The Winter Vault (32 page)

Jean watched the shape of Lucjan cross the room toward her, walking through the darkness of Montand's voice.

In the tub, listening. The water of the bath as hot as Lucjan and Jean could bear; soaking in every extreme of love – humiliation, hunger, ignorance, betrayal, loyalty, farce. Jean leaned back against him, her seaweed hair across his face. She felt Lucjan drifting to sleep. Jean imagined the love between Montand and Piaf, when he was very young, the affair that would shape the rest of his life. She imagined what it meant to listen to Montand in Moscow or in Warsaw. Soon Lucjan would get up and put Piaf on the turntable, and they would listen for Montand's shadow in her voice. And then they would listen to Montand again. Hearing all that biography in their voices.

Lucjan slipped his hands into the warmth of Jean's neck and unwound her scarf. He pushed his hands under her beret and loosened between the comb of his fingers her hair, cold as metal, from the winter street. Jean held up her arms and he drew her sweater over her head. Piece by piece, her winter clothes fell to the floor. She no longer knew which parts of her were cold and which were burning hot. She felt the roughness of his sweater and his trousers down all the length of her and it was this roughness that she would always remember – scrubbed in her nakedness by his clothes and his smell.

Night after winter night Jean and Lucjan met this way. Jean knew Lucjan would never have spoken of himself without the vulnerability of skin between them. As if, in a reversal of all she'd known, that vulnerability held them hostage to the deeper pact of words. Lucjan felt in her an acute listening and this above all, Jean decided, was his desire. Very slowly she began to feel the power of this searing, that led each night to her surrender in different ways, and to his words. She knew that this was her particular contract with Lucjan and that if she had not silently agreed she would have lost all the history of him.

She began to understand that this kind of intimacy was, in its own way, a renaming. An explorer reaches land; the discovered place already has a name, but the explorer puts another in its place. This secret renaming of the body by another – this is how the body becomes a map, and this is what the explorer craves, this branding of the skin.

Sometimes Jean came home to a phone message left by Avery in the night, a rambling dissertation on how the roofs of a neighbourhood can create a secondary horizontal plane for building, parallel to the ground, or how concrete can be finished to resemble marble. Sometimes he left for her a piece of music, something he knew she liked, Radu Lupu or Rosalyn Tureck, the sound of the lonely piano worn and battered by its journey through the answering machine. Perhaps twice a week they spoke, usually in early evening, sometimes even having dinner together over the phone. She could not define the content of these conversations. She knew they were a kind of code he meant her to understand, but all she heard was a heart-clenching formality, a courtesy, yet not this exactly; the painful decorum that rises out of the ruins of intimacy, just as intimate.

– A few days ago we had a critique, said Avery, for a train station. One student designed an elaborate complex for ‘freshening up’ after a journey – a boudoir with nooks and banquettes and mirrors, personal sinks and showers. He kept saying that this ‘spa’ would become a destination in itself. ‘It would be immensely convenient,’ he said. ‘The train would take people directly to the showers’; he kept repeating this – ‘the train would take them directly to the showers, directly to the showers …’ He kept on about it until I felt quite sick. All I could think of were the trains from Amsterdam to Treblinka, and finally I said so. The whole class turned to look at me as if I were demented. I thought, Now I've done it, they'll think I'm cracked, obsessed. Finally a young woman asked, ‘What's Treblinka?’ …

Yesterday we were talking about bridges. I said that yes, I suppose a bridge could also be a shopping mall and a parking lot, but why should we disguise a bridge, its function? What is the essence of a melon? It's roundness! Maybe someday we'll breed a square melon, but then it will be something else, a toy, a mockery of a melon, a humiliation. They looked at me again like I had lost my wits. But then someone said seriously, ‘Square melons, why didn't I think of that?’

Jean heard, through the phone, the sound of papers rustling and guessed that Avery had put his head on his desk.

– Today I was thinking, said Avery, that the moment one uses stone in a building, its meaning changes. All that geologic time becomes human time, is imprisoned. And when that stone falls to ruins, even then it is not released: its scale remains mortal.

