The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [34]
The rhododendrons reminded me that, just before the war, my mother who, like you, also loved flowers, wrote to me in a fury about a professor who connected ‘primitive’ vegetation and ‘primitive’ man. One of his examples was ‘tundra man,’ where the human species, he said, had clearly stagnated at an earlier stage of evolution. The only legitimate German garden, he said, was ‘the blood-and-soil rooted garden,’ ‘der Blut-und-Bodenverbundene Garten.’ I tell you all this for a reason. During the war, there were strict ‘landscape rules,’ enforced in all the occupied territories, especially in Poland. Not only were ‘foreigners’ to be expelled – including the Poles themselves – but also the soil had to be similarly purified. To this end, a botanical purge was ordered against the tiny forest flower Impatiens parviflora – and that's the meaning of the little flower you see hidden somewhere in every one of my paintings.
Soon after their conversation about Impatiens parviflora, Jean went back to look again at the children's books Marina had illustrated. The paintings were saturated with detail – animal fur glossy with oil, drops of water containing landscapes, ominous shadows in folds of cloth. In each face, painted with such empathy, a human moment poised – such desolation, such depth of joy – Jean felt her own eyes staring out from the page.
In every childhood there is a door that closes, Marina had said. And: only real love waits while we journey through our grief. That is the real trustworthiness between people. In all the epics, in all the stories that have lasted through many lifetimes, it is always the same truth: love must wait for wounds to heal. It is this waiting we must do for each other, not with a sense of mercy, or in judgment, but as if forgiveness were a rendezvous. How many are willing to wait for another in this way? Very few.
– We become ourselves when things are given to us or when things are taken away. I was born in Berlin, said Marina. In 1933, my father was so disgusted by the turn of events that he convinced my mother to move. For my mother, this was very hard, to leave behind her sisters, her friends. In Amsterdam, my father joined my uncle's business, a hat factory. Before they left, my father told us that perhaps it wasn't going to be so difficult to leave his professorship at the university – a job he guessed would very soon not exist anyway – because it wasn't so far from filling heads to fitting them. My mother did not find this amusing.
My sister was only thirteen and so, of course, she stayed with them. But I was nineteen, and soon after the move I made the decision to go to London instead and practise my English. I was happy to live in another language because the year before I had been foolish enough to fall in love with a boy who suddenly decided in 1933 that he couldn't marry someone of my ‘kind’ after all. A student of my father's had moved to England and said he would be happy to have someone who spoke both German and English to tutor his children. So I went to live in Twickenham for a year. Then my mother wanted me to come back to Amsterdam, but I wasn't quite ready to do that. So that's when I answered the advertisement and went to work for Annie Moorcock, off the coast of Scotland.
I took the boat from Port Askaig. Annie's neighbour, Mr. Muldrew, greeted me at Feolin dock and we drove slowly through the rain, past Craighouse and Ardfarnel. Mr. Muldrew clutched a rag in one hand – constantly reaching out the window to unfog the windscreen – while he steered and changed gears with the other hand, until we reached her rough stone house.
I was surprised to discover that inside all was refinement and proportion: fresh flowers on a polished round wooden table, a round rug beneath it, in a receiving hall of panelling and drapery. If I had been surprised by this elegance, I was completely unprepared to find, in this house on this secluded island of Jura, Annie Moorcock's library. There were fine fitted shelves from floor to rafters, shelves