mere boots being able to wear away stone – the way some stories bend in the middle after centuries of telling. The ground knows where we have walked …

At night instead of a bedtime story sometimes my mother and I would look at seed catalogues. She sent to England for some of them, just to dream, and she would whisper a garden for me. I would imagine it with her, every detail, the ivy, the bench beneath the willow, the snow of blossoms in the warm spring air. Until I fell asleep.

Avery stroked Jean's face. He leaned down and took off her sandals and drew the sheet up her bare legs.

– Let me tell you a garden story, said Avery, a bedtime story.

Jean closed her eyes.

– Each spring, said Avery, when my father was a boy, he waited for the sparrows to return to that garden in Cambridgeshire. By March he was brimming with impatience. Day after day, he faithfully threw the tea crumbs into the ivy. Finally, one morning, the wall began to sing.

Avery had already imagined, in those first months with Jean, what the chance to grow old with her would mean: not regret at how her body would change, but the private knowledge of all she'd been. Sometimes, his ache so keen, Avery felt that only in old age would he finally have full possession of her youthful flesh. It would be his secret, forged in all the nights next to each other.

In the flat on Clarendon, when Avery couldn't sleep, Jean whispered to him while he stroked her arm. She recited a list of all the native Ontario plants she could think of: hair grass, arrow leaved aster, the heath aster, swamp aster, long-leaved bluets, foxglove, side-oats grama, the compass plant whose leaves always align on the north-south axis. The sand dropseed, turtlehead, great St. John's wort, sneezeweed, balsam ragwort, fox sedge, umbrella sedge, the little bluestem … and then sleep grew farther away still and he began to touch her with purpose.

The desert heat would not leave Jean; above the yellow sand the air was a shimmering liquid, a palpable transparency; by early morning forty-five degrees Celsius in the shade. Even during the frigid night Jean felt her bones baking, even when the surface of her skin was cool.

On the deck of the houseboat she stood in her clothes and poured night river water through her hair. For a few ecstatic moments the chill reached her brain and she felt her skeleton cold as metal. But the effect seemed to last only as long as she was under the water.

To comfort her, Avery told Jean about thermophiles.

– They're a single-cell bacteria that thrive in heat – in temperatures of one-hundred-and-ten-degrees-Celsius – in thermal vents heated by magma, liquid rock. They squirm with pleasure and swim gleefully in baths boiled by bubbling lava, gorge themselves on sulfuric acid and molten iron. They set up house in the heart of volcanoes and in flues of steam spewing from the ocean floor. When you're hot, you must not think of cool things, such as Emperor penguins or the McMurdo Ice Shelf – it just doesn't work, it makes you feel hotter. Instead, think of thermophiles!

– I feel better already …

Among the few books Jean and Avery brought to the desert – aside from reference texts and field guides – were Jean's choice of Elizabeth David's cookery book,
Mediterranean Food
, and Avery's, of Thor Heyerdahl's
Kon-Tiki Expedition
.

There was sense to reading, high on a hill in the ancient ocean of the desert at dusk, where whales with feet once swam, about the small
Kon-Tiki
floating in the expanse of the Pacific, “where the nearest solid was the moon.” To prove that the ocean, a highway of predictable currents, might have connected prehistoric peoples rather than kept them apart, Heyerdahl constructed the raft, following in every detail the design on a petroglyph. Heyerdahl's vessel, at a fast clip, crossed the ocean in a hundred days. During a storm, the crew in its fragile craft climbed mountains and valleys of water, “uncertain where we were, for the sky was overclouded and the horizon one single chaos of rollers.” Avery read aloud as the desert colours flamed hotter, radiant, and the air grew cold. “When night had fallen, and the stars were twinkling in the dark tropical sky, the phosphorescence flashed around us … and single glowing plankton resembled round live coals so vividly that we involuntarily drew in our bare legs …”

Jean soon learned how chronic Avery's insomnia; no matter the depth of his physical exhaustion, the mathematical possibilities of error continued to combine and recombine in his head. So she began to read to him, first about the fruit-bearing trees of the desert – which proved too interesting to put him to sleep – then about herbs, and finally from Elizabeth David, whose serene voice promising so much certain pleasure seemed to calm him. “There's nothing like a good recipe to make you believe things will work out fine in the end,” said Avery. “Even the phrase ‘Serves four’ is hope distilled.”