Avery started out across the marsh. There was no moon, but the ground glowed with snow. The blackness above and the whiteness beneath him made him feel that with each step he might fall over an edge. A marker glowed above the canal. He moved toward it.

He lay down by the ditch and the ground now seemed almost warm to him. There was no one for many miles across the marsh, the nearest farm a pinprick of light. He listened to the water moving under the ice. Shame is not the end of the story, he thought, it is the middle of the story.

With the frozen mud digging into his back, Avery found himself thinking about Georgiana Foyle. He wondered if she were still alive, and if she had chosen where she would be buried, now that her place beside her husband was gone. He thought of Daub Arbab, who, for the first time, Avery realized, reminded him of his father, a seriousness that expressed itself as kindness. He thought that the closest thing he felt to belief of any kind was his love for his wife.

The painter Bonnard, the day before he died, travelled hours to an exhibit of his work so that he could add a single drop of gold paint to the flowers in a painting. His hands were too unsteady, so he asked his son to accompany him, to help hold the brush. Avery felt that even had Bonnard known that these were his last hours, he would still have taken that journey for the sake of a single second of pigment. What a blessed life, to live in such a way that our choices would be the same, even on the last day.

He thought about what his father had said to him while they sat together that afternoon in the hills, after the war: There is only one question that matters. In whose embrace do you wish to be when you die.

The lights were on in Marina's house; she had left them on for Avery's sake; for navigation, to plough the deep.

When Avery came in, Marina was waiting for him.

– You use that marsh like the desert, she said.

For several days Jean had been helping Lucjan knot lengths of thick rope for a sculpture; ten or fifteen knots, each the size of a fist, in each length. She did not know how Lucjan intended to use these pieces of rope, awkward and bulging. They worked with the lamps on, the pale February afternoon light barely passing through the windows.

Often they asked each other to describe a landscape, it was a key to a door between them, a way to tell a story. Now, in Lucjan's winter kitchen, the floor and table laden with lengths of rope, Jean quietly described the desert at sunset.

– The sand turned the colour of skin, and the stone of the temple looked like flesh. The first time I saw the stonecutters slice into Ramses' legs in that light, I flinched, as if I had almost expected the stone to bleed.

She added her coil to the others on the floor, the knots beginning to resemble a mound of stones.

– And these, she said, draping the rope over her lap, are as long as the reins of a camel.

– The closest I've ever come to seeing a camel, said Lucjan, was during the war, though I might as well have been on the other side of the world. I remember someone telling my mother and me that camels had come to Plac Teatralny, camels that kneeled down on the pavement so children could climb up for a ride. ‘And I thought nothing could surprise me now,’ my mother had said … After the war, I found out that, travelling right behind the German army, was the German circus. It was the same in every occupied territory. The big top came to town and gathered up the last coins from the losers …

They continued for a while in silence, the snow falling.

– They say that children find a way. Sometimes, said Lucjan. Not a way out, but a way. Just like bones – they'll mend by themselves but won't set straight. The rubble rats used to play a misery game – to see who could outdo the others: if you lost a brother as well as your mother and father, worse still. And a sister too? Worse still. Lost a part of your own body? Worse even still. There was always a ‘worse still’ –
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My stepfather used to get a look on his face, that warning grimace, of someone who knows he's doing wrong but can't figure out what to do instead, and so keeps on, defiantly, as if he were right. Knowing he was wrong gave him a real air of conviction. When we first saw each other again after the war, we looked at each other, trying to understand how we were connected. Everything was said in total silence in those first few seconds. He was only my stepfather – ‘after all’ –
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. What had the war done to him? Like an animal in a trap, he had bitten off parts of himself to survive – mercy, generosity, patience, fatherhood. Most of my life had been lived without him. He had never once appeared when I needed him most. I remember staring at the skull-white parting in his thick black hair, and tried to imagine my mother having touched that hair …

A woman could hold Lucjan close for a lifetime and even if his desolation had shrivelled to the size of an atom of paint, that atom would remain, just as wet. Jean had ascribed many meanings to the work she was helping with; it was a giant's rosary, the knots of a prayer shawl, an ancient form of counting. And now she thought, perhaps the worst knot of all: mistrust bound with longing.