At the Edge of Summer

“A girlfriend?” I took a step towards him. “You mean one you don’t have to pay for?”

At my advance, he stepped back. “Why is that so hard to believe?”

I moved closer.

He hesitated just for a second, and I swung my shopping bag. It wasn’t full and it wasn’t heavy, but enough to throw him off balance so that I could get a fist in his stomach. Like with Martel, it was a lucky shot. His knife clattered to the ground and his suitcase sprang open. A camera and bundles of photos tumbled out. Gasping for breath, he lunged at the suitcase, not the knife. I grabbed the latter.

“Keep back or I cry ‘Boche.’ ”

He glanced back over his shoulder. The street was quiet, but he kept his distance.

I pulled up a handful of photos, wondering why they kept him here on the street. He could have turned to run the moment I took the knife. Instead he waited.

As I sifted through the handful, I saw. Each one showed Paris in shambles. A city as shattered by war as I was. They were photos of tumbled buildings, of boarded windows, of craters in the street where bombs had fallen. They showed trees, splintered and leafless. They showed mutilés on the corners in ragged uniforms, begging. The photos, they were specific. They were intended to show Paris vulnerable.

“You once loved France.” I flipped through the photos. The buildings destroyed, the citizens depleted, the shops still shuttered. “You betray more than the people in your life.”

He hovered just out of reach. “The war is over, Crépet.” He tried to put a sneer into it.

I’d only seen the city’s wounds here and there as I passed down the streets, but to see them put together in photos, to see Paris looking so crippled and broken still, now, months after the armistice. To see it looking so exposed, it made me furious.

I snapped the suitcase shut. “But the battle’s not.” Though I had the knife in my hand, I swung a fist, the way I should have that night in the cellar. The way I should have years before that, when I stood in the dormitory as he promised that he didn’t know what had happened to Clare. One punch and then another and another and he was doubled over on the street.

But he didn’t stay down long. Bauer had always been faster than me, and he hadn’t spent the last year of the war recovering in a Paris garret. He drove up with his shoulder. I stumbled back, but kept my grip on the knife. He brought up his arms, trying to shake my grip. For a moment I thought he would. He was always more vicious.

But when he struck me, something kicked in. The same instinct that had led me to track him through the dark streets. I knocked his arms away and shifted the knife to my other hand. Bauer lunged again, but I did, too. The blade caught him on the back of the wrist. He didn’t flinch.

“You think you’ll even the score?” He bared his teeth in a grin. “You?”

All of my training came back. My movements were automatic. A year away from the lines didn’t erase the three years in them. He used his fists. I used the knife and my hatred. I drove him back towards the wall along the pavement. This close fighting, the smell of sweat and blood, it was familiar. I swung and my muscles remembered.

On the battlefield, we fought over an uneven landscape. And yet it was a loose cobble that brought Stefan Bauer down on that Paris street. He lifted an arm crisscrossed with cuts.

“My mistake was always trusting the world.” I leaned down over him, knife in hand. “Yours was underestimating it.”

That night I dreamt of redemption.

Luc had found it, it seemed, in his mask, in my arms. He’d gone to fetch me breakfast that morning and, while he was gone, I read his note, worried, and then left. But later I dreamt that he forgave me, that we talked, that he told me we’d cross the world and back hand in hand. I dreamt that we walked to Mille Mots and he kissed me under the poplar. I wondered if things could work.

I went to his apartment, to apologize. But Luc, he wasn’t there.

At his building, the suspicious fish-eyed woman frowned, but let me into his apartment when I mentioned that I was with the Red Cross. “Apologies. When you came the other afternoon, I didn’t realize you were a nurse.”

I didn’t correct her. “There are many people looking after his recovery.”

She turned the key with a grunt.

Nothing had changed from the last time I’d been there. The parrots rattled the cage beneath their cover. The sweater I’d left was still folded on the bed. A flash of relief that he hadn’t just avoided me was quickly replaced by the realization that he’d been gone all day and night. “When did you last see him, Madame Girard?”

“The morning after you brought that mask.” She jiggled the door handle. “I was leaving to take my ungrateful sister a parcel of fish. He left at the same time.”

Something had happened, before he left or before he returned. Something that kept him from his apartment. I paced the room, but nothing was out of place. “Did he say where he was going?”

She shrugged. “Why would he tell me, mademoiselle?”