181027〜191006

p.201~p.249

 

CHAPTER THREE:  JUNE 1940

 

 

ETHENE

 

201

01  For three days she does not meet her great-uncle.

02  Then, feeling her way to the toilet on the fourth morning after their arrival, she steps on something small and hard. 

03  She crouches and locates it with her fingers.

 

01  Whorled and smooth.

02  A sculpture of vertical folds incised by a tapering spiral.

03  The aperture broad and oval.

04  She whispers, “A whelk.”

 

01  One stride in front of the first shell, she finds another.

02  Then a third and a fourth.

03  The trail of seashells arcs past the toilet and down a flight to the closed fifth-floor door she knows by now is his.

04  Beyond which issues the concerted whispers of pianos playing.

05  A voice says, “Come in.”

 

01  She expects fustiness, an elderly funk, but the room smells mildly of soap and books and dried seaweed.

02  Not unlike Dr. Geffard’s laboratory.

 

01  “Great-Uncle?”

 

01  “Marie-Laure.”

 

202

00  His voice is low and soft, a piece of silk you might keep in a drawer and pull out only on rare occasions, just to feel it between your fingers.

01  She reaches into space, and a cool bird-boned hand takes hers.

02  He is feeling better, he says, “I am sorry I have not been able to meet you sooner.”

 

01  The pianos plink along softly; it sounds as if a dozen are playing all at once, as if the sound comes from every point of the compass.

 

01  “How many radios do you have, Uncle?”

 

01  “Let me show you.”

02  He brings her hands to a shelf.

03  “This one is stereo.

04  Heterodyne.

05  I assembled it myself.”

06  She imagines a diminutive pianist, dressed in a tuxedo, playing inside the machine.

07  Next he places her hands on a big cabinet radio, then on a third no bigger than a toaster.

08  Eleven sets in all, he says, boyish pride slipping into his voice.

09  “I can hear ships at sea.

10  Madrid.

11  Brazil.

12  London.

13  I heard Pakistan once.

14  Here at the edge of the city, so high in the house, we get superb reception.”

 

01  He lets her dig through a box of fuses, another of switches.

02  He leads her to bookshelves next: the spines of hundreds of books; a birdcage; beetles in match boxes; an electric mousetrap; a glass paperweight inside which, he says, a scorpion has been entombed; jars of miscellaneous fuses; a hundred more things she cannot identify.

03  He has the entire fifth floor ― one big room, except for the landing ― to himself.

 

203

01  Three windows open onto the rue Vauborel in the front, three more onto the alley in the back.

02  There is a small and ancient bed, his coverlet smooth and tight.

03  A tidy desk, a davenport.

 

01  “That’s the tour,” he says, almost whispering.

02  Her great-uncle seems kind, curious, and entirely sane.

03  Stillness: this is what he radiates more than anything else.

04  The stillness of a tree.

05  Of a mouse blinking in the dark.

 

01  Madame Manec brings sandwiches.

02  Etienne doesn’t have any Jules Verne, but he does have Darwin, he says, and reads to her from The Voyage of the “Beagle,” translating English to French, as he goes ― the variety of species among the jumping spiders appears almost infinite . . .

03  Music spirals out of the radios, and it is splendid to drowse on the davenport, to be warm and fed, to feel the sentences hoist her up and carry her somewhere else.

 

 

01  Six blocks away at the telegraph office, Marie-Laure’s father presses his face to the window to watch two German motorcycles with sidecars roar through the Porte Saint-Vincent. 

02  The shutters of the town are drawn, but between slats, over sills, a thousand eyes peer out.

03  Behind the motorcycles roll two trucks.

04  In the rear glides a single black Mercedes.

 

203

00  Sunlight flashes from the hood ornaments and chrome fittings as the little procession grinds to a stop on the ringed gravel drive in front of the soaring lichen-streaked walls of the Château de Saint-Malo.

01  An elderly, preternaturally tanned man ― the mayor, somebody explains ― waits with a white handkerchief in his big sailor’s hands, a barely perceptible shake showing in his wrists.

 

01  The Germans climb out of their vehicles, more than a dozen of them.

02  Their boots gleam and their uniforms are tidy.

03  Two carry carnations; one urges along a beagle on a rope.

04  Several gaze openmouthed up at the facade of the château.

 

01  A short man in a field captain’s uniform emerges from the backseat of the Mercedes and brushes something invisible from the sleeve of his coat.

