The Winter Vault (12 page)
It was because of Annie Moorcock, the extraordinary random chance of our connection, that I was able to join together the two things she loved and gave me to love: painting and children's books. Sometimes I feel she would not approve of what use I have made of her kindness, rendering images that would have turned her head away in despair. But then there are other days when I feel her blessing as I work, because she was the most acute human being I have ever met and this gift of hers was overlooked by almost everyone who knew her, until her library spoke for her, with such eloquence and such love, after her death.
I met William and his father for the third time in three days, said Marina, at Mr. McKechnie's shop when I was picking up the post. They were collecting supplies for the arduous walk to Corryvreckan.
They invited themselves to tea. Annie took an instant liking to them. She knew William and his father were both engineers and, after they explored the library, she set out her collection of movable books on the dining table. The three of them fell into a discussion of paper engineering – pivot points, rocker arms, angle folds, closed tents, wheels, and fulcrums. In her face, a transformation, a restoration worthy of one of her magical books – complete fulfillment, as if she'd been waiting decades for just this single afternoon of conversation – as William and his father sat with their teacups teetering excitedly in their laps, bearing avid witness to her life's work. After they left, this enravishment lasted for some hours before beginning to fade. By the time the shadows had grown between the trees, Annie had taken to her room, subdued. I never again saw that same pleasure in her face.
Jean and Marina sat looking into the fire, surrounded by the smell of damp wool and turpentine.
– Later, William's father helped me find my parents and my sister … but they had already died, in Fohrenwald …
For better or for worse, said Marina, slowly rising from her chair, love is a catastrophe.
Whenever Avery came down from Quebec, Marina and Jean greeted him with a lovingly prepared feast, which he received gratefully: pies, sweet and savoury, soups and stews made of vegetables from the marsh, pumpkin mashed and baked with butter and maple syrup, served hot, with cream. Afterwards, they spent the night around Marina's table, listening to Avery's stories.
Once, while walking in the woods above the river, Avery had met a young man, a teenager, who was helping his uncles build pylons for the dam. Avery watched him running between the trees in a pattern, endlessly, the same course.
– He saw me watching, said Avery, and came over to me without embarrassment, on the contrary, lit from within with urgency.
‘I'm going to be a race driver,’ he told me. ‘I won't always be pouring concrete. Someday I'll have enough money to buy my own car.’
He looked at me a moment and decided I would understand.
‘There are drivers who dare death – those are the ones who won't last. Then there are the drivers who respect death – those are the ones who hardly ever win.’ He began to sway back and forth, following with his eyes the circuit he'd just run. ‘And there are drivers,’ he continued, ‘who have so ingested –
ingérer, gorger, s'empiffrer –
death that they no longer have a taste for it. These are the ones who are already ghosts.’
‘How do you know this?’ I asked him.
The young man in the forest looked alien, mushroom white, his eyes an artificial blue.
‘Are the ghosts the ones who win?’ I asked.
The young man laughed. ‘Remember my name,’ he said. ‘Remember Villeneuve!’ And he ran off, one arm outstretched over the steep edge of the gorge.
Jean and Avery lay together on the floor of the Clarendon flat. It was a cold autumn night, a rainy wind. Marina had painted paper lampshades for Jean, in copper, madder, and gold, which gave Jean in her living room the feeling of sitting in the last minutes of sunset. Avery reached over and closed Jean's book.
– There's a new project … A new kind of project … I want you to come with me, said Avery.
– You look so worried, said Jean.
– It's far away.
Avery took Jean's hand and opened it, palm up, in his lap.
– Please close your eyes …
Your thumb is the Atlantic, your smallest finger, the Pacific. Your fingertips are Egypt, and the heel of your hand is Africa … Your heart line is the Arabian desert, your fate line is the river Nile …
Avery and Jean were married in the house on the marsh. It was a civil ceremony with two guests to act as witnesses, Marina's neighbours to the east, who'd kept a kind eye on her in her widowhood. Jean watched through the window as they arrived, their boots trailing out a brown path behind them across the marsh, through the snow. They left their woollen scarves and leather gloves to dry on the radiator, and Jean, standing with Avery, waiting for the ceremony to begin, committed the sight of these to memory: symbols of kindness. Is there no one you wish to invite? Marina had asked, and Jean, in her aloneness, had felt ashamed. Never mind, said Marina, we have each other now. What shall you call me? Just plain Marina, or Marina-Mother, or how about Marina-Ma? – that last name both women thought extremely funny, and loved for the Japanese sound of it, the joke of it, the delicate orientalism that seemed so far from the squat woman with the short, frazzled grey hair, cut like a boy's.
