thing better, is cursed or blessed with an artist's eye and hands and heart. The korl woman's form is ''muscular, grown coarse with labor"; one of the visitors to the mill, looking at the "bony wrist" and "the strained sinews of the instep," describes her as a "working woman,the very type of her class." The visitors see in her gesturing arms both "the peculiar action of a man dying of thirst" and "the mad, half-despairing gesture of drowning." Finally, the sympathetic narrator of the story, who keeps the carving after Hugh Wolfe's suicide, says that the korl woman has "a wan, woeful face, through which the spirit of the dead korl-cutter looks out, with its thwarted life, its mighty hunger, its unfinished work. Its pale, vague lips seem to tremble with a terrible question. 'Is this the End?' they say,'nothing beyond?no more?" 15
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These are Eva's questions. She asks them not only about her own life and the life of her son, Davy, who was killed in World War II, but also about all those lives wasted by war and by many kinds of starvation. In her delirium, she says: "Tell Sammy's boy, he who flies, tell him to go to Stuttgart and see where Davy has no grave. And what? . . . And what? where millions have no gravessave air." Her most tormenting questions are "when will it end?" and "Man ... we'll destroy ourselves?"
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Whether as Sphinx or korl woman or both, after a lifetime of being bread, Eva has conspired with the circumstances of her life to change herself into stone. This becomes clear if we look at another important passage, shortly after she has refused to hold her newest grandson. She spends the afternoons shut in the closet in her daughter's home, trying to protect herself from her family and their needs. As her mind travels impressionistically from subject to subject, she repeats to herself her grandson Richard's lesson on rocks: "Of stones . . . there are three kinds: earth's fire jetting; rock of layered centuries; crucibled new out of old (igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic). But there was that otherfrozen to black glass, never to transform or hold the fossil memory . . . (let not my seed fall on stone). . . . (stone will perish, but the word remain). And you, David, who with a stone slew, screaming: Lord, take my heart of stone and give me flesh." Shortly before this, Richard had given her two specimens to start her own
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