The Winter Vault (14 page)

Many days Jean watched from the shade of the houseboat as the Nubian women came down to the river. The sight of their black robes seemed to slice through the heat, although Jean could not explain why she felt this, since they, too, shimmered like black water above the baking sand.

It excited her to watch them; that is, she yearned for them to see her.

She felt like a child in their presence, and in the presence of the desert within them. They knew intimately the space of the desert and the timelessness of the river – two distinct immensities. And the third immensity, the sky. Yet there was also understanding between her and the women, or at least the longing to understand. She watched them move with fluid grace and knew that they too would soon be shedding the
gargara
.

How much of a woman's body belongs to herself, how much the clay of a man's gaze. Jean could not explain her loneliness, the lack in herself. There was some mystery of womanhood, she felt, that would remain forever lost to her; this, she believed, was because she was raised by her father alone. She wanted to strip off her clothes and roll in the sand, to lose the smell of herself in the desert and so, for a few moments, to feel at home there. She wanted Avery to understand something she could not explain; she knew this and could not fault him for not understanding.

She wondered how long it could take for the heat to sweat the northern-ness out of her – evaporate the body-memory of boreal lakes and forests – a transformation as chemical as cooking. How can place enter our skin this way, down into the very verb of us? It did not seem possible, yet she felt it was true. She felt that if she stood naked next to the Nile women, that even a man blindfolded in the dark would be able to tell that she was a stranger.

The European engineers took no notice of their stranger-ness – they brought their slide rules into the desert and spoke the ancient language of builders – a numerical language older than the temples. The men who had first come to this bend of the river to paint the line across the cliff face, more than thirty centuries before, could stand next to these engineers, look over their shoulders at their diagrams, and comprehend their intent almost instantly. And so Avery, with the ancient Egyptian builder looking over his shoulder, could not feel Jean's disgrace, an unworthiness that she herself could not find a way to express. She knew somehow it was not petty, not even personal, though it felt that way too, and all the words she had to describe how she felt, reeked of the personal. Soon she left off trying to express it to him. She left off, as in midsentence, and he did not notice. And this not noticing, she understood, was his relief. How much of our not noticing is a kind of relief.

Sometimes, if it was simply impossible to improvise a broken part, the engineers played cards or drew lots to decide who would have the adventure of scouring the market at Wadi Halfa for screws and boltheads, pistons and wire. Avery was given a four-day working holiday and he flew with Jean from Abu Simbel to Wadi Halfa. They had made several journeys to the market, and to Jean it always seemed that a great wind had blown into that dusty town, depositing a world's worth, a century's worth, of detritus that had been caught in its force. Electrical plugs and batteries, tweed caps, tins of tooth powder, bundles of herbs and paper packets of spices, women's evening shoes with silver buckles, eggs, pipe tobacco, ice skates, soft perfumed mounds of figs and dates and apricots, smoking jackets, great heaps of textiles – from Turkey, Asia, the Soviet Union, nylon stockings from Italy, English wool, calico and gingham, and the long bolts of fine dark cotton cloth – dark as the cold shadow of a desert hill – that the Nubian women used to make their
gargaras
. Coffee-sellers with radios at full volume, everyone shouting to be heard, dogs barking at the meat-sellers, meat-sellers yelling at the dogs, the tinkling glass of the soft-drink vendors, mills grinding coffee and grain, the sound of beans and split peas pouring into sacks, the tea-sellers rattling their cups. Taxi drivers arguing over a fare, donkeys braying, the loud exhaust systems of small French cars, the shouts of a boys' football match, and, suddenly right next to one's ear, the soft Arabic of a girl reading to her blind grandfather as they sat together behind a table heaped with socks and buttons, two items for which desert-dwellers have no use. Jean thought about the old man's livelihood being dependent on Westerners with loose threads and how completely, foolishly, European clothing had come to depend upon the button.

The market at Wadi Halfa was a place where every human whim had found a shelf. It was a catalogue of desires, a market of the broken and the lost, haunted by the hopes of both buyer and seller.

Baskets of hardware both shiny and rusted, springs, screws, nails, pliers, hinges; parts of boats and automobiles, electric fans. “Spare” parts that had been liberated from machines where they had not been “spare” or from machinery abandoned as useless in the desert. And here is where Avery often found the size of bolt he needed, even if it meant buying all the electric fans he could find, to pillage them for the single part. And here is where the rest of the now useless hardware of the fan would find itself, back again in the Wadi Halfa market, with blades that had little hope of ever being attached again, unless someone in turn twenty years later pillaged Avery's engine.

