The Stone Carvers

by Jane Urquhart

  Allward had studied these clouds, had watched them boil up behind the ridge on sunny afternoons. Even before the road was made, before the ground was cleared and levelled, he had decided they would be part of the monument, two soft gardens of mist to offset the hardness of marble, the toughness of grief. After months of vigilance, amazed by the predictability of these airborne wonders, he knew exactly where the memorial was to be sited: on the clean slice of the ridge, embraced on each side by the theatrical presence of vapour sculptures.

  There are, of course, days when the marvellous clouds do not appear—though if he could have managed it Allward would have had them constantly present. Sometimes in the winter in Picardie a solid grey sky settles in for weeks on end. And then, very occasionally, in the summer and autumn, there will be days when the sky is a dome of piercing blue, as if clouds have yet to be invented. Days when the monument itself stands as if at the edge of the world, solid, confident, reflecting light.

  And so it happened that one summer morning, very early, Giorgio woke just as the sun was making a faint red seam along the eastern horizon. The other men in his dormitory were snoring; one was mumbling a woman’s name in his sleep, and Giorgio felt for a moment a deep connection with this Italian called Carlo whom he knew came from the town of Orvieto—a comrade in love. He dressed quickly in his overalls and blue worker’s jacket and, boots in hand, walked in his sock feet across the planked floor, out the door into a world where light visited only the very tops of recently planted trees from Canadian forests. All so young now, hardly taller than a man’s shoulders, but he hoped they would grow to be healthy in a land where they were never meant to be, in the same way that his own family had grown—with some difficulty, it’s true—and had finally become rooted in a land far from the soil of their birthplace. He remembered his mother’s struggle with the spindly wisteria someone had brought her from the homeland, how it hung, frail and listless, on the trellis his father had built near the back door, barely leafing in the spring until one year it burst triumphantly into blossom in early June, its flowers hanging like an overstated offering of pale grapes at an emperor’s feast. And how his mother had wept with joy and told the family that she knew they were settled now in the new country.

  When he looked through the window above Klara’s bed into the grey stillness of the morning hut, he could see that she was sleeping on her stomach. She stirred when he knocked, lifted her head, and brushed the blonde hair from her eyes, confused by this interruption of her dreams. Then she smiled at him in a questioning way. He motioned for her to come outside, and she reluctantly threw off her blankets and put on her own overalls and jacket.

  “What?” she said, emerging from the door. “Is there something wrong?”

  Giorgio lifted his finger to his lips and then embraced her. He wanted no conversation at this time, wanted them to walk arm in arm over to the monument, up one set of stone stairs and down another to the part of the wall where the names gave way to untouched stone. Wanted them to walk to the west side, where the torchbearer was, then turn the corner to the south side of the base, where Giorgio had finished working the day before. The quietness was so profound that even tools abandoned the day before—wheelbarrows, shovels, carts on the narrow gauge railway, the tracks themselves—seemed to be sleeping. It wasn’t until they reached the platform of the monument that the first bird began to sing.

  They stopped for a moment and looked at the northeastern façade from which the scaffolding had only recently been removed. The monument was slightly backlit by the faint beginnings of day, its stone covered in cool blue shadow against a sky that was fractionally gaining in luminosity. Already several other birds had joined the first. Klara was shivering in the dawn chill, her shoulders drawn up to her neck. Both she and Giorgio were looking up at the pylons, at Allward’s distant angels whose features and expressions were barely discernible on this dark side of the sculpture. Around their wings there was nothing but sky.

  “This must be what night is like in heaven,” said Klara.

  “Night turning to morning,” said Giorgio, taking her arm, guiding her around the pylon to the opposite view.

  They arrived at the southwest side just as the sun broke through. Neither of them had seen the figures here so dramatically lit. Klara could barely move her eyes from the uplifted face she had illicitly carved, and the ribs, the strong, sinewy neck, the torso.

  “He was like that, was he?” Giorgio asked gently.

  “Yes, at times he was just like that,” Klara moved closer to Giorgio for warmth. “But he could be sombre too. For the first few months he came calling, he didn’t say one word. I thought I’d go mad if he wouldn’t talk.”

  “Young,” said Giorgio. “Shy.”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “But determined.”

  “Yes,” Klara smiled, “determined and stubborn.”

  “Come,” said Giorgio. “Come and see what I’ve been working on.”

  As he had hoped, the emerging sun was raking across the letters he had been carving. Beneath them his metal tool box shone. He pointed to the last name he had finished the day before. T O’Rourke.

  Klara’s eyes filled with tears, and her voice broke as she asked, “You are just about to carve his name then?”

  “No,” said Giorgio. “I’m not.”

  “But he must be soon. Here is some unfortunate boy called O’Rourke.” Her hand briefly touched the stone.

  Giorgio crouched over the tool box, opened the lid, and removed three delicate chisels and a small hammer from the top tray. Then he straightened and looked at her. “You are going to carve his name, Klara,” he said, “and I am going to help you, show you how.”

