The Winter Vault

by Anne Michaels

  Brown birds lined the eaves of the vault roof. They balanced on the edge, small dark stones against the sky, now marbled grey: dusk.

  – It was January, Jean told Lucjan, when my mother died. My parents had once passed by a country cemetery on a drive together, north of Montreal, and they stopped to walk there. My mother remembered that peaceful ground and the name of the nearby village, and that is where she chose to be buried.

  But the ground was too cold to dig the grave.

  For almost two months, several times a week, my father and I drove past the fields, past forest, to sit on camp chairs by the door of the vault. And do you know what my father did? He read to her. Keats, Masefield, Tennyson, Sara Teasdale, T. S. Eliot, Kathleen Raine. The vault itself was quite small and the door huge, all out of proportion, thick, with ornate metal hinges. At first I could not bear the thought of my mother listening behind that heavy, closed door. But slowly, as the days passed, I began to feel that although her dear body was inside, somehow her soul was not. The sound of my father reading became a kind of benediction, an absolution. Often it snowed. We opened umbrellas and poured out flasks of steaming, milky tea and, as he read, I sat under my mother's old umbrella and looked out to the wet trees and the cloud-blackened sky between the bare branches. One horse always roamed in the field next to the graveyard, liquid black against the snow. During all those vigils we never met anyone else. The day we finally buried my mother was the last we ever visited that place together. I understood what my father felt, something we never could have imagined – that even a grave can be a kind of redemption.

  They walked north from Amelia Street, through the leaves blowing across the empty streets. Jean's hair was loose, shining under the streetlamps and streaming out behind her, in the dark water of the October night. They came to a semicircle of narrow houses whose front yards emptied into a city park. A ribbon of pavement, perhaps a foot and a half wide, marked where private property ended and the park began.

  Lucjan pointed.

  – That's where I earn my living, now and then, the last house in the row. Do you see the electrical cord leading from the house into the trees? My boss has wired half the park with tiny bulbs. It amuses him, and no one has complained. He's like you, Janina, taking charge of the world, though he's not as dangerous. You're a memory bandit. But who can be distressed by little lights like fireflies in the forest? The expressway they were going to build – it would have sliced right through this quiet place.

  – Perhaps that's the reason he lights up the park, said Jean. To remind himself that what we take for granted already had to be saved.

  Lucjan took her cold hand and put it in his pocket.

  – He's still a fine bookbinder, but he's old now, and can't do all the work on his own. I like sitting with him at the big table, with vise clamps and glue and the smell of leather. Sometimes we don't talk the whole day. I can't tell you how much I like him, I like the way he touches the leather, I like that he's neat, every petit fers and mullen and marbling comb in its place, every pot of aqua regia and myrabolan tannin wiped clean after use, every endpaper cross-catalogued by colour and texture and age, and then filed away in square drawers – in a cabinet he built himself. I like that he keeps his letters from Edgar Mansfield close at hand in a wooden box on his worktable. He collects moss and mushrooms and photographs them. People come to his door with specimens, squares of moss in little boxes, like jewellery, or envelopes of fungi from all over the world – from Bolivia, India, New Zealand, Peru. He puts samples under a microscope and draws what he sees. Sometimes he uses the shapes in his designs, carving them into the leather of the books, a beautiful effect, almost marbled. When we sit together I feel even his silence is orderly, as if he says to himself, Okay, today we will not talk about what happened in 1954, today we will not talk about what happened when my wife went to the doctor, today we will not talk about Stalin and the way it was during the war, today we will not discuss the pain in my knee or the grief that bulges out suddenly sometimes from being childless, today we will not discuss Jakob Böhme, or spores, or what the rain reminds me of. It is a good feeling, to sit at a table with a man and not talk about specific things together. He thinks and I think, we keep each other company, and at the end of the day it is as if we'd had hours of intimate conversation.

