The Stone Carvers

by Jane Urquhart

  Tilman dug in his pockets and pulled out two marble shards that were shaped like the native arrowheads he had sometimes found in the fields after his father was finished with spring ploughing. “Some of the tourists, even ones who have lost family, friends, like to take away helmets, bullets,” he said. “I prefer a souvenir of the monument, rather than anything that reminds me of that mess. You can have one of them, if you like.”

  “Thanks,” said Klara, holding out her hand to receive the shards of stone. Then she walked away from him with the idea speaking in her mind and with the sharp piece of stone digging into the flesh of her palm.

  His sister had no real knowledge of what the return to Vimy had meant for Tilman. Among the throng that had gathered to work on the monument, he would be the only man who carried the battle in his mind, who carried the scars of the battle on his person, and from whom the battle had stolen flesh. The lower part of his leg had been abandoned somewhere in this landscape—the thigh being amputated later. Now that he was back at the site, Tilman thought he should be able to identify the shell hole, that he would somehow be drawn to the exact spot where the mud had swallowed his limb. But the terrain was so altered by the time he and Klara had arrived—Allward had rebuilt the ridge itself to enhance the shape of the memorial—that he was disoriented by grass, and saplings, roads, and tidy graveyards. He could never really believe that he was in the same place, even though after all this time the silent evidence of horror was everywhere. And yet, despite Tilman’s inability to mentally reconstruct the terrain of the conflict, there was something in the atmosphere, the way the light hung in the air, and in the direction of the wind that carried with it a grim reminder, a souvenir. Souvenir. The French term that appeared over and over, carved into the marble of civilian graveyards in Amiens or Arras, though oddly not in the military cemeteries. The word itself, which spoke of wrenching grief and loss, seemed to him to bring the sound of this wind with it, a sound like that of a bayonet slicing flesh.

  When Tilman and his company had been preparing for the battle at Vimy, the claustrophobia of the tunnels had made him eager to volunteer for any kind of job that would allow him out into the open air. More comfortable with snipers than with confinement, and remembering all the training he had done as a young boy during the summer of the bridge, he begged to be made a runner, loved the freedom of speeding across mud, then leaping into trenches, the message delivered by his unshaking hand. He had felt swift and alive, impervious to enemy ammunition, invisible almost, because he was on the move; travel of any kind had always relaxed him. But during the two days before the battle, the tunnels had swallowed him again, and he was forced to stand upright for twenty-four hours in murky and constantly faltering electric light with a multitude of other sombre men, some sleeping on their feet, others whispering to themselves or to a mate, all anticipating the barrage and their own performance in the face of it.

  Who were those boys he had stood beside on that April morning waiting for the command. Joey, Jimmy. He couldn’t remember, remembered only the dark boy’s flesh exploding under sleet and shrapnel. And the other turning to him, seemingly unharmed, his head cocked to one side, a puzzled expression in his eyes and the beginnings of a question on his lips. One word forming there. Something with a “W,” Who? or What? Then the opaque film moving over the eyes, and the knees buckling.

  Tilman had grabbed him by the sleeves as he sank, only then noticing the small dark circle at the temple. When he let him go, the boy fell backwards into the trench from which they had just emerged. Through the next twenty minutes of chaos Tilman froze in a crouching position with his back to the Germans. The boy’s pale, dead face had stared up at him from the filth of this unclean grave, the question, whatever it was, still frozen on his lips, and the face itself lit by the glorious colours made by the hail of deafening ammunition that was part of the soon to be famous “rolling barrage.” More noise, it would be said, than the world had ever heard before, the furious sound travelling across the English Channel, heard as far as London. More beautiful than any other form of fireworks that had ever visited the sky.

  An unimaginable amount of death had come into Tilman’s line of vision in the previous three years, and yet this one boy’s demise stayed with him, perhaps because it was the last clear image he retained from the great battle during which he was wounded out. Wounded out. The term seemed to fit his life. He had been wounded out of his family when he was a child, his parents being unable to cope with his nature. There were times when he felt that he had been wounded out of life altogether, forced to live in a world apart. Even at Vimy, he had avoided the camaraderie of the tunnels, the sense of collaboration. He had volunteered for dangerous jobs, for night reconnaissance work, or as a messenger before the battle, simply for the relief of an exposed position. And it was because of this that he had become intimate with the wind, could recognize it now when everything else had been camouflaged by order. The wind remained unpredictable, impossible to control, often vicious.

