The Winter Vault (23 page)

Who was the last person to hold our child? Jean sobbed instead of driving six hours to the cemetery north of Montreal to find and to look upon – she did not even know whether in order to thank or to excoriate – the one who had dug the hole.

Avery, having given up on sleep, fell into naps, in the early evening, in the hour or two before sunrise, between classes. At the moment of waking he instantly plunged his mind back into work … Every building makes space, and great buildings make room for the contemplation of death … He remembered parting the blanket to look at his daughter entire, and Jean's face when she woke in the hospital, seeing in him the one thing for which her tongue could find no word … How careful one must be with a roof – the enclosing principle – the line between a man and the sky …

On the way home from the university one afternoon, Jean came across a man, perhaps forty years old, well dressed in a good suit and tie, asleep on the grass in a public garden. It was startling to see someone so nicely dressed sprawled on a lawn; had he been alone, she would have thought he'd been struck down. But he lay next to an old woman who must surely have been his mother. The woman, also neatly dressed in a light coat, lay on her back, one arm across her eyes, in the sunlight. The man lay curled beside her, his back to her, as if they were in a bed. Jean could only glance, so intimate was the scene. She did not know what detail made her imagine the woman had emigrated, left her home in the last years of her life to join her son, yet Jean felt certain it could not be otherwise. They were together in this foreign place and he would face the responsibility of burying her far from everything she'd known. When Jean returned some days later to that patch of grass between the two flowerbeds, she could not look upon the spot where they had lain without feeling it now belonged to them. It was then that she began to feel a purpose; it was then that her plan first came to her. Very early the following morning, she returned to the spot and planted, quickly, a trespasser, in the existing beds, cuttings that would grow unnoticed except for their fragrance. If she had known their homeland, she could have planted with precision, flowers that would have reminded them of Greece, Lithuania, Ukraine, Italy, Sardinia, Malta … so that if they came back there to sleep on the grass, familiar scents would invade their dreams and give them an inexplicable ease. But she had not heard them speak and so had no idea from where they had come. So she planted wild sorrel, which grows in every temperate country, and which is both edible and medicinal.

At first, Jean planted in the ravines, then in laneways, along the edges of parking lots, places without obvious ownership, overlooked for years. Then she grew bolder, planting at night in the selvage between curbs and pavement, between pavement and front lawns; rims, crevices, along civic fencing.

She kept track in a notebook and sometimes returned to investigate the progress of her work. One might think this gave her pleasure. But after a night of planting, she was stunned with loneliness, as if she'd been tending graves.

It was not yet completely dark, but already even the streetlights above the thick trees revealed little. This was the dimness Marina painted with such knowledge, before the first real starlight, or even the shadow of the moon. Jean kneeled. She felt the damp soil of the small city park staining her legs. There would never be a time now when the coldness of the ground, no matter how black and wet, would not remind her of the desert. She parted the soil with her trowel and, one by one, drew rough round bulbs from her bag and slipped them down after the metal blade. She worked steadily, her hands found their way. She felt her fingernails fill with earth. From a distance, her trowel, a flashlight tied to it, was a firefly bobbing erratically a few inches above the ground.

Jean dug, wishing she had acres to upturn with only a trowel; the meditation of lifting the earth one scoopful at a time, submerged in thought, for hours moving toward an understanding that is at first merely visceral and then becomes conscious knowledge, as if only such physical action could bring the thought into words. She would sink her mind into an image, something she perceived in someone's face in the street, or something Avery had said, or a sentence read while standing in front of the bookshop shelves like her mother, with no money to buy the book so that later she had to finish the thought, sometimes even the whole story, in her mind.

This night she was thinking about Avery's father, about dying slowly, in the kind of pain Nature metes out; and Avery's story of his father swimming in the cold lakes of Scotland and Northern Ontario. It was William Escher's ceremony and it never varied. He waded in slowly – ankles, knees, hips – all the while calling out to Avery, who waited on the shore: “I'm not going in! It's too cold, I'm not going in!” until he was up to his chin, still calling out, “I'm not going in!” and then plunging his head under water. Avery watched as the body-wake of his strong arms and legs led to the spot in the middle of the lake where his father's head would reappear, shouting, “I'm not going in! It would be lunacy to swim in such cold water!” Jean thought about Avery's boy-body in the lake up to his knees, watching, shivering in his bathing trunks, while his father opened the lake with his arms. And she thought about Avery remembering that story in the hospital, sitting next to his father when all the tubes had been taken out. “I'm not going in, I'm not going in.”

– What are you doing?

Jean jumped.

– Do I have to be afraid of you? the man said, pointing to her glowing trowel. Are you a madwoman? Don't you know this is public property?

Now Jean could see he was amused. He was large – tall and bulky. He was older than Jean, but she could not tell by how many years. He wore paint-smeared overalls and a tool-belt with paint brushes. A worker. From one hand dangled a lantern. Though it was now quite dark and the park was empty, Jean, strangely, did not feel afraid. There was paint in his hair, a swath where his hand had pushed it from his face.

When asked a direct question, Jean was usually forthright, a child.

– I'm … planting, she said.

The man took in this information.

–
Scilla siberica
, said Jean, less firmly.

The man saw that nothing further was forthcoming. He thought a moment.

– Don't you know this is public property? he said again.

Jean quickly gathered her things.

– I'm just leaving.

– Wait, said the man, it's meant to be! Tonight I also broke the law of public property. I was just wishing I had someone to witness it when I saw your little light hopping up and down in the grass like a bird. This guarantees our solidarity!

