Luc

Laghouat, Algeria

31 March 1913

Luc,

We’ve only just arrived in Laghouat, but we may be moving yet again. The dialect Grandfather has been chasing, sniffing out scraps here and there, he thinks he’s found it. But we have to trek to the Senegal River. He was ready to set off with nothing but the phonograph strapped to his back, but I’ve told him we can’t leave right away. We need to be sure we have a stock of ink, paper, rice, dried beans, tea, chlorine, quinine tablets. We need to set up for our mail to be collected. We’ll be out of contact for however long it takes to track down a dialect. This is more than packing up to move to yet another city. This is an expedition. But we can manage.

But you, Luc, can you? You let Stefan Bauer trick you again and again. And you still think he is to be trusted? I could have told you two years ago that he wasn’t. If I didn’t think you’d have figured it out by now, if I didn’t want to let the past be the past, I would have.

I won’t let anyone trick me, not anymore. Not the fruit sellers, not the paper merchants, not the beggars in front of the Parish House. And not Stefan Bauer. I’ve spent these past years wandering Iberia and Africa, learning to navigate foreign streets, learning to manage our odd little household, learning to think for myself. Learning not to be as starry-eyed and unquestioning as I once was. I direct my own life and I can do it alone. I’ve grown too much to let someone else, for even a moment, feel they can outsmart me.

But it’s part of growing older, this deciding for ourselves. This deciding who we can trust and who we cannot. The day you led me to that stool in the kitchen and asked if I could trust you, I knew I could. You didn’t push, you didn’t intrude, you didn’t offer yourself uninvited. But what you gave, in those spoonfuls and bites of friendship, was perfect. They told me that, in my grief and loneliness, here was someone I needed. Here, surprisingly, was something I wanted.

But when you continue to put your trust in people like Stefan Bauer, it makes me wonder if I was wrong. I thought you knew more of the world than that. I thought you were clever enough to see when someone wasn’t really a friend.

Clare

Rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, Paris

Dimanche, le 4 mai 1913

Dear Clare,

I don’t know what I’ve said wrong.

Bauer, he’s always been tricky on the court. He’s always taken this game far more seriously than I have. It’s friendly competition. Fierce across the net, yet amiable across the café table afterwards. I don’t know if I’d count him a friend, but a friendly acquaintance? Someone I can trust? He’s given no reason for me to think otherwise.

But you, Clare, I’d trust you to the Amazon and back. I’d trust you across the Sahara, through the Himalayas, from here to Algeria. I’ve spent all these years writing to you, confessing to you, sharing with you pieces of myself that I’d never before shared. And now to have you write to me like none of that matters? I don’t know what to think.

And with you leaving, maybe I won’t ever know. Maybe you won’t write back. Of course I’ll still be here, worrying, waiting, wishing that I hadn’t shaken your trust like that. What else can I do?

I don’t know what I’ll do without you waiting at the other end of my letters. Is that too sentimental of me? Before I met you, the world was an uncertain, daunting place. But now, a letter from you brings me back to that summer. I read your words and I can hear the Aisne and the cicadas in each one. Like neither of us ever left Mille Mots. I don’t understand it, but seeing a sand-dusted envelope from you, and I suddenly feel as invincible as we did then.

So, if you don’t mind, I’ll keep writing to you. When you return from the depths of Africa, my letters will be waiting for you. And, as always, Clare, my thoughts.

Luc

I should have guessed that the army would be like boarding school all over again. The rows of narrow beds. The tall boys swaggering around the courtyard, looking for someone else to do their dirty work. The uniforms. The pranks. The occasional opportunities to stand in a line, shivering, in only your underwear and socks. The “Yes, sirs” and “No, sirs” and “Thank you for setting me straight, sirs.” It was as though those university years in Paris, pretending to be a grown-up, had never happened.

I had high hopes when I arrived. Watching all of the other conscripts milling around outside the barracks, looking so serious with their jackets and suitcases, I told myself times had changed. We weren’t twelve years old anymore. We were soldiers. Well nearly, anyhow.

