The Stone Carvers (32 page)

“I only hire Italians,” Allward told Simson and a silent Tilman, “and I hire them because they are the best, the most energetic, and the most skilled.”

Klara and Tilman were standing in the overseer’s hut the morning after the ascension of the plaster angels. The low winter sun entered through the window in front of which Allward was standing, his shadow stretching the full length of the room. While Klara shifted nervously from foot to foot, Tilman stood entirely still beside her, remembering that he really had no desire to be there at all, never mind a desire to be lectured to.

He had spent some time late on the previous afternoon wandering around the vastly altered battlefield with Giorgio, trying to explain the situation as it had been in April of 1917. “A mess,” he kept saying. “It was all a disaster.”

“I thought Vimy was our great victory,” Giorgio looked at Tilman, who was squinting in the face of the wind.

“That may be,” Tilman said, turning to climb out of one of the craters, “but I don’t think a single one of us who was there knew whether or not there was a victory. We barely understood where we were when it was all over. And let’s not overlook the fact that thirty-five hundred guys died, and three times as many were injured. I didn’t even hear about the grandness of the victory until the war was finished, and then I thought the fellow telling me had things all wrong.” Tilman’s expression tightened. “I never thought I’d ever be back here, that’s one thing for sure.”

“But here you are,” Giorgio put his large arm around his friend’s shoulder.

Because he was so fond of him Tilman endured his companion’s warmth for longer than usual. Then he pulled away. “Only because of my brother,” he said. “I’m only here because he wanted to come.”

“I didn’t think you had a brother.”

“No, neither did I.”

“Look,” Simson was saying now, his military side surfacing despite his healthy respect for Allward, “this man lost his leg fighting here at Vimy, fighting for his country. And he came all this way. Give him a break.”

Allward sighed, handed Tilman a chisel, and, leaving Klara anxious and alone with the overseer, escorted him out the door toward some abandoned chunks of marble. “All right, let’s see you carve a face.”

Tilman hated carving features, but he had learned how, after a fashion, from Juliani. “I’m better at distant views, reliefs, that kind of stuff.”

“There are no distant views on this hunk of rock. The distant views are all out there,” Allward jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the French countryside. “If you hadn’t come all the way from home, I wouldn’t hire you. But, I suppose, you can do some of the patterns on the base: fleurs-de-lys, shields, and the like.” He put his hands in his pockets and surveyed Tilman’s carving, which was less than impressive. “No danger of you wanting to do something original, you haven’t got the skill.”

Tilman was vaguely insulted, though he knew what the man was saying was true. At least when it came to stone. “Can
you
carve wood?” Tilman asked the tall man with what Allward correctly identified as impertinence.

Allward liked impertinence. “I’ve never had the desire to,” he said. As he walked away, his long dark coat flapping in the wind, he pointed toward a triangular-shaped wall that flanked a staircase on the east side of the base.

“Over there,” he called without turning around. “The Italians will show you what to do.”

As Tilman walked slowly back to the hut to rescue Klara, there came over him a strong desire to bolt. Shields, crosses. The work would take a long time and would, in the end, mean little to him. Moreover, he was anxious because of his sister’s disguise, which he knew would be close to impossible to maintain forever. But his own disguise as a dependable worker would be even more difficult to perpetuate. There were roads everywhere—some he could see from up here on the ridge—and around him were a number of tempting horses, had he only known how to ride them. Vehicles too, trucks, delivery vans, often stood purring nearby, their operators having briefly abandoned them to complete another task. It would be simple to climb into one of them, drive away. Then, as he rounded the east corner of the monument, he saw his sister leave the hut, walk a few paces beyond it, and lift her face to look at the pylons. From this distance he couldn’t read her expression, but everything in her posture suggested awe, as if her small body had already been transformed, redeemed by the experience of arriving at this destination. He was strangely and tenderly affected by this, and he knew then that he would stay, stay as long as he possibly could.

