The Winter Vault (11 page)

And sometimes Avery drove south to the Holland Marsh, and they spent the weekend together in the white farmhouse with his mother, Marina Voss Escher.

Avery alone was one thing, a universe with loose shirttails and notes in his pocket, to be discovered slowly. And Avery and Marina together, another universe.

For Avery it had always been three, until his father died. For Jean it had been two, longing for the third. Now they were three, and each felt the rightness of it.

– When my father came to Canada to work on the seaway, explained Avery, my parents searched for a place to please my mother. She chose the black fields of Holland Marsh. They moved into an old farmhouse and my father built a painting room for her. The house is bright white and sits like a ship on that good, black earth. A canal flows at the end of the garden. The colours and grandeur of the vegetables in the fields can pop open your eyes. After my father died, my mother thought she'd remain only temporarily in that house; but the longer she stayed, the less inclined she was to move. She found work illustrating for a children's press in Toronto. She bought a rowboat and docked it in the canal at the end of the garden.

The isolation suits her …

History soaked the ground of Marina's story-forests. One could almost hear the earth in her paintings grinding up the bones. Armed with only a heel of bread, a small basket, a walking stick, or a song; without resources and with the handicap of one's innocence, a child met the terrors of the dense, dark, unhappy wood, the winding paths from which one must not stray yet lead to the inevitable terror.

Marina's illustrations were the colours of plant rot, rain-soaked earth, shadow-coldness. The colours that hide under stones. Peering closely into the darkness of her paint, almost invisible, one saw half-faces, crippled hands, mad eyes, desires exerting their will on the events of the story. Is a curse anything more than a monstrous will at work?

Jean looked at the strong, compact body of Avery's mother, in her cheerful striped apron, swishing hot water in the teapot, chewing a biscuit, and she blurted out:

– Where do these forests come from?

Marina answered without a moment's pause.

– From home.

When Avery was working up north, Marina took Jean into her studio, set up a table there, and gave her exercises in looking. Then she let Jean's hand go free. Page after page, fast sketches dropped to the floor. Then again slowly – a single drawing each morning. They went on walks, they cooked together. Marina made pronouncements over the sound of the water as she washed the vegetables. “What is the meaning of the kitchen in a children's story? It is the mother's body!”

– William was away for so much of Avery's young life, said Marina, that they did not really know each other. But after the war, William took Avery everywhere with him in his Norton Big Four. He packed Avery into his blue Swallow sidecar along with their gear and they rode up to Scotland and down to Wales for the hydro-electric projects, Glen Affric, Glen Garry, Glen Moriston. Claerwen Dam, Clywedog Dam. William was part of the first underground power stations in England, in Strathfarrar and Kilmorack. But always he envied his colleagues who were busy building the underground in London.

We met on a train in Scotland, on the way to Jura, continued Marina. William was travelling with his father. The island of Jura is long and narrow. It has only one road. It was no surprise that our paths would cross again, and they did. As he came closer, I saw that he was the same man I'd talked to on the train. It was not a real road in those days, just a track really and, on either side, the wet bog. I was suddenly so shy I didn't even think but jumped down into the verge. Of course the instant I'd done it, I knew he would think I'd lost my wits. I lay down in the wet and clutched my book to my chest and closed my eyes. William slid down next to me. He just looked at me and asked, ‘What are you reading?’ It was outrageously funny, but at the same time I realized very suddenly how afraid I'd been that his first question would be ‘Are you a Jew?’

I was almost twenty-three. I'd answered an advertisement to be a companion to an elderly woman who could no longer live alone. It turned out that I was the only applicant because the woman, Annie Moorcock, lived in such remoteness. But that, to me, was the attraction. And I was not disappointed. It is a gorgeously desolate eden. The island is only twenty-nine miles long and seven miles wide, and on it, along with perhaps two hundred people, live thousands of red deer. I cooked and cleaned and I read to her. Annie Moorcock's father had worked on a ship in the islands and she told me sea stories and stories of Jura from when she was girl. But the real gift for me was that her hobby was painting. She taught me a little. I began to want to paint the rain – a sure subject on Jura. I painted hundreds of pictures of rain. The patient, grey hatching of rain on wood, on stone, on the bog, on the sea … This obsession worried the old woman and one day she brought me an armful of wildflowers – it surely cost her tremendous effort to pick them. She said, ‘Here are flowers. Why don't you try to paint them,’ and I said I can't paint flowers, they won't look real. ‘But you're a good painter, you're already much better than me. It will be lovely – does it have to look real?’ In those days I felt ferociously, that yes, it must look real. Then she held out the wildflowers and that's when something happened to me. I suddenly knew what I must do: not to paint the flowers, but the hand holding the flowers.

