Even in horror, there are degrees. And that is where the details matter most, because degrees are the only hope. And that's what keeps a man alive until the last second. Knowing that if he's lost one leg, at least it's not two. Or lost all his fingers, at least not his arm. To live a moment longer. That's often what belief is – the very last resort.
After the war, I painted for children who saw nothing but terror in whatever I painted, no matter how innocent the scene. Once a child has known this, he cannot see any place, not a room, without terror in it. Even if it can't be seen, he sees it; he knows it is hidden. Now I paint for children who have not known this; I try to paint beautiful things, to arm them with images in case they'll need them. So that some of this beauty perhaps might become a memory, even if it is only a picture in a book. So that even if that child grows up to be the killer, he might suddenly recognize something in himself when another man begs to be taken outside so he won't be killed in front of his family.
I have so few seconds to capture a child's attention. I will not waste the chance.
Jean had been sitting still, listening, looking down at her lap.
– We make cuttings, said Jean. I think that is what we do. It is cuttings we take with us.
At the market in Wadi Halfa, Jean had found a wooden box – once, it had contained three cakes of Yardley soap – that now held an assortment of humble treasures that could only have belonged to a child: glass marbles, an acorn, a feather, a length of twine with a bead knotted at one end, a silver belt buckle, a penknife, some polished stones, playing cards, a key. It hurt her to hold it, the ghost of the child still owned it. But she could not bear to leave the little box of possessions behind in the rubble of the market, so she bought it.
Back in the camp, she took to carrying it with her, in case she saw Monkey.
Pah! said the boy and knocked the contents into the sand. He stood looking at her and made it clear he would certainly never stoop in front of her to retrieve them. One of the Egyptian engineers who had seen the little scene unfold came over to the boy and took him by the shoulder, but Monkey was strong and squirmed from under the man's hand and ran off. The man bent down. Jean would not let him kneel for her and she fell to the sand herself and gathered up the pitiful treasure.
– He's wild. He should be punished for his rudeness.
– No, please, said Jean. I didn't mean to offend him. I should have known such things would not interest a boy his age. It is my mistake.
– The boy acts too free. If he were my son – But my son would never behave in such a way.
Jean held the box out to him.
– Perhaps your son would like these little things.
The man laughed uproariously.
– My son is thirty years old!
And Jean, ruefully, laughed too.
A child is like a fate; one's future and one's past. All the stories Jean told the child inside her as they walked by the river under the depthless sky … and the child took in nothing but the sweet sound of her mother's voice, a world entire. There was nothing Jean did not speak of those first months of pregnancy. She told her about Canadian snow and Canadian apples, about Egyptian boats, about techniques of grafting, topiary, and espalier. She told the child of her first weeks with Avery, and of Avery's excursions with his father, about the Newcomen atmospheric engine, “Fairbottom Bobs,” that Avery as a boy visited near Ashton-under-Lyne and the River Medlock. The baby learned how Jean's mother made animal shapes in the soapy water of Jean's bath, and about Jean's father, who read to her Milly-Molly-Mandy and Mrs. Easter on the train. Everything was described, with wonder and longing, to the child inside her. The breeze from the river was different from the wind that came across the desert and they met in the potent space of the riverbank. Jean listened for the sound of boats crossing the water in the darkness; never a light, the sailors navigated by sound. Jean sat in the darkness, also without a light, and listened; the whisper of hulls, the weight of the baby, the map of stars.
She lay awake. Her fullness now pressed down on her spine. A mound of earth. She heard Avery on deck and in a moment he stood at the cabin door. Slowly he unlaced his boots and dropped them in the passageway. The sound held all his weariness.
He hesitated by the bed, calculating whether he had the energy to take off his shirt. He left it on.
Almost the moment he lay down, he was asleep. In his face Jean saw not just exhaustion, but despair. She took the pencil from his shirt pocket.
Jean woke with Avery and, after he left for the engineers' hut, sat alone on deck, still half asleep, watching the sun hesitate before breaking over the edge of the hill, the quivering before the river turned blindingly bright. For only a few moments each dawn the pomegranate sky was splayed open with its mesh of seeds still visible, the stars.
She heard a small splash. Something, some knowledge that fear gives us, suddenly made her look up and a little farther downstream. She saw the glow of his white clothing first, a dome of swollen cloth in the dark water. She ran toward it and then saw the undulating edges of soaked hair floating, and she grabbed at him, pulling his shirt, then finding his arms and pulling with all her strength. She was screaming; she heard herself screeching almost apart from herself, as if a terror she had always carried in her, unknowing, had at last come to its moment. She pulled until his dark head came out of the water, she could see it in her mind, could see herself pulling him out and pressing his belly until the water spurted from his lungs, she could see him opening his eyes as she pulled with all the animal power in her. Finally there were voices far away. She kept pulling, but the boy was weirdly heavy, as if someone were holding his feet and pulling him back into the water. She felt the strength suddenly go out of her arms and, weeping, she saw the child's head sink below the surface. So heavy. His lips over his teeth as if he had a mouthful of stones. Then the voices were right behind her and their arms plunged into the water and Monkey was pulled out of the river, long dead.
