The Elder Man Read online

  He was profoundly relieved to find it was a very different company, but he also wondered if there had been some mix-up in the bookings and if he had been sent to the wrong workshop. That would really round up my career nicely, if I write an article about the wrong crazy French tree-hugger.

  ****

  Van

  Lunch was usually fairly late, as they tried to use the cooler morning hours to get as much heavy lifting done as possible, and it was about 2 PM when they all sat in the shade by the open-air kitchen to eat.

  P’tit Paul, glowing as bright and red as his carefully tended fires, dished out a tableful of excellent food of all sorts and jugs of cool juice and tea. No beer or wine. It was Van’s absolute rule. Alcohol was welcome in the evenings, but the last thing he needed was tipsy or sleepy people working under the afternoon sun, possibly climbing up and down ladders and scaffolding. Still, they all relaxed. It was their fourth meal together, and the group was starting to chat along nicely, which was good, because it meant he didn’t have to do all the work.

  At the far end of the table, the Danish family was a lively source of steady noise and laughter, as always.

  “He’s been pining for French bread all year, you know?” said one girl, to everyone’s amusement, while her father cut thick slices off a sourdough loaf. Frederic, who was French but lived in Denmark with his Danish wife and three perfectly trilingual daughters, was enduring the teasing of his womenfolk with his usual stoical patience and self-deprecating humor. Van had seen enough of the world to know that such men were the real heroes in it. Ella, the mother, was pure Viking stock, blonde, lean, muscular, with clean, clear features. She was quiet and softly ironic, but with a warning glint in her eye that could stop a bloke in his tracks. In a different age she’d have been a shield-maiden and wacked unruly men senseless with an axe, most likely. The eldest girl, Josefine, had her father’s dark coloring and her mother’s Scandinavian height and was so beautiful that Van had immediately resolved not to look at her lest his eyeballs do something stupid. Sofia, the middle daughter, was fairer and rather shy, with a smile full of steel—teeth braces—but she had eyes like gold-flecked woodland shade. She was at that awkward stage between adolescence and adulthood, which could be delightful or excruciating. In her case, delightful. Magic on the verge of happening, though she knew it not. The little one, Maja, was more of an imp than a human child, absurdly witty, articulate, and open. Van hoped Michel would grow to be like that.

  She had thrown Armin in a perfectly hilarious state of confusion earlier, which amused Van very much. Armin himself had missed all the previous communal meals and was still the outsider in the group, and rather silent, and Van pulled him to sit by him, which the boy seemed almost piteously grateful for.

  “What was the stuff in the bottle?” Armin asked as they loaded their dishes from the passing plates, meat for Van, vegetarian for Armin.

  “Elderflower lemonade. Why? What did you think it was?”

  Armin shot Van a sideways glance as Van paused for a moment with his fork poised, grinning.

  “Well, it did look rather funny,” he said.

  “But you still drank it?” Van asked.

  “Well. I thought you didn’t look like a complete asshole, so…” said Armin and glanced at Van again, obviously wondering if he had gone too far, but Van laughed.

  “How are you feeling today?” he asked.

  “Much better, in fact. Perhaps it was the tea,” said Armin with a shy smile, which was absurdly endearing in that carefully guarded and somewhat haggard face.

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  He did seem better, at least as far as his flu was concerned. As for the rest… well, one thing at a time.

  ****

  Armin

  If Armin had thought that treading clay was messy, he now discovered that it was nowhere near as messy as making cobs out of it. He had missed the first round of cob making the day before, so Van gave him a quick remedial course in the basics.

  “Cob is the stuff we build with. Clay and straw. But a cob is a portion of cob made into a ball, more or less”—he demonstrated—“or any shape that is needed at the time you are building.”

  “Cobs of cob? Really? You guys were running out of monosyllables, or what?” asked Armin a little sourly as he tried to pry a double handful of the heavy, sticky, stringy stuff from the tarp where he had been mixing it. Once thoroughly trampled and turned and trampled again, over and over, the mass of clay and straw was as rounded, heavy, and solid as a sleeping pig, and about as cooperative.

