I let myself be drawn into the peace of the château.

—

“Your papa is happy,” she said later, as we walked arm-in-arm through the tangled hopefulness of the rose garden. The two Belgian women sang as they spread damp shirts on the lawn to dry. “Is that strange, to find satisfaction in war?” Children’s shouts drifted from the riverbank.

“He’s doing what he loves. And, besides, they all say that La Section Camouflage is a cushy job.”

She frowned. “Cushy?”

“One of those colonial words that the Tommies use.” I shrugged. “It means easy, soft, comfortable.”

“Easy?” She bristled. “Claude’s work isn’t easy. It’s important.”

“Of course.” I stepped carefully around a fallen bird’s nest. “On the battlefields, men are right out there in the open, for God and the Germans to see straight and clear. There needs to be a way to camouflage that.”

“It’s the perfect job for him.” She tipped her face up to the sun. “Art, innovation, and the discipline of the army.”

It was perfect. So perfect that, at times, I was envious. While I crawled through barbed wire and slept on dirt and loaded my rifle with cold-numbed fingers, Papa was in a well-lit room behind the lines, painting and drawing and designing, all in the name of patriotism.

“Both of you are staying safe, that’s all that matters.” She gave my arm a squeeze. “You’re not so near to the front lines, are you?”

Carefully worded letters gave that impression, I knew. I didn’t intend to be deceptive, at least not at first. But I didn’t want Maman to worry. So I wrote about the food (“not nearly as good as Marthe’s”), the conditions (“rainy, but hoping for a break in the weather”), the uniforms (“finally, they’ve replaced the garance red!”), and the future (“when this is all over, Cairo? You’ve always wanted to see the pyramids”). I didn’t tell her anything that was really happening.

“Not so near,” I lied, glad she wasn’t looking at me. “Really, it’s almost…cushy.”

She nodded with satisfaction. “And have you seen your papa often?”

There were soldiers stretched across half of France. Had she not read a newspaper in eight months? Not once looked at a map? “Maman, no. He’s in a different unit. He’s posted near Nouvons and I’m…” I couldn’t tell her how near to Mille Mots I was. “I’m somewhere else.”

A furrow appeared at the edge of her brow.

“But I hear much about the camoufleurs,” I said in a rush. “And once I even saw a group of them. They’d built a tree stump, all out of metal, but painted to look like bark and smoke and battlefield ruin. They brought it out to our line.”

“A tree stump? I thought they were painting barricades or designing uniforms.” She frowned. “Why would they need a tree stump?”

“A listening post? A sniper perch?” I shrugged. “Nobody tells me. But I saw them with that make-believe stump. They came in the dead of night to spirit it out into No-Man’s-Land.”

“No-Man’s-Land…”

“That’s the space between the trenches. That’s where the fighting is. It’s where the camouflage is needed most.”

She ground to a halt. “Cher Claude, he goes so close to the battles?” Her face had gone gray as smoke. “But isn’t it dangerous?”

Dangerous would be more than tiptoeing out to place a fake tree stump. Dangerous would be going full into the zone between the trenches, weapon drawn, waiting for the shots directed at you. It would be creeping with half an ear on the shells in the sky, half an eye on the guy next to you, half a heart on your mission ahead. It would be leaving behind anything personal, any letters or photos or incriminating addresses, on the chance that you were captured and put everything you loved at risk. Dangerous would be what I did every day out there. “Not at all.”

She suddenly threw her arms around me, an uncharacteristically desperate gesture. I hadn’t told her about the splinters up and down my back, the ones left after a tree had shattered next to me. The nurses didn’t have time to get them all. As Maman’s fingers clutched my neck, I winced. She felt the tension and pulled back.

“Luc?” she asked, searching my face.

Her hand was still on my back, and I bit my tongue. “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a little sore, I suppose. A soldier’s life.”

She twisted me around and peeled back the top of my collar. I didn’t know what it looked like but I knew what she was seeing when she gasped. Against my shirt, my back felt like a porcupine.

“It’s nothing, really,” I said. “Only splinters. I used to get them all the time, remember?”

She took off her glove and felt underneath my collar. Her fingers were cool, like when I was a little boy and came to her, ill, scared, heartbroken. Sitting near, smelling like La Rose Jacqueminot and comfort, those cool fingers stroking my face and arms and back were better than any medicine. There was a lump in my throat and I didn’t know how it got there.

“My boy,” she said. And, at that moment, that’s all I needed.

—

Maman had the copper bathtub brought up to Papa’s studio, where the afternoon light stretched yawning across the room. I couldn’t lay in it, not enough to soak my whole back, so I sat on the floor in front of her chair. She dipped a washcloth into the warm saltwater and held it against my skin until some of the splinters, soft, worked their way to the surface.

“I saw something in your face, you know.” She squeezed the cloth in the basin and brought it again warm against my back. “I’ve always known when you were lying to me.”

“Maman, I’m not. I just—”

“Shhh.”

Water dripped down the curve of my spine. “It’s really not as bad as it seems.”

“Is that what you think?” Her voice was tight. The heat of the washcloth disappeared. “That this seems somehow worse than it is? I’m picking wood out from my baby.”

I’d seen men leave pieces of themselves on the battlefield. All of themselves. I didn’t answer her.

Around me were the shapes of my childhood. The skeletons of easels. Neat stacks of canvases. Moth-eaten armchairs and scroll-armed sofas. A tarnished cauldron. The head of a papier-mâché dragon. The trunks of costumes, the garishly painted swords and helmets, the swirls of silk scarves tied here and there. The props of a theater, in the studio of an artist. I’d grown up within it.

“I come up here more often these days.” Maman dropped the washcloth into the basin with a soft splash and picked up a pair of curved tweezers. “I know that things are dreadful out there. It’s a war, after all.” I bent my head closer to my crossed legs. “But here, safe in the château, surrounded by the beauty of Claude’s art…I can forget.”

For a quiet space of an afternoon, so had I.

“I try,” I finally said. I felt her tweezers against my back. “There’s art, even where I am.”

She paused. “Truly?”

“When we’re en repos, we stay—” I caught myself before I revealed troop movements. “We stay in a rocky area. Some of the men, they carve straight into the rock. The sound of the chisels against the stone, the smell of broken limestone, it all makes me…it makes me feel like I’m home again. Like I’m a boy again sitting beneath the worktable in your studio.”

Behind me, Maman had quieted.

I cleared my throat, embarrassed at my little admission. “There’s some real talent there. Men carving things that could find a place in Monsieur Santi’s gallery or one of the others on the Quai du Voltaire.”

She tapped the tweezers against the side of the basin.

“Insignia, rolls of honor, tapestries in stone. Memories of the things they left behind.” I rubbed at the damp hair at the nape of my neck. “One solider has been working on a wall with an allegory that would impress even Papa. Dancing peasants, toppled towers, swans, laurels, falling moons, Death crowned in crows’ feathers. Every time we are en repos, he adds a little more to the wall.”

“What have you carved?” she asked.

“Nothing.” I tensed as her tweezers found a deep-seated splinter. “I don’t know how to do that. I’m not the sculptor in the family.”