The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [100]
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’ – jeszcze straszniejsze.
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’ – w końcu. 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.
– Names were stolen while we slept.
We fell asleep in Breslau and woke in Wrocław. We slept in Danzig and yes, admittedly, we tossed and turned somewhat, yet not so much as to explain waking in Gdansk. When we slipped in between the cold sheets our bed was undeniably in the town of Konigsberg, Falkenberg, Bunzlau, or Marienburg, and yet when we woke and swung our feet over the edge of that same bed, our feet landed still undeniably on a bedside rug in Chojna, Niemodlin,