The Stone Carvers (11 page)

Still, she loved and admired her grandfather and wanted to learn everything she could from him, so she patiently listened to him on the subject of Tilman, the subject of Dürer, knowing that he would be unable to mention either name anywhere else. But today he veered briefly from the subject, the teacher in him stepping forward. “You must remember about the face,” he was saying now. “This abbess would not be a pretty woman necessarily. She would be strong, a true leader. On the rare occasion, popes and cardinals might have even taken counsel from her.”

Klara wandered around the barn picking up one tool after another. She did not want to admit to her grandfather that she didn’t know which chisels to ask for. He would never let those he had brought with him from Bavaria out of his sight, had never permitted anyone other than Tilman to touch them, though in truth the boy had not entirely taken to the carving. But he was generous with his more prosaic tools, the ones he had purchased in this country. He watched his granddaughter slap a mallet against her palm as if testing its punch.

“My tools from the old country I will give to your brother when he returns,” he said, “but you may have all the mallets you want.”

Klara was silent. Her brother’s existence was barely believable any more. She had ceased to be curious about his whereabouts. It wasn’t as if he were dead exactly, more as if he had never been born. In the earlier days when he disappeared for only short periods of time, Klara faintly remembered weeping, and pestering him to tell where he’d been. She also remembered frantic games of hide and seek where with pounding heart she would struggle through the bush lot calling and calling Tilman’s name, certain that she would never find him and that by agreeing to play she would somehow be held responsible for his disappearance. Now, looking back, she thought about the oddness of this child’s game, how the seeker would lean against a tree, arm lifted, forehead on wrist, in an attitude of despair, enduring the one hundred seconds that would allow the other to successfully dematerialize. She also recalled following the boy through the village to their grandfather’s barn, where the old man would patiently explain, for Tilman’s benefit alone, the various tools and then would demonstrate an assortment of cuts and flourishes.

Klara moved to the east side of the barn where stood her grandfather’s masterpiece, the one he had never been able to part with, though he had said it would go to the church when he died. The Virgin of Mercy stood with her arms slightly raised, her open cloak sheltering a small crowd of devotees, among them Klara’s brother as he was last seen, a child of twelve. Whenever he could her grandfather included a likeness of Tilman in his carving, hoping perhaps that the God for whom he carved would interpret this as a petition or a prayer. He will never be forgotten, thought Klara bitterly. We can’t even speak of him, but they will never forget him.

To her grandfather she said suddenly, “Tilman has been gone a long, long time, you know. Perhaps …”

“You remember,” the old man broke in, “what she did? Your own mother. A terrible thing. After that … after he escaped, is it any wonder he would go away for a longer time.”

“It wasn’t his fault,” said Klara.

“He would have a broken heart from being chained like an animal.” Her grandfather shook his head sadly. “A broken heart.”

Her grandfather had been the one to diagnose Tilman’s wanderlust during the boy’s first disappearance. While everyone in the parish had walked through the fields and had beaten their way through forests and swamps, while ponds and rivers were dragged and prayers were offered up to Saints Nicholas and Lambert, while masses were said and candles were lit, Joseph Becker never once gave into the belief that his grandson was lost forever. His daughter-in law took to her bed in despair, his son abandoned his fields, and his own wife moved into the household to look after little Klara, who was practically forgotten in the panic. And still the old man held to his position that the boy would return. Four months later, when the six-year-old did return, sauntering into the house at nightfall without a word of explanation and taking his usual place at the table, announcing he was hungry, it was Joseph Becker who had the sense neither to question nor scold him.

Everyone else believed, in the beginning, that the boy must have been abducted by tinkers, who without a shred of evidence were always blamed for such things. But Tilman quickly put an end to these fancies. “I went for a walk,” he said and then, when pressed, “I followed the road.” He showed little interest in further detailing his adventures and eventually, when questioned, developed the good-natured evasiveness Klara would later encounter in him. The family was forced to surmise, by certain French phrases that had crept into his vocabulary and an ability to make omelettes from hens’ eggs, that he must have gone as far as Quebec.