  Ghosts and marble and memory on the heights, and down on the plain, warmth and food and life. As often as he could, Tilman walked and hitchhiked through the wind into the atmospheric stillness of Arras, where, in his role as appreciator of haute cuisine, he had come to know Monsieur Recouvrir, the chef at the Hotel Picardie. A huge man, covered first in an ample layer of fat and then in his white chef’s uniform, he had noted the strange Canadian’s attachment to his restaurant and had been impressed by his interest in sampling even the most creative organ dishes that were almost always avoided by those who spoke English. Eventually he had presented himself at Tilman’s table, and a few days later he had offered to take the Canadian carver on a tour of the kitchen.

  Tilman had immediately responded to this aromatic workshop, the cauldron of potage murmuring on the gas range, garlands of onions and garlic in the vicinity. Recouvrir’s hysterical and very thin sous-chef frenetically chopping vegetables, the round, red face of Monsieur Recouvrir himself beaming in the centre. The chef was like a calm, benign God, confident in the midst of creation, seven perfectly sharpened and polished knives near the plump flesh of his right hand, a semicircle of different-sized ladles hanging from the ceiling, making a metal nimbus over his hat. As the weeks passed, Tilman visited the kitchen on his days off, and in the long evenings, and while the chef’s large body swayed as he stirred a sauce or while he leaned forward to roll out a perfect pastry, Tilman sat on a nearby stool, a glass of vin rouge in his hand, and began to talk about the war.

  Monsieur Recouvrir understood very little of what the English-Canadian said and was therefore in some ways the perfect listener. Grave and sympathetic, he responded infrequently and only, therefore, to the names of battles he recognized. “Ah, oui,” he would say sadly, his wooden spoon stopped in mid-stir, “la Somme.” And once he repeated the word, “Verdun” with tears in his eyes.

  One afternoon he met Tilman at the door and led him into the vacant restaurant. Sitting opposite him at the table, a pichet of vin blanc between them, he began to roll up his white sleeve. Tilman could see a red circle just above the dimpled elbow, and in the centre of the circle, a dark, sharp point. Recouvrir took a paring knife and, wincing, extracted a flat, bloody sliver of wet metal that he dropped with a clang onto a plate on the table between them. “Shrapnel,” he said, knocking twice on Tilman’s wooden leg. “Verdun,” he added. The Canadian understood then that this kind man carried in his body fragments of the catastrophe of the battle of Verdun, fragments that now and then, like Tilman’s own memories, worked themselves to the surface. He touched the plate where the blood was drying, then brought his fist down on his artificial leg. “Vimy Ridge,” he said. “Vimy.”

  Recouvrir began Tilman’s informal culinary training with an omelette aux fines herbes. AQuébécois hobo had once shown Tilman how to make omelettes over an open fire when he was a boy, but Tilman was only too happy to receive the instructions again.

  Standing with the stainless-steel bowl clas
ped to his round belly, Recouvrir said, “Regardez” while using his right arm to move the whisk in a winding, rhythmic motion. Then he let Tilman try to copy his actions, which he was able to do more or less successfully. The resulting shape of the eggs in the pan made Tilman think of a small yellow landscape in relief. He was so pleased with himself he wanted to frame the omelette rather than eat it. But Recouvrir roared at him goodnaturedly, “Mangez, mangez.”

  They strolled through the arcaded streets of Arras to the market, where the chef pointed out the roundest tomatoes, the fattest garlics, the most beautiful and aromatic cheeses, the plumpest chickens, gleaming trout, the small curls of pink shrimp. They visited the boulangerie, the pâtisserie, and walked back to the restaurant with their arms full of golden wands of bread and one small, round pastry, gorgeously decorated with quarter-moons of peaches and pears topped with bright berries, the whole surface glazed as though varnished.

