The Stone Carvers

by Jane Urquhart

  “I have something important to show you,” Giorgio said one evening as they lay on the sagging cot. “There are artists everywhere that no one knows about. You are one, I am another. But down here, even then, even with the rats and the blood, there were those who had to record experience. Let’s get dressed. I want to show you.”

  Klara had begun to believe that his body was shaping hers, the way a bend in a river shapes the bank beside it with the caress of water and of current.

  “I don’t want to stop touching you,” she said. “I don’t want you to stop touching me.” She loved the roundness and the warmth of his belly. His arms hardened by carving, and the tight skin that covered all of this. She didn’t want to separate his skin from hers. They had held their arms up side by side, his dark and full, hers pale, thin, but strong from the work. She liked to think about the clothes she might make for him, had she her tailoring equipment with her. She liked to think about seams she might sew following the contours of his body.

  Often she felt she might weep.

  “No,” he said, “come.”

  They dressed and walked with the lantern through the maze of tunnels, entering at last a room that someone had called Place de la Concorde. The whole labyrinth seemed a parody of the world above as soldiers had chiselled into the passageways and underground rooms the names of places they had been fond of, or places they had imagined. One oval space had been called Centreton Ball Park, and another Convocation Hall. What had these men carried in their minds? Had these references to the pleasures of the life they had left behind consoled them in the face of the damp and the lice and the certainty of death?

  They passed a tunnel that veered to the left, then slanted upward toward the surface. “Tilman probably used this exit,” said Giorgio, “when he volunteered as a runner. They wanted the messengers to burst out of here in full flight, hit the air running, unhampered by stairs. I remember that before the war he was a fabulous sprinter … kept the skill honed, for escape purposes, I guess.”

  “Then he lost his leg,” said Klara, “and lost all that too. Poor Tilman, no wonder he loathes all reminders of the battle—those ditches lined with concrete renditions of sandbags, for instance. He says they look nothing like the real thing, that they are toy trenches for tourists.”

  “Tilman’s right. If it’s authenticity they’re after, they should fill them up with mud and rats, pus and blood. But there is some authenticity left, down here, or at least the remnants of it.” He took Klara’s hand and led her into the darkness.

  They pushed deeper into the tunnels, took a left and then a right turn, the chalk walls leaving white traces on their sleeves. Once, Klara tripped and almost fell over the wooden levers of an abandoned and badly decayed canvas stretcher. Often there was the crunch of thin rusted metal under their feet.

  “Are you sure you know where we’re going?” she asked. “Will we be able to get back?”

  “Here we are. Look.” Giorgio held the lantern near a carving in relief of a young face with a soldier’s collar tight against the neck. “Who do you think he was?”

  Klara moved toward the wall, looked closely at the carving. “How can we know?” she asked.

  “I mean the carver,” Giorgio coughed, bending over his fist, the combination of the dank air and chalk dust of the tunnels catching in his throat. Then he straightened and cleared his throat. “Look at the expression in the eyes … This is a face the carver loved. What do you suppose the carver was thinking?”

  Giorgio leaned closer to the white chalk carving, moved the lantern back and forth in front of it. “He had compassion for the suffering of this face.”

  “Yes,” said Klara.

  She was turning to walk away when Giorgio gently caught her arm. “What was his name, Klara?” he asked softly. “Who was the boy you were carving?”

  “I can’t …” Klara began.

  “Klara,” Giorgio said, “I want to know you … everything about you …”

  “No, I can’t. Please understand. It’s something I can’t talk about to anyone.” This she said remembering the moment she had spoken to Allward. But nothing in her wanted to bring Eamon into her connection with Giorgio.

  Giorgio looked away from her, but even in the faint lamplight Klara could see he was wounded.

  “Let’s go back,” he said, turning away, heading for the tunnel that led from this room. “Let’s get out of here.” He began to walk away, taking the light with him.

