The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [64]
She began to weep.
The old man continued to look down at his feet.
– Emptiness is not failure, he said. His voice was so paternal, Jean could not subdue her tears.
Very gently, he said, you feel you have been punished for his death. You must decide: were you punished for your fear or for your faith?
He looked at Jean.
– I was punished once, for my fear, he said, and it destroyed me.
He leaned forward, frail and unsteady, on his stick. But she didn't see frailty, she saw obstinate strength; almost courage.
– You don't seem destroyed, said Jean at last.
– Some banishment is so deep, it seems like calm.
Jean felt pain in the core of her, as if he had laid his hand on her belly.
– I was born in Cologne, said the old man wearily. I came to Palestine in 1946. My father was a British soldier who served in India before I was born. My parents met in Zurich. I can say a prayer for the dead in English, German, French, Gujarat, Arabic, Palestinian, Turkish, Japanese, and Chinois.
– Chinese?
The old man looked startled.
– Yes, he said, but that's a different story. Please do not ask me to speak of it. That joy is the only secret I have left. And if I see something in the telling that I didn't see before? No, thank you very much.
– Don't be angry, said Jean. I misspoke. I'm sorry.
– I'm not angry. I've been thinking about what to say to you since I first saw you here. In fact, I've been thinking about it for fifty years.
In your misery you confuse fate with destiny. Fate is dead, it's death. Destiny is liquid, alive like a bird. There are consequences and there is mystery; and sometimes they look the same. All your self-knowledge won't bring you any peace. Seek something else. One can never forgive oneself anyway – it takes another person to forgive, and for that you could wait forever.
The old man rose unsteadily to his feet. For the first time, Jean realized that his back was bent; when he stood, he was still looking at the ground. She felt shame; sympathy.
– Thank you, said Jean.
– It's impolite to thank an old man for his sadness.
– I'm sorry! she cried. That isn't what I meant.
The old man nodded to the earth.
Jean returned to the camp. She was pitied from afar. It seemed to Avery that he could not think, could not draw her close, without hurting her. She is below sea level, Daub had counselled, you must try. But Avery felt she could not bear even the weight of his gaze.
As the Great Temple was removed and the cliff face was emptied to a ragged chasm, in an almost symbolically inverse ratio, Jean's belly had grown. Avery was haunted, the desert was haunted, by the emptiness of the villages, by their destruction, by impotence and mourning, by the lie of the replication. And yet, all the while, the beautiful dome of Jean's flesh had somehow been a sign of possible redemption: all the Nubian children to be born. It was not rational, any more than Jean conflating her dream with Monkey's death, or Jean's mother's feeling she had abandoned her pilot brother when she left behind the night sky on Clarendon Avenue. He knew such thoughts were a need to bring order to tragedy, and that one must admit oneself such a need. But he also knew that his moral grief, his self-searching was nothing, utterly without meaning in the face of a daughter lost, a country lost. Yet, he could not prevent himself: when their child died, Avery felt Jean's suffering, and his own, in the ache of the cliff, in the silent villages, in the new settlement of Khashm el Girba, in the heinous consolation of the rebuilt temples.
Hassan Dafalla arrived at Khashm el Girba for the first time after the inundation and looked around for a place to sit. But there was no shade. He and the settlers from Faras stood together miserably, each overcome by his own regret.
Then a man spoke, as if giving voice to all: A nation is a sense of space you will never walk with your own feet yet know in your legs as belonging to you. Its heat is your heat, its smells and sounds are yours – of water gushing through a metal pipe, or flowing