The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [104]
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