The soldier with the birthmark led the prisoners to an old trench, partially collapsed, its wood bracings removed. They were each given a blanket and shown where they could sleep.
Leo stretched out on a tarped ledge. Back in the Canadian side his bunk would not be empty. He’d taken great care to dig it into a deep side trench, under an overhang. Someone would have moved in the first night he was gone. Marty’s snug bunk would be occupied too, the silk postcard embroidered with flowers from the French girl he’d met on leave removed from the wall.
“Think they’re going to move us back to prison camps?” Wes, lying next to him, rolled in his thin blanket, whispered.
“Should,” Leo rolled over, pulling his blanket up tight around his ears to keep the rats out.
“I heard they’re keeping prisoners on the front,” Wes said. He blew one bloody nostril and then the next into the floor of the trench, wiped his face with the back of his hand. “Using us like animals.”
Leo had heard those rumours. He grunted, “Get some sleep.”
“Haltet die Klappe!” a guard shouted in the dark above them.
Leo’s bones, his guts, his veins felt heavy, as if filled with the sand he had carried. Maybe Marty was the lucky one.
WES HAD BEEN RIGHT. The men worked in shifts around the clock, digging and sandbagging new trenches, moving guns and lumber. They were roused from sleep by the returning shift, mute with fatigue and marched under guard from the work sites. The guards were mostly older soldiers, men with limps, tremors, or missing fingers. But it was the young guards who spoke in fierce bursts of German and prodded the prisoners into line with their bayonets.
ON THEIR FOURTH DAY, a heavy rain started as they ate their breakfast, bread so woody it left slivers in Leo’s mouth. He spit them out in the mud outside the cook tent.
“That’s it for you, Rid Eers seen that,” the Kiwi whispered in Leo’s ear. A young German corporal, who the prisoners called Red Ears, leaned on a post watching Leo. He couldn’t have been older than nineteen, round-cheeked, with bright red jug ears protruding from under his cap. He spit on Leo’s boots as he walked into the mess tent.
“Rauskommen!” He shouted at the men to come out.
The prisoners picked up their shovels. Red Ears motioned with his bayonet for Leo to take up the end of the line. “Geldsoldaten!” he called, poking at his back hard as they marched. The name they called the Canadians. Money soldiers, mercenaries, who volunteered to fight for another country, for pay.
They marched towards a terrible stench — the latrines, flooded by the recent rains. When they arrived, Red Ears pressed his bayonet harder into Leo’s back, forcing him to walk up to his ankles in the ooze. Blood trickled down his spine. Red Ears laughed, hollered in German, indicating that they should shovel the contents of the latrines into buckets to empty in a nearby hole.
AFTER A FEW DAYS, Leo realized that they weren’t going anywhere. At the cook tent, he forced his nausea down, swallowed the thin soup, and chewed dry biscuits.
At night the men whispered together.
“D’ya reckon they sent the list to the Red Cross?” a Kiwi tunneller, the men called Digger, said. He had the missing front teeth and broken nose of a pugilist. Leo could see the whites of his eyes shining in the dark.
“We’re supposed to go to the pow camps,” Wes hissed.
“Looks like we’re their indefinite guests here,” Leo said, crushing a louse behind his ear, between his fingernails.
“No one knows we’re alive,” Wes said into the dark.
Stripped of their dog tags, they were nameless, unidentifiable. They began memorizing each other’s names and regiments.
Leo lay sleepless, thinking of Marty. Thinking of Clare. Travelling back, spooling out the past. The memories of her were so worn with revisiting over the last two years, he wondered if he hadn’t made most of them up.
He took her hand and they walked past the gazebo to the lake. A breeze caught the lily pads and slipped them around in circles on their stems. They walked on to the farthest corner of the garden, where the new grass grew so tall that their footsteps left impressions, as if walking through fresh snow.
