The Winter Vault (35 page)

Jean parked her car at the beginning of the long driveway and walked the last way across the marsh to Marina's house. All was white and blue and black, the snow and sky and winter-wick trees of a clear cold afternoon in March. She carried her grafting satchel, the same canvas backpack she'd used since the days on Hampton Avenue. Now she recalled with longing the expedition to the hardware shop with her father when she was sixteen, to buy her first grafting knife – just the right size for her grip, with a wooden handle – and her first tin of wax, and the small primus. And when she thought ahead to Marina's peach trees, and the simple cleft graft she would make, she also thought of Abu Simbel, the clean slit of the knife into that precious flesh; cambium to cambium, scion to rootstock, and the pang – of both eagerness and regret – of being the one to induce those multiplying cells, just beneath the bark, into union. And of Albertus Magnus, whose seven-hundred-year-old question had startled Jean to attention in a drowsy, overheated, undergraduate classroom almost eight years before: Does a fruit tree have a soul? She thought it was time to read Magnus again, the heart-stopping
De Vegetabilibus
, a book that imagined, centuries before Darwin, plant varieties developing from their wild ancestors, for Magnus possessed the prescience of all men who dive into a subject without defence, and with their intuition sharpened by humility. If fruit trees have a soul, what does it mean, man's tampering? Now she was at Marina's white house, which was almost the exact white of the snow around it, and Jean thought that, in a storm, one might walk straight into it and perhaps even pass right through those white walls, like a ghost.

She knocked and waited. She stood on the doorstep and kept knocking, until she truly accepted the fact that Marina was not there. Reluctantly, she decided to begin work anyway, having no need of anything except Marina's companionship. Jean walked around to the back of the house to her mother's transplanted garden, enclosed by its white fence, now also lost to the snow. Startled, she then saw Marina and Avery, on lawn chairs piled with blankets, sleeping in the frail light of the low winter sun. She saw, too, Avery's old leather briefcase, stuffed with books, in his lap; he must have come, like her, straight from his car into the garden. Jean stood at the gate. The flowered pattern of Marina's smock, which she was wearing over her coat, rose and fell. Avery's hair, at his shoulders now, moved peacefully in the small breeze. How true their bodies looked together. She thought of Lucjan as a boy with his mother. She thought of the ghetto, the sleeping and the dead lying next to one another on the pavement. She remembered the afternoon she and Avery had left their car on the bank of the road and lay down together in the wet scrub of the Pennines, and fell into the sky. She thought of the eyes of thousands of deer watching young Marina and young William, on the moss of Jura, his coat beneath her head.

Sometimes there was shelter in lying out in the open, sometimes there was none. She thought of the dispossessed making their way on foot back into the ruins of Warsaw, how they must have stopped again and again to lie down beside the road. The people of Faras East climbing from the graveyard to the village one last time. Always, somewhere in the world, people are carrying everything they own and stopping by the side of the road. To sleep, to love, to die. We have always lain this way on the bare earth.

Jean ached to lie down in the snow, next to Avery's chair, with the great warm hills of Marina protecting them both. But she did not dare.

How terrible if they did not want her.

This thought did not arise from shame, but from a deep dispiritedness, the belief that grace is the aberration, something one passes through, like a dream.

After a moment more, she turned away as if she'd been told to and walked back to her car across the marsh.

That night, Lucjan stroked her shoulder until she woke.

– It's one in the morning, he whispered. Let's skate.

She saw something in his face and, without a word, leaned down for her clothes. Lucjan stopped her hand.

– Just this under your coat, he said, handing her his sweater. And your tights, nothing else. I'll keep you warm.

They drove through the white city to the edge of the ravine. Windows of light glowed through the falling snow, there was no interior that did not resemble sanctuary after a journey. By the river Lucjan spread a blanket on the snow and they changed into their skates.

Jean strode, her face pink not with cold but with heat. She was sweating under her coat, the heat building; blood flooding every muscle. Lucjan drew her toward him. He unbuttoned her coat. He drew up her sweater and pulled it over her head.

At first gasp – her skin so hot – the cold air was hardly recognizable as cold. She could not tell if his tongue was hot or cold.

– I want to tell you about a garden, the great hunting park of an Assyrian king, Jean whispered later, in the darkness of Lucjan's kitchen. Fragrant groves of cedar and box, oak and fruit trees, bowers of jasmine and illuru, iris and anemone, camomile and daisy, crocus, poppy, and lily, both wild and cultivated, on the banks of the Tigris. Blossoms swaying in a hot sunlight of scent, great hazy banks of shimmering perfume, a moving wall of scent …

The earliest gardens were walled not to keep out the animals, but to them keep in, so they could not be hunted by strangers. The Persian word for these walled sanctuaries was
pairidaeza
, the Hebrew,
pardes
, in the Greek,
paradeisos
. Jean felt Lucjan's weight begin to pinion her.

