Page 25 of If You Were the Only Girl in the World
“Right you are.” Aurore marched along the line of phaetons and lorries, aged omnibuses and an open shay, past workmen’s benches filled with tools. At a far wall, she pulled open a huge door and revealed the workshop of her father. Inside stood innumerable blocks of Carrara marble of all sizes, unshaped, roughly hewn from the earth. A ten foot tall kiln stood in once corner, empty and cold. A plinth of stone and woven iron chains formed the base for a half-formed shape of what might become a woman.
“Papa does not tell us what it is. I think he waits for the end of the war to see what it means for him.” She stood, considering with a critical eye the stone that stood eight or nine feet tall and three feet wide. “All my life, I watched him cut from rock the pulsing breath of life and what I know of how the body moves, I learned from him. And I learned it here.”
She turned away. “But what I know of the strength of emotion, I learned from my mother. Have you seen her work?”
“Yes, often. My mother bought one of her paintings from a New York dealer many years ago. A picture of a mother and her baby at the bath. The child laughs as her mother runs water over her tummy and the look on both their faces is ethereal. I can feel my heart lurch at how deeply a mother loves her child.”
Aurore nodded. “I have experienced that tug to your heartstrings when I see Mama working.”
“Does she paint here too?”
“No. She has a separate studio up at the house. After they married, she took her bedroom suite and removed all the furniture. They have never slept apart, you see. She took down all the interior walls, had one exterior wall of stone removed and a new one of glass installed. It is…” She inhaled. “All light and space. I will take you up if you like after lunch.”
“I would like that. Yes, please.”
Aurore walked through and opened yet another door.
This room too was an expression of the one who worked here.
On one pegged wall, hanging from hooks were cuts of leather, crude forms, approximately the size of a human head. On another wall were curved iron masks, some with slits for nose and mouth, others with holes for eyes and ears. At the center of the room stood a huge stone table and atop it were arrayed knives of all shapes and sizes as well as sketch pads, chalk and pens.
“This is my workshop. As you can see, I have my molds here and my outlines. I work here. It is best that I do. My clients come to me by referral from the hospitals of the army. They are called the ghouls, ‘les gueules’.The broken faces. Those who are never who they were. Not to themselves and not to their family. Also an alien other to those whom they meet each day.”
Katrina quivered with the horror of such a transformation. Who would she be if she looked in the mirror and could not see the one she was most familiar with? “I cannot imagine the challenge of it. I wonder if I would survive.”
“I too,” Aurore said, her voice a whisper in the cavernous room. “Many cannot find a way forward. Their families reject them. Often, it happens. Yet they are the visible mark of this war, and they may never erase it.”
“Some attempt skin grafts. I have known of this in cases where burns destroy the skin.”
“But it takes much time and effort to keep the graft well moisturized.”
“I believe it will succeed,” Katrina said, always believing in the abilities of a trained surgeon.
“In time to save many thousands from the hollowness of their future? I hope so, Katrina. I do.” Aurore wrung her hands. “I did not lose my face or my identity, yet when my husband was no longer alive I could not save myself from the hollowness of my life.”
Katrina was transfixed by her honesty and knew not what to say in response.
“My husband died and I was quite lost. My family, you see, believe in love. I do…or did. I cannot say now.” She ran the fingers of one hand over her bound hair. “Two men who were with him came to call on me afterward. They escaped the Germans and wished to tell me how brave he was. But he was wounded. Shrapnel, it was. He lost an eye and the infection killed him. So I think of him. My handsomebeau. Mon amour. I went a little mad after they called on me and told me. I shut down my office in Paris and moved here to be with my parents. Like a child, I thought. And I ridiculed myself for my cowardice. My weakness. Paris is no place for one who must be upright and working and positive. No place.”
She whirled to face Katrina. “I understand how you find the city difficult to endure. You come from a country not affected by this war. Not attacked from the sky or shaken by the deaths or mutilations that stream through every family with a black rope of grief. This country has known strife and war. Papa talks of the Commune. Long ago. Forty years it was, but many remember. People starved. My grandmother fed the masses in Paris. She was rich and had a well stocked larder. Papa and she gave away food as we do now here. Mama recalls your civil war and how those who suffered most were women and children and wounded.”
She grasped Katrina’s hand. “You can help those who see no hope for themselves. You have the skill, the knowledge. And if you need to escape to keep your balance, do that. Go to the ocean, if that suits you. Or take a day to do nothing but what you love. Read, write, study a method to improve the moisturizing of grafted tissue. Improve a method to unite blood vessels of one organ to its host. Or find a better method to treat a wound. I’ve used that contraption used to cleanse a shrapnel would.”
“The drip of saline solution?” Katrina had used the Carrel-Dakin procedure herself for patients who had deep wounds that needed to be sterilized. “Awful. Tedious. But necessary to eradicate the possibility of gangrene.”
“Yes. Yes! What is your special interest? Or what was it before the war brought you to France?”
“Herr Freud’s ideas on the emotions. How we improve and change ourselves.”
“Do that then. Find a way to change your own soul.”
“I want to. I have not fared well emotionally in Paris, it is true.”
“And you are ashamed to admit it,” Aurore said with compassion.
“Very much.” Katrina nodded. “Very much. Yet I have so much for which to be thankful.”
“And you have a skill that helps others.”
