The Stone Carvers (35 page)

Allward stood looking down at Klara as she struggled to pull breath back into her body. “Who are you?” he demanded. “Are you injured?”

Klara knew she was bruised. The fall had knocked the wind out of her, but nothing else about her seemed to be damaged. “I’m fine,” she gasped. “It’s just the wind gone out of me, that’s all,” she whispered.

“Listen,” said Allward, “I inspect the carving early each morning before anyone else is awake.
No one
is ever here. Who exactly are you and just what were you doing up there?”

“I’m Karl Becker,” she whispered, rising now to her feet, knowing who she was speaking to. “I am one of your carvers,” she lied. “I had hoped to get some extra work done,” she whispered, “on the torchbearer.”

Allward began to climb the ladder from which Klara had fallen. He scrutinized the marble features, then slowly descended, his face white with fury. “That’s not my torchbearer,” he said. “You’ve paid absolutely no attention to the plaster. You’re ignoring the points.”

Klara could not interpret the tone of the man’s voice, the level of anger in it. She said nothing but was suddenly aware that she was not wearing her cap, that her blonde curls were painfully visible. She felt exposed and terrified by the exposure.

“Don’t try to fool me,” Allward said. “I tell everybody,
everybody
who works for me that there are to be no independent acts, no theatrical feats of originality.”

Looking down at her boots, Klara remained silent, the sound of her heart pounding in her ears.

“You’re not one of my carvers. You’re some kind of vandal.” Allward had begun to pace. “And you’ve ruined my torchbearer.” He looked up at the sculpture. “I’ll have to replace the head now,” he said, “but, Christ, it will always look damaged. Where the hell did you come from?”

“You knew I was Canadian,” whispered Klara. “My brother and me. Giorgio Vigamonti told you when we came.”

“Well, Canadian, do you have a voice?”

“No,” said Klara, “I lost it as a child.”

“You’re a liar, Canadian. I heard you singing in a woman’s voice.” Allward was glaring at her. “Do you dress up in women’s clothes as well?” he asked sarcastically.

Klara walked over to him and seized the sleeve of his jacket. “Please,” she said, “I’m sorry.” Then, horrified, she covered her mouth with one hand, knowing she had unmasked herself simply by using her own voice, by forgetting to whisper.

Allward backed away from her. “So you
are
a woman.”

“Fire me,” she said, “but don’t change the face.” Klara was ashamed to realize she had begun to beg.

Allward sat down heavily on one of the stools the men had brought into the studio. Now that the sun had fully risen, the wind began to blow in from the Belgian coast and the canvas door began to scrape slowly against the floor like an animal stirring in its sleep. Outside the walls, the men could be heard shouting to one another on their way to breakfast in the mess hall, while he remained inside this makeshift studio with a damaged sculpture and a disguised woman. He looked at the body of the torchbearer and then again at the face, the alterations Klara had made. He had wanted this stone youth to remain allegorical, universal, wanted him to represent everyone’s lost friend, everyone’s lost child. He had wanted the stone figure to be the 66,000 dead young men who had marched through his dreams when he had conceived the memorial. Even in its unfinished state this face had developed a personal expression, a point of view. This had never been his intention. But he had to admit the work that had been done here in the early hours of the morning was careful, skilled.

“I think,” he said to the forlorn figure in front of him, “you had better tell me what this is all about.” His tone was still coloured by anger, but he placed a second stool beside his, then touched Klara’s elbow and motioned for her to sit down. “Come on,” he said, his voice softer now, “tell me what it’s all about.”

Klara’s own voice in this studio seemed strangely high and thin, even to her own ears, and at the same time rusty and harsh from lack of use. A part of herself she had put aside, an odd revisited diction, which at the start didn’t want to operate properly. “I can’t …” she began. She did not sit down.

Allward raised his feet one rung on the stool, then rested his forearms on his thighs. “Could you tell me at least where you learned how to carve?”

“My grandfather taught me woodcarving when I was a child. This,” she nodded her head toward the torchbearer, “this I learned by watching the men, by watching your carvers.” She began to walk toward the door.

“Come back and sit down,” said Allward. “Please.”

Klara turned to face him but did not move toward the stool. Allward looked huge to her, even when he was sitting. The atmosphere of authority that surrounded him made her feel that she herself would always be a child in his presence, could never achieve maturity.

