He shook his head. One hand still hovered near his face, but the other, pressed against his leg, had relaxed. In the room behind me, someone had begun singing.
Through the shadows, nothing but horizon blue and the pale oval of a face. So many of the soldiers who came in had worn their injuries for so long they had the old uniforms, those dark blue tunics and bright
On his left arm, three chevrons bore that up, indicating three years’ service, and on his right, another for each occasion he was wounded. Only one on that arm. Three years faithfully served and then, in return, one injury for him to carry the rest of his days.
“You don’t have to stay, but won’t you please come in? At least for a few moments?” I tightened my shawl, dark and swirling like smoke. I’d traded it for a still-damp watercolor in Algiers. “Warm up with a cup of tea. I can show you my sketches of the other guests we’ve had.”
He cleared his throat. “You sketch?” His eyes shone in the dimness. “Ah, there’s charcoal on your fingertips.”
Something in his voice washed over me, warm like summer. “Spoken like an artist.”
His hand lowered from his face and went behind his back. I wished I could see his fingertips.
“I have an extra drawing pad.” I took a step back. “Stay, please. Stay and sit with me awhile.”
He hesitated for just a moment more. Then he stepped out of the shadows.
He was in a bad way, that was clear. A fragmented shell, maybe. They tore like bread knives. Or a bayonet, swung too near. I was learning to identify what caused each injury. Long scars ran from the side of his jaw upwards. More than scars, though; they sank deep, like the trenches running across the Western Front. The right side of his face was unmarred, but the left, that whole side was a battlefield. I kept my gaze firmly on it, forced myself to look at every ridge, every crater, every shell hole. The map a soldier brought home.
He stood tall, shoulders back, as though daring me to recoil.
But I didn’t. I knew his face was a private hell for him, but I had seen worse cases in the studio. Men missing noses, men without chins, men whose faces sank in on themselves like deflated balloons. One of those poor men sat over at the checkers table right now, waiting for a few final dabs of enamel paint on his false nose. Then he was planning to go home to see his mother for the first time since he was wounded. Though the soldier standing so defiantly in the doorway had it bad, I had seen plenty worse.
So I made sure to look him square in the eye. I made sure to modulate my breathing so he wouldn’t hear an extra hitch in my throat. I made sure he knew that no matter what reactions he met walking down the streets of Paris, he would not find them here. Instead I asked, “How do you take your tea?”
I settled him in at a table and filled a chipped cup. Mrs. Ladd was American and assumed the French thought as much of tea as she did. The few British artists in the studio certainly didn’t mind. While I busied myself with unwrapping my charcoals, sharpening my pencils, squaring up my sketch pad, he took a polite sip. I passed him a pad of his own and then the tea grew cold.
At first he didn’t do much, just stared down at the paper as though he didn’t know what to do with it. I wondered if I was wrong. But then he picked up a pencil and rolled it between his fingers. “These are the pencils my father always used to prefer.”
“They’ve always been my favorites.” I took one of my own.
He started drawing.
I began with the outline of his face. “How long have you been in Paris?” In my few months here, I’d learned how to ask questions carefully. A direct “How long ago were you wounded?” would cause that familiar look of anguish to flash through their eyes.
He still flinched at the words. He saw straight through it. “Nineteen seventeen. Bastille Day.”
A year and a half, though, to him, it probably felt like more. “Have you been in Paris all this time?”
He pulled a cigarette case from his jacket pocket but didn’t open it. “Wouldn’t you be?”
I worked on sketching in the good side of his face. A narrow eye, brown like an almond, with long lashes. My pencil loved drawing those in. Thick curved eyebrows. A high, smooth forehead ending in short curls. A sharply angled cheek with a nick of a scar on top. “A work of art,” I murmured.
“I’m sorry?” He looked up from his drawing.
“Works of art.” I stared down at the lines beneath my pencil. “In Paris.”
He watched me.
As though a mirror were down the center of his face, I began copying the features from one side to the other. “What’s your favorite museum in the city?” I drew the curve of his chin in an unbroken line. “And you’re a liar if you say the Louvre.”
