G Anderson - Das Steingeschöpf

"Rike?" he said, his voice thick and impenetrable.

"I'm here," Frau Leitner said from the doorway. " Hab' keine Angst , Ambroise. Herr Hertzel just needs to have a closer look."

He towered over me. It was impossible to see the details of his face. "Can you bend down a little, Ambroise?"

He obliged, as cumbrous as a mountain, until his spine could bend no more and his face was level with mine. His eyes held traces of delicate iriswork; de Loynes had painstakingly carved individual muscle fibres into an otherwise smooth sclera. But everything had lost its definition and would have to be sanded away to give me a blank eye to work with.

I saw now that the disrepair of his mouth was in no small part due to an inexpert attempt to widen the cavity: scores had been left behind, made by a poker or a screwdriver. I glanced towards Frau Leitner, and she met my gaze steadily. If this was her doing, I hoped for her sake that she had covered her face well — but I’d already heard the state of her lungs.

I set my face and turned back to the task. His mouth was so obscured by the beard that in order to redefine it, I'd have to start from scratch. The whole beard, a sizeable chunk of his face, would have to go. And my eyes were drawn to the network of dark veins. No Schöpfer worth his badge could ignore these; they would only worsen and require more invasive restoration later.

A drop of sweat slid down my temple.

I reached out with my bare hand. If I was going to restore him, I'd have to touch him eventually. I might as well get past the first shock now. I pressed my palm to his chest and fell into the churning consciousness of a dozen or more men, sucked away in the act of carving and still thrashing with life, with rage, with creation. Aching backs and Queckstein dust caught under fingernails, a secondhand mask with a less-than-perfect fit; a persistent cough. And individual memories: a sackcloth-and-hay bed in a loft; a weeping sore in the groin and the smell of apples; the wetness between a wife's legs. Two young children and one blue stillborn; dark, muddy days and bright ones with blue skies. A hundred million things to paint, to write, to carve, to compose, all trapped in a body that's failing. Awareness of a brother come to save them at last, separated only by Ambroise's skin. They surge towards me: " Qui êtes-vous ?" A red flash of pride — de Loynes himself? — brushes against my mind: "Don't defile my work, connard , or I'll—"

I jerked my hand away. The voices stopped.

"Are you all right?"

Frau Leitner was watching me with a frown. Without training, Ambroise was just cold stone to her hands. She'd never felt the turmoil beneath his skin, beneath the skin of every Steingeschöpf. "Fine," I said shakily. "A lot of work went into carving him. The Queckstein is … chatty."

What is it that makes those old, traditional masters so hateful? I almost looked forward to restoring Ambroise just to spite his creator. I thought of the long ride home and Fellinger's smug smile as I admitted failing my first commission. My fists clenched. I'd weathered a decade of taunts and sneers, of indifference — and for what? So that I could run home with my tail tucked between my legs at the first sign of trouble, and prove him right?

I explained what little I could do. Neither Frau Leitner nor Ambroise seemed perturbed at the thought of his face changing drastically, which set my resolve. "He will need to be cleaned. Could you boil some water? And can you spare any soap?"

I scrubbed away the lichen and grime, refusing Frau Leitner's help: she'd suffered enough for his sake. She coaxed Ambroise into letting me clean his hands, which he would not let me touch at first. They'd been warped out of shape by centuries of holding paintbrushes, like an old stone stair hollowed out and buffed by the passing of countless feet. I hauled myself onto his tail, ignoring de Loynes's tantrum pounding against my palms, and by using the spikes of his back as footholds, was just able to reach his horns. Patches of de Loynes's signature scale work were still visible on his shoulder blades. Their intricacy astounded me.

The Steingeschöpf stayed quite still, resigned to my ministrations. The bucket of hot water grew murky before I was satisfied he was clean. I insisted that Frau Leitner rest downstairs for the afternoon; I'd only brought one face mask. Once she was gone, I explained the next step to Ambroise.

The dark seams across his chest and shoulders were areas where the Queckstein had lost its energy — had, in other words, died. Steingeschöpfe can only exist on the combined energy inside them. Unless this reservoir is replenished, it runs out. Even after three hundred years, Ambroise had plenty of life left by my reckoning, but faults like his must be picked out and filled in with putty before the decay could spread.

"This will feel unpleasant, but it must be done for your overall health."

Ambroise showed no sign of having heard or understood me. I slipped on my face mask and gathered the tools I would need to scrape away the darkened Queckstein.

It disintegrated like dust at first. Then, the tool caught in a fault line and a chunk the size of my thumbnail popped out. Ambroise growled at me. "Sorry," I muttered. The siphoning process had begun in earnest. It was a delicate balancing act, completing the work that was required at the smallest possible cost to myself. My memories and emotions jumped around erratically in my head: a shoe with the sole peeling away, my pale toe visible; my fear of de Loynes, who in my imagination looked much like Fellinger; Franz, with the crooked tooth and the slicked red hair. Franz.

We were nineteen in 1923. We'd been paid our allowance for the third and last time that day, as had become the norm: wages received in the morning were barely enough to live on by lunchtime. Inflation meant that our pockets were stuffed with wads of paper marks in dizzying denominations — more money than I'd ever had in my life — and all we could get for it was a bottle of watered-down gin. We drank it in a dank alleyway, until it was dark and our heads were too muddled to hear the rattle of trams from nearby Potsdamer Straße. We'd heard rumours of a cinema projectionist who was letting people in through the back door, bypassing the unaffordable box office. We staggered to the cinema in question. Packets of powder and snuff changed hands, from Franz's personal stock.

The projection room was small and hot, and there was only an inch-wide gap in the wall from which to watch. We crammed our faces close. The moving picture was of poor quality, the film underexposed. A young woman stood by a bed and slowly stepped out of her dressing gown. My face grew hot. What was on the screen didn't matter to me — it could have been anything — but the crush of his body against mine, our boundaries blurred by drink, the ticktickticktick of the projector and the stifled moans of the people in the back row and Franz's eyes lit up by the chalky, stuttering strip of light — it all suddenly mattered very much. Franz's breathing quickened, and I felt myself harden. " Scheiße ," he whispered.

We stood in the rain outside afterwards, our heads bowed and close, sharing a cigarette. Back and forth, back and forth, our lips settling into the same indent on the filter.

I stepped away from Ambroise, the faults removed, my heart thudding. My hands had gone numb; I had to give them a good shake to bring the feeling back. Ambroise gently poked the gaps I'd left. "Best leave them," I said. "You don't want to make them wider."

The stone-coloured putty came in stick form to be torn as required. I softened pea-sized pieces between my fingers and pushed them into the cracks where they would settle and harden.

Next, I used a miniature file to scrape away de Loynes's iriswork. The desecration would have given Fellinger an apoplexy. In the dust that drifted past my face, I thought I heard de Loynes's indignation. When the sclera was as smooth as oil, I began to shape the simple craters of his new irises. I thought of Franz as I’d seen him many times, finishing his latest piece, his shirt damp between his shoulder blades. My memories lost their colour and substance as I worked. At one point, I couldn’t recall the exact shade of Franz’s hair. My mind scrambled to drudge up other, more mundane things with which to feed the Queckstein. The attic grew dark; the numbness spread up to my elbows. I finally stepped away. His eyes were complete. They swivelled freely in their sockets, as big and round as apples, and fixed on me.