The Stone Carvers (33 page)

One morning after she’d had a dream in which Eamon behaved as if he had forgotten he had ever known her, Klara was told by Simson to help treat and polish the stone torchbearer that stood on the base of the monument between the pylons, directly behind the figure representing the spirit of sacrifice.

She had never been inside the lower studio, had no real idea of how the work there was progressing. But she remembered clearly the morning when the plasters for the lower grouping had arrived. She and the men she worked with had scrambled down from their eyrie to join the other workers gathered around the crate. It had been a miserable winter day, dry but overcast with a wind that cut through the blue cotton of their coats and overalls. A hundred yards or so from the place where the truck had stopped, some of the men had been busy digging a huge pit—it looked to her like a grave—where surplus blocks of marble were to be buried. Allward, she had come to know, always anticipated damage of one kind or another and wanted an excess of his treasured stone to be stored near the site for future repairs. But Klara remembered that for one brief, irrational moment she had thought that the figures inside the crates might be lowered into the ground rather than taken up to the monument. She also recalled an exquisitely rendered plaster arm, rivered with tendons and veins, holding a torch toward the sky, remembered finding herself running her hand gently across the neck of the torchbearer when she thought no one else was looking, then being admonished by Allward, himself, for this action. No one should touch the work any more than necessary, he had announced while Klara, her face flaming, stared at the pencilled instructions and mathematical calculations written in Allward’s hand on the pale plaster arm.

“Everyone’s being moved,” Tilman told her now, “except me. I am still to work on the back of the base.” Although his carving skills had turned out to be less questionable than Allward originally thought, Tilman was kept busy with decorative work: crosses and shields and, more recently, wreaths. This suited Tilman fine. He knew in any case he was mostly just putting in time, and besides, he had discovered for the first time in his life that he was interested in a paycheque, for Tilman had encountered in the restaurants of the town of Arras what he believed was going to be the love of his life.

Night after night as she lay in the bunk next to his, Klara would fall asleep listening to her brother telling her about the pleasures of eating French food. He would describe with great tenderness his experiences in the restaurant of the Hotel Picardie, when he first met
Gratin de homard au porto
or
Truffe St-Hubert
, or that particularly memorable evening when, quite by accident, he came to know
Caneton de la belle époque
in the company of
Flan de Langoustines George V
. He would also describe for her the tablecloths, the napkins, the large silver-plate spoons, and the elegant china edged in gold leaf, things that, in a thousand years, Klara would not have thought could have held his attention. It all proved a most soothing lullaby for Klara, the soft cadences of the French phrases:
Écrevisses à la crème, Bouillabaisse Marseillaise, Grillades aux pommes soufflées, Poulet à la crème et à l’estragon …

“Everyone’s being relocated,” he said, “because there’s some big shot coming from Ottawa. Simson wants to have the lower figures, at least, completed by the time he gets here. Giorgio told me that the folks back home are getting impatient. It’s all taking too long, costing too much money.”

Klara was not sure she wanted to work elsewhere on the site. She had become comfortable with her co-workers, liked her surroundings.

“Giorgio’s being moved to the names … which is what he wanted,” Tilman was fussing with his prosthesis. “They’ve, so far, only made it to ‘H.’ But he’ll only be there half-days. They still want him upstairs, working on the angels.” He stood up now and smoothed his pant leg over the wooden limb. “I’m going into Arras for dinner tonight. Why don’t you come with me? I’ll treat.”

“No, no, that’s all right,” said Klara. On the one or two times she had dined with Tilman she had soon tired of trying to keep up with his rapacious appetite.

On a morning in late April, Klara, who had been assigned to the lower studio, walked through its soft doors to be confronted with the beautiful stone sculptures of the two young men: one,
The Spirit of Sacrifice
, languid against a plinth, caught at the edge of surrender to unconsciousness, death, or complete dematerialization; the other, strong, alive, holding a torch toward the sky. The light shining between the pylons and through the skylight of this lower studio touched the arms, shoulders, and chest of the torchbearer, while his fainting stone companion, placed on a lower level, sank into shadow and became, himself, almost a shade. A tangle of ladders and scaffolding disguised the lower bodies of both youths, but the torso of the upper figure could be seen above this, sun from the skylight pouring over his chest and stomach like honey.

