The Winter Vault (34 page)

I used to spend many hours watching from the window in our corner of the ghetto, and, once, I saw an old man put down a wooden box on the pavement and painfully kneel next to it. An instant shoeshine enterprise. At first I thought this was as ill-chosen as setting up a kiosk to sell matches at a fire; who in all the starving city would pay to have their worn-out, barely held-together shoes polished? But incredibly he earned himself some supper that day. And he polished German soldiers' boots – they took a lot of boot-black and they took it for free. It made me hold my breath to see the soldier's boot so close to the old man's head.

The places where people were killed often showed no mark; within moments the bit of pavement looked exactly as before. From my window I kept looking for a trace of the old man's murder, but there was none.

My stepfather eventually found a hiding place for my mother and me – much harder to find someone willing to take both of us. There were holes in the ghetto wall for such transactions and people were killed halfway through, with their head or their feet sticking out. A few days before we were to make the attempt, I sat looking out the window to the street below where my mother was waiting to meet someone to make a trade for food. She was standing in the street because of me, to feed me. That is how my stepfather thought about it afterwards and why he never forgave me … That and the fact that my mother and I always had our heads together, leaning over a book or a drawing, laughing over something so small we could never quite explain it to him … I looked away from the window for a moment – no more than a few seconds – or maybe I was just daydreaming – and when I turned my eyes back again, my mother was gone, simply gone, just like that. I never saw her again. I still feel sure that if I hadn't turned away my eyes just at that moment, nothing would have happened to her.

A simple-minded, childish revelation – that we can die without a trace.

At the bottom of the ravine, a thread caught the light; the river had been peeled of snow and drizzled with water from a tin pail. One of the Dogs each day came to renew its frozen varnish. The gleaming ice of the river looked liquid in the lantern light, even reflecting the lanterns hanging in the trees, as if a spell had been cast upon the water preventing it from freezing. So unnatural was this mirage that Jean held her breath as she watched the first skater place his foot on the surface, as if he might sink in his heavy skates, swallowed without a sound by the river's enchantment.

– Go ahead, say what you're thinking – Breughel's peasants. Jean looked at Lucjan in surprise.

– You mouthed the words, smiled Lucjan.

– It's the deep colours of their jackets against the snow, I think.

Then Jean watched as Ewa appeared in her pink fake-fur coat, her pink scarf, her thin black legs ending in pink skates. Jean laughed.

– A flamingo, said Lucjan, who always seemed to know what she was looking at.

– Is it all right to say I love Ewa although I've only met her twice?

– We all love Ewa, said Lucjan seriously.

Jean saw Ewa pointing and knew she was shouting orders. A board appeared and trestles and in a moment the table was covered with pans of cake and flasks of every size. Jean smiled at the theatricality of the scene – the feast, the enchanted river, the ice-coated branches clattering in the night wind, the lanterns like drops of yellow paint between the trees.

Jean and Lucjan stood at the top of the hill, looking down at the skaters. The scene reminded Jean of Marina's palette, which was so married to texture – patches of woollen scarves, shawls, quilts, dresses, the fur of a wet dog; each colour – soil, night sky, northern lights, ice, figs, black tea, lichen, the bogs of Jura – each lick of paint a distillation of a thought, a feeling.

– In the dark of winter, the Robinson Kruzoes went down to the Vistula with lanterns and shovels. The frozen river was scraped clean to its grey gleam. Bone scraped of its marrow with a spoon. There were enormous skating parties. Street orchestras, children, dogs. Vendors selling coffee sprang up on the banks. Pastries in waxed paper. They even came from the nightclubs when they emptied at two or three in the morning, sobering up under the moon, in the sudden cold. That's where I met my wife, said Lucjan.

I met my husband on a river too, thought Jean. Though it was not frozen. And contained no water. And perhaps was no longer a river.

– A few nights after we met, Władka and I sat on the river-bank. There was a freezing wind. The Vistula was neither solid nor liquid; huge chunks of ice buckled and swayed, bumping open seams of black water, then sealing them shut again. Then we heard a huge cracking sound and right before our eyes the bridge near the Citadel came apart and began hurtling toward us, downstream, huge pieces of it banging against the ice, dipping into the blackness and bubbling up again. In an instant the two banks of the river were separate. Władka said later that ‘if the bridge had not fallen right before our eyes maybe we could have learned to stay together, but with a symbol like that …’ Władka had a very peculiar sense of humour.

One night, years before Władka and the bridge, I was lying in my burrow, listening to the rats. After a while I blew out the candle. But, like tonight in this snow light, it was not quite dark. I could see my hand in front of my face. Was something burning? I got up and looked out. There was a dim haze of light. There was the noise of a crowd growing louder. But there was no smoke. I climbed over the rubble toward the glow. Targowa Street had electricity! Hundreds of people were wandering about, disoriented, like survivors of a crash …

Do you remember when we met, you told me about a church that seemed to grow in size when you went inside? I can tell you a story about a church that moved, all by itself, said Lucjan. I was working with a crew building a road, the East-West Thoroughfare, and someone looked up and noticed the dome of St. Anne's was smiling. We didn't think much about that first crack in the stone, but the next day there were many cracks and they were growing wider and suddenly the whole northeast end of the church wobbled and broke off like a baby tooth. All the crews rushed to reinforce the rest of the church with steel, and we even tried Professor Cebertowicz's electro-osmosis idea, but St. Anne's and the earth continued to move, the belfry bending as much as a centimetre a day. Eventually the earth came to a halt …

Jean and Lucjan began to descend the hill.

