The Winter Vault (15 page)

‘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 window 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 …

Before dawn on the third morning of their stay in Wadi Halfa, they met, as arranged, their friend Daub Arbab in the lobby of the Nile Hotel. He had flown from Khartoum, where he had collected an order of Novello one-handed chainsaws and 25mm-toothed Sandviken handsaws, used for the most fragile cutting. The shipment had gone astray once and Daub had been sent to oversee its safe delivery. This fell into accord with Daub's own plan, to seize the opportunity to visit Wadi Halfa as many times as possible before the inundation. This time he'd hired a truck to drive Avery and Jean north to the Debeira pipe scheme. Avery wanted to see for himself the canal where the Nubians had set afloat their irrigation pumps on barges. “It is not far,” said Daub, “and on the way back, we will stop to say our sad farewell to the most beautiful place on this earth.”

They drove under the cold stars of dawn, north from Wadi Halfa to the now empty villages of Debeira and Ashkeit.

– In Nubia, said Daub, any dispute that arises is settled by the entire family, including women and children. Violent crimes are extremely rare, but in such a case, an exception would be made and only the men would meet to decide what was to be done. The guilty one would be shunned so completely that he would be forced, for his own survival, to leave the community. Cases are never brought to the police. In this way, Nubia has always protected itself, always kept its independence.

The economy depends on the division of ownership. This is a very satisfactory arrangement of real estate, capital, and labour. But often the distribution of the harvest is a complicated affair – because only the oldest women in the village can remember the tangled terms of the original transaction. These arrangements keep alive the history of each family. They ensure that even the labour exile will maintain his place in the village.

Here is a typical story of Nubia, continued Daub. Two men who shared an
eskalay
were quarrelling over the division of water. In order to irrigate the land of each man equally, the water had to be channelled from one ditch to the other. They were arguing over who was benefiting from the larger share when their uncle overheard. He arranged for a large stone to be brought and placed in the middle of the canal, separating the water into two streams, thus ending the argument. In 1956, when the hostilities erupted between Egypt and England over the Suez, the Nubians followed the events closely; they hurried back and forth from the field to the village, back and forth to gather around a single shortwave radio. An old man observed this rushing to and fro all morning and at last asked one of the young men what it was all about. ‘Grandfather, the Englishmen are fighting Egypt for the Suez Canal.’ The old man shook his head. ‘Won't anyone put a stone in the middle?’

I will tell you another story, said Daub. My father was hired by the British army to train and serve as a translator. He was very young and very clever. One British officer saw how quick he was and helped him to come to England and to find a job. My father eventually married an Englishwoman. And so I was born and raised in Manchester. I worked very hard, studying for engineering. Then I decided to come to Egypt. My father was unhappy at this but also secretly pleased. He would say, ‘Here in England you have everything, and there …’ he would trail off. There, I knew he was thinking, enviously, was the river and the hills and the desert. And secretly pleased too, because part of every father longs for his own boyhood to be understood by his son.

From a distance Avery and Jean saw that, like other Nubian villages, Ashkeit had been built at the foot of rocky hills and a thick date palm forest grew down to the river.

And from a distance they saw that, like other Nubian houses, the houses of Ashkeit were luminous cubes – both sunlight and moonlight had soaked into the whitewashed walls of sand and mud plaster, smooth and magical as ice that never melts. Just below the roof, small windows were cut in the walls for ventilation – large enough to let in a breeze but small and high enough to keep out the heat and the sand. Each house possessed the wooden door of a fortress, and a one-metre long wooden bolt, which would have held, before the evacuation, a giant wooden key. Behind the impressive entrance, Jean and Avery knew, would be the customary large central courtyard, with rooms leading from it.

Daub stopped a little way from the village. He turned to them. “There is something in both your faces,” he said. “I saw it even the first time we met, that made me wish to bring you here.”

Describe a landscape you love, Jean had asked Avery the first time they'd lain together in her bed on Clarendon Avenue; and he'd whispered the stone forests of his childhood; his grandmother's garden; the field at the end of his cousins' road in the countryside where he'd spent the war – there was a certain place, a fold in the hills that he could not stop looking at, a feeling he could never name, attached to that place.

Jean knew Avery's way of seeing, how he arrived somewhere and made room for it in his heart. He let himself be altered. Jean had felt it the first time they met, and many times since. In the riverbed of the St. Lawrence and in the drowning counties; in Britain, standing in the rain at the edge of the world in Uist trying to name the moment the last molecule of light disappeared from the sky; in the Pennines; on Jura; and when they walked upon the absolute black of Marina's newly ploughed marsh. And when Avery looked at her in the dark, making room for her inside himself.

Now, in Ashkeit, Jean felt the blow, the disaster to a soul that can be caused by beauty, by an answer one cannot grasp with one's hands. The hunger for a home was much worse here, unbearable. For now it was to be found and lost. The village, the way the houses grew out of the desert – it was as if the need of Avery's heart had invented them. And, too, the kinship with those who made them.

The houses were like gardens sprung up in the sand after a rainfall. As if cut by Matisse's scissors, shapes of pure colour – intense and separate – were painted onto the glowing white walls. Designs of cinnamon, rust, phthalocyanine green, rose, antwerp blue, tan, cream, madder, lamp black, sienna, and ancient yellow ochre, perhaps the oldest pigment used by man. Each a shout of joy. Embedded in the whitewashed walls were decoration – designs of brightly coloured lime wash, bright as the eye could bear – geometric patterns, plants, birds and animals – with mosaics set into the plaster like jewels; and snail shells, and polished pebbles. Over the gates were elaborately painted china plates, as many as thirty or forty decorating a single house. They were like stones of a necklace set against the white skin – porous, breathing, cool – of the plaster. Here was human love of place so freely expressed, alive with meaning; houses so perfectly adapted to their context in materials and design that they could never be moved. It was an integrity of art, domestic life, landscape – a beauty before which one did not wish to prostrate oneself, but instead to leap up. When Jean saw the houses of Ashkeit, she understood as never before what Avery meant about knowing builder and building intimately even at first sight. And Jean knew that he would be thinking what she was thinking; that it was Ashkeit they should be salvaging; though it could never exist anywhere else and if moved, would crumble, like a dream.