The Stone Carvers (37 page)

They were no longer young. Each was aware that they were uncovering a body that had walked through months and years of abstinence, a body that had relinquished all hope of communion. They touched each other’s necks, as if to discover the life tremor there. Then Giorgio pulled Klara’s head close to his chest; she could hear the sound of his heart. They made love quickly, Klara gasping, this new solid weight on her ribs and inner thighs, her senses being shaken awake. And then later, more carefully, until she believed her body, the candlelight, and the walls of the tunnels were all turning to water, and that she might drown in herself, in him. And all around them, stretching as far as the market town of Arras, the dank tunnels, like graves, out of which thousands of young men had rushed into the brimstone air.

“Love, in such a place as this,” Giorgio said, finally.

Klara remained silent, curled precariously by his side on the narrow bunk, aware of the ancient springs, the feel of them pushing into her hip and shoulder.

The tunnels themselves were a kind of memorial. Sometimes after making love Giorgio and Klara would walk the main passageways and then the tributaries that led from them as if they were explorers penetrating an unknown continent, travelling a river system they had yet to name. They moved the lamplight across the walls, reading and often recording in a notebook the inscriptions they found carved into the rock.
R.I.P. In Memory of the Sappers who fell at Vimy
was written in one spot, though whether in the midst of the battle or later, who could tell. A sculpted coat of arms hung over the words
in honour of the dead of the 42nd R.H.C
. Once Giorgio gasped, then drew Klara’s attention to a section of a wall where a boy had scratched his name and
still alive and kicking
in the same roughshod manner as he might have decorated the surface of a pioneer desk in a one-room country school. Another name was inscribed next to this along with
untouched by whizzbangs yet
. Giorgio grasped Klara’s arm. “I carved the letters of this boy’s name yesterday,” he whispered, pointing to the second inscription. He shook his head. “And the other … the other was found under the rocks when they cleared the entrance to Grange Tunnel. He was scratched from my list.”

Eventually Klara began to view the whole landscape, all the land given to Canada by France, the sky above, and the depths of the chalky earth below as part of an interconnecting system, one aspect of which could not survive without the other. The tunnels were like extended tangled roots reaching up to the monument above, feeding its construction by their very existence. And though the centre of the network was her carving of Eamon—who had never seen this particular battlefield—the heartbeat was surely her secret lovemaking with Giorgio, a life source pulsing deep in the earth.

At night Klara would lie in her bunk in the overseer’s office, thinking of Giorgio two huts down, letting her affection for him wash over her like warm water. In her youth she had wanted to live inside her lover, to look out at the world from under his eyelids, to be constantly stretched out at his side. Then she had, unconsciously, resented the intrusion of this thought, resented her own preoccupation. The woman Klara was now, however, could walk out into the bright morning, happy in the shadow of the monument, exchange glances with Giorgio as they moved toward their separate tasks, and take the pleasure of this one look with her, its atmosphere surrounding her all through the day. And then there was the delight in the discovery that a woman of her age could still succumb to the warmth of passion, could feel this smooth, manageable desire, allow it to enter her life.

Klara spent most evenings with Giorgio now. She would leave work, run across to the hut that held the showers, which, as she had learned during the time of her disguise, were always empty at this hour. After this she sometimes dressed in the skirt and one of the blouses she had bought in Arras, but often she waited until after the dinner hour to wear these feminine garments as her appearance in them seemed to make the men uneasy in the mess hall. Walking across the green grass of a summer evening toward a chosen underworld, dressed as if heading for a dance or a movie, no longer seemed odd to her. She wanted the walled enclosure, the sense of removal from the world provided by the tunnels, the darkness, and the private circle of light from Giorgio’s lantern.

“I have something important to show you,” Giorgio said one evening as they lay on the sagging cot. “There are artists everywhere that no one knows about. You are one, I am another. But down here, even then, even with the rats and the blood, there were those who had to record experience. Let’s get dressed. I want to show you.”

