He frames Daniel East among his wreaths. His fingers never stop working. He wears an old blue French army overcoat and a pink chrysanthemum flower in his buttonhole. Harry wishes that he could capture the colors—the coat and the flower and the barely blue of the man’s eyes. On film his irises will look like an absence.

“I’ll send you a copy if you want.”

“No fixed abode,” replies Daniel East and shrugs. He wishes Harry “Bonne route.”

He walks from the cemetery toward the village. It’s now another township of huts, rising up in corrugated iron and prefabricated panels between the ruins. He can hear the noise of a saw. Old foundations are being flattened. Children are chasing a dog through the new-made streets, laughing and banging a can.

There is a statue among the tumbled masonry, bright and crisp in clean new-cast concrete. Harry leans on the railings, which are threaded with red, white, and blue ribbons, and reads the words Monument aux Morts. Dedicated to the dead of the village, Nos Enfants, the figure of a woman embodies the sense of loss. Her eyes are cast down upon a poilu’s helmet. She touches it with the flat of her right hand, while with her left hand she holds a palm leaf to her breast. The way she is holding the palm, the tenderness of the gesture, reminds Harry of Bartley with the apple branch. Whose face was the artist resisting thinking of, he wonders, when he put this statue’s classically Greek features down onto paper? Wreaths and garlands and simple bunches of flowers have been placed at the base of the memorial. Harry counts the carved names: there are fifty-eight of them. It seems a heavy cost from this small village. The children and the dog chase around the railings.

He sits outside a street-corner bar and shuts his eyes into the sun. A gramophone inside is playing something with a jazz beat. Harry thinks about the apple pips around Bartley’s grave wriggling into life and reprimands himself for his melancholy. He reminds himself that he is lucky. He orders a beer from the barman and asks him if there is somewhere in the village where he can buy a postcard.

“Vous voulez un souvenir de ce coin?” The barman looks at him with surprise and laughs. But he places two picture postcards on Harry’s table with an apologetic shrug.

“C’est tout que je peux vous offrir. C’est avant. Before the war.”

Harry offers the man a palmful of coins, but he shakes his head. It is as if what came before now bears no relevance, is obsolete, and can be of little value to a traveler requiring a memento.

“Merci bien,” says Harry.