The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [112]
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.
In one of Marina's paintings, a child's face is severed by the edge of the canvas; only now did Jean understand the meaning of it. The edge, a tourniquet.
– You