The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [96]
– Are you mad? shouted Lucjan.
Lucjan took hold of Ranger's shoulders and was about to shake him. But he looked at Ranger's hopeless face and kissed him on top of the head instead.
– You make me sick, said Lucjan.
– Me too, said Ranger.
Suddenly Ranger turned to Jean.
– Fresh blood, said Ewa, nudging Lucjan.
– What do you say, Jean? You're my last chance.
– I have to think about it.
– Ha, said Ranger.
– No, she means it, said Lucjan.
So they gave her ten minutes' peace. Jean left the din of the party and wandered upstairs to the children's room and sat on a small bed.
Beside her on a little table was a box brimming with metal bottlecaps. There was a stuffed cat and a drawing of a heart with wings floating over the ocean. The heart also had an anchor chain that disappeared into the waves. It made her head ache to think about it.
Violence is a form of speech. Violence is a form of speechlessness. Of course it is.
– You still want to believe in something, said Ranger. You still think there are such qualities as selflessness, or neighbourliness, or even disinterest. You still think someone will step forward with a plan! You still believe a man's beautiful books or beautiful songs are written out of love and not a way to brag of all the women he's had. You still think that love is a blessing and not a disaster. You still believe in a sacred bond sealed during a night of soul-searching love, in tastes, scars, maps, a woman's voice singing of love, the hot kiss of whisky between her legs, a sax solo played by an old Pole in a sweater with a voice like a mistake. You still believe a man will join his life with a woman after a single night. You still believe a man will dream about one woman for the rest of his life. I believe in taking what I want until there is nothing left. I believe in sleeping with a woman for what she can teach you. I believe in the loyalty among men who know they will slip away from the others the first better chance they get. I believe you can only trust someone who has lost everything, who believes in nothing but self-interest. But you, he said, waving his hand across all assembled in Ewa and Paweł's living room, still step into the street with the possibility that something good might happen. You still believe you will be loved, truly loved, past all frailty and misjudgment and betrayal. I've seen a man say goodbye to his wife with a look of such penetrating trust between them you could smell the breakfasts and promises, the sitting up with the sick child, the love-making after the child has fallen asleep, the candy smell of the children's medicine still sticky on their hands – and then that same man drives straight from that bedroom to his lover, who opens her legs like a hallelujah while the wife scrubs the pots from last night's dinner and then sits down at the kitchen table and pays the bills. As soon as a war is over we revive the propaganda of peace – that men do terrible things in extremity, that men are heroic out of nobility of soul rather than out of fear or out of one kind of duty or another, or simply by accident. Men honour promises out of fear – the fear of crossing a line that will rip up their lives. Then we call this fear love or fidelity, or religion or loyalty to principles. There's garbage floating even in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from any land. Men shoot chemicals into a human corpse and put it on display and no one arrests them! When you take away the human body's right to rot into the earth or go into the air, you take away the last holiness. Do you understand me? The last holiness. People picnicked in the ruins. Poles stepped over dead Jews in the street on their way to lunch. We were afraid to open a suitcase in the rubble because it might contain a dead child, the infant a mother carried, the suitcase banging against her legs, all the way from Łódź to Poznań to Kraków to Warsaw, waiting to die herself. Children betrayed their parents to the state. Two filthy words: military occupation.
Ranger stood. Lucjan moved