The Winter Vault (28 page)

‘Even in the dark,’ the rabbi said, ‘you need a canopy.’

The man took off his coat and asked me to hold it over their heads. Under his coat was nothing. His bare skin, his black hair. ‘But you can't be married without a shirt,’ I said. What a stupid thing to say, I don't know why I said it. The man looked at me with surprise and laughed. ‘I think God knows what I look like without my shirt.’

Until then, the woman had said nothing. Then she said, ‘You'll be cold without your coat.’

Everyone except the woman looked at his ghastly upper body, white as paper. The hair on his chest looked like black threads sewing his skin together. He handed me the coat and I held it as best I could over their heads.

Afterwards, there was nothing to eat or say or do. The woman was crying. The man put his arm around her. After a while, I fell asleep.

I remember thinking that I had fallen asleep many times to the sound of crying. I tried, as a method of falling asleep, but I could not count them all.

Within days of the Red Army's occupation of Warsaw, people returned. At their first sight of the city, many sat down at the edge of the rubble, simply sat down, as if suddenly forgetting how to walk.

I was hidden outside the ghetto when it was emptied, and when Warsaw fell I was running for the Home Army, and for Professor S., in and out of any situation where I could eat. In the end I left the city with the others, and returned with the first to return, days after the Soviets moved in.

I'd helped rescue fragments of Polish culture, architectural slag. Now I worked to rebuild the city, stone by stone. I was a child and a Jew: you could say it was not my city, not my culture, and yet you could say it was. When your arm is in the water, you are part of it; when you pull it out, there is no trace of you left behind.

We lived in the ruins and hauled the rubble with our bare hands, loading trucks and filling holes. The city was a cemetery wired with explosives – thirty-five thousand mines were dismantled in the first weeks. And in the first months, seven bridges were constructed, and hundreds of thousands of trees were planted. Every Sunday, wagonloads of volunteers, whole families, came to the city to help with the digging and the carrying. And every July 22, the authorities staged a public celebration to officially open a newly constructed section of the city, to ensure we understood this miracle was not an achievement of Polish muscle and sweat but a feat of Soviet socialism. I went to every one of those July spectacles: the opening of the Poniatowski Bridge, the opening of the East-West Thoroughfare, the replication of the Old Town … and the inauguration of the Palace of Culture – for which the Soviets had torn down the only buildings that had survived the war.

One day I saw, sitting amid the rubble, the chemist who used to run the dispensary behind his high marble counter on Nalewki Street; I recognized him because I used to go there with my mother when she bought her headache tablets and her hand creams. Now he was crouched on his small suitcase on the mountain of destruction, still wearing his white coat, the angel who had always cared whether you took your vapours or dissolved your digestive powder, or used the right-sized spoon for your cough syrup, or mixed the paste to the proper consistency for your poultice – always so courteous and concerned about every particular, the size and pressure of the dressing, each small ache. Always he seemed to know just what to say to the man with a toothache or sore joints or bronchitis … and now there he sat, looking at the broken ground between his feet, without a word of advice.

And, in time, sitting in the ruins, all the old habits persisted, the ordinary gestures: mothers smoothed down the hair of their children and tugged at their jackets; men took out handkerchiefs and carefully wiped the bomb-blasted dust from the tops of their shoes.

To Lucjan, Toronto was a place of used-up, worn surfaces for painting – hidden fences, old traffic barricades, the backs of billboards hanging over the edge of the ravine. On the “Caveman's” tour, he and Jean squeezed their way between buildings that opened into other passageways, loading docks, transit sheds, abandoned train stations, brick walls painted with faded advertisements for shops that had gone out of business forty years before, silos hidden among trees, rail-tracks ending in scrubgrass. Lucjan scavenged for materials as they roamed, his eye keen for castaway plastic and wire, masonry, wood. Old doors, broken chairs, the detritus of renovations. Once, they dragged home a six-foot beam still bearing children's heights and ages; once, a box of first volumes of thirty or so encyclopedias –
Encyclopedia of Mammals A-B, Geography A-B, British History A-B, North American Trees A–B –
a whole library of subscriptions cancelled after the first free sample in the mail. “Imagine only knowing the world of things beginning with A or B,” said Lucjan, and so Jean did imagine – anemone, aster, bass-wood, box, bigtooth aspen – as they carried their finds back with them and piled them in the little studio.