He led her to the back fence and pulled her down into the grass where they lay on their backs completely hidden, as they would do when they were children, before the hay was mowed. He rolled towards her, pushing the dark hair away from her eyes with one hand and running his palm over her breasts and belly. He could feel the heat through the light cloth. She unbuttoned her blouse and he untied the ribbons of her chemise, exposing the miracle of her breasts.
25
A WOMAN STOOD in the centre of the room, one foot on a low wooden milking stool. She wore a sleeveless white tunic, which dropped to her knees. A drapery was thrown over her shoulder and pinned at her waist. In one hand she held a wooden spear, a not very convincing Athena.
“Please take off your glasses, Julia,” Mary said.
“Oh, sorry. I forgot.” The woman handed them to Mary and resumed her pose, with a slightly unfocused look towards the corner of the room.
“Today is a very important day in your training as artists,” Mary said. She was wearing a blue-and-white striped blouse with puffed shoulders, and her usual long grey skirt. Her neat black boots clicked as she stalked the circle of easels. She put her hands on her hips. “You’re beginning to work on the greatest subject of all. The human figure. Start as always with the large shapes, the oval of the head, the square of the torso, the oblongs and ellipses of the limbs.”
Elsie sat with her hands in her lap, turning her ring this way and that. Jane was looking intently at the model, thinking, Clare knew, how she would get down the folds of the drapery. She always worked one step ahead of Mary, leading to frustration for them both.
Mary was relentless with her. “Slow down, Jane. Stop hurrying to the next stage.” Sometimes she would make Jane go back to elementary contour drawings, following the subject’s edge, without looking at the paper, an exercise that Jane hated because the final drawings were never accurate.
Clare, on the other hand, liked the way contour drawing forced her to look at the classical sculpture or the spray of flowers, as if she was caressing it, lingering over its surface. The result didn’t matter. Most importantly, it gave the whole responsibility of the work to the eye. The hand simply followed. At night when she woke and the girl flying from the burning house appeared, she made contour drawings of her. Her sketchbook was full of misshapen dressers, chairs, boots, hanging dresses, even her own face, gazing out at her as if from a funhouse mirror. She drew until the etchings of exhaustion freed her and she fell back to sleep.
ARTHUR LISMER APPEARED at the classroom door.
“Take a break, Julia,” Mary said. The model gratefully shook out the arm that had been holding the spear.
Lismer walked around the room, stopping briefly at each easel, taking in the work and the women. He paused longest at Jane’s drawing.
“This is excellent.” He pointed to her rendering of the drapery.
Clare was sorry she hadn’t spent more time on that part of her drawing. She’d been too absorbed by the model’s head. Somehow, though she’d tried to make her look heroic, she had rather captured her near-sightedness, her impatience for the pose to come to an end so that she could rest. Lismer smiled when he looked at Clare’s drawing. But he said nothing. Instead he turned to her. “How are you feeling?”
Of course he recognized her. He would remember the eye patch.
“Fine. Thank you.”
“Mary told me you were joining us.” He patted her shoulder and walked on.
When he got to the front of the classroom, he pressed his hands together and swept the room with his lively gaze. “It is good to see your hard work here today.” He gathered himself up and looked at each of them in turn, deliberately, dramatically. “Art is the normal and rightful heritage of every individual. If the Victoria School of Art and Design is the means by which art is to reach this
city and the country at large, it must, within these walls, prepare good art teachers.” He leaned forward from his toes. “All children may not be able to learn to draw well, but every child can learn to recognize and appreciate the merit of good pictures. There are very few, perhaps none, who could write plays as Shakespeare wrote, but there are many who can read and enjoy his plays.”
Elsie fidgeted. Jane’s pale eyes were fastened on Lismer.
“We have all come through a dark time,” Lismer swiped the air with his hands, “with the explosion. Many of you will have lost loved ones here or in Europe. Never has art been more important, bringing beauty and order into a dismal world. I intend to start offering Saturday morning classes for children here and I’m counting on you to help me.” He ran his hand over his high forehead. “Meanwhile, it’s important to look at art whenever and wherever you can. Some of you saw the show of Canadian artists loaned from the National Gallery before the explosion. Some of you may know of Lord Beaverbrook’s efforts to fund artists to record the war.”