02  He exchanges a few words with a thin aide-de-camp, who translates to the mayor.

03  The mayor nods.

04  Then the short man disappears through the huge doors.

05  Minutes later, the aide-de-camp flings open the shutters of an upstairs window and gazes a moment across the rooftops before unfurling a crimson flag over the brick and securing its eyelets to the sill.

 

 

 

JUNGMANNER

 

205

01  It’s a castle out of a storybook: eight or nine stone buildings sheltered below hills, rust-colored roofs, narrow windows, spires and turrets, weeds sprouting from between roof tiles.

02  A pretty little river winds through athletics fields.

03  Not in the clearest hour of Zollverein’s clearest day has Werner breathed air so unadulterated by dust.

 

01  A one-armed bunk master sets forth rules in a belligerent torrent.

02  “This is your parade uniform, this is your field uniform, this is your gym uniform.

03  Suspenders crossed in the back, parallel in the front.

04  Sleeves rolled to the elbow.

05  Each boy is to carry a knife in a scabbard on the right side of the belt.

06  Raise your right arm when you wish to be called upon.

07  Always align in rows of ten.

08  No books, no cigarettes, no food, no personal possessions, nothing in your locker but uniforms, boots, knife, polish.

09  No talking after lights-out.

10  Letters home will be posted on Wednesday.

11  You will strip away your weakness, your cowardice, your hesitation.

 

206

01  You will become like a waterfall, a volley of bullets ― you will all surge in the same direction at the same pace toward the same cause.

02  You will forgo comforts; you will live by duty alone.

03  You will eat country and breath nation.”

 

01  Do they understand?

 

01  The boys shout that they do.

02  There are four hundred of them, plus thirty instructors and fifty more on the staff, NCOs and cooks, groomsmen and groundkeepers.

03  Some cadets are as young as nine.

04  The oldest are seventeen.

05  Gothic faces, sharp noses, pointed chins.

06  Blue eyes, all of them.

 

01  Werner sleeps in a tiny dormitory with seven other fourteen-year-olds.

02  The bunk above belongs to Frederick: a reedy boy, thin as blade of grass, skin as pale as cream.

03  Frederick is new too.

04  He’s from Berlin.

05  His father is assistant to an ambassador.

06  When Frederick speaks, his attention floats up, as though he’s scanning the sky for something.

 

01  He and Werner eat their first meal in their starchy new uniforms at a long wooden table in the refectory.

02  Some boys talk in whispers, some sit alone, some gulp food as if they have not eaten in days.

03  Through three arched windows, dawn sends a sheaf of hallowed golden rays.

 

01  Frederick flutters his fingers and asks, “Do you like birds?”

02  “Sure.”

 

207

01  “Do you know about hooded crows?”

 

01  Werner shakes his head.

 

01  “Hooded crows are smarter than most mammals.

02  Even monkeys.

03  I’ve seen them put nuts that they can’t crack in the road and wait for cars to run over them to get at the kernel.

04  Werner, you and I are going to be great friends, I’m sure of it.”

 

01  A portrait of the führer glowers over every classroom.

02  Learning happens on backless benches, at wooden tables grooved by the boredom of countless boys before them ― squires, monks, conscripts, cadets.

03  On Werner’s first day, he walks past the half-open door of the technical sciences laboratory and glimpses a room as big as Zollverein’s drugstore lined with brand-new sinks and glass-fronted cabinets inside which wait sparkling beakers and graduated cylinders and balances and burners.

04  Frederick has to urge him along.

 

01  On their second day, a withered phrenologist gives a presentation to the entire student body.

02  The lights in the refectory dim, a projector whirs, and a chart full of circles appears on the far wall.

03  The old man stands beneath the projection screen and whisks the tip of a billiards cue through the grids.

04  “White circles represent pure German blood.

05  Circles with black indicate the proportion of foreign blood.

06  Notice group two, number five.”

07  He raps the screen with his cue and it ripples.

08  “Marriage between a pure German and one-quarter Jew is still permissible, you see?”