In the small cabin of the houseboat, books in the blankets, Jean read to Avery about capon magro, “the celebrated Genoese fish salad made of about twenty different ingredients and built up into a splendid baroque edifice.” She unfolded her legs along his while assuring him that “wooden herb bowls with choppers are to be found at Madame Cadec's, 27 Greek St, W
1
,” as if they might just stroll down to the shop the following morning before lunch, as if the closest market were not seven hundred kilometres away through cataracts and desert. Avery drifted with strange possibilities of fulfillment whispered in his ear: “If by chance you happen to come upon a watermelon and some blackberries in the same season, try this dish …” He listened to descriptions of peppers sleek with oil. In his childhood, the only olive oil Avery knew was sold in chemists' shops in tiny brown bottles as an ablution (which his mother had used to clear his ears), and rationing meant that meat and fish and butter in the quantities Elizabeth David wrote of were absurdities (roast of whole hog browned on a spit). But in that absurdity was an ideal, and in the ideal a possibility, and yes, that every meal was planned for four servings contained hope – even if that hope was leftovers.

And, of course, Elizabeth David had married in Egypt.

Only after many months, with the delayed response we often have to facts too obvious to see, did Jean realize that their dear companion of the kitchen shared her mother's name, and that when she listened to Avery read in the desert about phosphorescent plankton clinging to the backs of dolphins, turning them into “clouds” and “luminescent ghosts,” swimming beside the raft in such tight formation the sea was white and solid in the darkness, and of black rays the size of a room, she was also listening to her father's miracles, his voice quiet beside her on the
Moccasin
, riding home from Aultsville.

They were to meet again in Morrisburg; they had known each other four months. Jean had taken the train and was to wait for Avery at the lunch counter near the small station. Avery watched her walking there, in her loose sweater flowing almost to her knees and with her auburn braid swinging back and forth across her back. He drove slowly alongside her and rolled down his window.

– I have to go to Montreal for a job interview, said Avery. Jump in.

Jean looked at him.

– I know you don't have anything with you, but I can buy you things … you can wear my clothes …

The wind was high across the river, through the trees a continuous splashing of shadow and early autumn sun. Jean's bare skin was cold under her cotton skirt.

They drove for about an hour and then stopped by the side of the road. Avery took out a folding camp table from the car and placed it in a field. The tabletop seemed to float in the high grass. Jean set out the hard sour spy apples and the blackberries, the bread and the cheese, two tin plates and a knife.

Jean looked out at the swaying field and the hurtling clouds; she held back strands of her hair with one hand. Amid the wind, the perfect fruit lay still and solid on the table.

Later they drove into the suspended light of dusk, the sun falling in the miles behind them. She could not stop thinking of the stillness of the apples, the movement around them.

A still life belongs to time … And this day's stillness, she thought, this single day: it belongs to us.

They continued to drive north in the cool beginning of night.

– During the war, said Avery, while my father was away, I stayed in Buckinghamshire with my mother and my Aunt Bett and my three cousins.

Every Tuesday in London there were lunchtime concerts in the vacant National Gallery; hundreds came each week without fail to stand in the picture-empty rooms and listen. Because my mother wished us to understand the importance of this – of people converging to listen to music despite the threat of bombing – at 1 p.m. every Tuesday my cousins Nina, Owen, and Tom and I pretended to pay a shilling – a circle of cardboard with the King's head crayoned on both sides – at the door of the sitting room. Then my mother and my aunt performed for us, duets they'd practised all week. My aunt played violin and my mother, piano. When the sheet music ran out, we listened to phonograph records. Afterwards we had tea at the dining room table laid with a clean white cloth, the good tea set, and my aunt's real silverware.

Despite bombings – one fell into the gallery's small courtyard and didn't explode until six days later, ironically while the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Unit was at lunch – for six and a half years there was a performance each week: 1,698 concerts. My mother took personal pride at this, for our sitting room concerts must have been nearly as many.

When they drove together along the edges of the flooded St. Lawrence landscape, Avery sometimes stopped and took out his paintbox – smaller than a pocketbook, square, with a hinge lid, a gift from his father – which he almost always carried with him. It was not often immediately clear to Jean what had caught his eye, an isolated farm building, a tree, the clouds. While Avery painted, Jean took the time to look at things. She kept a plant diary. Jean was used to long hours outside, but this feeling of companionship across a field was new.

