The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels

I said I can't paint flowers, they won't look real. ‘But you're a good painter, you're already much better than me. It will be lovely – does it have to look real?’ In those days I felt ferociously, that yes, it must look real. Then she held out the wildflowers and that's when something happened to me. I suddenly knew what I must do: not to paint the flowers, but the hand holding the flowers.
    And so for weeks I drew and then painted the old woman's hands.
    It was only when I'd heard she'd died that I understood that what I'd really wanted to do was to paint my mother's hands. Hands that I could not remember ever having looked at carefully, hands that I could not remember.
    Some time after that day, I had a dream that I put cut flowers into a vase of water, and when I took them out of the vase, they had earth clinging to their roots.
    While Avery was away, Jean began to spend her time at the marsh. She attended classes in Toronto, then drove the short hour to Marina's, each time grateful for the pleasure of driving toward a place where she would be welcomed. Often they spent the day walking the entire width of the marsh or its circumference, Marina stopping to sketch a detail of the fields, or of branch and sky that Jean would later recognize in Marina's work. They bought milk and bread from the neighbouring farm, and were invited in for coffee, an invitation Marina almost always declined. “It's just politeness on their part,” Marina explained, “and it's politeness to refuse.”
    One evening, after a winter walk along the canal, which was still flowing, an erratic line in the snow, they sat warming their feet at the fire in the kitchen.
    – This will interest you, said Marina. I read in the newspaper that there's a movement in Germany to expel the rhododendron and the forsythia, to rip them out of every public and private garden, because they are not indigenous and are therefore a threat to ‘pure German soil.’
    The newspaper said that the cherry came to Europe from Asia Minor and has probably been growing in Germany for more than fifteen hundred years, and that the potato came from Peru. Do you think the rhododendron-haters will give up potatoes in their stew? A German birth certificate will be forged for them, you can be certain.
    When I went to England and left my family behind in Amsterdam, my mother wrote to me every week. Her letters were like little pamphlets, filled with bits of information according to her interests and her indignations. I loved those letters. To this very moment I cannot believe I took leave of her on the platform of the Centraal station so carelessly, with such a youthful disdain of fate. I thought I had all the time in the world to return to her, but it was the last time I would ever see her face or be held by her. Marina wiped her eyes on her smock and sat down at the table.
    – Daughters don't stop crying for their mothers, Marina said, and I had ten more years with mine than you had with yours. We long for our mothers more, not less. Suddenly she jumped up and rushed to the oven. The seed biscuits had shrivelled to charcoal. She opened the window and the winter air filled the kitchen.
    – It's like a spell, said Marina. Nothing eats away time like the past.
    The rhododendrons reminded me that, just before the war, my mother who, like you, also loved flowers, wrote to me in a fury about a professor who connected ‘primitive’ vegetation and ‘primitive’ man. One of his examples was ‘tundra man,’ where the human species, he said, had clearly stagnated at an earlier stage of evolution. The only legitimate German garden, he said, was ‘the blood-and-soil rooted garden,’ ‘der Blut-und-Bodenverbundene Garten.’ I tell you all this for a reason. During the war, there were strict ‘landscape rules,’ enforced in all the occupied territories, especially in Poland. Not only were ‘foreigners’ to be expelled – including the Poles themselves – but also the soil had