 

208

01  A half hour later, Werner and Frederick are reading Goethe in poetics.

02  Then they’re magnetizing needles in field exercises.

03  The bunk master announces schedules of byzantine complication: 

04  Mondays are for mechanics, state history, racial sciences.

05  Tuesdays are for horse man ship, orientating, military history.

06  Everyone, even the nine-year-olds, will be taught to clean, break down, and fire a Mauser rifle.

 

01  Afternoons, they lash themselves into a snarl of cartridge belts and run.

02  Run to the troughs; run to the flag; run up the hill.

03  Run carrying each other on your backs, run carrying your rifle above your head.

04  Run, crawl, swim.

05  Then more running.

 

01  The star-flooded nights, the dew-soaked dawns, the hushed ambulatories, the enforced asceticism ― never has Werner felt part of something so single-minded.

02  Never has he felt such a hunger to belong.

03  In the rows of dormitories are cadets who talk of alpine skiing, of duels, of jazz clubs and governesses and boar hunting; boys who employ curse words with virtuosic skill and boys who talk about cigarettes named for cinema stars; boys who speak of “telephoning the colonel” and boys who have baronesses for mothers.

04  There are boys who have been admitted not because they are good at anything in particular but because their fathers work for ministries.

 

209

01  And the way they talk:

02  “One mustn’t expect figs from thistle!”

03  “I’d pollinate her in a blink you shit!”

04  “Bear up and funk it, boys!”

05  There are cadets who do everything right ― perfect posture, expert marksmanship, boots polished so perfectly that they reflect clouds.

06  There are cadets who have skin like butter and irises like sapphires and ultra-fine networks of blue veins laced across the backs of their hands.

07  For now, though, beneath the whip of the administration, they are all the same, all Jungmanner.

08  They hustle through the gates together, gulp fried eegs in the refectory together, march across the quadrangle, perform roll call, salute the colors, shoot rifles, run, bathe, and suffer together.

09  They are each a mound of clay, and the potter that is the portly, shiny-faced commandant is throwing four hundred identical pots.

 

01  We are young, they sing, we are steadfast, we have never compromised, we have so many castles yet to storm.

 

01  Werner sways between exhaustion, confusion, and exhilaration.

02  That his life has been so wholly redirected astounds him.

03  He keeps any doubts at bay by memorizing lyrics or the routes to classrooms, by holding before his eyes a vision of the technical sciences laboratory: nine tables, thirty stools; coils, variable capacitors, amplifiers, batteries, soldering irons, locked away in those gleaming cabinets.

 

01  Above him, kneeling on his bunk, Frederick peers out the open window through a pair of antique field glasses and makes a record on the bed rail of birds he has sighted.

02  One notch under red-necked grebe.

03  Six notches under thrush nightingale.

04  Out on the grounds, a group of ten-year-olds is carrying torches and swastika flags toward the  river.

05  The procession pauses, and a gust of wind tears at the torch flames.

06  Then they march on, their song swirling up through the window like a bright, pulsing cloud.

 

01  O take me, take me up into the ranks so that I do not die a common death!

02  I do not want to die in vain, what I want is to fall on the sacrificial mound.

  

 

 

VIENNA

 

211

01  Sergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel is forty-one years old, not so old that he cannot be promoted.

02  He has moist red lips; pale, almost translucent cheeks like fillets of raw sole; and an instinct for correctness that rarely fails him.

03  He has a wife who suffers his absences without complaint, and who arranges porcelain kittens by color, lightest to darkest, on two different shelves in their drawing room in Stuttgart.

04  He also has two daughters whom he has not seen in nine months.

05  The eldest, Veronika, is deeply earnest.

06  Her letters to him include phrases like sacred resolve, proud accomplishments, and unparalleled in history.

 

01 Von Rumpel’s particular gift is for diamonds: he can facet and polish stones as well as any Aryan jeweler in Europe, and he often spots fakes at a glance.

02  He studied crystallography in Munich, apprenticed as a polisher in Antwerp, has even been ― one glorious afternoon ― to Charterhouse Street in London, to an unmarked diamond house, where he was asked to turn out his pockets and ushered up three staircases and through three locked doors and seated at a table where a man with a mustache waxed to knife-points let him examine a ninety-two-carat raw diamond from South Africa.

