At the Edge of Summer - Jessica Brockmole

“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.

The soldiers guarding the little cellar were hunched over by the door, rain dripping off the brim of their round helmets. One straightened at my approach. The other lit a cigarette.

“What do you want?” he said, tossing his match.

“I’m bringing writing materials to the prisoners.”

The first one tipped back his helmet. “I thought you were busy making great art.”