The Winter Vault

by Anne Michaels

‘It's just the same with you,’ Owen said. ‘All those years ago when we were students, whenever we met you looked at me so earnestly, so seriously, and you asked me how I was. It always unnerved me. Now I see that what you were really asking was not “how are you?” but “are you in love?” That's all you really wanted to know about, and you were right, it's the same question. Now I see it, I look into your eyes even now and I see you were right, twenty years later. And now, whenever I think of you that's what I'll remember and it will make me smile. That's all we need to do in this life – find the single feature in each friend, the one really essential quality and then love them for it. When my mother checked to make sure the door was locked, even after she'd already checked a dozen times, even when she was at last sitting in the front seat of the car, in her place in the passenger seat next to my indulgent father, still she always had to get out and check the door one more time – and it wasn't good enough to watch my father do it, she had to do it herself. How that set my teeth on edge, I'd wait in the backseat literally grinding my jaws together. But she'd grown up with nothing and now she had a nice house full of nice things – of course she would have to make sure the door was locked again and again. Who in their right mind would trust such luck? The important thing is not that she checked the lock, but that she was once so poor and she never, never forgot it. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by that. Think of all the anger I wasted on locks when I should've been thinking about poverty.

  ‘But that's just the way it is with the truth, it's never in the same room with you, it's never in the backseat with you, it's never there when you need it. It always bobs up years later like a waterbird that dives in one part of the lake and pops up in another. You grab for the truth with both hands and it pops up behind you …

  ‘And now I'm late. I'm meeting a woman at a restaurant in the country and it's at least an hour's drive.’

  Owen got into his car and was about to pull away when I tapped on the window. ‘How's Nina?’

  ‘She's just the same,’ said Owen. ‘She cries for everything that doesn't have a home. And in spite of the fact she only has one good ear, she thinks she hears everything.’ Owen nodded to himself, already considering the traffic.

  ‘Yes,’ said Owen, waiting for his chance to pull out, ‘it's written on your face. When you ask someone how he is, what you're really asking is “are you in love?”’

  There were meetings now regarding the lighting and ventilation of the rebuilt temples, factors to be planned for in the construction of the concrete domes. The domes were to be cylindrical over the front of the Great Temple, gradually expanding into a sphere; no part of the dome could touch the temple, for fear that any pressure during the settling of the cliff would damage the fragile ceilings. Each dome would carry a cliff load of one hundred thousand metric tonnes.

  – My father and I, said Avery – sleepless with Jean in the night, the skin of her emerging belly dry and hot and smooth as clay – stood together in the Scottish rain, in our thick-soled boots; he saw the great achievement of engineering man where now I saw blunt, brute force and the submission of the river. This leaching of faith had been so gradual, I cannot tell you when it first started, but the moment shocked me. I loved and admired everything about my father, the solid sensual reality of him: his wet wool and his pipe-smoke smell, the bulk of him, his caps of canvas or tweed, his authority that, to this day, fills me with awe. And, deepest of all, although I hadn't the words for it when I was a child, what I came to understand was his complete engagement with all he saw – with every place he went and everyone he met. I watched him squatting down and digging into the earth, sitting at tables with businessmen or on the grass with children, soliciting the opinions of students, schoolteachers, farmers, mayors – and farm animals and birds! He had a curiosity about every living and inanimate thing, natural and man-made; in the great vales of Scotland, in the hill towns of Italy and India, in the marshes of Ethiopia and Ontario, at public rallies and alone in the desert, I saw he could find his way to belong anywhere. I watched him ruminating, sorting things out, as he observed various elements combine and recombine. He would unfurl maps across his knees, lay plans across camp tables, and I would watch as he altered the landscape with a stroke of his pencil, rerouting rivers and strangling waterfalls, bringing forests to the desert, and emptying entire lakes. Altering water tables millions of years old. And I wished I could snip the dams away like a stitch in a cloth, bring breath to the choked throat, bring all the water back with a single scrape of an eraser, bring back the houses, the graves, the gardens, the people. He would sit next to me and grab my arm with excitement. He brought me with him to the sites, to meetings in Quonset huts and expensive restaurants, to the first blasts of rock, to inauguration ceremonies.

