The Stone Carvers (26 page)

“What’s in here?” Tilman asked after he had finally knocked the bolt sideways.

“Just wait,” she answered, wanting his pure reaction.

He handed the hammer back to her, pulled the door through the thick weeds that prevented it from swinging open, and gasped in surprise, almost in fear.

In the light that shone through the east window of the small shop stood the abbess, her smooth, sightless eyes staring through a tapestry of spiderwebs, her two hands holding a network so thick it was as if she had spent the last decade creating a gauze map of the river systems of the world.

“Good Lord,” said Tilman, “I thought for a moment she was real.”

Klara clawed her way through webs into the interior of the shop. She seized an old broom from the corner and began to clean the sculpture with it, revealing an arm, a shoe, a draped skirt, almost as if she were painting a huge canvas. Dust rose into the shaft of light from the door and hung glittering there.

“Grandfather was one hell of a carver,” said Tilman with admiration. “Thank the Lord the carpenter ants didn’t get at her. How long has she been out here?”

“Grandfather didn’t make this,” said Klara. “I did.”

“You made this?” said her brother in disbelief. “You made this by yourself?”

Klara stepped back from the figure so Tilman could see it better. “Grandfather taught me,” she said. When her brother did not reply, she added, “It’s not quite finished.”

All Klara’s carving tools on the bench were oranged by time and bathed in dust. “I’ll show you,” she said, seizing a medium-sized chisel and the hammer. “Watch.”

It was as if the whole room were lit by her brother’s amazement. Though she worked with difficulty as the tools were not sharp, and she was nervous and out of practice, a fold, nevertheless, slid down the skirt at the end of the tool.

“Jesus!” said Tilman, impressed.

“I can barely hang on to the chisel,” said Klara. “It hasn’t been sharpened for a decade. But, as you can see, I
can
do it.”

Tilman, as if overcome by the largeness of the figure and the smallness of the space, stepped back toward the door of the shop. “Grandfather wanted me to make large figures like this.”

“Yes,” said Klara. “He had high hopes for you. When he was older he liked to believe you’d gone to Bavaria, that you were in some kind of workshop there, studying Riemenschneider, studying the masters.”

“Meanwhile, I was over there trying to kill the Hun, not even thinking about their works of art. Sometimes our trenches were so close together I could hear the men talking, and I knew what they were saying because of Grandfather. Remember … he would speak to himself when he was working. He always treated himself as an apprentice, then gave himself instructions in German.”

Klara quietly returned the chisel to the shelf. “I’ve done no carving now for almost twenty years,” she told Tilman. “Grandfather knew I had stopped. He said I would start again, that something would come along that would make me want to do it, that would make it impossible for me not to do it.”

Her brother was a dark, silent silhouette in the bright rectangle of the door.

“I want to do it now, Tilman,” Klara continued. “I want to carve. We should go to that man Allward’s monument, where your friend is, in France.”

Tilman was standing with his arms outstretched, one hand on either side of the doorframe. Klara could see his body swing forward as he began to laugh. She solemnly observed his mirth for a minute or two.

“I’m serious,” she said when he had recovered himself. “I honestly think we should do it.”

She had an answer for every one of his arguments, though the debate went on for days.
His leg?
He’d already travelled with it.
No money?
She would sell the animals, since she wouldn’t be there to mind them.
Still not enough money and all of it hers
. They would do it mostly on the bum, and he surely knew how to do that.
She didn’t know how to carve marble
. She’d learn, knew she could. He, in fact, could teach her.
She’s a woman
. It doesn’t matter.

“It
does
matter, Klara,” he argued. “You have no idea what happens to women on the road.”

“Whatever it is, it won’t happen to me.”

Tilman told her he hated the ocean, that he had found the journey to the war almost as bad as the war itself, the feeling of entrapment had been that strong, that and his persistent seasickness.

“You came back … you had to take a ship to come back.”

“Without a leg and with lots of morphia. I don’t remember much.” Why couldn’t she understand, he wanted to know, that almost every aspect of that period of his life had been nightmarish? To him, France was a place of carnage, claustrophobia, and continuous bad weather. “And Klara,” he added. “I’d been on the road, I survived it better than most.”