  Marina found a part-time job for Jean, three afternoons a week, at Mumford's, a children's press she sometimes illustrated for, a tiny publishing house, literally a house, near the university, a working mothers' co-op press, named after a suffragette grandmother of one of the editors, Jo Mumford. Its nickname among the editors was Mum's the Word. Jean's job was to do anything asked of her: type invoices, deliver packages, make photocopies, brew coffee. Marina had told them Jean could cook, so sometimes she did that too, in the tiny kitchen at the back of the bindery. She learned the hand-press and printed small runs of bookmarks, a cult item in the battle for feminist supremacy with the University Press' bookmarks, which featured ironic drawings of dull domestic cuisine – the “baked potato bookmark,” the “boiled egg bookmark.” Mum's the Word countered with their own series of bitingly lacklustre symbols of domesticity – the “kettle bookmark” and the “vacuum cleaner bookmark.”

  Walking to the university or to work, city signs now revealed themselves as fonts. She thought about Lucjan marbling endpapers for the bookbinder-on-the-park. She thought about paper, the first sheets that could be manufactured in endless lengths, without seams, rolling off the machine in Frogmore in 1803.

  Jean began to imagine a botanical typeface. She began with A and E, astor and eglantine. Avery and Escher. She could not render it herself adequately but could picture it in her mind in fine detail. She thought of asking Marina if she would illustrate a chapbook of Jean's remedies for imaginary afflictions if Jean were to set the type herself, a single copy for Avery, hand-sewn. Marina was illustrating a series of small, hardbound, classic adventure novels – Treasure Island, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Time Machine – each to be followed by a sister volume of the same tale told from the point of view of a female heroine. “Though of course I know the plots,” said Marina, “I keep reading anxiously, in a fever, hoping things will go differently than I remember, each moment hoping for better luck, for a reprieve, hoping I can make a difference with all my hoping …”

  Jean sat at her table with her seed books and a map of the city spread open around her, pen in the air, while sorrow moved from heart to head, a creeping paralysis. The wrenching sadness that she had not known Avery's father. Avery as a boy, afraid, in the café in Turin with the patch of gauze on his chin. Every detail and regret accompanied by the fear that her history with Avery was being erased by Lucjan's touch, Lucjan's stories. He'd lent her a book of photographs of Warsaw, comparing views of the same city blocks, before and after the destruction, a single tree or a single wall the only evidence that the photographer had stood in the same spot. She felt Lucjan, and what it was to stand in that place.

  It was too cold now for planting, and Jean's plans for the neighbourhoods, for Chinatown, Greektown, Little Italy, Little India, Tibet, Jamaica, Armenia, would have to wait for spring.

  She had an unexpected ally in her plans for the city: Daub Arbab. Over the months, he had been sending seeds and planting advice from the places he worked. And to Daub, Jean had confided a painful question. She hoped he would find words for her, believed in him since their journey to Ashkeit. And because when she'd returned to the camp from the hospital in Cairo, Daub had said, “You weep for all the daily reasons, you weep because you will never brush your daughter's hair.”

  Just as belief is visceral, so was this doubt. It had first formed in her when she stood before the re-erected temple and had felt her personal suffering to be almost un conscionable. What was personal loss in the face of universal devastation – the loss of Nubia, the destruction of cities. Her misery shamed her. And yet, her shame was not correct, she knew it was not. To mourn is to honour. Not to surrender to
this keening, to this absence – a dishonouring.

  ‘Your letter has reached me in Bombay,’ wrote Daub, ‘and tomorrow I begin the long drive, hundreds of kilometres, along a river, the first work for a dam. In the taxi from the airport, the multitudes pressed against the car, hands and faces pushed against the glass, they banged their hands on the bonnet and on the windows, which I'd kept closed, suffocating with the heat and the misery around me, as if I were in an armoured tank. Then guiltily stretching out on the hotel bed.

  ‘If I had a wife, I would not be here, I would be somewhere close to home, building something harmless, a bridge or a school. But instead I wander, my loneliness sticking like a burr. Why is Avery not with you? If you were my wife, I would be by your side. If love finds you, there is not a single day to be wasted. I watched you walking through the camp, the last weeks before your daughter was born, your horror and sorrow, and I could not understand then, as I do not understand now, Avery's reticence. I believe always it is a matter of taking the one you love in your arms. But I know nothing of marriage and what silences are necessary. As for your inquiry, dear Jean, I have been lying here trying to think what to say to you.