– Your heart line is the Arabian desert, your fate line is the river Nile … Not to scale, of course … Here, he said, circling the mound at the base of her thumb, is the Sahara …
During the months before their departure, first to England and then on to Khartoum, Jean packed away her newly earned diploma, sublet the flat on Clarendon, and moved into the white house with Marina. Neither could conceal their pleasure in this arrangement. They spent long days in Marina's painting room, they walked companionably along the canal through the snow, together they sat bundled with blankets in lawn chairs and stared out at the marsh. Neither could believe their good fortune, their affinities so matched. For Jean, to be so at ease with the older woman, mother and daughter – she was almost drunk with the satiety of it.
The summer before, Jean had brought all the jars from her living room to the house on the marsh and had planted each seedling from her mother's garden on a section of Marina's land. Avery had built a low white fence around it, so Jean would feel that square of earth was hers.
– Here, said Avery in the lamplit twilight, circling the mound at the base of her thumb, is the Sahara … And here, kissing the middle of her palm, is the Great Temple of Abu Simbel …
The Nile breaks over rocks of greatest resistance – creating fissures, foaming gorges, stone islands – these are the impassable cataracts, said Avery, the gateway to Nubia. Beyond this, the river is slow and its banks are cultivated – fields and date forests. The hills here, Avery traced the line down her palm, are gentle – terraces of silt, sandstone, quartzite. Here, between the fate and the heart lines, the Mediterranean collides with Africa – the desert is strewn with the ruins of two cultures. In your hand you hold Christian churches with elaborate frescoes, Coptic temples, fortresses, Stone Age petroglyphs, countless tombs …
For thousands of kilometres east and west, between the Red Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, the sand, without allegiance, claims everything. Tiny grains of quartz, oblivious to religion, royalty, or poverty, grind even the hardest stone monuments into dust, and whole dynasties have been abraded to invisibility …
The cataract at Aswan, and the fact that it was carved into the side of a cliff, secured Abu Simbel for centuries. The Sahara slowly climbed the cliff until only the very tip of the temple was visible …
The night unfolded, Avery explaining all he knew. Jean heard in his voice how hungrily he desired this chance, not to be the one building the dam but the one to salvage. At last, he looked to her for her answer.
– I don't have anything with me, said Jean, but I can wear your clothes …
They arrived in London in January. Avery's cousin Owen was away and they stayed in his flat, a fashionable idyll of darkly painted rooms, chandeliers and silk carpets; teak furniture, firesides heaped with cushions. Only the kitchen had never been renovated, and in the cupboards Avery recognized Aunt Bett's dishes – chipped and faded – from their childhood. It was a nostalgia Avery had not expected of Owen, and he was grateful for the discovery, as if the smallest details of their years together during the war had not been forgotten.
Dusk in Owen's bedroom, the window open to the rain, roofs black and shining, a crack of sunset. In this rainy blackness and this unexpected last light, the scattering of birds just before dark, both felt a new kind of desire, inseparable from the city. Inseparable from London, January 1964. The desire experienced in unfamiliar streets, one's body never more known by another.
During their last days in England, after staying with Aunt Bett in Leighton Buzzard, Avery and Jean drove through the valley of the River Usk. They stopped at a pub that hung over the rail line in the thick forest above the tracks. On the door was posted a warning:
We strongly recommend that you do not bring your children here after 9 p.m
. Jean was uneasy – what violence arose here and spilled into the forest at night? – but they had not passed another place to stop for many miles, and so they went in. Avery ordered a glass of beer and Jean, after noticing the barmaid herself was drinking a cup behind the bar, ordered a pot of tea. Still she felt uneasy. The dark forest was all around them; they heard a train passing through the valley. Then, on the wall above the bar Jean noticed a similar sign:
We strongly advise you do not bring your children here after 9 p.m., in consideration of the patrons who wish to enjoy the peace and quiet of this establishment
. The barmaid was watching her and gave her a wink. “Aye,” she said, “people will bring their crying bairns in the evenings and no one can heft a pint in peace.”
They sat quietly as the sound of the train faded into the forest.
– My father and I took the train from Rome to Turin, said Avery. We sat in a compartment with a young couple. The way they sat next to each other told their whole story, his hand on her thigh while he pretended to read the newspaper, her head on his shoulder while she pretended to sleep. The restless desire in them was so palpable it infected my father and me with an embarrassment that I was too young to understand and we kept getting up to pace in the swaying corridors.
At last we arrived at the huge train station in Turin. Since we each had only a small valise between us, we decided to walk the short distance to the hotel where my father was to have a business meeting. As we walked through the immense station, my eyes were suddenly caught by a small sign, which, if I had only been walking faster, I might have missed. There was a single sentence painted on a wooden board that stated that this station was where the deportations had taken place during the war and gave the number – in the hundreds of thousands – of those who had been sent to their deaths from the very place we stood. It was a small notice, barely visible, and to this day I cannot say why my eyes did not overlook it. When we walked out into the sunny street, within a few feet of the station doors, I tripped on the pavement and fell. I cut my head and I needed stitches. My father had to take me to the hospital and missed his meeting and that is the story of the scar on my chin. I wanted nothing more than to leave that place, said Avery. It seemed to me a city of utter dread.