Tilman was vaguely insulted, though he knew what the man was saying was true. At least when it came to stone. “Can you carve wood?” Tilman asked the tall man with what Allward correctly identified as impertinence.
Allward liked impertinence. “I’ve never had the desire to,” he said. As he walked away, his long dark coat flapping in the wind, he pointed toward a triangular-shaped wall that flanked a staircase on the east side of the base.
“Over there,” he called without turning around. “The Italians will show you what to do.”
As Tilman walked slowly back to the hut to rescue Klara, there came over him a strong desire to bolt. Shields, crosses. The work would take a long time and would, in the end, mean little to him. Moreover, he was anxious because of his sister’s disguise, which he knew would be close to impossible to maintain forever. But his own disguise as a dependable worker would be even more difficult to perpetuate. There were roads everywhere—some he could see from up here on the ridge—and around him were a number of tempting horses, had he only known how to ride them. Vehicles too, trucks, delivery vans, often stood purring nearby, their operators having briefly abandoned them to complete another task. It would be simple to climb into one of them, drive away. Then, as he rounded the east corner of the monument, he saw his sister leave the hut, walk a few paces beyond it, and lift her face to look at the pylons. From this distance he couldn’t read her expression, but everything in her posture suggested awe, as if her small body had already been transformed, redeemed by the experience of arriving at this destination. He was strangely and tenderly affected by this, and he knew then that he would stay, stay as long as he possibly could.
Klara slept in a dormitory Quonset hut in a bunk next to Tilman. Fifteen other workers shared the space and filled the air at night with muttering and snoring, the waking hours with a cacophony of Italian sounds Klara couldn’t understand. Often they could be heard singing when they returned from the mess hall or from the showers, and many of them stood unashamedly naked by their beds while sorting out the jumble of their morning clothing. Klara’s sole knowledge of the male body had come to her as a result of learning Eamon, a pale-skinned, beautifully formed boy with a clear chest and a flat stomach. Now she saw everything that in the past she had only measured for suit jackets, and she saw much more besides: men with enormous pot-bellies and hair covering all of their bodies, and younger men, powerfully but thickly built. They were wonderfully unselfconscious lumbering about the room like large, friendly animals, often delivering long Italian speeches to the man they thought she was. Though they knew he didn’t understand, and couldn’t reply even if he did, Klara suspected it was their way of telling her—or him—that they knew he was different in significant ways and that they had accepted these differences. They were physically affectionate with each other in a way that women would likely never be. Klara admired this. There was a peculiar smell to the place as well that eventually she came to savour, something to do with sweat and dirty socks, these things and a kind of acid sweetness that she recalled from Charolais.
Tilman’s friend, Giorgio, slept in a much smaller hut next door with the two other carvers who worked in the elevated atelier at the top of the pylon. Klara was grateful for this as she wanted, for the purposes of maintaining her disguise, no further intimacy with this friend of Tilman. There were occasions during the progress of the work when she was convinced that one or another of the men was examining her delicate, hairless hands with too much curiosity or was glancing far too often in the direction of her chest. And once or twice she caught herself just on the edge of saying something out loud. Her nightmares included scenes where she would find herself entirely undressed in the studio full of men. Tilman, sensing her anxiety, and acutely aware of his own, had tried to persuade her that they should tell Giorgio who she really was, confess her gender. He is entirely trustworthy, he had explained, and he would look out for her if he knew, would help them keep her secret. But she hadn’t liked the idea, and said she wanted to be treated the same as everyone else.
“How can you be like everyone else,” Tilman had argued, “when you have to whisper all the time?”
But she wouldn’t be convinced, so remained quiet and discrete when working, whispering a word or a sentence only when a question was put to her directly, and keeping her back turned and her head lowered as much as possible. Oddly, without words, she began to open more to the perceived world. As if even the pores of her skin had enlarged in order to drink light, she began to retain in startling detail the visual images around her. The way the sinews on the men’s hands moved when they held a carving tool, the concentration lines around their eyes when they squinted at the development of form in stone. How the men hovered in front of a line of chisels perfectly arranged on a table in order of ascending scale. And how, once they had made their choice they never changed their mind. Sandro, Alfredo, and Giorgio, the musical sound of their names in a wind-rocked room.
They were finishing the figure at the top of the monument, a female allegory of peace, her back arched against the top of the pylon, her head thrown back as if she were succumbing to an invisible embrace, the laurel branch like a stone fountain in her raised hand. She was clothed only from the hips down, one leg emerging from the drapery; her upper torso was naked. Full breasts, the horizontal ladder of her ribs, and wonderfully formed shoulders and arms.
The men clearly adored her, referred to her as the bella donna. Each morning Sandro would take off his cap and greet the stone woman, whom he said that he knew well since it was he who had carved her features and expression. But the other men spoke quietly to her as well, glancing at her white face now and then while they sculpted her body. All day long she was invented and reinvented, changing under the chisels, which Klara handed up to the carvers, and under the altering angles of the light.
