‘That is the risk of sculpting, my friend, the risk of carving. Is there anything riskier? You risk making a mistake and breaking the stone. You risk people not liking your carving. You risk someone destroying what you create. You take those risks.’
‘Pah! Your head is in the sand, old man!’
I throw down my chisel.
*
All those people I’ve accosted about Islam – the factory hands I’ve stood beside in production lines in the cities that cling to the Great Lakes, my drinking buddies, the old men on park benches, the buskers pausing between songs to tune their guitars, the mothers with their children on overnight Greyhound buses, Gianni, Antonio – all of them must finally understand. He isn’t mad after all, they’ll say, remembering me, shaking their heads at themselves, wishing they’d listened. Each of those Muslims I’ve confronted in the street or the aisles of supermarkets will know now the reason for my wrath – will understand it was my duty – that there is something rotten in their faith that needs rooting out, defeating.
*
Em writes, begging me to come home.
‘It’s too dangerous,’ she pleads.
But there is nowhere I’d prefer to be.
*
Us or them, the president says. There is no need. We’ve already come together in a great sigh of relief now that we’ve found the cause for everything we’ve sensed was fracturing around us.
*
I start skipping the workshop, become unreliable, spend whole days instead in the great library reading the newspapers, a country-full of Bugles and Posts and Standards. In the first week alone bricks and stones are thrown through windows of Islamic Centers in Starkville and Tidewater and Lexington, a Molotov cocktail is hurled at the Denton mosque, a pick-up driven into the one at Tallahassee. USA and no forgiveness and terrorist are painted in bright red letters outside the homes of imams across the country. In Greater Toledo the stained glass window of the Islamic Center with its God is Great lettering is smashed by a bullet. My soaring heart, this strange elation. In bar after Washington bar I quote the verses of the Qur’an I’ve memorised, turning my trick into an endless supply of drinks.
*
Still, I wake at night in my caravan, trembling. Because the agitation of Allahu Akbar in my blood remains. I wake from heavy dreams come back to torment me despite everything: all the years and all the miles, my late apprenticeship, the planes, these heady months of Islam bared. Despite it all, the nightmare of spilt blood returns, of Sophe and Jack. Of me turning and fleeing. Look, see, remember. The Beards are my companions still.
And yet, and yet.
ELEVEN
‘You come back or what?’
It’s been a full week this time since I was last at the workshop. Antonio finds me with Gianni in his lounge room. He is exasperated but I don’t answer. It is midmorning and the sun is shining thinly through the curtained windows. It will not strengthen, I know that by now. Winter has fallen, fast and hard. Sometimes I sleep on the sofa in front of the flickering television screen because it is warmer than in the caravan, and Gianni goes to bed early most nights.
The brothers greet each other with kisses on their cheeks. Gianni points to the television. There are street protests in Rome against the war the American president has started in Afghanistan and Gianni leans forward, reading aloud the protesters’ placards, first in Italian then translating them into English for my benefit. He shakes his fist towards the screen, and his face reddens.
‘They are foolish. They do not understand.’
He is old.
Antonio watches with us in silence for fifteen minutes, before turning to me.
‘What you think you do, Bas?’ he tries again.
Even now the glue is dissolving. More slowly here than elsewhere, but the intensity fades with each passing month. Our memories are short and we are easily distracted. I’ve been down to the rallies to try to understand: much of the anger and the hatred now looks contrived. The footage of the planes and the towers is no longer shown. The War On Terror, the Department of Homeland Security, the Rules of Engagement, Enemy Combatants and Enemy Non-Combatants – the voice of each new government spokesman grows more hollow.
‘It’s a clash of civilisations, Antonio.’
Metal barricades hold the crowd of demonstrators from spilling onto the cobbled streets as politicians’ cars make their way to the Palazzo Montecitorio to debate Italy’s involvement in the war.
‘So they say.’
‘We fight or die.’
