The Winter Vault (19 page)

Avery leaned over her.

– Jean, what I said about sadness … what I mean is that a building and the space it possesses should help us be alive, it should allow for the heeding of things; I don't know even how to talk about it, what words to use; just that some places make certain things possible or even likely – not to go so far as to say a place can create behaviour, but it is complicit somehow. Is there a difference between making events possible and creating them? Does a certain kind of bridge create its suicides? I know that when I am in a great building I feel a mortal sadness, and it is so specific that when I leave the building – the church, the hall, the house – and walk back out into the street, I see everything around me with a clarity that only the experience of the building could bestow in me.

And what I said about building the room where I wished I'd been born, continued Avery, what I mean to say is that it would be a place to be reborn …

Jean reached for Avery's hand. She wondered where their child would be born: at the camp hospital in Abu Simbel, in the better-equipped hospital in Cairo, or in London, perhaps with Avery's Aunt Bett nearby. There was still time to decide, but perhaps London was best, perhaps Marina would come; for a moment she rested in the luxury of that possibility. But she knew that Avery would not want to be far from the temple, during the first months of the rebuilding.

Avery read the apprehension in Jean's face.

– Please don't worry, he began. And then, with a shock of panic: How will we manage.

After the evacuation of Wadi Halfa, the engineers turned to Aswan and to Khartoum for their supplies.

Jean and Avery flew back to the camp from Khartoum, following the Nile, its banks tarnished green where the silver river had overflowed.

At the village of Karina, the bright colour abruptly ended and, past the town, as if human history had stopped too, the eternal yellow sandstone of the Nubian Desert. They droned on in the clear air, no movement below except for the shadow of the plane and the ghostly circle of the propeller. The pilot turned slightly so Jean and Avery could look back. The floodplain spread behind them, long and green and generous. They headed farther into the desert known by the Nubians as intimately as their own bodies, and the bodies of their children.

Each time Jean had come to Wadi Halfa, she and Avery had disembarked at the aerodrome and followed the white, coarse sand road to the Nile Hotel. Past the brown hills, stony cliffs wedged with sand, blown by the winter wind for thousands of kilometres, thousands of years. The balcony of their hotel room had overlooked the railyards and they'd felt at home instantly in the incessant noise of the metalworkers.

But now they did not land, instead circled above, and saw that the town was as still as the surrounding hills. Their shadow fell on the houses, mottled the abandoned streets. So empty and so still was Wadi Halfa that Jean began to feel the city was not real.

Then, suddenly, the stones in the street seemed to jump, the sidewalk began to move, to slide back and forth, the brown ground erupted, bubbled, seethed, rock and sand burst to life.

– What is it? cried Jean. What is it?

The ground was moving so quickly it made her almost sick to look down.

– They must be starving, shouted the pilot. And now they'll be left there. The water will come and they'll drown.

He began to laugh, an awful, amazed, bitter sound.

Jean looked at him, frightened.

– Who? shouted Jean. Who will drown?

– It's dogs! he said.

Jean stared down at the seething ground.

– Just dogs! the pilot shouted.

There was a young boy in the camp; he did not belong to anyone. He earned the nickname of Monkey – the name was born of irritation and affection. He was everywhere, darting, hanging upside down, fingering tools and rope. The engineers had no patience for him, and the labourers swatted him aside. He jumped, dangled, squatted. The cook fed him so he would not pilfer.

Jean first saw the boy when she was in the camp store. He was hiding under a table, out of the sun. There was something wrong with him, with his bones. His back was twisted. But he was agile and graceful and he had a live, expressive face. The hair on the back of his arms and neck had a fine nap, the skin of a peach. His teeth were too large, a mouth full of stones.

From the moment she first saw him, Jean wanted to give him something.

–We do not like to think about children's fears, Marina had said one afternoon in the weeks alone with Jean. We push them aside to concentrate on their innocence. But children are close to grief, they are closer to grief than we are. They feel it, undiluted, and then gradually they grow away from that flesh-knowledge. They know all about the terror of the woods, the witch-mother, things buried and not seen again. In every child's fear is always the fear of the worst thing, the loss of the person they love most.

I come from a country where men begged not for their lives but not to be murdered in front of their children. Where people, ordinary in every way, learned what it is to look into the face of a man who knows he is going to take your life from you. Where people were afraid to close their eyes and also afraid to open them again. Of course this was true in many other places in the world. Afterwards, in Canada, a colleague of William said to me: you must paint these things. And I said no, I do not want to give them soil, another place to take root.

