The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [37]
– Your heart line is the Arabian desert, your fate line is the river Nile … Not to scale, of course … Here, he said, circling the mound at the base of her thumb, is the Sahara …
During the months before their departure, first to England and then on to Khartoum, Jean packed away her newly earned diploma, sublet the flat on Clarendon, and moved into the white house with Marina. Neither could conceal their pleasure in this arrangement. They spent long days in Marina's painting room, they walked companionably along the canal through the snow, together they sat bundled with blankets in lawn chairs and stared out at the marsh. Neither could believe their good fortune, their affinities so matched. For Jean, to be so at ease with the older woman, mother and daughter – she was almost drunk with the satiety of it.
The summer before, Jean had brought all the jars from her living room to the house on the marsh and had planted each seedling from her mother's garden on a section of Marina's land. Avery had built a low white fence around it, so Jean would feel that square of earth was hers.
– Here, said Avery in the lamplit twilight, circling the mound at the base of her thumb, is the Sahara … And here, kissing the middle of her palm, is the Great Temple of Abu Simbel …
The Nile breaks over rocks of greatest resistance – creating fissures, foaming gorges, stone islands – these are the impassable cataracts, said Avery, the gateway to Nubia. Beyond this, the river is slow and its banks are cultivated – fields and date forests. The hills here, Avery traced the line down her palm, are gentle – terraces of silt, sandstone, quartzite. Here, between the fate and the heart lines, the Mediterranean collides with Africa – the desert is strewn with the ruins of two cultures. In your hand you hold Christian churches with elaborate frescoes, Coptic temples, fortresses, Stone Age petroglyphs, countless tombs …
For thousands of kilometres east and west, between the Red Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, the sand, without allegiance, claims everything. Tiny grains of quartz, oblivious to religion, royalty, or poverty, grind even the hardest stone monuments into dust, and whole dynasties have been abraded to invisibility …
The cataract at Aswan, and the fact that it was carved into the side of a cliff, secured Abu Simbel for centuries. The Sahara slowly climbed the cliff until only the very tip of the temple was visible …
The night unfolded, Avery explaining all he knew. Jean heard in his voice how hungrily he desired this chance, not to be the one building the dam but the one to salvage. At last, he looked to her for her answer.
– I don't have anything with me, said Jean, but I can wear your clothes …
They arrived in London in January. Avery's cousin Owen was away and they stayed in his flat, a fashionable idyll of darkly painted rooms, chandeliers and silk carpets; teak furniture, firesides heaped with cushions. Only the kitchen had never been renovated, and in the cupboards Avery recognized Aunt Bett's dishes – chipped and faded – from their childhood. It was a nostalgia Avery had not expected of Owen, and he was grateful for the discovery, as if the smallest details of their years together during the war had not been forgotten.
Dusk in Owen's bedroom, the window open to the rain, roofs black and shining, a crack of sunset. In this rainy blackness and this unexpected last light, the scattering of birds just before dark, both felt a new kind of desire, inseparable from the city. Inseparable from London, January 1964. The desire experienced in unfamiliar streets, one's body never more known by another.
During their last days in England, after staying with Aunt Bett in Leighton Buzzard, Avery and Jean drove through the