  Klara felt the slight warmth of the new sun graze the top of her head, or thought she did. She did not move, immobilized by the tenderness of what was being offered to her.

  Giorgio brought over his work partner’s stool and they sat side by side with the morning sun touching the backs of their blue jackets. Placing the chisel in one of Klara’s shaking hands and the hammer in the other, Giorgio wrapped his own larger hands around hers.

  “We can only use the initial of the first name,” he told her, “because of the space, which has been worked out to the last character, the last eighth of an inch.”

  Klara said nothing. Then, “I don’t know if I can do this. What if I can’t do this?”

  “We’ll take it slow,” said Giorgio. “The curved letters are the most difficult, and there are only three of those in his name. We’ll just make one mark at a time. Start here.” He tapped the chisel in their joined hands very gently with the mallet, and the straight line that would make the left side of the letter “E” began to appear on the stone.

  Klara knew this would be the last time she touched Eamon, that when they finished carving his name all the confusion and regret of his absence would unravel, just as surely as if she had embraced him with forgiving arms.

  A shadow fell over the inscribed wall in front of them. “You can’t go wrong,” said Allward, who had been silently watching this small drama from the bottom of the stairs and had now made his way over to them, “as long as you don’t engage in any heroic feats of originality.”

  The artist towered over the carvers as they twisted on their stools to look up at him. They didn’t even think to stand. Giorgio had not removed his cap.

  “We didn’t know you were here,” said Klara.

  “I’m here even when I’m not here,” Allward laughed. “I’ve been eating and sleeping stone for so long that it has become an obsession with me. And, incidentally, a nightmare. But no nightmares this morning. Have you ever seen such light?”

  “I want her to carve the name,” said Giorgio.

  Allward was silent for a moment, considering. Klara’s hands remained enclosed in Giorgio’s. The chisel rested against the perfect stone.

  Allward came up beside Klara and put his hand on her arm. “This is him then?”

  “It’s him,
” said Klara, not looking up. Giorgio did not take his hand away from hers, his forearm resting on her thigh, the chisel emerging from their joined fists.

  Allward took all of this in, the two damaged people, the now distant pain of bereavement and lost youth, the warmth of the affection that surrounded the pair, a warmth that in some ways was engendered both by the bloody, endless tragedy of the war and this huge white structure meant to be a memorial to grief, on the one hand, and a prayer for peace, on the other. He took it all in. Soon the project would be completed, after fifteen years of accidents, postponements, labour problems, the harassment of several levels of government in a number of different countries. He thought of the clouds, the shapes he had spent hours learning all those years ago, even before he had found the marble, made the plasters, hired the carvers, thought of how reliably the vapour sculptures floated back to the site, how they so genuinely provided the perfect accompaniment, the perfect balance. Balance. For just one moment, and in the presence of Giorgio and Klara, the artist in Allward believed that he had achieved balance.

  The weight of the sorrow he had carried for fifteen years was leaving him. The emotion was moving through the arms of these people who worked for him—no, these friends who worked with him—and he knew that passion was entering the monument itself, the huge urn he had designed to hold grief.

  “Carve it with your heart then,” he said, speaking to them, to himself. “Let it go out of your heart and into the stone.”

  The larger, the more impressive the monument, the more miraculous its construction, the more it seems to predict its own fall from grace. Exposed and shining on elevated ground, insisting on prodigious feats of memory from all who come to gaze at it, it appears to be as vulnerable as a flower, and its season seems to be as brief. And who among us does not imagine the stone crushed, the altars taken away to museums, the receding past vandalized. The day arrives when there is no one left to climb the tower, pull the rope, ring the bell of the magnificent, improbable church. Names carved in stone become soft and unrecognizable under the assault of acid rain. No one knows any more what the allegorical figures represent.

  No one cares.

  In 1936, the completion of the Vimy Memorial was announced to the world with great fanfare, the ribbon cut by a king whose own reign was but a brief season, while tens of thousands of pilgrims, veterans and their relatives, widows and orphans, French and Canadian officials filled the now altered, manicured battlefield. Speeches were made, cannons were fired, trumpets played, and aeroplanes buzzed overhead. The bereaved searched the white wall for the names of loved ones now almost two decades vanished from the earth. Whole oceans of grief were revisited, especially by women. Stories concerning the brief lives of young soldiers were told, absent fathers were explained to grown children, brothers were described to men who were so young when they died they could barely remember them.

  Allward returned to a country he hardly recognized. The war had been over for twenty years; few people wanted to discuss the monument. Each day he walked through the bright rooms of his Toronto house, the memorial a fact in his brain, its white stone echoed by snow in winter, a cumulus cloud with a flat base in summer. He could not disengage.

  Designs for further monuments were attempted by him—he wanted to move forward, wanted to re-enter his life. But like a long love affair that had ended in sorrow, the Vimy Memorial would not relinquish the large space it had occupied in his heart. He wouldn’t let it go, and traces of its brooding presence entered every drawing he made. In the end the government was uninterested in his proposals, his efforts to document the past. And his reputation preceded him; his memorials took too long, cost too much money. The military bureaucracy wanted nothing more to do with him. Besides, it was too busy preparing for a violent future to wallow in nostalgia for a violent past.