 

212

01  Before the war, the life of Reinhold von Rumpel was pleasant enough: he was a gemologist who ran  an appraisal business out of a second-story shop behind Stuttgart’s old chancellery.

02  Clients would bring in stones and he’d tell them what they were worth.

03  Sometimes he’d recut diamonds or consult on high-level faceting projects.

04  If occasionally he cheated a customer, he told himself that was part of the game.

 

01  Because of the war, his job has expanded.

02  Now Sergeant Major von Rumpel has the chance to do what no one has done in centuries ― not since the Mogul Dynasty, not since the Khans.

03  Perhaps not in history.

04  The capitulation of France is only weeks past, and already he has seen things he did not dream he would see in six lifetimes.

05  A seventeenth-century globe as big around as a small car, with rubies to mark volcanoes, sapphires clustered at the poles, and diamonds for world capitals.

06  He has held ― held! ― a dagger handle at least four hundred years old, made of white jade and inlaid with emeralds.

07  Just yesterday, on the road to Vienna, he took possession of a five-hundred-and-seventy-piece china set with a single marquise-cut diamonds set into the rim of every single dish.

 

213

01  Where the police confiscated these treasures and from whom, he does not ask.

02  Already he has personally packed them into a crate and belted it shut and numbered it with white paint and seen it loaded inside a train car where it sits under twenty-four-hour guard.

 

01  Waiting to be sent to high command.

02  Waiting for more.

 

01  This particular summer afternoon, in a dusty geological library in Vienna, Sergeant Major von Rumpel follows an underweight secretary wearing brown shoes, brown stockings, a brown skirt, and a brown blouse through stacks of periodicals.

02  The secretary sets down a step stool, climbs, reaches.

 

01  Tavernier’s 1676 Travels in India.

 

01  P. S. Pallas’s 1793 Travels Through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire.

 

01  Streeter’s 1898 Precious Stones and Gems.

 

01  Rumor is that the führer is compiling a wish list of precious objects from all around Europe and Russia.

02  They say he intends to remake the Austrian town of Linz into an empyrean city, the cultural capital of the world.

03  A vast promenade, mausoleum, acropolis, planetarium, library, opera house ― everything marble and granite, everything profoundly clean.

04  At its core, he plans a kilometer-long museum: a trove of the greatest achievements in human culture.

 

214

01  The document is real, von Rumpel has heard.

02  Four hundred pages.

 

01  He sits at the table in the stacks.

02  He tries to cross his legs but a slight swelling troubles his groin today: odd, though not painful.

03  The mousy librarian brings books.

04  He pages slowly through the Tavernier, the Streeter, Murray’s Sketches of Persia.

05  He reads entries on the three-hundred-carat Orloff diamond from Moscow, the Nur-al-Ain, the forty-eight-and-a-half carat Dresden Green.

06  Toward evening, he finds it.

07  The story of a prince who cannot be killed, a priest who warned of a goddess’s wrath, a French prelate who believed he’d bought the same stone centuries later, 

 

01  Sea of Flames.

02  Grayish blue with a red hue at its center.

03  Recorded at one hundred and thirty-three carats.

04  Either lost or willed to the king of France in 1738 on the condition that it be locked away for two hundred years.

 

01  He looks up.

02  Suspended lamps, rows of spines fading off into dusty gold.

03  All of Europe, and he aims to find one pebble tucked inside its folds.

 

 

 

THE BOCHES

 

215

01  Her father says their weapons gleam as if they have never been fired.

02  He says their boots are clean and their uniforms spotless.

03  He says they look as if they have just stepped out of air-conditioned train cars.  

 

01  The townswomen who stop by Madame Manec’s kitchen door in ones and twos say the Germans ( they refer to them as the Boches ) buy every postcard on every pharmacy rack; they say the Boches buy straw dolls and candied apricots and stale cakes from the window of the confectionery.

02  The Boches buy shirts from Monsieur Verdier and lingerie from Monsieur Morvan; the Boches require absurd quantities of butter and cheese; the Boches have guzzled down every bottle of champagne the caviste would sell them.

