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As much as he can given such close quarters, Augustin has made himself a hermit. He does what he’s meant to do when he’s meant to do it but other than that he operates poorly as a man. No one’s heard a word from him in anything other than French since he explained what had gone on and why he was the only one of his lads who came back out of the ones who had gone. It had been Stirling who spoke to him and who continues to toss him the odd quiet “Ça va?” on the occasions Augustin sees fit to make the motions of personhood again. They’ve all lost people and even important ones. It’s pointless to run down the list of who lost who when there’s a war on; every man feels that theirs was the one unsurvivable thing, that his fellows can’t possibly feel what he feels and live through feeling it, and in a way every man is right.
Augustin dresses, eats, lays down for bed and even sleeps. He washes when the opportunity presents itself. The hunger for jollies that sets a grieving man apart has passed him over. He does not go for his own extracurricular jaunts in the dead of night to hunt down fascists, nor does he gun them down with any extra voracity now that they have killed every other man from his merry band. Instead he performs the SAS’ mission to the letter: Go. Kill. Return. Go again.
He has not turned up for breakfast today. Paddy finds him in some dark corner where he has availed himself of a chair and his canteen, which sits beside his boot. His body is curled into a long thin C with his back bent and his elbows on his knees with his head bowed between them as if he anticipates losing his dinner.
Paddy approaches him and says to him, “Stirling requests that I tell you that either you may accompany us tonight or you may go on missing your breakfast, but you may not do both.” Stirling has made no such ruling. He handles others’ grief poorly. So does Paddy, but at least he knows what makes men tick.
There comes a mumbled French response.
“N’est fucking pas,” says Paddy. “I will not be your handler but should it come to it I will drag you out by the leash.”
For a long time he hears nothing else, only the voices of soldiers having their morning bacchanale out in the mess and the more immediate hush of Augustin’s breathing. A thin column of light cuts through the doorway, casts Paddy’s shadow over Augustin’s shoulders so the sun can’t reach him. Then there comes a quiet click.
“You have a gun,” Paddy observes.
Augustin tells him that yes, he does. It hangs from his hand like he’s never held one before. His fingers alternate between gripping it with purpose and letting it relax from his palm. He doesn’t raise it to aim it at Paddy or at himself but the way his grasp tenses in turns is concerning all on its own. It’s directionless. No one should hold a gun without direction, either at the enemy or at himself. If it were any other man in the room with Augustin right now he would probably tell him to put it down.
“This old game, then,” says Paddy.
Augustin says nothing, not even that Paddy’s a hypocrite.
“Shall I tell Stirling that we will expect one man fewer this evening? Likely he may give Fraser your squad if he does not see fit to postpone the whole thing entirely. If nothing else we will get another period of mourning out of it which we may spend watching the slow creep of fascism advance inch by inch.”
“Then I will go into the desert,” Augustin says at last in English. “How did you find it? When you went. I heard from Stirling that you had gone.”
“Ah, now, that’s the thing about the desert. You do not find much there. The desert has one thing in abundance and that is sand.”
“And what had you gone out to find?”
Eoin. That was the long and short of it. He had gone out into the desert to find Eoin and when he lost hope of bringing back his body he turned his focus to wandering and telling himself that the direction he went was the direction Eoin was pulling him. That even across the boundary of death Eoin’s hand still found him and guided him. And then he’d gotten tired and still there was no Eoin and he went back alone, hungry, and too exhausted for anger. The French had arrived shortly thereafter.
“Not fucking sand.”
Augustin lifts his head. Studies Paddy’s face for something unidentifiable. Philosophers are nearly as bad as poets in that regard, always searching for the invisible, the intangible, the imaginary. Paddy can see the pad of his palm tense and relax.
“If I were to walk out into the desert I would not find my men,” says Augustin. “They are dead. I was there for it. I heard the explosion and felt the fire at the back of my neck.” Indeed there’s still a patch of scorched skin there where his hair is short and soft. It’s healed over a tender pink. “There is nothing out there for me to find. Sometimes I think to myself there is nothing for me there, nothing for me here. Once there are no more fascists to kill…”
A silence falls then. Paddy finds a wall and leans back against it. With him over here his shadow no longer falls across Augustin as if he’d draped himself over his back and from this new angle he can see that his hair is stood on end here and there as if from grabbing at it, or perhaps the sweat had agitated him.