  When the Second World War broke out in 1939, less than three years after he had returned to Canada, Allward reacted with panic and rage. He deluged the Department of National Defence with telegrams begging for reports and demanding that the memorial be sandbagged against aerial bombardment. As the weeks passed and he received no replies, he retreated into an inner landscape of great bleakness, pacing the house in the middle of the night, imagining the worst. He accepted no invitations, withdrew emotionally from his family, sat for hours by windows staring at falling snow or at a winter moon the colour of white stone. Sometimes he wept silently, tears falling over the now creased and folded skin of his large face.

  With sharp coloured pencils he began a series of small, secretive drawings, each one more violent, more angry than the last. Tangled bodies littered torn landscapes, burning clots of brimstone rained down from a savage sky. And, in the background, tiny, almost insignificant in the drama, the wreckage of the monument. He shared these works with no one, carried them around in his pockets or sometimes crumpled and twisted under his hat. He knew he would never exhibit these records of anguish, wanted to keep his despair private, close to his head, his heart.

  The drawings seemed to feed his belief in catastrophe, his certainty that there was absolutely nothing on earth not subject to vicious attack. In his imagination, and on the rice paper he used, the allegorical figures of his sculptures stepped away from their fixed positions to engage in appalling dramas. Always with the ruins of the memorial smoking in the distance, he drew embracing lovers impaled by a single sword, cairns composed of lifeless bodies, a naked man straddling the torn, prone torso of a woman from whose chest he had snatched her bleeding heart. Allward knew, even before he had completed this particular drawing, that it was his own heart the man held aloft, a trophy steaming in his desperate hands.

  He had spent fifteen years of his life obsessed by perfection and permanence, had used verbal descriptions such as “the impregnable wall of defence on the clean slice of the ridge” to describe the base of his memorial. He had believed that he was making memory solid, indestructible, that its perfect stone would stand against the sky forever. With this certainty threatened, his world collapsed.

  Ironically, although the memorial survived the Second World War, the psyche of its creator did not. Allward remained a kind, courteous man who walked slowly through the city streets in a grey coat. Sometimes, especially in winter, when he was more likely to be alone, he visited the bronze sculptures he had created so many years ago for the park in front of the provincial legislature. He liked the way the gestures of dark statues that had first established his reputation were made explicit by the whiteness of the surrounding snow. But in this land so famous for winter, the knowledge of Allward’s genius was quickly forgotten by the very nation that had commissioned the memorial where he was most able to demonstrate this genius. Even those Canadians who would later make the trip to France and who would admire the monument would rarely take the trouble to ask the sculptor’s name.

  Klara returned to Shoneval, walking up the lane toward the house with Giorgio at her side. For several days she insisted that he stand in various rooms while she leaned in doorways and smiled with pleasure at the physical fact of him filling up the empty hallways of her life. Years later she would still sometimes make him enact this ritual. Suddenly, she would think that she couldn’t call to mind the way he looked in the woodshed, for example, or the pantry, and she would pull him by the sleeve to the place in question and make him stand in its light or its shadow until she had taken the sight of him there permanently into her memory.

  In her sunroom, a few days after their arrival, she took his hand and showed him the incised marks Eamon’s pattern had left on the floor.

  “For a while,” she said, “it was the only memorial I had.”

  “It’s like an inscription,” Giorgio said, “an inscription without words.” And Klara agreed with the beloved man who had carved thousands of names that that was exactly what it was like.

  Later, she took him outside and unlocked the door of the old workshop.

  Once again, the folds of the abbess’s clothing were edged with
fine dust, and she was covered with the webs of the spiders that Klara’s grandfather had insisted should stay alive. “I hate removing the webs,” Klara told Giorgio. “I know what it’s like to work with thread. Anything woven is so fragile, its chances for survival so limited.” She was thinking of the first red waistcoat, now twenty years old, and wondered what had become of it. Had it been engulfed by mud, stolen by a German soldier, or was it covered with dust in the attic of Eamon’s family, who had left the village years before? She had never known … there had been no one to tell her … that Eamon had worn it the day he departed for the wars.

  Giorgio was circling the carved woman. “She’s wonderful,” he said.

  “Maybe but not quite finished, though I worked on her for years and years.”

  “You should finish her now.”

  Klara rubbed the dust from a webless part of a window pane to let more light into the shop. “I will,” she said.

  A month later, when the sculpture was completed, Klara presented her female saint to Father Gstir’s church on the hill. She wanted it dedicated to the memory of her grandfather, whose own carvings graced the main altar and several side chapels. The week after, Klara and Giorgio were quietly married at the side chapel in front of one of Joseph Becker’s altars, an altar where small European towns, not unlike those left smouldering by the war, remained intact, and a runaway boy stood, furtive, in the midst of crowds attending a crucifixion, a birth in a stable, a martyrdom, an entry into a city.