The Stone Carvers Read online

  How had he managed to twist her attention, swing it round in the direction of his face, his long silences, and now his abrupt reappearance, that one kiss. Klara had read about passionate embraces, but in the books she loved they had always taken place out of doors, in English gardens or on sweeping moorland, not in a tailor’s workshop nor, for that matter, in a village like Shoneval. She had imagined that one day she would be approached by a man who would want to touch her, but in her imagination this individual was mature, worldly, could never be a boy she had known from school. No. He would have to come from somewhere else, from Europe, from Britain. She felt she had been abducted by Eamon in the midst of a journey to this other, unknown person, that he had cast a spell on her thoughts so that like his birds they would always return to him no matter how far they flew. Perhaps the carving would free her from this. She recalled with pleasure and relief certain periods of intense concentration when it would be as if she had fallen down a wooden well or had become lost inside a wooden cave, as if the world and its complicated inhabitants had disappeared, the only relationship in her life was developing between her and the figure emerging from the block. By the time you finish even the smallest figures, her grandfather had told her, you must know all about them: their habits, their weaknesses, what they had for supper yesterday, who their enemies are, where they spent last night. She had laughed then, but Joseph Becker remained unsmiling. This was the only way, he maintained, that one could make a statue live, make it affect those who came to look at it.

  She decided to visit her grandfather now, wanting to borrow the delicate chisels she could not yet afford, chisels that would more precisely render the medieval woman’s face. She also wanted, under the circumstances, some instruction on concentration. But before she left the house she leafed through her catalogues until she found a good red worsted material that could be purchased from a firm in Montreal. Reeling at the expense, she nevertheless wrote a letter ordering the required yardage. Then she untied her apron and left the kitchen through the adjacent woodshed where her brother’s folding cot remained leaning against the wall in the shadows of the farthest corner as it had done for almost a decade. Feeling the sun on her face and hands as she walked down the lane that led to the road, her spirits lifted somewhat.

  How beautiful the day was! Shoneval, finally at the peak of what Father Gstir had envisaged as its destiny, was filled with the flowering trees and shrubs of June. Lilac, spirea, cherry, and apple. Klara couldn’t help but notice the opulence of the display. As she walked past the brewery she could feel Eamon’s presence behind the soft yellow of the windowless brick wall. Even the small river that was the brewery’s driving force seemed to speak of him, its voice melodic, emotionally charged, the water moving and shining. Klara shook herself and walked away—though the bright afterimage remained behind her eyes as she walked past Hafeman’s store and up the hill toward Father Gstir’s magnificent church. When she cut through the cemetery she paused to cross herself at her mother’s grave, then wandered through marble stones and iron crosses to the fence that marked the beginning of her grandfather’s property. His fields and pastures. His apple orchard. And the tidy Canadian farmhouse that was never a home to him in the way that his barn workshop was—for it was in his workshop that he preserved Europe. To enter this cluttered space was to taste, for just a moment, the flavour of everything he had lost. Markets and cathedrals, medieval cities whose spires stood like a bouquet on the horizon, and rivers over which arched bridges of such beauty that the old man’s eyes filled with tears whenever he described them.

  Klara stood in the doorway of the barn and watched as her grandfather worked. Everything about him was hunched and crooked from years of bending over various kinds of labour. The gristmill, the farm, and always this carving. He was bowed toward a relief panel with reverential affection, chisel and hammer in hand. As long as Klara could remember, her grandfather’s fingers had been twisted and arthritic. And yet his hands were large and strong, with veins and sinews like a net of ropes rising from the skin. And his gestures, when touching wood or making a conversational point, were tender yet assured. He turned from his work, to look at his granddaughter, and his face lifted into multiple creases, as if the drapery of his many carved saints, prophets, apostles, and evangelists had taken up residence on his supple skin.

  As Klara entered the barn, a lamb lying near the work table scrambled to its feet and cantered out into the yard. “Now look what you’ve done,” said her grandfather, but not unkindly. “It took me all morning to coax the little devil in here.”

  “Was he a model?” Klara asked.

  “That too,” said her grandfather, “but also I was keeping him from your grandmother’s spirea bushes. One more bite and we would be having him for dinner Sunday night.” He began to clean the chisel he held in his hand with a cloth. “How is your abbess?” he asked. “Have you finished her yet?”

  Klara did not answer but crouched down instead to look at her grandfather’s latest carving. He had completed more than half of the spokes of radiance that emanated from the relief of the holy lamb’s body. The floor around the piece was littered with spirals of paper-thin wood. “No,” said Klara, still examining the piece, “I’ve had tailoring to do.”

  “ ‘It were noble occupation for ingenious youths without employment to exercise themselves in this art.’ It was Dürer who said it.”

  Klara rose and crossed the floor to a small, partly finished altarpiece. She used her skirt to polish the hat of one of the figures where sawdust had gathered around the rim. She could not see how the statement applied to her—a wood sculptor, and a woman. Her grandfather, however, loved to tell how the year Tilman was born a book of Dürer’s writings became available through a university in England, and how he had travelled all the way to Toronto to purchase it. It had contained, among other things, instructions from the great master on how a boy might be raised toward becoming the maker of “great, far reaching, and infinite art.” This was seen as a highly auspicious sign by their grandfather and, after Tilman’s birth, he lectured his daughter-in-law mercilessly on the subject. It was suggested that “the child be kept eager to learn and not vexed” and “that he dwell in a pleasant house so that he be distracted by no manner of hindrance.” Dürer had never been mentioned in relation to Klara’s upbringing and this had not gone unnoticed by her. But, in truth, a few years after Tilman’s disappearance, her father had forbidden any reference to the book in his house, knowing that each time the grandfather quoted from it, the boy’s absence became more palpable, and his wife more vengeful. Once, after the book had been brought out, Klara’s mother turned to her twelve-year-old daughter with madness in her eyes and whispered, “Why are you still here? Why don’t you run away?” The grandfather had snapped the book shut then and had taken Klara by the hand out of the house to his own farm, where she stayed for several weeks under the care of her quiet grandmother. Everything in her had wanted to go home, believing that by staying with her grandparents she had run away, that she had proved her mother right. But her grandfather would not relent, and as neither parent came to fetch her, she began to believe that all of the adults surrounding her were complicitous, wanted her somehow to be gone.

  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 an
yone 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.