The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [67]
I do not believe home is where we're born, or the place we grew up, not a birthright or an inheritance, not a name, or blood or country. It is not even the soft part that hurts when touched, that defines our loneliness the way a bowl defines water. It will not be located in a smell or a taste or a talisman or a word …
Home is our first real mistake. It is the one error that changes everything, the one lesson you could let destroy you. It is from this moment that we begin to build our home in the world. It is this place that we furnish with smell, taste, a talisman, a name.
II
The Stone in the Middle
When Gregor Mendel – the monk who grew pea plants and became the father of genetics – was twenty-two years old, he was sent to study at the university in Vienna. Perhaps in the early mornings or in the long summer twilight, as he walked along the Danube, he first considered the succession and end of generations. Perhaps he sought consolation for his aloneness by sitting with the ghosts of the river-dead, whose bodies were interred in a small graveyard on the banks. Perhaps he felt it was a cruel choice of resting place for those who'd drowned, to be laid to rest within the sound of the river; those whose last wish – perhaps the last wish even of the suicides – was for the maternal embrace of land. So close were the graves to the river that again and again over the years, the rising water threatened the dead until finally the little cemetery was moved to a field behind the new dam, where there would be no danger of flooding. A small chapel was built and hedges planted. In the site of the old cemetery – where perhaps Gregor Mendel first contemplated the mechanisms of heredity – a small grove grew up among the nameless dead who were left behind. Today no one picnics in the thought-full grove nor in the grass of regret on that side of the river. Although there is no sign to indicate the site was once a cemetery, perhaps something in the light seems to forbid such pleasures. But if one wishes to visit the dead, one simply takes Tram 71 to the end of the line at Kaiser Ebersdorferstrasse. From there one must walk. It is not very far.
Jean stood at the gate of her mother's garden, flourishing now in the farmer's soil of Marina's marsh. The dahlias and peonies sagged with shaggy, weary fullness, drunken with heat and sunshine. Marina had taken care of everything; in Jean's absence, a young man had been hired to prune and tie and turn and tend; her tools had been respected, returned to hang on the wall of the shed in careful rows, their blades and prongs wiped clean.
Jean opened the gate. She wanted nothing more than to dig, to blacken her hands. She asked herself what it meant, this desire; it was not to lay claim, she was sure. Perhaps a way to offer herself, as one stands before another, asking to understand. The soil was wet and cold.
From the back porch of the house, Avery watched Jean kneel – the bend of her back, her skirt stretched across her thighs, her hair piled loosely on top of her head, so the breeze would reach the sweat of her nape and shoulders. He saw how differently she moved now, as if she were used to stooping from fatigue, from futility; this new body, of which he had no knowledge. The loss he felt was so sharp he turned quickly and went back inside. Marina was working; her door was shut, the house was quiet. Avery sat with his bare feet cool on the tiled kitchen floor and closed his eyes.
What was needed was a mechanical advantage, he thought, block and tackle. He must become the fixed pulley.
He remembered the months he'd spent in Quebec, how Jean had repacked his rucksack after their weekends together, sneaking in letters for the weeks they would be apart, each to be opened at an appointed hour: poems, stories, photographs. It was a way to domesticate their desire in their apartness, to provide another tributary for that desire. He had believed then, opening those letters – after dinner, at 3 p.m. on Sunday, just before sleep – that somehow he and Jean possessed between them, unearned,