The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [86]
And, in time, sitting in the ruins, all the old habits persisted, the ordinary gestures: mothers smoothed down the hair of their children and tugged at their jackets; men took out handkerchiefs and carefully wiped the bomb-blasted dust from the tops of their shoes.
To Lucjan, Toronto was a place of used-up, worn surfaces for painting – hidden fences, old traffic barricades, the backs of billboards hanging over the edge of the ravine. On the “Caveman's” tour, he and Jean squeezed their way between buildings that opened into other passageways, loading docks, transit sheds, abandoned train stations, brick walls painted with faded advertisements for shops that had gone out of business forty years before, silos hidden among trees, rail-tracks ending in scrubgrass. Lucjan scavenged for materials as they roamed, his eye keen for castaway plastic and wire, masonry, wood. Old doors, broken chairs, the detritus of renovations. Once, they dragged home a six-foot beam still bearing children's heights and ages; once, a box of first volumes of thirty or so encyclopedias – Encyclopedia of Mammals A-B, Geography A-B, British History A-B, North American Trees A–B – a whole library of subscriptions cancelled after the first free sample in the mail. “Imagine only knowing the world of things beginning with A or B,” said Lucjan, and so Jean did imagine – anemone, aster, bass-wood, box, bigtooth aspen – as they carried their finds back with them and piled them in the little studio.
Afterwards, the dishwater still on his hands, Lucjan soaping her back under her straps.
Sometimes Jean or Lucjan would choose a painting in a gallery – Rembrandt's Lady with a Lapdog – or a specific book in a library – Chekhov's Lady with Lapdog or Grotowski's Towards a Poor Theatre – and meet there. Jean favoured meeting via Dewey Decimal, like the coordinates of a map. Sometimes they would choose a building or a remnant of a building – the last Dominion coal chute, a small wooden door cut into the hillside for waterworkers to enter the reservoir, the church on Kendal Avenue that had been left unfinished during the Second World War, half a transept dangling.
They passed other sites of lost hopes, sites of amputations and scars; vacant lots strewn with the debris of a building that had been torn down so long ago the rubble was overgrown with grass, an abandoned bank leaning over the edge of the ravine. Lucjan was an expert at identifying Hydro Houses, small electrical power stations scattered throughout the city with false facades each built in the style of the neighbourhood – from the outside, perfectly innocent looking houses, but if one opened the front door one would stand face to face with two storeys of gleaming machinery, dials, and coils. These houses were hard to detect, and gave themselves away only by a vague aura of uninhabitedness, windows permanently shut, a lack of a garden, no porch light. They explored an alternate city of laneways – sheet metal garages and wooden sheds. They sought out all the streets leading to railway tracks, where night trains rattled back-garden fences and the scream of light tore across bedroom walls.
– You had at least two good rivers flowing through this city and what have you done with them? said Lucjan. You've covered them over and siphoned them off and turned them into expressways. Instead you could have had boats to ride to work! And water markets and flower barges and swaying cafés and shops. You could have walked down your little residential street to your little neighbourhood dock and taken the ferry to another stop around the city – to work, to school. You could almost still do it …
One autumn afternoon, the trees bare and black against a white sky, they walked through the back door of a hardware shop and out into the silence of a hidden Catholic cemetery: the final destination of immigrants who'd fled the Irish potato famine, now a square of grass concealed behind storefronts. They had met there several times before, under the