They unwrapped the meals Jean packed for them – Edwards cheddar, sunflower bread, McIntosh apples, wholemeal biscuits – and ate on the ground, or in the car if it was raining – and only a long time later, in the dark, driving home to Clarendon Avenue, would they would describe to each other what they, with their different eyes, had seen.

It was an engagement of mind that was almost shattering in its pleasure. Jean could not look at the world now without seeing hypars and span-to-depth ratios, wind drift, and vortex separation oscillations. She learned that a building must never sway more than 1/500ths of its height or the wind could create alternating vacuums that would start the building wavering as much as three feet from side to side. “Office workers,” said Avery, “have been known to get airsick in high towers.” He told her about bascules and swing bridges, Gauss's domes and steel whiskers, and how an entire bridge can be supported by half an inch of metal. He explained the difference between hundred-year winds and design winds; he explained that air rushing between tall buildings behaved just like water forced through a narrow gorge. He told her about soil mechanics and the strange case of the National Theatre in Mexico City, which had been built on a sandy foundation. The weight of the heavy stone theatre squeezed water from the sand and the building sank ten feet. But just when they'd constructed a new staircase leading down to the sunken entrance, the building started to rise again, and yet another staircase had to be built so theatregoers could now climb up to the entrance. All the newly erected buildings surrounding the theatre had squeezed the water out of their foundations too and had lifted the theatre back up again. The world, she now understood, was always on the verge of flying apart. The only thing holding matter together was the very fact that it had reached its limits.

Jean had her secrets of matter too. She told him of the shyest plant on earth, the colocynth or bitter gourd, whose seeds cannot bear even a flicker of light; a flash will send them back to dormancy and they will hibernate until they are sure of the darkness they need to sprout. This makes them perfect desert plants, for they need only a little moisture to establish a strong root system before growing to face the scorching desert sun. She told him of a fungus that eats through wood, turning entire buildings to powder, and lichen that is blown about the steppes into great heaps, where it is gathered and roasted like popcorn. Some plants have been cultivated by man for centuries; some, like the olive, are thousands of years old. The most extreme example is probably the seventy-two-hundred-year-old Japanese
Cryptomeria
, although some claim that the Seychelles double coconut might be more than fourteen thousand years old.

– I happen to know about the
Cryptomeria
tree, said Avery in the car somewhere in the September evening east of Kingston, because I've just been reading about temples, about the Ise temple in Japan. Two clearings lie next to each other in the midst of dense
Cryptomeria;
the forest itself is considered holy. One clearing is covered with shining white pebbles. In the other clearing stands the Ise temple. Every twenty years, for almost three millennia, the temple has been dismantled and burned and a new, identical temple erected in the clearing next to it. Then the empty site is covered in white pebbles and only a single post remains, hidden in a small wooden hut; this is the sacred pillar that will be used to rebuild the temple when its turn comes again, twenty years later. The temple is not considered a replica, instead it has been recreated. This distinction is essential. It is a Shinto belief that a temple must not be a monument but must live and die in nature, like all life, and continually be reborn in order to remain pure.

The fields glowed under the moon and the car was dark. Jean kept the window open and the night air on her bare legs was cold; she loved this cold, like being on the deck of a ship.

– Sometimes, Avery continued, when I'm looking at a building, I feel I know the architect's mind. Not only his technical choices, but more … as if I knew his soul. Well, no man can know the soul of another man – perhaps not his soul, but the state of his soul. I'm ashamed to say this, it sounds so simple-minded, but there are choices that strike me as so achingly personal, and there they are in stone and glass, for anyone to see … a man's mind laid bare in the positioning of each doorway and window, in the geometric relationship between windows and walls, in the relation between the musculature of a building to its skeleton, the consideration of how a man might feel, placing his chair here or there in a room following the light. I'm convinced we feel the stresses in a building when we're inside.

