The Winter Vault (31 page)

– Lucjan tells me you recognized him by his work, said Ewa. She laughed. He enjoys what the newspapers like to call ‘local notoriety.’

Jean smiled.

– I enjoy it, said Lucjan, only because no one knows who I am, and I never face my public.

– Not unless someone catches you in the act, said Ewa.

– Yes. He frowned. That's why I only come out to paint at night.

Ewa and Paweł's children, five and seven years old, climbed into Jean's lap and began to have their way with her. Jean sat still as they investigated her attributes, examining her hair, poking with their fingers. They made cherry earrings and hung them from her ears, where they bobbled like plastic marbles.

– Do they want to be doctors or hairdressers? Jean asked, laughing.

– One of each, naturally, said Lucjan from the doorway, taking obvious pleasure in Jean's initiation.

Jean soon learned that at Ewa's parties there was always a project on. Huge rolls of brown paper were unfurled and everyone painted a mural; a sheet was tacked to the wall and a film projected while the Dogs played, sewing together a melody out of silence and the whirring of the projector. Actors gathered in the middle of the living room and, with nothing more than a spoon or a dishtowel, transformed reality – having a Sunday row on a pond or floating in a lifeboat on the North Sea; suddenly they were lovers on a picnic blanket, or thieves, or children on a swing. Jean knew these actors had worked together for a long time, a bodily history among them. She had seen Avery perform loaves and fishes with objects, with stones on the beach, with rulers and wooden blocks, creating bridges, castles, entire cities. But his magic was solitary and intellectual compared with the instantly complex communication between these bodies, the moment continually changing, deepening into humour or sorrow. And sometimes this pathos was intense, and a hole opened, and everyone watching from the edges of the room found their own sorrow pouring into it. Crack! the earth of the scene split open and down everyone tumbled together into the wreckage of memory. And then the actors melted back into the party, and the food and the bottles were passed around again.

Jean's hair was pinned up in a knot, gently unravelling. She had Lucjan's sweater over her shoulders.

– You radiate happiness, said Ranger.

Ranger sat down next to her.

– Does Lucjan talk to you? he asked.

Jean looked at him, startled.

– Yes, Lucjan talks to me.

Ranger stretched out his legs.

– I'm drunk, he said.

He leaned his head on Jean's shoulder.

– What if, Ranger said, the most important, the most meaningful, the most intimate moment of your life was also the most important, the most intimate moment for hundreds of thousands of others? Any man who's lived through a battle, the bombing of a city, a siege, has shared the same private moment with thousands of others. People pretend that's a brotherhood. But what belongs to you? Nothing. Not even the most important moment of your life is your own. Okay, so we understand this. But what about what happens between a man and a woman in the dark, in privacy, in bed? I say there's nothing intimate about that either. You hold her hand in the street, everyone knows what you do at night. You have a child, everyone knows what you did together.

Jean was silent. She felt the damp weight of Ranger's head against her, a terrible sadness. Then she said, in a gentle voice, Do you mean to say that all women and men are alike, that one woman is exactly like another? Or do you mean to tell me that Lucjan has had many women? If so, don't worry, he's told me himself.

– And what do details matter? continued Ranger. Her father, his father, her mother, his mother, the deprived childhood, the happy childhood … Even the particulars of our bodies – at the moment of passion, at that precise moment, she is any body, any body will do.

– Have you never been in love?

– Of course I have. I'm seventy-four years old. But the experience of love – what you feel – it's always the same, no matter who the object of that love is.

Lucjan came with Jean's drink.

– Jean, is he scaring you? Ranger, I wish you wouldn't – that's my job.

Ranger bowed his head and held out his hand for Jean's glass.

– No, said Lucjan quietly. Language is only approximate; it's violence that's precise.

– No, said Ranger, raising his voice. Violence is a howl – the ultimate howl – inarticulate.

– No, said Lucjan. Violence is precise, always exactly to the point.

– It's just a philosophical argument, said Ranger. Have a drink.

– Are you mad? shouted Lucjan.

Lucjan took hold of Ranger's shoulders and was about to shake him. But he looked at Ranger's hopeless face and kissed him on top of the head instead.

