The Wild Rose

by Jennifer Donnelly

  After another thirty-odd frames, the sun dipped beneath the city’s rooftops; its last golden rays disappeared, and Willa put her camera down.

  “That’s it,” she said. “We’re done.”

  “Thank God,” Oscar said, standing up to stretch.

  “I think I got some good shots. You have an amazing face. Sensitive and intense. It’s a photographer’s dream.”

  Oscar smiled. “Well, let’s hope my pretty face can sell out a few music halls,” he said. “God knows my agent isn’t.”

  “Have a seat on the divan,” Willa said. “Make yourself comfortable. I won’t be a moment.”

  “The very last thing I want to do is sit down again,” Oscar said, walking over to a wall where various black-and-whites were tacked up. “I’d much rather look at your work. I’ve been wanting to nose around ever since I arrived.”

  Willa lived and worked in what used to be a milliner’s atelier in Montparnasse, on Paris’s Left Bank. She’d just moved in a fortnight ago from the flat she’d had near the river. The atelier was at the top of a dingy, rundown building, but the space was much larger than her old flat, filled with light, and quite cheap.

  “Suit yourself,” she said.

  She carried her camera to her darkroom—a small alcove she’d made by hanging blankets around the atelier’s lone, cold-water sink—and carefully set it down on the counter. She would develop the film later, when she was alone. Next to the sink was a syringe, a length of rubber tubing she used as a tourniquet, and a vial of morphine. She would attend to those later, too. When Oscar was gone. When the film was developed. When she’d got back from haunting the late-night cafes with her friend Josie. When there was nothing else to do and nowhere to go and she was all alone with her ghosts and her grief.

  A doctor had given her the morphine when she’d first arrived in Paris. She told him she needed it to control the pain in her damaged leg. It was true, sort of. The leg didn’t pain her so much anymore, but other things did. It was peacetime now, but there was no peace, not for her, and there never would be.

  Willa took a half-empty wine bottle down off a shelf, tugged the cork out of it, and filled two glasses. “Cheers,” she said, as she reemerged from the darkroom. “Thank you for being such a wonderful subject.”

  Oscar seemed not to hear her. He was walking around her flat, peering at the photographs on the wall. She walked up to him and handed him one of the glasses. “I came to your concert, by the way. The one you gave two nights ago at the Opera. I loved it,” she said. “What are you working on now?”

  “A new symphony. A new musical language for a new world,” he said absently.

  “Is that all?” Willa joked, sipping from her glass.

  Oscar laughed. “I sound like a jerk, don’t I?” he said, turning to her. “Sorry, I was distracted. How could I not be? This is incredible,” he said, pointing at a silvery black-and-white nude.

  Willa glanced at the shot. It was a self-portrait. She’d taken it about two weeks ago and had exhibited it, along with a few other photographs, at a local gallery. It had caused quite a stir. Titled Odalisque, it showed her sitting on her bed, without her artificial leg, completely bare, her body taut and scarred. She had not modestly turned her gaze away from the camera, but instead had stared into it nakedly and challengingly. It had been called “shockingly brazen” and “subversive” by the mainstream press, but other, more forward-thinking critics had called it “brilliantly symbolic,” “wrenching,” and “a modern, war-torn Odalisque for our modern, war-torn world.”

  “Weren’t you afraid? To be so naked? So vulnerable?” Oscar asked her.

  “No, I wasn’t,” Willa said. “What’s left to be afraid of? I’m scarred. Damaged. I’m missing pieces of myself. After the last four years, aren’t we all?”

  Oscar smiled sadly. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, we are.”

  He kept walking from one shot to the next. Some were framed. Some were simply pinned to the wall. More were fastened with clothes-pegs to a length of rope stretched from one end of the room to the other.

  “I’ve never seen anything like these,” he said quietly.

  “No,” Willa said. “Most people haven’t. Which is the whole point, I suppose.”

