The Winter Vault (37 page)

In one of Marina's paintings, a child's face is severed by the edge of the canvas; only now did Jean understand the meaning of it. The edge, a tourniquet.

– You wouldn't harness an animal so tightly, said Lucjan, because you want work from that animal. Only would you tie a man so tightly, a man whose life is not even worth being worked to death.

She lifted her head to Lucjan. He looked at her as if he were pleading, but it was the contortion of holding back tears.

Afterwards, he showed her the drawings. It was her flesh.

Talk is only a reprieve, Lucjan had said this more than once. No matter how loud we shout, no matter how personal our revelations, history does not hear us.

In Jean, the remnants of two rivers – rendings. The uprooted, the displaced. She remembered what Avery had written in his shadow-book from the desert. Soon, more than sixty million people will have been dispossessed by the subjugation of water, a number almost comparable to migrations caused by war and occupation. While the altered weight of the watersheds changes the very speed of our rotating earth and the angle of its axis.

Unprecedented in history, masses of humanity do not live, nor will they be buried, in the land where they were born. The great migration of the dead. War did this first, thought Jean, and then water.

The land does not belong to us, we belong to the land. That is the real homesickness, and that is the proprietorship of the dead. No place proclaims this with more certainty than a grave. In this century of refugees, it is our displacement that binds us.

The sun was already low, a pale crimson seeping from beneath the clouds. Jean's hands were cold, but she did not like to work with gloves. She made the first cut into the bark of one of Marina's peach trees and carefully began the graft. She saw, at the far end of the orchard, the pile of lumber Avery had had delivered, awaiting the realization of his plans: a small house, mostly windows, of proportions that Jean knew would be hidden by the fruit trees, and that would stand within the sound of the canal.

For five thousand years, humans have been grafting one variety of plant to another – the division, the pressing together, the conductive cells that seal the wound. And for more than five hundred thousand years – until evolution, chance, or aggression left
Homo sapiens
alone on earth – at least two species of hominid had co-existed in North Africa, and in the Middle East, abiding in the same desert.

There is a soul in the fruit tree, thought Jean, and it is born of two.

– Ewa and Paweł, Witold, Piotr – we were part of a group, said Lucjan. We managed to do some useful things. We raised cash for people who had to leave Poland in a hurry, we circulated information. Ewa and Paweł performed their plays at home and in other people's flats. That's when I started the cave paintings – it was one of my jokes – life underground – I painted them as a signal to the others, a wave, just a stupid bit of mischief.

Then I made the Precipice Men – sculptures that I mounted on the roofs of buildings. Ewa and Paweł helped me. We worked at night. First we put one figure on the roof of the building where I lived, and then three more on theirs. I made them from clay, just mud really, reinforced inside with scrap metal. They wouldn't last and that was part of it; and I liked that it was scrap that held them together. I could make them fast, they didn't cost much, and, because of the clay, they were truly lifelike. They peered over the edge at impossible angles. I got the idea from a book of Ewa's, a picture of Palladio's
Villa Rotonda
. The figures were there for weeks before anyone noticed; nobody looks up. But when people started to spot them I'd stand on the street watching. I liked that moment of surprise. It was a game, a childish game. I would have liked to put some of them on the Palace of Culture but Władka talked me out of it. She said the most disparaging thing anyone has ever said about the silly things I make: the idea isn't worth prison.

Lucjan sat up in bed. He paused.

– Then one evening, an old man waited on the roof of Ewa and Paweł's building in the Muranów. He stepped off the edge. A young man, a student, happened to be looking up and saw one of the figures come to life. The suicide left his suit jacket neatly folded, with a letter in the pocket asking only that the jacket be given to charity.

Jean sat up beside him.

– I can hardly believe what you've just said.

Lucjan covered his face with his hands.

– As soon as I heard someone had jumped, I thought of my stepfather. I thought it was just the thing he would do to himself and to me. But of course, it wasn't my stepfather. Paweł and Ewa knew the man very slightly because he lived in their building. The man's wife had been sick for a long time, and she'd died in their flat. They'd never been apart – not once in fifty years, not even during the war. Paweł believed that I had given him a way to die, in the place where his wife had died.

Death makes a place sacred. You can never remove that sacredness. That apartment tower was built over the ghetto, where some of the worst fighting had been. All the dead trapped in the rubble under those apartments, perhaps my own mother somewhere, all that happened after. We were already in a graveyard.

Jean wrapped her arms around him. Lucjan took her arms away.

– Not long after that, Władka and I had a bad fight, the worst. I'd had a little conversation with Lena, I felt she was old enough to learn one or two things about what we were doing, the politics of non-violent action. She'd wanted to know why I was always doing such crazy things, leaving matryoshka dolls on top of things too high to reach, hanging from streetlamps, second-storey windows, etcetera, and so I explained about ‘friends in high places.’ And she wanted to know why the older students wore radio parts on their lapels like jewellery – and so I explained about ‘resistors,’ and that the first act of subversion is a joke, because humour is always a big signal to the authorities, who never understand this: that the people are dangerously serious. And that the second most important subversive act is to demonstrate affection, because it is something no one can regulate or make illegal.

