Read Chapter 4: A Letter from Home

The envelope lay on the floor of her room, half-shoved under the door, its cheap paper already creased from the journey. Claire recognized her mother’s handwriting before she even picked it up—the tight, sloping script that always seemed to be in a hurry to disapprove.

She sat on the edge of her narrow bed and tore it open.

*Ma chérie,*

*I pray this letter finds you well and that you have not forgotten your rosary in the chaos of that city. Your father spoke of the riots on the radio—students throwing stones at the police as if they were savages, not sons of France. I worry every moment that you are in the middle of it. Do not go near the Latin Quarter after dark. Do not go near it at all if you can help it. The Church teaches us to keep away from temptation, and Paris is a garden of it.*

Claire’s eyes moved down the page. Her mother wrote of the garden, of the neighbor’s daughter’s engagement, of the new priest’s homily. Then the familiar ache.

*We received a letter from the army office last week. They say there is still no word from your brother. They say “no word” as if that is a comfort, as if silence after eleven months is something to be patient about. Your father has stopped speaking at dinner. I have started to pray the novena to Saint Anthony again. Philippe is lost, Claire. I feel it in my bones. And you are so far away.*

Claire stopped reading. Her throat closed. She folded the letter with more care than it deserved and pressed it to her chest, as if she could feel the grief through the paper.

Guilt moved through her slow and heavy, like syrup. She had been at Café Procope last night, laughing at something Jean-Luc had said, while her mother wept into her hands over a son who would not come home. She had worn her mother’s silver locket and lost it in a café, left it behind like a piece of the family she no longer wanted to carry.

She reached for the locket on her nightstand. The chain was still snapped, the silver links parted like a tiny wound. She hadn’t been able to fix it. She hadn’t even tried.

That morning, she had gone to see the Romanesque sculptures at the Musée Cluny, and for three hours she had not thought of Philippe once. Not once.

The lecture hall of the Sorbonne was cold, all pale light and high windows that seemed to have been designed to make the present moment feel shabby. Claire slid into a seat in the third row, clutching her notebook like a shield. Students around her talked in clusters, cigarettes burning between fingers, scarves undone.

At the front of the room, Professor Marchand took her place behind the lectern. She was a severe woman in her fifties with gray hair pulled so tightly it seemed to hurt, and she wore a dark suit that belonged to another decade. She did not introduce herself. She simply began.

“Art is not decoration. It is documentation of the human soul at war with its time.” Her voice was flat, impatient. She scanned the room as if she expected to be disappointed. “You are here because you think you love beauty. I am here to teach you that beauty is a lie you tell yourself while the world burns.”

Claire’s pen hovered over the page. This was not the poetry of her provincial art history lessons, where they had discussed the light in Monet’s water lilies.

Professor Marchand continued all the way through the hour without once consulting notes. She spoke of the Impressionists as reactionaries, of the camera as the great democratizer of image, of something she called the “New Vision”—photographers who did not paint the world but forced it to stand still and confess.

“Hausmann, Brandt, Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson,” she said, ticking off names like a prosecutor. “These are not men who take pretty pictures of gardens. They are men who hold up a mirror to the rot of civilization and say, *look.*”

At the end of the hour, she assigned the semester project.

“Choose one photographer working in the New Vision school. Study their work. Write ten pages on how their lens speaks to the moral crisis of our age.” She looked out over the class with something like hate. “If you cannot find their work, you are not trying.”

Claire’s hand shot up before she could stop herself. The professor’s eyes narrowed.

“Yes?”

“Where would we find—where would we start looking for the photographs?”

Professor Marchand stared at her for a long moment. “The galleries on the Left Bank. Or do you intend to ask them to come to you?”

A few students laughed. Claire felt her cheeks flame. But she wrote the names in her notebook and did not look up until the professor had left the room.

After the lecture, Claire drifted through the courtyard of the Sorbonne with the vague intention of returning to her room and finishing the letter she had not been able to read to the end. But her feet took her instead toward the Boulevard Saint-Germain, past the bookshops and cafés, until she stood at the window of a small gallery she had never noticed before.

THE GALLERY DU REGARD, the sign said. A modest storefront, the glass dusty, but the photographs inside caught her eye. Black and white, huge prints hung against whitewashed walls. She stepped closer and saw bodies in motion, flags burning, streets thick with smoke. A series of images from the war.

Not the war in her mother’s letters. The war she felt in her chest every time she looked at her brother’s empty chair.

The door was wedged open with a stone. Claire slipped inside.

The gallery was empty of people but full of ghosts. Photographs hung in single rows along the wall, each one a brutal frame. A young man crouching in the rubble of a street, his face turned away from the camera. A mother holding a child whose eyes had already left her. A shot of a line of men against a wall, hands raised, their faces impossible to read.

Claire stopped in front of the fourth image.

A man was seated on the ground, his hands bound behind his back. His face was swollen almost beyond recognition, one eye entirely shut, blood dried in dark riverbeds from a cut on his scalp. His chest was bare, and across it, burns formed a pattern too deliberate to be accidental. He was looking directly at the camera. The look was not fear. It was something else—an exhausted, undefeated clarity that rooted Claire to the spot.

She could not have said how long she stood there. The photograph held her like a hand on the wrist.

“You always start with the worst ones.”

The voice came from behind her. Claire turned so quickly she felt her neck pull.

Jean-Luc stood in the doorway, a bag slung over one shoulder, cigarette burning between his fingers. He was wearing the same jacket she had seen at Café Procope, the one with the collar turned up, and he looked at her with that half-smile she had not been able to decide if she disliked.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. It came out sharper than she intended.

He shrugged and walked into the gallery, past the walls of photographs, comfortable in the silence. “I took some of these. This is my work.” He gestured vaguely at the room. “Good thing you found my little show. Though I’m told my compositions are ‘too brutal’ for the fashion magazines.”

Claire looked back at the tortured man. The print was signed in the corner—J. Luc.

“That’s yours,” she said. Not a question.

“Yes.” He came to stand beside her, close enough that she could smell the smoke and something else, leather and rain. He looked at the photograph, not at her. “His name was Farid. He was Algerian. He worked with a group of us in the fall. He took a beating that was meant for me.” Jean-Luc’s voice was quiet, almost matter-of-fact. “I owe him a debt I can never repay.”

Claire turned to look at his profile. For once, the playfulness was gone.

“Where is he now?” she asked.

Jean-Luc took a long drag from his cigarette and let the smoke out slowly. When he looked at her, his eyes were darker than she remembered.

“I’m leaving for Algeria tomorrow,” he said. “To find him. Or to find out what happened to him. Either way, I’m going.”