In the dream, it was clear that the boy had died even before he was in the water. And that Jean had been trying to save his corpse.
But what she also saw in the dream – the vision of his head rising from the water and of herself pulling him onto the bank – and the water pouring from his mouth and his eyes opening – this image was so vivid her mind could not put it away.
A few days later, Monkey was found at the bottom of the quarry. He had been goading fate for many weeks, swinging from a blondin across the chasm. Only after the grave was dug did they realize that no one knew his name.
Avery and Jean sat on the deck in lamplight, wrapped in blankets, reading – a bond of such stillness between them that Daub almost walked away without stopping to impart the news of Monkey's death. He stayed only a few moments, and afterwards, Jean pulled her chair close to Avery's, facing him.
– The boy died in my dream, whispered Jean.
Avery looked up from his work and saw her face.
– It's not your fault!
Jean stood up, a strange look in her eyes.
– Because you dreamed it, repeated Avery, does not make it your fault.
– Then what is prescience for.
Avery had no answer to this. He gathered her toward him.
– It's not my fault, but maybe I could have prevented it. Maybe both things are true.
Jean's logic hovered in the lamplight, and remained in the darkness as she lay in bed, and was still there the next morning and the next; many days afterwards, her first thought upon waking: maybe both things are true.
– It is not the heat, the doctor in the camp told Jean several days later. Sometimes, something goes wrong and the baby is not meant to be born. That is all.
Some mothers say they feel the exact moment the child stops living. Some sense something wrong, or dream of death without knowing why; others notice only later, when the movement stops – although even this is only a feeling, for when the baby is this large, it no longer has room anyway to move in the w
omb.
There is no safe way to induce the birth. It is best to let the body make its own decision, though this is a danger if labour waits too long. You may have to carry the still-baby for some weeks, perhaps even as long as a month.
Avery put his hand on her taut skin where he had felt movement for so many weeks and now felt nothing.
– Sometimes, the doctor said, it is simply not meant to be.
Avery could not help himself thinking: All the water inside her and our child dead.
– It is time to go to Cairo, the doctor said.
The young Nubian woman who had offered to bless the child in the Nile dipped palm leaves in river water and wrapped the cool greenness over Jean's distended belly. The leaves drew the heat from her skin. Again and again the woman did this for her, until Jean fell asleep.
No need of a translator between the two women now.
Jean understood that she must leave; await her time at the hospital in Cairo. But instead, for days, she remained in the darkness of the houseboat. And Avery, though anxious and afraid, could not deny her this right.
She did not know how to grieve; she could not separate the baby's body from her own. What had been a vulnerable ripeness, her shape, she now felt as deformity. The earth-weight, now a child cast in stone.
She remembered a middle-aged woman from her neighbourhood in Montreal who walked everywhere backwards, her elderly mother always beside her, watching out for her. The resigned love in the mother's face as she looked eternally into the damaged face of her daughter. When Jean was a girl, this sight had frightened her. Now, twenty years later, a welt of pity rose in her heart.
She sat in the dark cabin and could not make out the difference between soul and ghost.
She remembered the young girl from Faras, on the train travelling on forever without her mother's satchel.
For hours working on deck, Avery heard nothing beneath him. But when he went below, he found it had not been the silence of sleep, but of a disappearance. Jean sitting up in bed, staring into the dark; a vigil. When he tried to come near, he felt it, her invisible shrivelling from touch. As if she had spoken aloud: My body is a grave.
The pilot stood some way off, waiting.
– Are you sure you must go alone? asked Avery.
–Yes, said Jean. Her face was stony, the tears leaking out. We don't know how long we'll have to wait.
He moved toward her.
– If you come close, she said, I won't be able to go.
A moment passes; with all its possibilities. All that love allows us, and does not allow.
Avery ached when he saw the pilot's hand touching her arm, helping her board the plane.
No one knows what triggers labour. Finally, simply, the wild hormones are released.
Clutching the hands of a stranger – a nurse she'd never met and would never see again – suddenly Jean did not believe the child was dead. She rushed toward the pain, each contraction proof that the child was struggling to be born. Within the pain Jean felt an unbearable purpose, almost an ecstasy. But the baby would not come out. All through the labour, Jean would not give up this new knowledge, the feeling that the child was alive. She felt the presence of a soul returned to her, overwhelming, feasting on the oxygen in her blood. Hour after hour she focused her belief directly into the pain – an animal force of will. She wept with gratitude and joy. And then an almost preternatural, shivering attention, a kind of praying. The child's presence filled the room, she could feel the certainty of the child's heart beating into her own blood.
The next morning, they opened her. The scalpel made a red seam beneath her belly, and they squeezed the dead child out. Now the nurses swaddled the child, a daughter, as if she were alive, in sweet-smelling cotton blankets, and waited for Avery's arrival. Jean held the sunken head against her own face, she clutched the now weightless baby and would not let go; the embrace that no nurse or midwife dared to tear apart. With infinite tenderness, Jean cradled the perfect cheeks that death had pressed with its thumbs.
