FICTION | Laura Dean Between Wolf and Dog

FICTION

Between Dog and Wolf

(EXCERPT FROM NOVEL-IN-PROgRESS)

By Laura Dean

Marseille, 1916

The first wagon didn’t stop. Neither did the second. There weren’t many on the road now; most of the horses had been taken to the battlefield years ago. The ones that weren’t dead were probably wasting away under Belgian plows. When the third wagon drew level with Ibrahim he almost didn’t get up. His side still hurt from the fight and it was an effort to stand. But more than the physical pain, Ibrahim felt the vertigo of his brother’s sudden absence. He was, for the first time in this country, alone.

The driver reined in his horse and motioned to the cart behind him where four goats jostled for balance. One of them had gotten its head stuck between the bars and peered at Ibrahim with its strange slitted pupil. What now? it seemed to say. He put one narrow foot on the wheel and swung himself up into the cart, sitting down hard on its uneven slats. Perhaps if he’d been in uniform he would have been invited to sit next to the driver. Or perhaps the driver wouldn’t have stopped at all, tired of the stories, all the same, none moving anyone anymore,

least of all those who’d been there, as he probably had.

Ibrahim pondered the goat’s question. It didn’t feel like luck that he’d escaped the raid, though that was what the foreman had said when he’d walked in that morning, suddenly the only Algerian on the factory floor. It felt like fate, it felt written. And fate was something Ibrahim tried to avoid. Ibrahim did not look at the Italians, though he’d felt their eyes on him as they took their places in the first slots on the assembly lines. Theirs had always been the safer jobs. He’d made the decision to leave as he stood there, watching the liquid alloy flow from tray to tray. On the first day he’d thought it beautiful, before he’d seen it flow over the bodies of men.

He’d finished out his shift, then headed for the coastal road. He had brought his few belongings with him in an oilcloth bag. It had never yet fallen to Ibrahim to be the one to make decisions. At first, he’d imagined the gendarmes having to subdue his brother; it would have taken at least four of them. He saw Marwan’s pumping thighs as they lifted him into the air, and heard him screaming his name. But more likely, he would have gone quietly. A quick look around the room would have let him know there were too many of them—a whole regiment, perhaps, to round up every man there. No, that wasn’t right either. Not enough young men for that now. Besides, these were colonials they were dealing with; one or two Frenchmen were enough, they’d have thought.

Doubt plucked at the space between his ribs. What if Marwan had escaped? Without thinking, he worked his fingers up the neck of the goat. The beast was still. His touch usually had that effect on animals. When he reached its ears, his hands through the bars up to his wrists, he put pressure on the creature’s jawbone, guiding and pulling it gently back until its head was

inside the cart with the others. It nosed him hard under his ribs for his trouble. Its prodding felt like a question again, or an accusation: Shouldn’t you have stayed? What if Marwan were still in France? Where would he send a message now?

“Marseille?” Ibrahim asked the driver, though the road only led to one place.

“Ça va,” he said through teeth clenched around a pipe. His intonation didn’t rise. Ibrahim said nothing more.

As the cart bumped along the track, Ibrahim felt relief in spite of everything, leaning toward the pink city that appeared periodically beyond the white shoulders of rock that sloped into the sea. Every now and then, almost involuntarily, he turned back to the factory, precarious as ever atop its outcropping. Many days working there he’d imagined the whole thing, chimneys and all, tipping into the sea. All those flames extinguished, molten iron transformed in an instant to cold metal, coming to rest, twisted and useless, among the dropped cargo and lost treasures that line the seafloor of any port. He reached his hands toward the smokestacks. From here it almost looked as though he could push them in. He hadn’t confided these thoughts to his brother, who’d have told him they were lucky to have jobs. Never mind the fact they came without papers. Perhaps being the luckier one made Marwan naturally more grateful, or maybe it was the appreciation that begat the luck. Ibrahim shrugged at no one. No use trying to parse God’s agenda.