  The shots Willa had taken were not pretty images of children and parks and bourgeois Parisians out for a Sunday stroll. They were photographs of prostitutes and pimps. Shots of armless and legless soldiers, begging on the streets. A drunk man lying in the gutter. A skinny, dirty girl singing for pennies outside of a restaurant. They were ugly, many of them, harsh, raw, and utterly compelling.

  They showed the souls of a war-weary people, and they showed her own soul, for Willa poured everything inside her—her emotion, her passion, and her sorrow—into them. Her art was the only solace she had, the only thing that allowed her to express the inexpressible—the sadness and anger she felt at having survived the great war and its horrors, only to wish she hadn’t.

  “There are so many,” Oscar said quietly. “You must never sleep.”

  “No, not if I can help it,” Willa said. “I’m sitting down, even if you’re not. I’m knackered,” she added, flopping down on a cracked and torn leather divan.

  Oscar sat down in a battered old armchair across from her, and Willa refilled their glasses.

  “What happened to you? During the war, I mean,” he asked, giving her a searching look.

  “I rode with Lawrence, in the desert. I photographed him and his men.”

  “It sounds exciting.”

  “It was.”

  “What else happened? Something must have. These pictures …” His voice trailed off as his eyes lit on even more prints, stacked haphazardly on the table between them. “You must have experienced a very great sorrow to be able to so easily recognize it in others.”

  Willa smiled sadly. She looked into her wineglass. “I lost the person I loved most in the whole world,” she said. “He was a naval commander. His boat was sunk in the Mediterranean.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Oscar said, visibly moved.

  Willa nodded. “So am I,” she said.

  She remembered that day now, the day she’d learned Seamie was dead. She’d been in Lawrence’s camp, recovering from cholera. She’d been lying in her bed, eating some soup, when Fatima suddenly came into her tent, talking excitedly.

  “Willa, you have a guest,” she said. “He’s tall and handsome and says that he knows you.”

  Willa put her soup bowl down. Was it Seamie? she wondered. Could he have come back? Her heart began to race.

  The flap to her tent opened again and her brother came inside. His face was tanned. He was wearing a uniform. He took off his hat and held it in his hands.

  “Hello, Willa,” he said. “I’ve come to see you. And to bring you back to Haifa. To stay with me there. In a house. A rather nice one. If you’d like to come.”

  “Albie?” Willa said. “My goodness, this is a surprise! I thought … I thought that—”

  “You thought that I was Seamie,” he said, then quickly looked down at his hat.

  “Yes, I did,” she said awkwardly. “But I’m very glad to see you, Albie. I really am. Sit down.”

  Albie sat on the cushion next to her bed. He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “It’s good to see you, Wills. It’s been yonks, hasn’t it. I’ve heard all about your exploits,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Much better. Getting stronger every day, in fact. My food and drink stay in me now. It doesn’t sound like much, but believe me, it’s a huge achievement.”

  Albie laughed, but his eyes were sad. Willa knew her brother well. They hadn’t been on the best terms, hadn’t even seen each other for years now, but it didn’t matter—she knew him. And she knew when something was wrong.

  “Albie, what is it?” she said.

  “Oh, Willa,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve got some very bad news.”

  Willa grabbed his hand. “Is it Mother? It is, isn’t it? Albie, what’s
happened to her?”

  “It’s not Mother. I received a letter from her just last week. She’s fine.” Albie stopped speaking. Willa saw that his throat was working. “It’s Seamie,” he finally said.

  Willa shook her head. “No. No, Albie. Please.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “When? How?” Willa asked.

  “A few days ago. Off the coast of Cyprus. His ship was broadsided by a German U-boat. It burned and then sank. No survivors were found.”

  Willa let out a long, trailing moan. She felt as if her heart was being ripped from her. He was gone. Seamie was gone. Forever. The pain of it was beyond bearing.

  As she wept, she remembered what Seamie had said while he nursed her. She remembered how he’d asked Fatima to pray for Willa. She’d heard his voice in her fevered dreams then, and she heard it still—in her nightmares.

  Talk to Him, Fatima. He listens to you. Tell Him if He wants a life, He can have mine. A life for a life. Mine, not hers. Tell Him, Fatima. Tell Him to let Willa live.