Afterwards, the dishwater still on his hands, Lucjan soaping her back under her straps.

Sometimes Jean or Lucjan would choose a painting in a gallery – Rembrandt's
Lady with a Lapdog –
or a specific book in a library – Chekhov's
Lady with Lapdog
or Grotowski's
Towards a Poor Theatre –
and meet there. Jean favoured meeting via Dewey Decimal, like the coordinates of a map. Sometimes they would choose a building or a remnant of a building – the last Dominion coal chute, a small wooden door cut into the hillside for waterworkers to enter the reservoir, the church on Kendal Avenue that had been left unfinished during the Second World War, half a transept dangling.

They passed other sites of lost hopes, sites of amputations and scars; vacant lots strewn with the debris of a building that had been torn down so long ago the rubble was overgrown with grass, an abandoned bank leaning over the edge of the ravine. Lucjan was an expert at identifying Hydro Houses, small electrical power stations scattered throughout the city with false facades each built in the style of the neighbourhood – from the outside, perfectly innocent looking houses, but if one opened the front door one would stand face to face with two storeys of gleaming machinery, dials, and coils. These houses were hard to detect, and gave themselves away only by a vague aura of uninhabitedness, windows permanently shut, a lack of a garden, no porch light. They explored an alternate city of laneways – sheet metal garages and wooden sheds. They sought out all the streets leading to railway tracks, where night trains rattled back-garden fences and the scream of light tore across bedroom walls.

– You had at least two good rivers flowing through this city and what have you done with them? said Lucjan. You've covered them over and siphoned them off and turned them into expressways. Instead you could have had boats to ride to work! And water markets and flower barges and swaying cafés and shops. You could have walked down your little residential street to your little neighbourhood dock and taken the ferry to another stop around the city – to work, to school. You could almost still do it …

One autumn afternoon, the trees bare and black against a white sky, they walked through the back door of a hardware shop and out into the silence of a hidden Catholic cemetery: the final destination of immigrants who'd fled the Irish potato famine, now a square of grass concealed behind storefronts. They had met there several times before, under the chestnut trees, amid fallen gravestones with names now melted, only an undecipherable indentation, Jean thought, like the line a finger makes in sand.

No noise of the street leaked into this hidden place; the long grass grew so thickly tangled around the plinths that, even if one were to fall, it would not make a sound; only the trees clattered in the wind. The ground was cold and wet but, nevertheless, they spread the square of blanket Lucjan had brought with him and they leaned against the shelter of a limestone wall of a small octagonal building – beautifully proportioned – with deeply set shutters, closed tight and hooked fast.

– When ground is too frozen for the digging of graves, said Lucjan, the dead wait in these winter vaults. There is always a dignity to these buildings – whether made of brick or stone with expensive brass fittings or just a humble wooden shed – because they are built with respect for those who will lie within their walls.

But in times of war or seige, he continued, when there are too many civilians for such vaults, other makeshift shelters must be found. In Warsaw during the bitter winter of 1944–45, the dead rested together in root cellars, in mine-blasted gardens, amid the rubble of the streets under sheets of newspaper. During the seige of Leningrad, along the road to the Piskarevsky cemetery, thousands were heaped, so high the ice-encased dead formed a tunnel through which one passed in terror. Crowded trolley cars stood immobile in the ice and snow, tombs that could not be moved until the spring. The dead were wound tenderly in shawls, towels, rugs, curtains, wrapping paper bound with twine. In cold apartments, bodies were placed in the bath, left in bed, lain on tables. They clustered the pavement, doused with turpentine. In the thirty-degree-below-zero weather, the ground was, like the hymn says, hard as iron, and a mass grave could only be made by dynamiting. The frozen bodies were then thrown, clinking together, into the pit.

