The Stone Carvers (38 page)

He was devastated and in turn shocked by his response to her coldness. In subsequent days he carried the pain around with him like an infected auxiliary organ, of no use to body or heart. There was nothing that was not affected by it; he became withdrawn, taciturn, even in the friendly company of his fellow carvers. He had lived four decades in the world and yet he had never known that affection could carry within its warm centre the seeds of such appalling anguish. Even when his father had deserted the family for a year, Giorgio had believed with a child’s trust that one day the absent parent, whose love, he correctly intuited, was being telegraphed from immeasurable distances, would re-enter the door and take his place in the family circle. Perhaps he should just hold on to the faith, the hope that Klara would once again soften toward him.

One day, unable to prevent himself from doing so, he spoke to Tilman about it. “What did I do wrong?” he asked, his voice whining and querulous. “All I wanted was for Klara to tell me about him.” He stood with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders drawn forward. “What happened to the poor kid, anyway?”

“The war, as usual,” his friend answered. Tilman pointed to an area about five hundred yards to the south of them where all day men had been planting saplings of various kinds. “It’s sort of wonderful, don’t you think, that all those trees were brought from Canada? One of every species, they say. All the provinces mixed up together. Wonder if they’ll all survive? I’d like to see them grown.”

Giorgio was not interested in discussing the trees. What were they doing planting trees in midsummer, anyway, he thought with irritation. Shouldn’t they do it in spring?

“You know, Giorgio,” said Tilman, responding to the uncomfortable silence that had fallen between them, “I wasn’t there when the romance happened. It was such a long time ago … probably while you and I were making stoves. Remember The Forest Eater?” He smiled at Giorgio, then shook his head. “So much time has passed.”

Giorgio found that he was now put off by his friend’s remarkable good humour, the geniality that he had exuded for weeks. “This boy,” he asked quietly, “was he from your town?”

Tilman nodded. “Klara didn’t say much to me about it, but she did mention he lived near Shoneval.” He stopped walking, swung his artificial leg back and forth as if exercising it. “I remember she told me she’d made him a coat or a jacket out of red cloth.”

Giorgio waited. He was startingly hungry now for any information about Klara’s past. He looked intently at Tilman, hoping for more.

“Sorry, Giorgio, that’s all I know. Just that she made him a coat … Klara’s quite a tailor, you know … and that he was from Shoneval.” Tilman began walking again, turned and beckoned for his friend to follow. “Why not come into town with me tonight?” he said. “I’d like you to meet Recouvrir. We could have something to eat, a good bottle of wine.”

Giorgio could see that Tilman was impatient to get to the Hotel Picardie. “I don’t think so. You go ahead.”

“C’mon.” Tilman insisted,
“Canard à l’Orange
, a fine Bordeaux rouge … it will do you good, make you forget the past. It looked to me like you and Klara were curing each other of all that, anyway. “

Four nights later Giorgio stood outside Grange Tunnel waiting until long after dark. The stars became vivid behind the monument, though its bulk blocked out large portions of the Milky Way. He could feel the night chill penetrate his shirt. It was always cold in the tunnels, but of course there he had had the warmth of a woman. The warmth of Klara. How the hell had it come to this? In his family, sorrow was always shared, almost celebrated, experience of any kind being considered a gift, a narrative that would be given to the community like scenes from an opera.
I have lived, I have felt this grief. Now you will live it, feel it with me
. He became aware of the subtle weight of the blanket on his arm, then thought himself a fool for standing in the dark holding this reminder of his brief, dying love affair as if it were a grey shroud.

As he walked back toward his sleeping quarters, he saw that the light in the overseer’s hut was on, the curtain near Klara’s bed drawn back. Looking through the glass of the door’s upper panel, he could see that Klara’s cot was empty. Gone into Arras with Tilman probably. Perhaps this Recouvrir, whoever he was, had caught her attention with his fancy French food, his bourgeois restaurant. He had thought it impossible that Klara might take another lover, but by now he was so tired and discouraged, so confused and vulnerable, he believed anything might happen. He stared hard into the functional room where Klara slept, its scrubbed linoleum and iron cot, as if he might find some evidence of this imagined, dark betrayal. Then, on the foreman’s desk, just a few feet from where he stood, he saw a folder with
Master File
written on it.

