The Winter Vault (36 page)

– I discovered the Marimekko shop in Karelia's, said Marina. It's a revolution. Fabric like this was unimaginable when I was young. Women are wearing these brilliant, preposterous colours and designs and striding about the world. We are going to make you some summer clothes, big, happy, square frocks, loose and cool. With your lovely arms and legs sticking out of them, you are going to look magnificent.

– And would you wear one too? asked Jean. A big, square, loose Marimekko frock?

They looked at each other, and themselves; Jean's shabby turnout – in planting clothes, baggy black leggings, an old shirt of Avery's that hung to her knees and an old sweater of an unidentifiable shade, mud-coloured, also Avery's, with elbows worn through, falling loose from Jean's slight shoulders. Marina's plastic painting apron, her woollen trousers that looked as though they'd been made before the war, which they had been, nicely tailored (for they had been William's) but sagging and paint-stained.

– Marina, said Jean, you're quite insane.

Marina took Jean's hand, almost desperate to see happiness again in Jean's eyes.

– Not quite insane.

A few days later, Jean came again to the marsh and left her car, as she usually did, just off the main road, so she could approach the white house on foot; to take in the sight of it, among the trees, now winter trees of black paint, vertical strokes, thick and thin, at the edge of the fields. She knocked at the back door, then realizing it was unlocked, went in. On the kitchen table was a bowl of soup. Large wads of bread were crammed into the bowl, bloated with broth. At that moment she knew Avery had been there, perhaps was there still; perhaps he had parked his car in the field on the other side of the house. She had never known him once to leave the table without clearing up after himself, out of duty or habit, and certainly not in his mother's house. Jean stood in the doorway and looked at the bowl of soup thick with bread. A child's bowl.

It was her own vulnerability she felt, looking, and not his.

She went back outside.

From the window of her studio, Marina saw Jean and Avery talking together, and past Jean's shoulder, Avery's glove in midair, pointing. And she knew that Avery was beginning to think about that single piece of paper.

Jean sat on the edge of the bed while Lucjan drew.

– I worked as a slave, said Lucjan, building that great Soviet project, the Palace of Culture. I did every sort of job the lowest labourer could pass on to me. Slowly the monstrosity rose, stone by stone; no one could believe the gargantuan proportions, which symbolized, right from the start, the torments inflicted by Stalin. The higher it rose, the more elaborate its decorations and pinnacles, its spiky stalagmites, the greater the depths of submission it represented. I detested this work, which also fascinated me. And it's there that I met Ostap.

I hated everything that surrounded us, but I did not feel contempt for him. There was something about him, in the way he moved his body, the way he met a load head-on as if he respected it, the way he shrugged off another man's comments invisibly, yet not invisibly, with his ears, with his hair. I have never met another man who was so sure of his independence, his inner disdain. I can't describe it adequately – even after all these years I find it difficult to describe this independence he possessed.

Ostap liked to quote Andrei Platonov, although such quoting was not too good for one's health. He would stretch his legs out as if he had all the time in the world and didn't have to leap to his feet again any second, and he would recite: ‘For the mind, everything is in the future; for the heart, everything is in the past.’ ‘Life is short, there is not enough time to forget everything.’

Often, while eating together, this Russian Ostap would take from his shirt pocket a pencil, sharpened to a stub the size of his thumb – ‘short pencils have long memories!’ – and scrawl pictures to teach me the names of objects in Russian. At first they were practical words –
truck, stone, hammer –
and then he taught me words that were useful in another way –
anger, idiot, friend
. Instead of throwing away these bits of paper, he mortared them between the stones. There are many words hidden between the stones of the Palace of Culture, enough to tell some kind of story. In this way I also learned fragments of his childhood in St. Petersburg – a cat, a bridge, a flat on Furstadtskaya Street.

In return I used to tell Ostap stories of places in Warsaw I didn't know as a child, stories that I'd heard later among the students, and it was unaccountable but even as I told them, those anecdotes seemed to become part of my own memory – perhaps that is the precise reason I told them – until it was impossible to tell them apart, the memories that belonged to me and the memories that didn't, as if by virtue of collective loss they became collective memory. To keep everything, even what was not mine to keep.

Never has there been a man so loyal to his childhood as Ostap. After everything was taken, even the little tea set he and his sister had played with, the one with Lenin's portrait painted on all the tiny cups and saucers, Ostap made a decision not to forget anything He especially remembered books he'd read as a child, a story about a hedgehog and a tortoise – Slowcoach and Quickfoot – which he compared with the Soviet ‘classics,’ terrifying trains and trucks with their human scowls, robots with squared-off mouths and knob noses, faces made of gears and cogs, not quite human and not quite machine. They reminded me of the trucks grinding down the cleared-out spaces on Freta Street. He showed me one of Tsekhanovsky's flip books, little movies with their shrinking children and machines growing huge or locomotives bearing down on small animals. When he was young he'd read Chukovsky's translations of O. Henry and R. L. Stevenson; Evgenia Evenbach's ‘How Kolka Panki Flew to Brazil and Petka Ershov Didn't Believe Him’ and ‘100,000 Whys.’ He talked about his mother, who was very small, who used to rest her head against his shoulder, even when he was only twelve years old, and who now lay buried in the cemetery on St. Petersburg's Golodni Island.