 

01  Hitler, the women whisper, is touring Parisian monuments.

 

01  Curfews are installed.

02  Music that can be heard outdoor is banned.

03  Public dances are banned.

04  The country is in mourning and we must behave respectfully, announces the mayor.

05  Though what authority he retains is not clear.

 

216

01  Every time she comes within earshot, Marie-Laure hears the fsst of her father lightning another match.

02  His hands flutter between his pockets.

03  Mornings he alternates between Madam Manec’s kitchen, the tobacco shop, and the post office, where he waits in interminable queues to use the telephone.

04  Afternoons he repairs things around Etienne’s house ― a loose cabinet door, a squeaking stair board.

05  He asks Madame Manec about the reliability of the neighbors.

06  He flips the locking clasp on his tool case over and over until Marie-Laure begs him to stop.

 

01  One day Etienne sits with Marie-Laure and reads to her in his feathery voice; the next he suffers from what he calls a headache and sequesters himself inside his study behind a locked door.

02  Madame Manec sneaks Marie-Laure chocolate bars, slices of cake; this morning they squeeze lemons into glasses full of water and sugar, and she lets Marie-Laure drink as much as she likes.

 

01  “How long will he stay in there, Madame?”

 

01  “Sometimes just a day or two,” Madame Manec says.

02  “Sometimes longer.”

 

01  One week in Saint-Malo becomes two.

02  Marie begins to feel that her life, like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, has been interrupted halfway through.

 

217

01  There was volume 1, when Marie-Laure and her father lived in Paris and went to work, and now there is volume 2, when Germans ride motorcycles through these strange, narrow streets and her uncle vanishes inside his own house.

 

01  “Papa, when will we leave?”

01  “As soon as I hear from Paris.”

01  “Why do we have to sleep in this little bedroom?”

01  “I’m sure we could clean out a downstairs room if you’d like.”

01  “What about the room across the hall from us?”

01  “Etienne and I agreed we would not use it.”

01  “Why not?”

01  “It belonged to your grandfather.”

01  “When can I go to the sea?”

01  “Not today, Marie.”

01  “Can’t we go for a walk around the block?”

01  “It’s too dangerous.”

 

01  She wants to shriek.

02  What dangers await?

03  When she opens her bedroom window, she hears no screams, no explosions, only the calls of birds that her great-uncle calls gannets, and the sea, and the occasional throb of an airplane as it passes over far overhead.

 

01  She spends her hours leaning the house.

02  The first floor belongs to Madame Manec: clean, navigable, full of visitors who come through the kitchen door to trade in small town scandal.

03  There’s the dining room, the foyer, a hutch full of antique dishes in the hall that tremble whenever anyone walks past, and a door off the kitchen that leads to Madame’s room: a bed, a sink, a chamber pot.

 

218

01  Eleven winding steps lead to the second floor, which is full of the smells of faded grandeur: an old sewing room, a former maid’s room.

02  Right here on the landing, Madame Manec tells her, pallbearers dropped the coffin carrying Etienne’s great-aunt.

03  “The coffin flipped over, and she slid down the whole fright.

04  They were all horrified, but she looked entirely unaffected!”

 

01  More clutter on the third floor: boxes of jars, metal disks, and rusty jigsaws; buckets of what might be electrical components; engineering manuals in piles around a toilet.

02  By the fourth floor, things are piled everywhere, in the rooms and corridors and along the staircase: baskets of what must be machine parts, shoe boxes loaded with screws, antique dollhouses built by her great-grandfather.

03  Etienne’s huge study colonizes the entire fifth floor, alternately deeply quiet or else full of voices or music or static.

 

01  Then there’s the sixth floor: her grandfather’s tidy bedroom on the left, toilet straight ahead, the little room where she sleeps with her father on the right.

02  When the wind is blowing, which it almost always is, with the walls groaning and the shutters banging, the rooms overloaded and the staircase wound tightly up through its center, the house seems the material equivalent of her uncle’s inner being: apprehensive, isolated, but full of cobwebby wonders.

 

01  In the kitchen, Madame Manec’s friends fuss over Marie-Laure’s hair and freckles.

02  In Paris, the women say, people are waiting in line five hours for a loaf of bread.

03  People are eating pets, crushing pigeons with bricks for soup.

04  There is no pork, no rabbit, no cauliflower.

05  The headlights of cars are all painted blue, they say, and at night the city is as quiet as graveyard: no buses, no trains, hardly any gasoline.