Soldiers we may have looked after being given our uniforms—as ill-fitting as the getups might have been—soldiers we may have looked after all lining up along the foot of our beds for evening call—exhausted, bewildered, but upright—yet there was still a touch of twelve-year-old boy there. The second-years, seasoned and nudging, had warned us that in order to make it between the tightly tucked sheets of our beds, we had to do it in one smooth motion of a dive over the headboard. I gamely tried, to find that my bed had been apple-pied. My optimistically impressive dive turned into an ungraceful tumble to the floor with my whole person tangled in my bedclothes. The rest watched me carefully and dismantled their beds before climbing in. Me, I had to remake the bed to army standards, in the dark, and went to sleep in a glower.

The next day wasn’t any better. From six-thirty in the morning until eight at night, we were busy with drills and marches and gymnastic exercises in the courtyard, but mostly with lectures. In rows of desks, like unruly schoolboys, we were treated to what was promised to be the first of many lectures on the history of the French army, from Charles VII onward. We had lectures on “The Moral Duty of a Citizen” and on “The Evils of Disobedience.” Only two hours within all of that to eat—soup at midday; Papa would be pleased—and then two hours between the last drill and “Lights out.” I fell asleep with my boots on, only to be awoken with a crash, upside down, pinned between my bed frame and the center partition of the room. A long rope wrapped around the frame, mattress, and my poor feet, then tossed up over the partition, was to thank for this. “Sending you heavenward, recruit,” they told me between laughs. By the end of the day I didn’t feel any more soldierly, but I did feel more inclined to bayonet someone.

I found solace in the camp canteen, where for a few sous I could get a glass of passable brandy. The canteen was packed shoulder-to-shoulder and reeked of burnt garlic, spilled wine, and cut-rate tobacco, but the drinks were cheap and plentiful. I found a corner to wedge myself in and think about Paris and the countryside. About Clare and the months that had gone by without a letter. About anything but the roomful of men and coarse jokes and whatever it was that I was stepping in on the canteen floor. I already knew the next few years were going to crawl.

The quiet in my little corner, however, was short-lived. Very short-lived. A sip in, a bright-eyed fellow in a too-big tunic squeezed himself onto the bench next to me. His hair was the color of butter and in sore need of a trim. He waved over a glass of brandy for himself and, raising the grimy glass, said, “Merci.”

I looked around, but he was grinning at me. “For what?”

He slipped his kepi off and pushed hair from his eyes. “For buying me a drink.”

He nodded to the waiter, who was waiting with hand outstretched.

“It’s the height of bad manners to drink alone. Faire Suisse, they say. You buy me a drink in punishment.” He took a slurping gulp. “Shall I order another?”

Grumbling, I dug for a few more coins. “Nice to meet you.”

He reached around his glass to extend a hand. “Michel Chaffre. I have the bed next to yours, remember?”

I couldn’t tell him what color my blanket was, much less who slept next to me.

Chaffre took another noisy slurp of the brandy. He wasn’t one to talk about manners. “You look like a fellow who likes to be left to himself.”

“Yes, please.” I pointedly took a book out from where it was tucked in my jacket.

He laughed. “You don’t think anyone will let you read that here. Are you trying to get a pounding?”

“Who said I was reading?” I extracted a square of stationery and smoothed it on top.

“Writing in a café? How very Proust.”

“This is hardly a café.”

Chaffre wrinkled his nose. “Smells like one.”

“What sort of cafés do you eat in?”

“Ones that make this place look like Fouquet’s.”

I fished around my pocket for my gold pen. Chaffre whistled when he saw it.

“Looks like I picked the right chap. With a pen like that, you can afford better cafés. I hear the officers’ canteen has brandy that costs three sous.”

“And yet here I am.”

He hitched up the sleeves of his jacket. “You’re really going to write a letter in this slophole?”

“Some of us like to remind our mothers we’re still alive.”

“ ‘Dear Clare’? What an odd way to address one’s maman.”