The Stone Carvers (34 page)

One afternoon he met Tilman at the door and led him into the vacant restaurant. Sitting opposite him at the table, a pichet of vin blanc between them, he began to roll up his white sleeve. Tilman could see a red circle just above the dimpled elbow, and in the centre of the circle, a dark, sharp point. Recouvrir took a paring knife and, wincing, extracted a flat, bloody sliver of wet metal that he dropped with a clang onto a plate on the table between them. “Shrapnel,” he said, knocking twice on Tilman’s wooden leg. “Verdun,” he added. The Canadian understood then that this kind man carried in his body fragments of the catastrophe of the battle of Verdun, fragments that now and then, like Tilman’s own memories, worked themselves to the surface. He touched the plate where the blood was drying, then brought his fist down on his artificial leg. “Vimy Ridge,” he said. “Vimy.”

Recouvrir began Tilman’s informal culinary training with an
omelette aux fines herbes
. AQuébécois hobo had once shown Tilman how to make omelettes over an open fire when he was a boy, but Tilman was only too happy to receive the instructions again.

Standing with the stainless-steel bowl clasped to his round belly, Recouvrir said,
“Regardez”
while using his right arm to move the whisk in a winding, rhythmic motion. Then he let Tilman try to copy his actions, which he was able to do more or less successfully. The resulting shape of the eggs in the pan made Tilman think of a small yellow landscape in relief. He was so pleased with himself he wanted to frame the omelette rather than eat it. But Recouvrir roared at him goodnaturedly,
“Mangez, mangez.”

They strolled through the arcaded streets of Arras to the market, where the chef pointed out the roundest tomatoes, the fattest garlics, the most beautiful and aromatic cheeses, the plumpest chickens, gleaming trout, the small curls of pink shrimp. They visited the
boulangerie
, the
pâtisserie
, and walked back to the restaurant with their arms full of golden wands of bread and one small, round pastry, gorgeously decorated with quarter-moons of peaches and pears topped with bright berries, the whole surface glazed as though varnished.

When they returned to the hotel in the late afternoon, Recouvrir put his arm around Tilman’s shoulders and guided him into the apartment that he kept at the back of the establishment. In the small salon Tilman sat on a burgundy chair near the fireplace while his new friend scurried around in the adjacent kitchen, called out pleasantries in French, some of which Tilman actually understood, and finally reappeared with the pastry, fruit, dessert dishes, silver forks, and a bottle of Veuve Cliquot champagne all artfully displayed on a silver tray. He stood for a moment in the doorway, side-lit by the light from a window that looked out to a small garden, his face soft and unguarded, the tray and its contents gleaming in his hands, a kind of glorious Father Nature, Tilman thought, complete with bubbles and grapes and lustre. And it was while he was thinking this that he realized he had not flinched when the plump arm had touched his shoulder.

One morning not long after this, Recouvrir drove his rather battered Renault up the road lined by young Canadian maples, parked in front of the Givenchy Road military cemetery, and walked toward the work site, carrying in his hand a plate covered by a blue linen towel. Now and then he stopped to talk to French labourers he knew, as many of them came from Arras or the surrounding territory. One of these men directed him to the opposite side of the monument from where one could see the industrial town of Lens, and so Recouvrir climbed the southwest steps, rounded the left pylon, and began to descend the left set of northeastern steps, where several men sat on three-legged stools, engraving the names of the lost. Beyond them, at the front of the monument, he found Tilman carving a pleat in a flag that draped the empty stone catafalque meant to suggest the tomb of an unknown Canadian warrior. The noise of machinery in the vicinity had overwhelmed the sound of Recouvrir’s footsteps, so Tilman did not hear him approach.

Recouvrir gently placed the plate on a nearby stone ledge, then crouched down beside the spot where Tilman sat without his wooden leg, which he had removed and placed against the casket. Recouvrir smiled at the Canadian’s surprise and sensed his momentary lack of recognition now that he was not wearing the customary white outfit. He touched the fold that Tilman was carving.
“Merveilleux,”
he said.
“Tu es artiste.”

