The Stone Carvers (36 page)

It took Klara three days to complete the face, though most of the essential work had been done that first morning when she knew she had been carving in secret, each gouge a private gesture. Allward came each day to see Klara’s progress, to see the completed head, and nodded at her to let her know he was satisfied. But he made it clear that she would not be carving anything else.

“You will remain an assistant on my monument,” he said. “You are too dangerous with a carving tool in your hand. As you and I both know, you suffer from an excess of originality. And, anyway, you’ve already made your statement, as the saying goes.”

So in the mornings she hauled water, stacked lumber, and swept up discarded stone chips and dust. And in the afternoons she climbed to the upper studio to hand tools to Giorgio and to polish those areas of the angel he considered to be completed.

As they worked, the talk flowed easily. He told her about the city in which he had lived for most of his life, about his large, rowdy family, the stoveworks, the tombstones. He mentioned the young Italian woman to whom he had been briefly engaged.

“You must have loved her,” Klara said quietly.

“I don’t think I ever really did. I was fond of her though. She has another man for a husband now.” They laughed as they remembered their conversation about marriage, and Giorgio having asked her if she’d ever had a wife.

She told him about Father Gstir’s church, and her grandfather’s workshop, about the cows, and about her friends the nuns in the Convent of the Immaculate Conception. She couldn’t bring herself to mention Eamon, as if to say his name aloud in the presence of this man might expose her as a sexual being, on the one hand, and prove her disloyal, on the other. She would keep Eamon—his bright spirit—in the darkest part of the centre of herself, like a secret lantern. She would keep her own young self there too, to make him stay. Were he released, if he became no longer her secret or something other than her secret, she feared his light would be scattered by the winds of the real world.

Giorgio threw his head back and laughed when he heard about the cows. His white teeth, his brown face. “Good for you,” he said, his hand once again on her shoulder. Then he became serious. “There is absolutely nothing,” he told her, “like the carving of names. Nothing like committing to the stone this record of someone who is utterly lost.” He described the reactions of the people who sometimes came to see him do this in Canada.

They were again sitting at the entrance to the studio, looking out over the beautiful fields whose patterns had been determined a thousand years ago, fragmented by the war, then reassembled in recent times. If you overlooked the dimpling of the craters, which were now covered by green, you could, from this elevated position, easily believe that the calm landscape had never known battle. And yet, each year, war’s detritus was plentifully unearthed by the blade of the plough. One farmer had told Giorgio that since the war he had discovered at least fifty small bibles—French, English, and German—in the plot of earth where he grew his turnips. And often these bibles were found in the torn and decayed pocket of a military uniform, along with a mud-soaked photograph or a stained and unreadable letter from home.

Late one afternoon Klara left Giorgio working alone on the drapery that covered the angel’s right leg and descended the ladder until she reached the base of the monument. It was a Friday and the site was deserted, the men having quit at four to go into town with their paycheques. Tilman, she knew, would be looking forward to a gourmet dinner in the company of his new friend. She stood for a moment or two surveying all the signs of hastily abandoned labour, shovels in mounds of earth, a discarded lunch pail, a cart halfway down the narrow gauge track. Then she pivoted and walked back to the ladder, climbed slowly up to the studio. Giorgio stepped away from the sculpture as she entered and turned to her with a puzzled look.

She stood with her hands clasped nervously in front of her and her eyes down, her heart thumping; she could not look at him. Neither of them said anything for several moments. He high on the scaffolding, she on the floor. “Do you understand?” she finally whispered, raising her face up to him,
“Do
you understand?”

He climbed down from the angel then, walked across the room that rocked slightly under his feet and hers. “Yes,” he said, touching her hair and her neck and face, then running the fingers of his right hand along her collarbone. His hands were rough and calloused, his gestures gentle but purposeful. She responded to the first, wonderful unfamiliarity of another’s fingers on her own skin.

“I understand,” he was saying. “I understand.”