  When they returned to the hotel in the late afternoon, Recouvrir put his arm around Tilman’s shoulders and guided him into the apartment that he kept at the back of the establishment. In the small salon Tilman sat on a burgundy chair near the fireplace while his new friend scurried around in the adjacent kitchen, called out pleasantries in French, some of which Tilman actually understood, and finally reappeared with the pastry, fruit, dessert dishes, silver forks, and a bottle of Veuve Cliquot champagne all artfully displayed on a silver tray. He stood for a moment in the doorway, side-lit by the light from a window that looked out to a small garden, his face soft and unguarded, the tray and its contents gleaming in his hands, a kind of glorious Father Nature, Tilman thought, complete with bubbles and grapes and lustre. And it was while he was thinking this that he realized he had not flinched when the plump arm had touched his shoulder.

  One morning not long after this, Recouvrir drove his rather battered Renault up the road lined by young Canadian maples, parked in front of the Givenchy Road military cemetery, and walked toward the work site, carrying in his hand a plate covered by a blue linen towel. Now and then he stopped to talk to French labourers he knew, as many of them came from Arras or the surrounding territory. One of these men directed him to the opposite side of the monument from where one could see the industrial town of Lens, and so Recouvrir climbed the southwest steps, rounded the left pylon, and began to descend the left set of northeastern steps, where several men sat on three-legged stools, engraving the names of the lost. Beyond them, at the front of the monument, he found Tilman carving a pleat in a flag that draped the empty stone catafalque meant to suggest the tomb of an unknown Canadian warrior. The noise of machinery in the vicinity had overwhelmed the sound of Recouvrir’s footsteps, so Tilman did not hear him approach.

  Recouvrir gently placed the plate on a nearby stone ledge, then crouched down beside the spot where Tilman sat without his wooden leg, which he had removed and placed against the casket. Recouvrir smiled at the Canadian’s surprise and sensed his momentary lack of recognition now that he was not wearing the customary white outfit. He touched the fold that Tilman was carving. “Merveilleux,” he said. “Tu es artiste.”

  “And I have just completed this,” said Tilman, pointing to the shield at the right of the drapery. He felt shy but not offended by the large man’s proximity. Neither shifted his gaze from the other’s face.

  Recouvrir moved his hand back and forth across the unremarkable shield. “Merveilleux,” he said again, then took his hand away from the stone and placed it on Tilman’s back, touching it with the same sweeping motion as he had the shield.

  Neither man spoke for several moments.

  Recouvrir rose, walked over to the ledge, and returned with the plate in his hand. He placed it on the catafalque. “Pâté de campagne,” he said. “Un cadeau,” he paused, “pour toi.”

  That night Tilman, who had never made love to anyone, dreamt that he was being made love to by Recouvrir. Both were clothed, Tilman wearing his blue worker’s jacket and overalls, Recouvrir in his chef’s outfit but without the hat. They were alone in the Quonset hut, but Tilman was at first concerned that, because of the activity outside the walls, they might be discovered. “Why this?” he asked his friend. The large bulk of Recouvrir was silhouetted against the open window near the foot of the bed on which Tilman lay. The chef moved to one side to allow Tilman to look out at the world filled with singing birds and a multitude of trees in full leaf. He gestured toward the verdant, musical landscape that held traces of neither battle nor monument.

  “Because I love you,” he said in English, “and because,” he gestured toward the open window and the world beyond, “I love this too.”

  In the dream Tilman was suddenly filled with an indescribable joy as a river made of leaves and grass flowed through the window and into the room where he slept.

  When they undressed each other the following Monday night in Recouvrir’s apartment behind the restaurant, Tilman was amazed to find beauty in his friend’s enormous body, which was firm and round and clean, amazed too by the map of scars that made Recouvrir’s skin appear to have been ceremonially patterned, like the engravings of South Seas tribal warriors that Tilman remembered from a book he had looked at as a child. The white marks left by the entrance and the exit of hundreds of bits of shrapnel covered his arms and chest and belly like tiny flowers or stars. “Like constellations,” Tilman would tell him some months later, touching some of the groupings and naming them, looking for and finally claiming to have found Caela Sculptoris, his very own carver’s tool, somewhere on the skin under Recouvrir’s left arm. But on this first night, when the two men stood naked and facing each other, having touched each other tentatively on the head and hair and shoulders, Recouvrir moved his hand toward Tilman’s hip. “Explique-moi,” he said, adding, “s’il te plaît.”