“And I have just completed this,” said Tilman, pointing to the shield at the right of the drapery. He felt shy but not offended by the large man’s proximity. Neither shifted his gaze from the other’s face.

Recouvrir moved his hand back and forth across the unremarkable shield.
“Merveilleux,”
he said again, then took his hand away from the stone and placed it on Tilman’s back, touching it with the same sweeping motion as he had the shield.

Neither man spoke for several moments.

Recouvrir rose, walked over to the ledge, and returned with the plate in his hand. He placed it on the catafalque.
“Pâté de campagne,”
he said. “
Un cadeau,”
he paused,
“pour toi.”

That night Tilman, who had never made love to anyone, dreamt that he was being made love to by Recouvrir. Both were clothed, Tilman wearing his blue worker’s jacket and overalls, Recouvrir in his chef’s outfit but without the hat. They were alone in the Quonset hut, but Tilman was at first concerned that, because of the activity outside the walls, they might be discovered. “Why this?” he asked his friend. The large bulk of Recouvrir was silhouetted against the open window near the foot of the bed on which Tilman lay. The chef moved to one side to allow Tilman to look out at the world filled with singing birds and a multitude of trees in full leaf. He gestured toward the verdant, musical landscape that held traces of neither battle nor monument.

“Because I love you,” he said in English, “and because,” he gestured toward the open window and the world beyond, “I love this too.”

In the dream Tilman was suddenly filled with an indescribable joy as a river made of leaves and grass flowed through the window and into the room where he slept.

When they undressed each other the following Monday night in Recouvrir’s apartment behind the restaurant, Tilman was amazed to find beauty in his friend’s enormous body, which was firm and round and clean, amazed too by the map of scars that made Recouvrir’s skin appear to have been ceremonially patterned, like the engravings of South Seas tribal warriors that Tilman remembered from a book he had looked at as a child. The white marks left by the entrance and the exit of hundreds of bits of shrapnel covered his arms and chest and belly like tiny flowers or stars. “Like constellations,” Tilman would tell him some months later, touching some of the groupings and naming them, looking for and finally claiming to have found
Caela Sculptoris
, his very own carver’s tool, somewhere on the skin under Recouvrir’s left arm. But on this first night, when the two men stood naked and facing each other, having touched each other tentatively on the head and hair and shoulders, Recouvrir moved his hand toward Tilman’s hip.
“Explique-moi,”
he said, adding,
“s’il te plaît.”

Tilman showed him how to remove the wooden leg, and when Recouvrir knelt beside him to complete this task, Tilman remembered Ham Bone and Phoebe, remembered the kind of tenderness that transformed a crazed, ragged woman of the roads into a beautiful young girl, ennobled by love. And he knew that the love he had witnessed then was echoed here in this French room as two damaged, fragmented middle-aged men made each other fresh and beautiful and whole again.

Because he had no experience of a sexual nature, having always avoided proximity of any kind, it did not seem odd to Tilman that the hands and mouth and body that were providing him with this miraculous pleasure were those of a man and not a woman. What stunned him was that such joy could be part of human experience, could draw out of him the part of himself that had been left unmarred by either chain or battle. When he closed his eyes he saw the migrating birds that had moved him as a small child, he remembered his mother’s breast. When he opened them again, he saw Recouvrir closer than anyone had been since then, closer than anyone except this gentle man would ever be again.

K
lara woke on a spring morning before dawn. Five-thirty and the half-finished face of the torchbearer still burning in her mind. She who would eventually rub with powdered pumice his legs and feet, she who would polish the long stretch of his side. His half-finished face in her mind, the roughness of the one side, the wrongness of the other.

Everyone else would be sleeping for two more hours, and even then they would awaken reluctantly, a full day of labour their only reward for the reappearance of light. Klara left the hut dressed only in trousers and a shirt, not wearing the cap, thinking little about disguise, carrying her true self to the task.

