The Winter Vault (21 page)

– 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.

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.