The Winter Vault (38 page)

– Please, Janina, he said, whispering against her. Please get dressed and go home.

His words turned her cold. But he did not let go.

He did not let go, and gradually she felt her longing was not separate from his. The slow, impossible, surrender to what was true. He did not let go, and in this union, his confession of aloneness was as close to love as all that had yet passed between them; as close as love is to the fear of love.

With utmost gentleness, slowly Lucjan enclosed Jean in her underclothes, her thick tights, her sweater-dress, her coat and boots. With each item of clothing, a deepening loss soaked into her.

They stood by the front door, the house in darkness, except for the small light above the stove. Every detail now achingly familiar, a world that was also hers.

He took her arm and quietly they walked north, past the landmarks they had claimed together, through the city, toward Clarendon Avenue. The snow gave light to the ground. When they reached Jean's apartment building, Lucjan said, I only meant to walk you home, but now that we're here, Janina, I would like to stay.

They rode the small lift together and, for the first time, Lucjan lay with Jean in her own bed.

Just before midnight, the following night Jean stood at the front door of her flat on Clarendon. She had been almost immobile with thought, most of the day.

The past does not change, nor our need for it. What must change is the way of telling.

She did not want to disturb Lucjan, but perhaps he was awake too. She would walk there and see. This walking, she realized, was one of his gifts; this city inside the city, any hour of day or night, this walking. The snow from the previous night had melted away and the streets shone wet in the darkness.

There were no lights on in Lucjan's house except for the light in the upper window, his bedroom.

On its own it meant nothing, but Jean, standing at the gate of his house, recognized instantly the single fact that made the truth visible. She understood everything – a recombination of all she'd known – the way history is suddenly illuminated by a single “h.”

She saw – leaning against Lucjan's fence, with its plastic flowers wound around the handlebars – Ewa's bicycle. Jean saw what bound Lucjan to her, and what bound him – with the friendship and loyalty of decades – to those closest to him.

The word love, he had said, is it not always breaking down into other things? Into bitterness, yearning, jealousy – all the parts of the whole. Maybe there's a better word, something too simple to become anything else.

But what word could be so incorruptible? she had asked. What word so infallible?

And Lucjan, to whom words were a moral question, had said: tenderness.

The next morning Jean phoned Lucjan and told him she'd seen Ewa's bicycle at his gate. She heard the anguish in his silence. Then he said:

– Please, Janina, I want you to understand.

And, almost as if his words were from her own mouth, as if all along she had known he would come to speak them, he said:

– Perhaps Ewa can help us.

She walked to Ewa and Paweł's. It was two in the afternoon. The front door was open. Jean looked through the screen door, through the house to the back porch, where she saw Ewa bending over one of her projects. Jean called to her and Ewa looked up.

– Jean, come in … Come out …

Jean walked through the narrow house, past the flowered bicycle in the hallway and a pile of scarves and mittens on the floor. Now the children's wall was a green field with horses. She stepped over a stack of newspapers by the back door.

Ewa was making papier-mâché boulders with newspaper and chicken wire. She wiped her hands on her smock and pulled a chair close beside her. Ewa gestured to the boulder-strewn porch.

– The coast of Denmark, she explained. You're welcome to roll up your sleeves. Just dip the strips of paper into the glue and cover the form. She pointed to a pile of wire shapes. Then she looked into Jean's face.

– Or maybe, she said quietly, it's time for a cup of tea.

Ewa put the kettle on the stove and they sat at the kitchen table.

– You love him, said Ewa.

– Yes, said Jean. Not as my husband, but – for who he is.

Ewa nodded.

– I knew Lucjan before I met Paweł. When I met Paweł, well, it was hard. But even Lucjan saw that Paweł was the man for me.

She looked at Jean.

– How can I explain it to you? she said quietly. We're –
uwikłani
– entangled; – Paweł, Lucjan, and me. So many times we've saved each other over the years; perhaps it's as simple as that. When Lucjan met you, Paweł and I thought, If it could be anyone, it would be you. Lucjan's brought home women over the years, but none like you. He talks to you. It's your compassion, it's everywhere in you – in your beautiful face, in the way you carry yourself. It's your sadness. And perhaps the fact that you love your husband has a little to do with it.

Sometimes Paweł goes to sit with him, but it's me he needs. It's my hands he needs. I stay with him until he falls asleep … Do I have to have a name for it? It's not a love affair, not a romance we're having, not something psychological, not an arrangement – it's more like … a disaster at sea.