  My father looked at a bridge and he could hear it humming. He could hear the loom of forces, the warp and weft of stresses clattering in the span. It was instinctive, an intuition. But it's not that way for me, said Avery. I must work all the time. It's not in my skin. I'm like a pianist who must continually watch his hands. I have always wanted to feel what he felt. As a boy I craved to belong to him, to prove our bond. I felt I would always love him more than he loved me. I don't know why I felt this. He wanted me with him wherever he went; he wanted to show me everything, to teach me.

  – You wanted him to be proud of you, said Jean. Perhaps you couldn't see how much he wanted you to feel proud of him.

  – My father could really draw, he had such a brilliant hand. You could feel the structure inside the machine, feel how something worked. But when he tried to paint landscapes, my mother used to say she could feel the immense G.I. forces – gravity and inertia – but she also said there was something missing, something he could never capture – they weren't breathing somehow, is what she would say; there was no oxygen, no wind in his landscapes, as if they were under glass. He saw it too but couldn't ever seem to do anything about it. It's the same feeling one has looking at paintings of wild animals – somehow they never seem real, even when every detail is astonishingly precise – and well, that's because one could never be so close to such an animal in its own environment, we could never experience that kind of detail in reality. We feel their aliveness precisely because they are moving too fast or are too far away for us to take in those details. The convention has always irritated me – when I was young I was indignant about it – we could never be so close to a cougar, five paces away, in the wild; we could never paint it on its rocky crag from life. I used to yell on at my mother about it. As a portrait it was impossible because the relationship between the viewer and subject was impossible. A photo is possible, but not a painting. And well, though it seems I've strayed far from the point, somehow my father's painting always felt that way too – as if there was something not quite real about it, whereas my mother's paintings – well, they were too real.

  Jean rolled off Avery and they sat together on the edge of the bed. She heard the trucks grinding up the hill.

  – I was terrified to be in her studio alone, said Avery, yet I wanted to see. You can look at a few square inches of some of her forests for fifteen minutes and still not see everything that's there. It's hungry paint. A bottomless hunger. It was so distressing when I was small, to know that these images were made by my own mother, who otherwise was pragmatic and straightforward and so much fun – as if just to live – to walk around or do the washing or the cooking was a holiday … I could never put the two parts of her together. Only later when I began to learn the history did I truly understand this was not her nightmare alone, but the world's … and only then began to make sense of some things I'd heard about, and overheard, as a child … The first morning I was alone with my father, after the war, just my father and me, we sat in the hills and he talked for ages about abutments. Abutments! I loved the word, it was a liqueur, his liqueur – he was treating me like an adult, it was like having a first drink together, father and son. We sat in what had always seemed my private
place, I had roamed those hills for hours, I had spent many, many afternoons alone watching the light moving across the landscape, the sun setting, in the rain, in the winter, and I knew every animal hollow in the grass. And now I was there with him, in that place, and I could show him everything and he could lie down on the ground and stretch out his legs with a great sigh and talk to his heart's content about abutments and Coade stone and pneumatic railways. It was bliss, that day. I was so excited to be with him, so shy of him, I wanted so badly for him to know me, and he looked so carefully at everything I showed him, took everything so seriously – the field mice, the clouds. It was a perfect afternoon. That was the first time I understood the war was really over. I thought it was going to be the beginning of many afternoons, but there never was another afternoon like that. That was the only one. We were in each other's company so much, and there were snatches of time alone together on his projects – a half-hour here or there, but never again an endless unfolding afternoon when I sensed he didn't want to be anywhere else but with me.