It took him no time at all to open the unlocked door, to approach the file. For one moment he felt like a thief, or as if he might be betraying Klara’s wish to keep her young man’s name private. All he knew for sure was that the boy was dead. His name might be on a stone in a military cemetery or, he touched the cardboard cover, it might be in this file.

The missing, as he expected, were listed alphabetically, so it was necessary for him to read every town name in the adjacent right column. Grimsby, Maple Creek, Fernie, Clinton, Lévis, Vernonville, Rimouski, Colborne, Truro, Humboldt, Walkerton, Parry Sound, Lilac, Medicine Hat, Moose Jaw. Who were the settlers who had titled these places? Could they have imagined the names they had invented would lie, as the result of an immense slaughter, in an official document on a foreign desk? Vernon, Collingwood, Val d’Or, Nanaimo, Lunenburg, Kingsville, Swift Current, Trois-Rivières, Hull, Winnipeg, Alderville. Eventually his finger came to rest at Shoneval. But still he knew he must keep reading, for he was unaware that only one boy had left this overlooked hamlet for France. By the time he came to the final name, every crossroad, every city, every rural township, each Indian reserve, and almost all the concession roads in Canada had been present in his mind.

There was only one name with Shoneval beside it, and that name was Eamon O’Sullivan. Giorgio was filled first with relief, then joy. He and his fellow letter carver had only gone as far as the letter “K.” The name had not yet been engraved. He carefully closed the folder, then laid his hand on it for a moment or two as if he were blessing it. As he approached the door he saw Klara coming toward the hut. She halted as if startled by the appearance of his head and shoulders framed by the door’s small window like a portrait in the glass, the rest of the world a dark night around him.

He left the hut and walked toward her with his arms out and his palms up. I am guilty but remorseful, this gesture said. She had her hands in the pockets of her worker’s jacket, and she stood entirely still with her head bent. Stars appeared to be raining down the sky above and on either side of her.

Giorgio stopped and stood with his hand on her sleeve. Even though his touch was tentative and held nothing but the loose fabric of the jacket, he could tell she was trembling. He smoothed her hair and to his great relief she didn’t walk away. “I thought all of that was over for me, years ago, decades ago,” she said.

“It’s not over,” he said.

“I’m not uncomplicated.”

“No,” he agreed, “you’re not. But I won’t try to force anything from you ever again. Your soul is your own. I should not have interfered. If only we can still meet.”

Klara took one hand out of her pocket and placed it in one of his. “Do you not want a younger woman? What about children?”

“I want you.”

They stood together silently for some time, the unlit tunnels beneath them, the monument, ghostly and still webbed with scaffolding, cocooned with canvas, a quarter of a mile away.

“Good night then,” Klara said.

“I’ll wait for you? Tomorrow night?” Giorgio was suddenly aware of, and slightly embarrassed by, the blanket that still hung over his arm.

Klara didn’t answer but wrapped her arms around his large chest before opening the door. Then she turned and, not looking at Giorgio, whispered in the direction of the monument the two words she had uttered only to herself. “Eamon,” she said. “Eamon O’Sullivan.”

Giorgio almost told her that he knew, then reconsidered, this gift from her being so purely given.

“Poor boy,” she added. “He was so young.” She paused. “And so much time has passed.”

T
here are certain currents of air that have crossed the Atlantic, have become confused briefly by the intricate coastline of Cornwall, and then have been reassured, calmed by the salt moisture of the English Channel. When these currents find themselves over the land mass of France, they respond to this unfamiliarity by transforming themselves into large towering clouds, some of which look like monuments or castles or cathedrals. Were it not for their whiteness and total absence of attendant noise they might be mistaken for thunder clouds, but they bring with them no bad weather. They appear in pairs, one-half of the sky mirroring the other, as if making important statements about twinship, about collaboration.

