The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [97]
– I'm not as drunk as you think.
Ranger picked up his jacket and left.
Ewa began to collect the ashtrays and empty them into the bin. No one said a word. Jean looked at Lucjan, who looked away with a shrug.
– I'm going to bed, said Ewa, climbing the stairs. Throw yourselves out.
Jean took off everything, then pulled Lucjan's sweater over her head; the sleeves hung down to her knees. The wool carried his embrace and his shape. Then she cooked only in the small light of the stove, working alone in the dim kitchen. She would cook something that required slow, long heat, the flavours intensifying. She smelled the herbs on her fingers, his smell in her hair, the eucalyptus scent of her own skin. She watched the kale and onions and mushrooms turn soft and shrink with the heat. Love permeates everything, the world is saturated with it, or is emptied of it. Always this beautiful or this bereft. She crushed the rosemary between her palms, then drew her hands over his sweater so later he would find it. Everything one's body had been – the pockets of shame, of strange pride, scars hidden or known. And then the self that is born only in another's touch – every tip of pleasure, of power and weakness, every crease of doubt and humiliation, every pitiful hope no matter how small.
It was an early Sunday evening in January, snow at the windows. Jean carried a tray with Paweł's Jamaican coffee and thick slices of brown bread, a pot of jam with a spoon sticking out of it. Lucjan was lying on the bed with a book over his face.
– Talk to me, Janina. Tell me about a Sunday you've had, he said from under the book.
Jean poured and set the cup on the floor beside him.
She thought of Avery, a sudden, burning homesickness. What they knew together: black earth and stone trees, swathing forest, a glimpse of stars. The grasses of Kintyre swaying above their heads in a sea of air. Collecting stones from the hard winter sand and building houses from them, the largest up to her waist, the smallest in the middle of the square kitchen table in the cottage they'd rented in this Scotland they loved, their great gasp of cold wind before the heat of the desert. The blankets heaped on the bed, so heavy they could barely roll over in their perfect sleep together. No use to ask Avery if he remembered. She knew he remembered.
– One Sunday, said Jean slowly, an archaeologist suddenly appeared on our houseboat. He was hunting for Canadians; he was from Toronto and was feeling melancholy, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to sit with him on the Nile on a Sunday evening listening to him describe a concert he'd heard by Segovia at Massey Hall.
At Faras, continued Jean, there were archaeologists from Warsaw, and a huge Soviet camp at the dam. Sometimes we saw them at the market in Wadi Halfa. The Russians especially looked bereft. They sat in the shade of the coffee stalls smoking and whistling songs by Yves Montand. The desert was filled with foreigners – from Argentina, Spain, Scandinavia, Mexico, France – and there was brisk trade in the small bitter cigarettes of each country. And wherever the archaeologists were working, the Bedouin shadowed the sites, watching and waiting just off in the distance, never approaching.
– Wait a moment, said Lucjan.
He jumped out of bed and she watched as he moved through the dusk, down the steep stairs and into the kitchen. For a moment the light of the fridge touched the ceiling, then darkness again.
She heard him, scrabbling about trying to feel his way through a stack of record albums. Then a man's voice floated upstairs.
Lucjan stood at the top of the staircase, remembering.
– Yves Montand … There was a time in Warsaw, said Lucjan, when, from every open window, you could hear ‘C'est à l'Aube’ or ‘Les Grands Boulevards’ or ‘Les Feuilles Mortes’ in the street. When Montand sang at the Palace of Culture, thirty-five hundred people listened. Fifteen minutes after he left the stage, people were still shouting for encores. The bureaucracy did not object