G Anderson - Das Steingeschöpf

I hesitated. "What do you think?"

Ambroise looked around the starlit attic. His eyes settled on the pile of canvasses. I leapt out of the way of his tail as he all but lunged for them. He picked up the closest canvas— Ein Garten ohne Blumen —and stared at it. His shoulders started to shudder, and there came from him a noise like rolling thunder. He whipped around, banging his horns on a low beam. "Rike!" he boomed. "Rike!"

Frau Leitner's footsteps were quick on the stairs. She stopped to catch her breath at the top, a hand resting on the banister. Ambroise lumbered over to her and hunkered down. They regarded each other in disbelief. He reached out and ran his fingers through her hair. " Grau ."

Frau Leitner's smile transformed her face. " Grau . I got old while you weren't looking, didn't I?"

That evening, I smoked and ate supper alone in the kitchen. My body felt like the rind of a fruit after the flesh has been scooped away. Fellinger and the other masters were often commissioned to restore Steingeschöpfe, and they always returned greyer and more wizened than ever. I finally understood why.

I snatched a glance through to the sitting room. Frau Leitner had taken a yellowing photograph of two solemn young men in uniform down from the mantelpiece. Ambroise was holding it.

Over the rim of the frame, Frau Leitner’s eyes met mine. Danke , they said. Danke .

My mallet had hovered in the air far too long. Ambroise's new eyes flicked between my face and my wavering hand. Carving irises was quite different to removing a considerably large part of his face. I had to pour my intentions into the chisel slotted beneath his nose, and by doing so pour a little more of myself than I would like into the Queckstein. This is the shape I want. Help me make it so .

The mallet swung down and the whole beard snapped clean off, landing on the floor with a bang. We watched it roll wonkily across the floorboards and grow still. I turned back and saw that Ambroise's eyebrow was raised. "Your first shave," I said. His new eyes creased with silent laughter.

I was left with a messy void from which to shape a jaw and a mouth. I worked quickly, and did my best to resist the pull— no , I thought, you’ve already taken too much from me —but the Queckstein demanded more.

The day we got our badges, Franz and I went to a bar and drank our own weight in schnapps. We toasted to the boy who'd died with lungs full of dust; we toasted to our future; we even toasted to old Fellinger, much as we both hated him. Years of hauling stone and working a chisel had reshaped Franz's body: the scrawny boy had become a lean man with callused hands and ropy arms. He still teased his crooked tooth with his tongue; he still slicked back his hair. In many ways he was the same old Franz, but that night he seemed different. Tightly wound. Something had happened between us in that projection room, and had existed between us since — a quickening that needed to be addressed — but neither of us could bear to break the illusion of easy friendship we'd created.

We sat so close that we drew attention. A band of brownshirts, their faces blotchy with drink, swaggered towards our table.

"Hey, you faggots!"

Franz's spring-loaded fist shot out; the ringleader's jaw crunched like an autumn leaf. The brawl that followed knocked out two of my molars and shattered the entire collection of vintage liquors behind the bar. The manager threw us out after ten minutes.

Franz and I left the brownshirts groaning on the pavement and staggered back to the safety of the dormitory, our arms slung across the other's shoulders, too drunk to keep ourselves upright. “Those fascist bastards,” he grinned through bloodstained teeth. “We got ‘em good though, eh?” We passed beneath a grubby poster for the Sturmabteilung that had been pinned to a high fence, its loose corners rattling in the wind. In my room, I found clean cloth and a small bottle of iodine, and dabbed Franz's black eye. I moved his head to one side to deal with a cut on his cheek. As he watched my face through half-lidded eyes, my thumb ran over his lips.

Ambroise's lips.

I blinked and realised what I'd done: I'd given Ambroise the jaw and mouth of my best friend. A sharp Cupid's bow; a plump bottom lip. Lost in memories, I'd reached out to touch his face, and he had leaned into my hand.

Tension was building in him, like the tension in Franz's arm that night. I leapt back, expecting a fist. Instead, he let out a roar so loud that the house vibrated. Dust — real dust, made of spores and crushed beetle shells and sand — drizzled down on us, coating my shoulders and turning my hair grey. The roar ended and became a full-throated laugh. He bellowed banned poetry from England, traditional tongue breakers, Italian love songs, classics in Greek and Latin — at last, all the things he'd held in his heart for decades, completely uncensored.

I stood back and witnessed his joy.

I needed a few days’ rest after completing the restoration. At the same time, Friederike — she insisted I drop the Frau — took a bad turn; she started to cough all hours of the night. Ambroise abandoned his lonely post in the attic to care for both of us downstairs, lack of space be damned. He pushed the little furniture they had against the walls to make room for his heavy, dragging tail, which left gouges in the floorboards.

Ambroise and I found ourselves with time to fill. It’s funny: I’d worked on many Steingeschöpfe during my apprenticeship, but I don’t think I’d ever sat down and talked to one before. I found it disconcerting. Ambroise was at once me and not me, a patchwork of personality and mood that I half-recognised. I found his German hard to follow, influenced as it was by different dialects and languages, but his voice was rich, like strong coffee. "Rike's been lying to me all these years," was one of the first things he said to me. "My paintings are terrible."

"I like them," I said. "They look … modern."

He shook his huge head incredulously. "Random dabs of paint on canvas? Whatever next."

Ambroise confirmed de Loynes as his creator, an unpleasant man by his account. "I was a very early creation," he told me as I lay in my sickbed. "I spent my formative years in a church in Rouen, ringing the bells every morning and watching the parishioners in prayer. But I was not rooted to one spot like the unfortunate Wasserspeier , and I left against de Loynes's wishes. I wanted to see the world, and to learn more of this god I'd heard so much about."

"And?" I asked.

Ambroise took a moment to answer. "When you've lived as long as I have, one religion starts to look much the same as another." He tilted his head. "What about you? Rike tells me you're a Jew, but … I think not."

It was as if the room had put on a heavy coat; both the light and my humour darkened. I closed my eyes and saw again Fellinger's sneers, the driver's spit on my shoe. “My parents — whoever they were — gave me to a children’s home when I was still a baby. I was brought up Catholic.”

Within a few short years, Jews would be identified, not only by their religious beliefs, but by their ancestry. It wouldn't matter that I didn't attend the synagogue or wear the kippah; it wouldn't matter that my parents only might have been Jewish. Without their papers, lost by the children’s home years before, I couldn't prove otherwise. All that would matter was the Jewish-sounding name they'd left me with, and the fact that my face happened to fit an arbitrary mould.

Ambroise watched me in silence, the same thought — my thought — undoubtedly occurring to him.

"I'm sorry," he said.