No one can take in a building all at once. It's like when we take a photograph – we're looking at only a few things, half a dozen or even a dozen – and yet the photo records everything in our frame of vision. And it's those thousand other details that anchor us far below what we consciously see. It's what we unconsciously see that gives us the feeling of familiarity with the mind behind a building. Sometimes it seems as if the architect had full knowledge of these thousand other details in his design, not just the different kinds of light possible across a stone facade, or across the floor, or filling the crevices of an ornament, but as if he knew just how the curtains would blow into the room through the open window and cause just that particular shadow and turn a certain page of a certain book at just that moment of the story, and that the dimness of the Sunday rain would compel the woman to rise from the table and draw the man's face to the warmth of her. It was as if the architect had anticipated every minute effect of weather, and of weather on memory, every combination of atmosphere, wind, and temperature, so that we are drawn to different parts of a room depending on the hour of day, the season, as if he could invent memory, create memory! And this embrace of every possibility, of light, weather, season – every calculation of climate – is also the awareness of every possibility of life, the life that is possible in such a building. And the sudden freedom of this is profound. It's like falling in love, the feeling that here, at last here, one can be one's self, and the true measure of one's life can be achieved – aspirations, the various kinds of desire – and that moral goodness and intellectual work are possible. A complete sense of belonging to a place, to oneself, to another. All this in a building? Impossible, but also, somehow, true. A building gives us this, or takes it from us, a gradual erosion, a forgetting of parts of ourselves …

They passed the dark miles in this way, the St. Lawrence, then Lake Ontario on one side of the highway, farmers' fields on the other; a landscape inscribed by a lover is like no other place on earth.

– This river where no one bathes, said Avery, this new St. Lawrence with its graves … I understand perfectly why Georgiana Foyle would rather row out to her husband's grave than move it. Even though she will now have to be buried alone … This torments her. But she's right. His body belongs to that place because his life belonged there.

– There is such a long human relationship with plants, said Jean, not just between seed and sower, but with the creation of the first aesthetic gardens. Who was the first person to desire certain plants for pleasure, to separate these plants from wilderness, the way prayer separates certain words from the rest of language? Why did the Egyptians use a palm leaf to symbolize a vowel? Before about
8000 B
.
C
., wheat was just a kind of wild grass. But by accident, this grass was pollinated with goat grass, and the fourteen chromosomes of each combined to create twenty-eight chromosomes: emmer wheat. Then emmer crossed with another kind of grass and made forty-two chromosomes, and this is the wheat we now use for bread, the wholegrain we ate for lunch. But this was really a rare accident. Because the seeds of the new wheat couldn't easily transport and fertilize themselves, they would not spread. So man and plant needed each other. This tiny accident led to settlement, to the scythe, to the plough and wheel and axle, to the potter's wheel and the waterwheel and pulley, to irrigation.

– To water rights and land rights, said Avery. To canals, dams, and seaways.

– I've been reading about rain, said Jean. That utterly distinctive smell, when rain first starts to fall – two scientists have analyzed it. They've named it ‘petrichor’ from the Greek for stone and for the ‘blood’ that flows through the veins of the gods. It's the scent of an oil produced by plants partially decomposed, undergoing oxidation and nitration, a combination of three compounds. The first raindrops reach into stone or pavement and release this plant oil, which we smell as it is washed away. We can only smell it as it is washed away.

In the autumn, Avery packed his kit again and went north into the rock and darkness, the darkest green of northern Quebec, to work on the dam on the Manicouagan River. Many Saturday mornings, Jean and Avery drove toward each other. The highway motels had their own strange attraction, nothing more than a brick rectangle inserted among the northern forest, the front door to each motel room leading directly from the highway; and yet the chill, astringent air of the firs, the coldness of centuries of shade, seemed to penetrate even the bricks and cinderblocks with a clean, live joy. One would approach and see the other's car waiting in the gravel parking lot; that sight was sufficient to overwhelm each with happiness. Let us always meet in motels, Avery had said, even after we've been together for a hundred years. Jean drove to these meetings in her father's old blue Dart, often with her botany textbooks open on the passenger seat so that, after the first hour or so of daydreaming, she could glance down and memorize facts for her courses at the university. Thus the botanical lexicon attached itself to the miles, to small towns and gas stations: Esso and
Equisetum
, The Voyageur Restaurant and
Athyrium
, Greenville and
Gymnocarpium
, Ste. Therese and
Selaginella
, Pointe-aux-Trembles and
Thelypteris
.