Spanners, handkerchiefs, pencil crayons, steam irons. Soviet cigarettes and old newspapers, years out of date, from all over Europe. Shellac, perfume, machine oil, tissue-thin blue air-mail paper edged with mucilage …

Jean looked with fascination at this debris of time and trade. But quickly this turned to melancholy, for by what other means than tragedy or unconscionable neglect would an object such as an engagement ring or a child's doll arrive at its fate in the distant desert market of Wadi Halfa? The market seemed one consciousness, one body of memory, haunted by murderous betrayal and ill fate, inconsolable loneliness, entire lives scorched by a single mistake; and the softer regrets – wistful, elegiac. She stood with a girl's knitted hat in her hand, or a cardigan worn for many years by a man who Jean imagined must have sat with his elbows on the table while drinking alone, or an ornate brooch heavy enough to rip the silk of a blouse, given by a fiancé or inherited from an aunt, found in a basket overflowing with such tokens. The anonymous loss, the hardship or death that brought this ivory comb or this watch engraved
from your loving father
to a stall in Wadi Halfa oppressed her; the memories she imagined these objects carried, the sadness of things. Sometimes Jean would buy something simply in order to rescue it from what she felt was the painful apathy of its surroundings, the market where customers preferred not to know an object's history.

In the slow end of the day's heat, Avery and Jean lay on their bed in the annex of the Nile Hotel, the annex itself yet another example of an object scavenged for use in another context, kidnapped from one history to another, for their room was aboard the
S.S. Sudan
, an old Thomas Cook steamboat, permanently moored to accommodate guests when the main hotel was full.

They never tired of this, the claiming of a hotel room, the strange bed, the act of opening a satchel and bringing their few objects into a new story.

They woke the next day to the sounds of the railyard at Wadi Halfa, the hammering on steel, the shunting of cars, clanging and hissing, as the trains were readied for their long journey to Khartoum.

Jean felt the sweat in her scalp and under her breasts despite the slow fan that circled above their heads.

Avery lay a book with a moss green cover across Jean's hips.

– Rosario Castellanos, said Avery. He turned over the book and read:

‘Because from the start you were fated to be mine.
Before the ages of wheat and larks
and even before fishes …
When everything lay in the divine
lap, confused and intertwined,
you and I lay there complete, together.
But then came the punishment of clay …
Because from the start you were fated to be mine
my solitude was a somber passage,
an impetus of inconsolable fever …’

A dog barked through the words of the poems.

‘… I learned
that nothing was mine: not the wheat, the star,
his voice, his body; not even my own.
That my body was a tree and that the owner of a tree
is not its shadow, but the wind …’

– It was in the bottom of the first-aid kit we saw in the market, said Avery, that banged-up tin box with a lid – perfect for keeping wingnuts and bolts – and still filled with eye-droppers and squeezed-up tubes of ointment, old packets of gauze dressings.

– Poetry in a first-aid tin? It's too perfect, you're making it up, said Jean.

– No, said Avery. And this was there too. He leaned over the edge of the bed and handed Jean a thin leather book – a diary. The book was curved slightly, as if the owner had carried it in a pocket.

– Ah, said Jean, afraid to look inside.

– Someone had only just started writing in it, said Avery. No date, no name. Will you read it to me?

Jean opened the journal; instantly, tears filled her eyes. The writing was very small, blue ink; she could not tell whether a man's hand or a woman's.

‘We tear open the oranges, the figs, all the fruit we can no longer bear to eat alone …

‘We've met in so many cities … the ports where sleep empties its cargoes into the bay, the night and day of love. We waste nothing in these meetings, not a breath to spare. A full hold in each direction – what each brings to the other, what we carry home. It will be a long time now until we see each other again. At night, feel my hands, feel my voice, carry me with you, in a muscle and in a word. And I will too, carry you …

‘In a forest of stars and boughs, here is your face. In the garden, in the shipwreck, in sacred stones, in figs and roses. Through long nights of walking, what does not sing for us? Through long nights of waking, what does not sing for us? …

‘Walking with your mouth inside my clothes, and all the possible days. The city in the rain: violinists wearing tuxedoes, the white stick of the blind pointing to the wet pavement, sheet-metal skows moving slowly across the river. The owned and the old, everything either lost or found. With you, here, lost and found …’

Jean closed the book. After a moment she said, I believe you could pluck the necessary book out of the air.

They lay next to each other, listening to the clang of the metalworkers.

– After the war, my mother and I moved back to London, said Avery. We had a tiny flat and our kitchen table – my father's huge wooden worktable where we ate all our meals – was in an alcove, surrounded by four walls of books. Without getting out of our chairs, we could simply reach behind us and, yes, pluck! the appropriate book off a shelf. That was my father's idea, so that there would always be active discussions at meals, and so that I or any guest could find a reference in a trice. My father loved to call out directions from his end of the table like a mad navigator on a small boat: ‘A bit more to the right, nine o'clock please, forty-five degrees left …’ Over the years, certain thick or oversized volumes became landmarks by which we steered: ‘The grey cover two inches to the right of
The Child's New Illustrated Encyclopedia
(“new” about forty years previous), below
One Thousand and One Wonderful Things;
about ten inches above
Engines and Power
…’ And when the book was retrieved successfully from the shelf, my father would let out a sigh, as if just the right unreachable itch had been scratched.

My father illustrated his explanations using objects on the table, becoming so absorbed that eventually any outsider risked impropriety and drifted away, leaving him in silent and solitary contemplation of a miniature Battersea Power Station with its four juice-glass smokestacks, or a liftlock that began with a slice of bread …