The Stone Carvers (31 page)

She doubted Tilman could speak French and told him so.

“Sure.
Messieurs, mesdames, je suis un pauvre, mais j’ai un coeur plein de la joie de Dieu. Dieu
means God. The Frenchies are all Catholics. All the ‘bos in Quebec travelled with a rosary.”

Klara pulled her own beads out of her pants pocket and showed them to her brother, who announced that they would be very helpful for begging.

“No one is going to beg,” said Klara. “If you are hungry, we’ll go to a restaurant.”

“Good idea, lots of scraps out back.”

“No, Tilman, we are going right
in
the restaurant.”

Tilman stopped walking and looked at her in amazement. “I’ve
never
gone into a restaurant.”

“Neither have I,” said Klara. “But I’ve always wanted to.”

“I wouldn’t even go with the others during the war on leave, wouldn’t even go to a café. I didn’t like the crowds.”

“Well, we’re about to share a new experience together.” Klara looked up and down the narrow, unfamiliar street on which they stood. She was unnerved by the strangeness of the architecture, the shutters that seemed to be closed against her, the thick, bolted doors. But she knew she wasn’t as frightened as she would have been had she still been dressed as a woman. As they penetrated deeper into the city, the streets seemed to become older, darker. Brown water ran in the gutters and the cobblestones under their feet were blackened by a persistent cold rain. Eventually, Klara saw a plain painted sign announcing the Hotel Restaurant Richelieu.

“Okay, let’s go there,” she said, pointing.

“No,” said Tilman, though he sounded less determined. Klara suspected that he was beginning to enjoy being managed.

Years later Klara would say that her brother, Tilman, unrepentant hobo, gave up the road because of a humble French restaurant near the docks in Le Havre, a restaurant where he first encountered
Coquilles St-Jacques meunière
and
Jambon d’Alsace à la crème
. “One mouthful,” she claimed, “and he spontaneously recovered from a week and a half of nausea. He would have liked to make us stay at Le Richelieu because he couldn’t believe there would be more of these miraculous establishments in the rest of the country. Eventually he would spend most of the money he made at the monument in a restaurant, running into town every time he had a chance. He insisted on moving to Montreal when he returned,” Klara would announce to anyone who would listen, “became a real snob, worrying about freshness and texture. And
finally,”
she would add, “finally, he learned how to speak French.”

They slept in a room above the restaurant, descending in the morning for bowls of coffee and milk, served with bread, butter, and gooseberry jam. The patron, who was also the chef, had ceremoniously embraced each of them when he discovered they were Canadians. His eyes filled with tears when he spoke about the war; two sons dead and every landmark he cared about reduced to ash and dust. Everyone, he said, had heard about the great monument being carved at Vimy, and about the perfect Yugoslavian stone. There was a train to Amiens, and another from there to Arras. Once in Arras they should stop anyone at all with a horse and cart, tell them that they were Canadians come to work on the great monument, and, he assured them, they would be joyfully delivered to the site. Then he gave them two
baguettes
, some goat’s milk cheese, and a hunk of sausage, and sent them on their way, refusing all efforts on their part to pay for either food or lodging.

“Couldn’t we just stay here for a couple of days?” said Tilman, and then when Klara refused, “How can you just walk away from that fish soup? We could have it again tonight.” He was quiet and sulky all the way to the station.

On the train Klara worried about how she should manipulate the mask of her new identity. What did men think about that gave their faces expressions she knew had never visited her own? She had been surrounded by men all her life: her father, her grandfather. She had experienced the anger, the brief joy of courtship, and then the sorrow of Eamon’s death. And she had at last become familiar with her brother. But she knew she had never been able to tunnel into the part of men that determined their posture and disposition. Eamon’s feelings had always been disclosed by changes in his eyes, the line of his mouth. Yet the faces of the mature men she had known well had closed against the world, had become unreadable when they were moved or frustrated. Would she be able to keep her own face closed if the situation demanded? She looked at her brother’s profile beside her. His blank eyes and neutral mouth gave her no information, no sense of what the men concerned themselves with when in a state of rest. Was he still thinking about the food? Or was he looking back or forward, remembering, or germinating the seed of a new future? “I’ve never gotten used to a seat on a train,” he had said to her. “More comfortable with the boards in the boxcar, or even the rods. Only other time I had a seat I was on my way to slaughter with a bunch of other fellows all dressed the same. Maybe it’s that …” Perhaps, thought Klara, in spite of his placid demeanour, he was thinking of terror and blood. But who would ever know? These thoughts swam in her mind until the motions of the train made her drowsy, caused her head to droop.

