The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [49]
Like discovering latent knowledge in one's self while reading words on a page, like a shape emerging from sculptor's clay, so arose their feelings of astonishment and inevitability as the village of Ashkeit had come into closer view. It was the same sensation that Avery felt when he first saw Jean, walking alone on the riverbank. Inexplicably, in that moment, he knew the place held meaning, for him and for her, as if his own heart had brought this to pass. As if he had caused the event – then and there. More, as if the place itself had given rise to her.
It was also the knowledge that they would be forever changed, their bodies already changed; attuned to each other.
He could almost imagine that the houses of Ashkeit rose out of the sand at the very moment of his sight, born from the intensity of his desire.
Jean watched as the white shapes of the houses dissolved into the twilight; she thought of the leaf of the sumach, which looks like six separate leaves but which is botanically only a single leaf. So, too, Ashkeit. Jean took Avery's hand. His eyes were closed, but because he felt her hand in his he also saw her hand in his mind. So it was with the houses of Nubia; no landscape alone could arouse such feeling. It was what he felt, looking as a child at that crease of hill in Buckinghamshire, in the fall of light, familiar as a face. This earth, this Jean Shaw.
At that moment he imagined he knew, his body knew, what Ashkeit and Debeira and Faras, all the villages, meant.
When he had sat in the Buckinghamshire hills with his father – though he had said nothing about his feeling for that place – he knew his father had felt it too. How could Avery explain it; it was as if what he experienced there could not have been brought to life anywhere else.
When the water came, the houses would dissolve like a bromide. But they would not even disappear into the river, which held a memory of them. For even the river would be gone.
Daub had come and Jean sat between the two men, between the earth and stars. She thought of the children who had been born in this village and who would never be able to return, never be able to satisfy or explain the nameless feeling that would come upon them, in the midst of their adulthood, perhaps waking from an afternoon sleep, or walking along a road, or upon entering a stranger's house.
– A human being can be destroyed piece by piece, Daub said, looking out at the abandoned village glowing in the sand. Or all at once.
Do you know the beginning of Metamorphoses? asked Daub. ‘Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed/into different bodies.’
They began the drive back through the twilight desert to Wadi Halfa.
Avery spoke of the despair of space that the built world had created; waste space too narrow for anything but litter, dark walkways from carparks to the street; the endless, dead space of underground garages; the corridors between skyscrapers; the space surrounding industrial rubbish bins and ventilator shafts … the space we have imprisoned between what we have built, like seeds of futility, small pockets on the earth where no one is meant to be alive, a pause, an emptiness …
Avery imagined a time, not too far distant, when engineers' calculations could be so cleverly manipulated, that materials, tension, stress, and weight-bearing would have a new vocabulary; a time when buildings of such startling shapes would rise from the ground like the sudden eruption of a volcano; a time when bombastic originality would be mistaken for beauty, just as austerity had once been mistaken for authority.
– It is not originality or authority that I desire in a building, said Avery. It is restoration. When you find yourself someplace – he paused. I suppose I mean exactly that – to find myself, in a place.
– We wish our buildings to grow old with us, said Daub.
North of Sarra the road climbed to the top of the hills, and Daub stopped the truck. It was almost dark. Here, from the height, they looked out to the groves of the Nile and