At the Edge of Summer (20 page)

He nodded. “I was going to suggest the same. Young Clare has an eye.”

Grandfather settled back onto the sofa with his pipe. “She does. You should see her work.”

Mr. Mackintosh lifted an eyebrow. “I shouldn't be surprised. Maud's daughter, of course you'd be drawing.”

“She draws, she paints. She's even sculpted with clay from the banks of the Senegal River. Clare, run and get your portfolio.”

I wanted to tell my grandfather that I was too old to run, that we'd long since passed the stage where he could instruct me, that I didn't even have a portfolio. But the small hopeful part of me that sent Luc the occasional drawing, just to see what his father had to say about it, that part of me went up to my room for the cracked leather case that had traveled Iberia and northern Africa clutched to my chest. That part of me held my breath while waiting for Mr. Mackintosh's pronouncements.

He looked through the stack—charcoal sketches, oil paintings, soft watercolors of the sunrise over the desert—and then spoke directly to Grandfather. “Do you need help with her application?”

“It's a good fit for her.”

“I can see the potential.”

“She's had a little instruction.”

“I can see, but it's raw and fumbling.”

“Still, it's a good fit.”

“Please,” I broke in. “Are they really that bad? What's a good fit?”

Mr. Mackintosh blinked. “The Glasgow School of Art. Your grandfather wishes to enroll you.”

I looked to Grandfather, whose eyes were already evasive. “You mean to be rid of me so that you can leave again.” I reached over the table, gathering up my drawings. “Well, I won't go. Someone needs to take care of you.”

“Clare,” he protested, clapping his hands down on the painting nearest him, a fantasy piece I'd painted of Luc sitting in the curve of a Marrakesh doorway. “I'm not trying to rid myself of you. I'm trying to do what's best for you.”

I tried to tug the paper from under his splayed palms, but it began to tear in the corner.

“Of all the women in my life, given the opportunity of art school, you'll make the most of it. Clare, you're already a traveler. You won't be satisfied until you've seen how far you can go.”

“But Grandfather, I know you, too. I know you'll be back on the trail of one dialect or another the moment I'm in Glasgow. You won't be able to stay alone in this empty house.”

“I'll stay.” He said it, surprised with himself. “Do you hear? I will. As long as you come back to visit, as often as you're able, I'll stay.” He shrugged. “I have to start writing the book eventually, don't I?” He lifted his hand from the painting and let me take it. “The two of us, we've been through French West Africa and back. We've braved crocodiles and malaria and eating nothing but goat for weeks. And now…now it's time for the next adventure.”

“Us explorers, we have to stay together,” I said, taking up my painting of Luc.

O
n Bastille Day a unit of German gunners was taken prisoner. They'd been harrying our line for weeks and were escorted back to Brindeau amid hurled insults. They were lined up on the parade ground—a P.G., for
prisonnier de guerre,
chalked onto their jackets—and then shoved into a crumbling cellar, our makeshift camp prison, until they could be moved. We all hoped the ceiling would come down on them.

They were kept without water or food for the rest of the day. It began raining mid-morning, but only mud seeped through the stones of their prison. The Germans bore it in stoic silence. When I came to the cellar with a petrol can of the same oily-tasting water we all drank, all I was greeted with were sullen stares.

I stood in the doorway, waiting for them to come forward. Better that then stepping down into the cramped, low cellar full of Boche. But they stayed hunched around the edges of the room. No one stood. No one even looked up. Muddy rain dripped from the ceiling.

“Yeah, they don't deserve it.” The guard nudged me with the butt of his Lebel. “Just get down there and then get out.”

I took a deep breath and stepped down the stairs.

I'd been given a can, but no tins for drinking. The prisoners had been stripped of anything apart from the clothes on their backs. I summoned up my long-disused German.
“Wölben Ihren Händen,”
I instructed, sloshing through the mud. A rat skittered out of my way. One of the Boche cupped his palms for a handful of water, but the rest ignored me. They sat with knees up, battered and bruised from the capture, indifferent.

Except one, hatless, filthy, bleeding, who grabbed my ankle as I shuffled past. “Wait,” he croaked in French. He tipped his head up and, through the black eye, the swollen jaw, the mud-gray hair, I knew him. “Crépet,” he said. “Sorry I missed the Olympics.”

I stumbled. “Stefan Bauer?”

He licked chapped lips and nodded.

