The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [79]
Often, Jean sat in the university library, waiting until it was late enough to walk to Lucjan's, 9 or 10 p.m., when she knew he would be finished in the studio. She emerged from the glaring brightness of the library stacks, from taxonomy, epiphytic genetics, Blaschka glass, and Minton wax replicas, into the dark November street, with its display of intimacies, amber windows filled with mysterious, ordinary, living. She and Lucjan had tea together, and if Lucjan had not quite finished working, he'd go back to it, rummaging for the right shape of metal, painting, soldering while Jean read. Then a last cup of tea, sometimes with a shot of something in it for Lucjan; and the climb to bed, where Jean lay in her clothes and each night for perhaps ten minutes Lucjan drew her face. There were now thirty or so portraits; quick, precise, loving. A record of his changing knowledge of her. Then the bedtime story that continued to unravel, both recognizing this for what it was, an agreement of trust. Egypt, Montreal, but mostly Warsaw, at Jean's entreaty. His words opened a dark radiance, phosphorescence in a cave. What was illuminated was not the world, but an inner darkness. Not the flower, but the tinctures made from the flower. Often they fell asleep still in their clothes, now not as if in a train station, but as if on a night flight; in the small bedroom window, snow falling like ash into the black Vistula.
One morning they woke and the house was cold, the windows feathered white. Lucjan went downstairs to start the fire. He used pages of old phone books as kindling, choosing a letter at random and declaiming names and addresses aloud before crumpling the pages. Jean watched, shocked.
– You feel tender even toward a phone book, said Lucjan. What am I going to do with you?
He squatted in front of the fireplace and looked at her.
– Why does it make you so sad?
– I'm not sure, said Jean.
She hesitated.
– Take all the time you need. We'll just sit here in the cold while you think.
I'm sorry, he said.
– It's as if there's a connection between those names that we'll never understand, said Jean quietly. As if something important is being disregarded.
Lucjan sat beside her on the floor.
– I remember my stepfather getting up early to light the fire in the sitting room where we ate our breakfast, said Lucjan. I never knew my real papa, who died before I was born. I was two years old when my mother remarried. She was so beautiful. Educated, refined, assimilated. She embodied an era, a moment, the first and last of the Jewish debutantes in Poland. My stepfather, who was not Jewish, stayed outside the ghetto and joined the Home Army because he thought it would save us. Those years when my mother and I were alone together, she talked to me all the time. We crawled under the blankets to keep warm and she told me stories, everything she could remember about when she was a girl and what it was like when she met my stepfather, always stroking my hair and making me laugh. After the war when he came back and found me, I could see the disturbance in his face – all the things he made himself do for us – for what. It was really only for my mother and now she was gone. He'd hardly seen me in almost seven years … We went through the debris, we carried half the city between us in our hands, stone by stone. He refused to believe we would not find her. He dragged me from place to place. We stood in front of one pile of rock after another, day after day. I was always crying. Until finally he shook me and told me to shut up. I must have been driving him mad. He said he was going to Kraków. He told me to wait for him. In the end I don't know whether the Red Army picked him up before he could return for me or not. For a long time I thought that single fact mattered more than anything. But many months later there was a moment when I understood he'd never intended to come back. I was working in the New Town, helping to empty truckloads of broken houses into the riverbed. It was raining. A man was nearly crushed under