The Winter Vault

by Anne Michaels

  They had to give up their beds lined with date branches and now slept in beds of steel frames and wire springs.

  Several months before the inundation, a Polish archaeologist had discovered a buried mud brick church not far from the village of Faras. One wall bore a magnificent painting in coloured lime. Using a chemical solution to imprint the image on muslin cloth, Professor Michałowski began to make a copy of the painting when he was surprised to find another image underneath. Each time he copied the painting on the wall, another was discovered beneath. Eighty-six layers of paintings were uncovered.

  The Nubians, who had given up everything for the hydroelectric power provided by the new dam, were themselves without electricity. The cables passed right by the new settlements; only some extra poles and wire would have been needed to bring electricity into their houses. But the Nubians had to wait seven years to turn on a light.

  Many days Jean watched from the shade of the houseboat as the Nubian women came down to the river. The sight of their black robes seemed to slice through the heat, although Jean could not explain why she felt this, since they, too, shimmered like black water above the baking sand.

  It excited her to watch them; that is, she yearned for them to see her.

  She felt like a child in their presence, and in the presence of the desert within them. They knew intimately the space of the desert and the timelessness of the river – two distinct immensities. And the third immensity, the sky. Yet there was also understanding between her and the women, or at least the longing to understand. She watched them move with fluid grace and knew that they too would soon be shedding the gargara.

  How much of a woman's body belongs to herself, how much the clay of a man's gaze. Jean could not explain her loneliness, the lack in herself. There was some mystery of womanhood, she felt, that would remain forever lost to her; this, she believed, was because she was raised by her father alone. She wanted to strip off her clothes and roll in the sand, to lose the smell of herself in the desert and so, for a few moments, to feel at home there. She wanted Avery to understand something she could not explain; she knew this and could not fault him for not understanding.

  She wondered how long it could take for the heat to sweat the northern-ness out of her – evaporate the body-memory of boreal lakes and forests – a transformation as chemical as cooking. How can place enter our skin this way, down into the very verb of us? It did not seem possible, yet she felt it was true. She felt that if she stood naked next to the Nile women, that even a man blindfolded in the dark would be able to tell that she was a stranger.

  The European engineers took no notice of their stranger-ness – they brought their slide rules into the desert and spoke the ancient language of builders – a numerical language older than the temples. The men who had first come to this bend of the river to paint the line across the cliff face, more than thirty centuries before, could stand next to these engineers, look over their shoulders at their diagrams, and comprehend their intent almost instantly. And so Avery, with the ancient Egyptian builder looking over his shoulder, could not feel Jean's disgrace, an unworthiness that she herself could not find a way to express. She knew somehow it was not petty, not even personal, though it felt that way too, and all the words she had to describe how she felt, reeked of the personal. Soon she left off trying to express it to him. She left off, as in midsentence, and he did not notice. And this not noticing, she understood, was his relief. How much of our not noticing is a kind of relief.

  Sometimes, if it was simply impossible to improvise a broken part, the engineers played cards or drew lots to decide who would have the adventure of scouring the market at Wadi Halfa for screws and boltheads, pistons and wire. Avery was given a four-day working holiday and he flew with Jean from Abu Simbel to Wadi Halfa. They had made several journeys to the market, and to Jean it always seemed that a great wind had blown into that dusty town, depositing a world's worth, a century's worth, of detritus that had been caught in its force. Electrical plugs and batteries, tweed caps, tins of tooth powder, bundles of herbs and paper packets of spices, women's evening shoes with silver buckles, eggs, pipe tobacco, ice skates, soft perfumed mounds of figs and dates and apricots, smoking jackets, great heaps of textiles – from Turkey, Asia, the Soviet Union, nylon stockings from Italy, English wool, calico and gingham, and the long bolts of fine dark cotton cloth – dark as the cold shadow of a desert hill – that the Nubian women used to make their gargaras. Coffee-sellers with radios at full volume, everyone shouting to be heard, dogs barking at the meat-sellers, meat-sellers yelling at the dogs, the tinkling glass of the soft-drink vendors, mills grinding coffee and grain, the sound of beans and split peas pouring into sacks, the tea-sellers rattling their cups. Taxi drivers arguing over a fare, donkeys braying, the loud exhaust systems of small French cars, the shouts of a boys' football match, and, suddenly right next to one's ear, the soft Arabic of a girl reading to her blind grandfather as they sat together behind a table heaped with socks and buttons, two items for which desert-dwellers have no use. Jean thought about the old man's livelihood being dependent on Westerners with loose threads and how completely, foolishly, European clothing had come to depend upon the button.