  ‘Perhaps there is a collective dead. But there is no such thing as a collective death. Each death, each birth, a single death, a single birth. One man's death cannot be set against millions, nor one man's death against another. I beg you not to torment yourself on this point. We were many months in the desert together and I know a little of how your heart works. Please sit quietly as you read this and hear what I say: There is no need to replace your grieving with penance.’

  There's too much sand in the cement, Avery had said, and Jean had listened, lying next to him in the dark, at the limit of self-possession, cradling the stillness in her belly. It's not the workers' fault, he had continued, they'd been unsupervised. Cement is not hardened by the air, as most people believe, but by a chemical reaction … And now, in the kitchen on Clarendon, Jean heard Avery's desperation. The cement that would not dry.

  Lucjan was working on a series of maps, sized to fit, when folded, into the glovebox of a car. He painted each detail with care, like medieval decoration on an illuminated manuscript. Every trade, he had explained to Jean, has its own map of the city: the rat and cockroach exterminators, the raccoon catchers, the hydro and sewer and road repair workers. There is the mothers' map marked with pet shops and public washrooms and places to collect pinecones, with sidewalk widths and pot-hole depths indicated for carriages, tricycles, and wagon-pulling. The knitters have their own map, with every wool supplier in the city marked. Lucjan made a map of exceptional tree roots, of wind corridors, and water runoff. He made a coffee map (with only one location marked), a sugar map, a chocolate map, a ginkgo tree map, a weeping willow map, a map of bridges, of public drinking fountains, of boulders larger than five feet in diameter. A shoe repair map. A grape arbour map, a map of kite-flying spaces (without overhead wires), a sledding map (hills without roads or fences at the bottom). Then there were the personal maps. The remorse map. The embarrassment map. The arguments map. The disappointment maps (bitter and mild). The map of the dead; the cemeteries built on vertical slopes. And the map he was working on when he met Jean – perhaps the most beautiful of all – a map of invisible things, a thought map, indicating where people had experienced an idea, a fear, a secret hope; some were well known, others private. An intersection where a novel was first imagined, a park where a child was dreamed of. The beach where an architect visualized his skyline. The bench where a painter had a premonition of his own death. “How does one paint what is not there?” asked Jean. “One paints the place exactly as one sees it,” said Lucjan. “Then, one paints it again.”

  Lucjan's friend Paweł was a member of the Stray Dogs, a jazz orchestra of old men – old except for Paweł, the youngest by several decades. Lucjan was a silent member; he didn't play an instrument, but he was good at finding unusual things to bang on and, because he understood them, his advice was invaluable; sometimes he was called upon to settle a vote. The cornet, Janusz, was the second youngest and proud of his youth, introducing himself to Jean as “barely seventy years old in my stocking feet.” Some wore an air of permanent, desiccated romance, while the faces of the others, including the leader, “Mr. Snow” himself, contained such ransacked grief one could barely behold them. Mr. Snow – Jan Piletski – had worked with his father in the fish market at Rynkowa Street in Warsaw before the war. From a block away, Lucjan explained to Jean, you could see the long trestle tables, glinting with silver, a shimmering lake hovering in the middle distance. But this was a mirage with a stench. When the wind blew, the reek of fish floated for a quarter-mile in every direction. Once a week, I went with my mother and we always watched a man who used to sit at his easel, painting the wares. His fish were true to life – every shimmering scale – even the stink. Jan's wife, Beata, had referred to the distinctive aroma of the market as the Piletski perfume, and Jan Piletski himself was nicknamed by the Stray Dogs after the herring fisherman in a song from the musical Carousel. Mr. Snow became Jan Piletski's stage name, and this was also in honour of his fish-seller father, who had died in the Uprising.