Mary, who was standing just to the side of Lismer, squared her shoulders and looked off to the back wall of the studio.
Lismer continued, “I myself cannot join the Canadian artists on the front. But many artists in Canada are documenting the war effort here. I hope you will stop by my studio to see the paintings of the waterfront I have been working on. And next week, a show of work by other Canadian war artists will open at the Museum of Fine Art.”
His eyes burned greener. “Work hard, ladies. Part of your war effort must be to keep alive the higher aspirations of civilization.”
Clare stayed to work in the afternoon, drawing another still life, cones in a basket. She was always the last to go. As long as she was drawing, her mind could not play tricks on her. Mary, who was sorting through a portfolio of drawings, looked across the table at Clare’s work. “Now use your pencil shading to emphasize the depth.” She stepped around the table to Clare’s side and once again took her pencil. “How do we show that one thing is in front of another?” She began laying down shadow with cross-hatching on the cone behind. “We emphasis the value difference where they overlap.”
Clare still had trouble perceiving depth. But since she’d started drawing she’d learned to turn her head slightly, to examine the edges of things from different angles. Dimension was falling back into the world.
“If we had more money we’d have fruit and you could all draw like Cezanne,” Mary said.
Clare had heard of Cezanne. She wasn’t sure what his paintings looked like though.
“I met him, you know.” Mary returned to her portfolio. “In Paris. But by that time he was almost a recluse. He wasn’t very interested in talking to anyone.” She flicked through drawings with an arch look.
“Paris?” Clare said. She had imagined Paris, what she and Leo would do there, walk the Seine, stay in a cheap room. She blushed and looked down at her drawing.
“Yes, I spent many years there training and painting.” Mary shut her portfolio and looked out the window. The afternoon light had turned buttery.
“You went to art school in France? How …?” Clare wasn’t sure what she wanted to ask. How did a woman go to art school in France? How did she afford it, how did she get there, where did she live, but mostly how did she even imagine such a thing?
Mary gave Clare a level glance. “I was married very young. To a wealthy older man, someone I wasn’t suited to. He was interested only in his horses.” Mary shuffled through drawings again. “He died early in our marriage, a fall from his favourite Arabian. I had taken a few art classes. Some of the men went off to Europe to study. That is absolutely necessary for the serious artist. I decided I would go too.”
“How brave of you,” Clare said. Mary laid her hands squarely on the table. For the first time Clare noticed the sprinkling of early liver spots, the short fingers and rough cuticles. She was older than she looked.
“Not particularly.” Mary walked to the window. “It would have taken more courage to stay in that little town, with the penniless bachelors circling.” She slammed the window shut and laughed. Then she turned serious. “I was in Europe for twenty years. I only came back because of the war.”
Mary left the room. Clare heard the footsteps of the night school students clattering upstairs.
Mary clicked back into the room, a book under her arm. She looked over Clare’s shoulder at her drawing. “Good work.” She placed the book on the table in front of her. The French Impressionists. “I’ll lend this to you if you promise to bring it back tomorrow.”
Clare opened the book and whispered through the pages with their fragile colour plates. Some of the paintings she recognized, soft pink-cheeked girls, dappled water lily ponds, light-filled skies. At the very end, a blue plate of apples on a wooden table. The apples, rich and warm, slightly misshapen, leaned heavily against each other, as if they were carved from wood.
“Cezanne’s apples,” Mary said. She circled the table and shut the open portfolio of drawings, tying the blue ribbons in a perfect bow.
IT WAS DUSK by the time Clare pushed her shoulder into the front door of the art school, holding the book close to her chest. Evening light was creeping back, though spring still felt far away. The air was cold and smoky, without a hint of bud or resin.
Fred Baker came around the corner, suddenly illuminated by the circle of gaslight. Clare stopped, waiting for him to notice her, but he was walking fast, with his usual slight stoop and his eyes down. He was late for class. He carried a cardboard tube, which she guessed held some of his drawings. Work he must have done at home. Where did he live? She felt an unexplainable twinge of sadness, thinking of him working alone at his table.
