The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [84]
Lucjan tore a piece of paper from his drawing tablet and crumpled it into a ball.
– This is what the world is. A ball where everything is smashed together – collusion, complicity – those German plans for Egyptian dams you spoke of, and countless other examples …
He threw the ball of paper into the fireplace.
– I do not know, said Lucjan, if we belong to the place where we are born, or to the place where we are buried.
– You speak of the Old Town, said Jean, and of false consolation. That's what Avery could not bear about his work in Egypt – this false consolation.
She felt Lucjan's attention, felt the quality of the darkness change, though he hadn't moved. Whenever she spoke of Avery, Jean felt him drawing in all the power of his listening.
– I want you to talk about him, whispered Lucjan, because it makes our lying here together more real, because you are here with me partly because you love him. And to know you, I must know him. Please, keep on.
Jean sat up and drew her knees under her chin.
– It repels him, the idea of false consolation. In the end, he believed that's what the moving of the temple was. Because so many already believed the dam to be a mistake.
– I wonder what it means to save something, said Lucjan, when first we make necessary its need to be saved. First we destroy and then we try to salvage. And then we feel self-righteous about the salvaging. And who is to say yet that the dam was a mistake?
– What was lost is more than what was gained, said Jean.
– Maybe. Lucjan paused. And maybe that's what you feel about your own life, maybe your marriage too.
The injury of this travelled through her.
– Don't be angry, said Lucjan. It's old fashioned, but let's say there's a hierarchy – of suffering. We could open a stock exchange for moral value and trade shares in human ‘necessity.’ If anyone were interested. Then we could really compare what things are worth, without the ambiguity of currency. Just goods. A pound of Paweł's coffee in Toronto and a hundred sacks of grain in the Sudan. A bottle of whisky in Warsaw and an English book in Moscow by an exiled dissident. A car, running water. A temple, fifty villages, thousands of archaeological artifacts for the price of a dam. The loss of one child and the loss of three million children.
Jean held her head in her hands.
Lucjan sighed. He pulled her toward him.
– Everything we do is false consolation, said Lucjan. Or to put it another way, any consolation is true.
During the Uprising, children delivered messages, helped in temporary hospitals, ran weapons from cellar to cellar. Courage came to us, said Lucjan, in the form of a fly, a speck of life, a parasite, landing on your bare arm. It came to us as hunger.
Everyone harvested what they could from the rubble – knitting needles, picture frames, the arm of a chair, a scrap of fabric – it was the market of the dead. There was a use for everything, someone was always willing to trade for something …
He held Jean close.
– I haven't talked about these things for a long time, he said quietly. Not since my ex-wife, Władka, and I were young, lying on the deck of her father's apple boat, buried in the cold fruit, with only our heads sticking out.
Your skin is so white. When you lie on top of me like this, with your legs all along mine so brown, and your tough little arms all along mine, you're like –
All her weight was upon him, and Lucjan felt her –
– Like snow on a branch.
There's a lot of work for children in a battle, said Lucjan. We were good at hide-come-seek, we felt we had nothing to lose. I darted down holes and found all kinds of things, all kinds