Klara gasped, let the canvas fall from her hand, and walked out onto the marble base of the monument, where she collapsed into a seated position, her head in her arms. She felt as though she might actually black out in the face of this radiance. She sat there for several minutes, swallowing air, attempting to focus. Then she pulled herself together, walked back through the studio door, moved behind the scaffolding, picked up the pumice, and, reaching through the scaffolding in a kind of trance, began to polish the torchbearer’s feet. When she finally climbed the ladder and permitted herself to look carefully at the half-finished face, she touched the neck, her fingers moving across it in the same way that they had, three months before, the morning the plaster had arrived. She would have to wait for the carver to complete the sculpture before she would be asked to polish the features.

When the work day was over, she walked away from the studio with an idea as a companion. No one could disturb her relationship with it, no one could break into the plan. When she found herself alone with Tilman outside the mess hall, she could hear him talking to her and she could hear the sound of her own replies, but she knew she wasn’t fully there, was answering mechanically. She had walked into an interior classroom, a dark school, where as if committing an act of robbery, she was gathering together for her own use everything she had seen the men do when they had chisels in their hands and all she remembered about the shape of her dead lover’s head, the features of his long-absent face.

“What do you do with everything that is cut away?” she asked Tilman, thinking now about the negative space of stone sculpture, the stone that is discarded, thinking too about how she had thrown away huge pieces of her own early life, how she had tried to dispose of the memory of Eamon.

Tilman dug in his pockets and pulled out two marble shards that were shaped like the native arrowheads he had sometimes found in the fields after his father was finished with spring ploughing. “Some of the tourists, even ones who have lost family, friends, like to take away helmets, bullets,” he said. “I prefer a souvenir of the monument, rather than anything that reminds me of that mess. You can have one of them, if you like.”

“Thanks,” said Klara, holding out her hand to receive the shards of stone. Then she walked away from him with the idea speaking in her mind and with the sharp piece of stone digging into the flesh of her palm.

H
is sister had no real knowledge of what the return to Vimy had meant for Tilman. Among the throng that had gathered to work on the monument, he would be the only man who carried the battle in his mind, who carried the scars of the battle on his person, and from whom the battle had stolen flesh. The lower part of his leg had been abandoned somewhere in this landscape—the thigh being amputated later. Now that he was back at the site, Tilman thought he should be able to identify the shell hole, that he would somehow be drawn to the exact spot where the mud had swallowed his limb. But the terrain was so altered by the time he and Klara had arrived—Allward had rebuilt the ridge itself to enhance the shape of the memorial—that he was disoriented by grass, and saplings, roads, and tidy graveyards. He could never really believe that he was in the same place, even though after all this time the silent evidence of horror was everywhere. And yet, despite Tilman’s inability to mentally reconstruct the terrain of the conflict, there was something in the atmosphere, the way the light hung in the air, and in the direction of the wind that carried with it a grim reminder, a souvenir.
Souvenir
. The French term that appeared over and over, carved into the marble of civilian graveyards in Amiens or Arras, though oddly not in the military cemeteries. The word itself, which spoke of wrenching grief and loss, seemed to him to bring the sound of this wind with it, a sound like that of a bayonet slicing flesh.

When Tilman and his company had been preparing for the battle at Vimy, the claustrophobia of the tunnels had made him eager to volunteer for any kind of job that would allow him out into the open air. More comfortable with snipers than with confinement, and remembering all the training he had done as a young boy during the summer of the bridge, he begged to be made a runner, loved the freedom of speeding across mud, then leaping into trenches, the message delivered by his unshaking hand. He had felt swift and alive, impervious to enemy ammunition, invisible almost, because he was on the move; travel of any kind had always relaxed him. But during the two days before the battle, the tunnels had swallowed him again, and he was forced to stand upright for twenty-four hours in murky and constantly faltering electric light with a multitude of other sombre men, some sleeping on their feet, others whispering to themselves or to a mate, all anticipating the barrage and their own performance in the face of it.