  God had listened. And God had taken him.

  “And you came here after the desert? Right to Paris?” Oscar said now, breaking in upon her sad memories.

  “No,” Willa said, shaking her head. “I stayed with my brother for a few days. He was stationed in Haifa. Then I went home to England. I stayed with my mother in London, but London was gray and sad and full of ghosts. Everywhere I looked, someone was missing. That, too, only lasted a few days and then I came to Paris, where the ghosts all belong to other people, not me.”

  She didn’t tell Oscar how unhappy her mother was that she’d gone to Paris, or that she’d sent Albie to fetch her after he’d arrived home from Haifa. He’d come to her flat, taken one look at her, and said, “Still trying to kill yourself, eh? Only this time it’s with a needle.” He’d returned to London without her.

  Oscar picked up a print of an actress painting her face. Willa had shot it as the woman was looking into her dressing room mirror. Her hair was twisted up in pin curls. Her enormous breasts were nearly popping out of her black corset. Her expression, as she rubbed white greasepaint onto her skin, was searching and intense, as if she’d hoped the mirror might tell her who she was.

  “Josephine Lavallier, l’Ange de l’Amour Oscar said.

  “You know her?” Willa asked.

  “I think all of Paris does. Thanks to that photograph of her at Bobino’s, standing onstage in a pair of feathery wings and very little else. I saw it a few nights ago, hanging on the wall at La Rotonde. Did you take that one, too?”

  Willa nodded. “That shot was published in one of the daily papers here. The editor was outraged such an act is permitted on a Paris stage. Ever since he ran it, Josie’s show has been sold out,” she said, laughing. “The show’s very cheeky. Have you seen it?”

  Oscar said he had not, and Willa said he must. “We’ll go this very evening,” Willa said. “I’ll take you. Are you free?”

  Oscar said he was, and Willa said it was a date, then. They’d get a bite at La Rotonde first.

  “I thought you said the show’s been sold out. Will we be able to get tickets?”

  “Josie will get us in,” Willa said. “We’ve struck up quite a friendship, Josie and I. We get along quite well. In fact, we’ve made a pact—neither one of us is allowed to talk about the past. There is no past when we’re together, only the present. We don’t talk about the war, or what we’ve lost. We talk about paintings and the theater and what we had for dinner, and whom we saw, and what we wore. And that’s all. She’s originally an English girl. Did you know that?”

  “No, I thought she was as French as onion soup.”

  Willa laughed. “She lets me come backstage and photograph her and her fellow actresses. I get shots of everyone and everything. The stage manager. The back-door johnnies. The girls in their costumes. The romances and the rows. In return, I give her prints of anything I take of her.”

  Willa looked at the shot Oscar was holding and smiled. She was quite proud of it. “Josie’s a fascinating entertainer,” she said. “Even though she’s English, she embodies Paris, a place that’s been battered but not broken. A place that’s still beautiful, still defiant.”

  Willa gazed at the photograph for a bit, then said they should get going. Coats and hats were gathered. As they walked toward the door, another photograph, one hanging over another divan—that Willa used as a bed—caught Oscar’s eye. It showed a young man standing on top of a mountain peak, with what looked like the whole world spread out behind him.

  “Where was that taken?” he asked.

  “On Kilimanjaro. On top of the Mawenzi peak,” Willa said.

  “That’s him, isn’t it? The naval commander?”

  “Yes, it is. It was taken just after we’d summitted. And just before I fell. And shattered my leg.”

  Willa told him the story.

  “My God,” he said, when she finished. “Can you still climb?”

  “Only foothills,” she said, touching the photograph gently. “I loved climbing more than I loved anything or anyone, except for Seamie. We had such plans, he and I. We were going to climb every mountain in the world. We used to talk about what made a good climber. We decided it was longing—the overwhelming desire to be the first, to lay eyes on a view no human being had ever seen before.” She smiled ruefully, then added, “That was many years ago. Before I lost my leg. And Seamie lost his life. But I still think about it—Kilimanjaro, Everest, all of them. And in my dreams, I climb them. With him.”

