The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [118]
Jean's childhood, her web of memory and unconscious memory, had once been her gift only to him. Now it had been given to another. This was the loss that overwhelmed him the most. Our memories contain more than we remember: those moments too ordinary to keep, from which, all of our lives, we drink. Of all the privileges of love, this seemed to him to be the most affecting: to witness, in another, memories so deep they remain ineffable, glimpsed only by an intuition, by an illogical preference or an innocent desire, by a sorrow that arises out of seeming nothingness, an inexplicable longing.
It is not the last chance that we must somehow seize, but the chance that is lost. He had not realized how fervently he'd been waiting for this date, this April 10. Now his head ached from the early drive, from six hours of straining, mistaken hope.
He closed his eyes and soon slept, his head at an awkward angle against the stone wall of the vault. When he woke, he returned to Elisabeth's grave and left a handful of stones. Jean had cried so many tears, but he had wept only once, in his mother's kitchen, for all of them. Now he sat in the car at the gates of the cemetery and wept again; for himself.
He remembered taking Jean to the churchyard at St. Pancras, to show her Thomas Hardy's tree. The small London parish cemetery had been dug up, bones and plinths scattered, to make way for the railroad. The excavation of the graves had been overseen by Hardy as a young architect. Not knowing what else to do, and burdened by the responsibility, he had gathered the strewn gravemarkers and placed them in a tight circle, leaning them together like stone pages of a book, encircling the wide trunk of an ash tree.
The wind had been damp and chill. His arm around her, he had felt Jean's cold skin beneath the waistband of her skirt. His fingers still remembered that inch of cold. Time and weather had effaced every marking on the tombstones. Not a name or a date remained. They had been able to read only two words distinctly, on a single stone: In memory. The tree was bare, but it sheltered the dead.
It was mid-afternoon when Avery drove back through the cemetery gates and turned toward the small town of St. Jerome. The sky was blackening with coming snow. When he was almost all the way to the town, he saw her along the road, walking back toward the cemetery, a slight, determined figure, head lowered to the wind. He drove on, in confusion, a few minutes more.
They travelled past Montreal and into the landscape they both knew so intimately. They did not stop, but drove through. Neither foresaw the effect of travelling again through land that had been so changed, and had so changed them. How many times in earliest days had they returned to the drowned landscape of the seaway, had they set out without a destination, only the desire to be together as the day revealed itself. They saw the phantom shoreline as it had been, even as they passed through the new towns.
Jean thought of Ashkeit, and the abandoned town of Gemai East that had been their second sight of that emptiness. There, on a bright limewashed wall, a house owner, in fluid Nubian script, had painted his poem of farewell.
The smells of homeland are those of gardens.
I left it with tears pouring …
I left my heart, and I have no more than one.
I forsook it not by my own will …
And some weeks later, when they had travelled to the new settlement at Khashm el Girba, they saw that what sparse decoration had been added, to some of the houses, did not depict the new world around them, nor geometric shapes and patterns, but the forlorn likeness of what had been left behind, the plants and palm groves of the banks of the Nile, the horizon of mesas and hills.
In all the bleak flatness surrounding Khashm el Girba, there was only one hill. It was common, a young man in the village had told them, for the settlers to walk to that solitary height, a distance of more than