As the Great Temple was removed and the cliff face was emptied to a ragged chasm, in an almost symbolically inverse ratio, Jean's belly had grown. Avery was haunted, the desert was haunted, by the emptiness of the villages, by their destruction, by impotence and mourning, by the lie of the replication. And yet, all the while, the beautiful dome of Jean's flesh had somehow been a sign of possible redemption: all the Nubian children to be born. It was not rational, any more than Jean conflating her dream with Monkey's death, or Jean's mother's feeling she had abandoned her pilot brother when she left behind the night sky on Clarendon Avenue. He knew such thoughts were a need to bring order to tragedy, and that one must admit oneself such a need. But he also knew that his moral grief, his self-searching was nothing, utterly without meaning in the face of a daughter lost, a country lost. Yet, he could not prevent himself: when their child died, Avery felt Jean's suffering, and his own, in the ache of the cliff, in the silent villages, in the new settlement of Khashm el Girba, in the heinous consolation of the rebuilt temples.
Hassan Dafalla arrived at Khashm el Girba for the first time after the inundation and looked around for a place to sit. But there was no shade. He and the settlers from Faras stood together miserably, each overcome by his own regret.
Then a man spoke, as if giving voice to all: A nation is a sense of space you will never walk with your own feet yet know in your legs as belonging to you. Its heat is your heat, its smells and sounds are yours – of water gushing through a metal pipe, or flowing from the clay bowls of the sagiya, dripping from the wet ropes, the dates warm in the basket on your head. The sound of the felucca's hull passing close by in the darkness, sailing always without lights through the long room of the night river. You recognize your neighbour's voice before you have opened your eyes, the voice of his young son, almost a man, calling to his friend who is also on his way to bring in the lentils and the barley. The shifting seeds as your wife scoops her bowl into the sack, then straightens her arm to cast them into the air, into the earth. The sound of the lentils hitting the bottom of the pot. The wind through the small high windows at night. But mostly it is the river that is in your limbs as if you will live forever, as long as the Nile flows.
And so, who am I in Khashm el Girba? What is my body but a memory to me? To come here is like growing old in an instant, not to know your own body except as what it once was. It was sudden like that, it was a madness, still to feel the hills, the sand, the river, even in sight of the ugly Atbara! You breathe different air, you smell different to yourself, and your wife smells different and your children. And the only time they feel truly familiar is when they're asleep, dreaming of home. Then I can smell the river in them.
I wish my son could see me, but he is in a stiff white shirt in London, a place I have never been. I remember his face with the hills behind, and I wonder what it would be like to see his face with London behind. When my son comes to bury me, I will be lying in a strange place; and my own father and mother will be under the waves.
I used to say to my wife: As long as you are in my arms, you are safe. But she is not safe now and my children are not safe.
Jean and Avery climbed the hill. Ramses was awash with light. Avery knew every square centimetre of the king's body by number – the storage code of each fingernail, each boulder of a knee, his nostrils and ears.
The illusion was immaculate. The sight before them was so immense and unequivocal that Jean almost staggered. The thin line across her own belly, the scar that was already turning white and disappearing into her flesh – thin as the line that had been sawn across Ramses' chest – this, she felt, was the lie, something inexplicable, distastefully personal. And instead, the gargantuan temple before their eyes – with all the lines of the saw now invisible – was irrefutable proof that the events of her body, and all of Nubia, had not happened. That the temple's purpose now had become this forgetting.
The expanse of desert that would soon become Lake Nasser lay emptied. In an area of more than three hundred kilometres, only one man remained, in Argin, in his thatched hut, and one family in Dibeira. They would stay until their houses were flooded. They did not know what would become of them, but the one place they vowed they would never live was the “New Halfa” of Khashm el Girba.