He and your Marina would have a thing or two to say to each other. He knew all about children's books, he never grew out of them, or perhaps better to say he grew into them, into understanding their secrets. He knew which writers were
stopiatnitsa
, a member of the 105 club, one who's forbidden to live closer than 105 kilometres from any city … and who was in prison for writing a certain story about a rabbit and a goat. That was during the reign of ‘Queen Krupskaya,’ whose personal campaign was the denouncing of fairy tales as ‘unscientific’ and therefore dangerous to the state. ‘Do rabbits talk? Do goats wear clothes? The anthropomorphism of animals is not realistic, therefore it is a lie. You are lying to our children.’ Perhaps the writer did lie, Ostap agreed. Because he wrote a story in which a stone is able to turn into a man …

Those Russians sent to Warsaw to build the Palace of Culture slept in a big camp by the river. In the months I worked there, fetching and carrying, comrades ‘fell’ regularly to their deaths and were simply left to be buried by the foundations. Such a fall was described as someone having had ‘too much to drink.’

Lucjan stopped talking. Wait a moment, he said as he slid from the bed. Jean heard him going down the stairs and heard the old metal handle of the fridge close tight. She heard banging.

– Don't worry, I'm just crushing ice with a hammer!

He came upstairs carrying a bowl of snow drizzled with vodka. The cold went straight to Jean's brain.

– Is any single part of us inviolable? No. Everything can be carried off, picked away; carrion. Yet, there is something in a man. Not even strong enough to be called intuition, maybe just the smell of your own body. And that is what you base your life on …

Lucjan began to cover Jean's back with the blanket but then, at second thought, instead pulled away the sheet and looked at her.

He twisted the sheet between her buttocks. He saw that she would agree to anything. He let go of the sheet.

– Don't give in to me, he said.

There was another Russian I knew when I worked on the Palace of Culture. At lunch he would smoke with his mouth full of food – I've never seen anyone else do that. He used to lecture the young ones. All women are the same, take what you can before they rob you …

And muzak, do you want to know the origin of muzak, why we can't go out to buy a package of frozen peas without hearing a woman moaning in the supermarket over her lost love, while all we want to do is buy the peas and get out of the shop as fast as we can – why we can't buy our carton of milk or a pair of socks or sit quietly in a café? The origin of muzak is the loudspeakers in the camps, at Buchenwald, all the warbling lovesongs that were shoved in their ears in the lineup, in the infirmary, while the dead drifted in and out …

There is one moment in every lifetime when we are asked for courage we feel in every cell to be beyond us. It is what you do at that moment that determines all that follows. We like to think we are given more than one chance, but it's not true. And our failure is so permanent that we try to convince ourselves it was the right thing, and we rationalize again and again. In our very bones we know this truth; it is so tyrannical, so exacting, we want to deny it in every way. This failure is at the heart of everything we do, every subtle decision we make. And that is why, at the very heart of us, there is nothing we crave more than forgiveness. It is a bottomless desire, this desire for forgiveness.

And I'll tell you something else, said Lucjan, covering Jean with the blankets, this truth attends every death.

Walking for the first time into the replica of the Old Town, said Lucjan, the rebuilt market square – it was humiliating. Your delirium made you ashamed – you knew it was a trick, a brainwashing, and yet you wanted it so badly. Memory was salivating through your brain. The hunger it tried to satisfy. It was dusk and the streetlamps miraculously came on and everything was just the same – the same signs for the shops, the same stonework and archways … I had to stop several times, the fit of strangeness was so intense. I squatted with my back against a wall. It was a brutality, a mockery – at first completely sickening, as if time could be turned back, as if even the truth of our misery could be taken away from us. And yet, the more you walked, the more your feelings changed, the nausea gradually diminished and you began to remember more and more. Childhood memories, memories of youth and love – I watched the faces of people around me, half mad with the confusion of feelings. There was defiance too, of course, a huge song of pride bursting out of everyone, humiliation and pride at the same time. People danced in the street. They drank. At three in the morning the streets were still full of people, and I remember thinking that if we didn't all clear out, the ghosts wouldn't come back, and who was this all for if not for the ghosts?

Jean moved closer beside him.

– Janina, keep your compassion to yourself. Do you want to hear this or not?

He stuffed pillows between them.

– After that I thought maybe it would have been better if we'd just loaded all that rubble onto trucks and dumped it somewhere far away where it couldn't be used for anything again.

– You could have built nothing, said Jean. But … building nothing is hard work too. Perhaps, sometimes, it's harder to build nothing.

– Pah, said Lucjan. You don't understand anything.

He pushed away the pillows.

– You might as well touch me, since you don't hear a thing I say.

– I do understand, said Jean.

– All right, I'm sorry. But do you think a few words will do the trick? Do you think perhaps I haven't thought enough about it?

He threw his drawing book on the floor.

– For six years the Poles ate their fruit and bread. The juice ran down their chins while a hundred metres away people lay dead from hunger – they may as well have spread their starched tablecloths right over the corpses in the streets and had their picnic there.

Jean leaned over and gathered her clothes from the floor.

– I don't know anything, said Jean. You're right, I don't know anything about it.

– I don't want your pity. Not your psychoanalysis. Not even empathy. I want simple, common, fellow feeling. Something real.

She began to dress.

– There's hardly anything to you. From behind you're like a little girl. Just starting out.

He got up and stood beside her.

– Except for here, he said, pushing his hands between her legs. And here, touching her breast. And here, covering her eyes.

He wrapped his thick belt around her waist, twice, and pulled tight and buckled it. He looked at the flesh, the slightest flesh that stood out from the leather and kissed her there and began to draw.

He twisted the belt around her wrists and stretched her arms over her head and pulled her body across the bed.

– Does it hurt?

– No, I could slip out if I wanted to.

– Good.

He drew her with her hands tied behind her back, and with her arms tied and hanging in front of her. The drawings were very close, always the line of raised flesh pinched by the leather.