As the weeks passed Giorgio instructed Klara, explaining the use of chisels, rasps, and claws so that eventually she knew automatically which size the men might need, could sense by their posture and gestures when they required a change of gauge. He showed her how to use the pumice to polish finished limbs, always speaking slowly and patiently.
One day, shortly after the carvers began to work on the recently arrived angels, Klara whispered to Giorgio that she knew a bit about chisels from woodcarving.
“Like Tilman,” he said. “You had a grandfather who was wonderful, I understand.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “He taught us when we were quite small children. He had high hopes for Tilman. But after he disappeared …”
“Your brother finds it hard to stick,” Giorgio said. They had pulled the canvas aside and were sitting at the front door of the studio, thoughtfully chewing on the baguettes they were given for lunch, their legs swinging over emptiness. It was a cold, clear day in early March. They could see as far as Arras. “Sometimes he even ran away from us, his adopted family. But we all knew he would come back. And he was pretty good about jobs, the one at the stoveworks, and even when we were with Juliani.” Giorgio exchanged a wave with someone on the ground, then turned back to the person he knew as Karl. “How long do you think he’ll stay here?” he asked.
“I hope he’ll stay,” whispered Klara, not really answering the question. “I hope so.”
“Well, I’ll be here, anyway,” said Giorgio, sensing by the way this small man kept his features mostly shadowed by his cap that his companion was shy and reticent. Giorgio laughed now and made some kind of uninterpretable male gesture to his friend below.
Klara turned to look at him, to study his rectangular-shaped face in profile, the prominent nose and generous mouth, his large arm resting on a strong thigh. She couldn’t remember ever coming to like someone this quickly, this fast. She almost touched his sleeve, the soft plaid flannel that emerged from his blue jacket, then remembered and pulled back.
He glanced at her suddenly, then grinned and scrambled to his feet, oddly light and agile for a man so large. “Back to work,” he said.
“Yes,” whispered Klara, “back to work.”
Later in the afternoon Giorgio asked her to work with him in the far corner of the studio, where he had begun to rough out the left wing of an angel. Klara was to fill a bucket with waste stone, then take it to the canvas door and lower it by a rope to the ground beneath. On one occasion, just before she was to proceed to the door with a full load, she amazed herself by asking Giorgio if he were married.
He tilted his puzzled face down toward her. Then he looked away and began to tap the chisel with the mallet.
“Do you have a wife?” she whispered. Giorgio was four rungs up on the ladder, working on the angel’s shoulder. From where she stood, Klara could see the smooth curve of his throat.
“I came close once, but it didn’t happen. Circumstances,” he said slowly. “First the war, then the Depression. How about you?”
“No,” she whispered. “No, not ever.” Klara moved away from him—away from the ladder—to fetch the broom and dustpan.
“Tilman never told me he had a brother. You are how old?” He did not look at her, concentrating instead on the way the surface of the neck unfurled at its base to allow for a collarbone, a breast.
“Thirty-nine.” Klara looked at the floor, stone chips and dust.
Giorgio threw his head back and laughed. “I’m forty-one,” he said. “We still have lots of time for women, you and I.” Klara laughed out loud.
Giorgio stared at her, surprised. He had never known what to make of this brother of Tilman.
Klara staggered a bit as the studio shuddered under a blast of wind. She feared she had briefly released her hidden womanhood simply by expressing her delight in the phrase of another. Frightened, she drew this woman sharply back into her self, but couldn’t pull back the scenario that was building in her imagination. She looked at her small hands, which to her embarrassment she could envisage undoing the buttons on her shirt in the presence of this man, although she couldn’t even remember the shape and weight of her own breasts.
Giorgio turned back toward the sculpture. Klara felt a kind of tense silence settle between them, and she decided from now on to remain as quiet as possible in his presence. But all day long, after this, while Giorgio and the other men chatted in Italian, Klara’s inner voice continued to speak to her brother’s friend. Do you see? she was saying to him in her mind, this looking inward unfamiliar in the wooden and canvas room. Do you understand?
She hadn’t dreamt of Eamon for a long, long time, but in recent nights he had been strolling through her dreams, looking angry and distant, as if he no longer wanted to know her. In the past she had often had such dreams, attributing them to the difficult way in which they had parted. Now that she was standing on the soil of the country whose air he had last breathed, in the vicinity of a memorial that would bear his name, the memory of Eamon often came painfully alive in her mind. How did he think about her in the end, with longing, with indifference, or with hatred? Or was there, by the time he died, a French or English girl on his mind, someone who had been kind to him? It was she who had felt abandoned, when in fact she had closed toward him, had sent him away without even touching his hand.
One morning after she’d had a dream in which Eamon behaved as if he had forgotten he had ever known her, Klara was told by Simson to help treat and polish the stone torchbearer that stood on the base of the monument between the pylons, directly behind the figure representing the spirit of sacrifice.
