The Winter Vault Read Free Page B

father believed this was the most unjustly neglected technology of the century, and we were continually thinking up new uses for pneumatic tube systems – it was a game he started with me in his letters during the war and we never stopped playing it. He drew maps of London criss-crossed with hundreds of miles of underground pneumatics – little trains of capsule-cars for public transportation; groceries delivered direct from shops to private residences, swooshed right into the kitchen icebox; flowers shot directly from the florist into the vase on one's piano; delivery of medicines to hospitals and convalescent homes; pneumatic school buses, pneumatic amusement rides, pneumatically operated brass bands …
    My father was a splendid draughtsman, Avery continued. I have never known anyone who could draw machinery as he did. He pushed aside his plate at the supper table and I'd watch him sketch inner workings with fine clear lines. Suddenly the paper came alive and each part took its place in a moving, working mechanism.
    It was over a draughtsman's drawing that my parents met. My mother was sitting across from him on a train. He had a drawing tablet open across his bony knees and she praised his work. Avery sat up in their bed below deck, very straight, and jostled against Jean as if they were in a railway compartment. ‘… Thank you,’ said my father, ‘though I must tell you, it's not the human circulatory system, it's a high-pressure vacuum engine. Though perhaps,’ he added politely, ‘it seems like a heart when viewed upside down.’ He turned the drawing around and looked. ‘Yes, I see,’ he said. ‘And now so do I,’ said my mother. ‘It's beautiful,’ she added. ‘Yes,’ said my father, ‘a well-designed engine is a thing of exceptional beauty.’ My mother reports that he then examined her more closely, searched her face. ‘Well, yes,’ said my mother, ‘but what I mean is the drawing itself, the pressures and flow of the pencil.’ ‘Ah,’ said my father, blushing. ‘Thank you.’
    – Wait! said Jean, to whom one of the great, unexpected pleasures of her marriage was this free speech before sleep. Did your father really blush?
    – Oh, yes, said Avery. My father was a mechanism for blushing.

    The palm tree, Jean discovered, bears two fruits – not only dates, but also shade. Everywhere in Nubia they are tended, but in Argin and Dibeira, in Ashkeit and Degheim, the date palms grow so thick along the banks of the river that the Nile disappears. The shade there is green and the wind makes a fan of the entire tree. Even the south wind gathers there to cool itself among the leaves of the crown.
    The Bartamouda palm gives the sweetest fruit, pouches bursting with brown liqueur, plump flesh with a tiny stone, which the tongue finds like a woman's jewel as the sweetness fills one's mouth. Gondeila dates, by far the largest but less sweet, just right for syrup. The Barakawi, barely sweet at all and therefore somehow more satisfying to eat by the handful. And the Gaw, thin flesh barely covering its bulbous stone, perfectly adequate for vinegar and araki gin.
    More than half the palm trees in the Wadi Halfa district were Gaw, immense huras , ancient groves growing around a single mother, reproducing for generations. At pollination time, the Nubians climbed, the graceful trunk between their legs, and cut the male flower in the bud. Then the buds were ground to powder and small amounts were wrapped in a twist of paper. As each female flower opened, the climber would again ascend, his cap brimming with paper twists of pollen that would be broken over the open flowers. Any flowers left unpollinated grew a tiny date, a little fish, sis , and were fed to the animals.
    When Jean and Avery first arrived in Egypt, the dates were still green, but soon the fruit drooped in heavy yellow-and-crimson clusters. By August the crop had grown dark and wrinkled with ripeness and then grew darker still. When at last the