I couldn’t go back to being nineteen. The boy who played tennis, sketched in cafés, studied until he couldn’t see straight, that boy who thought he could do it all, he was long gone. Sometime, in the middle of a war, I’d grown up. As I told Maman the day she found me in Paris, I needed to find out who I was.
I crumpled onto my narrow bed and pressed my face into the pillow. My ruined face, that she’d seen, that she’d touched. I flinched at the memory. The last time those fingers had traced my face, they felt boyish cheeks, unkissed lips, eyes waiting for wonder. Now those eyes had seen too much. This face—I buried it further in the pillow, hid it, erased it—had felt too much.
I fell asleep like that, half-formed sobs lost in the cotton and horsehair, as Paris quieted. For the first time in years I didn’t dream in nightmares. I didn’t dream at all. I woke in the sickly gray of dawn, my blanket tangled around my feet. February, but I was bathed in sweat.
My early bedtime, my dreamless sleep, the way the dawn had snuck up on me, I woke renewed and restless. My window was edged in frost. It was cold and overcast, but there was a strange hopefulness around the edges of the day. I stood for a moment at the window, my little finger trailing through the frost.
Part of me wished I hadn’t left the studio when I did. That I’d sat and listened to her talk about Paris with that satisfied little glow. I wanted to ask her about her art, her job, her grandfather, her life. I wanted to catch the eight years I’d missed.
But that other, the part that refused mirrors, refused friendship, refused anything that used to make me happy, that part hesitated. I was older and warier, but so was Clare. I’d watched through her words as she changed over the years. I watched her grow strong and self-sure, not one to forgive. Knowing what I knew about that one night in Paris, the night when Stefan Bauer took her off the train, I understood why. I drew my fingernail down the frosted glass with a scratch.
But, in the window’s reflection, I swore my eyes were a little less dead today. The only thing that had changed, the only thing new, was her.
The parrots were rattling the sides of their cage. I’d forgotten to cover them last night. “I shouldn’t go back,” I said to them, leaning close. “I won’t.” Lysander turned his head and fixed me with a round eye, but Demetrius cackled. I fed them and moved the cage closer to the sunlight coming through the window.
I peeled off my hated uniform, damp and again wrinkled. I splashed my face with ice-cold water from my basin and bent to pour a trickle through my hair. Dripping, I shaved by touch. The last time the concierge had brought me a mirror, I’d hurled it down the incinerator with the rest.
The concierge, she was my mirror. Madame Girard, as round as a boule and just as crusty. She’d poke her head out from her loge on the ground floor when I left the building, always ready with a suspicious look, as though disreputable characters traipsed in and out of her building every day. No, I was the only one. The way her gaze flit away, the way those hard eyes grew harder. I frightened her.
Today, though, she leaned on her doorway a moment longer than usual. “Monsieur.” The word she always managed to infuse with sarcasm. “You’re going out, for a second day in a row?”
Despite herself, the sentence was tinged with surprise. Maybe curiosity.
“And you’ve washed your hair.”
I drew my jacket tighter. “Even Quasimodo took a moment to bathe.”
She grunted. “I’ll take up more water.”
The day was unnaturally bright. Frost glittered between the cobbles. I walked against the edge of the pavement, close to the fences and the garden wall, the collar of my jacket turned up. Without my uniform on, no one paid me much mind. At least it was easier to tell myself that. I could go along, eyes fixed on the pavement, and pretend that no one was staring.
And maybe they weren’t. These days, only months into peace, Parisians had other things to worry about.
The streets ran black and blue, like a fresh bruise. Black for the mourning clothes, blue for the uniforms. Some were the indigo of factory workers, hoping to earn enough to buy an evening’s worth of coal. Some were the tattered horizon blue of soldiers—broken and wretched—begging for coins on the corners. Few children. Though refugees still crowded the city, the children who’d been sent to safety when the Big Bertha started targeting Paris hadn’t returned.
Though I was no better than the vagrant soldiers and refugees, I had the trust left to me by Uncle Jules. It was the thin thread that kept me off the streets. I didn’t use much. Enough to keep me in a miserable apartment where I wouldn’t encounter too many questions, enough to keep the parrots and me fed. Bread and milk and sugar were dear, but I’d never needed much to eat. The most I spent was on art to brighten my walls. To remind me that, somewhere in the world, there was still honest beauty.
I passed through Les Halles, smelling of fresh herbs and meat. The market was nearly deserted. Red-nosed women stood behind overladen tables of cheese or parsnips, while farmers with carts of mushrooms and turnips stamped their feet and burrowed further into their mufflers. At the edge of the market, in wooden sabots and a faded spotted head scarf, the old flower seller caught the sleeve of my jacket. “Flowers for your sweetheart?”
I don’t know what was in her basket in the middle of February—something limp and colorless—but her lips were blue. She was the only person in the city who looked straight at me. I pressed a handful of coins into her hand. “Mademoiselle, you’re my only sweetheart.”
Paris didn’t feel like Paris, not anymore. The city I’d fallen in love with all those years ago, with its flat, green gardens, bright-awninged cafés, galleries, bookstalls, rainbow-windowed churches, was gray and still. The Jardin des Tuileries wasn’t a place to sit by the basin, watching girls in white dresses stroll arm-in-arm. The statues were still sandbagged, the trees bare, and the gardens pockmarked with small shell craters. At the end of the garden, lining the Place de la Concorde, were captured German guns. Even Notre Dame shone sickly yellow through the temporary windows standing in for its great stained glass. Walking through Paris, you couldn’t forget how close war had come to it.
I crossed the Seine, high and green. On the bridge, a woman sang “Auprès de Ma Blonde” and listlessly tapped a tambourine. I gave her the two coins I had left.
The peace conference had begun only weeks ago. Paris had rushed to sweep the dust under the rug before the presidents and prime ministers and ambassadors arrived. I had gone out the day the American president, Wilson, and his wife came. Parisians thronged the streets, waving, shouting, singing. The city put on a cheerful smile for the arriving delegates, with parades and buntings, flags and flowers, but now that the great men were all tucked into their meetings at the Quai d’Orsay, the petals fell and the festoons had begun to droop.
Of their own accord, my feet traced the path to the Café du Champion, my old haunt. Gaspard had long since sold the shop, and the windows of the building were shuttered. On an impulse, I crossed the street and rapped at the door.
After a minute it creaked open. The doughy woman inside startled at me and hastily crossed herself. “Yes?”
“There was a café here once…”
“Yes, but I’ve bought the space now.” She leaned a broom against the open door. “It will be a rag shop.”
“A rag shop? No, no. You see, it was a café.”
“And they’ve closed. The owner has moved away.”
“The owner promised to leave a bottle of cognac behind the counter. The good stuff.”
“There is nothing there. I would’ve noticed a bottle of cognac.”