“Surely you must have known you would be discovered sooner or later. I’m just astonished it didn’t happen until now.” He put his hands in the pockets of his long coat.

“I don’t know,” Klara said, desperation in her voice. “I don’t really know. But I’ll go now, I’ll go back to Canada. I’m sorry, I wasn’t …”

“You don’t have to leave.” Allward looked at her closely. Dressed in the blue trousers and the man’s shirt, with her short hair, she seemed ageless as well as sexless. It was hard for him to situate her in any of the usual categories reserved for women. “You can stay and work here for as long as you like,” he continued, surprising even himself with this decision. “I’m intrigued by this, you going to all this effort, the voyage, the disguise.” Turning his head to the left, he examined the sculpture again. “But I want to know about the face you were making up there. You must understand. He was meant to be everyone, all of them.” Allward paused, a brief cloud of anger passing over his face. “You’ve changed that.”

There was full sun now in the studio. Allward walked across the room and switched off the electric lights.

“There was a boy I knew …” Klara began. She broke off, her voice gone from her.

“Ah … of course,” Allward settled himself back on one stool and pushed the other in her direction with his foot.

Feeling dizzy from the fall, the fear and the shock of being revealed, Klara leaned one hip against the stool and braced herself with her left arm. “It was a long time ago,” she said.

“But it’s never long enough, is it? How did he die? Did he die here?”

“No, not here.” She was suddenly exhausted, no longer able to stop the words from pouring out of her. “There wasn’t conscription yet,” she said. “He chose to leave. I think I hated him for a while for the pain he caused me. Even after he was dead I couldn’t forgive him for that, for choosing a war and death, for choosing that instead of me.”

Allward was shaking his head. “They all believed, every one of them believed there would be something romantic about it, some notion of adventure. They all wanted it to be beautiful in some way, noble, I suppose. What they got instead was a living hell with nothing resembling beauty or nobility in it.”

Klara was silent, looking at the floor. Then she spoke, “I don’t know how he died. He just disappeared.”

It was almost time for the carvers to begin their morning shift. One of the men pulled aside the canvas door and was about to step over the sill when he saw Allward and stopped in his tracks, surprise on his face.

“Don’t come in,” called Allward. “Come back in half an hour. And tell your friends to stay away too.” The carver looked puzzled but let the door fall back into place. Klara and Allward listened to the receding footsteps for a moment or two and then Allward rose and walked back over to the ladder. He stood on the third rung and looked at the torchbearer’s face.

The work was clean, assured. “You know how to carve,” said Allward, not turning around, not taking his eyes off the sculpture. The face was becoming a portrait, he could see that, but beyond that the expression had about it the trustfulness of someone who did not know he would ever be missing, lost from the earth. This woman had brought a personal retrospection to his monument, and had by doing so allowed life to enter it. She had carved the uncomplicated face of prewar youth, children who were unaware they would be made extinct by the war. No subsequent generation, Allward suddenly knew, would ever achieve such innocence. Their kind would never come again.

He sighed and began to climb down the rungs. “We’ll leave the face,” he said, “but when you work here I want you to work as a woman. Forget the disguise, it’s too much trouble. He was just a kid, after all. You’re a woman. And you can finish carving his face.”

“Thank you.”

“For letting you stay? It’s not much.”

“For letting me stay, yes, but also for giving me my voice back.”

N
ews of Karl’s true gender was telegraphed around the site with a velocity that seemed to exceed the speed of sound. This information, combined with the knowledge that Klara had actually altered one of Allward’s figures and had lived to tell the tale, gave her a kind of superhuman presence that caused the men to fall silent whenever she appeared. She smiled at this, then solemnly shook each carver’s hand, hoping that this neutral gesture of good will would make them more comfortable with her, would allow them at least now and then to treat her as an ordinary colleague.

Her brother seemed, against all odds, to be more and more at home in Picardie. The rhythm of the work, his time in town, the emergence of the stone figures above him all now gave him pleasure. The fact that Klara had been unmasked, and that there had been no serious repercussions, appeared to have removed the last vestiges of tension from his mind. One day he took her aside and told her that he had decided that everything about this adventure at the monument was astonishing, miraculous, that it had been fate, after all, that had brought them to this place.

“And you hated boats,” she said, teasing him. “And I thought you couldn’t bear to work on shields and wreaths and crosses.”

