The Winter Vault (24 page)

The Caveman, Lucjan, lived in a building that had been marooned. Over time, the tumbledown coach house had been cut off from the rest of the property and stood stranded behind other houses and without an entrance on the street. Nevertheless, it had its own parenthesized address:
(rear)
. It was surrounded on three sides by residential backyards and on the remaining side by an apartment building. Two days after their meeting in the park, Jean followed the narrow path that led from Amelia Street, accepting Lucjan's invitation to tea. She hesitated at his gate. The trees were thick with leaves of every shade of yellow, the sun illuminating the coach house like a cottage in the middle of a wood. She felt that if she turned around, she would see the city street retreating from her, like the shore from a ship, and she wished Avery were with her. She felt the lurch of banishment, for the first time feeling he had already forgotten her. The swaying leaves, captured sun, moved continuously in and out of shadow, a woven disquiet; this seemed to Jean to be as sad as the first waking instant of consciousness, sad as the single continuously disappearing moment that is a life. Sad as a hope suffocating in a collector's jar, too few holes pounded into the tin lid.

Inside, Jean discovered, Lucjan's little building had been renovated, piecemeal, over many years. It contained only half of a second storey that might, fashionably, be called a loft, though in truth it was half a floor, reached by a steep staircase. This is where Lucjan slept. He had painted an oriental carpet in the centre of this room on the bare planks – two weeks of work. The ground floor was a single large room, a kitchen against one wall, with an old, elegant claw-footed bathtub in the corner. The tub had remained because of the pipes and, besides, had been simply too heavy to move. At night, with a fire, Lucjan soaked and listened to music, which filled the open space like a cathedral. He'd cut and sanded a board and placed it across the tub whenever he needed an extra table.

Lucjan used the other half of the ground floor as his studio.

Every surface of the kitchen was bright white – sparse and clean. But the other half of the large room, the half used for work, was piled with sculptors' tools, scrap metal, pieces of wood, old cabinets, driftwood, lumber, canvas, broken furniture. Lucjan followed Jean's gaze.

– My friend Paweł says, ‘Don't think clean and dirty, think conscious mind and unconscious.’

Jean sat quietly in Lucjan's kitchen while he searched for a drawing. She had noticed small stones here and there, on the tables and the low shelf beside the bed, and now she noticed the books, on the kitchen counter, on the floor, gaping in varying degrees, and realized Lucjan used these round stones as bookmarks, to prop open his place.

Jean carried their cups to the sink and rinsed them. Then she crossed the room and picked up the toy train she'd glimpsed on the windowsill. The silver paint was scratched but still bright; and she saw, on the side of the engine, a swastika and the double lightning insignia of the ss. Immediately Jean put it down. She stood very still. From across the room, Lucjan watched her.

He looked at her and suddenly she felt a great fear.

– I'm sorry, said Jean. I think I should go.

– Then go, he said.

Jean put on her coat and scarf and stood at the door.

– Do you think I'm a simpleton? he asked.

She opened the door.

– That engine, said Lucjan, I've had it since I was a boy. I loved that train, it was my first real toy, something store-bought, not home-made, not carved out of an old table leg or stuffed and sewn from scraps. It came from Piotrowski's on Krakowskie Przedmieście, plucked right from the shop window. My stepfather and I saw it together. We went in and he bought it straightaway. He knew something was about to happen, and it was a reckless, extravagant thing to do, to spend the money on something that would surely have to be left behind. For a few days' pleasure. But he did. So those ugly letters, that ugly symbol means something to me, yes.

Jean stood quietly, her eyes on the floor.

Without looking at his face, she came back into the room and sat down on a kitchen chair, though she did not take off her coat.

– You're very beautiful, Lucjan said. I'm sorry you're so afraid of me.

He sat at the table. He reached across and slowly pulled her handbag from her lap and with a startling gentleness set it beside her on the table.

In the mornings, Avery was woken by the family that lived upstairs. He heard the children on their tricycles as they rode around and around the dining room table, their father shouting at them to stop, the running up and down, the thump of the front door slamming.

The laundry room was in the basement and Avery knew that, when their mother was sorting the washing, sometimes the children explored his flat. Often they left toys or books behind (once, Tibor Gergely's
Animal Orchestra
– “the grey seals barked and lifted their fins and tweedled upon their violins …”). Avery did not mind the children's idle browsing among his things; in fact, he was disappointed to come home and not detect their trail. Finding the children's possessions among his own seemed to confer permission, confirmed his place; there, where he did not belong.