A few weeks after the Nubian villages were evacuated, a sandstorm struck the new settlement. It blew the roofs off Village #22 (the new Degeim) and the metal sheets and trusses flew as in a hurricane. A great number of the livestock, which had been so carefully transported, died in the sandstorm. The roofs and trusses had not been properly attached. The walls of the houses had not been anchored deeply enough in the ground.
And then, in a bitter irony, two months after the sandstorm, there was a lightning storm of such proportion that the whole resettlement of Khashm el Girba was submerged in water.
Hassan Dafalla waited. At last, just past 1 a.m., the Nile began to overflow in the harbour of Wadi Halfa. He watched as the railway station slipped away.
The water climbed the walls of the hospital, it flooded the houses at Tawfikia and Abbasia, then sped toward the Nile Hotel filling its bedrooms with its last guests – reptiles and scorpions. The gardens that had been withering for lack of water suddenly gleamed with lushness and vibrancy, only to die a day later of drowning.
The day before, Hassan Dafalla had posted a letter from Wadi Halfa, the last letter to bear the postmark of the town. On the last night he slept with his bedding trailing on the floor, so that if the water reached his room, his wet sheet would wake him. He saw the mosque crack open and watched the shops and mud houses “melt like biscuits.” As he walked through the town recording all he could with his Rolleiflex, he saw rats fleeing with their babies in their teeth and, from all sides, he heard “the dismal roar” of collapsing buildings. He saw his own house split up the middle and crumble. Hassan Dafalla, the last man in Wadi Halfa, took his bags to the airport, but he could not keep away from the town as long as there was anything left to be seen and to record. It was necessary to chain his dog to a pole at the airport, fearing it might “return to the house, which was expected to collapse at any time. As a matter of fact, when the dog was tied up, I felt I needed a chain too.”
When at last Hassan Dafalla departed Wadi Halfa, the only signpost to remain of the town was the tip of the minaret, floating like a stone buoy.
In the newly built towns of Ingleside and Long Sault, the inhabitants whose houses had been moved continued to wake and dress and eat each day; and although an observer would have said that everything about these houses was exactly the same, those who lived there – distressed, sleepless – knew that it was not. At first, one could not discern the cause; it was simply a feeling. Someone described it as the sensation of being watched, another as if the pages of one's mind were stuck together – that there was another, very different image beneath what was visible that one couldn't reach and, although the thumbnail of one's mind picked repeatedly at the sides of the thin page, it never separated. Another believed it was simply that the light was different, it did not fall across the table or across a book or through the curtains in the same way. Or maybe it was a trick of the wind, an unfamiliar breeze across one's face. Some felt it in the church that had been moved, stone by stone and, after the Sunday sermon, walking in the little graveyard, though in this case it was the feeling not of being watched, but instead the opposite, that no one was watching now, an abandonment. There was a feeling that the new towns were the ones that were “lost” and not the ones that had been left behind to be dismembered, burned, drowned. That postcards of “the lost villages” should depict instead the gleaming new subdivisions. It was an intuition, like that possessed by war pilots and navigators on the bombers, who had lost most of their hearing and yet could still, as veterans on the ground, feel the presence of a plane long before it could be seen. Some said it was like the difference between a man and his corpse, for what is a corpse if not an almost perfect replica.
Builders know that
there is a grain in wood and a grain in stone; but there is also a grain in flesh.
Eighteen months after Avery's work on the salvage had begun, Ramses' face, with his one-metre-wide lips, was sliced just before his ears. He then suffered the indignity of a workman injecting him with a nasal spray of polyvinyl acetate. His visage, Block #120, held by the steel rods that had been inserted in the top of his head, was slowly winched into the sky.
Standing next to Avery, Jean could feel the heat radiating from his body and suddenly his shirt flashed into wetness only to dry instantly in the overpowering sun. Avery felt even the inside of his mouth was unbearably hot, felt even his teeth were sweating.
All work ceased as the huge head of Ramses slowly ascended on wires invisible in the sunlight. As thirty tonnes of stone seemed to ascend, hover, float in the air, the entire camp, three thousand men, stood silent and watched.
