“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.
As far as Glasgow was from the war, I saw both ends of it every day. Buchanan Street and Queen Street stations teemed with raw soldiers from all corners of Scotland, scrubbed and hopeful. Glasgow Central brought them back, worn, weary, wary. There were whispers that some of the trains unloaded their cargo far from the center of the city, where no one would be disturbed by the sight of gurneys and bandages. Scotland’s brave soldiers could appear nothing less.
Mostly, though, the streets were full of women. Brisk, serious nurses, ruddy shipbuilders and munitions workers, black-draped widows, the occasional Belgian or French refugee. Every day I passed by St. Aloysius’ Church, full of women and their quiet contemplation. Though I wasn’t Catholic, sometimes I joined them.
I was so far from the war, yet I felt so near to it with each person I passed in the street, with each troop train waiting at the station, with each pasted newspaper headline, with each kilted soldier, desperate couple, handkerchief pressed to eyes. The breathless, headlong rush of war, brought straight to Scotland.
I kept that smudged map in my pocket, the one I’d torn from the newspaper in Saint-Louis. I kept it to remind myself that the war was just as close for me. Somewhere in France was a soldier I still thought of.
—
I never knew independence could feel so lonely.
In Glasgow, I didn’t have sand or sunshine or the smells of coffee and spices. I didn’t have blue skies stretching upwards forever. I didn’t have companionable quiet at the supper table. I didn’t have Grandfather.
I did have a narrow bed in a rooming house, a crooked desk too far away from the window, a gas ring that never completely warmed my kettle. The other female students, those fresh from under their fathers’ thumbs, rejoiced. “A tiny flat?” they’d exclaim to one another. “But it’s my tiny flat.” The only thing that made it mine was the wooden mask hanging on the wall, the one I’d brought back from Mauritania. I’d been to Africa and back. The other women had only made it as far as Glasgow. Listening at the edges of these conversations, I felt lonelier for not understanding.
My first day at the School of Art, I was bewildered. The clean, echoing halls, the well-ordered studios, the big, bright rooms and their high ceilings. I’d been used to painting in the souks of North Africa, strapping an easel onto the back of my bicycle and mixing pigments in the jostle of the crowd as the colors presented themselves. I’d brushed sand from my canvas and picked blown grass from the paint on my makeshift palette. I’d crouched on the banks of the Senegal River, sculpting brown clay. Now, I held my leather case to my chest as I made my way through the pillared front hall of the school, wondering how art could be created in such a sterile place. I wondered how I’d ever find the warmth and color and life that I had on my travels.
I thought I could find it in the students. Young women flocked the halls in excited, chattering bunches, exhilarated at being on their own, at being here, at walking the halls of artists. Some were so young. Their dresses high-necked, their hair braided down their backs, they couldn’t have been long out of the schoolroom. I could scarcely keep up with their nattering. I followed them, soaking in their radiance, wishing I’d had even one girlfriend in my life to know how it was done. Once in the basement corridor, a girl turned to me, mistaking me for someone in her group, and asked whether I agreed that the Artists Football Club was smashing. By the time I accidentally responded in French, she had already moved on down the hallway.
I was no better with the male students. All I’d had for comparison was Luc. Well, Luc and my grandfather. Both quiet, introspective, absorbed. I didn’t find that here. The few male students left in Glasgow were boys—restless, impatient boys. They always kept half a watch out for the news, waiting to see if they’d be called for their turn. I couldn’t blame them, I suppose. With nearly everyone else over the age of eighteen in the army, they wanted to be next. The older students were those turned down at the recruitment bureau, and they kept their heads down, hiding a weak heart or spirit. I couldn’t talk to them, any of them, not when they made me think of someone else, someone who hadn’t escaped the army.