The sweet inevitability of that simple proposition.
‘You a sculptor or you a soldier, Bas?’
‘We’re all soldiers now, Antonio. In one way or another.’
Gianni asks Antonio over his shoulder if he wants a coffee, but then forgets he’s asked as we watch a young woman swing her leg over the barricade.
‘No, Bas. Is not true. You know it is not true. Your own brother.’
Ah, Jack. How close Jack is. Jack who turned his back.
‘Does it matter any more, Antonio?’ I say.
‘You decide, my friend, you decide. But hurry. Tomorrow. You tell me. I need a carver.’
TWELVE
The night before he left, after our father had gone to bed, Jack was examining the posters on my walls, all the sculptures I might one day carve. How knowing and comfortable Jack was in that silence, how unbearable it was for me.
‘So when’re you off?’ I asked, to draw him away from my dreams and vulnerabilities.
‘Three weeks.’
‘So, Africa,’ I said as he gazed at a large photo of the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Did he see more in that one inspection than I had in all my months of contemplation?
‘You got it,’ he said, intent on the marble goddess: the great span of her wings, the detail of each feather, her thrusting breast, the flesh beneath the seaspray-pressed robes, her bared thigh.
‘What happened to her?’
‘She was lost for two thousand years before they found her, half-buried, on a Greek island. Her arms came off when they shipped her to France, but no one knows what happened to her head.’
‘What do you think she looked like, Bas? Her face?’
‘I don’t think about it. It doesn’t matter. She’s perfect as she is. Trying to imagine her features would ruin her.’
He turned to look at me.
‘What have you been thinking about then, Bas?’
That question of his. But I didn’t answer, just sat there dumbly, my heart running on and on and on.
‘Come on then,’ Jack said eventually, ‘let’s have a shot.’
As we left the house he took the air rifle our father gave him one birthday from its mount on the laundry wall and slipped a box of pellets into his pocket. We helped each other over the barbed-wire fence at the back of the yard, Jack parting the strands for me to climb through, then me for Jack, the barbs glinting in the moonlight.
On the other side of the fence was the paddock of anthills, rising from the earth one after another, high as a man, like sentinels guarding the forest and the sandstone ridges beyond. There must have been a hundred of them – all those abandoned towers and their inhabitants disappeared, never to return, as if an entire civilisation had vanished and forsaken its monuments.
Jack picked up a can we’d left on the ground last time we were out there, and placed it on top of one of the mounds. At forty paces we stopped, and turned. I hadn’t fired a shot since before Jack left home for the army, and pellet after pellet thudded into the compacted earth, or flew off into the night. I handed him back the gun. It must have been strange for him, I thought, after all the army’s sophisticated weaponry. It took him a few shots till he got his range, worked out the corrections he’d need to make.
‘So, Bas,
’ he said after he’d nailed three in a row and I’d reset the can for him each time, ‘what do you want to do with yourself then?’
‘Sculpt.’ I said it aloud, tentatively.
‘Sculpt?’
‘Yeah.’
From somewhere in the forest a mopoke sounded. Oom Oom Oom Oom Oom. I used to think they were owls when I was a kid. Until Jack set me straight.
‘Sculpt?’ Jack asked again.
‘Yep,’ I said. I would hold. I had to.
‘Bas,’ Jack replied, sighing, ‘you’ve got to get out of here.’
‘Huh?’
‘There’s nothing here for you, Bas. Absolutely nothing. It’ll swallow you in the end. You’ve got to leave, Bas. My brotherly advice to you – leave.’
The shock – realising then he would not be coming back. That my father’s hopes for Jack and the quarry were doomed. Jack was turning his back on us, maybe forever.
‘There’s no life here, Bas. No one can survive it.’
*
I lie on my bunk in the caravan. The curtains gust coldly and a sharp beam of light from the house next door wakes me. I shudder from the chill and sit up to close the window. My statuette of Sophe on the shelf above my head is illuminated by the sudden light. My angel.