  “What can I say,” said Van, mildly enough, “we natural builders are simple folks.”

  There were different kinds of cobs. You’d think a mud pie is a mud pie is a mud pie. But no, there were plain cobs, for building walls. And corbel cobs, which had not been covered yesterday, for building arches and even sculptures. These had more straw in them and were difficult to get to stick together at first so that you had to knead them and prod them and turn them and slap them and coax them into submission.

  There were people who could paint walls, cook complicated sauces, and clean messy rooms without getting a smudge on their white clothes. But Armin was not one of those.

  Within minutes of beginning the gruesome task of making cobs, he had managed to get dirty all the way to his armpits. Van was fairly muddy too, but he seemed quite unconcerned.

  “Making cobs is much the same as kneading bread, you know?” said Van conversationally. “You want to work it well, but not too much. And don’t fight it. Feel it.”

  “Sure,” muttered Armin, who had somehow contrived to lick some clay from his lips and now had grit between his teeth.

  Oh, I’m feeling the stuff all right. He was sure that something had made its muddy way into his Levi’s to places that had never, ever been intended to be involved with the dirty side of sustainable architecture.

  “Oh, Meintje,” said Van, and Armin looked up and saw that the very taciturn black woman he had seen earlier in the day was approaching tentatively, obviously unsure whether to join or not. She was late and looked somewhat unwell. “Everything all right, Meintje?” asked Van, sounding casual but looking sharply at her.

  “Oh yes. I apologize. I just have these moments…”

  “We all do from time to time. No need to apologize,” said Van seriously, and Armin, who had no idea what they were talking about, went on making cobs.

  “Meintje,” said Van, “this is Armin. You remember him of course. He will teach you to make corbel cobs.”

  “I will?” said Armin, shocked.

  “Yep,” said Van, smiling, and he walked off without a backwards glance.

  Meintje and Armin stared at each other like the deer in the proverbial headlights.

  “We-ell, er, um…” he said uncertainly. Then, seeing no way out of it, he took a double handful of clay and plopped it down in front of Meintje.

  “You kinda knead it like this.” He demonstrated every step as he talked. “And then you take the straw … the longer stalks, yes, like that … and put them all straight. It adds longitudinal strength into each cob”—he felt rather proud of his competence while saying this—“so the arch is stronger.”

  And after a few minutes, he and Meintje were working together companionably, stacking a respectable pyramid of neat cobs on the tarp.

  Take two introverts and leave them alone with a pile of mud. Smooth.

  He was beginning to realize that Van’s abrupt introductions and departures were a way to get his pupils to open up, talk to each other, share the learning experience. It was rather fascinating, in fact, once you looked at it this way.

  Later that afternoon Armin did his first bit of actual building, and it was a revelation. Sure, it was a long shot, from the rough lumpy wall they were making to the exquisite and bizarre sculptures that adorned Van’s house. But he began to see a process, to get an inkling of how the raw dirt out of the ground was transfigured into walls, arches, windowsills, dragons.<
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  He immediately felt better when all the dirt and mess in which he had been wallowing for hours suddenly began to become something, a wall that went up from a stone foundation, with slightly tapering faces and over-reaching ends across gaps that would become windows and niches. Each course of cob that was worked onto the wall, he understood, would reach out a bit more and then a bit more, and the two ends of the wall framing each window would eventually meet in the middle in an elegant gothic arch.

  Van could have made him a pencil sketch to explain this or hung a blackboard somewhere, but instead, he just grabbed two handfuls of mud and, in a matter of seconds, sculpted a model of how the arch was built. There was something bewildering and exhilarating in the facility with which the cobber made the clay do things.