– You're a family, said Jean.

The two women sat with their hands around the fragile, old-fashioned teacups.

– I love Paweł, said Ewa. What would I be without him? And Lucjan belongs with us. How can I explain what bread means to us, what making things means? Those years can't be measured like other years.

Ewa paused.

– We've lived many lifetimes together.

Jean saw past Ewa's costumes, the hairstyles, the feathers and fake fur, to the most adult face.

– Of all of us, Lucjan feels everything the worst. Sometimes he can't bear his loneliness; soul loneliness. I think you understand, said Ewa. She spoke with such contrition, Jean could hardly hear her: We teach each other how to live.

III

Petrichor

J
ean took the train to Montreal, the route of the
Moccasin
of her childhood. It felt right to make the journey by train. Then she changed lines and rode another stop farther, to the town of St. Jerome, and walked the short distance to the cemetery her mother had chosen so many years before.

It was a cold April day. A high wind beat down the long grass between the church and the graveyard. Jean stood in front of the three stones, for the first time looking upon the marker for her daughter: the few words, the single date.

She put down her satchel and kneeled in the mud. How could she have left off talking at the precise moment her daughter had needed most to hear her voice? She began to chastise herself, but then let this misgiving fall away; for it was a true peace to feel the knees of her tights growing sodden with the damp earth. She had so often tried to imagine who had made the first garden; the first person to plant flowers for the pleasure of them, the first time flowers were deliberately set aside – with a wall or a ditch, or a fence – from the wilderness. But now she felt, with an almost primordial knowledge, that the first garden must have been a grave.

In the late morning, when Avery reached the cemetery at St. Jerome, he saw Jean's flowers. She had come, their daughter's first birthday, his instinct had been right. But he had missed her. He had driven half the night and come too late. He stood there for some time, unbelieving.

He descended the small hill to the vault, in a corner of the graveyard, just as Jean had described it, so long before. Along the rough stone building was a wooden bench. He sat, leaning back, his head against the wall. He looked out to the adjacent field, empty, without even the single black horse from Jean's childhood. He imagined her as a young girl with her father, almost as if it were his own memory, reading together by the thick oak door.

Jean's childhood, her web of memory and unconscious memory, had once been her gift only to him. Now it had been given to another. This was the loss that overwhelmed him the most. Our memories contain more than we remember: those moments too ordinary to keep, from which, all of our lives, we drink. Of all the privileges of love, this seemed to him to be the most affecting: to witness, in another, memories so deep they remain ineffable, glimpsed only by an intuition, by an illogical preference or an innocent desire, by a sorrow that arises out of seeming nothingness, an inexplicable longing.

It is not the last chance that we must somehow seize, but the chance that is lost. He had not realized how fervently he'd been waiting for this date, this April 10. Now his head ached from the early drive, from six hours of straining, mistaken hope.

He closed his eyes and soon slept, his head at an awkward angle against the stone wall of the vault. When he woke, he returned to Elisabeth's grave and left a handful of stones. Jean had cried so many tears, but he had wept only once, in his mother's kitchen, for all of them. Now he sat in the car at the gates of the cemetery and wept again; for himself.

He remembered taking Jean to the churchyard at St. Pancras, to show her Thomas Hardy's tree. The small London parish cemetery had been dug up, bones and plinths scattered, to make way for the railroad. The excavation of the graves had been overseen by Hardy as a young architect. Not knowing what else to do, and burdened by the responsibility, he had gathered the strewn gravemarkers and placed them in a tight circle, leaning them together like stone pages of a book, encircling the wide trunk of an ash tree.

The wind had been damp and chill. His arm around her, he had felt Jean's cold skin beneath the waistband of her skirt. His fingers still remembered that inch of cold. Time and weather had effaced every marking on the tombstones. Not a name or a date remained. They had been able to read only two words distinctly, on a single stone: In memory. The tree was bare, but it sheltered the dead.

It was mid-afternoon when Avery drove back through the cemetery gates and turned toward the small town of St. Jerome. The sky was blackening with coming snow. When he was almost all the way to the town, he saw her along the road, walking back toward the cemetery, a slight, determined figure, head lowered to the wind. He drove on, in confusion, a few minutes more.

They travelled past Montreal and into the landscape they both knew so intimately. They did not stop, but drove through. Neither foresaw the effect of travelling again through land that had been so changed, and had so changed them. How many times in earliest days had they returned to the drowned landscape of the seaway, had they set out without a destination, only the desire to be together as the day revealed itself. They saw the phantom shoreline as it had been, even as they passed through the new towns.