She had never been inside the lower studio, had no real idea of how the work there was progressing. But she remembered clearly the morning when the plasters for the lower grouping had arrived. She and the men she worked with had scrambled down from their eyrie to join the other workers gathered around the crate. It had been a miserable winter day, dry but overcast with a wind that cut through the blue cotton of their coats and overalls. A hundred yards or so from the place where the truck had stopped, some of the men had been busy digging a huge pit—it looked to her like a grave—where surplus blocks of marble were to be buried. Allward, she had come to know, always anticipated damage of one kind or another and wanted an excess of his treasured stone to be stored near the site for future repairs. But Klara remembered that for one brief, irrational moment she had thought that the figures inside the crates might be lowered into the ground rather than taken up to the monument. She also recalled an exquisitely rendered plaster arm, rivered with tendons and veins, holding a torch toward the sky, remembered finding herself running her hand gently across the neck of the torchbearer when she thought no one else was looking, then being admonished by Allward, himself, for this action. No one should touch the work any more than necessary, he had announced while Klara, her face flaming, stared at the pencilled instructions and mathematical calculations written in Allward’s hand on the pale plaster arm.
“Everyone’s being moved,” Tilman told her now, “except me. I am still to work on the back of the base.” Although his carving skills had turned out to be less questionable than Allward originally thought, Tilman was kept busy with decorative work: crosses and shields and, more recently, wreaths. This suited Tilman fine. He knew in any case he was mostly just putting in time, and besides, he had discovered for the first time in his life that he was interested in a paycheque, for Tilman had encountered in the restaurants of the town of Arras what he believed was going to be the love of his life.
Night after night as she lay in the bunk next to his, Klara would fall asleep listening to her brother telling her about the pleasures of eating French food. He would describe with great tenderness his experiences in the restaurant of the Hotel Picardie, when he first met Gratin de homard au porto or Truffe St-Hubert, or that particularly memorable evening when, quite by accident, he came to know Caneton de la belle époque in the company of Flan de Langoustines George V. He would also describe for her the tablecloths, the napkins, the large silver-plate spoons, and the elegant china edged in gold leaf, things that, in a thousand years, Klara would not have thought could have held his attention. It all proved a most soothing lullaby for Klara, the soft cadences of the French phrases: Écrevisses à la crème, Bouillabaisse Marseillaise, Grillades aux pommes soufflées, Poulet à la crème et à l’estragon …
“Everyone’s being relocated,” he said, “because there’s some big shot coming from Ottawa. Simson wants to have the lower figures, at least, completed by the time he gets here. Giorgio told me that the folks back home are getting impatient. It’s all taking too long, costing too much money.”
Klara was not sure she wanted to work elsewhere on the site. She had become comfortable with her co-workers, liked her surroundings.
“Giorgio’s being moved to the names … which is what he wanted,” Tilman was fussing with his prosthesis. “They’ve, so far, only made it to ‘H.’ But he’ll only be there half-days. They still want him upstairs, working on the angels.” He stood up now and smoothed his pant leg over the wooden limb. “I’m going into Arras for dinner tonight. Why don’t you come with me? I’ll treat.”
“No, no, that’s all right,” said Klara. On the one or two times she had dined with Tilman she had soon tired of trying to keep up with his rapacious appetite.
On a morning in late April, Klara, who had been assigned to the lower studio, walked through its soft doors to be confronted with the beautiful stone sculptures of the two young men: one, The Spirit of Sacrifice, languid against a plinth, caught at the edge of surrender to unconsciousness, death, or complete dematerialization; the other, strong, alive, holding a torch toward the sky. The light shining between the pylons and through the skylight of this lower studio touched the arms, shoulders, and chest of the torchbearer, while his fainting stone companion, placed on a lower level, sank into shadow and became, himself, almost a shade. A tangle of ladders and scaffolding disguised the lower bodies of both youths, but the torso of the upper figure could be seen above this, sun from the skylight pouring over his chest and stomach like honey.
Klara gasp
ed, let the canvas fall from her hand, and walked out onto the marble base of the monument, where she collapsed into a seated position, her head in her arms. She felt as though she might actually black out in the face of this radiance. She sat there for several minutes, swallowing air, attempting to focus. Then she pulled herself together, walked back through the studio door, moved behind the scaffolding, picked up the pumice, and, reaching through the scaffolding in a kind of trance, began to polish the torchbearer’s feet. When she finally climbed the ladder and permitted herself to look carefully at the half-finished face, she touched the neck, her fingers moving across it in the same way that they had, three months before, the morning the plaster had arrived. She would have to wait for the carver to complete the sculpture before she would be asked to polish the features.
When the work day was over, she walked away from the studio with an idea as a companion. No one could disturb her relationship with it, no one could break into the plan. When she found herself alone with Tilman outside the mess hall, she could hear him talking to her and she could hear the sound of her own replies, but she knew she wasn’t fully there, was answering mechanically. She had walked into an interior classroom, a dark school, where as if committing an act of robbery, she was gathering together for her own use everything she had seen the men do when they had chisels in their hands and all she remembered about the shape of her dead lover’s head, the features of his long-absent face.
“What do you do with everything that is cut away?” she asked Tilman, thinking now about the negative space of stone sculpture, the stone that is discarded, thinking too about how she had thrown away huge pieces of her own early life, how she had tried to dispose of the memory of Eamon.
The Stone Carvers Page 25