The winter dead wait, said Lucjan, for the earth to relent and receive them. They wait, in histories of thousands of pages, where the word love is never mentioned.

Brown birds lined the eaves of the vault roof. They balanced on the edge, small dark stones against the sky, now marbled grey: dusk.

– It was January, Jean told Lucjan, when my mother died. My parents had once passed by a country cemetery on a drive together, north of Montreal, and they stopped to walk there. My mother remembered that peaceful ground and the name of the nearby village, and that is where she chose to be buried.

But the ground was too cold to dig the grave.

For almost two months, several times a week, my father and I drove past the fields, past forest, to sit on camp chairs by the door of the vault. And do you know what my father did? He read to her. Keats, Masefield, Tennyson, Sara Teasdale, T. S. Eliot, Kathleen Raine. The vault itself was quite small and the door huge, all out of proportion, thick, with ornate metal hinges. At first I could not bear the thought of my mother listening behind that heavy, closed door. But slowly, as the days passed, I began to feel that although her dear body was inside, somehow her soul was not. The sound of my father reading became a kind of benediction, an absolution. Often it snowed. We opened umbrellas and poured out flasks of steaming, milky tea and, as he read, I sat under my mother's old umbrella and looked out to the wet trees and the cloud-blackened sky between the bare branches. One horse always roamed in the field next to the graveyard, liquid black against the snow. During all those vigils we never met anyone else. The day we finally buried my mother was the last we ever visited that place together. I understood what my father felt, something we never could have imagined – that even a grave can be a kind of redemption.

They walked north from Amelia Street, through the leaves blowing across the empty streets. Jean's hair was loose, shining under the streetlamps and streaming out behind her, in the dark water of the October night. They came to a semicircle of narrow houses whose front yards emptied into a city park. A ribbon of pavement, perhaps a foot and a half wide, marked where private property ended and the park began.

Lucjan pointed.

– That's where I earn my living, now and then, the last house in the row. Do you see the electrical cord leading from the house into the trees? My boss has wired half the park with tiny bulbs. It amuses him, and no one has complained. He's like you, Janina, taking charge of the world, though he's not as dangerous. You're a memory bandit. But who can be distressed by little lights like fireflies in the forest? The expressway they were going to build – it would have sliced right through this quiet place.

– Perhaps that's the reason he lights up the park, said Jean. To remind himself that what we take for granted already had to be saved.

Lucjan took her cold hand and put it in his pocket.

– He's still a fine bookbinder, but he's old now, and can't do all the work on his own. I like sitting with him at the big table, with vise clamps and glue and the smell of leather. Sometimes we don't talk the whole day. I can't tell you how much I like him, I like the way he touches the leather, I like that he's neat, every petit fers and mullen and marbling comb in its place, every pot of aqua regia and myrabolan tannin wiped clean after use, every endpaper cross-catalogued by colour and texture and age, and then filed away in square drawers – in a cabinet he built himself. I like that he keeps his letters from Edgar Mansfield close at hand in a wooden box on his worktable. He collects moss and mushrooms and photographs them. People come to his door with specimens, squares of moss in little boxes, like jewellery, or envelopes of fungi from all over the world – from Bolivia, India, New Zealand, Peru. He puts samples under a microscope and draws what he sees. Sometimes he uses the shapes in his designs, carving them into the leather of the books, a beautiful effect, almost marbled. When we sit together I feel even his silence is orderly, as if he says to himself, Okay, today we will not talk about what happened in 1954, today we will not talk about what happened when my wife went to the doctor, today we will not talk about Stalin and the way it was during the war, today we will not discuss the pain in my knee or the grief that bulges out suddenly sometimes from being childless, today we will not discuss Jakob Böhme, or spores, or what the rain reminds me of. It is a good feeling, to sit at a table with a man and not talk about specific things together. He thinks and I think, we keep each other company, and at the end of the day it is as if we'd had hours of intimate conversation.