Avery lay with the empty house above him. His fellow students were fervent about the design of museums, malls, skyscrapers, mixed-use piazzas, entirely rebuilt urban cores. They were ardent and combative about urban fabric and infrastructure, crowd management and traffic flow. Avery listened to the noise of ambition around him and found himself alone, aching to learn what simple humanism might be possible, against all odds, in an industrial building, Aalto's Sunila or the Olivetti factory at Ivres. He was beginning to realize what it meant to build structures of the humblest and most straightforward disclosure, frank and spare, without irony; capable simply of both sorrow and solace: a house that understands that the entire course of a life can be altered, for better or for worse, by someone walking across a room. A room able to focus all its stillness in a single pear, sliced in half on a plate by a window. A school classroom so beautifully formed and situated that it is an idea. Playgrounds that children could continually redesign themselves, with movable pieces to make forts and shelters. Office buildings with alcoves for reading aloud, and big work spaces (space to think). Why were schools in particular so ugly, so barren, so bereft of aspiration or inspiration, the antithesis of the qualities one would wish to instill in students; cinderblock walls, sickly linoleum, dead light, dreadful basements, institutional fixtures, without self-respect … He knew one could spend just as much money building something lifeless as building something alive … It was not enough to make things less bad; one must make them for the good.

Has evolution moved the bone in our throat to allow for speech, have we learned to stand erect, to measure, to worship, to plant and harvest, to manipulate the atom and explore the gene, to thread needles – philosophic and otherwise – with our prehensile, self-conscious brains, to utter the world in paint and language, because we have no destiny as a species?

These thoughts were attached to the sound of the children running up and down the stairs, to the brief moment of silence when he imagined embraces before they all flew out the door, to the insurmountable fact of the happiness of others, as innocent as a child's name carefully printed in the flyleaf of a book.

For almost a month, Lucjan drew Jean. The velvet dress, the heavy sweater. She did not know if she would take her clothes off for him if he asked, if he moved across the room to her; but he did not. He looked at the way material gathered or stretched, glimpses of weight and bones. The comprehension that exists before touch makes one blind.

Lucjan's glance was painful; at first, Jean could barely tolerate his scrutiny of each part of her, even though they were parts visible to any stranger in the street: her face, the soft places between her fingers, behind her knees, the curve of her neck. Each afternoon his eyes travelled the same passage, the next day and the next, with increasing depth of knowledge, and after a few days she began to look at him as he drew, making the same slow journey of his body.

To be made visible by the sight of another.

Many nights that first month, they sat across from each other at Lucjan's table, or Jean on the painted carpet and Lucjan on the edge of the bed, two travellers on two separate journeys, waiting together in an empty train station, encouraged by circumstance into an awkward intimacy.

– Do you know the story of Kokoschka and his life drawing class? asked Lucjan from across the room. His students were painting from a model. He thought their renderings pathetic, feeble, dull. How could he bring their sight to life? One day he took the model aside before class began and whispered in her ear. Partway through the hour the woman collapsed and Kokoschka rushed to her side. ‘She's dead!’ he cried. The students stared at the suddenly lifeless flesh in horror. Then Kokoschka took the model's hand and helped her to her feet. She resumed her pose. ‘Now,’ said the master, ‘draw her again.’

In return, Jean told Lucjan about Hans Weiditz’ woodcuts, the first illustrations of plants in a printed book. Suddenly, throughout Europe, apothecaries, herbalists, doctors, mid-wives could look at the same plant and identify it indisputably. Perhaps the same could be said of the first drawing of a human face. And from then on, Jean said, botanical drawing became an art; da Vinci's meticulous studies of tree bark and the serrations and veins of leaves. Albrecht Durer's watercolours – so realistic – his irises, folds and flaps of papery purple skin …

– All flowers are watercolours, said Lucjan.

Lucjan made a late supper. He threw all the ingredients into one pan, the vegetables, the meat, the eggs; he crushed and rubbed the dust of the herbs over the puckering oil and afterwards tipped the pan, spilling everything onto two plates.

Jean watched him. No one had ever sat her in a chair and cooked for her, in all the years since her mother died. She had not known that this had hurt her. The first time they sat to supper together, she wept as she ate, ordinary food more delicious than she'd ever tasted, and he let her cry, only taking her hand across the table, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, this gratitude. To eat and weep.

After supper Lucjan said, Whisper in my ear.

– All right, little Jean – Janina, said Lucjan as they sat fully dressed next to each other on his bed. The first bedtime story. If we're honest, there is only one. You wish me to speak first …

There are many degrees of solidarity. One who risks his career and one who risks his life; one who risks because his friends have, who can't bear the shame and loneliness of being a coward. The friend who helps you when you need it, and the friend who helps you before you need it.

We must learn the value of each other's words, what they cost.

Under her sweater, on her belly, Jean felt the bandaid on Lucjan's hand, she felt the buttons of his shirt, she felt his watchband. Never again would she feel indifference to such objects.

– There were thousands of us, Robinson Kruzoes, living in the debris …