Who were those boys he had stood beside on that April morning waiting for the command.
Joey, Jimmy
. He couldn’t remember, remembered only the dark boy’s flesh exploding under sleet and shrapnel. And the other turning to him, seemingly unharmed, his head cocked to one side, a puzzled expression in his eyes and the beginnings of a question on his lips. One word forming there. Something with a “W,” Who? or What? Then the opaque film moving over the eyes, and the knees buckling.

Tilman had grabbed him by the sleeves as he sank, only then noticing the small dark circle at the temple. When he let him go, the boy fell backwards into the trench from which they had just emerged. Through the next twenty minutes of chaos Tilman froze in a crouching position with his back to the Germans. The boy’s pale, dead face had stared up at him from the filth of this unclean grave, the question, whatever it was, still frozen on his lips, and the face itself lit by the glorious colours made by the hail of deafening ammunition that was part of the soon to be famous “rolling barrage.” More noise, it would be said, than the world had ever heard before, the furious sound travelling across the English Channel, heard as far as London. More beautiful than any other form of fireworks that had ever visited the sky.

An unimaginable amount of death had come into Tilman’s line of vision in the previous three years, and yet this one boy’s demise stayed with him, perhaps because it was the last clear image he retained from the great battle during which he was wounded out.
Wounded out
. The term seemed to fit his life. He had been wounded out of his family when he was a child, his parents being unable to cope with his nature. There were times when he felt that he had been wounded out of life altogether, forced to live in a world apart. Even at Vimy, he had avoided the camaraderie of the tunnels, the sense of collaboration. He had volunteered for dangerous jobs, for night reconnaissance work, or as a messenger before the battle, simply for the relief of an exposed position. And it was because of this that he had become intimate with the wind, could recognize it now when everything else had been camouflaged by order. The wind remained unpredictable, impossible to control, often vicious.

Ghosts and marble and memory on the heights, and down on the plain, warmth and food and life. As often as he could, Tilman walked and hitchhiked through the wind into the atmospheric stillness of Arras, where, in his role as appreciator of haute cuisine, he had come to know Monsieur Recouvrir, the chef at the Hotel Picardie. A huge man, covered first in an ample layer of fat and then in his white chef’s uniform, he had noted the strange Canadian’s attachment to his restaurant and had been impressed by his interest in sampling even the most creative organ dishes that were almost always avoided by those who spoke English. Eventually he had presented himself at Tilman’s table, and a few days later he had offered to take the Canadian carver on a tour of the kitchen.

Tilman had immediately responded to this aromatic workshop, the cauldron of potage murmuring on the gas range, garlands of onions and garlic in the vicinity. Recouvrir’s hysterical and very thin sous-chef frenetically chopping vegetables, the round, red face of Monsieur Recouvrir himself beaming in the centre. The chef was like a calm, benign God, confident in the midst of creation, seven perfectly sharpened and polished knives near the plump flesh of his right hand, a semicircle of different-sized ladles hanging from the ceiling, making a metal nimbus over his hat. As the weeks passed, Tilman visited the kitchen on his days off, and in the long evenings, and while the chef’s large body swayed as he stirred a sauce or while he leaned forward to roll out a perfect pastry, Tilman sat on a nearby stool, a glass of vin rouge in his hand, and began to talk about the war.

Monsieur Recouvrir understood very little of what the English-Canadian said and was therefore in some ways the perfect listener. Grave and sympathetic, he responded infrequently and only, therefore, to the names of battles he recognized.
“Ah, oui,”
he would say sadly, his wooden spoon stopped in mid-stir,
“la Somme.”
And once he repeated the word, “Verdun” with tears in his eyes.