And so for weeks I drew and then painted the old woman's hands.

It was only when I'd heard she'd died that I understood that what I'd really wanted to do was to paint my mother's hands. Hands that I could not remember ever having looked at carefully, hands that I could not remember.

Some time after that day, I had a dream that I put cut flowers into a vase of water, and when I took them out of the vase, they had earth clinging to their roots.

While Avery was away, Jean began to spend her time at the marsh. She attended classes in Toronto, then drove the short hour to Marina's, each time grateful for the pleasure of driving toward a place where she would be welcomed. Often they spent the day walking the entire width of the marsh or its circumference, Marina stopping to sketch a detail of the fields, or of branch and sky that Jean would later recognize in Marina's work. They bought milk and bread from the neighbouring farm, and were invited in for coffee, an invitation Marina almost always declined. “It's just politeness on their part,” Marina explained, “and it's politeness to refuse.”

One evening, after a winter walk along the canal, which was still flowing, an erratic line in the snow, they sat warming their feet at the fire in the kitchen.

– This will interest you, said Marina. I read in the newspaper that there's a movement in Germany to expel the rhododendron and the forsythia, to rip them out of every public and private garden, because they are not indigenous and are therefore a threat to ‘pure German soil.’

The newspaper said that the cherry came to Europe from Asia Minor and has probably been growing in Germany for more than fifteen hundred years, and that the potato came from Peru. Do you think the rhododendron-haters will give up potatoes in their stew? A German birth certificate will be forged for them, you can be certain.

When I went to England and left my family behind in Amsterdam, my mother wrote to me every week. Her letters were like little pamphlets, filled with bits of information according to her interests and her indignations. I loved those letters. To this very moment I cannot believe I took leave of her on the platform of the Centraal station so carelessly, with such a youthful disdain of fate. I thought I had all the time in the world to return to her, but it was the last time I would ever see her face or be held by her. Marina wiped her eyes on her smock and sat down at the table.

– Daughters don't stop crying for their mothers, Marina said, and I had ten more years with mine than you had with yours. We long for our mothers more, not less. Suddenly she jumped up and rushed to the oven. The seed biscuits had shrivelled to charcoal. She opened the window and the winter air filled the kitchen.

– It's like a spell, said Marina. Nothing eats away time like the past.

The rhododendrons reminded me that, just before the war, my mother who, like you, also loved flowers, wrote to me in a fury about a professor who connected ‘primitive’ vegetation and ‘primitive’ man. One of his examples was ‘tundra man,’ where the human species, he said, had clearly stagnated at an earlier stage of evolution. The only legitimate German garden, he said, was ‘the blood-and-soil rooted garden,’ ‘der Blut-und-Bodenverbundene Garten.’ I tell you all this for a reason. During the war, there were strict ‘landscape rules,’ enforced in all the occupied territories, especially in Poland. Not only were ‘foreigners’ to be expelled – including the Poles themselves – but also the soil had to be similarly purified. To this end, a botanical purge was ordered against the tiny forest flower
Impatiens parviflora –
and that's the meaning of the little flower you see hidden somewhere in every one of my paintings.

Soon after their conversation about
Impatiens parviflora
, Jean went back to look again at the children's books Marina had illustrated. The paintings were saturated with detail – animal fur glossy with oil, drops of water containing landscapes, ominous shadows in folds of cloth. In each face, painted with such empathy, a human moment poised – such desolation, such depth of joy – Jean felt her own eyes staring out from the page.

In every childhood there is a door that closes, Marina had said. And: only real love waits while we journey through our grief. That is the real trustworthiness between people. In all the epics, in all the stories that have lasted through many lifetimes, it is always the same truth: love must wait for wounds to heal. It is this waiting we must do for each other, not with a sense of mercy, or in judgment, but as if forgiveness were a rendezvous. How many are willing to wait for another in this way? Very few.