“He is a wunderkind,” the grandfather would explain. “Often they develop wanderlust.” It was a state almost common among boys in Bavaria. These children were considered cursed in some ways, but mostly they were thought to be blessed as they had often proved useful for guarding wandering flocks in high, distant summer pastures. “They are wonderful climbers,” Joseph had told his worried son and daughter-in-law, “and good singers. Sometimes they become poets. Often when they become men, they settle. Tilman here,” the grandfather put his hand on the boy’s blond head, “Tilman will settle, and he will become a carver.”

Joseph had tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to interest Tilman in making a small figure-in-the-round. As he lectured him on the merits of limewood and as he repeated Dürer’s instructions for the six attitudes of the human frame, the boy had stared absently at a bas-relief panel in the corner. Thinking that the child was fascinated by the “S” curve of Saint Sebastien’s body and by the hundreds of arrows projecting from it, the old man carried the panel into a shaft of sunlight that shone through the door.

Tilman ignored the suffering saint but ran his long, tapered fingers over the texture of the distant landscape behind the celebrated martyr. “Teach me how to make that,” he said.

Klara, having heard this story several times, resolved even at her young age to always concentrate on figures-in-the-round. Her grandfather had told her about the famous, sacred statue of the Infant Jesus of Prague, about its “garderobe” filled with dozens of dresses, and about the two jewelled crowns. “It would be almost the same size as your biggest doll,” he told her. Though he had of course never seen this wonder, he pencilled a picture of the small sculpture on a piece of scrap lumber. Klara was delighted by the idea of a boy doll, holy or otherwise, wearing dresses, and she set to work immediately carving the body from a section of an abandoned porch pillar and making the dresses from her mother’s scraps. But something else about the story had fascinated her: her grandfather said there was a legend about the monk who created the holy statue, that he had had a vision of the infant Jesus while working in his garden and had wanted to make a likeness but couldn’t complete the face. “He couldn’t complete the face,” Joseph said, speaking mostly to himself, remembering, “until he allowed each detail of it to enter his heart. He had to revision it, you see, had to see it again, but not with his eyes, with his heart.”

“How did he finish the statue?” asked Klara. “When did he do the face?”

Joseph looked at his granddaughter in surprise. He hardly knew he had been speaking aloud. “After hoping for a long time, he had another vision, a vision of the heart … with everything clear and joyful but at the same time terribly, terribly painful. When it was over, he was able to finish the face in minutes.”

He sighed, came slowly back from the Bavarian workshop where he had trained as a boy and first heard this story, and turned toward his work table, away from the rapt little girl who had been listening and the quiet boy who had not.

Tilman had proved, in very short order, to be a genius of distant views, a kind of miniaturist when it came to detail but concerned with phenomena so far away their specificities dissolved into texture when looked upon by an unpractised eye. Despite his grandfather’s best efforts, he remained unmoved by either narrative or personality. He turned away from the facial expressions and gestures in his grandfather’s carving as if embarrassed by them, as if he had been caught spying on another’s intimate moments. Looking always beyond the drama imposed by the figures in bas-reliefs, he pointed to the swells of hills, or the stipple of forests, and moved by cloud formations looming over polished horizons. Wise man that his grandfather was, he encouraged this, allowing Tilman to use the smallest and most delicate tools he had brought from the old country: twist augers, gouges and chisels, miniature calipers. He taught him how to make the suggestion of a pine forest behind the spires of a distant hill town, and then how to render the much removed hill town itself. He described the towers and walls and “the Münster” of the city of Ulm, a city he had seen only once when he was not much older than his grandson. And then, because he could not stop himself, he spoke of the linden trees that were used by the boy’s namesake, Tilman Riemenschneider, and by the other great wood sculptors during the miraculous flowering of the sixteenth century. Altarpieces, he told the boy, with tracery so delicate and fine you would swear the artists were descended from spiders. Figures, he enthused, in attitudes so rife with emotion one wept with joy or sorrow—sometimes both—just to follow the lines of limbs and drapery with one’s eyes.

