“Do you see how beautiful all this is?” I traced the edges of the carving with the side of my palm. “Not me.”
“You always talk about how you come from a long line of artists.”
And one of them a sculptor. Though Maman hadn’t carved in years, I still remembered the shards of stone beneath my feet, the magic of watching a face appear in solid stone beneath her chisel.
I wrote to Maman, dutifully. I reminisced, I complained about the food, I quoted bits from her favorite poems. The sort of letters we all sent home. She wrote back cheery notes of her own. This year her roses had lasted long into the fall. Marthe had a new recipe for galette that used very little butter. Oh, and did she tell me about the poor Belgian family she’d taken in?
But to Clare, I couldn’t dissemble like that. The last letter I sent, the day the war began, fear and uncertainty made me write things I’d only ever thought. I didn’t write to her again after that. I didn’t know what to say. These battles, they were changing me from the boy under the chestnut tree to a grim-faced soldier. What was there to write? How could I tell her that the world we thought was so beautiful was rotten to the core?
And so when I sat back in the caves during that week of rest, reading, watching the artists at work, trying not to look at the ceiling, and Chaffre asked, “Will you make one?” all I could say was no. The soldiers who spent one day killing and the next carving altars and figures and spreading trees, they were sorted. They could separate the human and the machine within all of us. I wasn’t there yet.
“Crépet, you think too much.” Chaffre passed me a pair of sardines on the tip of his knife. “It’s much simpler than that.”
I swallowed the oily little fish and washed them down with a swig of sour wine.
“You’ve heard of that Austrian fellow, right?”
“Was he that sniper?”
“Not here, in Vienna.” He waved his hand and narrowly missed impaling me. “The doctor who asks people about their dreams and their childhood and then discovers that the root of all their problems is that they’re in love with their own mothers.”
“I seem to have missed that at school.”
“These poor saps here, we don’t need to ask them their dreams. The chap who carved the regimental insignia, he’s hoping to be remembered a hero. The one who carved la belle Marianne, so noble and stately, well, he’s missing his mother. Note that the one over there”—he pointed to a soldier drawing the curves of a nude woman with lamp black—“misses an altogether different sort of woman.”
“And those who carved the altar?” That altar chipped out at the foot of the stairs, that crucifix carved above and a low kneeler beneath. On rainy days, when the stones of the caves seeped, Jesus wept.
“Those who’ve lost their faith,” Chaffre said softly. “And those who are trying to find it again.”
“Chaffre, what would you carve?” I finally asked.
“Hand me a chisel, and I’m as likely to gouge out my left eye as the stone wall.” He tapped his chin. “My dog, Macquart. Most loyal bastard you’ll ever meet. My mother said he’s been sleeping at the foot of my bed since I left.” He untied the canteen at his waist that held his daily ration of pinard. “Or maybe a decent glass of wine.”
“You wouldn’t know a decent glass of wine if it crawled in bed with you.”
His eyes twinkled above the rim of the canteen as he emptied it.
A lanky soldier, cap pulled low over his eyes, reached over and smacked the canteen from Chaffre’s hands as he walked past. I flinched. It rattled off down the tunnel.
He grit his teeth until the other poilu passed. “Or maybe Joyeuse.” Charlemagne’s legendary sword. “Would I be stronger?”
With bent head, I went to retrieve his canteen. You are, I wanted to say to him. Sometimes I think you’re stronger than me. But I passed it to him with a nudge to the shoulder. “The strongest person I ever knew was a girl. I don’t doubt that she could attack any man who looked at her sideways.”
He looked wistful. “Clare?”
My smile slipped.
“And you?” Candlelight flickered on his face. “What would you carve?”
“Summer,” I simply said. The one summer when the world was perfect. When I seemed right on the edge of the future. The one summer before things began slowly crumbling beneath my feet. “I’d carve summer.”
At first the post office told me that there were no letters. We’d been gone from Laghouat for almost two years. Surely something came in that time. Surely Luc had written. Oily black clouds were rolling in across the city and I begged Grandfather to ask again. To plead.
Finally the postal clerk, an elderly Algerian who probably wanted nothing more than to go home early and take a nap, sighed and shuffled back to wherever they stored years’ worth of uncollected mail. Grandfather patted me on the shoulder. “They’ll be there.” I watched the minutes tick by on my watch, a splendid man’s pocket watch bought from the junk market in Constantine that I wore on a chain around my neck. He patted me on the shoulder again. Outside, the sky rumbled. Grandfather began tapping his acacia walking stick. He didn’t like to be wet. I shook my watch to be sure it was working.
Finally he shouldered his walking stick. “Excusez moi!” he called towards the back. “My good fellow! Allô?”
Date palms shuddered in the lift of wind.
The man finally came back, slowly, a small packet of letters in his hand. Not even enough for a canvas sack. “This is all we have. I spent much time looking.” My watch would agree, but the crumbs of sugar littering his drooping mustache gave him away.
He handed them to Grandfather, but I pounced and thumbed through the meager stack. A few from the University of Glasgow, where he used to lecture, two from Mrs. Pimms, our ancient housekeeper in Perthshire, a half-dozen from friends of his (“Ah, young Toshie wrote?” he cried, seizing on one), and, at the bottom of the stack, one for me from Luc. One. Nearly two years, and only one letter.
The rain started as we left the post office. I held my one letter against my chest and ducked my head against the weather. Was it a dismissal? A disappointment? A hopeful finger-crossing? As we slipped in through our door and shook off our hats, I looked at the postmark. It had been sent four months ago, the day the war began. Spattered with rain, the envelope had transferred its ink onto my blouse.
I waved a hand at my ink-stained chest. “I should go see about…”
“Go.” Too impatient to find a towel, Grandfather was drying his hair with a tablecloth. “I know you want to read your letter without an old man staring at you.”
I fetched him a cotton towel from my little improvised washstand and then shut myself in my room.
The letter inside wasn’t long, scrawled on one side of a thin yellowed page numbered xii in the corner. Luc, the rule-follower, had defaced a book for me. I slid off my stained blouse and sat on the bed in my camisole to read it.
The script was smeared from the rain. It couldn’t be from tears, not with solid, dependable Luc Crépet behind the pen, but his words trembled. He must have written it the very moment war was declared. I don’t have their courage, he wrote. I don’t know how my tale will end. I wanted to reach through the paper, through the four missing months, and take hold of him. I wanted to tell him that I would be fine, that he would be fine, that someday we’d both return to Mille Mots and sit beneath the chestnut tree. Even if it was a lie. I can think of no better standard to carry into war than the memory of your face.
As if I could forget his. A day didn’t go by in those two years that I didn’t think of Luc, of the way he watched me with those owl-brown eyes, the way he always stood near me, close enough to touch, not close enough that I’d have to worry he would. He’d held my hand on four occasions; I could still remember the way my fingers felt in his.