She stepped, barefoot, onto the cool pebbles of the earth beyond the hut, then sat on a boulder and pulled on her boots, removing them again when she reached the ramp that led to the lower studio. The texture of the planks on her soles gave the ascent significance, purpose. When she pulled aside the canvas door, she saw that the dawn was just beginning to enter through the windows and skylights of the room, warming the flesh of the torchbearer and his dying stone twin and painting one section of the wooden floor deep shades of blood and rose, though enough shadows remained in the corners of the room that she decided to switch on the electric lights. She walked across to the table where the men kept their tools, chose a mallet, a medium and a small chisel, and several different sizes of rasps, then looked carefully at the stone youth. She would need to climb the ladder twice in order to deliver the tools to the platform beside the torchbearer’s face. Once she began she might have to fetch something else. None of this concerned her, she was peeling back the layers that time had built around her visual memory, pulling the past across the vague landscapes of the intervening years.

How to recall the face of one who has died, a face that has been held in the inner eye and then, when the pain of this has exhausted the holder, pushed from the mind altogether. No matter how much it is cherished, an absent face that is a fixed point of reference becomes tyrannical, and tyranny eventually demands revolt, escape. Klara had fled from the memory of Eamon’s face over and over, his bright eyes and perfect skin, now almost two decades younger and more perfect than her own. She had rationed the time she would allow herself to think about him, and by a fierce act of will had almost succeeded in turning him into a faceless ghost, until all that was left was the vaguely human, dark shape of his absence. A shadow thrown against an unforgiving wall.

Now she would have to remember the bones under the skin, the scar on his left temple, the beautiful, full mouth, his upturned glance and radiant expression when searching the sky for a kite, an aeroplane. Each detail. The two graceful wings of his eyebrows. How his hair fell when he threw his head back, the soft, slightly slanted contour of his eye. He had been only a boy, the inquisitive child he had been had never left his face. He must hold the torch aloft, yes, but because this figure would become Eamon and would be looking up toward his beloved ether, his expression must be one of astonishment and joy at finding himself, at last, forever reaching toward the sky. His arm illuminating clouds. She stood on the ladder, eyes squeezed shut, scraping these images from the deepest recesses of her memory as if using a sculpting tool on the inner curve of her skull. Then she began.

It was necessary for her to lean over the upturned face so that she was looking down at him as she had so often done as a girl, in haylofts, in orchards, in the sunroom. These scenes came back to her as she worked, and occasionally she felt as if she were falling into the ghost of an embrace, as if either he or she were haunting the stone. She was a novice with marble and she knew this. Hers was the almost impossible task of keeping her concentration fierce and divided at the same time between her long-vanished lover’s remembered features and everything she had surreptitiously learned about the marble carver’s skill. And so it was, while she was causing the eyes and mouth and expressions of a beloved farmboy’s face, the tendons of his beautiful neck, to emerge from the blond stone that she realized she was carving one-half of Eamon’s face with the tools Giorgio had taught her how to hold and to use. Giving little thought as to how the face would be explained when the others entered the studio in a few hours, Klara focused on the
ping, ping
of the chisel. Perhaps they would think it was an act of God, a miracle.

She began with the hair on the finished side of the head, which was too long and straight to be Eamon’s. She cut it with the claw, then choosing a small chisel she added several curls, knowing that by changing texture she was altering the colour as well, making the young marble man dark rather than fair. She thought of Riemenschneider, Tilman’s namesake. Her grandfather had told her how the great wood sculptor had insisted that colour could be suggested without the use of polychrome, how he had wanted the wood or the stone he was using to describe smell, body temperature, colouring, narrative, and emotion as well as form. She adjusted the angle of the cheekbone, made the jawline softer, and the bones above the eye and at the top of the nose slightly less pronounced. Then she allowed the mouth, which must be sensual and flexible, to carry her hand into the virgin territory of the unfinished side.

Her own mark.

Once she began to work on the untouched side of the face, she remembered the pure joy of making art, how the self connected with the emerging form. She began to sing quietly, and the sound of her own voice was like liquid pouring over the stone.

She did not hear the squeak of the ramp under the shoes of the climber. She did not hear his step on the planked floor. It was only after she had smoothed out the shallow basin of the temple that she heard the voice, shouting. She froze. The chisel in her hand was poised to the left of a stone eyebrow. She slowly lowered her arm, and turned, and fell.