The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [113]
She lifted her head to Lucjan. He looked at her as if he were pleading, but it was the contortion of holding back tears.
Afterwards, he showed her the drawings. It was her flesh.
Talk is only a reprieve, Lucjan had said this more than once. No matter how loud we shout, no matter how personal our revelations, history does not hear us.
In Jean, the remnants of two rivers – rendings. The uprooted, the displaced. She remembered what Avery had written in his shadow-book from the desert. Soon, more than sixty million people will have been dispossessed by the subjugation of water, a number almost comparable to migrations caused by war and occupation. While the altered weight of the watersheds changes the very speed of our rotating earth and the angle of its axis.
Unprecedented in history, masses of humanity do not live, nor will they be buried, in the land where they were born. The great migration of the dead. War did this first, thought Jean, and then water.
The land does not belong to us, we belong to the land. That is the real homesickness, and that is the proprietorship of the dead. No place proclaims this with more certainty than a grave. In this century of refugees, it is our displacement that binds us.
The sun was already low, a pale crimson seeping from beneath the clouds. Jean's hands were cold, but she did not like to work with gloves. She made the first cut into the bark of one of Marina's peach trees and carefully began the graft. She saw, at the far end of the orchard, the pile of lumber Avery had had delivered, awaiting the realization of his plans: a small house, mostly windows, of proportions that Jean knew would be hidden by the fruit trees, and that would stand within the sound of the canal.
For five thousand years, humans have been grafting one variety of plant to another – the division, the pressing together, the conductive cells that seal the wound. And for more than five hundred thousand years – until evolution, chance, or aggression left Homo sapiens alone on earth – at least two species of hominid had co-existed in North Africa, and in the Middle East, abiding in the same desert.
There is a soul in the fruit tree, thought Jean, and it is born of two.
– Ewa and Paweł, Witold, Piotr – we were part of a group, said Lucjan. We managed to do some useful things. We raised cash for people who had to leave Poland in a hurry, we circulated information. Ewa and Paweł performed their plays at home and in other people's flats. That's when I started the cave paintings – it was one of my jokes – life underground – I painted them as a signal to the others, a wave, just a stupid bit of mischief.
Then I made the Precipice Men – sculptures that I mounted on the roofs of buildings. Ewa and Paweł helped me. We worked at night. First we put one figure on the roof of the building where I lived, and then three more on theirs. I made them from clay, just mud really, reinforced inside with scrap metal. They wouldn't last and that was part of it; and I liked that it was scrap that held them together. I could make them fast, they didn't cost much, and, because of the clay, they were truly lifelike. They peered over the edge at impossible angles. I got the idea from a book of Ewa's, a picture of Palladio's Villa Rotonda. The figures were there for weeks before anyone noticed; nobody looks up. But when people started to spot them I'd stand on the street watching. I liked that moment of surprise. It was a game, a childish game. I would have liked to put some of them on the Palace of Culture but Władka talked me out of it. She said the most disparaging thing anyone has ever said about the silly things I make: the idea isn't worth prison.
Lucjan sat up in bed. He paused.
– Then one evening, an old man waited on the roof of Ewa and Paweł's building in the Muranów. He stepped off the edge. A young man, a student, happened to be looking