Tilman crossed the night kitchen, then returned to the table, sat down, and hauled his wooden leg up to the seat of the adjacent chair. “Christ, this thing is a burden,” he said. “Can’t ever rest easy with it—except at night when it is on one side of the room and I am on the other.” He was silent for a bit, then he leaned forward, his arms resting on the table. He looked at his sister. “I don’t like saying this because I believe in freedom and everybody being at least given a chance to do what they want—even if what they want to do is nothing.”

Klara waited.

“But, Klara, I have to tell you this. You won’t ever be able to work on that monument.”

“I can do it. If they won’t let me carve I’ll do some other kind of work. I want to be near it. I’ll do anything.”

“No, you can’t.” He raised his hand to keep her from speaking. “You’re a woman, Klara, and everyone else is men. Not one of them would hire a woman.”

Klara looked right back at him. “I am harmless,” she said, the last thing he expected to hear. She rose and walked away. “I wouldn’t touch a hair on the head of any of them,” she added as she left the room.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Tilman said, laughing. He was certain the discussion had ended.

Tilman chopped wood every day for a week, explaining to his subdued sister that when he met Giorgio’s father, Refuto, the man could chop wood like a machine and he had taught Tilman tricks so that the work went faster. “At least I’ll have been some help to you, Klara, before I go,” he told her. “There’ll be enough in the shed for winter by the time I’ve finished.”

Klara was washing up after dinner and paid him no mind. After this she would climb the stairs to her sunroom, where she had been sewing for the past few days, quiet, absorbed, and distant from her brother. “And where is it you are planning to go?” she eventually asked, not turning away from the sink.

Tilman didn’t answer but rose from the chair instead. “It will be cold tonight—a frost maybe,” he said. “I’ll go bring in the animals. They’ll be happier in the barn.”

“They can stay in the pasture,” said Klara. “No need.”

“No, I’ll get them,” he limped toward the door. “It’s better that I do.”

Through the window, Klara watched him dragging his leg down the lane toward the pasture.

She said “Vimy” and “Allward” aloud, hoping that even though he couldn’t hear them, the words would penetrate his brain and stay there. She didn’t want to see him limping like that on the concession road, going out to meet life and taking all of life with him. And she staying put, trapped in her constant place, the view from the window never changing except on those occasions when it framed a picture of someone walking away from her.

A
s she had each day during the past week, Klara sat cross-legged on the wide work table surrounded by pins and thread and scraps of cloth. It was mid-October, each day was fractionally shorter than the last, and there was a scurrying noise of squirrels storing nuts between the ceiling and the roof above her, a sense of urgency in the air. Klara was pleased to have almost completed the garment that lay draped across her lap, the arms hanging languidly down from the edge of the table.

People up and die, she thought, they up and die before they have their fill of the impossible. Her grandfather had died before Tilman’s much-longed-for return. Father Gstir had died before the bell for his illogical church was blessed. Eamon, without ever laying a hand on a military aircraft. They all had approached their desires naked, simple and glowing, without artifice or disguise, their wide-open hearts an uncomplicated target for annulment of one kind or another. Renunciation was an option they never even had time to consider before they were rejected by experience and the light was cancelled.

This was not going to happen to her. She would court the impossible, but she would conceal herself, confuse the spirit of annihilation, bring no attention to her quest.

When she descended the stairs for the noon meal, she found Tilman rummaging in the pantry, making room for the large bag of flour he had brought from town. “Traded one of my boxes for it,” he told her. “It should last you quite some time.

“What a relief,” he added, stepping back into the kitchen, “to have been in a village not filled with widows and orphans. Towns all over Ontario are still carrying on about the war as if they knew something about it, naming streets and memorial halls after battles they couldn’t even begin to imagine. Not in Shoneval, though,” he remarked sarcastically. “The Germans here still look at me as if I’m a freak because of my leg. Refreshing.”

“You said you sometimes heard the Germans talking in the trenches.”

