The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [81]
Often the nights when Jean was not with Lucjan, the phone would ring and she would lie with Avery's voice pressed against her ear. He would talk only about what he was learning. But he spoke as if there were not a handful of city blocks between them but a mountain, an ocean, time zones, making every sentence count. When they hung up and silence descended, Jean ached from trying to understand what was important, whose need was greater, an excruciating inability to grasp the moral imperative, her task, the organizing principle of this derangement and longing. Some gardens are organized by taxonomy, some by geographic origins, some by feature. She knew that anyone overhearing their conversations, so steeped in context, would understand nothing Their urgency would seem, to a stranger, to be anything but; instead … almost desultory.
All through that autumn, Jean and Lucjan met late at night at the house on Amelia Street. Sometimes he undressed her in the doorway, at first, only for a moment, like a parent whose child has just come in from playing in the snow. His hands through her hair to release her beret, unwinding her scarf. Her sweater pulled over her head. Jean, who had known no other man but Avery, was compliant, resting her hands on Lucjan's shoulders as he rolled her tights down her cold thighs. The hot bath was waiting; music filled the darkness. When she stepped into the invisible water, it was like stepping into a voice. She did not know the names of the singers nor understand their words. But she felt the heat of it, women singing of love, every broken piece of it. The voice was the city, it was the Polish forest, complicated earth. It was the lanterns brought to the true grave at Katyn, it was a meeting on the fire-stairs, it was the silk that smelled of her, it was a hotel room in Le Havre, it was the last time. The almost unbearably hot water, the dark chocolate of a woman's voice. Lucjan's hands never asked any questions. He knew and he touched. He renamed her with her name.
The music was the boy with stones in his mouth, it was a woman on stage whose nakedness is her disguise, it was the black gargara, it was the ominous, body-sized, paper moth-bags draped over the arms of the sellers on Marszałkowska Street, the paper shadows, the paper souls, it was the smell inside a hat, the smell of gas leaking across the rubble, it was cloves and nutmeg before the bitter coffee, it was the smell of coffee in the dark, it was the stench of the karbidówki, it was the silk that smelled of her.
– I slipped down between the stones, said Lucjan, into a neat burrow and found an oilcloth on the ground and a whole loaf of bread laid out on a wooden shelf. I picked up the loaf and started to climb out when I heard a voice.
‘I don't have much. Help yourself.’
The voice spoke without sarcasm. I turned around to see a man sitting cross legged on the floor in the dimness, leaning against the wall. His generosity made me so ashamed I wanted to knock his head off, knock him over. But instead I tore into his bread right in front of him, crammed it into my mouth, and left for him only a pinch of it.
Still he didn't move. He sat, watching me.
I really felt like giving him a clout. But I was curious too. So I stood there and watched him. Finally he said, ‘Are you going to stay here all night?’
‘What were you doing,’ I asked, ‘when I came in?’
‘Thinking.’
‘What were you thinking about?’
‘The city. Nowy Swiat Street.’
I began to climb out.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘You're as strong as an oxen – two oxen. Why don't you help us? I'll make sure you get fed. A whole loaf of bread and a coupon for shoes.’
I waved him off.
‘Don't you want to help? We'll rise again, you'll see. Are you so sure you don't want to help?’
He looked hard at me. And then suddenly he understood.
‘Are you a Jew?’
We stood looking at each other – a long time, maybe a minute. Until – disgusting! – tears came into my eyes. Tears came into my eyes, but still I wouldn't let go my gaze.
‘Ah,’ he said and finally looked away.
And that's when I felt what power