06  Marie-Laure sits at the square table, a plate of cookies in front of her, and imagines the old women 

with veiny hands and milky eyes and oversize ears.

07  From the kitchen window comes the wit wit wit of a the barn swallow, footfalls on ramparts, halyards clinking against masts, hinges and chains creaking in the harbor.

08  Ghosts.

09  Germans.

10  Snails.

 

 

 

HAUPTMANN

 

220

01  A rosy-cheeked and diminutive instructor of technical sciences named Dr. Hauptmann peels off his brass-buttoned coat and hangs it over the back of a chair.

02  He orders the cadets in Werner’s class to collect hinged metal boxes from a locked cabinet at the  back of the laboratory.

 

01  Inside each are gears, lenses, fuses, springs, shackles, and registers.

02  There’s a fat coil of copper wire, a tiny instrument hammer, and a two-terminal battery as big as a shoe ― finer equipment than Werner has had access to in his life.

03  The little professor stands at the chalkboard drawing a wiring schematic for a simple Morse-code practice circuit.

04  He sets down his chalk, presses his slender fingertips together, five to five, and asks the boys to assemble the circuit with the parts in their kits.

 

01  “You have one hour.”

 

01  Most of the boys blanch.

01  They dump everything out on the tables and poke gingerly at the parts as if at trinkets imported from some future age.

02  Frederick plucks random pieces out of his box and holds them to the light.

 

221

01  For a moment Werner is back inside his attic room at Children’s House, his head a swarm of questions.

02  What is lightning?

03  How high could you jump if you lived on Mars?

04  What is the difference between twice twenty-five and twice five and twenty?

05  Then he takes the battery, two rectangles of sheet metal, some penny nails, and the instrument hammer from his box.

06  In under a minute, he has built an oscillator to match the schematic.

 

01  The little professor frowns.

02  He tests Werner’s circuit, which works.

 

01  “Right,” he says, and stands in front of Werner’s table and laces his hands behind his back.

02  “Next take from your kit the disk-shaped magnet, a wire, a screw, and your battery.”

03  Though his instructions seem meant for the class, he looks at Werner alone.

04  “That is all you may use.

05  Who can build a simple motor?”

 

01  Some boys stir the parts in their kits halfheartedly.

02  Most simply watch.

 

01  Werner feels Dr. Hauptmann’s attention on him like a floodlight.

02  He sticks the magnet to the screw’s head and holds the screw’s point to the positive terminal on the battery.

03  When he runs the wire from the negative side of the battery to the head of the screw, both the screw and the magnet start to spin.

 

222

01  The operation takes him no more than fifteen seconds.

 

01  Dr. Hauptmann’s mouth is partially open.

02  His face is flushed, adrenalized.

03  “What is your name, cadet?”

 

01  “Pfennig, sir.”

 

01  “What else can you make?”

 

01  Werner studies the parts on his table.

02  “A door bell, sir?

03  Or a Morse beacon?

04  An ohmmeter?”

 

01  The other boys crane their necks.

02  Dr. Hauptmann’s lips are pink and his eyelids are improbably thin.

03  As though he is watching Werner even when he blinks.

04  He says, “Make them all.”

 

 

 

FLYING COUCH

 

223

01  Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand.

02  Voluntary surrender of firearms.

03  Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot.

04  At noon the following day, various Bretons troop in to drop off weapons, farmers on mule carts from miles away, plodding old sailors with antique pistols, a few hunters with outrage in their eyes gazing at the floor as they turn in their rifles.

 

01  In the end it’s a pathetic pile, maybe three hundred weapons in all, half of them rusted.

02  Two young gendarmes pile them into the back of a truck and drive up the narrow street and across the causeway and are gone.

03  No speeches, no explanations.

 

01  “Please, Papa, can’t I go out?”

 

01  “Soon, little dove.”

02  But he is distracted; he smokes so much it is as if he is turning himself into ash.

03  Lately he stays up working frenetically on a model of Saint-Malo that he claims is for her, adding new houses everyday, framing ramparts, mapping streets, so that she can learn the town the way she learned their neighborhood in Paris. 

04  Wood, glue, nails, sandpaper: rather than comforting her, the noises and smells of his manic diligence make her more anxious.