By the time the old man had reached this point of the lecture, Tilman would have turned away, drawn himself inward, would have become distant from his grandfather’s passion. But Klara, who was playing with wooden scraps near the door, Klara, to whom no enthusiastic remarks had been addressed, never forgot her grandfather’s words.

Once Tilman had discovered what it was he wanted to carve, he excelled at every landscape project he undertook, completing the small panels in an astonishingly short time. Sometimes he added herds and flocks and even the odd series of fences to the scene, but the grandfather learned that the appearance of these details often foretold the boy’s departure, as if even anonymous references to human activity suggested an intimacy that Tilman simply wasn’t able to maintain.

Despite her tidy appearance and orderly conduct, Klara had wanted her grandfather or, failing that, the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception to tell her everything they knew and anything they could imagine about the lives of the saints her grandfather carved, particularly about their lives before sainthood—moments of sin especially fascinated her. She suspected, for instance, that her namesake, the famous Chiara of Italy, had been in love with Saint Francis, and had left her parents’ comfortable home in order to follow him, and that the many pious works of her strict, contemplative life would have been enacted as bids for his approval and affection. She believed (even more heretically and secretively) that the Virgin Mary had been in love with the Holy Spirit, and that she had spent the remainder of her days pining for this spirit and longing for another miraculous union.

The nuns, sensing a current of passion and imagination running beneath Klara’s serene expression and good deportment, suggested a course of study that included much reference to female saints who had been abbesses rather than those who had been visionaries or martyrs, hoping that the practical side of the young girl’s nature would be encouraged by their example of hard work and selfless attention to others. Klara’s idle hands, they suspected, might be the Devil’s playground.

The lamb had begun shyly to inch its way back into the barn. “Come,” said Joseph, holding out his hand, “come back in here now and stay out of mischief. If the old woman sees you with flowers in your mouth, you’ll be eating parsley and mint on Sunday.” The animal stayed near the door, looking at Klara warily. “Oh, she’s all right,” said her grandfather. “She won’t hurt you.”

“Would my abbess ever have been in love?” Klara asked. “I need to know for the carving, for the face.”

Joseph Becker looked skeptical. “Of course,” he said wryly, “for the carving. Perhaps you should be asking such questions about the Irish saints.”

Klara flushed but said nothing. Her father, she now knew, had been speaking about Eamon’s visits. She imagined him laughing and winking as he described the boy.

“Father Gstir always claimed the Irish saints were the most passionate,” her grandfather continued. “Passionate believers, passionate travellers, passionate scholars, passionate speakers. Might they not have been, at some time during their lives, passionate lovers as well?”

I
n the spring of 1868, the young Joseph Becker had worked on the model of Father Gstir’s church in the early-morning hours, beginning by the light of a lantern, then moving outside when the first glow of dawn became strong enough for him to see by. He made use of leftover cedar shingles from the despised sawmill and horse-hoof glue that he kept simmering on his stove during the few short hours he was able to sleep. He had never done this kind of work before, but as a boy had admired the gorgeous branching of Veit Stoss’s lacelike sculptural work and so was able to understand the beauty of a structure through which a breeze might be able to blow and light might be able to shine. The beauty of line, and then the clear air.

Father Gstir was full of instructions—mostly concerning the Gothic style he had decided was right for his project. The nave, the side aisles, the radiating chapels, the tracery, and the bits of coloured cloth meant to represent splendid stained glass. A tympanum! Could Joseph carve a miniature Christ in Majesty? Should there not be buttresses? Flying buttresses?

Joseph, overworked as he was, refused to make miniature altars, miniature statues of the Virgin.

“But we will need money for the interior as well,” Father Gstir said, “for the altars and the magnificent pulpit. And you, Joseph, you will be the carver of these wonders. What about the baptismal font? Ludwig must know that we need money for all of it.”