K
lara slept in a dormitory Quonset hut in a bunk next to Tilman. Fifteen other workers shared the space and filled the air at night with muttering and snoring, the waking hours with a cacophony of Italian sounds Klara couldn’t understand. Often they could be heard singing when they returned from the mess hall or from the showers, and many of them stood unashamedly naked by their beds while sorting out the jumble of their morning clothing. Klara’s sole knowledge of the male body had come to her as a result of learning Eamon, a pale-skinned, beautifully formed boy with a clear chest and a flat stomach. Now she saw everything that in the past she had only measured for suit jackets, and she saw much more besides: men with enormous pot-bellies and hair covering all of their bodies, and younger men, powerfully but thickly built. They were wonderfully unselfconscious lumbering about the room like large, friendly animals, often delivering long Italian speeches to the man they thought she was. Though they knew he didn’t understand, and couldn’t reply even if he did, Klara suspected it was their way of telling her—or him—that they knew he was different in significant ways and that they had accepted these differences. They were physically affectionate with each other in a way that women would likely never be. Klara admired this. There was a peculiar smell to the place as well that eventually she came to savour, something to do with sweat and dirty socks, these things and a kind of acid sweetness that she recalled from Charolais.

Tilman’s friend, Giorgio, slept in a much smaller hut next door with the two other carvers who worked in the elevated atelier at the top of the pylon. Klara was grateful for this as she wanted, for the purposes of maintaining her disguise, no further intimacy with this friend of Tilman. There were occasions during the progress of the work when she was convinced that one or another of the men was examining her delicate, hairless hands with too much curiosity or was glancing far too often in the direction of her chest. And once or twice she caught herself just on the edge of saying something out loud. Her nightmares included scenes where she would find herself entirely undressed in the studio full of men. Tilman, sensing her anxiety, and acutely aware of his own, had tried to persuade her that they should tell Giorgio who she really was, confess her gender. He is entirely trustworthy, he had explained, and he would look out for her if he knew, would help them keep her secret. But she hadn’t liked the idea, and said she wanted to be treated the same as everyone else.

“How can you be like everyone else,” Tilman had argued, “when you have to whisper all the time?”

But she wouldn’t be convinced, so remained quiet and discrete when working, whispering a word or a sentence only when a question was put to her directly, and keeping her back turned and her head lowered as much as possible. Oddly, without words, she began to open more to the perceived world. As if even the pores of her skin had enlarged in order to drink light, she began to retain in startling detail the visual images around her. The way the sinews on the men’s hands moved when they held a carving tool, the concentration lines around their eyes when they squinted at the development of form in stone. How the men hovered in front of a line of chisels perfectly arranged on a table in order of ascending scale. And how, once they had made their choice they never changed their mind. Sandro, Alfredo, and Giorgio, the musical sound of their names in a wind-rocked room.

They were finishing the figure at the top of the monument, a female allegory of peace, her back arched against the top of the pylon, her head thrown back as if she were succumbing to an invisible embrace, the laurel branch like a stone fountain in her raised hand. She was clothed only from the hips down, one leg emerging from the drapery; her upper torso was naked. Full breasts, the horizontal ladder of her ribs, and wonderfully formed shoulders and arms.

The men clearly adored her, referred to her as the
bella donna
. Each morning Sandro would take off his cap and greet the stone woman, whom he said that he knew well since it was he who had carved her features and expression. But the other men spoke quietly to her as well, glancing at her white face now and then while they sculpted her body. All day long she was invented and reinvented, changing under the chisels, which Klara handed up to the carvers, and under the altering angles of the light.

As the weeks passed Giorgio instructed Klara, explaining the use of chisels, rasps, and claws so that eventually she knew automatically which size the men might need, could sense by their posture and gestures when they required a change of gauge. He showed her how to use the pumice to polish finished limbs, always speaking slowly and patiently.

One day, shortly after the carvers began to work on the recently arrived angels, Klara whispered to Giorgio that she knew a bit about chisels from woodcarving.