  Armin was immediately fascinated with the process, a gradual layering of material not unlike 3D printing, but 3D printing on a monumental scale. He was surprised by the plasticity of the clay, which he still thought of as “dirt” but was beginning to realize was truly also the same stuff from which pots were made and tiles and all manners of fine ceramic parts. Somehow, the wetting and threading and kneading and shaping were making the earth less and less like dirt and more and more like something refined and valuable.

  He was the worthy child of a cynical capitalistic age, and he knew that somewhere down the road, everything, eventually, boiled down to its value, but this thought made him squirm uncomfortably.

  He was also, in fact, intelligent enough to know that capitalism as they knew it was a doomed structure, a self-devouring monster that was bound to take itself and democracy and the environment down to hell in the not-too-distant future.

  The clay had value before we put our work into it, he thought, furiously, as he built. It is the land on which we stand, and if land doesn’t have value, I don’t know what does, but as a material, its value is hard to put a number to. A value that is almost nil in today’s world … and yet…

  And yet, it is now transfigured. How do you compute this in terms of wages, profits, benefits, investments and return? We went from dirt to building straight, no middleman at any point. It’s priceless. In our modern world this is priceless.

  This single realization was so huge that he swayed on his feet for a moment.

  I don’t know if we gave the clay value. That’s reductive and simplistic, and even beside the point. Perhaps what we are giving it is purpose or even… soul?

  How strange. As he worked each cob into the top of the wall—it was not like stacking bricks because each single blob was molded and kneaded into its neighbors so that the wall became one monolithic whole—he suddenly found himself in a strangely contemplative, and even mystical state of mind, not what he had expected to feel while building a house.

  He worked side by side with Meintje for a while, while the young Danish girls carried cobs from the tarps. Meintje had already begun building walls the day before and explained things to him. Then she disappeared for a little while—call of nature, he guessed—and was replaced by an even more taciturn lady he had not talked to before. She was very thin, and tall for a woman, with short, iron-gray hair. She seemed somewhat hesitant in her movements, although once she had a cob on the wall, her hands were exceptionally skillful in working it.

  “Oh, Armin, how’s everything going?” said Van, materializing behind him.

  “Er, fine, I think,” said Armin, who was having fun, despite himself, but was also worried that he was building a massive wall with no other qualification than a few instructions imparted on him by various elderly ladies who had done this work for the first time yesterday.

  “That’s good,” said Van, observing his handiwork for a minute. “Just mind that you build the top of the wall flat and level all the way to the outer face. Don’t let it slope down, or it will be harder to lay on the next course. And watch out that the joint between layers is nice and tight, here, see?” He demonstrated, daubing the face of wall flat and even with almost insulting ease. “And don’t pat it or slap it too much. Don’t fight the clay. Look at Rebekka. She does it very well.”

  He shot them both a smile that lit up his face like a sunburst, and then he disappeared again, and Armin did look at Rebekka and tried to learn from her.

  He was intensely puzzled by the bizarre assortment of people in the workshop. Women, elderly people, and children were not what he imagined as ideal house-builders. Only after a few minutes of awkward silence did he remember that he was, after all, a journalist and was here to write an article about this workshop and perhaps this required him, and entitled him, to be a little bit nosy and ask questions.

  He was not exactly the interviewing sort of journalist. He was the sort that lurked in libraries for days on end and spent too many hours ruining his health and eyesight digging up obscure facts online. So it was with considerable awkwardness that he ventured to ask, “Er… so, why are you here at this building workshop, Rebekka?”

  Rebekka looked somewhat vaguely in his direction and smiled.

  “Not your typical builder, you think?”

  Armin returned the smile. “Well, ahem, no, I don’t suppose so. I hope you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “I don’t. I am not really thinking of building my own house. I have one. But maybe a shed… something sculptural and artistic. I was interested in the idea of cob. The idea of hand-sculpting something as big as a building. I wanted to try. I did some sculpting in art school. Long time ago,” she said, laughing softly.

  “Aha,” said Armin, “I see why you are so good at it.”