“Stefan Bauer?” I asked again, unwilling. This hollow-eyed man couldn't be Bauer, couldn't be the glowing, arrogant boy I used to face across the net. Bauer, always so sophisticated and sure. The boy I'd known would never look so defeated. He'd sooner…well, he'd sooner die.

Then I remembered what they'd said when they brought the prisoners in, that the tall one had fought furiously rather than surrender, swearing in French all along. Gaunt as he was, his back was straight. He could be that same boy.

“It's really you?” My mind moved like marmalade. “Here? Now?”

“Aren't we all?” He sank back and rested elbows on his knees. It was a sigh of a movement. “These days, nowhere else to be.”

“You're talkative tonight,
le Flemmard,
” the guard said from outside the cellar.

Bauer stiffened, so I said, “It's me he's calling ‘lazybones.' ” I switched to German. “We said we'd meet in Berlin in 1916. Instead, here we are.” I held up my can of water.

He cupped his hands. “A Frenchman wouldn't have exactly been welcome in Berlin.” Most of the water splashed through his fingers.

I tipped the can back up. “I was busy last year.”

He opened his hands and let the rest of the water soak into his lap. I'd been busy, yes, killing his countrymen. A faded black and white striped ribbon, from an absent Iron Cross, was sewn to the front of his tunic. From his side of the line, he'd been doing the same.

One of the other Boche scowled and said, “Who's this frog-eater you talk to like a friend?”

I started, spilling water down my leg. I hoped the guard outside hadn't heard.

Bauer, though, growled out something that the German master at school hadn't taught us, something that earned him a glare and a muttered oath in return.

I backed up, towards the doorway. The water can banged at my shins.

“Wait.” Bauer scrambled to his feet. “A familiar face I never thought I'd see. Crépet, will you come back?” This time he spoke in English, the third language we shared, the one that neither the guard outside or the prisoners inside knew. “We can talk about old times.” His English was better than I remembered.

I shifted the can to my other hand. “I shouldn't. I can't.” Out in the sunset, the rain slowed. “I…I don't have a reason to come back.”

“A letter.” His eyes were earnest, bright. “You can bring me paper and ink.” He nodded, suddenly looking as boyish as he did when I last saw him, five years before. “I want to write a letter to my mama. Do you remember how often I'd write to her?”

I did. “Every week.”

“I always told her what our score was. What was it at that last match?”

“I don't remember,” I lied.

“I was winning, wasn't I?”

It was 299-299. “We were tied.”

“Crépet, won't you say you'll come back?”

I couldn't. Without a goodbye, I left into the drizzly sunset.

Chaffre was in the caves, sleeping. I tiptoed around him, but he woke, the way he always did when I was near. “Is it mess time already?” he asked with a yawn.

“No.” I realized I was still holding the water can, and set it down with a slosh. “I don't know.”

“I wouldn't want to miss a mouthful of cold soup.” He stretched out first one arm, then the other.

“Stop complaining.” I took off my cap and tossed it in the direction of my pack. “Some don't have anything to eat tonight.”

“I know that.” Chaffre nudged me. “Has it been too long of a week for a joke?”

“I'm sorry.” I ran a hand through my hair. “Don't mind me. Yes.”

“Now you're getting this all dirty.” He yawned again and picked up my dropped cap. As though it could get any dirtier. “I'll shake it out. It's wet.” He was fussing again. He did that when he was worried.

“Stop that. Everything's wet and dirty.”

“You should've worn your helmet anyway.”

“I forgot.”

“They look like brutes, didn't they?” He brushed at the hat. “Remember the helmet next time.”

I took the damp cap back. “You worry more than my mother.” I pulled a punch on his arm. “I'm fine.”

He ducked his head. “I know.”

I wrung the cap out. I knew it wouldn't dry. “Can I ask you about something?”

He nodded, but bent to fiddle with his bootlaces.

Just as steadfastly, I refused to meet his eyes. “Someone you haven't talked to for a long time should sound different, right? Even when you haven't heard from them in years?” I set the cap on top of my pack, smoothed it out. “But when they don't, even though they should, and when you want to listen to them, even though your very insides shout out that things have changed and you've drifted too far apart…Chaffre, what then? Do you move on? Or do you remember your years of friendship?”

He stood. “Is that it?” The edges of his eyes relaxed. “And here I thought there was something really worrying you.”