“Like Tilman,” he said. “You had a grandfather who was wonderful, I understand.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “He taught us when we were quite small children. He had high hopes for Tilman. But after he disappeared …”

“Your brother finds it hard to stick,” Giorgio said. They had pulled the canvas aside and were sitting at the front door of the studio, thoughtfully chewing on the baguettes they were given for lunch, their legs swinging over emptiness. It was a cold, clear day in early March. They could see as far as Arras. “Sometimes he even ran away from us, his adopted family. But we all knew he would come back. And he was pretty good about jobs, the one at the stoveworks, and even when we were with Juliani.” Giorgio exchanged a wave with someone on the ground, then turned back to the person he knew as Karl. “How long do you think he’ll stay here?” he asked.

“I hope he’ll stay,” whispered Klara, not really answering the question. “I hope so.”

“Well, I’ll be here, anyway,” said Giorgio, sensing by the way this small man kept his features mostly shadowed by his cap that his companion was shy and reticent. Giorgio laughed now and made some kind of uninterpretable male gesture to his friend below.

Klara turned to look at him, to study his rectangular-shaped face in profile, the prominent nose and generous mouth, his large arm resting on a strong thigh. She couldn’t remember ever coming to like someone this quickly, this fast. She almost touched his sleeve, the soft plaid flannel that emerged from his blue jacket, then remembered and pulled back.

He glanced at her suddenly, then grinned and scrambled to his feet, oddly light and agile for a man so large. “Back to work,” he said.

“Yes,” whispered Klara, “back to work.”

Later in the afternoon Giorgio asked her to work with him in the far corner of the studio, where he had begun to rough out the left wing of an angel. Klara was to fill a bucket with waste stone, then take it to the canvas door and lower it by a rope to the ground beneath. On one occasion, just before she was to proceed to the door with a full load, she amazed herself by asking Giorgio if he were married.

He tilted his puzzled face down toward her. Then he looked away and began to tap the chisel with the mallet.

“Do you have a wife?” she whispered. Giorgio was four rungs up on the ladder, working on the angel’s shoulder. From where she stood, Klara could see the smooth curve of his throat.

“I came close once, but it didn’t happen. Circumstances,” he said slowly. “First the war, then the Depression. How about you?”

“No,” she whispered. “No, not ever.” Klara moved away from him—away from the ladder—to fetch the broom and dustpan.

“Tilman never told me he had a brother. You are how old?” He did not look at her, concentrating instead on the way the surface of the neck unfurled at its base to allow for a collarbone, a breast.

“Thirty-nine.” Klara looked at the floor, stone chips and dust.

Giorgio threw his head back and laughed. “I’m forty-one,” he said. “We still have lots of time for women, you and I.” Klara laughed out loud.

Giorgio stared at her, surprised. He had never known what to make of this brother of Tilman.

Klara staggered a bit as the studio shuddered under a blast of wind. She feared she had briefly released her hidden womanhood simply by expressing her delight in the phrase of another. Frightened, she drew this woman sharply back into her self, but couldn’t pull back the scenario that was building in her imagination. She looked at her small hands, which to her embarrassment she could envisage undoing the buttons on her shirt in the presence of this man, although she couldn’t even remember the shape and weight of her own breasts.

Giorgio turned back toward the sculpture. Klara felt a kind of tense silence settle between them, and she decided from now on to remain as quiet as possible in his presence. But all day long, after this, while Giorgio and the other men chatted in Italian, Klara’s inner voice continued to speak to her brother’s friend. Do you see? she was saying to him in her mind, this looking inward unfamiliar in the wooden and canvas room. Do you understand?

She hadn’t dreamt of Eamon for a long, long time, but in recent nights he had been strolling through her dreams, looking angry and distant, as if he no longer wanted to know her. In the past she had often had such dreams, attributing them to the difficult way in which they had parted. Now that she was standing on the soil of the country whose air he had last breathed, in the vicinity of a memorial that would bear his name, the memory of Eamon often came painfully alive in her mind. How did he think about her in the end, with longing, with indifference, or with hatred? Or was there, by the time he died, a French or English girl on his mind, someone who had been kind to him? It was she who had felt abandoned, when in fact she had closed toward him, had sent him away without even touching his hand.