  The market at Wadi Halfa was a place where every human whim had found a shelf. It was a catalogue of desires, a market of the broken and the lost, haunted by the hopes of both buyer and seller.

  Baskets of hardware both shiny and rusted, springs, screws, nails, pliers, hinges; parts of boats and automobiles, electric fans. “Spare” parts that had been liberated from machines where they had not been “spare” or from machinery abandoned as useless in the desert. And here is where Avery often found the size of bolt he needed, even if it meant buying all the electric fans he could find, to pillage them for the single part. And here is where the rest of the now useless hardware of the fan would find itself, back again in the Wadi Halfa market, with blades that had little hope of ever being attached again, unless someone in turn twenty years later pillaged Avery's engine.

  Spanners, handkerchiefs, pencil crayons, steam irons. Soviet cigarettes and old newspapers, years out of date, from all over Europe. Shellac, perfume, machine oil, tissue-thin blue air-mail paper edged with mucilage …

  Jean looked with fascination at this debris of time and trade. But quickly this turned to melancholy, for by what other means than tragedy or unconscionable neglect would an object such as an engagement ring or a child's doll arrive at its fate in the distant desert market of Wadi Halfa? The market seemed one consciousness, one body of memory, haunted by murderous betrayal and ill fate, inconsolable loneliness, entire lives scorched by a single mistake; and the softer regrets – wistful, elegiac. She stood with a girl's knitted hat in her hand, or a cardigan worn for many years by a man who Jean imagined must have sat with his elbows on the table while drinking alone, or an ornate brooch heavy enough to rip the silk of a blouse, given by a fiancé or inherited from an aunt, found in a basket overflowing with such tokens. The anonymous loss, the hardship or death that brought this ivory comb or this watch engraved from your loving father to a stall in Wadi Halfa oppressed her; the memories she imagined these objects carried, the sadness of things. Sometimes Jean would buy something simply in order to rescue it from what she felt was the painful apathy of its surroundings, the market where customers preferred not to know an object's history.

  In the slow end of the day's heat, Avery and Jean lay on their bed in the annex of the Nile Hotel, the annex itself yet another example of an object scavenged for use in another context, kidnapped from one history to another, for their room was aboard the S.S. Sudan, an old Thomas Cook steamboat, permanently moored to accommodate guests when the main hotel was full.

  They never tired of this, the claiming of a hotel room, the strange bed, the act of opening a satchel and bringing their few objects into a new story.

  They woke the next day to the sounds of the railyard at Wadi Halfa, the hammering on steel, the shunting of cars, clanging and
hissing, as the trains were readied for their long journey to Khartoum.

  Jean felt the sweat in her scalp and under her breasts despite the slow fan that circled above their heads.

  Avery lay a book with a moss green cover across Jean's hips.

  – Rosario Castellanos, said Avery. He turned over the book and read:

  ‘Because from the start you were fated to be mine.

  Before the ages of wheat and larks

  and even before fishes …

  When everything lay in the divine

  lap, confused and intertwined,

  you and I lay there complete, together.

  But then came the punishment of clay …

  Because from the start you were fated to be mine

  my solitude was a somber passage,

  an impetus of inconsolable fever …’

  A dog barked through the words of the poems.

  ‘… I learned

  that nothing was mine: not the wheat, the star,

  his voice, his body; not even my own.

  That my body was a tree and that the owner of a tree

  is not its shadow, but the wind …’

  – It was in the bottom of the first-aid kit we saw in the market, said Avery, that banged-up tin box with a lid – perfect for keeping wingnuts and bolts – and still filled with eye-droppers and squeezed-up tubes of ointment, old packets of gauze dressings.

  – Poetry in a first-aid tin? It's too perfect, you're making it up, said Jean.

  – No, said Avery. And this was there too. He leaned over the edge of the bed and handed Jean a thin leather book – a diary. The book was curved slightly, as if the owner had carried it in a pocket.

  – Ah, said Jean, afraid to look inside.

  – Someone had only just started writing in it, said Avery. No date, no name. Will you read it to me?

  Jean opened the journal; instantly, tears filled her eyes. The writing was very small, blue ink; she could not tell whether a man's hand or a woman's.