– You make me sick, said Lucjan.

– Me too, said Ranger.

Suddenly Ranger turned to Jean.

– Fresh blood, said Ewa, nudging Lucjan.

– What do you say, Jean? You're my last chance.

– I have to think about it.

– Ha, said Ranger.

– No, she means it, said Lucjan.

So they gave her ten minutes' peace. Jean left the din of the party and wandered upstairs to the children's room and sat on a small bed.

Beside her on a little table was a box brimming with metal bottlecaps. There was a stuffed cat and a drawing of a heart with wings floating over the ocean. The heart also had an anchor chain that disappeared into the waves. It made her head ache to think about it.

Violence is a form of speech. Violence is a form of speechlessness. Of course it is.

– You still want to believe in something, said Ranger. You still think there are such qualities as selflessness, or neighbourliness, or even disinterest. You still think someone will step forward with a plan! You still believe a man's beautiful books or beautiful songs are written out of love and not a way to brag of all the women he's had. You still think that love is a blessing and not a disaster. You still believe in a sacred bond sealed during a night of soul-searching love, in tastes, scars, maps, a woman's voice singing of love, the hot kiss of whisky between her legs, a sax solo played by an old Pole in a sweater with a voice like a mistake. You still believe a man will join his life with a woman after a single night. You still believe a man will dream about one woman for the rest of his life. I believe in taking what I want until there is nothing left. I believe in sleeping with a woman for what she can teach you. I believe in the loyalty among men who know they will slip away from the others the first better chance they get. I believe you can only trust someone who has lost everything, who believes in nothing but self-interest. But you, he said, waving his hand across all assembled in Ewa and Paweł's living room, still step into the street with the possibility that something good might happen. You still believe you will be loved, truly loved, past all frailty and misjudgment and betrayal. I've seen a man say goodbye to his wife with a look of such penetrating trust between them you could smell the breakfasts and promises, the sitting up with the sick child, the love-making after the child has fallen asleep, the candy smell of the children's medicine still sticky on their hands – and then that same man drives straight from that bedroom to his lover, who opens her legs like a hallelujah while the wife scrubs the pots from last night's dinner and then sits down at the kitchen table and pays the bills. As soon as a war is over we revive the propaganda of peace – that men do terrible things in extremity, that men are heroic out of nobility of soul rather than out of fear or out of one kind of duty or another, or simply by accident. Men honour promises out of fear – the fear of crossing a line that will rip up their lives. Then we call this fear love or fidelity, or religion or loyalty to principles. There's garbage floating even in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from any land. Men shoot chemicals into a human corpse and put it on display and no one arrests them! When you take away the human body's right to rot into the earth or go into the air, you take away the last holiness. Do you understand me? The last holiness. People picnicked in the ruins. Poles stepped over dead Jews in the street on their way to lunch. We were afraid to open a suitcase in the rubble because it might contain a dead child, the infant a mother carried, the suitcase banging against her legs, all the way from Łódź to Poznań to Kraków to Warsaw, waiting to die herself. Children betrayed their parents to the state. Two filthy words: military occupation.

Ranger stood. Lucjan moved to take his arm and Ranger swerved from his grasp.

– I'm not as drunk as you think.

Ranger picked up his jacket and left.

Ewa began to collect the ashtrays and empty them into the bin. No one said a word. Jean looked at Lucjan, who looked away with a shrug.

– I'm going to bed, said Ewa, climbing the stairs. Throw yourselves out.

Jean took off everything, then pulled Lucjan's sweater over her head; the sleeves hung down to her knees. The wool carried his embrace and his shape. Then she cooked only in the small light of the stove, working alone in the dim kitchen. She would cook something that required slow, long heat, the flavours intensifying. She smelled the herbs on her fingers, his smell in her hair, the eucalyptus scent of her own skin. She watched the kale and onions and mushrooms turn soft and shrink with the heat. Love permeates everything, the world is saturated with it, or is emptied of it. Always this beautiful or this bereft. She crushed the rosemary between her palms, then drew her hands over his sweater so later he would find it. Everything one's body had been – the pockets of shame, of strange pride, scars hidden or known. And then the self that is born only in another's touch – every tip of pleasure, of power and weakness, every crease of doubt and humiliation, every pitiful hope no matter how small.