They were sick men, the ones they’d rounded up, his brother too, for all he’d tried to hide it. So sick that a police escort to the boat seemed excessive. Night after night Ibrahim had lain awake in the barracks listening to the coughing, knowing in a few weeks it would come for him too. It would start up in one corner, first an exhalation, then a clearing, then the choking

and gasping for air that could last minutes until the man took ahold of himself, usually sitting or standing to clear the phlegm. On nights when he heard the whistle in his brother’s chest and the uncatchable breath, he’d go to him, offering herbs he had foraged from the hills on his nighttime ramblings. His brother would press Ibrahim’s hands to his chest before letting them go, no breath for speaking at night. Gone now, all of them, Marwan most of all. Ibrahim pictured them in a police van in their underclothes shivering all the way to the city, the gendarmes not letting them out of their sight until their boat had left shore. Some back to their families—the women—who no doubt would place poultices on their chests at night, who would soon see them out of this life. Where would his brother go? The women who’d raised them—grandmothers, aunts—were long-dead. It was a clever game they played, the state and the company: the state spiriting these men home before too many were visibly close to death, only to turn a blind eye to boatloads more arriving that very week. No, he’d not stay here. Ibrahim set his gaze in the direction of the city. He was bound for Marseille and the openair work that awaited him there.

“Seen a lot of you out at the leadworks lately,” the driver shouted back to him, his words half-snatched by the wind.

Ibrahim nodded.

“Used to be Italians.”

Ibrahim rubbed the withers of one of the goats. Another shifted and sat on his knee, straining the joint. He had tended goats since childhood on his uncle’s farm and though he loved their rough affection, he knew to be wary of their hard skulls.

The track toward the city rose and fell on the chalk hills; the goats pushed against the latch of the cart on the way up and almost crushed Ibrahim on the way down. He hollowed his

chest away from them, guarding his wound. In the valleys lay the villages, in the lee of the mistral, while the sandy fields rose around them on the high sloping ground. As stone buildings replaced stone hills, the cart slowed. The driver tapped the bars behind him indicating it was time for Ibrahim to get off.

He staggered but kept his balance after the jump. Only the goat, its head between the bars again, looked back at him as the cart drove away: what now? Ibrahim raised his empty palms, half to the animal and half to the heavens.

The city was quieter here than the Marseille he remembered. In the brief periods he’d stayed with his brother in Belsunce, near the city center before they’d gotten the factory jobs, he’d never walked down an empty street and couldn’t remember seeing the cafes shut. Here some shutters were already closed though the sun was not yet down. The shops were unfamiliar too: hams and sausages hung obscenely in butchers’ windows, and there were flower sellers and tailors’ shops with colorful dresses on display. A young woman hissed from a doorway, and a little boy came scampering. He stared briefly at Ibrahim before being hauled inside by the wrist. Ibrahim realized it had been months since he’d seen a child. He envied him the security of his mother’s grasp.

He had the name and address his brother had given him of a distant cousin. When he’d walked out of the factory that afternoon, Ibrahim had felt sure he would find him easily, and together they would find out what had happened to Marwan. But now as shadows spread longer out of every corner, his confidence ebbed and the thing he had being trying to avoid, turning this way and that to elude its gaze, now greeted him head-on: fear. The kind that knots the gut like hunger. He walked faster. Since he’d stepped off the cart, he’d scoured alleyways

and parks for places he might sleep unmolested. When he’d first arrived in the city he’d seen clusters of men, sometimes families, asleep on sidewalks and in church doorways. Perhaps if he could bed down near one such group he’d be concealed until morning and avoid being woken by a prod from a policeman’s stick. His brother, in the open like that, would have a plan, or at least the courage to run, but he knew, if it came to that, he’d follow docilely to whatever windowless hole awaited him.

He tried to remember the names of some of his brother’s friends. But he had approached people as he had everything else in this country, not looking at them too carefully, sure that he would always have Marwan to guide him through. He felt now that he had focused on all the wrong things: the herbs that grew here, the accents, the sea. Marwan’s charisma had always been so overpowering, like the smell of a bakery, he’d long since stopped trying to make his own impressions on people.