The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [2]
While he painted her back, Jean remembered the first time – in the cinema in Morrisburg – that they'd sat together in the dark. Avery had touched her nowhere but her wrist, where the small veins gather. She felt the pressure move along her arm, his fingertips still touching only an inch of her, and she decided. Later, in the bright foyer she was exposed, in invisible disarray; he had crawled a slow fuse under her clothes. And she knew for the first time that someone can wire your skin in a single evening, and that love arrives not by accumulating to a moment, like a drop of water focused on the tip of a branch – it is not the moment of bringing your whole life to another – but rather, it is everything you leave behind. At that moment.
Even that night, the night he touched one inch of her in the dark, how simply Avery seemed to accept the facts – that they were on the edge of lifelong happiness and, therefore, inescapable sorrow. It was as if, long ago, a part of him had broken off inside, and now finally, he recognized the dangerous fragment that had been floating in his system, causing him intermittent pain over the years. As if he could now say of that ache: “Ah. It was you.”
Avery was often lost, thinking through the mathematics by which a temple defines its space, attempting to enclose no less than sacredness. Constructing a plane where heaven meets earth. Jean argued that this meeting best takes place out in the open, and that the true plane where the divine vertical pierces this world is simply in the upright posture of a man. But for Avery, the body was one thing and the shaping of space – the human calculation of space to receive spirits – quite another.
– But we shape our inner space too, argued Jean. We are making up our minds and changing our minds all the time. And if we believe, I think it's because we choose to.
– Of course, said Avery, but the body is given to us. We arrive … prefabricated. A temple was the first power station. Think of the formulas invented, the physical achievement of thousands of men moving a mountain, hewing and hauling stone tonne by tonne, often hundreds of kilometres, to a site of precise coordinates – all in an attempt to capture spirits.
To define space, Avery continued, and then he stopped. No. Not to give shape to space, but to give shape to … emptiness.
At this, Jean grew fond and took her husband's hand. From the deck of the houseboat, they watched as workers disappeared into the newly fitted steel culvert that ran from Ramses' feet into the inner rooms of the Great Temple. The culvert burrowed its way through five thousand truckloads of sand, which had been transported from the desert to protect the facades and to provide lateral support for the cliffside. A century before, it had taken the discoverer of Abu Simbel, Giovanni Belzoni, many days to dig his way down through drifted dunes to the temple; now Avery and his men had reburied it.
– You're like a man seen from a distance, said Jean, a man who we think has stopped to tie his shoelaces but who is really kneeling in prayer.
– Our shoelaces have to come undone, said Avery, before we ever think to kneel.
North of Bujumbura in Burundi, a small stream – Kasumo – bubbles out of the ground. This spring joins others – the Mukasenyi, the Ruvironza, the Ruvubu