  All the Dogs remembered the days of the Crocodile Club, the Quid Pro Quo, the Czarny Kot – the Black Cat – and the Perskie Oko – the Persian Eye. They still dreamed of the queen of popular song, Hanka Ordonówna, and referred to her long affair with “that old man” Juliusz “My little Quail has Flown” Osterwafor with disdain and jealousy. The Stray Dogs were united in age, in inexpressible misfortune, in exile that defined them so completely it was difficult to imagine for them any other destiny, nor in their synchronized swim of chordal progressions and bent sound. Uniting them too was the knowledge that one's life is never remembered in its vicissitudes and variety but only as a distillation, a reduction of sixty or seventy years into one or two moments, a couple of images. Or as Hors Forzwer – the emcee at Warsaw's Round Club – might have said, from juice to jus. For each of them, the concepts of “music” and “women” were inseparable, as inseparable as “music” and “loneliness.” As ideas, “music” and “women” could not be disentangled, and in fact made an irreducible whole, like a molecule that is defined by its components and, if altered, changes into something unrecognizable. Just as “death” and “life” are meaningless one without the other, so “music,” “women,” “loneliness.” All this was evident in a single note gnarled beyond recognition, in a single chord heavy as a woman's thigh flung across a man's chest in the night. They played a cellarful of abandonment, the guilty look in an offguard moment, the coffee ring hardened into enamel at the bottom of the cup, the nub of a candle burnt down to the china saucer. And yet, there was a kind of solace too, the solace of emerging from the ruins to find that at least you no longer had any hair left to catch fire or that, for the moment, your prosthesis was not aching. “We want our music,” explained Mr. Snow, “to make people long to go home, and,” he boasted, “if the place is even half-cleared out by the time we've finished one set, we're overjoyed. Because for once it will seem better to be home alone in all one's misery than to be out listening to us. That's the kind of happiness we're capable of provoking!”

  The Stray Dogs – a.k.a. the Hooligans, the Troublemakers, the Bandits, the Carbon Club (the latter a reference to the final days of the uprising, when Home Army Second Lieutenant Kazimierz Marczewski, who happened also to be an architect and town planner, had stood in the middle of Warsaw while firebombs fell and mines exploded around him, famously sketching plans for the reconstruction of the city on carbon paper) – indulged themselves with strange musical obsessions including Broadway musicals that they mangled into something agonizing, precisely heartbreaking, taking all the sweet hope and earnestness and extracting betrayal and despair with what Lucjan called “emotional acupuncture.” And they played Laura Nyro's “Stoned Soul Picnic” and “Kamienny Koniec” – “Stoney End” – because Nyro resembled – was in fact an exact physical re
plica of – Beata in her youth, whom they all remembered with great feeling. How beautiful she'd been – Jakże była piękna.

  “I was born from love – Jestem dzieckiem miłośći” Mr. Snow growled, his voice singeing Jean's ears. “And my poor mother worked the mines – A moja biedna matka pracowała w kopalni … I never wanted to go down the stoney end – do kamiennego końca … Mama, let me start all over, Cradle me again.”

  There were of course the zakazane piosenki, the “forbidden songs,” all the classics of the Chmielna Street Orchestra: “A Heart in a Rucksack,” “Autumn Rain,” “Air Raid,” “In the Black Market You'll Survive,” and “I Can't Come to You Today.” And, needless to say, Hanka Ordonówna's signature “Love Forgives Everything,” which Mr. Snow sang with a voice of such rancid sarcasm Jean wanted to stop up her ears before her heart shrivelled. “He is the only person alive,” said Lucjan, “who looks even at a kitten with disapproval.” Mr. Snow sang, “Miłość Ci wszystko wybaczy – Love forgives everything, forgives betrayal and lies” and by the time he reached the final line “Bo miłość, mój miły, to ja – Love, my dear, is me” in his strangulating creak, one felt one would rather die alone in a ditch than fall in love again.

  The Stray Dogs took each song apart, dismantling the melody, painstakingly, painfully, sappers dismantling a lie, and then turned each single component around so many times it disintegrated. Then they put it together again from nothing, notes and fragments of notes, bent notes and breaths, squawks on the horns and the reeds' empty lidded beating of keys. By the time the melody reappeared, one was sick with longing for it. “At first,” said Janusz, the cornet, “following Mr. Snow in a piece was like following the tracks of a jackrabbit – I never knew where he'd land. But after a while I could guess where his demented, sentimental mind might take him and one or two times over the years I even beat him there first. You should have seen the grin on his face – as if he'd opened a door and finally found himself home. I think that's the best thing I ever did for a man, taking away that loneliness for a bar or two.”