The Beards could not have been immune to her beauty, I think, and the thought startles me. Even they must have recognised it: Sophe’s soft skin, the line of her throat, her sweeping hair and the perfection of her face. Her natural gracefulness. If anyone was God’s messenger, it was Sophe. The Beards must have known that, must have. Yet still they sacrificed her.
THIRTEEN
‘You come back?’
‘Yes, Antonio, I am back. And I am sorry, if I . . . let you down.’
‘Is OK.’ He looks at me, those steady eyes of his which have seen so much. ‘Here at the cathedral, the sculptor is the creator, not the carver. But we carvers also give life. Long life. You know, the sculptor create with his clay. And then when he make his plaster cast – that is the death. And the carving . . . my work . . .’
Antonio lays his hand on the piece before him.
‘. . . that is the resurrection.’
He smiles.
‘You see, I am in the resurrection business.’
I show him my palms, then touch my breast and my forehead as I speak, the words strange on my tongue. ‘I want to try again, Antonio. Please.’
He sighs.
‘You want tea?’
I shake my head, but he puts on a pot, and when he asks a second time as he’s pouring one for himself I accept.
‘My father,’ he says, ‘did both. He sculpt the clay and then he carve the marble.’
‘Your father taught you to carve?’
I feel my failure, that I have not asked him this before.
‘And his father taught him. Seven generations. We lived near the Carrara quarries – you know? We carved the same marble Michelangelo did. My grandfather had a studio on the corso in our village. I went back not so long ago. The building is still there. Is not a studio no more, but I knew. I could tell. I look through the window and imagine what it was like. My grandfather . . . my father . . . all those carvers . . . all that marble.’
‘But . . . you came to America?’
‘My father, he followed the stone. My brother too. The stone yards in New York were filled with Italians! After that they needed stone carvers and cutters down here – you been to the Capitol?’
I shake my head.
‘My father is there. Everywhere. He carved the pediments above the House, all the figures, all the stories there. He carved the goddess of peace with the boy at her feet. The boy has a flame in his hands. You think you might burn yourself! See the olive tree behind the goddess. My father’s friends told me you want to eat the olives!’
I return Antonio’s smile.
‘He once carve a memorial for a little girl who drown in the river: a cloud of butterflies and a bell with a tiny clapper at the end of a chain. A miracle! It moves if you touch it, like a real bell.’
‘And your brother?’
‘You know him. You tell me.’
I think of Gianni’s bent shoulders and his paunch and his silent mourning for his wife. I shake my head.
‘He was good too, and he and I – we work here at the cathedral together. But the stone did not speak to him. Not like our father.’
He is silent.
‘You hear the stone, Bas?’
‘I just want a block to sculpt.’
Antonio fixes his cap on his head and stands.
‘Come with me.’
He leads me out through the door on the other side of the workshop into the stone yard where sometimes I go to smoke. It is filled with blocks of limestone, some already cut and waiting to be lifted onto Antonio’s bench inside. There are finished carvings too: a finial, some gargoyles, a cherub or two. Other flawed blocks have been abandoned after only a few chisel strokes. Clouds of breath follow Antonio as he moves between the rows, running his fingers along the winter stone.
‘Here,’ he calls out from the farthest corner of the yard. Our breath mingles in the air when I join him, our shoulders almost touching. Before us is a large piece, a metre and a half high, stained from the weather.
‘He is good. He is sweet,’ Antonio says. ‘You take him.’
FOURTEEN
To care for someone like this, casting breath into stone for them. The solace of it. Laying bare her head and shoulders with my point chisel, her breasts beneath her robes, her waist. Constantly brushing the chips away. Moving closer with a claw chisel, nearer still with a flat. Each evening when my work for Antonio is done I carve until I am spent.
She is constant. The redeeming stone remains firm.
