The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [90]
There's too much sand in the cement, Avery had said, and Jean had listened, lying next to him in the dark, at the limit of self-possession, cradling the stillness in her belly. It's not the workers' fault, he had continued, they'd been unsupervised. Cement is not hardened by the air, as most people believe, but by a chemical reaction … And now, in the kitchen on Clarendon, Jean heard Avery's desperation. The cement that would not dry.
Lucjan was working on a series of maps, sized to fit, when folded, into the glovebox of a car. He painted each detail with care, like medieval decoration on an illuminated manuscript. Every trade, he had explained to Jean, has its own map of the city: the rat and cockroach exterminators, the raccoon catchers, the hydro and sewer and road repair workers. There is the mothers' map marked with pet shops and public washrooms and places to collect pinecones, with sidewalk widths and pot-hole depths indicated for carriages, tricycles, and wagon-pulling. The knitters have their own map, with every wool supplier in the city marked. Lucjan made a map of exceptional tree roots, of wind corridors, and water runoff. He made a coffee map (with only one location marked), a sugar map, a chocolate map, a ginkgo tree map, a weeping willow map, a map of bridges, of public drinking fountains, of boulders larger than five feet in diameter. A shoe repair map. A grape arbour map, a map of kite-flying spaces (without overhead wires), a sledding map (hills without roads or fences at the bottom). Then there were the personal maps. The remorse map. The embarrassment map. The arguments map. The disappointment maps (bitter and mild). The map of the dead; the cemeteries built on vertical slopes. And the map he was working on when he met Jean – perhaps the most beautiful of all – a map of invisible things, a thought map, indicating where people had experienced an idea, a fear, a secret hope; some were well known, others private. An intersection where a novel was first imagined, a park where a child was dreamed of. The beach where an architect visualized his skyline. The bench where a painter had a premonition of his own death. “How does one paint what is not there?” asked Jean. “One paints the place exactly as one sees it,” said Lucjan. “Then, one paints it again.”
Lucjan's friend Paweł was a member of the Stray Dogs, a jazz orchestra of old men – old except for Paweł, the youngest by several decades. Lucjan was a silent member; he didn't play an instrument, but he was good at finding unusual things to bang on and, because he understood them, his advice was invaluable; sometimes he was called upon to settle a vote. The cornet, Janusz, was the second youngest and proud of his youth, introducing himself to Jean as “barely seventy years old in my stocking feet.” Some wore an air of permanent, desiccated romance, while the faces of the others, including the leader, “Mr. Snow” himself, contained such ransacked grief one could barely behold them. Mr. Snow – Jan Piletski – had worked with his father in the fish market at Rynkowa Street in Warsaw before the war. From a block away, Lucjan explained to Jean, you could see the long trestle tables, glinting with silver, a shimmering lake hovering in the middle distance. But this was a mirage with a stench. When the wind blew, the reek of fish floated for a quarter-mile in every direction. Once a week, I went with my mother and we always watched a man who used to sit at his easel, painting the wares. His fish were true to life – every shimmering scale – even the stink. Jan's wife, Beata, had referred to the distinctive aroma of the market as the Piletski perfume, and Jan Piletski himself was nicknamed by the Stray Dogs after the herring fisherman in a song from the musical Carousel. Mr. Snow became Jan Piletski's stage name,