“What about that wife and child of yours?”
Augustin gives a soft humorless laugh. “I thought you were smarter than that.”
“I have been accused of intellect once or twice. Always by men who fancied themselves smarter than I.”
Another scoff. The sound of Augustin’s restless hand stops. “Well?” he asks.
“Well?” says Paddy.
“You were going to ask me who he was.”
“Ah. Go on, then.”
“A mathematician. Let’s call him Michel.” Augustin adjusts his glasses. “He took a pragmatic approach to all things, even the business between us. We carried on, not for very long. Only two years. Then France fell to the Nazis and we had a difference of opinion regarding how to continue.”
“Sympathies?” asks Paddy.
“No. I told him that if France were to fall I would fight for her. He drew up his own calculation and came to the conclusion that there are much easier things to do than that.”
“He surrendered.”
“Yes. In a sense.” The gun turns in Augustin’s hand and both his eyes and Paddy’s go to it, Augustin’s wryly and Paddy’s with the paradoxical ease of someone used to looking down a barrel. That barrel is now pointed towards the floor at a low angle. If Augustin were to shoot he would kick up an awful lot of dust.
“I wasn’t going to, you know,” he tells Paddy. “Not that I didn’t think about it. I did. I was very tempted to go the way of the poets.”
“And what about the way of the philosophers?”
“Socrates was made to poison himself.”
“I was not counting him.”
Paddy’s lucky to catch the very corner of a smile, though it’s there for a split second and then gone as if it had never appeared. Imagines a big chalkboard where he tallies his score: 1. No competitors but a difficult game is competition enough. Eoin had smiled all the time. He smiled so often that Paddy often thought that that was how his face was made. He smiled in his sleep, he smiled when there were very few reasons to. When enough of the sand had cleared that Paddy could see his face there was a smile there too, or maybe it was a grimace.
“At some point I tricked myself into believing that if I thought about feeling then I would stop myself from doing very much of it,” says Augustin. “Enough to get by. No more than any other man.”
“Easier said than done.”
“You speak from experience.” Not a question.
“You and I have things in common.” Not an answer. “We are two dogs chasing our tails.”
Augustin nods. “Howling at sirens.”
It’s then that Paddy decides to step forward and stoop to take Augustin’s hand and remove the gun from it. This he pockets for the time being and Augustin lets him without protest, not even to remind him that he isn’t a child who can’t be trusted with pointy things. When his hand is empty it falls beside him and swings in the air like a pendulum. Grief is a feeling with which he’s well familiar; reads it, sees it, feels it, all more often than he’d prefer.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” says Paddy at last once the silence has overstayed its welcome. He hears Augustin sigh and sees the sliver of light that hits his shoulders rise and fall with it.
“I think we are in rats’ alley
Where dead men lose their bones.”
“Not quite.”
Augustin scoffs. “I never paid much attention to dull poetry.”
“But?”
“But he favored it and so I humored him.” Paddy understands the “he” in question to mean Augustin’s man they're calling Michel, and when he thinks the name it calls to mind someone else’s familiar mouth curved into the wide bow of a smile. Dark hair, dark eyes. Tall frame and warm broad palms that sat on his shoulders as if the crook of his neck had been carved out for them. The sort of man who humored him without pity, resentment or condescension. “He himself had no ear for rhyme or cadence but he said he appreciated the way the poets saw things and wrote them down.”
He lifts his head up and towards Paddy. The yellow sunlight hits it from the side and casts the shadow of his nose across his cheek, illuminates the opposite side and the lens of his glasses catches white with glare. His fringe forms a sweaty curl against his forehead. He doesn’t kiss him. The thought forms, evaporates. Finds purchase again in the back of his mind, something he will agonize over and pretend never to have thought, and then he’ll go to the piano and twiddle his fingers over E and D# for a while and come up with no real answer.
“My nerves are bad tonight,” recites Paddy. “Yes, bad.”
“Stay with me.”
“Discovering a sudden affection for Eliot now, are you?”
“No, but the two of us occasionally find common ground.”