During the day I force myself to produce wreaths, to be attentive to Antonio and the roughing out that must be done, setting and resetting the pointing machine, and marking the pieces for Antonio to take up and finish off. He senses my distraction and keeps me busier than before. I sweep the floor three and four times a day, freshen the chisels for him, and in the long hours am sent away from the workshop on dubious errands – to pass messages to the dean, or buy small orders of materials, or guide lorries with their fresh blocks to the back gate of the stone yard.
When I am in the workshop I cannot concentrate. This new presence in the room, standing alone on her bench, a white sheet draped over her. There is change, a new shape to the room, new emotion. When I whisper to myself, the answers are different. There is a new spirit with us. Does Antonio feel the change too?
The banter between Antonio and me. All our easy cups of tea, our shared bread and meat. His voice, and his singing. And in the open windows, a sparrow on the sill. My coursing blood. I think he is right. That it is a terrible thing to carve angry. That anger may become trapped in the stone. I cannot do that to Sophe.
To begin, I light a candle at the end of the day and honour her in the softness. Her veil is pulled back from her head and rests on her shoulders, and her hair flows from her forehead in waves. She allows me to tuck loose strands behind her ear. Her skin glows. In answer to my whispers, she smiles. We are sitting on a patterned carpet and the winds puff against the tent-flaps, then suck them out again. A child’s hand appears in the doorway. Then another, and another. A dozen small palms with fingers stretched out, their bodies hidden from us behind the canvas wall. The hands wave and their fingers wiggle – Sophe laughs and so do I, and the laughter brings out the hiding children who spill into the tent, rolling over each other towards us, all arms and legs and joy.
*
The dean enters the workshop unexpectedly one afternoon to speak with Antonio about the cathedral’s sculptures.
‘What is this?’ he asks when he sees my covered stone.
‘It is mine, Dean.’
‘And what is it?’
‘I work on it at night. After I have finished my work here. Not during the day.’
He waves me away and lifts the sheet. My heart startles.
‘Who is she?’
‘An angel.’
‘I can see that.’ He bends close, but not touching. ‘She is really yours?’ the dean says, facing me.
‘Yes.’
He turns to Antonio.
‘Is it you who teach him, Mr Vasari?’
‘He sculpt before, Dean.’
The dean replaces the sheet.
‘Why don’t you give him whatever time he needs, Mr Vasari?’
*
Antonio and I work together in that space, each on our own pieces, the sounds of our chisels and hammers conversing. My agitation seems to fall away. Slowly – imperceptibly – the Beards cease their crowding, stop trying to inhabit the space between my chisel strokes, step back.
Late one morning I look up from Sophe. Antonio’s tools have been silent too long and he is leaning heavily on his banker, as if his arm is holding all his weight. When I reach him, sweat is pouring off his forehead, great beads of it, more than the morning’s exertion.
‘Here, old man,’ I say softly and bring a chair across for him, ‘sit.’
His skin burns. I fetch him a glass of water which he sips, though even raising it to his lips is an effort.
‘How do you feel?’
‘I come down with something,’ he murmurs.
He is shaking by the time Gianni collects him.
*
Antonio was working to a deadline, an unveiling the dean has already announced for next month. I take up his hammer. Feel its weight. Feel the way Antonio’s hand has shaped the handle to itself over the years, feel him in it. At Antonio’s bench is the saint he left, the holy man’s bare legs and unfinished sandalled feet. Tentatively, ever so tentatively, I set Sophe aside and begin.
I report to Antonio in the evenings at his bedside. Gianni nurses him in the spare room at his house. The virus is a nasty strain of flu, but Antonio is strong. Gianni lays cool, damp facecloths on his forehead. Picks the blankets off the floor when he kicks them away in delirium, folding them neatly until his brother begins once again to shiver. I tell Antonio not to worry, that I will finish his piece in time. He nods, though in his illness he does not seem to understand.
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