I shifted. “And this isn't?”

“For years I've been hearing nothing but ‘Clare in the deepest reaches of Africa.' ” He said it almost wistfully. “She writes, finally, and you're upset?”

“No, it's…”

“You knew Clare so long ago, back when things were…quiet. Does it remind you of then?”

Though he had the wrong person, he had the right idea. Yes. This Stefan Bauer—battered and beaten, yet not defeated—I recognized. We'd meet on the courts, playing through rain and exhaustion, ignoring our books for just one more match. Refusing to give up. So like Clare, focusing on her art. She set off to capture the world with her pencil, to soak in as much life as she could. Seeing Bauer again, hearing Clare's name, I was reminded of a time when everything was easier. I was reminded of a time when I didn't think I could stumble. “You're right,” I said.

“Ah,” he sighed. “Those happier days.”

They weren't all happy. I thought of the months between commissions, when Marthe tried to make the soup stretch and the wind blew through the cracked window in my bedroom. Clare, arriving at Mille Mots alone, hiding her mourning. Searching for a mother who didn't want to be found. That one night she spent in Paris, the night she refused to talk about. Maybe not all happy, but they had to be better than this.

For a brief instant I felt alive. A surge—furious, frustrated, futile—ran through me. “We can't go back, can we?”

He shook his head, a distant look in his eyes. I wondered what he was remembering. “What did you once call it? Summer.” He gave an almost wistful smile. “But we can do our best not to forget it.” It was his turn to chuck me in the arm before he left.

For the first time, I borrowed a piece of charcoal and began sketching on the wall. I had to stop a dozen times and smudge out errant lines, but I drew. In those curves and whorls on the limestone, I found my way back to myself.

Summer, Chaffre said. For me, it was Clare who I thought of when I heard the word. That summer, our summer, the last time the world had felt completely and perfectly right. Though it was July now, it felt a thousand miles and a thousand years from then.

For a little while I was able to forget the noise aboveground. The ruin and the cries and the death on the distant lines. The slumped exhaustion down here in the caves. I didn't want to think about my friend, who I never thought I'd see again, up in that cramped husk of a prison just because he'd been on the opposite side of the battlefield. I didn't want to think about my comrades—who I'd bedded down next to, eaten cold soup with, marched, weary, alongside—who had fallen beneath that friend's gun. I drew furiously and forgot.

Chaffre returned with a tin of soup, gray and oily, but I wiped charcoal-black fingers on my trousers and kept my eyes fixed on the wall.

Behind me he quietly watched. His spoon scraped in his tin. “This is something,” he finally said. “I didn't know you could draw like that.”

I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. “Neither did I.”

He was silent for another space. “What's really eating you, then?” He moved around to my side, close to the charcoal-streaked square of wall. “What's bad enough to get you to draw, after all this time?”

All of this, I wanted to say. All of this destruction, this suspicion, this fighting for nothing we could see and even understand. But, “I'll tell you tomorrow,” was what I said.

He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “I hate it, too.”

When he left, I dug deep within my pack for Maman's roll of chisels and rasps. The metal was as cold as the bayonet hanging at my side, but each nick along its length was familiar. I remembered afternoons of watching Maman at her stone, singing as she hammered. The tools were battered, but lovingly so, from everything that took shape beneath her fingertips. The bayonet destroyed, but the chisel in my hands, it created.

And so I stood in the caves that echoed with song and laughter and restless horses, eyes stinging with the smoke from oil lamps, and took a chisel to my sketch. I carved the limestone walls and tried to pretend that I hadn't changed like Bauer had. I wanted to still be the boy who'd sketched in Maman's rose garden, the same boy who'd been afraid of caves and dragons and kisses under poplar trees. I swung the hammer harder, drove the chisel deeper, knowing that I wasn't that boy. I knew I'd become the same thing that Bauer had. I couldn't turn back.

I tucked the chisel into my belt, right next to my bayonet. From my pack, I took a stub of a pencil and the copy of
Tales of Passed Times
that I had bought for Clare all those years ago. Inside were my few sheets of paper, the ones I used to write falsely cheerful notes to Maman. I put on my wool cap, still damp, and left the caves.

The drizzle from earlier had settled into a sweating downpour. I couldn't tell how late it was; I'd lost hours in front of that wall of limestone. I tucked the book into my greatcoat and wound my way through the oily dark.