In his Maida Vale studio in London, Allward had built the plasters, employing a process Byzantine in its manipulations of space, on the one hand, and dependent on scientific and mathematical accuracy, on the other. First he had made simple gesture drawings in the presence of the model, attempting to find the pose that would most perfectly describe
Hope
or
Honour, Peace
or
The Spirit of Sacrifice
. He explored the most minor alterations in the line of a jaw, the setting of a shoulder, the bend in an arm. He lifted a cheekbone by a quarter of an inch, fractionally increased or decreased the circumference of a thigh, changed the weight of the body from the left to the right foot, and then back again.

When he believed that the attitude of the figure was set, he would make one formal drawing, busy with measurements, then begin to build the figure in clay. It was during this process that he felt most like a child playing with mud and at the same time most like God the Father creating Adam. When the dark grey, vaguely ominous clay human was modelled, Allward would approach it with wet plaster, and rags and burlap, and then more wet plaster until it was completely covered in a rapidly setting white cloak that, when removed, provided the perfect mould for the final pouring of the ultimate plaster.

Most of the sculptures were to be placed against the various walls of the monument and were therefore not executed entirely in the round. Before they set, it was necessary to brace them at the back with wire and crisscrossed wooden beams and to constantly add more plaster and rags to the rear of the piece. Allward loved this tattered, unfinished side almost as much as the smooth flesh of the front, was pleased, for instance, that evidence of his own palms and thumbs would be left like frantic signatures behind the serenity of the flawless, fragile figures that emerged.

Once this theatrical act was completed, however, and the figures stood beside him pure and clean in the studio’s light, Allward would begin to become anxious about how the carvers—with the help of the pantograph, the pointing machine—would transform them into stone. Like a scientist who has just discovered a new formula, he made endless calculations that—along with copious verbal instructions—he recorded in pencil on the thighs and arms of the white men and women. He drew the placement of the limbs of one figure like maps of peninsulas on the flesh of its neighbour, adding to the sketch phrases such as “arm of
Hope
should cross here” or “knee of
Peace
comes in at this angle.” He was pleased by the sight of his own handwriting on the smooth white surfaces, felt finally that this, along with the handprints at the back, ensured that something of himself was present in the crates that would eventually take the pieces across the English Channel and then overland to the site, the wind-scoured, silent battlefield he kept, always, in his mind. London never really came into focus for him, was known only by the differing intensities of light in the studio, the way the rain beat on the skylight.

He fell in love over and over again with the clay and then the plaster renditions of the young women he created, though never with the models themselves, who seemed too actual, too specifically human to be fully interesting. For the young men, once they had evolved into the perfection of plaster, he experienced huge compassion, knowing that he had caught them just as they were letting their individual personalities go, beginning to understand that they were part of a collective, moved by the lunatic actions of war.

As the years passed and the monument came close to completion, the world beyond Allward’s walls was beginning to forget about the tragedy of a distant slaughter. The grief was losing its sharpness, could perhaps bruise, but could no longer really cut most hearts. Rarely now did women weep in their beds for a man whose face and body they had known in the teens of the century, or for a child the earth took back too soon. Allward began to feel like a vessel into which the world’s diminishing sorrow was poured for safe-keeping, and the weight of it was heavy on his bones. He put as much of this intense responsibility into the reflective and powerfully sad figure of the mature male mourner, the curve of his spine and the desperate inwardness of his downcast face, but his own grief was less focused and contained more anger. There were no words to express this, only the impressions of his hands in the disarray of cloth and plaster behind his beautiful plaster people, the exact measurements on the muscles of their arms. And the pencil drawings of the gestures of one on the limbs of another.

When they descended from the upper studio that afternoon, Giorgio drew Klara into the lower workspace to point out these delicate pencil lines on the plasters of the two youths that had been used to carve
The Spirit of Sacrifice
.