It was an early Sunday evening in January, snow at the windows. Jean carried a tray with Paweł's Jamaican coffee and thick slices of brown bread, a pot of jam with a spoon sticking out of it. Lucjan was lying on the bed with a book over his face.

– Talk to me, Janina. Tell me about a Sunday you've had, he said from under the book.

Jean poured and set the cup on the floor beside him.

She thought of Avery, a sudden, burning homesickness. What they knew together: black earth and stone trees, swathing forest, a glimpse of stars. The grasses of Kintyre swaying above their heads in a sea of air. Collecting stones from the hard winter sand and building houses from them, the largest up to her waist, the smallest in the middle of the square kitchen table in the cottage they'd rented in this Scotland they loved, their great gasp of cold wind before the heat of the desert. The blankets heaped on the bed, so heavy they could barely roll over in their perfect sleep together. No use to ask Avery if he remembered. She knew he remembered.

– One Sunday, said Jean slowly, an archaeologist suddenly appeared on our houseboat. He was hunting for Canadians; he was from Toronto and was feeling melancholy, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to sit with him on the Nile on a Sunday evening listening to him describe a concert he'd heard by Segovia at Massey Hall.

At Faras, continued Jean, there were archaeologists from Warsaw, and a huge Soviet camp at the dam. Sometimes we saw them at the market in Wadi Halfa. The Russians especially looked bereft. They sat in the shade of the coffee stalls smoking and whistling songs by Yves Montand. The desert was filled with foreigners – from Argentina, Spain, Scandinavia, Mexico, France – and there was brisk trade in the small bitter cigarettes of each country. And wherever the archaeologists were working, the Bedouin shadowed the sites, watching and waiting just off in the distance, never approaching.

– Wait a moment, said Lucjan.

He jumped out of bed and she watched as he moved through the dusk, down the steep stairs and into the kitchen. For a moment the light of the fridge touched the ceiling, then darkness again.

She heard him, scrabbling about trying to feel his way through a stack of record albums. Then a man's voice floated upstairs.

Lucjan stood at the top of the staircase, remembering.

– Yves Montand … There was a time in Warsaw, said Lucjan, when, from every open window, you could hear ‘C'est à l'Aube’ or ‘Les Grands Boulevards’ or ‘Les Feuilles Mortes’ in the street. When Montand sang at the Palace of Culture, thirty-five hundred people listened. Fifteen minutes after he left the stage, people were still shouting for encores. The bureaucracy did not object because Montand was a man of the people; he was the man who stood up and gave a spontaneous concert for eight thousand workers at the Ukhachov auto plant. Khrushchev knew Montand filled every seat in the eighteen-thousand-seat Uljniki Stadium. But in Warsaw, we liked him even despite these things; it was partly because he was singing in a language that was not the language in which we bartered for food or fought over a soup bone, or swore at our mechanic, or begged for a cigarette from the man standing next to us in the prison yard. His language was unpolluted by that ‘h’ in Khatyn, that drop of tainted blood that poisons the whole body. And we liked him even more when he spoke his mind about the squashing of Hungary: ‘I continue to hope, I cease to believe.’ When the Soviets went into Czechoslovakia, he told a reporter: ‘When things stink we have to say so.’ That last commentary was the final straw – overnight, Montand was banned. From the moment the words were out of his mouth, we had to hide our LPs and pretend we'd never heard of him – of Montand! – who up to a minute before was selling by the millions. And that's why my friend Ostap, who'd just woken up from a bender, dis appeared and was never seen again – because he was absent-mindedly humming ‘Quand Tu Dors’ while he was walking down the street. These rules always change overnight and too bad if you're a heavy sleeper. This is just the way the map changes; like a man who decides to part his hair differently one morning: suddenly Mittel Europe is Eastern Europe. Even Mr. Snow respects Montand and the Dogs won't touch him. They listen to his songs and never mutilate them.