  ‘We tear open the oranges, the figs, all the fruit we can no longer bear to eat alone …

  ‘We've met in so many cities … the ports where sleep empties its cargoes into the bay, the night and day of love. We waste nothing in these meetings, not a breath to spare. A full hold in each direction – what each brings to the other, what we carry home. It will be a long time now until we see each other again. At night, feel my hands, feel my voice, carry me with you, in a muscle and in a word. And I will too, carry you …

  ‘In a forest of stars and boughs, here is your face. In the garden, in the shipwreck, in sacred stones, in figs and roses. Through long nights of walking, what does not sing for us? Through long nights of waking, what does not sing for us? …

  ‘Walking with your mouth inside my clothes, and all the possible days. The city in the rain: violinists wearing tuxedoes, the white stick of the blind pointing to the wet pavement, sheet-metal skows moving slowly across the river. The owned and the old, everything either lost or found. With you, here, lost and found …’

  Jean closed the book. After a moment she said, I believe you could pluck the necessary book out of the air.

  They lay next to each other, listening to the clang of the metalworkers.

  – After the war, my mother and I moved back to London, said Avery. We had a tiny flat and our kitchen table – my father's huge wooden worktable where we ate all our meals – was in an alcove, surrounded by four walls of books. Without getting out of our chairs, we could simply reach behind us and, yes, pluck! the appropriate book off a shelf. That was my father's idea, so that there would always be active discussions at meals, and so that I or any guest could find a reference in a trice. My father loved to call out directions from his end of the table like a mad navigator on a small boat: ‘A bit more to the right, nine o'clock please, forty-five degrees left …’ Over the years, certain thick or oversized volumes became landmarks by which we steered: ‘The grey cover two inches to the right of The Child's New Illustrated Encyclopedia (“new” about forty years previous), below One Thousand and One Wonderful Things; about ten inches above Engines and Power …’ And when the book was retrieved successfully from the shelf, my father would let out a sigh, as if just the right unreachable itch had been scratched.

  My father illustrated his explanations using objects on the table, becoming so absorbed that eventually any outsider risked impropriety and drifted away, leaving him in silent and solitary contemplation of a miniature Battersea Power Station with its four juice-glass smokestacks, or a liftlock that began with a slice of bread …

  ‘Every object,’ my father used to say, ‘is also a concept.’ If you place two or three or ten things next to each other that have never been next to each other before, this will produce a new question. And nothing proves the existence of the future like a question …

  My parents, as you know, first met on a train in Scotland. They had both walked the same road to the same rural station, a road thick with dust, and my father's boots and trouser legs were covered with fine powder. He stamped his feet, frustrated by the dust that was determined to cling. He looked up to see a young woman watching him, amused. He thought that her skirt was spattered with mud, but upon closer view he saw that the material was embroidered with tiny bees. Her shoes were spotless and shining. Had she floated to the station? ‘Don't be silly,’ she answered. She told him that she polished her shoes with a special homemade varnish that ‘repelled’ the dust. It had something to do with static electricity. Hadn't he heard of static electricity? My father replied that indeed he knew quite a lot about electricity – he had started out as an electrical engineer, after all – but perhaps he hadn't given enough thought to shoes. ‘That's not surprising,’ my mother said. ‘It takes a woman to put two such practical things together.’ And that's when my father learned a piece of wisdom he was to follow the rest of his life and passed on to me: ‘No two facts are too far apart to be put together.’

  My father possessed an enviable equanimity. If he sat on something painful – if I'd left a toy in the crease of the chesterfield – or if he tripped over something I should have put away, he picked it up, ready to complain. But then, upon inspecting the object more closely, all blame was forgotten; he'd stand there wondering how it was made, by whom, and where; he began to ponder the kind of machinery necessary to mass-produce such a product, possible improvements to the design … He worked with machines all day and then at home continued to fiddle and ruminate; he penetrated mechanisms with a sixth sense. His hands were deft with nuts and bolts, circuitry, solder, springs, magnets, mercury, petrol. He fixed walkie-talkies, dolls, bicycles, ham radios, steam engines; he seemed to see into the heart of any machine at a glance. Children from the neighbourhood left their broken objects on our doorstep with a note propped up or shoved inside: ‘doesn't ring’ ‘wheel stuck,’ ‘won't cry any more.’ When the object was fixed, he put it back outside to be claimed by the satisfied owner.