The nurses would not forcibly take the baby from her. They stood by – the nurses, Avery – in the face of Jean's suffering. They could not spare her; for different reasons, they could not fully share it. There was a hair, a thread of terror in their empathy.
The nurses came and went, impatient to take the child away. The room grew dark; they came in to turn on the light, still waiting.
Avery sat in a chair next to the bed. When at last Jean fell asleep, he took their daughter from her arms.
The moment Jean woke, she called desperately for a nurse to bring back her child, the child who had died twice. Then she saw the guilt, the wretchedness, the betrayal, in Avery's face.
Afterwards, Jean could not take care of herself; she remained in the hospital, so listless she could not brush her teeth. Her milk came in. Her breasts went hard. The baby was sent to Montreal, where Marina received her, burying her granddaughter, Elisabeth Willa Escher, near Jean's parents, in the graveyard at St. Jerome. Jean was no longer in the ward with expectant mothers bulging with life. Now she was in a room with women waiting, at various distances from death; heart disease, kidney failure. In Cairo, the heat pounded against the windows of the crowded hospital ward. In Montreal, the dark, cold, spring rain. Marina wrote and asked if she could come. No, answered Jean, don't come.
For months after birth, a child remains in the mother's body; moon and tide. Before the child cries, the mother flashes wet with milk. Before the child wakes and cries out in the night, the mother wakes. Deep in the child's cranial vault, the mother's gaze knits up the dangling synapses.
And when the child is spirit, it is exactly the same.
For several days Jean had noticed an old man sitting on the steps as she came back from her slow walk around the hospital garden. Then, one day, she did not look away quickly enough to avoid his gaze.
– You're walking a little better today, he said. Please sit with me and rest for a few minutes.
Jean hesitated. Then she sat down on the step below him.
– No, here, beside me.
Jean sat beside him. They leaned over their knees to their feet, as one leans over a railing to look down into an abyss.
– I know about your child, he said. I asked about you and the nurse told me. But now I am speaking of that young boy, that Monkey. I couldn't help but overhear you, with your husband. I didn't mean to listen, but people always talk freely next to me, even though the old have the greatest need for eavesdropping.
Jean could feel the tremble in the old man's arms and shoulders as he sat beside her.
– Let us imagine you are right, he continued, and his life was somehow in your hands. You were sent to him and this was your purpose in coming to this country. Perhaps your whole life, every choice, was meant to lead you to the very moment of meeting the boy in order to save him. But, if that were so, do you think that after so many years of living in preparation, your destiny would have failed you, or that you would have failed your destiny? And of your own child? Perhaps what you live now is still your destiny. And you do not know the meaning yet.
– I did fail, said Jean. I feel it inside, in the very core of me.
She began to weep.
The old man continued to look down at his feet.
– Emptiness is not failure, he said. His voice was so paternal, Jean could not subdue her tears.
Very gently, he said, you feel you have been punished for his death. You must decide: were you punished for your fear or for your faith?
He looked at Jean.
– I was punished once, for my fear, he said, and it destroyed me.
He leaned forward, frail and unsteady, on his stick. But she didn't see frailty, she saw obstinate strength; almost courage.
– You don't seem destroyed, said Jean at last.
– Some banishment is so deep, it seems like calm.
Jean felt pain in the core of her, as if he had laid his hand on her belly.
– I was born
in Cologne, said the old man wearily. I came to Palestine in 1946. My father was a British soldier who served in India before I was born. My parents met in Zurich. I can say a prayer for the dead in English, German, French, Gujarat, Arabic, Palestinian, Turkish, Japanese, and Chinois.
– Chinese?
The old man looked startled.
– Yes, he said, but that's a different story. Please do not ask me to speak of it. That joy is the only secret I have left. And if I see something in the telling that I didn't see before? No, thank you very much.
– Don't be angry, said Jean. I misspoke. I'm sorry.
– I'm not angry. I've been thinking about what to say to you since I first saw you here. In fact, I've been thinking about it for fifty years.
In your misery you confuse fate with destiny. Fate is dead, it's death. Destiny is liquid, alive like a bird. There are consequences and there is mystery; and sometimes they look the same. All your self-knowledge won't bring you any peace. Seek something else. One can never forgive oneself anyway – it takes another person to forgive, and for that you could wait forever.
The old man rose unsteadily to his feet. For the first time, Jean realized that his back was bent; when he stood, he was still looking at the ground. She felt shame; sympathy.
– Thank you, said Jean.
– It's impolite to thank an old man for his sadness.
– I'm sorry! she cried. That isn't what I meant.
The old man nodded to the earth.
Jean returned to the camp. She was pitied from afar. It seemed to Avery that he could not think, could not draw her close, without hurting her. She is below sea level, Daub had counselled, you must try. But Avery felt she could not bear even the weight of his gaze.
The Winter Vault Page 14