The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [87]
No noise of the street leaked into this hidden place; the long grass grew so thickly tangled around the plinths that, even if one were to fall, it would not make a sound; only the trees clattered in the wind. The ground was cold and wet but, nevertheless, they spread the square of blanket Lucjan had brought with him and they leaned against the shelter of a limestone wall of a small octagonal building – beautifully proportioned – with deeply set shutters, closed tight and hooked fast.
– When ground is too frozen for the digging of graves, said Lucjan, the dead wait in these winter vaults. There is always a dignity to these buildings – whether made of brick or stone with expensive brass fittings or just a humble wooden shed – because they are built with respect for those who will lie within their walls.
But in times of war or seige, he continued, when there are too many civilians for such vaults, other makeshift shelters must be found. In Warsaw during the bitter winter of 1944–45, the dead rested together in root cellars, in mine-blasted gardens, amid the rubble of the streets under sheets of newspaper. During the seige of Leningrad, along the road to the Piskarevsky cemetery, thousands were heaped, so high the ice-encased dead formed a tunnel through which one passed in terror. Crowded trolley cars stood immobile in the ice and snow, tombs that could not be moved until the spring. The dead were wound tenderly in shawls, towels, rugs, curtains, wrapping paper bound with twine. In cold apartments, bodies were placed in the bath, left in bed, lain on tables. They clustered the pavement, doused with turpentine. In the thirty-degree-below-zero weather, the ground was, like the hymn says, hard as iron, and a mass grave could only be made by dynamiting. The frozen bodies were then thrown, clinking together, into the pit.
The winter dead wait, said Lucjan, for the earth to relent and receive them. They wait, in histories of thousands of pages, where the word love is never mentioned.
Brown birds lined the eaves of the vault roof. They balanced on the edge, small dark stones against the sky, now marbled grey: dusk.
– It was January, Jean told Lucjan, when my mother died. My parents had once passed by a country cemetery on a drive together, north of Montreal, and they stopped to walk there. My mother remembered that peaceful ground and the name of the nearby village, and that is where she chose to be buried.
But the ground was too cold to dig the grave.
For almost two months, several times a week, my father and I drove past the fields, past forest, to sit on camp chairs by the door of the vault. And do you know what my father did? He read to her. Keats, Masefield, Tennyson, Sara Teasdale, T. S. Eliot, Kathleen Raine. The vault itself was quite small and the door huge, all out of proportion, thick, with ornate metal hinges. At first I could not bear the thought of my mother listening behind that heavy, closed door. But slowly, as the days passed, I began to feel that although her dear body was inside, somehow her soul was not. The sound of my father reading became a kind of benediction, an absolution. Often it snowed. We opened umbrellas and poured out flasks of steaming, milky tea and, as he read, I sat under my mother's old umbrella and looked out to the wet trees and the cloud-blackened sky between the bare branches. One horse always roamed in the field next to the graveyard, liquid black against the snow. During all those vigils we never met anyone else. The day we finally buried my mother was the last we ever visited that place together. I understood what my father felt, something we never could have imagined – that even a grave can be a kind of redemption.
They walked north from Amelia Street, through the leaves blowing across the empty streets. Jean's hair was loose, shining under the streetlamps and streaming out behind her, in the dark water of the October night. They