  The air around Klara grew first dim and then dark. She knew he was hurt, angry. But she insisted on the ownership of her past. Since the day of his departure, Klara had never once said aloud the name of her young lover. She felt that to release the syllables into the air all these years later would be a kind of amputation, a violent removal of a part of the self. To present them to the man she had so recently embraced would betray, she believed, Eamon’s bright, eager passion, would for the second time annul it. She wanted to crawl away from Giorgio now, to curl up somewhere in the dark, alone. But not here, not when the tunnels were not lit by love. She had only two choices: to stay alone in the dripping shadows of the underground labyrinth or to follow Giorgio, follow his light.

  They parted awkwardly at the entrance to Grange Tunnel: Giorgio looking intently into Klara’s face, she scrutinizing the uneven and still deadly ground of the surrounding territory. The innocent, she suddenly thought, were never aware that merely by strolling across grass they could activate a mine from the past. Just last week a horse had been killed by simply grazing in what appeared to be a benign field.

  All the way back to the overseer’s hut and for a long time after she had collapsed onto her cot near the window, Klara thought about the foolishness of a woman her age engaging in a love affair as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She imagined how the villagers in Shoneval would react were they to come to hear of it, how shocked they would be if they knew about the overwhelming response of her body in such awkward and arousing positions, the sounds she knew she had made once Giorgio entered her. They were both too old for this sort of thing; it could only end badly. And now this space between them, this unspoken name. A horse trusting a green field because his knowledge of fields had never involved injury, pain. A young man’s unclouded love for her, complicated only by her own ultimate refusal to accept it. She had never been one of the innocent, had always predicted loss. “Eamon,” she whispered now, in the dark, “Eamon O’Sullivan.”

  Reared in a household that on Sundays expanded to hold a hundred people, and on ordinary days never sheltered less than ten, Giorgio had become ubiquitous—though never fickle—in his affections. No person was to him too young, too old, too withdrawn or effusive to be interesting. He could recall with great fondness all the little girls dressed in white whose first communions he had attended, and all the old men at whose funerals he had wept. He had loved equally the hobos in the Don Valley, the labourers and artisans with whom he now worked on the memorial, and the soldiers with whom he had fought in the war. It had never occurred to him that one should, or that one could, focus all of one’s attention on a single human being, though loyalty in romance was something he believed in. He had always assumed that were he to find a woman he liked well enough he would be faithful to her, and had in the past stayed close for periods of up to a year to one young woman or another. But the relationships had shifted to friendship as time passed, and it became clear that neither he nor the woman had experienced the inner connection that binds couples together even when they are apart.

  He knew that Klara was different, that she was comfortable with long periods of isolation and would likely be given to infrequent yet passionate attachments. He admired this in her, this focus that had driven her to cross an ocean, carve the beloved face of one long dead in the stone of a monument. He suspected that she had been alone for so long she had forgotten what it was to be known, knowable, and he understood this. Still it hurt him that she would not disclose this important, tender episode from
the past to him. He wanted all of her, was interested in every detail that had gone into the construction of her character, and it was this combined with physical desire that made him realize for the first time, and now into the middle of his life, that he had actually fallen in love.

  Each day he rendered the letters of the alphabet that made permanent the names on the stone. Had he already, unknowingly, carved the name of Klara’s young man while thinking of something else? Often he concentrated so fiercely on the precise bevelling of a character that his mind became empty of plans and memories, his thoughts circling around how the letter “M” resembled two houses touching, for instance, or the champagne glass look of the letter “Y.” Had Klara walked to the wall once after he had finished a day’s work, and had she run her fingers sadly over the shape of the loved words?

  In the weeks since they had become lovers, Klara and he had met at lunch hour to sit beside each other on the west steps of the base while they ate their baguettes. In recent days, however, she had not appeared, neither there nor, as he had come to expect, at the entrance to Grange Tunnel after the dinner hour. He stared at her across the rows of tables in the mess hall, trying to read something, anything into her expression. At noon he walked by the studio where she was working and saw her sitting hunched and silent beside a half-finished meal. She glanced at him, then turned her face away. When he approached her and began to speak, she said, “Don’t!” and then scrambled to her feet and walked hurriedly back into the studio.

