The Winter Vault

by Anne Michaels

  Often, while eating together, this Russian Ostap would take from his shirt pocket a pencil, sharpened to a stub the size of his thumb – ‘short pencils have long memories!’ – and scrawl pictures to teach me the names of objects in Russian. At first they were practical words – truck, stone, hammer – and then he taught me words that were useful in another way – anger, idiot, friend. Instead of throwing away these bits of paper, he mortared them between the stones. There are many words hidden between the stones of the Palace of Culture, enough to tell some kind of story. In this way I also learned fragments of his childhood in St. Petersburg – a cat, a bridge, a flat on Furstadtskaya Street.

  In return I used to tell Ostap stories of places in Warsaw I didn't know as a child, stories that I'd heard later among the students, and it was unaccountable but even as I told them, those anecdotes seemed to become part of my own memory – perhaps that is the precise reason I told them – until it was impossible to tell them apart, the memories that belonged to me and the memories that didn't, as if by virtue of collective loss they became collective memory. To keep everything, even what was not mine to keep.

  Never has there been a man so loyal to his childhood as Ostap. After everything was taken, even the little tea set he and his sister had played with, the one with Lenin's portrait painted on all the tiny cups and saucers, Ostap made a decision not to forget anything He especially remembered books he'd read as a child, a story about a hedgehog and a tortoise – Slowcoach and Quickfoot – which he compared with the Soviet ‘classics,’ terrifying trains and trucks with their human scowls, robots with squared-off mouths and knob noses, faces made of gears and cogs, not quite human and not quite machine. They reminded me of the trucks grinding down the cleared-out spaces on Freta Street. He showed me one of Tsekhanovsky's flip books, little movies with their shrinking children and machines growing huge or locomotives bearing down on small animals. When he was young he'd read Chukovsky's translations of O. Henry and R. L. Stevenson; Evgenia Evenbach's ‘How Kolka Panki Flew to Brazil and Petka Ershov Didn't Believe Him’ and ‘100,000 Whys.’ He talked about his mother, who was very small, who used to rest her head against his shoulder, even when he was only twelve years old, and who now lay buried in the cemetery on St. Petersburg's Golodni Island.

  He and your Marina would have a thing or two to say to each other. He knew all about children's books, he never grew out of them, or perhaps better to say he grew into them, into understanding their secrets. He knew which writers were stopiatnitsa, a member of the 105 club, one who's forbidden to live closer than 105 kilometres from any city … and who was in prison for writing a certain story about a rabbit and a goat. That was during the reign of ‘Queen Krupskaya,’ whose personal campaign was the denouncing of fairy tales as ‘unscientific’ and therefore dangerous to the state. ‘Do rabbits talk? Do goats wear clothes? The anthropomorphism of animals is not realistic, therefore it is a lie. You are lying to our children.’ Perhaps the writer did lie, Ostap agreed. Because he wrote a story in which a stone is able to turn into a man …

  Those Russians sent to Warsaw to build the Palace of Culture slept in a big camp by the river. In the months I worked there, fetching and carrying, comrades ‘fell’ regularly to their deaths and were simply left to be buried by the foundations. Such a fall was described as someone having had ‘too much to drink.’

  Lucjan stopped talking. Wait a moment, he said as he slid from the bed. Jean heard him going down the stairs and heard the old metal handle of the fridge close tight. She heard banging.

  – Don't worry, I'm just crushing ice with a hammer!

  He came upstairs carrying a bowl of snow drizzled with vodka. The cold went straight to Jean's brain.

  – Is any single part of us inviolable? No. Everything can be carried off, picked away; carrion. Yet, there is something in a man. Not even strong enough to be called intuition, maybe just the smell of your own body. And that is what you base your life on …

  Lucjan began to cover Jean's back with the blanket but then, at second thought, instead pulled away the sheet and looked at her.

  He twisted the sheet between her buttocks. He saw that she would agree to anything. He let go of the sheet.

  – Don't give in to me, he said.