A few days after that conversation with Lena, Władka said she'd had enough. I moved to Ewa and Paweł's. Soon she was making it very hard for me to see Lena; she would arrange a meeting and then, when I came, they weren't home. She sent Lena to her parents, to her friends. For several months I was crazy, I followed Władka around in the street. The swish of Władka's sleeve against the body of her plastic raincoat – day after day I listened to this irritating sound; it grew in my head to such volume that it outmeasured the calling of the crows, the grinding of the endless trucks dumping their rubble, the planes overhead. Every other sound fell dumb to the overpowering swishing of her plastic sleeve. I watched men and women at the building sites as if their actions and gestures were taking place behind glass – all I heard was that enraging, incessant brush of her raincoat as she walked ahead of me. There is one thing I can say for Władka: she bore this madness too. Following her around like that, I knew I would never want another child. I will never forget that sound and that feeling of being imprisoned out in the open air. We can rebuild cities, but the ruins between husband and wife …

Even before this, with Władka it always came apart the same way. I'd ask a question, a simple question – ‘what would you do in the same circumstance?’ – but really I was probing like a monkey with a stick down a hole, looking for ants. They dribbled off the stick, dripping globs of moral ambiguity – that moment of hesitation, of her not taking the question seriously, or of plain, shocking, moral uncertainty. And each time it sickened me to discover the spot, soft like a bruise, the moral line she was always willing to cross, even though I understood it was out of a very sensible fear. It sickened me with triumph. There it was, proof it was foolish, crazy, to trust her, and how close I'd come to forgetting. That twinge of satisfaction – it was almost a feeling of safety, that inner smirk – while all the time she would go on stroking my hair or reading to me and I would be disgusted by her touch and it was over, right at that moment, for the hundredth time, over.

After a year of this and when they made it easy for the last Jews to leave, I went. Paweł and Ewa were always in trouble, Ewa's cousin Witold, and Piotr – we all left. Later I learned that Władka had been working on making ‘improvements’ for herself and Lena, with a certain Soviet bureaucrat, and that these trysts had been going on for quite a while, even before my little talk with Lena. She might have turned in any of us – me, Paweł, and the others – but she didn't. She wanted me to be grateful – she cost me my daughter but at least didn't cost me the lives of my friends. That's just the sort of bargain Władka liked. Enemies know each other best, she liked to say whenever we argued, because pity never clouds their judgment. It was her way of telling me I was an inconvenience and nothing more, ‘not even worth prison.’

Ewa had a brother, her twin. They deliberately stressed the resemblance, Ewa used to dress like him. It sometimes made me sad, like in those ballads where the girl cuts her hair short and dresses like a boy in order to go off to sea to be with her brother or her lover; there was a desperation in it, in the disguise. And when the police picked him up and he wasn't heard from again, Ewa never knew, she'll never know, if they'd really been looking for her. The truth is, either of them would have sufficed. But Ewa had always taken more risks and she feels, even now, it should have been her.

Once, I spent a whole month's money to phone Lena in Warsaw. While we were talking, Władka came home and told her to hang up. I could hear Władka yelling. Lena said she'd quieten her down. ‘Just a minute,’ said Lena. ‘I'll be right back.’ I called to her to come back to the phone. Then I waited. For twenty minutes all I heard was the dog howling and his chain sliding across the floor. A whole month's money – just to listen to a dog barking across the ocean. That was years ago, that conversation with Mr. Bow-wow. It was the last time I phoned her.

– You've never spoken to your daughter again?

– No.

Jean reached out, but Lucjan took her hand and placed it in her lap.

She turned away. The snow fell, soundless and slow, in the window high above the bed.

Everything we are can be contained in a voice, passing forever into silence. And if there is no one to listen, the parts of us that are only born of such listening never enter this world, not even in a dream. Moonlight cast its white breath on the Nile. Outside the snow continued to fall.

As Jean spoke, Lucjan could see the gauze of starlight on the river the night the boy drowned in her dream, the moment Jean believed her daughter floated from her, without a trace but for this dream of drowning. In her voice, Lucjan saw the hillside where Jean first told her husband he would be a father, and the bare hospital room in Cairo. Her fear of not carrying, her fear of carrying, another child. Her body abandoning Avery's touch.

– Janina, said Lucjan, fearlessness is a kind of despair, do not wish it, it is the opposite of courage …

For a long time they lay together quietly. Every so often the glass bowl on top of the fridge began to vibrate and then stopped. It was warm under the blankets, Lucjan along the length of her.

The absence that had been so deep, since childhood – at last Jean felt it for what it was, for what it had always been – a presence.

Death is the last reach of love, and all this time she had not recognized what had been her mother's task in her, nor her child's; for love always has a task.

From the peace of sleep, Jean opened her eyes. Beside the bed, her clothes, Lucjan's thick cabled grey sweater, the teapot, a drawing of her. She could see, barely in the dimness of dawn, the curve of her waist, the sleeping curve of her across the heavy paper. She remembered what Lucjan had said, one of their first nights together: There is no actual edge to flesh. The line is a way of holding something in our sight. But in truth we draw what isn't there.

She turned to find Lucjan, his eyes open, beside her. He had been waiting for her to wake. He drew his hand through her hair, drew her hair tight against her scalp, a gesture an observer might have mistaken for pure desire. Then, lowering his head to her belly, he slipped his arms beneath her, held her so tightly her breath went shallow. He did not let go, but held her this way, as if he would break her in half, the grip of a most painful rescue.