Avery finished writing in his shadow-book, just as his father had taught him, the personal record to be kept alongside the one maintained for his employer; their last night at Abu Simbel.
Every action has a cause and a consequence …
I do not believe home is where we're born, or the place we grew up, not a birthright or an inheritance, not a name, or blood or country. It is not even the soft part that hurts when touched, that defines our loneliness the way a bowl defines water. It will not be located in a smell or a taste or a talisman or a word …
Home is our first real mistake. It is the one error that changes everything, the one lesson you could let destroy you. It is from this moment that we begin to build our home in the world. It is this place that we furnish with smell, taste, a talisman, a name.
II
The Stone in the Middle
When Gregor Mendel – the monk who grew pea plants and became the father of genetics – was twenty-two years old, he was sent to study at the university in Vienna. Perhaps in the early mornings or in the long summer twilight, as he walked along the Danube, he first considered the succession and end of generations. Perhaps he sought consolation for his aloneness by sitting with the ghosts of the river-dead, whose bodies were interred in a small graveyard on the banks. Perhaps he felt it was a cruel choice of resting place for those who'd drowned, to be laid to rest within the sound of the river; those whose last wish – perhaps the last wish even of the suicides – was for the maternal embrace of land. So close were the graves to the river that again and again over the years, the rising water threatened the dead until finally the little cemetery was moved to a field behind the new dam, where there would be no danger of flooding. A small chapel was built and hedges planted. In the site of the old cemetery – where perhaps Gregor Mendel first contemplated the mechanisms of heredity – a small grove grew up among the nameless dead who were left behind. Today no one picnics in the thought-full grove nor in the grass of regret on that side of the river. Although there is no sign to indicate the site was once a cemetery, perhaps something in the light seems to forbid such pleasures. But if one wishes to visit the dead, one simply takes Tram 71 to the end of the line at Kaiser Ebersdorferstrasse. From there one must walk. It is not very far.
Jean stood at the gate of her mother's garden, flourishing now in the farmer's soil of Marina's marsh. The dahlias and peonies sagged with shaggy, weary fullness, drunken with heat and sunshine. Marina had taken care of everything; in Jean's absence, a young man had been hired to prune and tie and turn and tend; her tools had been respected, returned to hang on the wall of the shed in careful rows, their blades and prongs wiped clean.
Jean opened the gate. She wanted nothing more than to dig, to blacken her hands. She asked herself what it meant, this desire; it was not to lay claim, she was sure. Perhaps a way to offer herself, as one stands before another, asking to understand. The soil was wet and cold.
From the back porch of the house, Avery watched Jean kneel – the bend of her back, her skirt stretched across her thighs, her hair piled loosely on top of her head, so the breeze would reach the sweat of her nape and shoulders. He saw how differently she moved now, as if she were used to stooping from fatigue, from futility; this new body, of which he had no knowledge. The loss he felt was so sharp he turned quickly and went back inside. Marina was working; her door was shut, the house was quiet. Avery sat with his bare feet cool on the tiled kitchen floor and closed his eyes.
What was needed was a mechanical advantage, he thought, block and tackle. He must become the fixed pulley.
He remembered the months he'd spent in Quebec, how Jean had repacked his rucksack after their weekends together, sneaking in letters for the weeks they would be apart, each to be opened at an appointed hour: poems, stories, photographs. It was a way to domesticate their desire in their apartness, to provide another tributary for that desire. He had believed then, opening those letters – after dinner, at 3 p.m. on Sunday, just before sleep – that somehow he and Jean possessed between them, unearned, and made possible only by the other, an aptitude, a calibration for happiness.
Now he would be as one who had witnessed a miracle and would not let himself forget; as a believer who clings to signs and portents; he would refuse doubt. He felt that his father would have understood. For William had taught him the commerce of invisible forces, ions in league across enormous distances and densities. He would continue to desire, to believe, until, as when suddenly one senses someone's gaze across a room, Jean looked up. He sat, in the misery of this resolve.
