The Stone Carvers Read Online Free PDF Page B

the past to buzz around in her head until, by the time Saturday arrived, she began to believe that, like the fog that was everywhere except indoors, she was not really inside the house of her mind. Or perhaps it was that unlike the fog she was in that house and nowhere else. She decided then to let the outside atmosphere into her rooms, and she opened every window, every door, and watched the white, odourless smoke crawl over threshold and sill, curl around the legs of chairs, and spread itself over tables and beds. She unlatched cupboard and closet doors and pulled open drawers in various dressers so that the fog touched even her most intimate underclothes and crept around her dead mother’s good dishes. When the whole house had turned opaque, she realized suddenly that her actions had gone well beyond the bounds of eccentricity permitted a spinster. She slammed shut windows, doors, drawers and cupboards, and washed her face with cold water—for she now found that she had been weeping—and promised herself nothing of this nature would ever happen again. There would be no more unpremeditated dives into personal memory. She knew this was nonsense, of course, that there was nothing at all one can do about something one can’t forget. The more it is pushed away, the more it stays stubbornly planted in the rich soil of a life’s narrative. Dormant, perhaps, but ready with the smallest provocation to burst into full flower.
    Despite a total change in the weather, the dampness in Klara’s empty house had lasted for several days.
    The house, which was Klara’s childhood home, had not always been empty. Once, there had been a father and a mother. Once there had been a brother. Each had left a trace of himself or herself in one room or another: a pipe, a set of suspenders, a jewellery box, a hand mirror, a small pair of good Sunday boots. And each had left something unresolved in Klara, words spoken, or not spoken, or words spoken in anger. Each had left an empty chair at the table.
    It had taken her mother, Helga Becker, five years to die. When the actual physical sickness set in during the last six months of her mother’s life, Klara realized she had known since the age of ten that some dark thing was growing slowly larger inside the woman who had given birth to her. When at fifteen she was told about the cancer and how it would soon kill her mother, it seemed to Klara that, like the dimension of her brother’s absence that expanded at the close of each new day, this tumour had been gradually filling her mother’s skull, slowly pushing the light and the life out of their house.
    After Klara’s brother had been gone for a full year, and her mother’s fits of weeping and formidable tantrums had ceased, a new, clipped practicality appeared to enter her. She seemed then to be perpetually angered by the superficiality of a world that could continue on with its business in the face of the total dematerialization of her son. It was during this time that she began to teach Klara the art of tailoring, but without tenderness, as if she felt that her young daughter were part of this conspiracy of ordinariness and ought to be provided with some business to get on with. This phase was followed by greater and greater withdrawal, punctuated by terse statements suggesting that her husband, Dieter, was to blame for the boy’s disappearance and therefore, by association, responsible for her own unhappiness, though she never spoke of Tilman except when making these allegations. When the subtle accusations were overheard by Klara, they terrified her, for though she had never said so, she felt that the real culprit was herself, that any blame ought to be aimed at her. In the end, though she left school and nursed her faithfully until the instant of her death, Klara no longer loved her mother but was able to muster no argument against her that did not circle back to her own actions.
    But it was neither this nor the grief that accompanied it