  Tilman showed him how to remove the wooden leg, and when Recouvrir knelt beside him to complete this task, Tilman remembered Ham Bone and Phoebe, remembered the kind of tenderness that transformed a crazed, ragged woman of the roads into a beautiful young girl, ennobled by love. And he knew that the love he had witnessed then was echoed here in this French room as two damaged, fragmented middle-aged men made each other fresh and beautiful and whole again.

  Because he had no experience of a sexual nature, having always avoided proximity of any kind, it did not seem odd to Tilman that the hands and mouth and body that were providing him with this miraculous pleasure were those of a man and not a woman. What stunned him was that such joy could be part of human experience, could draw out of him the part of himself that had been left unmarred by either chain or battle. When he closed his eyes he saw the migrating birds that had moved him as a small child, he remembered his mother’s breast. When he opened them again, he saw Recouvrir closer than anyone had been since then, closer than anyone except this gentle man would ever be again.

  Klara woke on a spring morning before dawn. Five-thirty and the half-finished face of the torchbearer still burning in her mind. She who would eventually rub with powdered pumice his legs and feet, she who would polish the long stretch of his side. His half-finished face in her mind, the roughness of the one side, the wrongness of the other.

  Everyone else would be sleeping for two more hours, and even then they would awaken reluctantly, a full day of labour their only reward for the reappearance of light. Klara left the hut dressed only in trousers and a shirt, not wearing the cap, thinking little about disguise, carrying her true self to the task.

  She stepped, barefoot, onto the cool pebbles of the earth beyond the hut, then sat on a boulder and pulled on her boots, removing them again when she reached the ramp that led to the lower studio. The texture of the planks on her soles gave the ascent significance, purpose. When she pulled aside the canvas door, she saw that the dawn was just beginning to enter through the windows and skylights of the room, warming the flesh of the torchbearer and his dying stone twin and painting one section of the wooden floor deep shades of blood and rose, though enough shadows remained in the
corners of the room that she decided to switch on the electric lights. She walked across to the table where the men kept their tools, chose a mallet, a medium and a small chisel, and several different sizes of rasps, then looked carefully at the stone youth. She would need to climb the ladder twice in order to deliver the tools to the platform beside the torchbearer’s face. Once she began she might have to fetch something else. None of this concerned her, she was peeling back the layers that time had built around her visual memory, pulling the past across the vague landscapes of the intervening years.

  How to recall the face of one who has died, a face that has been held in the inner eye and then, when the pain of this has exhausted the holder, pushed from the mind altogether. No matter how much it is cherished, an absent face that is a fixed point of reference becomes tyrannical, and tyranny eventually demands revolt, escape. Klara had fled from the memory of Eamon’s face over and over, his bright eyes and perfect skin, now almost two decades younger and more perfect than her own. She had rationed the time she would allow herself to think about him, and by a fierce act of will had almost succeeded in turning him into a faceless ghost, until all that was left was the vaguely human, dark shape of his absence. A shadow thrown against an unforgiving wall.

  Now she would have to remember the bones under the skin, the scar on his left temple, the beautiful, full mouth, his upturned glance and radiant expression when searching the sky for a kite, an aeroplane. Each detail. The two graceful wings of his eyebrows. How his hair fell when he threw his head back, the soft, slightly slanted contour of his eye. He had been only a boy, the inquisitive child he had been had never left his face. He must hold the torch aloft, yes, but because this figure would become Eamon and would be looking up toward his beloved ether, his expression must be one of astonishment and joy at finding himself, at last, forever reaching toward the sky. His arm illuminating clouds. She stood on the ladder, eyes squeezed shut, scraping these images from the deepest recesses of her memory as if using a sculpting tool on the inner curve of her skull. Then she began.