– For a criminal you're shouting awfully loudly, said Jean. She looked around. She smiled slightly. The neighbours will open their windows and throw shoes at us.

– Shoes. The man nodded. Now that's a serious subject.

Don't be frightened. I've been working hard, he said, and I'd just like to show it to someone. I may not get another chance. Look, we can walk twenty paces from each other.

He moved off, to indicate his good intentions.

He walked through the gate and waited beside the fence of the small carpark, holding the lantern high above his head. He studied the fence, slowly swinging the lamp back and forth in concentration.

Jean saw that what he had painted was not a sterile replica, but had taken its life from the fence itself. The broken boards, knotholes, peeled paint, the stubble of old posters, graffiti, nailheads, cracks, industrial staples, every feature – man-made, weather-made, time-worn – was integrated into the textures and forms of fur, hooves, eyes, horns. In this way not only the animals of Lascaux, but the decrepit fence itself leaped into life. As if the Canadian fence had been waiting for someone to see what was hidden inside it, which happened to be cave paintings from Cro-Magnon Europe. Horses strained against the current of the stream. Bison on thin legs, their eyes wild with the chase. The animals leaped into the light. The work was fast, uncanny. She thought of Matisse: “Exactitude is not truth.”

At last Jean turned to him.

– You're the ‘Caveman’!

He nodded as if his collar was too tight.

– You know me, he said, disappointed.

– Not yet, said Jean.

At that, the Caveman looked happy again.

– There's a café right here, two steps away, he said.

Jean knew the place, though she had never been inside. It was a narrow storefront with a square of cardboard in the window:
Coffee
, the sign warned,
and nothing else
.

The Caveman loped meekly ahead, looking back every moment or two to make sure she was following.

– This little coffee house is my friend Paweł's place, it's like my living room to me.

He held the door for her. The smell of roasting coffee rushed past them into the night. Inside the empty café, a man, slight and pale, in a wax-white short-sleeved shirt, was sitting behind a wooden bar, reading. Beside him was a music dictation book, the kind that schoolchildren use. On the antique cash register was taped a slogan in the same handwriting as the sign in the window:
I do not presume to tell you what your sight has cost you. Do not presume to tell me what my blindness has cost me
. Behind the bar, a wall of tiny windows like an automat, filled with gleaming beans, oily and aromatic.

– Paweł knows his coffee, said the Caveman proudly. He's a vintner with his vintages!

Paweł stopped reading and looked up.

– Paweł, I'd like you to meet – this is … a girl with a trowel.

Paweł looked at them and took in Jean's muddy knees, her canvas shoes, and her planting bag with the torch-trowel sticking out. He saw how the night clung to them both. He quickly closed his book.

– Ewa's home tonight. Stay as long as you like. Just lock up, Lucjan, when you go. Leave the light on over the bar so the mice won't trip.

Jean sat at a small table. Everywhere was mismatched furniture, wooden tables and chairs of kitchen vinyl, frayed upholstered silk, wicker, plastic netting.

– Would you like Brazilian, African, Jamaican, Argentinian, or Cuban? asked the Caveman.

– Or Polish, said Paweł, quickly closing the door behind him.

– Have you ever seen a man, said the Caveman, so happy to be going home to his wife?

– Were they just married?

– Paweł and Ewa? They've been married since they were children – at least twenty years now, said the Caveman.

– What's Polish coffee? asked Jean.

– Instant, said the Caveman. Without the water!

The Caveman sunk a metal scoop into the beans.

– I read about your paintings in the newspaper, said Jean. The anonymous ‘Caveman’ … they were praising your work … Someone offered a commission …

– Okay, said the Caveman. That's too bad! But I won't dwell on it. Never dwell on good news! He took another long look at her, smiling. And now, before anything else, tell me why you plant things secretly, a nun leaving a signal for her lover.

Jean looked down at the table guiltily. Then, the quick defiance to speak the truth.

– When I'm planting, said Jean, I'm leaving a kind of signal. And I'm hoping that the person it's meant for will receive it. If someone walking down the street experiences the scent of a flower they haven't smelled for thirty years – even if they don't recognize the scent but are suddenly reminded of something that gives them pleasure – then maybe I've done something worthwhile.

Jean looked at him miserably.

– But what you evoke could be something painful, said the Caveman. When you plant something in people's memories, you never know what you'll pull up.

He saw the look of dismay in her face. He thought for a moment.

– Maybe you should work in a hospital.

– Why paint Lascaux? Jean asked. But as soon as she spoke, she felt a twinge of understanding. He had found the life within the fence – using each scar, adapting the animals to their environment. She felt an intimation of something she would realize later, that this was not about Lascaux but about exile and the seizing of joy that will not come of its own accord.

– My husband told me about a church in a little town in the centre of Italy, said Jean. From the outside it's a dirty stone box, not a single ornament. But when you step inside, plummeting into darkness from the Italian sunshine, as your eyes adjust to the dimness, the scale of the place unfolds; the church grows in front of your eyes! The statuary leaps out. I think they must have all been after the same thing – the early Christian grottos, the painted caves – to bring the stone to life.

The earliest churches were just enclosed space, said Jean, I think what really changed Christianity was when someone first put a chair in that space. People no longer felt the ground when they prayed. And certainly those chairs must have meant some were more equal than others in the sight of God.

– The fence makes you think of all this?

– Yes, said Jean.

– What I worry about, said the Caveman, is whether all those bison will confuse the squirrels.