  “Ye-es,” she said uncertainly. “But really, I am a photographer, not a sculptor. And I am going blind, a bit at a time.”

  “What?” exclaimed Armin, absolutely shocked, more by the off-hand, casual way she had thrown it into the conversation than by the fact itself.

  “Yep. Age-related macular degeneration. Never smoked in my life, always ate healthy, took long walks. Exercised. No risk factors. Yet here I am. I don’t do too badly. I can still see enough to get about. But photography is becoming rather… hit and miss. More miss than hit, I fear. I thought it’d be interesting to do something wholly different. Something I can do by touch, with my whole body. It does me good. Although this morning I could hardly get out of bed. Everything hurt.” She laughed a little.

  “God, I’m sorry,” said Armin, appalled. “About the photography and all the rest.”

  “I don’t do too badly,” Rebekka repeated, shrugging, smoothing down some clay here, tweaking some straw there. But then she paused a moment. “It’s just that I don’t go out and about much anymore. It’s very isolating. Especially here. I have a house just over the department border, in the Lot. I wanted a quiet life and solitude in the country. Now it’s a bit too quiet, perhaps. That, too, is why I came here. I thought it would be nice to be in company for a while.”

  “Of course,” said Armin automatically. Then he gave it some thought, and despite his own hard-core solitary nature, he added, “Of course it’s nice.”

  Before dinner, Van showed him to a little outbuilding, connected to the west side of the house by a small pergola covered with vines.

  “This is my summer bathroom. You can have it to yourself while you are here. The tap at the sink has only cold water, but at the end of the afternoon, there should be enough hot water for a shower in the cistern, unless it’s very cloudy. I would be really grateful if you could use this soap, please. It’s not as harsh on the soil as other stuff.”

  This was an altogether more courteous request than Armin had expected from Allie’s warnings. The soap in question was a new bar, which smelled very faintly of something herbal, maybe lavender and peppermint. It lay on a small pile of clean folded towels and washing mitts. The room was simple, leather-smooth clay walls and a floor of pebbles set in an informal mosaic. The sink was a large hand-made ceramic bowl sitting on a table or shelf made of oiled hardwood with an irregular edge, the shape of the tree from which the plank had been cut. Everything
was simple and clean and painted gold by the afternoon sun, which came through a glass wall, a roundel of clear bottles set in the clay of the wall. Armin found it was a pleasant place to shower, and the soap left his skin so squeaky clean that it was almost glowing.

  The communal meals were cooked and served from a kitchen near the bottom of the garden, a half-open cob building with a big bread oven in it, clay stoves, and tables in a sort of grass-roofed veranda. There was a choice of very good vegetarian dishes. Meintje and Monica were both vegetarians, like him. Not that the rest of the menu was especially heavy on meat. No great piles of roast chickens, broiled steaks, or pork ribs. It was, in fact, a very healthy menu, full of different seasonal vegetables, carbs—they had, after all, worked hard for many hours—cheese, eggs, with a little meat.

  “You know,” said Monica to Van, who was dishing himself a generous portion of home-made noodles in carbonara sauce, “you can’t go about preaching about ecology if you are not a vegetarian. It’s absolutely contradictory. Meat farming is disastrous for the environment.”

  “Oh aye,” he said levelly. “And so is vegetable farming. All intensive farming is terrible for the land.”

  “But animal farming is much, much worse. You have to admit that.”

  “Well, when the land is used organically, animals are needed on it. The problem is how many and how you feed them and where and how and if you dispose of their waste. I completely agree that the meat consumption in the western world is obscenely excessive. There is no sense to it. But eating seasonal, locally-sourced food is as important to the environment as what you choose to eat. We take exotic ingredients absolutely for granted, forgetting that they are flown in, with great expenditure of energy, from the four far corners of the world. Imagine living on a vegetarian or vegan diet based on what’s seasonally available in the UK. How can people have a locally-sourced, balanced, and moderately enjoyable diet without meat and animal fats in cold and temperate countries?”