Allward had studied these clouds, had watched them boil up behind the ridge on sunny afternoons. Even before the road was made, before the ground was cleared and levelled, he had decided they would be part of the monument, two soft gardens of mist to offset the hardness of marble, the toughness of grief. After months of vigilance, amazed by the predictability of these airborne wonders, he knew exactly where the memorial was to be sited: on the clean slice of the ridge, embraced on each side by the theatrical presence of vapour sculptures.

There are, of course, days when the marvellous clouds do not appear—though if he could have managed it Allward would have had them constantly present. Sometimes in the winter in Picardie a solid grey sky settles in for weeks on end. And then, very occasionally, in the summer and autumn, there will be days when the sky is a dome of piercing blue, as if clouds have yet to be invented. Days when the monument itself stands as if at the edge of the world, solid, confident, reflecting light.

And so it happened that one summer morning, very early, Giorgio woke just as the sun was making a faint red seam along the eastern horizon. The other men in his dormitory were snoring; one was mumbling a woman’s name in his sleep, and Giorgio felt for a moment a deep connection with this Italian called Carlo whom he knew came from the town of Orvieto—a comrade in love. He dressed quickly in his overalls and blue worker’s jacket and, boots in hand, walked in his sock feet across the planked floor, out the door into a world where light visited only the very tops of recently planted trees from Canadian forests. All so young now, hardly taller than a man’s shoulders, but he hoped they would grow to be healthy in a land where they were never meant to be, in the same way that his own family had grown—with some difficulty, it’s true—and had finally become rooted in a land far from the soil of their birthplace. He remembered his mother’s struggle with the spindly wisteria someone had brought her from the homeland, how it hung, frail and listless, on the trellis his father had built near the back door, barely leafing in the spring until one year it burst triumphantly into blossom in early June, its flowers hanging like an overstated offering of pale grapes at an emperor’s feast. And how his mother had wept with joy and told the family that she knew they were settled now in the new country.

When he looked through the window above Klara’s bed into the grey stillness of the morning hut, he could see that she was sleeping on her stomach. She stirred when he knocked, lifted her head, and brushed the blonde hair from her eyes, confused by this interruption of her dreams. Then she smiled at him in a questioning way. He motioned for her to come outside, and she reluctantly threw off her blankets and put on her own overalls and jacket.

“What?” she said, emerging from the door. “Is there something wrong?”

Giorgio lifted his finger to his lips and then embraced her. He wanted no conversation at this time, wanted them to walk arm in arm over to the monument, up one set of stone stairs and down another to the part of the wall where the names gave way to untouched stone. Wanted them to walk to the west side, where the torchbearer was, then turn the corner to the south side of the base, where Giorgio had finished working the day before. The quietness was so profound that even tools abandoned the day before—wheelbarrows, shovels, carts on the narrow gauge railway, the tracks themselves—seemed to be sleeping. It wasn’t until they reached the platform of the monument that the first bird began to sing.

They stopped for a moment and looked at the northeastern façade from which the scaffolding had only recently been removed. The monument was slightly backlit by the faint beginnings of day, its stone covered in cool blue shadow against a sky that was fractionally gaining in luminosity. Already several other birds had joined the first. Klara was shivering in the dawn chill, her shoulders drawn up to her neck. Both she and Giorgio were looking up at the pylons, at Allward’s distant angels whose features and expressions were barely discernible on this dark side of the sculpture. Around their wings there was nothing but sky.

“This must be what night is like in heaven,” said Klara.

“Night turning to morning,” said Giorgio, taking her arm, guiding her around the pylon to the opposite view.

They arrived at the southwest side just as the sun broke through. Neither of them had seen the figures here so dramatically lit. Klara could barely move her eyes from the uplifted face she had illicitly carved, and the ribs, the strong, sinewy neck, the torso.

“He was like that, was he?” Giorgio asked gently.

“Yes, at times he was just like that,” Klara moved closer to Giorgio for warmth. “But he could be sombre too. For the first few months he came calling, he didn’t say one word. I thought I’d go mad if he wouldn’t talk.”

“Young,” said Giorgio. “Shy.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“But determined.”