The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [89]
Jean sat at her table with her seed books and a map of the city spread open around her, pen in the air, while sorrow moved from heart to head, a creeping paralysis. The wrenching sadness that she had not known Avery's father. Avery as a boy, afraid, in the café in Turin with the patch of gauze on his chin. Every detail and regret accompanied by the fear that her history with Avery was being erased by Lucjan's touch, Lucjan's stories. He'd lent her a book of photographs of Warsaw, comparing views of the same city blocks, before and after the destruction, a single tree or a single wall the only evidence that the photographer had stood in the same spot. She felt Lucjan, and what it was to stand in that place.
It was too cold now for planting, and Jean's plans for the neighbourhoods, for Chinatown, Greektown, Little Italy, Little India, Tibet, Jamaica, Armenia, would have to wait for spring.
She had an unexpected ally in her plans for the city: Daub Arbab. Over the months, he had been sending seeds and planting advice from the places he worked. And to Daub, Jean had confided a painful question. She hoped he would find words for her, believed in him since their journey to Ashkeit. And because when she'd returned to the camp from the hospital in Cairo, Daub had said, “You weep for all the daily reasons, you weep because you will never brush your daughter's hair.”
Just as belief is visceral, so was this doubt. It had first formed in her when she stood before the re-erected temple and had felt her personal suffering to be almost un conscionable. What was personal loss in the face of universal devastation – the loss of Nubia, the destruction of cities. Her misery shamed her. And yet, her shame was not correct, she knew it was not. To mourn is to honour. Not to surrender to this keening, to this absence – a dishonouring.
‘Your letter has reached me in Bombay,’ wrote Daub, ‘and tomorrow I begin the long drive, hundreds of kilometres, along a river, the first work for a dam. In the taxi from the airport, the multitudes pressed against the car, hands and faces pushed against the glass, they banged their hands on the bonnet and on the windows, which I'd kept closed, suffocating with the heat and the misery around me, as if I were in an armoured tank. Then guiltily stretching out on the hotel bed.
‘If I had a wife, I would not be here, I would be somewhere close to home, building something harmless, a bridge or a school. But instead I wander, my loneliness sticking like a burr. Why is Avery not with you? If you were my wife, I would be by your side. If love finds you, there is not a single day to be wasted. I watched you walking through the camp, the last weeks before your daughter was born, your horror and sorrow, and I could not understand then, as I do not understand now, Avery's reticence. I believe always it is a matter of taking the one you love in your arms. But I know nothing of marriage and what silences are necessary. As for your inquiry, dear Jean, I have been lying here trying to think what to say to you.
‘Perhaps there is a collective dead. But there is no such thing as a collective death. Each death, each birth, a single death, a single birth. One man's death cannot be set against millions, nor one man's death against another.