Tilman stood still for a while, remembering. “You know,” he said, “it was peculiar, but they were talking about precisely the same things that the men beside me were talking about: girls, hometowns, food. Sometimes I would forget I was listening to German because what they were talking about was so familiar.”

“It’s not what you think,” Klara said, “about Shoneval. Some of the boys were keen to go, but parents and grandparents got them exempted for farming.”

“Lucky them.” Tilman began to walk back and forth across the room. “Except,” he added, “they are all still here, in the same place.” A look of faint contempt passed over his face.

“Sit down,” said Klara, “stop pacing. You’re not on the road yet. Just sit right there and don’t move. I’m going upstairs. I’ve got something to show you. A surprise.”

Tilman collapsed into the Boston rocker. “What kind of a surprise?”

“Wait and see,” Klara called over her shoulder. “Just wait and see.”

Klara undressed in the noon light of the many-windowed sunroom, no one to see her nakedness. She stood without clothing for several minutes, allowing the coolness of the air to touch her skin, to dry the sweat behind her knees and between her breasts as if all she had been until this moment were disappearing with the evaporation. Eventually she stepped into the trousers she had been tailoring all week and sat down to lace up the new shoes she had bought in the village. She stood and placed a dark hat on her head. Then she straightened her shoulders, dressed the upper part of her body, and descended the stairs.

When she entered the kitchen, Tilman sprang from the rocker, then stumbled, having forgotten about his leg. “What the hell …” he said.

Klara, dressed in men’s trousers and shoes, white shirt, tie, complete with her father’s diamond tie pin and a splendid red waistcoat, tipped her hat. Her father’s gold cufflinks shone in the sunlight.

“What’s all this?” Tilman’s expression had changed from shock to suspicion.

“I am going to Vimy and you are too,” Klara said. “You told me they’d never hire a woman, so I’m going as a man, as your brother.”

Tilman continued to stare at her. He was not sure she looked like a man, but she didn’t look like a woman either. She had pulled her hair up under the hat.

“I’ll cut it,” said Klara, noticing his gaze. Then she changed her mind. “No, I won’t cut it. I’ll keep my hat on all the time.”

“What
is
this madness?” her brother asked. “It’s like a religion, your wanting to go. If it’s the carving you’re after, stay here and make angels for the churches. You’re good enough for that. I meant it when I said no man could do better.”

“I don’t want to make angels,” Klara ran her hands nervously over the waistcoat. “I want to work on that monument … . You know how to travel.” She stopped, let her pride slip. Then she said quietly, “I can’t get there by myself, Tilman, I don’t think I could do it.”

Tilman stepped away from her, crossing the floor to the sink. He bent down so that he could see as much of the sky as possible. There was one delicate chevron of migrating birds, far off, but they were heading east, not north. They’re practising, he thought, they’re not departing yet.

Few birds crossed the ocean, Tilman knew, unless they were carried by the fierce, inescapable winds of storm, unless they had been forced to give up all control of direction, departure, arrival. The boat would be like the chain or at best like school, or like Limb-Bo. “I’m not going, Klara,” he said, refusing to look at her. “I won’t go.”

Though he couldn’t see her, an atmosphere of sorrow seemed to run like a river from the place where his sister stood. Tilman felt its strength flow over his shoulders, through the window glass, and out into the grey autumnal sky.

And then there came a loud crash as Klara swept her mother’s good Limoges platter from the ledge of the china cabinet onto the planked floor. She stood staring at the shards for several moments, then with her voice choked by tears said, “I won’t stay any more.”

Tilman looked at her, amazed, frightened by this display of emotion. In her men’s clothes with her slight figure Klara looked like the boy he had been—filled with the need for escape—and despite the fear his heart went out to her.

She stepped away from him as he reached over to touch her arm. “You can go, Klara, anywhere you want to and I’d take you there. But why this monument on the other side of an ocean I can’t cross?”

“I
want
to go there,” she said. “I want
you
to go there.” There were tears streaming down her face just as there had been when Tilman had last seen her thirty years before.