Jean turned to look back across the field and saw the empty porch and the shaded windows, closed against the heat. She could not explain how native her defeat, her desolation, as if all the years of happiness with him had somehow been only a reprieve, not meant to be hers. His pity: one kind of love unintentionally mocking another. She would work until her hands ached, until the low, intense glow of twilight spread across the garden. She longed for the first clarity of autumn, wondering if the cold could cleanse her. But she knew it could not. She had squandered all the time the child had been alive inside her; she had been beseeching the dead; her ache for her mother; her mother's, for her.
From the window of her studio, Marina watched Avery and Jean, two slight figures slowly crossing the marsh. She saw the distance between them. Avery's loose shirt flapped emptily behind him in the wind.
Since their return, Jean had slept in the little room she'd once shared with Avery, and Avery on the pullout bed in Marina's studio. He felt faint satisfaction to see this bed, the evidence of his separation from Jean, disappear each morning into the sofa, as if all might so easily be restored.
Avery and Jean stood a little apart, always now there seemed space for another between them. Rows of bright lettuce stuttered above the black earth. The marsh was bordered by rain-soaked trees. They had been out of the desert for almost a month and still the smell of wet earth was sharp and strange.
Jean could barely speak.
– Are you saying you want your freedom?
– I'm saying we should both feel free, Avery said, until we know what to do.
In this perversity, he felt certain, was a kind of truth, an integrity at least. As soon as he spoke, he knew it was so. He did not know how to restore her, he was incapable. Jean's despair was as true as everything else about her. He knew one thing with certainty: nothing would heal this way, in this orbit of defeat, this brokenness.
She was so thin now, the only pouches of flesh left of her were her breasts, her sex. The sight of her moved him to the core.
Jean was thinking hard. At last she said:
– I see. Going back to school will be difficult, you've waited for this a long time, you'll need to work without distraction …
Marina was washing peaches in the sink, the window wide open to the night.
– Jean loves you, she said.
Marina waited, but there was no answer. She turned around and saw Avery, with his soup spoon halfway to his mouth.
Standing behind his chair, she held him. Not one mother-cell forgets the feeling, her c
hild crying.
Marina sat down next to him, crossed her arms on the table, and lay her head there, waiting for him to speak.
The flat on Clarendon was empty, the subleasers gone, and that is where Jean went. The return to Clarendon was terrible. She brought a suitcase of clothes, a box of books, a table and two chairs, a mattress for the floor. Everything else was left at Marina's house on the marsh.
Avery found a basement flat near the School of Architecture, where he was now enrolled, a graduate student. The first night on Mansfield Avenue, he sat at his table, incoherent with the risk he was taking, setting her free. He remembered a story Jean had told him of her parents, one of the first stories she'd told during their night in the cabin by the Long Sault. Elisabeth Shaw had come home late from grocery shopping. Looking flushed and guilty, she'd confessed to her husband that she'd been standing in Britnell's Bookshop in her heavy tweed coat and woollen hat for nearly an hour reading Pablo Neruda. She had no money to buy the book so she went down the street to a jeweller's and sold the bracelet she was wearing. She begged John, “Don't be angry.” “Angry!” he said. “I can't tell you what it means to me that I've married a woman who'd sell her jewellery to buy poetry.” Avery thought about what his own mother had said that very morning, standing at the back door as he'd left her house, “Grief bakes in us, it bakes until one day the blade pushes in and comes out clean.”
It was almost midnight when he telephoned Jean. They lay together with the few city blocks between them, his voice in her ear. He talked about what he would learn: the meaning of space, the consequences of weight and volume. Then he hung up and remembered her. He had not said what he wanted: send me a signal across the river, by lantern light or bird call, come under cover of darkness, I will know you by your smell, come with the rain …
The Winter Vault Page 15