“It’s as if Allward wished there to be a relationship between his sculptures,” he said to her, “as if he were trying to invent a way for them to express affection, as if he were giving them instructions on how to touch.”

They had embraced once again then in the shadow of the torchbearer, Eamon’s face looking away from them, toward the sky.

E
ven in early summer, particularly in bright, clear weather, the nights in this part of France could be cold enough that the combination of their dark chill and the heat of the earth that had all day swallowed sun would produce a thick covering of morning fog. Then Giorgio would insist that Klara come with him to the upper studio for the first few moments of the day. They would climb a ladder that disappeared into white vapour, a ladder that would allow them to enter the strong sunlight that shone on the studio floor. Giorgio poured two cups of coffee from his Thermos as they sat in the open doorway with their legs swinging fifty feet above a surface of thick, quilted mist, the pylons thrusting their marble arms through this like the architecture of heaven. Beneath the place where Klara and Giorgio sat, odd sounds—a whistle or the crunch of footsteps in gravel—would reach them from a world they couldn’t see. When the fog began to fragment under the assault of the sun, the spires of churches would appear first, and Klara and Giorgio would attempt to guess the names of villages … Souchez, Thelus, Neuville St. Vaast. Then the tops of woodlots would emerge like gardens growing in snow, followed by the tile roofs and the chimney pots that had been so recently reconstructed.

On one such morning, Giorgio and Klara were looking over the plain at patches of townscapes that had only recently become visible through the mist. “These are our priorities,” said Klara after mentioning that the church was always the first building to be repaired. “Procession, church, brewery.”

“Pardon?” Giorgio looked confused.

“One of the first remarks to be made by Father Gstir about my village. Both the church and the brewery were the result of a Corpus Christi procession.”

“With such an auspicious beginning, I hope they are both still there.”

“They are. Maybe someday I’ll show you.”

They could see now the medieval roof timbers of one or two distant houses that had not yet been, and might never be, restored. “Like the brown bones of ancient skeletons,” said Klara. “It’s so easy to see that they were hewn by hand when you look at them closely. The irregularity, the marks of gouges and planers. To think that the hand that did the work has been gone for six hundred years, though the wonderful thing about wood and stone is that they always hold traces of those who have shaped it.”

One night after dinner in the mess hall, Klara and Giorgio met outside among the debris at the base of the monument, then walked down the new road past the scrubbed, sanitary reconstructed trenches in the direction of Grange Tunnel.

They waited near the entrance until they were certain the landscape was empty of witnesses. Then they descended to the labyrinth beneath, Giorgio walking ahead with a blanket over one arm, his lantern illuminating in an arbitrary manner graffiti, rock carvings, the handle of a stretcher, helmets, bully tins, old pipes, and bits of electrical wiring. There were surprisingly clean white signs on the walls, pointing to the 42nd B.H.Q., or to the officers’ room, or the telegraph office, and finally one indicating a passage on the left that led to the old brigade sleeping quarters. Here the bunks remained intact, and in the corner on a makeshift table stood a basin and pitcher filled not with water but with the dust of nineteen silent years.

“I found this room last week,” said Giorgio, “when I was exploring. I wanted Tilman to come with me to explain these tunnels, but he would have none of it.”

“He hates enclosed places like this,” said Klara, who did not know that her brother had been confined here before he lost his leg.

Giorgio placed the candle on a shelf near the most trustworthy bunk and unrolled on the dirty surface the clean blanket he had carried over his arm. He turned to Klara then, who was near him in the partial gloom. “I’m sorry,” he said, “that there isn’t someplace nicer, warmer. But we’ll have no visitors here.”

Klara said nothing. She was frightened by the thought of the exposure that she knew was about to occur, frightened by the fact of her own body, grateful for the dark. What if he turned away, in disappointment?

But when—surrounded by the detritus left behind by an army of men who were on the cusp of death—they began to undress each other, their nakedness seemed fresh and new set against the rotting furniture and sweating rock and everything that was covered by the silt of the intervening years.