– What happened, asked Jean suddenly, to that architect, the one who gave you bread?

When he did not answer, she looked up and felt she had never before seen such cold sorrow in his face.

– People disappeared. Sometimes they came back, but most of the time they didn't. There were reports of
stojki –
‘standings’ – for months, with a lightbulb burning an inch in front of the prisoner's open eyes, who was being kept awake with injections. When someone died from torture, they said ‘he fell off the table.’ Ordinary words, banal words a child learns to spell in first grade. ‘The man fell off the table.’ Perhaps that was not his fate precisely, but … Unsuspecting people were trapped in ‘cauldrons’ – anyone who happened to visit a suspect in their apartment was arrested – that's what the Germans did and that's what the Soviets did. He survived the war, but he didn't survive the Soviets.

The Dogs joke about the Thursday-night meeting, but it is an old habit, an old intuition, not to show up where you are expected.

They heard Mr. Snow's voice through the trees.

– Let's listen to Mr. Snow sing, said Lucjan. He has a voice like a hatchet. The Dogs saw and wheeze and when they pass on you can be sure they'll rattle their bones.

If I have learned anything, it is that courage is just another kind of fear. And, Lucjan said, slapping his abdomen, if you are anti-fascist, you must have an anti-fascist belly and not an anti-fascist head. An appetite is more useful than a fever.

Lucjan slung his skates over his shoulder like a hunter carrying home a brace of birds and strode back through the ravine. In the distance, in the darkness, Jean could still hear the sound of blades on the hard ice. The Stray Dogs were almost always there before them and stayed on, almost always, after them. Looking back, Jean saw their breath in the dark. The ravine itself glistened like white breath, enclosed by the snowy embankments, the snow-laden trees, and moonlight that softly circled their faces as they skated across the ice. The air was cracking cold, the ice glinting and hard. She knew there was heat inside their clothes from their swinging legs and arms, and painful cold on their faces and in their lungs.

Jean and Lucjan walked back to Amelia Street, stopping at Quality Bakery, where the ovens baked all night. The smell of bread inhabited College Street, turning the snowfall, thought Jean, to manna.

– You cannot entirely despair, said Lucjan, with your mouth full of bread.

One could walk through the back door of the bakery, step right into the kitchen, and pay cash for loaves that had just been taken out of the oven. The bakers all knew Lucjan and the Stray Dogs. The cake man, Willy, used to play piano with them until he got his job at the bakery and couldn't play nights any more. “The bakery has taken all the walk out of my cake walk,” Willy complained.

Then Jean and Lucjan sat in the small park at the end of Amelia Street, with Lucjan's battered metal flask of tea between them and each with a paper bag in their arms. They scooped out soft-breathing handfuls from long sleeves of bread, Lucjan feeding fingerfuls to Jean. Sometimes, after a whole evening together with Lucjan and the Dogs, this was her first taste of him.

Afterwards, they sat in the tub in the dark, listening. And still Lucjan had not touched her except for the tips of his fingers to her mouth, full of bread. This was a kind of rationing, a valuing of each pleasure. Nothing, especially desire, was wasted.

Lucjan looked at Jean asleep beside him in the winter afternoon light. Her hair was tied back with a twist of cloth, her face smooth and pale.

What did she believe in? What mess of assumptions did she live by, what tangle of half-formed beliefs and untested deductions, from the moment she opened her eyes in the morning or, for that matter, even when she was asleep? What mechanics did she live by? Did she believe in Plato's souls, in Kepler's harmony, in Planck's Constant? In Marxism, in Darwinism; in the gospels, in the Ten Commandments, in Buddhist parables; in Hegel, in the superstition of black cats and Mr. Snow's stories of the Czarny Kot, in crumbs of genetic theory, in who-knows-what family tales and gossip; in the conviction that sprinkled sugar tastes better than salt on porridge? In reincarnation – a little, in atheism – a little in the Holy Trinity – a little. In Husserl, in Occam's Razor, in Greenwich Mean Time, in monogamy, in the atomic theory by which her steam kettle boils each morning for her cup of tea … She believed in humility, he knew, and in the wince of shame that guides us to the right action, though she would call this some-thing else, even perhaps love. This net of assumptions – if Lucjan moved one or two or two hundred of his own assumptions an inch here or there, was he not the same person as she, or her husband, or most members of the human species? Lucjan put his hand on Jean's waist. He watched her breath fill her lungs; as she lay on her side, he saw the curve of her hips, the crease behind her knee, the loose weight of her calf suspended. For this we erect monuments, kill ourselves, open shops, close shops, explode things, wake in the morning …