At the Edge of Summer

On 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.

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.”

“Chaffre, what are you doing here?” I asked.

“Guess.” He looked unhappy. He’d pulled guard duty with Martel, the brute who’d hated him since our training days. “Did you eat that soup?”

“I forgot.”

“You also forgot your helmet again.”

I shrugged. “I could use a bath.”

Martel snorted. “Is he your maman, Crépet? Or maybe your girlfriend?”

“Fuck off,” I said, but my face burned. Chaffre never did his fussing in front of others.

“I dunno. You’ve always jumped to defend him.” He took his cigarette out and spit. “Like some damsel-in-distress.”

I started for him, but Chaffre stepped between us. “It’s nothing.” In the moonlight his eyes were pleading.

I stopped, but Martel chuckled and strolled away for a piss.

Chaffre lifted his helmet and wiped his brow. “He’s a bastard.”

“He is. But, hey, don’t rag on me all the time.” I regretted it the moment I said it.

His eyes flickered. “I’m looking out for you. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing out here?”

I forced a smile. “Sure.”

Something clattered onto the ground and I bent to pick it up. Chaffre’s little lead Madonna, the one he carried everywhere. For him to be holding it, out here in the rain, to be worrying and praying, something must still be nagging at him.

“It’ll feel like summer again someday,” I said, and held it out.

He pushed the little figure into his pocket. “Someday.” He shifted his rifle. “So what are you doing here? If I were you, I would be sleeping instead.”

“Delivering writing materials to the prisoners.” I kept my book covered with my hand. “I have orders.”

I didn’t tell him that the orders were nothing more than a plea from an old friend. I couldn’t explain, not even to Chaffre.

“Your own paper? You’re wasting it on them?”

I hated lying to him. “Yeah,” I said, glad it was dark.

He hesitated. Rain pinged off his helmet. “Okay, but make it quick. I think they’re asleep.”

They were, but it was a wary doze that ended when I opened the door and let in a sweep of windy rain down the cellar steps. I couldn’t see more than the splash of moonlight let me, but one of the figures got heavily to his feet. “Crépet, you came back.”

I picked my way down the steps. “For a minute. I brought what you asked.” I fumbled for the book inside my greatcoat. “I can’t stay. I shouldn’t even be here.”

His reply was in English, low and guarded, almost private. “Thank you for helping me.”

Gratitude, I didn’t expect. Not from Bauer. Not now. He’d never thanked anyone in all the years I knew him. I dropped the pencil. “It’s nothing.”

He moved closer, just a little bit. I couldn’t see more than a shadow of his face. “It’s more than you know.” His eyes glittered in the dark.

I bent and felt along the floor. Rain beat against the stairs from the open door. Outside, Chaffre paced, sending his shadow across the floor. Bauer stepped nearer. I wished I hadn’t come.

“Do you remember some of the tricks we’d pull on the court?” he asked, squatting by me.

I edged back. This sudden nearness, this gratitude, this nostalgic remember-when. “You were always much more serious about the game than I was.” From outside, Chaffre cleared his throat loudly. “You always wanted to win.” My fingers connected with the pencil and I straightened.

Bauer stood, and as he did, the others did, too. I took a step back, my heels against the stairs, realizing that I’d dropped the pencil again.

“It’s really not so different these days, is it?” he said. “We all want to win.” He clapped a hand on my left shoulder.

“The game ended long ago.” I twisted my body away from his hand.

But I’d forgotten about Bauer’s drop shot. I’d forgotten that he always knew how to set me up to lose.

Clare had told me not to trust him. I wished I had listened.

When he put his hand on my shoulder and I twisted away, I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t realize I’d left my hip open. Bauer lunged and metal grated. He swung up with my bayonet in his fist.

I swerved, I tried. I didn’t move as fast as he did. That same forehand that won him 299 games caught me full across the left side of my face.

The bayonet was long, edged to the hilt, with a curved quillon. He held it thrust-down when he swung, the way he’d pulled it from the scabbard. The quillon slammed into my nose, snapping my head to the side. The blade hissed cold through my cheek.

I caught myself against the wall, against slime-slick rocks.

“You’ve never understood ‘enemy,’ Crépet,” Bauer said, leaning in close. “You have always trusted too much.”

Behind me the others had moved in to block my exit. My head spun but I pushed myself off the wall.

“The little fräulein, she trusted me, too.” His eyes gleamed in the dim. “Someone had to show her Paris.”

I could still see Clare hunched in that doorway without her hat. “You…” Dizzy, I pulled the chisel from my belt and lunged at him. He ducked easily. With the bayonet still in hand, he backhanded. Like a wire through clay, the blade sliced through my shoulder until it jarred against bone. The chisel clattered away.

“Three hundred,” he whispered. He shoved me off the bayonet, against the wall. My head cracked against the wet stones as I fell, and I saw stars. He leaned down close. “I win.”

I tried to push myself up, to call out a warning to Chaffre, but Bauer squared an almost offhand kick at my mouth. Hobnails tore into my already-cut cheek and I swallowed the cry.

The others waiting by the door parted and let him up the stairs. Someone bent for the chisel, someone else for the pencil. Moonlight skittered across the floor as they followed him up.

I pushed myself up with my left arm, coughing blood. Outside, shadows jerked.

“Luc!” I thought I heard, but the sound was pulled away into the wind.

Something fell through the doorway and down the stairs, something heavy with a round helmet that clattered away. The door slammed shut, throwing the cellar into a thick darkness, but I was already pulling myself up the rocks to my knees, already crawling over.

“Who is it?” I whispered, but got no response. I felt shoes, legs, a long French greatcoat soaked with a night’s guard duty in the rain. Buttons straight and neat. Wool sticky and warm, but beneath, faintly, the rise and fall of a chest. “Oh, please. Chaffre.”

I pushed down, feeling ribs, hot blood, and a jagged tear. It was nothing, was it? Such a small hole. I could hold all the blood in. I stretched my hands over the wound and tried to swallow down any doubts. All he’d wanted was to be strong enough for all of this. I’d hold him together if I had to.

But his hands scrabbled at mine, pulled my fingers up and away. He brought them to his lips. Against the back of my hand, I felt rasping breaths and an exhaled, “Go.”

“I’m not leaving,” I said, though my jaw ached to move. From his pocket, I took the little lead Madonna. “Here.” I tucked the figure into the hand that held mine.

“Luc.” He inhaled raggedly, then gave a cough. Like a breath, his lips brushed my knuckles. His grip loosened. When I pulled my hand away, it held the lead statue.

I don’t know how long it took to crawl up the stairs, how much strength it took to push that door open, how far I staggered before I found Martel, coming out of the woods buttoning his fly.

“Jesus, Crépet.” He caught me as I stumbled.

“Chaffre,” I tried to say. “In the cellar.” But the words were as shattered as my jaw.

He stared. “Is all that blood yours?”

“They got away,” I managed to say before sliding into blackness.