The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [99]
– A few days ago we had a critique, said Avery, for a train station. One student designed an elaborate complex for ‘freshening up’ after a journey – a boudoir with nooks and banquettes and mirrors, personal sinks and showers. He kept saying that this ‘spa’ would become a destination in itself. ‘It would be immensely convenient,’ he said. ‘The train would take people directly to the showers’; he kept repeating this – ‘the train would take them directly to the showers, directly to the showers …’ He kept on about it until I felt quite sick. All I could think of were the trains from Amsterdam to Treblinka, and finally I said so. The whole class turned to look at me as if I were demented. I thought, Now I've done it, they'll think I'm cracked, obsessed. Finally a young woman asked, ‘What's Treblinka?’ …
Yesterday we were talking about bridges. I said that yes, I suppose a bridge could also be a shopping mall and a parking lot, but why should we disguise a bridge, its function? What is the essence of a melon? It's roundness! Maybe someday we'll breed a square melon, but then it will be something else, a toy, a mockery of a melon, a humiliation. They looked at me again like I had lost my wits. But then someone said seriously, ‘Square melons, why didn't I think of that?’
Jean heard, through the phone, the sound of papers rustling and guessed that Avery had put his head on his desk.
– Today I was thinking, said Avery, that the moment one uses stone in a building, its meaning changes. All that geologic time becomes human time, is imprisoned. And when that stone falls to ruins, even then it is not released: its scale remains mortal.
Avery started out across the marsh. There was no moon, but the ground glowed with snow. The blackness above and the whiteness beneath him made him feel that with each step he might fall over an edge. A marker glowed above the canal. He moved toward it.
He lay down by the ditch and the ground now seemed almost warm to him. There was no one for many miles across the marsh, the nearest farm a pinprick of light. He listened to the water moving under the ice. Shame is not the end of the story, he thought, it is the middle of the story.
With the frozen mud digging into his back, Avery found himself thinking about Georgiana Foyle. He wondered if she were still alive, and if she had chosen where she would be buried, now that her place beside her husband was gone. He thought of Daub Arbab, who, for the first time, Avery realized, reminded him of his father, a seriousness that expressed itself as kindness. He thought that the closest thing he felt to belief of any kind was his love for his wife.
The painter Bonnard, the day before he died, travelled hours to an exhibit of his work so that he could add a single drop of gold paint to the flowers in a painting. His hands were too unsteady, so he asked his son to accompany him, to help hold the brush. Avery felt that even had Bonnard known that these were his last hours, he would still have taken that journey for the sake of a single second of pigment. What a blessed life, to live in such a way that our choices would be the same, even on the last day.
He thought about what his father had said to him while they sat together that afternoon in the hills, after the war: There is only one question that