Sometime later Tilman shook her awake. “Don’t put your head on my shoulder,” he said. “Men never put their heads on each other’s shoulder.”

As predicted in Le Havre, Tilman quickly located at the market in Arras a farmer with a cart who was delighted by the idea of being able to convey two new workers to the massive sculpture at Vimy six miles away. As they got nearer to the site the terrain through which they rolled became unsettling in its disorder, the farmer pointing out germinating trenches, muddy craters, barbed wire, shell holes. Acres and acres remained fenced off, posted out of human bounds as active shells and mines still littered the surface and hid in the depths of the earth. Each crossroad they passed through was defined by a mound of rubble where once there had been a hamlet, and almost always behind and on either side of this mound men still toiled at reconstruction. All this more than sixteen years after the troops had gone home, leaving in their wake a torn, unrecognizable landscape, a wind full of ashes, and the smell of rotting flesh. The most manicured and orderly spots now were the household gardens (growing only cabbages and endive in early December) and the military cemeteries, though, even there, the landscaping was in various stages of completion. But the grass that covered the graves was mostly green, ironically unscarred. Tilman would not look at the graveyards, stared straight ahead as they lumbered past these inappropriately tidy reminders of tragedy, these gardens of the dead. “I can’t look at them yet,” he told Klara, who had reacted with shock at the quantity of headstones and crosses. “Just, please, don’t make me talk about it.”

Above all this, on the horizon, rose the twin white towers of the monument, their shape distorted by five-storey-high scaffolding and canvas bunting. Klara touched Tilman’s arm when the structure first came into view, but he drew away, reminding her that men usually don’t touch each other’s arm.

The wagon turned onto a splendid new road lined with young Canadian maple trees, a few brown leaves of late autumn still clinging to their frail branches. Although Tilman and Klara were viewing the monument from almost a mile away, the structure had begun to dominate the entire landscape. Distant grey woodlots, this miraculous road, the ridge itself, even the stratified clouds in the sky leaned toward it as if a construction of this magnitude could not be ignored, even by the surrounding disarray, and even by nature.

As they entered the work site they were amazed by the numbers of horses, donkeys, the cumbersome cranes and lorries. “Just like the war,” Tilman commented. Dressed in the traditional French worker’s costume of overalls, jacket, and cap, several dozen men scurried like bright blue beetles along the scaffolding and across the frost-covered mud that surrounded it. A narrow gauge railway had been set up near the structure in order to more easily move horse-drawn cars filled with the stone that had been used for the base and the pylons. The wagon drew up near this, and the farmer turned to them and smiled and nodded. “Much working!” he said.

Tilman smiled back, descended awkwardly from the vehicle, and reached up and quite uncharacteristically shook the man’s hand. Then he gave Klara a quick glance. “Let me do the talking,” he said, gesturing toward the Quonset hut the farmer had pointed out to them. “I’ll get us a job in no time.”

“There’s another Canadian here,” Simson informed them. “Only one, an Italian Canadian, Giorgio Vigamonti.”

Klara looked warily at the overseer. There was a dismissive, almost pompous practicality about him for which she was grateful. He did not raise his eyes from his desk.

“I know him,” said Tilman. “That’s why I’m here. That’s why we’re here, my brother and me.”

“Allward will have to see what you can do before you can be brought on board. What kind of experience do you have?”

“I worked with Giorgio … but I’m not as experienced as him.” He rapped his wooden leg with his knuckles. “I can’t climb,” he said.

“I gathered that,” said Simson. “You’ll have to work on the details at the base, if you are hired, that is. We need some help there. What’s the matter with your brother, cat got his tongue?”

“Vocal chords destroyed by,” Tilman paused, “a bungled tonsillectomy when he was a kid.”

