The Winter Vault (16 page)

Avery approached Daub, who was standing alone by the river.

– It will take all my life, said Avery, to learn what I have seen today.

But Jean took Avery's arm and gently led him off, for their friend Daub was weeping.

Jean and Avery waited for Daub at the edge of the village. They sat together in the twilight sand of Ashkeit. The air deepened. For a long moment this light was suspended, like the face of a listener at the precise moment of understanding. And then the new skin of starlight, like ice on water, spread across the sky. How remorselessly the sand turned cold, the surrounding coldness of thousands of kilometres of desert, an endless cold. Avery thought of his schoolteacher in England who had cut an apple and held one-quarter of it up to the class: this is the amount of earth that is not water; and then cut the quarter in half – this is the amount of arable land; and cut again – this is the amount of arable land not covered by human habitation; and finally, the amount of land that feeds everyone on the earth – barely a scrap of skin.

Like discovering latent knowledge in one's self while reading words on a page, like a shape emerging from sculptor's clay, so arose their feelings of astonishment and inevitability as the village of Ashkeit had come into closer view. It was the same sensation that Avery felt when he first saw Jean, walking alone on the riverbank. Inexplicably, in that moment, he knew the place held meaning, for him and for her, as if his own heart had brought this to pass. As if he had caused the event – then and there. More, as if the place itself had given rise to her.

It was also the knowledge that they would be forever changed, their bodies already changed; attuned to each other.

He could almost imagine that the houses of Ashkeit rose out of the sand at the very moment of his sight, born from the intensity of his desire.

Jean watched as the white shapes of the houses dissolved into the twilight; she thought of the leaf of the sumach, which looks like six separate leaves but which is botanically only a single leaf. So, too, Ashkeit. Jean took Avery's hand. His eyes were closed, but because he felt her hand in his he also saw her hand in his mind. So it was with the houses of Nubia; no landscape alone could arouse such feeling. It was what he felt, looking as a child at that crease of hill in Buckinghamshire, in the fall of light, familiar as a face. This earth, this Jean Shaw.

At that moment he imagined he knew, his body knew, what Ashkeit and Debeira and Faras, all the villages, meant.

When he had sat in the Buckinghamshire hills with his father – though he had said nothing about his feeling for that place – he knew his father had felt it too. How could Avery explain it; it was as if what he experienced there could not have been brought to life anywhere else.

When the water came, the houses would dissolve like a bromide. But they would not even disappear into the river, which held a memory of them. For even the river would be gone.

Daub had come and Jean sat between the two men, between the earth and stars. She thought of the children who had been born in this village and who would never be able to return, never be able to satisfy or explain the nameless feeling that would come upon them, in the midst of their adulthood, perhaps waking from an afternoon sleep, or walking along a road, or upon entering a stranger's house.

– A human being can be destroyed piece by piece, Daub said, looking out at the abandoned village glowing in the sand. Or all at once.

Do you know the beginning of
Metamorphoses?
asked Daub. ‘Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed/into different bodies.’

They began the drive back through the twilight desert to Wadi Halfa.

Avery spoke of the despair of space that the built world had created; waste space too narrow for anything but litter, dark walkways from carparks to the street; the endless, dead space of underground garages; the corridors between skyscrapers; the space surrounding industrial rubbish bins and ventilator shafts … the space we have imprisoned between what we have built, like seeds of futility, small pockets on the earth where no one is meant to be alive, a pause, an emptiness …

Avery imagined a time, not too far distant, when engineers' calculations could be so cleverly manipulated, that materials, tension, stress, and weight-bearing would have a new vocabulary; a time when buildings of such startling shapes would rise from the ground like the sudden eruption of a volcano; a time when bombastic originality would be mistaken for beauty, just as austerity had once been mistaken for authority.

– It is not originality or authority that I desire in a building, said Avery. It is restoration. When you find yourself someplace – he paused. I suppose I mean exactly that – to find myself, in a place.

– We wish our buildings to grow old with us, said Daub.

North of Sarra the road climbed to the top of the hills, and Daub stopped the truck. It was almost dark. Here, from the height, they looked out to the groves of the Nile and beyond, to the great Sahara. Jean suddenly understood that the colours of the limewash at Ashkeit were as startling as the green of the floodplain.

– Soon, said Daub, everything we see here will be under water. There is an illusion of peace. But there is trouble and like much of the trouble in the desert, it is caused both by the living and the dead.

My father had a habit, which I find I have inherited, of clipping articles from the newspapers. He used to form an idea about the world, a theory, and then he would happen upon all kinds of ‘proof’ in the papers – coincidental, of course, but it amused him. And it became a small obsession.

Once, he held up a newspaper photograph of a dark-featured child, her hair wrapped in a scarf or shawl, holding a bundle of cloth.

‘What do you see?’ my father asked me.

‘A DP from the war in Europe?’

‘A Palestinian refugee, 1948.’

He showed me another clipping, very similar to the first.

‘And this?’

‘Another Palestinian boy?’

‘No. A Jewish boy who has arrived in Israel from a refugee camp in Germany. And this?’

He held up a photo of a line of people, weighed down with suitcases and satchels, clearly carrying all they owned.

‘Immigrants to Israel?’

‘No, Arab Jews forced to leave Egypt, also 1948. And this photo – a Polish boy, a Christian, in a camp in Tashkent; and this – a Yugoslav boy in a refugee camp in Kenya; and another in Cyprus; and in the desert camp at El Shatt in 1944; and here, a Greek child in the camp near Gaza, at Nuseirat, also 1944. Quite a few times,’ said my father, ‘I have found faces that are almost identical. These two – one is from a refugee camp in Lebanon; the other, from a refugee camp in Backnang near Stuttgart. When you see just their faces, nothing else, do they not look like twins? That resemblance is what caused me to begin this collection, photos everyone sees every day, from newspapers or magazines, refugees from every side.’