Even in horror, there are degrees. And that is where the details matter most, because degrees are the only hope. And that's what keeps a man alive until the last second. Knowing that if he's lost one leg, at least it's not two. Or lost all his fingers, at least not his arm. To live a moment longer. That's often what belief is – the very last resort.

After the war, I painted for children who saw nothing but terror in whatever I painted, no matter how innocent the scene. Once a child has known this, he cannot see any place, not a room, without terror in it. Even if it can't be seen, he sees it; he knows it is hidden. Now I paint for children who have not known this; I try to paint beautiful things, to arm them with images in case they'll need them. So that some of this beauty perhaps might become a memory, even if it is only a picture in a book. So that even if that child grows up to be the killer, he might suddenly recognize something in himself when another man begs to be taken outside so he won't be killed in front of his family.

I have so few seconds to capture a child's attention. I will not waste the chance.

Jean had been sitting still, listening, looking down at her lap.

– We make cuttings, said Jean. I think that is what we do. It is cuttings we take with us.

At the market in Wadi Halfa, Jean had found a wooden box – once, it had contained three cakes of Yardley soap – that now held an assortment of humble treasures that could only have belonged to a child: glass marbles, an acorn, a feather, a length of twine with a bead knotted at one end, a silver belt buckle, a penknife, some polished stones, playing cards, a key. It hurt her to hold it, the ghost of the child still owned it. But she could not bear to leave the little box of possessions behind in the rubble of the market, so she bought it.

Back in the camp, she took to carrying it with her, in case she saw Monkey.

Pah! said the boy and knocked the contents into the sand. He stood looking at her and made it clear he would certainly never stoop in front of her to retrieve them. One of the Egyptian engineers who had seen the little scene unfold came over to the boy and took him by the shoulder, but Monkey was strong and squirmed from under the man's hand and ran off. The man bent down. Jean would not let him kneel for her and she fell to the sand herself and gathered up the pitiful treasure.

– He's wild. He should be punished for his rudeness.

– No, please, said Jean. I didn't mean to offend him. I should have known such things would not interest a boy his age. It is my mistake.

– The boy acts too free. If he were my son – But my son would never behave in such a way.

Jean held the box out to him.

– Perhaps your son would like these little things.

The man laughed uproariously.

– My son is thirty years old!

And Jean, ruefully, laughed too.

A child is like a fate; one's future and one's past. All the stories Jean told the child inside her as they walked by the river under the depthless sky … and the child took in nothing but the sweet sound of her mother's voice, a world entire. There was nothing Jean did not speak of those first months of pregnancy. She told her about Canadian snow and Canadian apples, about Egyptian boats, about techniques of grafting, topiary, and espalier. She told the child of her first weeks with Avery, and of Avery's excursions with his father, about the Newcomen atmospheric engine, “Fairbottom Bobs,” that Avery as a boy visited near Ashton-under-Lyne and the River Medlock. The baby learned how Jean's mother made animal shapes in the soapy water of Jean's bath, and about Jean's father, who read to her
Milly-Molly-Mandy
and
Mrs. Easter
on the train. Everything was described, with wonder and longing, to the child inside her. The breeze from the river was different from the wind that came across the desert and they met in the potent space of the riverbank. Jean listened for the sound of boats crossing the water in the darkness; never a light, the sailors navigated by sound. Jean sat in the darkness, also without a light, and listened; the whisper of hulls, the weight of the baby, the map of stars.

She lay awake. Her fullness now pressed down on her spine. A mound of earth. She heard Avery on deck and in a moment he stood at the cabin door. Slowly he unlaced his boots and dropped them in the passageway. The sound held all his weariness.

He hesitated by the bed, calculating whether he had the energy to take off his shirt. He left it on.

Almost the moment he lay down, he was asleep. In his face Jean saw not just exhaustion, but despair. She took the pencil from his shirt pocket.

Jean woke with Avery and, after he left for the engineers' hut, sat alone on deck, still half asleep, watching the sun hesitate before breaking over the edge of the hill, the quivering before the river turned blindingly bright. For only a few moments each dawn the pomegranate sky was splayed open with its mesh of seeds still visible, the stars.