The Stone Carvers

by Jane Urquhart

  As they had decided against a four-day Italian wedding they had not yet told the elder Vigamonti and his tribe about their marriage. But some of the surprised nuns attended, as did Tilman and his dear friend Recouvrir, who had hitchhiked from Montreal for the small ceremony. On the way there, Tilman taught his companion some tricks of the road: how to sing Presbyterian hymns, for example, or the correct approach to a fellow hobo’s campfire. But this was done for pleasure, not as a result of necessity, for when the work on the monument was completed, Tilman had convinced his friend to immigrate to Montreal, where they had opened a restaurant called Monument de l’Archange, which was soon prospering. “I always liked the idea of that priest insisting on the big church,” Tilman said when Klara asked him about the name of the establishment, “even though it was much too large for the size of the town.”

  They had all returned from the modest wedding and were sitting on the sagging porch of the old farmhouse. Giorgio had just explained that he was going to be a market gardener as well as a gravestone maker, and that Klara, who would also do some carving, was anxious to get the Charolais cattle back in the field.

  Tilman reached into his pocket and pulled out a small parcel wrapped in brown butcher paper and tied with string. “I have a wedding gift for you,” he said, turning first to his sister, then to Giorgio. He hesitated. “I don’t know which one of you should open it.”

  Recouvrir, who had been studying English, interjected. “Giorgio must make the strings,” he said, “and then Klara makes the papers.”

  After Giorgio had removed the twine, Klara pulled a bright silver whistle out of its nest of brown paper, then smiled quizzically at her brother. “Thank you, Tilman,” she said, then, after looking closely at the small object, she laughed. “It says, ‘Royal Thunderer’.”

  Tilman smiled at his sister. “When I was a boy, a woman gave the whistle to me … the same woman who helped me get free of the chain. For years it was my only possession. Sometimes, when things were bad on the road, I would take it out of my pocket and blow it. At first the sound reminded me of my freedom, but, after a while, I began to use it as a kind of summons, began to hope that someone would come.” He paused, cleared his throat. “No one ever came,” he said.

  There was silence on the porch. Then Recouvrir said quietly, “Someone answered when it was a long time. It is impossible, I know, but someone answered.”

  “We’ve all been involved in some way with the impossible,” said Giorgio as the warm white of the monument where he had found Klara slid into his mind. When he closed his eyes he could see the thousands of names he had chiselled into the stone, the way they looked in raking light.

  “True,” said Tilman, leaning forward to touch Recouvrir’s arm.

  Klara turned the shining whistle in her hands and thought of the fragile plaster angels lifted by ropes toward a sky chosen by Walter Allward after much consideration. Their shadows gliding up the pylons. About how the difficult, amazing man had altered the angle of the ridge to accommodate the clouds, had not destroyed what she had created in stone, had given her a voice.

  She thought of Eamon’s face, and his name, carved by her own hand with tools Giorgio has shown her how to use. And how several times in recent weeks, when she had made her new love stand utterly still in one room or another of her house so that she could believe in the fact of him, the blessing of him being there had connected with the honeyed voice of Father Archangel Gstir’s miraculous bell floating on the hour through the partly opened window.

  It was said that King Ludwig twice sent his equerry to Capri to memorize the precise shade of turquoise in its famous Blue Grotto, a model of which had been built at the king’s palace at Linderhof. This was in a time before colour photography was invented, a time when the memory of the realistic hues and tints of the natural world were still carried in the mind. Painters rarely strove to imitate real colour, more interested—even then—in the transformation demanded by their art. The emerging craft of photography reduced all scenes to various shades of black and grey, making the images, oddly, more like printed descriptions of themselves.

  How does one describe in words the colour turquoise? Even before the dust of travel was shaken from his clothing, the returning equerry would have been summoned to the false grotto where Ludwig, anxious to have his carefully constructed, imaginary world confirmed by one man’s description of the colour of reality, would be drifting in a golden boat. But colour is something best shown, not told. Or if it must be told it demands comparison. “It is like the neck of that peacock strutting in your gardens,” the equerry might have said. “It is like the summer sky one minute after the sun has set.”

  None of this could possibly have put the king at ease, of course, and the equerry would have known this. Constantly alternating between the desire to be enclosed by stage-set fantasy, on the one hand, and a need to be exposed to the sublime scenery of the Alpsee, on the other, the king was like a man with two mistresses of whose beauty he must be assured in order to keep the flame lit. “It is like this, Your Majesty,” the equerry would have been forced to say, opening his hands expressively in the papier mâché environment with its rainbow machines and its ugly hidden plumbing. “The picture I have carried to you in my mind is just like this.”

  In the late 1860s, the prince, who was now the king, had continued to send funds to the little Bavarian settlement in the Canadian wilderness, the money arriving in instalments over the period of the next several years. Father Gstir, correctly intuiting the monarch’s state of mind in relation to remote, fantastic landscapes, had sent more and more highly creative letters to the Ludwig Missions at Munich, hoping that his descriptions of massive trees silvered by ice and beasts whose antler systems resembled the wonderful tracery of the hanging wooden sculptures of Veit Stoss would be in some form or another related to Ludwig and in a manner that would excite the king’s imagination and cause him to desire that architecture should be added to the scene. He was met with several inquiries from the mission, inquiries that could only have originated with the king. Would the surroundings lend themselves to opera, for example? Opera, Father Gstir had mused, of course, why not? Especially in winter when the mud and squalor were covered with a helpful coating of snow. Wagner would love these forests, Father Gstir wrote back to the Central Direction of the Ludwig Missions-Verig in Munich. Arctic swans flourish here.

