The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [115]
After a year of this and when they made it easy for the last Jews to leave, I went. Paweł and Ewa were always in trouble, Ewa's cousin Witold, and Piotr – we all left. Later I learned that Władka had been working on making ‘improvements’ for herself and Lena, with a certain Soviet bureaucrat, and that these trysts had been going on for quite a while, even before my little talk with Lena. She might have turned in any of us – me, Paweł, and the others – but she didn't. She wanted me to be grateful – she cost me my daughter but at least didn't cost me the lives of my friends. That's just the sort of bargain Władka liked. Enemies know each other best, she liked to say whenever we argued, because pity never clouds their judgment. It was her way of telling me I was an inconvenience and nothing more, ‘not even worth prison.’
Ewa had a brother, her twin. They deliberately stressed the resemblance, Ewa used to dress like him. It sometimes made me sad, like in those ballads where the girl cuts her hair short and dresses like a boy in order to go off to sea to be with her brother or her lover; there was a desperation in it, in the disguise. And when the police picked him up and he wasn't heard from again, Ewa never knew, she'll never know, if they'd really been looking for her. The truth is, either of them would have sufficed. But Ewa had always taken more risks and she feels, even now, it should have been her.
Once, I spent a whole month's money to phone Lena in Warsaw. While we were talking, Władka came home and told her to hang up. I could hear Władka yelling. Lena said she'd quieten her down. ‘Just a minute,’ said Lena. ‘I'll be right back.’ I called to her to come back to the phone. Then I waited. For twenty minutes all I heard was the dog howling and his chain sliding across the floor. A whole month's money – just to listen to a dog barking across the ocean. That was years ago, that conversation with Mr. Bow-wow. It was the last time I phoned her.
– You've never spoken to your daughter again?
– No.
Jean reached out, but Lucjan took her hand and placed it in her lap.
She turned away. The snow fell, soundless and slow, in the window high above the bed.
Everything we are can be contained in a voice, passing forever into silence. And if there is no one to listen, the parts of us that are only born of such listening never enter this world, not even in a dream. Moonlight cast its white breath on the Nile. Outside the snow continued to fall.
As Jean spoke, Lucjan could see the gauze of starlight on the river the night the boy drowned in her dream, the moment Jean believed her daughter floated from her, without a trace but for this dream of drowning. In her voice, Lucjan saw the hillside where Jean first told her husband he would be a father, and the bare hospital room in Cairo. Her fear of not carrying, her fear of carrying, another child. Her body abandoning Avery's touch.
– Janina, said Lucjan, fearlessness is a kind of despair, do not wish it, it is the opposite of courage …
For a long time they lay together quietly. Every so often the glass bowl on top of the fridge began to vibrate and then stopped. It was warm under the blankets, Lucjan along the length of her.
The absence that had been so deep, since childhood – at last Jean felt it for what it was, for what it had always been – a presence.
Death is the last reach of love, and all this time she had not recognized what had been her mother's task in her, nor her child's; for love always has a task.
From the peace of sleep, Jean opened her eyes. Beside the bed, her clothes, Lucjan's thick cabled grey sweater, the teapot, a drawing of her. She could see, barely in the dimness of dawn, the curve of her waist, the sleeping curve of her across the heavy paper. She remembered what Lucjan had said, one of their first nights together: There is no actual edge to flesh. The line is a way of holding something in our sight. But in truth we draw what