Jean thought of Ashkeit, and the abandoned town of Gemai East that had been their second sight of that emptiness. There, on a bright limewashed wall, a house owner, in fluid Nubian script, had painted his poem of farewell.

The smells of homeland are those of gardens
.
I left it with tears pouring …
I left my heart, and I have no more than one
.
I forsook it not by my own will …

And some weeks later, when they had travelled to the new settlement at Khashm el Girba, they saw that what sparse decoration had been added, to some of the houses, did not depict the new world around them, nor geometric shapes and patterns, but the forlorn likeness of what had been left behind, the plants and palm groves of the banks of the Nile, the horizon of mesas and hills.

In all the bleak flatness surrounding Khashm el Girba, there was only one hill. It was common, a young man in the village had told them, for the settlers to walk to that solitary height, a distance of more than forty kilometres.

And what do you do, Avery had asked, when you reach the hill?

We climb, said the young man. But we can never see as far as our homeland.

Avery had placed his hand then on Jean's belly.

Now, in the car, the evening sky motionless above the fields, Jean remembered what Avery had said after their child had died. The wrong time, other words, meant to heal, futile. She remembered the thanksgiving with which his hand had touched their child that day, in the new settlement. Their daughter was still alive, in that place of banishment, in Khashm el Girba; in that place of helpless beginnings.

If there is true forgiveness possible in this world, thought Jean, it is not conferred out of mercy; nor is it conferred by one person to another, but to both by a third – a compassion between them. This compassion is the forgiveness.

We must not forget what it means to be in love with another human being, Lucjan had said. For this, once lost, can no longer even be imagined.

In the car, something settled between them. But it was not a peace. They both sensed it, the raw chance. If they spoke imprecisely, it would vanish.

Avery felt again that the dark weight of her next to him was a kind of earth. He felt the familiarity of her concentration, and now, the intensity of new experience in her, at which he could only, painfully, guess. He had missed this so completely: just being able to sit beside her, listening to her think.

It was dark now, east of Kingston. They had spoken very little, all the hours since Montreal.

The car heater was on, but Jean's feet were cold and wet in her boots. The mud of the cemetery had hardened into the knees of her tights.

– Avery, said Jean. Moving the temple was not a lie.

For some time, he did not reply.

– Moving the temple was not the lie, he said at last, but moving the river was.

– How long have you known this? asked Jean.

Again, silence.

– About a kilometre.

– You tried to tell me this before, said Avery. That I must think harder about my hand in things. For wanting to do good. Just by living, you said, we change the world, and no one lives without causing pain.

Sometimes, she thought, there is no line between one kind of love and another. Sometimes it takes more than two people to make a child. Sometimes the city is Leningrad, sometimes St. Petersburg; sometimes both at once; never now one without the other. We cannot separate the mistakes from our life; they are one and the same.

– I've known you for so long, said Avery, and still you surprise me. I remember feeling I knew the essence of you almost from the very first moment, and I think I did. But I wasn't listening to you, Jean, even though you were whispering right in my ear.

– When I saw the flowers, said Avery, I knew you'd been there.

– The flowers won't last, said Jean. It's too cold. But I planted something else. Seeds from the plants I collected on the riverbank, the day we met.

For a moment Avery thought he would have to pull over to the side of the highway. But he drove on.

– Very early this morning, said Avery, I stopped along the St. Lawrence, just past Morrisburg. I walked down to the river. In the sand, glinting in the moonlight, there was a baby's bottle. It had only been dropped and forgotten, yet the sense of violence was overwhelming. I knew there was nothing but innocence there, yet still I felt it. It was a scene my mother might have painted.

We want to leave something behind, thought Jean, a message on the kitchen table saying we'll be back soon. A suit jacket on a roof.

What does a child leave behind? Marina had asked, long ago. We cling to the children's paintings from Thieresenstadt, to a Dutch girl's diary, because we need them to speak for every war child's loss.

Some days are possible, Jean thought, only because of love.

In the long silence surrounding them, in the low noise of the car heater, Avery touched her cheek. Jean bent her head into his hand.

He had never truly believed he would feel this again, the response of her body to his touch. He dared not stop the car nor speak a word.

White patches of snow floated, icebergs, clouds, in the black fields. But nothing shone white in the blackness of the river, as it flowed past them, driving past.