The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [88]
Lucjan pointed.
– That's where I earn my living, now and then, the last house in the row. Do you see the electrical cord leading from the house into the trees? My boss has wired half the park with tiny bulbs. It amuses him, and no one has complained. He's like you, Janina, taking charge of the world, though he's not as dangerous. You're a memory bandit. But who can be distressed by little lights like fireflies in the forest? The expressway they were going to build – it would have sliced right through this quiet place.
– Perhaps that's the reason he lights up the park, said Jean. To remind himself that what we take for granted already had to be saved.
Lucjan took her cold hand and put it in his pocket.
– He's still a fine bookbinder, but he's old now, and can't do all the work on his own. I like sitting with him at the big table, with vise clamps and glue and the smell of leather. Sometimes we don't talk the whole day. I can't tell you how much I like him, I like the way he touches the leather, I like that he's neat, every petit fers and mullen and marbling comb in its place, every pot of aqua regia and myrabolan tannin wiped clean after use, every endpaper cross-catalogued by colour and texture and age, and then filed away in square drawers – in a cabinet he built himself. I like that he keeps his letters from Edgar Mansfield close at hand in a wooden box on his worktable. He collects moss and mushrooms and photographs them. People come to his door with specimens, squares of moss in little boxes, like jewellery, or envelopes of fungi from all over the world – from Bolivia, India, New Zealand, Peru. He puts samples under a microscope and draws what he sees. Sometimes he uses the shapes in his designs, carving them into the leather of the books, a beautiful effect, almost marbled. When we sit together I feel even his silence is orderly, as if he says to himself, Okay, today we will not talk about what happened in 1954, today we will not talk about what happened when my wife went to the doctor, today we will not talk about Stalin and the way it was during the war, today we will not discuss the pain in my knee or the grief that bulges out suddenly sometimes from being childless, today we will not discuss Jakob Böhme, or spores, or what the rain reminds me of. It is a good feeling, to sit at a table with a man and not talk about specific things together. He thinks and I think, we keep each other company, and at the end of the day it is as if we'd had hours of intimate conversation.
Marina found a part-time job for Jean, three afternoons a week, at Mumford's, a children's press she sometimes illustrated for, a tiny publishing house, literally a house, near the university, a working mothers' co-op press, named after a suffragette grandmother of one of the editors, Jo Mumford. Its nickname among the editors was Mum's the Word. Jean's job was to do anything asked of her: type invoices, deliver packages, make photocopies, brew coffee. Marina had told them Jean could cook, so sometimes she did that too, in the tiny kitchen at the back of the bindery. She learned the hand-press and printed small runs of bookmarks, a cult item in the battle for feminist supremacy with the University Press' bookmarks, which featured ironic drawings of dull domestic cuisine – the “baked potato bookmark,” the “boiled egg bookmark.” Mum's the Word countered with their own series of bitingly lacklustre symbols of domesticity – the “kettle bookmark” and the “vacuum cleaner bookmark.”
Walking to the university or to work, city signs now revealed themselves as fonts. She thought about Lucjan marbling endpapers for the bookbinder-on-the-park. She thought about paper, the first sheets that could be manufactured in endless lengths, without seams, rolling off the machine in Frogmore in 1803.
Jean began to imagine a botanical typeface. She began with A and E, astor