The origin of the word ‘paradise’ is simply ‘enclosure.’ And after, Lucjan and Jean in the bath in the darkness, until yes, it was true, one was sick with longing for the melody to return.

– Please tell me about your daughter, said Jean.

Lucjan lay on his back next to her, looking out the small window above the bed.

– First of all, her name is Lena. Second, she is almost twelve years old, almost a woman. Third, I haven't seen her since she was a little girl.

Jean knew that she must wait. A long time passed.

– Władka, Lena's mother, worked with her father on their apple boat. You could smell those fruit barges from five blocks away, the sweet cider smell on the river breeze. The barges, piled high with cherries and peaches and apples, docked at the bottom of Mariensztat Street near the Kierbedz Bridge, bringing all the fruit to town from the riverside villages.

I remember those first water-markets after the war, the first mountain of Vistula apples, hard, sweet, sour, softened by the sun, rotting, fermenting, the bees circling. Władka and her mother baked pastries crammed with fruit and sold them at a stall on the docks.

Władka was so young, even younger than I, and her strong arms when she rolled up the sleeves of her dress, smelled of apples – as white and cold, as wet and sweet – and I could smell apples between her breasts and on her breath and in her hair.

We were married in the Bristol Hotel. 1955. I was twenty-five years old. Władka's parents insisted on the Bristol, with its mirrors and chandeliers, velvet chairs and bossy waiters. When you ordered, the waiters disagreed with you and never brought what you asked for, but what they thought was best. Our wedding feast was stuffed roast duck, ice cream, fruit. I remember very clearly because I hadn't eaten such food in twenty years. I was crazy for Władka – the thought of sleeping with her night after night – but that food made me very sad. Suddenly I knew, really knew, such meals had always existed, even during the war, for some. A great big greed opened up inside me, sitting at that table. A big rage. Every succulent mouthful filled me with despair. I was eating the duck of fury. None of us had any idea if we would ever eat like this again. That food made us all very sad.

Lucjan pulled on his sweater and went downstairs. Jean heard him filling the kettle. Then he began to hunt through the papers on the large table, through notebooks and newspapers on the floor.

– There's a photo of my daughter … If I can find it in this mess. I don't like to keep it one place or even in a frame, to make it a shrine. I like to come across Lena's face when I'm in the middle of something; it's like looking up and finding her sitting in the room with me.

He gave up and returned to the edge of the bed.

– I'll find it later, he said.

And Jean felt humiliation – at her own need to be found.

– You saw it all the time, said Lucjan, people standing in the street, perfectly still, holding a suddenly useless object – his coat, her book – staring at the place where the one they loved had just disappeared. All through those years we stood on the street, arms full of useless things, while the car drove off, while the line marched away, while the train departed, while the door closed.

Jean reached over and put her hand on his. He lifted her hand and put it down gently on the bed between them.

– You wanted me to tell this, he said.

He was right to reproach her; she should not have reached out her hand. What could her touch mean against such facts; nothing. Someone else's touch perhaps, but not hers.

– There are people on this earth who can't even bear to hear the engine of a truck. And the fact that their memories are shared by thousands of others – do you imagine this feels like a brotherhood? It's just as Ranger said … Every happy person, said Lucjan, and every unhappy person knows exactly the same truth: there is only one real chance in a life, and if you fail at that moment, or if someone fails you, the life that was meant to be yours is gone. Every day for the rest of your life you will be eviscerated by that memory.

Jean lay meagrely next to him in the dark.

Soon she realized Lucjan was asleep. His stillness was large and solid, a fallen tree. But she could almost hear his brain, even in sleep, rampage.

On a clear blue morning near the end of March, Jean drove out to Marina's to examine the peach trees. Then she and Marina made lunch together. Jean was peeling carrots and Marina was folding a mixture of egg and onion into a pan, when Marina said,

– I've given Avery a little project.

Jean looked up.

– Nothing expensive, mind. Marina smiled. Something he can plan on a single piece of paper. In fact, that was a condition. If the design can't be folded out of a single piece of paper, he has to start again.

It came alert inside her, an almost forgotten feeling: anticipation.

– Just a small one-or two-room house, a hut, a cabin, he can put it anywhere, but I thought perhaps by the canal. A place to think, to drift. A little project for him to do with his bare hands and his brain, something he can make mistakes with.

And I've thought of something for you too, said Marina.

She steered Jean into the dining room. Fabric, folded in large, flat squares, was piled on the table. Marina began to open and shake them out, one by one, perhaps a dozen designs of such outrageous brightness Jean had to laugh, erratic geometrics or florals eight or ten inches across, clean and alive, poppy red, graphite, mustard, cerulean, cobalt, lime, anemone white, of stiff strong cotton that looked like it could be used for the sails of a fantastical ship.