  The aching note of sadness in her voice was not lost on Oscar. “It’s an awful thing, isn’t it?” he said quietly, as Willa opened the door for him.

  “What is?” she asked, fishing her key out of her pocket.

  “That which drives us,” Oscar said, starting down the stairs. “The quest. We are prisoners, both of us. One of music. One of mountains. And neither will ever be free.”

  “Perhaps freedom is overrated,” Willa said, locking the door. “What would either of us be without our quests? Me without my mountains. You without your music.”

  Oscar stopped midway down the flight of stairs. He looked up at her.

  “Happy,” he said. Then he turned and kept on walking.

  Willa, laughing ruefully, followed.

  Chapter Ninety-Nine

  He was going to die. He knew that now. He hadn’t eaten for three days. Hadn’t drunk for two. There was no more food, no more water, and no hope of getting either of those things.

  The guards were gone. Two weeks after Armistice Day, they’d heard the war was over, and they’d left. News traveled slowly in the desert. They’d taken the camels, the goats, all the weapons, and plenty of food and water, and they’d buggered off, leaving their charges—seventy-two British prisoners of war, survivors of U-boat attacks in the Mediterranean—to fend for themselves. In the middle of the desert.

  They’d unlocked the doors to the cells. That was something. It had enabled the men to get out—those who could walk, at least—and reconnoiter the prisoner-of-war camp to take stock of supplies.

  It had been a very quick exploration. The prison, such as it was, was merely a series of stone huts—the remains of a small village, the men guessed—that had been fashioned into cells by bolting strips of sheet metal over the windows and adding padlocks to the doors. There were no toilets, no sinks, no cots. Just some rags on the ground upon which to sleep. For meals they had got whatever half-rotted mess their jailers saw fit to feed them. Temperatures usually reached 110 degrees during the day and often sank into the fifties at night.

  Out of the seven who’d survived the U-boat attack with him, three had died of their injuries during the first week. Walker had starved to death three days ago. Liddell, last night. Benjamin was hanging on, but only barely. He’d likely be gone by nightfall.

  And Ellis, well … he didn’t know if Ellis was alive or dead. Ellis had walked out with two other men nine days ago, vowing to make it to Damascus, but t
here were more than one hundred and fifty miles of heat and sand between this godforsaken place and that city, and he and his comrades had been sick, weak, and malnourished. Most likely, they’d dropped down dead one by one in the desert.

  Which would mean that no one on their side knew now that he, Benjamin, and the other prisoners were even here.

  The Germans had pulled him from the sea three months ago. He’d been clinging to a piece of wood. His clothes had been in shreds. Blood had been seeping from his nose and mouth. He’d had a deep gash across the back of his head. His right side was burned down the length of it—arm, torso, and leg.

  “You were nearly dead by the time they pulled you out,” Ellis, his quartermaster, had told him. “You were raving. Out of your mind. You didn’t even know your own name.”

  Bir Güzel, the Turkish guards had called him—“beautiful one.” It was their little joke, for with his bruised and swollen face, he’d been anything but beautiful.

  When he was better, when he could open his eyes and talk, Ellis told him that he’d been unconscious for days. They’d tended to him—Ellis and the others—they’d kept him alive.

  He couldn’t remember a thing when he’d first come to. Little by little, though, the memories returned. The ship-to-ship message. The German U-boat. The torpedoes. The horrible way the rest of his crew had died. The noise and the fire and the screaming. And then the awful silence as the ship went under.

  The guards told them little. They’d had no idea the Allies had won until the day the guards let them out of their cells and informed them that the war was over and they were free to go. They pointed south and told them Damascus was that way, and that it was in the hands of the British now, and that it would take them five days to reach it. On a camel. If they could find one. And then they’d ridden off. One had looked back and tossed Ellis a compass.

  They’d talked among themselves that night, all the men, after they’d seen how little food and water they had, and decided to send a party south to the city. The three strongest would go. Hopefully they’d be able to get to Damascus and bring help back before it was too late for the ones left behind.