  My mother was deft in another way. Sometimes my father had fits of private despair, of professional disappointment, anger at a job poorly done. I was attuned to my mother's work of restoration – the plate of biscuits; the bar of chocolate on my father's worktable; a sealed note, the envelope painted beautifully with an architectural detail or a valve or a latch – and then the whole house seemed readjusted, like the hands of a clock. Chaos was restored to its rightful place, that is, once again left to me and, when they came to visit, my cousins – four children who liked to build things and then blow them up, or blow things up and then rebuild them. We worked best together when implementing morally questionable schemes, like the heist of the sweet shop that involved, among other strenuous tasks, the digging of a tunnel from the end of our garden out to the street. We'd progressed about five yards before winter set in. The tunnel caved in sometime during the spring rains and remained there, a muddy scar.

  Avery reached for Jean's hand, the hand that had once served as a map of the Sahara. Through the open win
dow they could hear new arrivals at the Wadi Halfa station shouting for porters, and for a moment Jean thought of the huge clock that dominated the little waiting room.

  – I loved when my father made use of my mother's hands when he ran out of useful digits on his own, during complicated demonstrations, folding her fingers into stress coordinates, said Avery. Years later, I remembered this habit of his and began to wonder if my father had used other parts of my mother in private demonstrations I never saw. I liked the idea that perhaps I was the result of an intricate equation.

  It was in the Wadi Halfa market that Jean conceived of her compendium of plants with healing properties. It would be a present for Avery, perhaps Marina could be persuaded to illustrate it: a list of imaginary botanica to treat very real but elusive ailments. She was looking at a volume of Linnaeus – someone had written in the margins in Spanish – when the idea came to her. Balms, tinctures, ointments, teas, salves, compresses, inhalations, for those who are far from home or for those who are housebound, for those who are bedridden on summer days, in autumn, on rainy days. For those suffering painful nostalgias of weather accompanied by severe despond, regret, shame. For those who have not felt a human touch for two months, a year, for many years – a matter of dosage. For those who have lost everything because they were misunderstood. For those who can no longer feel the wind, even on their bare skin. An ointment made from the astringent torreya, for those who suffer from miserliness. Balms of moss for those who have become colour-blind, for those who cry too easily, for those who have lost perception, for those who have lost the faculty of empathy, of forgiveness or self-forgiveness. Brew the bark or, for urgent cases, apply directly without boiling first. Safe for children and other animals. Ineffective on men with long hair; results achieved instantly; reapply every hour; for those weakened by too much hope, for those weakened by too much despair, for those who are landlocked and crave the sea, for those who fear the sea, for those who fear opera. For those who fear music sung by low-voiced women who have lost everything. For those who eat too much chocolate, for those who do not eat enough chocolate. For those who have forgotten how to pray, apply to hands and knees the milk of the pod of humilitas immensita, a strong-smelling tuber for treating wounds to the eyes, heart, hands, ears, genitals, lips, spirit. For those experiencing the vertigo of loss, very potent – for one-time use only – do not operate heavy machinery or make important decisions while under its influence. Illuminatus leaves for those who are lost or misguided, choose only the small leaves near the stem that give off a faint glow, effective even in moral quagmires. With gaudy blooms … Plants with strong odours … Use only the inner bark … Discard seeds and pulpy matter … A good cooking substitute for those who cannot eat garlic … Use only the stem of the plant, boil in salt water, boil in sugar water. If it boils, you must begin again. To reduce swelling. Apply directly to affected area. Soothing oil for feet too long in ill-fitting shoes, for those who have waited for necessities too long in queues. To fade the appearance of scars. Milky pods, milky stems, leaves and stems that weep with a clear sap, “hair of the dog” nettles, spikes, brambles, thistles. Ointments for those who cannot stop feeling angry, salve for those who have lost feeling in their hands and other forms of corporal rigidity. Compresses for those who cannot stop crying, and also encourages tears in those whose eyes will not weep. Tea for those who cannot remember their dreams, or for those who cannot forget them. Consolatum empathatum, salve for eyes that have seen too much, or too little. Astringent of thorns for those feigning serious illness to elicit sympathy from others and who punish those who withhold this abused mercy. Apply directly to tongue. Apply directly to eyelids. Avoid eyes. Repeat until urge to dissemble is purged. Reapply at night. Dual – often directly opposite – effects, depending on the severity of the affliction …