Klara had begun to believe that his body was shaping hers, the way a bend in a river shapes the bank beside it with the caress of water and of current.

“I don’t want to stop touching you,” she said. “I don’t want you to stop touching me.” She loved the roundness and the warmth of his belly. His arms hardened by carving, and the tight skin that covered all of this. She didn’t want to separate his skin from hers. They had held their arms up side by side, his dark and full, hers pale, thin, but strong from the work. She liked to think about the clothes she might make for him, had she her tailoring equipment with her. She liked to think about seams she might sew following the contours of his body.

Often she felt she might weep.

“No,” he said, “come.”

They dressed and walked with the lantern through the maze of tunnels, entering at last a room that someone had called Place de la Concorde. The whole labyrinth seemed a parody of the world above as soldiers had chiselled into the passageways and underground rooms the names of places they had been fond of, or places they had imagined. One oval space had been called Centreton Ball Park, and another Convocation Hall. What had these men carried in their minds? Had these references to the pleasures of the life they had left behind consoled them in the face of the damp and the lice and the certainty of death?

They passed a tunnel that veered to the left, then slanted upward toward the surface. “Tilman probably used this exit,” said Giorgio, “when he volunteered as a runner. They wanted the messengers to burst out of here in full flight, hit the air running, unhampered by stairs. I remember that before the war he was a fabulous sprinter … kept the skill honed, for escape purposes, I guess.”

“Then he lost his leg,” said Klara, “and lost all that too. Poor Tilman, no wonder he loathes all reminders of the battle—those ditches lined with concrete renditions of sandbags, for instance. He says they look nothing like the real thing, that they are toy trenches for tourists.”

“Tilman’s right. If it’s authenticity they’re after, they should fill them up with mud and rats, pus and blood. But there is
some
authenticity left, down here, or at least the remnants of it.” He took Klara’s hand and led her into the darkness.

They pushed deeper into the tunnels, took a left and then a right turn, the chalk walls leaving white traces on their sleeves. Once, Klara tripped and almost fell over the wooden levers of an abandoned and badly decayed canvas stretcher. Often there was the crunch of thin rusted metal under their feet.

“Are you sure you know where we’re going?” she asked. “Will we be able to get back?”

“Here we are. Look.” Giorgio held the lantern near a carving in relief of a young face with a soldier’s collar tight against the neck. “Who do you think he was?”

Klara moved toward the wall, looked closely at the carving. “How can we know?” she asked.

“I mean the carver,” Giorgio coughed, bending over his fist, the combination of the dank air and chalk dust of the tunnels catching in his throat. Then he straightened and cleared his throat. “Look at the expression in the eyes … This is a face the carver loved. What do you suppose the carver was thinking?”

Giorgio leaned closer to the white chalk carving, moved the lantern back and forth in front of it. “He had compassion for the suffering of this face.”

“Yes,” said Klara.

She was turning to walk away when Giorgio gently caught her arm. “What was his name, Klara?” he asked softly. “Who was the boy you were carving?”

“I can’t …” Klara began.

“Klara,” Giorgio said, “I want to know you … everything about you …”

“No, I can’t. Please understand. It’s something I can’t talk about to anyone.” This she said remembering the moment she had spoken to Allward. But nothing in her wanted to bring Eamon into her connection with Giorgio.

Giorgio looked away from her, but even in the faint lamplight Klara could see he was wounded.

“Let’s go back,” he said, turning away, heading for the tunnel that led from this room. “Let’s get out of here.” He began to walk away, taking the light with him.