  I want to feel what my father felt, Avery repeated, sitting on the edge of their bed on the Nile, what the marmisti know, what the blind man knows when he's on Ramses' knee. What my mother calls ‘flesh-knowledge.’ It's not enough for your mind to believe in something, your body must believe it too. If I hadn't witnessed this particular pleasure in my father when I was a child perhaps I wouldn't feel the lack of it. But I do. I can imagine what a chemist feels when he looks in a microscope, how his mind can practically touch what he sees. Or a physicist who can feel an equation tearing molecules apart along the shear, like tearing a handful of bread from a loaf. Or the tension in a meniscus. The closest understanding I have of this is when I look at a building. I feel the consequences of each choice; how the volume works, how the building eats the space it inhabits, even how it carries its ruins.

  – I had a glimpse of what you're saying, said Jean, in Ashkeit.

  At the mention of Ashkeit, Jean felt Avery surrender.

  – I want to study architecture, said Avery. I feel like an apprentice who spends decades learning to draw a human arm or a hand before he is allowed to pick up a brush. You must learn to draw bones and muscle before the flesh can be real. The engineering is essential … But I want so much to pick up a brush.

  My father was so pleased that I wanted to be an engineer, like his own father. It was as if it hadn't mattered that he'd been away all those years when I was a child.

  – Well, said Jean slowly, you will still be an engineer … but an engineer with a brush.

  Avery leaned back, his feet still on the floor. Jean saw the bones of his face, saw how his clothes pooled around him, saw the exhaustion that had penetrated him so deeply it was almost a smell. He held out his thin strong arm, muscle and tendon, and she lay down too, like him, across the bed.

  She thought she would never be used to her luck, of lying beside him, this … scrupulous … broad leafed … Avery-est Escher.

  She heard the Bucyruses whining across the sand; a voice shouting in Greek, an answer, perhaps without understanding, in Italian. The whimpering voice of a child from a houseboat down the river: “J'ai soif …” The floodlights filtered down from the deck, a faint glow. The great desert factory never stopped.

  – When he died, I sat looking into my father's face, said Avery. I held his hands. My mother lay with her face against his, and the side of him where she lay was warm. At first there was such a feeling of palpable peace in the room, a lightness so totally unexpected. And then, after a while, looking at his body that had not outwardly changed and yet was utterly changed, the simulacrum seemed to me blasphemous, a violation.

  Avery looked at Jean. Her hair fell across her bare arms, a splash of shadow. At what moment had the transubstantiation occurred – at what moment during their years together had this woman, this Jean Shaw, become Jean Escher? He knew it had nothing to do with marriage, not even with sex, but somehow had to do with all this talking, this talking they achieved together.

  – I want to build the room where I wish I'd been born, said Avery.

  Jean felt the heat of Avery's arm beneath her back, a wire of heat.

  – Perhaps it's not your father who hurts you so much, said Jean.

  – My mother never wanted to let me into her workroom when I was a child, but sometimes I sneaked in – and I was always sorry afterwards. But it can't be my mother who's haunting me.

  By the time Jean found a way to reply – the living haunt us in ways the dead cannot – the broad leafed Avery Escher was asleep.

  It was still cold and dark below deck, but Avery knew the men would already be talking around the fires and that he must soon get up. Jean, awake too, stretched beside him and drew the blanket up to her chin.

  Avery leaned over her.

  – Jean, what I said about sadness … what I mean is that a building and the space it possesses should help us be alive, it should allow for the heeding of things; I don't know even how to talk about it, what words to use; just that some places make certain things possible or even likely – not to go so far as to say a place can create behaviour, but it is complicit somehow. Is there a difference between making events possible and creating them? Does a certain kind of bridge create its suicides? I know that when I am in a great building I feel a mortal sadness, and it is so specific that when I leave the building – the church, the hall, the house – and walk back out into the street, I see everything around me with a clarity that only the experience of the building could bestow in me.