Klara could feel her face grow hot. Simson was looking at her now as if he knew there was something odd here, but he couldn’t determine what. He raised his eyebrows. “What a pair: one can’t walk, the other can’t talk. What’s his work experience?”

“Mostly woodcarving. He’d like to be an assistant, or something like that. He can do any kind of light manual labour.”

Simson examined Klara for a disturbingly long period of time. “Well, he’s small enough to be a good climber. He could go upstairs. Plenty of odd jobs up there. And that’s where Vigamonti is.” He led the pair over to the window and pointed to a wooden room affixed to the top of the left pylon. A long rope ladder that hung from it was swaying back and forth in the wind. “No need to audition to be an assistant or a polisher up there.” He turned to Klara, “What do you say?”

She nodded, then whispered, “I’ll do anything.”

“Is Giorgio up there now?” asked Tilman.

“He is, but as you say, you can’t climb, and he won’t descend until sundown.” Simson was still looking at Klara’s face. Not a trace of a beard. Maybe, he thought, the surgeon had cut something else besides the vocal chords. “Perhaps your brother here could climb up there with a note or something?”

“No …” whispered Klara, not wanting to leave her brother’s side.

“We’ll wait till evening,” said Tilman.

Simson began to busy himself with a pile of papers on his desk. “Suit yourself,” he said.

Three days later word spread around the site (where like Giorgio before them, Tilman and the small man known as Karl were being housed and fed by a few of the carvers) that Allward would arrive from London later that day to oversee the arrival of two new plaster figures that would be used as reference for the sculptures on the inside of each pylon. All the previous day Klara and Tilman had watched as men worked at fixing the studio in place. Some swung from ropes, like rock climbers, using their legs to push themselves away from stone and wood out into the air and over to another part of the scaffolding. Others lay on their stomachs on the studio floor with their arms hanging out of the canvas doorway hammering nails, using screwdrivers, while underneath them a pulley was attached to the bottom of the studio floor. Klara was intrigued by these acrobatics, but Tilman was appalled. When Giorgio joined them at noon, Tilman told his friend that for the first time since the war he was actually grateful for his amputation. “Thank God,” he said, “I only have one leg. Otherwise that would be me up there swinging around like a suicidal monkey.”

Giorgio laughed. “Listen to you,” he said, “and after all that bragging you’ve done about riding the rods, leaping in and out of speeding trains.”

Klara liked the sound of this large man’s laugh, the warmth it brought to the chill December air.

That afternoon Tilman and Klara stood with Giorgio in a crowd of silent workers and watched as the man called Allward unpacked his latest creations. “There’ll be hell to pay,” Giorgio informed them, “if anything’s broken. One of the
Defenders
had his nose knocked off coming over the channel. Allward almost didn’t survive that.”

Allward was brushing straw from the wing of a plaster angel. Behind him the monument rose like a pale, partly completed cathedral.

“
Charity,”
said Giorgio, moving his head to one side to get a better look, “or
Hope
. I’m one of the angel men,” he continued. “I’m going to get to work on them. Look,” he pointed at Allward, who had uncrated another winged woman, straw blowing around him as if he were in the centre of a small cyclone.

There are certain visual occurrences that become tethered to memory, Klara would later decide, images that appear in the mind when one is sitting in waiting rooms or staring out train windows. If they are strong enough, they may bloom in the brain when one is making love or, perhaps, though no one really knows this, a few moments before death.

The raising by rope of the white plaster angels up to the elevated studio that was to be their home until they were reinvented in stone was, for her, a masterpiece of shape and motion that she took, unknowingly, deep into herself. The twisted rope beneath the breasts, the shadows of the wings moving up the marble pylons, the utter silence surrounded her, none of this would ever leave her. She had witnessed an ascension, an apotheosis, an act so fragile its perfection could be shattered by the smallest alteration in the direction of the wind. And when it was over and she looked at Giorgio, she could see that, like her own, his eyes were full of tears.

Allward had disappeared to the overseer’s hut, his head in his hands, the shades drawn, and all his paranoia about the destruction of his work rampant in the room. But Klara had not noticed his departure. She was rapt, certain she had seen the expression on an angel’s face change, become painfully alive when, for just one second, a cloud had hidden the sun.