The air around Klara grew first dim and then dark. She knew he was hurt, angry. But she insisted on the ownership of her past. Since the day of his departure, Klara had never once said aloud the name of her young lover. She felt that to release the syllables into the air all these years later would be a kind of amputation, a violent removal of a part of the self. To present them to the man she had so recently embraced would betray, she believed, Eamon’s bright, eager passion, would for the second time annul it. She wanted to crawl away from Giorgio now, to curl up somewhere in the dark, alone. But not here, not when the tunnels were not lit by love. She had only two choices: to stay alone in the dripping shadows of the underground labyrinth or to follow Giorgio, follow his light.

They parted awkwardly at the entrance to Grange Tunnel: Giorgio looking intently into Klara’s face, she scrutinizing the uneven and still deadly ground of the surrounding territory. The innocent, she suddenly thought, were never aware that merely by strolling across grass they could activate a mine from the past. Just last week a horse had been killed by simply grazing in what appeared to be a benign field.

All the way back to the overseer’s hut and for a long time after she had collapsed onto her cot near the window, Klara thought about the foolishness of a woman her age engaging in a love affair as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She imagined how the villagers in Shoneval would react were they to come to hear of it, how shocked they would be if they knew about the overwhelming response of her body in such awkward and arousing positions, the sounds she knew she had made once Giorgio entered her. They were both too old for this sort of thing; it could only end badly. And now this space between them, this unspoken name. A horse trusting a green field because his knowledge of fields had never involved injury, pain. A young man’s unclouded love for her, complicated only by her own ultimate refusal to accept it. She had never been one of the innocent, had always predicted loss. “Eamon,” she whispered now, in the dark, “Eamon O’Sullivan.”

R
eared in a household that on Sundays expanded to hold a hundred people, and on ordinary days never sheltered less than ten, Giorgio had become ubiquitous—though never fickle—in his affections. No person was to him too young, too old, too withdrawn or effusive to be interesting. He could recall with great fondness all the little girls dressed in white whose first communions he had attended, and all the old men at whose funerals he had wept. He had loved equally the hobos in the Don Valley, the labourers and artisans with whom he now worked on the memorial, and the soldiers with whom he had fought in the war. It had never occurred to him that one should, or that one
could
, focus all of one’s attention on a single human being, though loyalty in romance was something he believed in. He had always assumed that were he to find a woman he liked well enough he would be faithful to her, and had in the past stayed close for periods of up to a year to one young woman or another. But the relationships had shifted to friendship as time passed, and it became clear that neither he nor the woman had experienced the inner connection that binds couples together even when they are apart.

He knew that Klara was different, that she was comfortable with long periods of isolation and would likely be given to infrequent yet passionate attachments. He admired this in her, this focus that had driven her to cross an ocean, carve the beloved face of one long dead in the stone of a monument. He suspected that she had been alone for so long she had forgotten what it was to be known, knowable, and he understood this. Still it hurt him that she would not disclose this important, tender episode from the past to him. He wanted all of her, was interested in every detail that had gone into the construction of her character, and it was this combined with physical desire that made him realize for the first time, and now into the middle of his life, that he had actually fallen in love.

Each day he rendered the letters of the alphabet that made permanent the names on the stone. Had he already, unknowingly, carved the name of Klara’s young man while thinking of something else? Often he concentrated so fiercely on the precise bevelling of a character that his mind became empty of plans and memories, his thoughts circling around how the letter “M” resembled two houses touching, for instance, or the champagne glass look of the letter “Y.” Had Klara walked to the wall once after he had finished a day’s work, and had she run her fingers sadly over the shape of the loved words?

In the weeks since they had become lovers, Klara and he had met at lunch hour to sit beside each other on the west steps of the base while they ate their baguettes. In recent days, however, she had not appeared, neither there nor, as he had come to expect, at the entrance to Grange Tunnel after the dinner hour. He stared at her across the rows of tables in the mess hall, trying to read something, anything into her expression. At noon he walked by the studio where she was working and saw her sitting hunched and silent beside a half-finished meal. She glanced at him, then turned her face away. When he approached her and began to speak, she said, “Don’t!” and then scrambled to her feet and walked hurriedly back into the studio.