  And what I said about building the room where I wished I'd been born, continued Avery, what I mean to say is that it would be a place to be reborn …

  Jean reached for Avery's hand. She wondered where their child would be born: at the camp hospital in Abu Simbel, in the better-equipped hospital in Cairo, or in London, perhaps with Avery's Aunt Bett nearby. There was still time to decide, but perhaps London was best, perhaps Marina would come; for a moment she rested in the luxury of that possibility. But she knew that Avery would not want to be far from the temple, during the first months of the rebuilding.

  Avery read the apprehension in Jean's face.

  – Please don't worry, he began. And then, with a shock of panic: How will we manage.

  After the evacuation of Wadi Halfa, the engineers turned to Aswan and to Khartoum for their supplies.

  Jean and Avery flew back to the camp from Khartoum, following the Nile, its banks tarnished green where the silver river had overflowed.

  At the village of Karina, the bright colour abruptly ended and, past the town, as if human history had stopped too, the eternal yellow sandstone of the Nubian Desert. They droned on in the clear air, no movement below except for the shadow of the plane and the ghostly circle of the propeller. The pilot turned slightly so Jean and Avery could look back. The floodplain spread behind them, long and green and generous. They headed farther into the desert known by the Nubians as intimately as their own bodies, and the bodies of their children.

  Each time Jean had come to Wadi Halfa, she and Avery had disembarked at the aerodrome and followed the white, coarse sand road to the Nile Hotel. Past the brown hills, stony cliffs wedged with sand, blown by the winter wind for thousands of kilometres, thousands of years. The balcony of their hotel room had overlooked the railyards and they'd felt at home instantly in the incessant noise of the metalworkers.

  But now they did not land, instead circled above, and saw that the town was as still as the surrounding hills. Their shadow fell on the houses, mottled the abandoned streets. So empty and so still was Wadi Halfa that Jean began to feel the city was not real.

  Then, suddenly, the stones in the street seemed to jump, the sidewalk began to move, to slide back and forth, the brown ground erupted, bubbled, seethed, rock and sand burst to life.

  – What is it? cried Jean. What is it?

  The ground was moving so quickly it made her almost sick to look down.

  – They must be starving, shouted t
he pilot. And now they'll be left there. The water will come and they'll drown.

  He began to laugh, an awful, amazed, bitter sound.

  Jean looked at him, frightened.

  – Who? shouted Jean. Who will drown?

  – It's dogs! he said.

  Jean stared down at the seething ground.

  – Just dogs! the pilot shouted.

  There was a young boy in the camp; he did not belong to anyone. He earned the nickname of Monkey – the name was born of irritation and affection. He was everywhere, darting, hanging upside down, fingering tools and rope. The engineers had no patience for him, and the labourers swatted him aside. He jumped, dangled, squatted. The cook fed him so he would not pilfer.

  Jean first saw the boy when she was in the camp store. He was hiding under a table, out of the sun. There was something wrong with him, with his bones. His back was twisted. But he was agile and graceful and he had a live, expressive face. The hair on the back of his arms and neck had a fine nap, the skin of a peach. His teeth were too large, a mouth full of stones.

  From the moment she first saw him, Jean wanted to give him something.

  –We do not like to think about children's fears, Marina had said one afternoon in the weeks alone with Jean. We push them aside to concentrate on their innocence. But children are close to grief, they are closer to grief than we are. They feel it, undiluted, and then gradually they grow away from that flesh-knowledge. They know all about the terror of the woods, the witch-mother, things buried and not seen again. In every child's fear is always the fear of the worst thing, the loss of the person they love most.

  I come from a country where men begged not for their lives but not to be murdered in front of their children. Where people, ordinary in every way, learned what it is to look into the face of a man who knows he is going to take your life from you. Where people were afraid to close their eyes and also afraid to open them again. Of course this was true in many other places in the world. Afterwards, in Canada, a colleague of William said to me: you must paint these things. And I said no, I do not want to give them soil, another place to take root.