Did you know, said Daub, that the first plans for the High Dam were drawn up by West Germany to appease Egypt, after compensating Israel after the war? There is so much collusion, from every side, it might be possible to sort it out, if only a single soul possessed all the information.

Here I am, a British citizen, whose father was born in Cairo, and whose grandfather died in London in the Blitz, sitting in the Sudanese desert, with a Canadian and her British husband, talking about refugees in Kenya, Gaza, New Zealand, India, Khataba, Indonesia …

Daub rested his head in his arms on the steering wheel. The breeze lifted the hair from the back of his neck and Jean felt a pang at the sight; a place of vulnerability. One could live a lifetime, she thought, and perhaps never be touched there.

– I was in Faras during the first evacuation. I was working in Halfa then, said Daub, and I went to witness it. I saw a mother and daughter saying their farewells. They had lived in two villages that were side by side, a short walk from each other. The daughter had moved to live with her husband's family when they were married, but the mother and daughter saw each other very often, just a walk of short distance between the two villages. However, the villages happened to be on either side of the border between Sudan and Egypt, that invisible border in the middle of the desert, and so now the mother was being moved to Khashm el Girba and the daughter fifteen hundred kilometres away, to Kom Ombo. Everyone watching this scene knew they would never see each other again. After the daughter, who was very big with child, boarded the train, and the train moved off into the desert, the mother looked down at her feet and saw the satchel she had meant to give her, with family things inside, now left behind.

Daub looked at them and then looked out at the hills above Sarra. It was dark now, the sand pale under the stars.

– When I witnessed this, I thought of my father's collection of pictures. It goes on and on, as my father understood, like the detritus of the Second World War that ended in bits and pieces, leaving behind horror and misery in isolated places, these foul refugee camps all over the world, like pools of stagnant water after a flood …

The next evening they flew back to Abu Simbel. From above, the camp came into view, glowing with its artificial light, a conflagration in the wilderness; filling the tiny plane sudden as a searchlight. Jean felt regret for the darkness of the desert they had left behind: palpable, alive, a breathing blackness.

The forces within the cliff at Abu Simbel were balanced by steel scaffolding and the roof of the temple was sliced from the walls to relieve the stress. Nevertheless, it was not known whether the release of the first block – on August 12, 1965 – would cause the temple to crack open. Avery had stood on the crest of the cofferdam. The stone had been so finely cut, the seam so invisible, that at first it seemed the winch alone was magically reaching into the stone to bring forth a perfect block from the whole.

But Avery had not felt simple relief as the stones were lifted; instead, from the very first cut of the first block – the eleven-tonne GA1A01, Great Temple, Treatment A, Zone 1, Row A, Block 1 – a specific anguish took root. As the ragged cavity expanded, as the gaping absence in the cliff grew deeper, so grew Avery's feeling they were tampering with an intangible force, undoing something that could never be produced or reproduced again. The Great Temple had been carved out of the very light of the river, carved out of a profound belief in eternity. Each labourer had believed. This simple fact roused him – he could not imagine any building in his lifetime or in the future erected with such faith. The stone had been alive to the carvers, not in a mystical way but in a material way; their relationship to the stone had affected the molecules of the stone. Not mystical, but mysterious.

The heat and weight of Jean were in his dreams. And at the beginning, memory blossomed in him, childhood images so strong he could describe to her in detail the objects on a shelf. But as the pile of temple blocks grew around them, even Jean could not dispel what quickly became in Avery more than anxiety – a dispossession.

He had expected the salvage to be an antidote, an atonement for the despair of dam-building. He had imagined a rite of passage, a pilgrimage, an argument his father could respect. Instead he felt that the reconstruction was a further desecration, as false as redemption without repentance.

– There are seeds, said Jean, coaxing Avery to sleep, coated in wax, that can survive in water without germinating; like the lotus, which has been known to survive at the bottom of a lake for more than twelve hundred years and then sprout again; seeds that can survive even salt water, like the coconut that will float across the ocean fully protected, a stony globe, and wash to shore where it will take root. There is a plant – a kind of acacia – that carries on even when all its seeds have been eaten and it is nothing but husk; after the ants have left it hollow, the wind rushes in, and it whistles …

The desert was one immensity, the river another. In the hills beyond the din of the camp, Jean and Avery looked up at the third immensity, the stars.

The importance of place: the worn garden path on Hampton Street, the dried-up riverbank, a hotel room. The incline behind Avery's house in Buckinghamshire, a view his mind still knew viscerally.

Jean led Avery a small way up the slope. They stood by a scattering of stones. Standing next to him, looking down at the river flowing in the white light of the generators, she said:

– This very place we stand is where you first learned we will have a child.

And she smiled at Avery's astonished face.

By seven weeks, one hundred thousand new nerve cells in the brain are being formed each minute, by birth, one hundred billion cells. Half of Jean's chromosomes had been discarded to form her “polar body.” By eight weeks, every organ of their child existed; each cell possessing its thou-sands of genes.

Over the months, the baby continued to swell and tighten the entire surface of her; and Jean felt not only her body, but the shape of her mind changing. She imagined taking her place next to the Nubian women, her belly a white moon next to the beautiful, swollen blackness of the other mothers. Fatigue overcame her suddenly; once, she did not make it all the way to the camp shop but sat to rest in the shadow of the generator, thirsty enough to drink the sky. She fell asleep sitting up, leaning against the machine, her legs heavy in the sand. She was not asleep long – perhaps a quarter of an hour – and woke ashamed. She'd been indecorous, and was relieved to see no one near.