The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [42]
It excited her to watch them; that is, she yearned for them to see her.
She felt like a child in their presence, and in the presence of the desert within them. They knew intimately the space of the desert and the timelessness of the river – two distinct immensities. And the third immensity, the sky. Yet there was also understanding between her and the women, or at least the longing to understand. She watched them move with fluid grace and knew that they too would soon be shedding the gargara.
How much of a woman's body belongs to herself, how much the clay of a man's gaze. Jean could not explain her loneliness, the lack in herself. There was some mystery of womanhood, she felt, that would remain forever lost to her; this, she believed, was because she was raised by her father alone. She wanted to strip off her clothes and roll in the sand, to lose the smell of herself in the desert and so, for a few moments, to feel at home there. She wanted Avery to understand something she could not explain; she knew this and could not fault him for not understanding.
She wondered how long it could take for the heat to sweat the northern-ness out of her – evaporate the body-memory of boreal lakes and forests – a transformation as chemical as cooking. How can place enter our skin this way, down into the very verb of us? It did not seem possible, yet she felt it was true. She felt that if she stood naked next to the Nile women, that even a man blindfolded in the dark would be able to tell that she was a stranger.
The European engineers took no notice of their stranger-ness – they brought their slide rules into the desert and spoke the ancient language of builders – a numerical language older than the temples. The men who had first come to this bend of the river to paint the line across the cliff face, more than thirty centuries before, could stand next to these engineers, look over their shoulders at their diagrams, and comprehend their intent almost instantly. And so Avery, with the ancient Egyptian builder looking over his shoulder, could not feel Jean's disgrace, an unworthiness that she herself could not find a way to express. She knew somehow it was not petty, not even personal, though it felt that way too, and all the words she had to describe how she felt, reeked of the personal. Soon she left off trying to express it to him. She left off, as in midsentence, and he did not notice. And this not noticing, she understood, was his relief. How much of our not noticing is a kind of relief.
Sometimes, if it was simply impossible to improvise a broken part, the engineers played cards or drew lots to decide who would have the adventure of scouring the market at Wadi Halfa for screws and boltheads, pistons and wire. Avery was given a four-day working holiday and he flew with Jean from Abu Simbel to Wadi Halfa. They had made several journeys to the market, and to Jean it always seemed that a great wind had blown into that dusty town, depositing a world's worth, a century's worth, of detritus that had been caught in its force. Electrical plugs and batteries, tweed caps, tins of tooth powder, bundles of herbs and paper packets of spices, women's evening shoes with silver buckles, eggs, pipe tobacco, ice skates, soft perfumed mounds of figs and dates and apricots, smoking jackets, great heaps of textiles – from Turkey, Asia, the Soviet Union, nylon stockings from Italy, English wool, calico and gingham, and the long bolts of fine dark cotton cloth – dark as the cold shadow of a desert hill – that the Nubian women used to make their gargaras. Coffee-sellers with radios at full volume, everyone shouting to be heard, dogs barking at the meat-sellers, meat-sellers yelling at the dogs, the tinkling glass of the soft-drink vendors, mills grinding coffee and grain, the sound of beans and split peas pouring into sacks,