  He was devastated and in turn shocked by his response to her coldness. In subsequent days he carried the pain around with him like an infected auxiliary organ, of no use to body or heart. There was nothing that was not affected by it; he became withdrawn, taciturn, even in the friendly company of his fellow carvers. He had lived four decades in the world and yet he had never known that affection could carry within its warm centre the seeds of such appalling anguish. Even when his father had deserted the family for a year, Giorgio had believed with a child’s trust that one day the absent parent, whose love, he correctly intuited, was being telegraphed from immeasurable distances, would re-enter the door and take his place in the family circle. Perhaps he should just hold on to the faith, the hope that Klara would once again soften toward him.

  One day, unable to prevent himself from doing so, he spoke to Tilman about it. “What did I do wrong?” he asked, his voice whining and querulous. “All I wanted was for Klara to tell me about him.” He stood with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders drawn forward. “What happened to the poor kid, anyway?”

  “The war, as usual,” his friend answered. Tilman pointed to an area about five hundred yards to the south of them where all day men had been planting saplings of various kinds. “It’s sort of wonderful, don’t you think, that all those trees were brought from Canada? One of every species, they say. All the provinces mixed up together. Wonder if they’ll all survive? I’d like to see them grown.”

  Giorgio was not interested in discussing the trees. What were they doing planting trees in midsummer, anyway, he thought with irritation. Shouldn’t they do it in spring?

  “You know, Giorgio,” said Tilman, responding to the uncomfortable silence that had fallen between them, “I wasn’t there when the romance happened. It was such a long time ago … probably while you and I were making stoves. Remember The Forest Eater?” He smiled at Giorgio, then shook his head. “So much time has passed.”

  Giorgio found that he was now put off by his friend’s remarkable good humour, the geniality that he had exuded for weeks. “This boy,” he asked quietly, “was he from your town?”

  Tilman nodded. “Klara didn’t say much to me about it, but she did mention he lived near Shoneval.” He stopped walking, swung his artificial leg back and forth as if exercising it. “I remember she told me she’d made him a coat or a jacket out of red cloth.”

  Giorgio waited. He was startingly hungry now for any information about Klara’s past. He looked intently at Tilman, hoping for more.

  “Sorry, Giorgio, that’s all I know. Just that she made him a coat … Klara’s quite a tailor, you know … and that he was from Shoneval.” Tilman began walking again, turned and beckoned for his friend to follow. “Why not come into town with me tonight?” he said. “I’d like you to meet Recouvrir. We could have something to eat, a good bottle of wine.”

  Giorgio could see that Tilman was impatient to get to the Hotel Picardie. “I don’t think so. You go ahead.”

  “C’mon.” Tilman insisted, “Canard à l’Orange, a fine Bordeaux rouge … it will do you good, make you forget the past. It looked to me like you and Klara were curing each other of all that, anyway. “

  Four nights later Giorgio stood outside Grange Tunnel waiting until long after dark. The stars became vivid behind the monument, though its bulk blocked out large portions of the Milky Way. He could feel the night chill penetrate his shirt. It was always cold in the tunnels, but of course there he had had the warmth of a woman. The warmth of Klara. How the hell had it come to this? In his family, sorrow was always shared, almost celebrated, experience of any kind being considered a gift, a narrative that would be given to the community like scenes from an opera. I have lived, I have felt this grief. Now you will live it, feel it with me. He became aware of the subtle weight of the blanket on his arm, then thought himself a fool for standing in the dark holding this reminder of his brief, dying love affair as if it were a grey shroud.

  As he walked back toward his sleeping quarters, he saw that the light in the overseer’s hut was on, the curtain near Klara’s bed drawn back. Looking through the glass of the door’s upper panel, he could see that Klara’s cot was empty. Gone into Arras with Tilman probably. Perhaps this Recouvrir, whoever he was, had caught her attention with his fancy French food, his bourgeois restaurant. He had thought it impossible that Klara might take another lover, but by now he was so tired and discouraged, so confused and vulnerable, he believed anything might happen. He stared hard into the functional room where Klara slept, its scrubbed linoleum and iron cot, as if he might find some evidence of this imagined, dark betrayal. Then, on the foreman’s desk, just a few feet from where he stood, he saw a folder with Master File written on it.

