The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [43]
The market at Wadi Halfa was a place where every human whim had found a shelf. It was a catalogue of desires, a market of the broken and the lost, haunted by the hopes of both buyer and seller.
Baskets of hardware both shiny and rusted, springs, screws, nails, pliers, hinges; parts of boats and automobiles, electric fans. “Spare” parts that had been liberated from machines where they had not been “spare” or from machinery abandoned as useless in the desert. And here is where Avery often found the size of bolt he needed, even if it meant buying all the electric fans he could find, to pillage them for the single part. And here is where the rest of the now useless hardware of the fan would find itself, back again in the Wadi Halfa market, with blades that had little hope of ever being attached again, unless someone in turn twenty years later pillaged Avery's engine.
Spanners, handkerchiefs, pencil crayons, steam irons. Soviet cigarettes and old newspapers, years out of date, from all over Europe. Shellac, perfume, machine oil, tissue-thin blue air-mail paper edged with mucilage …
Jean looked with fascination at this debris of time and trade. But quickly this turned to melancholy, for by what other means than tragedy or unconscionable neglect would an object such as an engagement ring or a child's doll arrive at its fate in the distant desert market of Wadi Halfa? The market seemed one consciousness, one body of memory, haunted by murderous betrayal and ill fate, inconsolable loneliness, entire lives scorched by a single mistake; and the softer regrets – wistful, elegiac. She stood with a girl's knitted hat in her hand, or a cardigan worn for many years by a man who Jean imagined must have sat with his elbows on the table while drinking alone, or an ornate brooch heavy enough to rip the silk of a blouse, given by a fiancé or inherited from an aunt, found in a basket overflowing with such tokens. The anonymous loss, the hardship or death that brought this ivory comb or this watch engraved from your loving father to a stall in Wadi Halfa oppressed her; the memories she imagined these objects carried, the sadness of things. Sometimes Jean would buy something simply in order to rescue it from what she felt was the painful apathy of its surroundings, the market where customers preferred not to know an object's history.
In the slow end of the day's heat, Avery and Jean lay on their bed in the annex of the Nile Hotel, the annex itself yet another example of an object scavenged for use in another context, kidnapped from one history to another, for their room was aboard the S.S. Sudan, an old Thomas Cook steamboat, permanently moored to accommodate guests when the main hotel was full.
They never tired of this, the claiming of a hotel room, the strange bed, the act of opening a satchel and bringing their few objects into a new story.
They woke the next day to the sounds of the railyard at Wadi Halfa, the hammering on steel, the shunting of cars, clanging and hissing, as the trains were readied for their long journey to Khartoum.
Jean felt the sweat in her scalp and under her breasts despite the slow fan that circled above their heads.
Avery lay a book with a moss green cover across Jean's hips.
– Rosario Castellanos, said Avery. He turned over the book and read:
‘Because from the start you were fated to be mine.
Before the ages of wheat and larks
and even before fishes …
When everything lay in the divine
lap, confused and intertwined,
you and I lay there complete,