Simson had walked into the Quonset dormitory the morning after Klara’s encounter with Allward and had stood staring at her for a full minute before speaking. “Allward wants your bunk moved to the office. Out of here, anyway.”

Klara looked at Tilman. “I can stay,” she said, “with my brother.”

“Not according to Allward. He wants you out of here.” Simson cleared his throat. “Now that you’re a woman.” He shook his head. “I thought I’d seen it all, but I guess I was wrong.” He wasn’t able to look her in the face, whether from embarrassment or irritation Klara couldn’t tell. “So get packing,” he said to her before abruptly leaving the room.

That afternoon Giorgio stepped quietly into the lower studio while she was working. When Klara turned on the ladder to see who was there, he looked up at her, grinning. “God, how amazing … your disguise,” he said to her. “How did you manage it all this time?”

Klara’s face became hot and flushed. She didn’t know what to say to him.

“I came to see your carving,” he said, moving toward the torchbearer.

Klara remained silent but descended from the ladder and stepped aside. Then Giorgio, like Allward before him, stood on the third rung and looked at her work. Afterwards he walked back and forth on the floor in front of the statue. “You’ve made a portrait,” he finally commented. “This is now much more than an allegorical figure. A sensitive face. This is the face of someone you know.”

She still said nothing, then reconsidered. “It’s someone I knew.”

“Dead?”

She nodded.

“Sorry.” Giorgio reached across the space between them and touched her shoulder. “Tilman told me long ago how you helped him get free when you were children. He always loved you for that, and somehow I suppose I came to love you for it too … this distant small sister I thought I’d never see.” He looked into her eyes. “I’m sorry if you lost someone that mattered to you.”

Klara could feel the heat of his hand through the flannel of her shirt. No longer wearing the cap, she felt self-conscious about the short blonde curls on her head, felt neutered, ashamed.

Giorgio walked toward the door, then turned before leaving the room. “The carving is very skilled,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“I felt there was something odd about you, you know … I couldn’t say what exactly. But Tilman had never mentioned a brother …” The sound of a distant hammering filled the silence that fell between them. Then, suddenly, Giorgio ran his hand over the short curls on the top of her head.

Klara stood utterly still.

“I’m doing this for all the Italians,” he explained to her. “They’re much too shy, but they believe that to rub the hair of a blonde person brings luck.”

“Oh,” said Klara, reddening once again.

“Well, anyway, it’s good,” Giorgio added, just before leaving the studio, “very good to hear your voice.”

That night Klara sat on her bunk in the overseer’s hut for a long, long time, not ready to undress for sleep, sorting through the details of the past two days and trying to assemble the self she was now. She glanced at Simson’s desk across the hut, on which a number of bulky files were neatly arranged. One of them, she knew, must contain Eamon’s name. She thought of all that had become dormant in her during the empty season of her young adulthood. Her body, once awakened, had gone back to sleep, folding in on itself, the skin recognizing only the change of external temperature, or the touch of cloth, or now and then a rush of fever or pain. Anything else she had simply willed away, refused to remember or even dream. Once or twice she had thought of her unborn children, but they were ghosts, gone before she could conjure them. In the early years men had approached her from time to time, but although she had made no conscious decision to remain true to Eamon’s memory, in fact, had tried to push his memory as far away from her as possible, it seemed that when he had gone, he had taken all her desire with him.

Now she was made anxious by the discovery that in the presence of Giorgio, it was as if this lost desire had pulled aside the swaying canvas door of the studio and had stood grinning near the table that held the carving tools. She had begun to dream about this friend of Tilman after full days in the company of men and statues, dreamt, sometimes, that he
was
a statue she was working on, polishing his marble boots and overalls. Once she dreamt that she was measuring him for a suit coat. In the mornings she would awake confused and disoriented. And it had taken some time to reassemble her persona, to remember who it was she was meant to be. She had stood for three months beside him on the unsteady floor, a woman disguised as a thin man with pumice in his hand and marble dust on his clothing. Now that he knew she was a woman she felt middle-aged and unattractive. She found herself trying to remember what her woman’s body looked like, whether there was anything left there that a man like Giorgio might receive as a gift. Almost immediately she was embarrassed by her thoughts, even the idea of presenting herself to him seemed to her to be presumptuous, bold, vaguely shameful. Desire was a word that had no place in the vocabulary of a spinster.