  There followed deep inland, on both sides of the Atlantic, a period of great architectural activity. While Ludwig bent over the first plans for the bright, small fantasy known as Neuschwanstein, changing his mind over and over about its exact position in relation to Pollat Falls, the parishioners in Father Gstir’s log chapel cheered as the cornerstone for the great church was laid just steps beyond the door. While seventeen carvers worked for four and a half years on the boiseries for the king’s bed chamber, Joseph Becker worked on the great altar for the church in the old barn of a nearby farm that he had managed to purchase with his wages from the gristmill. While dozens of hummingbirds were released to fly freely in perpetuity through the Winter Garden Room at Neuschwanstein, Father Gstir and his parishioners were assembling the same sad collection of decorated animals for yet another Corpus Christi procession in Shoneval, the result of which was that the men of the congregation were moved to contribute another year of free labour high on the granite walls. And while the magnificent chandeliers were hung in the palace of Linderhof from ceilings whose Gods and Goddesses, Rhine Maidens, and Swan Kings were barely dry, Father Gstir lit forty candles in the log chapel to replace the light that had been blocked out by the increasingly high stone walls that now completely enclosed the little structure. And, finally, several years later, while Ludwig floated in a boat on a pool designed as part of a stage set for one of his separatvorstellungen, or private performances of Wagner’s Lohengrin, a different kind of theatre was being enacted in Shoneval, Canada, where a few dozen young farmers, who had been working all day to dismantle it, took the wooden chapel, log by
log, out of the wonderful tall oak doors of their large and splendid new stone church.

  And so the impossible happens as a result of whims that turn into obsessions. A priest is struck by the light in an unexpected valley, a king requires rainbow machines, on the one hand, and a belief in the magic of distant landscapes, on the other. A Canadian man dreams the stone that will be assembled and carved to expiate the sorrow of one country on the soil of another. The men in the counting houses of government rage against the expense, preferring to hoard their coins for the machinery of war. And still the beautiful stone walls rise in barely accessible, elevated places. Heartbreaking operas are written and performed in various private and public rooms. Mass is celebrated. And the windows and statues and towers are maintained longer than you might think, in the face of autumn’s bitter winds and winter’s frantic storms. If you stand in certain parts of the valley you can see them shine. A clear flash of silver or alabaster in daytime, lit by a rich inner fire, or reflected moonlight at night, they disperse light and strength and consolation long after the noise of the battle has ended, and all of the warriors have gone home.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Walter Allward was an enormously gifted sculptor who worked in Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. His most major and best-known achievement is the imposing Vimy Memorial, the Canadian First World War Monument built near Arras in France. Allward is a character in this book and, as so, is used in the text in a purely fictitious manner. I leave it to others to write the factual biography his life and accomplishments so richly deserve.

  A great number of scholarly works inspired and informed parts of this book. Of these, the most important to me were The Rites of Spring by Modris Eksteins, Vimy by Pierre Berton, and two theses: The Idea of Vimy Ridge by John Pierce and A Catalogue Raisonee of the Work of Walter Allward by Lane Borstadt. I would also like to bring attention to the fine work done on the art of Walter Allward by Christine Boyanoski while she was at the Art Gallery of Ontario. I owe her an enormous debt of gratitude.

  Many other people have encouraged me and assisted me with my research while I was working on this book. My particular thanks goes to Peter Allward, Mieke Bevelander, Laura Brandon, Pat Bremner, Natalie Bull, Virgil Burnett, Jane Buyers, Terry Copp, Joan Coutu, Dennis Duffy, Sandra Gwyn, Ellen Levine, Stuart Mackinnon, Manfred Meurer, Anne Newlands, Louise Quayle, Roseanne (Buttons) Quinn, Peter (Tom) Sawyer, Sebastian Siebel-Achenbach, and Rosemary Tovell.

  Thanks also to Veterans Affairs Canada, the Heritage Conservation Program of Public Works and Government Services Canada, Queen’s University Archives, the Archives of the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario, as well as the Drawing Cabinets of the latter two organizations. At the Vimy Memorial, I would like to thank the enthusiastic student guides who were working there in the spring of 2000.

  I shall always be grateful to my long-term Canadian publisher, McClelland & Stewart, to Avie Bennett, and to all those employees with whom I have had the privilege of working while Mr. Bennett was at the helm. My thanks in particular to the director of publicity, Kelly Hechler, for her tact, grace, and friendship, and to copy editor Heather Sangster for her painstaking efforts with the manuscript and for bringing my attention back to “the whistle.”

  As always, a special thank you to my dear friend and best adviser, Ellen Seligman.

  Jane Urquhart was born in Little Long Lac, Ontario, and grew up in Toronto. She is the author of seven acclaimed novels: The Whirlpool, which received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France; Changing Heaven; Away, winner of the Trillium Book Award and a finalist for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Underpainter, winner of the Governor General’s Award and a finalist for the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; The Stone Carvers, which was a finalist for The Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and longlisted for the Booker Prize; A Map of Glass, a finalist for a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book; and, most recently, Sanctuary Line. She is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Storm Glass; four books of poetry; a biography of L.M. Montgomery for the Extraordinary Canadians series; and the editor of The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. Her work has been translated into numerous foreign languages.

  Urquhart has received the Marian Engel Award and the Harbourfront Festival Prize, and is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and an Officer of the Order of Canada. She has received numerous honorary doctorates from Canadian universities and has been writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa and at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and held the Presidential Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the University of Toronto.

  Jane Urquhart lives in Northumberland County, Ontario, and occasionally in Ireland.