  There was another Russian I knew when I worked on the Palace of Culture. At lunch he would smoke with his mouth full of food – I've never seen anyone else do that. He used to lecture the young ones. All women are the same, take what you can before they rob you …

  And muzak, do you want to know the origin of muzak, why we can't go out to buy a package of frozen peas without hearing a woman moaning in the supermarket over her lost love, while all we want to do is buy the peas and get out of the shop as fast as we can – why we can't buy our carton of milk or a pair of socks or sit quietly in a café? The origin of muzak is the loudspeakers in the camps, at Buchenwald, all the warbling lovesongs that were shoved in their ears in the lineup, in the infirmary, while the dead drifted in and out …

  There is one moment in every lifetime when we are asked for courage we feel in every cell to be beyond us. It is what you do at that moment that determines all that follows. We like to think we are given more than one chance, but it's not true. And our failure is so permanent that we try to convince ourselves it was the right thing, and we rationalize again and again. In our very bones we know this truth; it is so tyrannical, so exacting, we want to deny it in every way. This failure is at the heart of everything we do, every subtle decision we make. And that is why, at the very heart of us, there is nothing we crave more than forgiveness. It is a bottomless desire, this desire for forgiveness.

  And I'll tell you something else, said Lucjan, covering Jean with the blankets, this truth attends every death.

  Walking for the first time into the replica of the Old Town, said Lucjan, the rebuilt market square – it was humiliating. Your delirium made you ashamed – you knew it was a trick, a brainwashing, and yet you wanted it so badly. Memory was salivating through your brain. The hunger it tried to satisfy. It was dusk and the streetlamps miraculously came on and everything was just the same – the same signs for the shops, the same stonework and archways … I had to stop several times, the fit of strangeness was so intense. I squatted with my back against a wall. It was a brutality, a mockery – at first completely sickening, as if time could be turned back, as if even the truth of our misery could be taken away from us. And yet, the more you walked, the more your feelings changed, the nausea gradually diminished and you began to remember more and more. Childhood memories, memories of youth and love – I watched the faces of people around me, half mad with the confusion of feelings. There was defiance too, of course, a huge song of pride bursting out of everyone, humiliation and pride at the same time. People danced in the street. They drank. At three in the morning the streets were still full of people, and I remember thinking that if we didn't all clear out, the ghosts wouldn't come back, and who was this all for if not for the ghosts?

  Jean moved closer beside him.

  – Janina, keep your compassion to yourself. Do you want to hear this or not?

  He stuffed pillows between them.

  – After that I thought maybe it would have been better if we'd just loaded all that rubble onto trucks and dumped it somewhere far away where it couldn't be used for anything again.

  – You could have built nothing, said Jean. But … building nothing is hard work too. Perhaps, sometimes, it's harder to build nothing.

  – Pah, said Lucjan. You don't understand anything.

  He pushed away the pillows.

  – You might as well touch me, since you don't hear a thing I say.

  – I do understand, said Jean.

  – All right, I'm sorry. But do you think a few words will do the trick? Do you think perhaps I haven't thought enough about it?

  He threw his drawing book on the floor.

  – For six years the Poles ate their fruit and bread. The juice ran down their chins w
hile a hundred metres away people lay dead from hunger – they may as well have spread their starched tablecloths right over the corpses in the streets and had their picnic there.

  Jean leaned over and gathered her clothes from the floor.

  – I don't know anything, said Jean. You're right, I don't know anything about it.

  – I don't want your pity. Not your psychoanalysis. Not even empathy. I want simple, common, fellow feeling. Something real.

  She began to dress.

  – There's hardly anything to you. From behind you're like a little girl. Just starting out.

  He got up and stood beside her.

  – Except for here, he said, pushing his hands between her legs. And here, touching her breast. And here, covering her eyes.

  He wrapped his thick belt around her waist, twice, and pulled tight and buckled it. He looked at the flesh, the slightest flesh that stood out from the leather and kissed her there and began to draw.

  He twisted the belt around her wrists and stretched her arms over her head and pulled her body across the bed.

  – Does it hurt?

  – No, I could slip out if I wanted to.

  – Good.

  He drew her with her hands tied behind her back, and with her arms tied and hanging in front of her. The drawings were very close, always the line of raised flesh pinched by the leather.

  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 pl
astic 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.’