The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [51]
The next evening they flew back to Abu Simbel. From above, the camp came into view, glowing with its artificial light, a conflagration in the wilderness; filling the tiny plane sudden as a searchlight. Jean felt regret for the darkness of the desert they had left behind: palpable, alive, a breathing blackness.
The forces within the cliff at Abu Simbel were balanced by steel scaffolding and the roof of the temple was sliced from the walls to relieve the stress. Nevertheless, it was not known whether the release of the first block – on August 12, 1965 – would cause the temple to crack open. Avery had stood on the crest of the cofferdam. The stone had been so finely cut, the seam so invisible, that at first it seemed the winch alone was magically reaching into the stone to bring forth a perfect block from the whole.
But Avery had not felt simple relief as the stones were lifted; instead, from the very first cut of the first block – the eleven-tonne GA1A01, Great Temple, Treatment A, Zone 1, Row A, Block 1 – a specific anguish took root. As the ragged cavity expanded, as the gaping absence in the cliff grew deeper, so grew Avery's feeling they were tampering with an intangible force, undoing something that could never be produced or reproduced again. The Great Temple had been carved out of the very light of the river, carved out of a profound belief in eternity. Each labourer had believed. This simple fact roused him – he could not imagine any building in his lifetime or in the future erected with such faith. The stone had been alive to the carvers, not in a mystical way but in a material way; their relationship to the stone had affected the molecules of the stone. Not mystical, but mysterious.
The heat and weight of Jean were in his dreams. And at the beginning, memory blossomed in him, childhood images so strong he could describe to her in detail the objects on a shelf. But as the pile of temple blocks grew around them, even Jean could not dispel what quickly became in Avery more than anxiety – a dispossession.
He had expected the salvage to be an antidote, an atonement for the despair of dam-building. He had imagined a rite of passage, a pilgrimage, an argument his father could respect. Instead he felt that the reconstruction was a further desecration, as false as redemption without repentance.
– There are seeds, said Jean, coaxing Avery to sleep, coated in wax, that can survive in water without germinating; like the lotus, which has been known to survive at the bottom of a lake for more than twelve hundred years and then sprout again; seeds that can survive even salt water, like the coconut that will float across the ocean fully protected, a stony globe, and wash to shore where it will take root. There is a plant – a kind of acacia – that carries on even when all its seeds have been eaten and it is nothing but husk; after the ants have left it hollow, the wind rushes in, and it whistles …
The desert was one immensity, the river another. In the hills beyond the din of the camp, Jean and Avery looked up at the third immensity, the stars.
The importance of place: the worn garden path on Hampton Street, the dried-up riverbank, a hotel room. The incline behind Avery's house in Buckinghamshire, a view his mind still knew viscerally.
Jean led Avery a small way up the slope. They stood by a scattering of stones. Standing next to him, looking down at the river flowing in the white light of the generators, she said:
– This very place we stand is where you first learned we will have a child.
And she smiled at Avery's astonished face.
By seven weeks, one hundred thousand new nerve cells in the brain are being formed each minute, by birth, one hundred billion cells. Half of Jean's chromosomes had been discarded to form her “polar body.” By eight weeks, every organ of their child existed; each cell possessing its thou-sands of genes.
Over the months, the baby continued to swell and tighten the entire surface of her; and