– We become ourselves when things are given to us or when things are taken away. I was born in Berlin, said Marina. In 1933, my father was so disgusted by the turn of events that he convinced my mother to move. For my mother, this was very hard, to leave behind her sisters, her friends. In Amsterdam, my father joined my uncle's business, a hat factory. Before they left, my father told us that perhaps it wasn't going to be so difficult to leave his professorship at the university – a job he guessed would very soon not exist anyway – because it wasn't so far from filling heads to fitting them. My mother did not find this amusing.

My sister was only thirteen and so, of course, she stayed with them. But I was nineteen, and soon after the move I made the decision to go to London instead and practise my English. I was happy to live in another language because the year before I had been foolish enough to fall in love with a boy who suddenly decided in 1933 that he couldn't marry someone of my ‘kind’ after all. A student of my father's had moved to England and said he would be happy to have someone who spoke both German and English to tutor his children. So I went to live in Twickenham for a year. Then my mother wanted me to come back to Amsterdam, but I wasn't quite ready to do that. So that's when I answered the advertisement and went to work for Annie Moorcock, off the coast of Scotland.

I took the boat from Port Askaig. Annie's neighbour, Mr. Muldrew, greeted me at Feolin dock and we drove slowly through the rain, past Craighouse and Ardfarnel. Mr. Muldrew clutched a rag in one hand – constantly reaching out the window to unfog the windscreen – while he steered and changed gears with the other hand, until we reached her rough stone house.

I was surprised to discover that inside all was refinement and proportion: fresh flowers on a polished round wooden table, a round rug beneath it, in a receiving hall of panelling and drapery. If I had been surprised by this elegance, I was completely unprepared to find, in this house on this secluded island of Jura, Annie Moorcock's library. There were fine fitted shelves from floor to rafters, shelves over the doorway, shelves spilling into the room beyond. There were tens of thousands of books.

Though not ashamed of her obsession, the old woman was nevertheless somewhat shy, as befits the confessing of any intimate pleasure.

‘I can't bend to retrieve the books from the bottom shelves any more,’ she said, ‘and this makes me so mournful I cannot express it, those books as inaccessible to me as my youth.’

That first afternoon we sat in the kitchen and Annie took the measure of me, Marina said. I could see it would be all right between us, and perhaps even something more – an affection.

Her children did not approve of her living alone on the island, but she would not leave her library and could not bear the thought of moving it. Within an hour of my arrival on that rainy late afternoon in November, I understood that I had been hired not for the simple task of keeping an old woman company by reading to her and cooking and helping her dress and bathe, but for a secret objective all her own. Over tea she said, with a tinge of triumph in her voice, that I was to help her catalogue her books, and that she had been preparing for this task for some time. Indeed, she had a table overflowing with neatly addressed piles of folded paper. Over the months, we slipped these notes and many others into the volumes as we went along: messages to her daughters, her son, and her eight grandchildren. We compiled her list for divesting each book – which child or grandchild would benefit most from a specific volume – her hope, as she told me, to provide a moment of solace or guidance or respite for the one who would open it some winter evening many years hence. ‘Though I hope my rosy-cheeked Thea’ – who was only six at the time – ‘might never need John Donne, there is something about her, a little shadow, that tells me she might feel the want of these words some day.’ And so the weeks went by, in this most peculiarly tender way.

Annie had an astonishing collection of movable books for children, including several published by Ernest Nister in Nuremberg. She even had a copy of Meggendorfer's
Circus
, which her father had brought home from a trip to Germany when she was a child. With the outbreak of the First World War, British children's books were no longer printed in Germany, and Annie had some of the earliest movable books published in England between the wars, almost all the Bookano Stories and the
Daily Express
annuals from which animals popped out of their V-folds. I often regret that she didn't live long enough to see the work of Vojtech Kubasta, the Czech architect who studied in Prague and then turned his hand to children's pop-up books – I discovered these in London after the war – his
Sleeping Beauty
and
Snow White
among many others – where the eyes of dogs roll around in their heads, demonstrated Marina, and melancholic dwarves are suddenly restored to happiness by the agency of a tab, and where long, empty tables are, in an instant, magically laden with food, a particularly welcome device in those years of cravings and deprivations.