  It took him no time at all to open the unlocked door, to approach the file. For one moment he felt like a thief, or as if he might be betraying Klara’s wish to keep her young man’s name private. All he knew for sure was that the boy was dead. His name might be on a stone in a military cemetery or, he touched the cardboard cover, it might be in this file.

  The missing, as he expected, were listed alphabetically, so it was necessary for him to read every town name in the adjacent right column. Grimsby, Maple Creek, Fernie, Clinton, Lévis, Vernonville, Rimouski, Colborne, Truro, Humboldt, Walkerton, Parry Sound, Lilac, Medicine Hat, Moose Jaw. Who were the settlers who had titled these places? Could they have imagined the names they had invented would lie, as the result of an immense slaughter, in an official document on a foreign desk? Vernon, Collingwood, Val d’Or, Nanaimo, Lunenburg, Kingsville, Swift Current, Trois-Rivières, Hull, Winnipeg, Alderville. Eventually his finger came to rest at Shoneval. But still he knew he must keep reading, for he was unaware that only one boy had left this overlooked hamlet for France. By the time he came to the final name, every crossroad, every city, every rural township, each Indian reserve, and almost all the concession roads in Canada had been present in his mind.

  There was only one name with Shoneval beside it, and that name was Eamon O’Sullivan. Giorgio was filled first with relief, then joy. He and his fellow letter carver had only gone as far as the letter “K.” The name had not yet been engraved. He carefully closed the folder, then laid his hand on it for a moment or two as if he were blessing it. As he approached the door he saw Klara coming toward the hut. She halted as if startled by the appearance of his head and shoulders framed by the door’s small window like a portrait in the glass, the rest of the world a dark night around him.

 
; He left the hut and walked toward her with his arms out and his palms up. I am guilty but remorseful, this gesture said. She had her hands in the pockets of her worker’s jacket, and she stood entirely still with her head bent. Stars appeared to be raining down the sky above and on either side of her.

  Giorgio stopped and stood with his hand on her sleeve. Even though his touch was tentative and held nothing but the loose fabric of the jacket, he could tell she was trembling. He smoothed her hair and to his great relief she didn’t walk away. “I thought all of that was over for me, years ago, decades ago,” she said.

  “It’s not over,” he said.

  “I’m not uncomplicated.”

  “No,” he agreed, “you’re not. But I won’t try to force anything from you ever again. Your soul is your own. I should not have interfered. If only we can still meet.”

  Klara took one hand out of her pocket and placed it in one of his. “Do you not want a younger woman? What about children?”

  “I want you.”

  They stood together silently for some time, the unlit tunnels beneath them, the monument, ghostly and still webbed with scaffolding, cocooned with canvas, a quarter of a mile away.

  “Good night then,” Klara said.

  “I’ll wait for you? Tomorrow night?” Giorgio was suddenly aware of, and slightly embarrassed by, the blanket that still hung over his arm.

  Klara didn’t answer but wrapped her arms around his large chest before opening the door. Then she turned and, not looking at Giorgio, whispered in the direction of the monument the two words she had uttered only to herself. “Eamon,” she said. “Eamon O’Sullivan.”

  Giorgio almost told her that he knew, then reconsidered, this gift from her being so purely given.

  “Poor boy,” she added. “He was so young.” She paused. “And so much time has passed.”

  There are certain currents of air that have crossed the Atlantic, have become confused briefly by the intricate coastline of Cornwall, and then have been reassured, calmed by the salt moisture of the English Channel. When these currents find themselves over the land mass of France, they respond to this unfamiliarity by transforming themselves into large towering clouds, some of which look like monuments or castles or cathedrals. Were it not for their whiteness and total absence of attendant noise they might be mistaken for thunder clouds, but they bring with them no bad weather. They appear in pairs, one-half of the sky mirroring the other, as if making important statements about twinship, about collaboration.