“Mr. Baker,” she called.
He stopped abruptly, turned to peer at her. “Oh, Miss Holmes. I’m sorry, I was preoccupied.”
“Clare,” she said.
“Clare,” he answered as if turning it over in his mind. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m taking classes.”
He broke into one of his rare smiles. “I didn’t know you were interested in art.” He stepped a little closer.
“I took some lessons as a girl.”
“And will you take a full training here?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” She held the Impressionist book to her chest. “I needed something … to do.”
For a moment Fred looked as if he wanted to ask her more. Then, “I must go,” he said, looking up at the second storey windows of the art school.
“Goodnight then, Mr. Baker.”
“Fred,” he said. “Perhaps I will see you tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?”
“Celia has asked me to help her practise some Bach.” He looked sheepish. “I’m not sure I can keep up to her. She’s very good. Or maybe next week when the glassworks opens again,” Fred added. “Did you see the notice in the paper this morning?”
In the gathering dark, a man came around the corner towards them. Something about his solid form, his stiff-kneed gait, his farmer’s jacket. Her father! For an instant Clare was pleasantly surprised. In the next instant, dread rushed from her gut to her throat. Why had he come all this way to find her?
“Clare,” he called, trying to control the urgency of his purpose.
“Dad, what is it?” She clutched the book tightly to her chest.
Fred, who had been turning towards the front steps of the art school, turned back, hesitating.
Her father was breathing heavily. “The girl at your rooming house — Geraldine — told me I would find you here.”
Fred looked back and forth between them.
“Fred, this is my father. Dad, a friend from the glassworks, Fred Baker.”
Clare’s father nodded briefly at Fred. “We should go back to the house.” He took Clare’s elbow and began directing her away.
“No. Tell me now. Here,” Clare said.
Her father looked uneasily at Fred, who was standing awkwardly, as i
f not sure what to do.
“I should go,” Fred said, at the same moment Clare’s father said, “It’s Leo.”
Clare’s dread dropped through her like a stone.
“He’s missing,” her father said, his clear blue eyes filling with tears.
26
IT WAS RAINING when Fred left the school. He pulled his hat brim low. His class had been interesting, adapting Egyptian motifs to domestic design. He remembered the wall of an Egyptian mausoleum from his visit to the Prado where the Bosch painting had first come to haunt him. The mausoleum had, in contrast, depicted serene beauty. Fred had stood at eye’s level with scenes of the Nile, water alive with fish and birds, banks lush with vegetation. He had lifted his hand to touch an ibis, carved in shallow relief on the white marble, and a guard had pushed him roughly away. He would work on a lampstand this week, using some of the plant motifs he remembered from that day.
As he climbed the stairs, Mrs. Dempsey swung open her door. The smell of burned potatoes filled the landing. “This came in the mail for you.” She waved an envelope at him. “From overseas.” Her eyes narrowed. “Germany.”
Fred took the letter, turned away slightly, and examined the envelope. Mrs. Dempsey sidled nearer and peered over his shoulder. “Bad news?” she said hopefully.
Lena’s writing. He stuffed it in his coat pocket and continued up to the next floor, away from Mrs. Dempsey’s beady gaze. Lena had written him after she left. It had been the right decision to return to Germany with her parents, she’d said. The war would be over in no time and Germany would be stronger, the future brighter than ever. She hadn’t tried to convince him to join her. She wrote him six months later to say that she was married. In the church at Lauscha, to an officer in the army. She had included a wedding photo. There she was. Seated on a high-backed chair in a white satin dress with puffed sleeves and a high neck. Her fair hair swept up from her face into a high braided bun. In her ears were the pearl earrings he had given her when he was promoted from apprentice to master in Hamilton. The man standing beside her wore a uniform with a double row of gleaming buttons, his clipped moustache waxed at the corners. His name was Felix, she said. They’d met at a dance in Leipzig.
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