05   Why will she have to learn the streets of Saint-Malo?

06  How long will they be here?

 

01  In the fifth-floor study, Marie-Laure listens to her great-uncle read another page of The Voyage of the “Beagle.”

02  Darwin has hunted rheas in Patagonia, studied owls outside Buenos Aires, and scaled a waterfall in Tahiti.

03  He pays attention to slaves, rocks, lightning, finches, and the ceremony of pressing noses in New Zealand.

04  She loves especially to hear about the dark coasts of South America with their impenetrable walls of trees and offshore breezes full of the stink of rotting kelp and the cries of whelping seals.

05  She loves to imagine Darwin at night, leaning over the ship’s rail to stare into the bioluminescent waves, watching the tracks of penguins marked by fiery green wakes.

 

01  “Bonsoir,” she says to Etienne, standing on the davenport in his study.

02  “I may be only a girl of twelve, but I am a brave French explorer who has come to help you with your adventures.”

03  Etienne adopts a British accent.

04  “Good evening, mademoiselle, why don’t you come to the jungle with me and eat these butterflies, they are as big as dinner plates and may not be poisonous, who knows?”

 

01  “I would love to eat your butterflies, Monsieur Darwin, but first I will eat these cookies.”

02  Other evenings they play Flying Couch.

03  They climb onto the davenport and sit side by side, and Etienne says, “Where to tonight, mademoiselle?”

 

01  “The jungle!” Or: ”Tahiti!” Or: “Mozambique!”

 

01  “Oh, it’s a long journey this time,” Etienne will say in an entirely new voice, smooth, velvety, a conductor’s drawl.

02  “That’s the Atlantic Ocean far below, it’s shining under the moonlight, can you smell it?

03  Feel how cold it is up here?

04  Feel the wind in your hair?”

 

01  “Where are we now, Uncle?”

 

01  “We’re in Borneo, can’t you tell?

02  We’re skimming the treetops now, big leaves are glimmering below us, and there are coffee bushes over there, smell them? and Marie-Laure will indeed smell something, whether because her uncle is passing coffee grounds beneath her nose, or because they really are flying over the coffee trees of Borneo, she does not want to decide.

 

01  They visit Scotland, New York City, San Diego.

02  More than once they put on winter coats and visit the moon.

03  “Can’t you feel how lightweight we are, Marie?

04  You can move by hardly twitching a muscle!”

05  He sets her in his wheeled desk chair and pants as he whirls her in circles until she cannot laugh anymore for the pain of it.

 

01  “Here, try some nice fresh moon flesh,” he says, and into her mouth goes something that tastes a lot like cheese.

02  Always at the end they sit side by side again and pound the cushions, and slowly the room rematerializes around them.

03  “Ah,” he says, more quietly, his accent fading, the faintest touch of dread returning to his voice, “here we are. Home” 

 

 

 

 

THE SUM OF ANGLES

 

227

01  Werner is summoned to the office of the technical sciences professor.

02  A trio of sleek long-legged hounds swirl around him as he enters.

03  The room is lit by a pair of green-shaded banker’s lamps, and in the shadows Werner can see shelves crowded with encyclopedias, models of windmills, miniature telescopes, prisms.

04  Dr. Hauptmann stands behind his big desk wearing his brass-buttoned coat, as though he too has just arrived.

05  Tight curls frame his ivory forehead; he tugs off his leather gloves one finger at a time.

06  “Drop a log on the fire, please.” 

 

01  Werner tacks across the room and stirs the coals to life.

02  In the corner, he realizes, sits a third person, a massive figure camped sleepily in an armchair intended for a much smaller man.

03  He is Frank Volkheimer, an upperclassman, seventeen years old, a colossal boy from some boreal village, a legend among the younger cadets.

04  Supposedly Volkheimer has carried three first-years across the river by holding them above his head; 

 

228

1  ; supposedly he has lifted the tail end of the commandant’s automobile high enough to slip a jack under the axle.

2  There is a rumor that he crushed a communist’s windpipe with his hands.

3  Another that he grabbed the muzzle of a stray dog and cut out its eye just to inure himself to the suffering of other beings.

 

01  They call him the Giant.

02  Even in the low, flickering light, Werner sees that veins climb Volkheimer’s forearms like vines.

 

01  “A student has never built the mortar,” says Hauptmann, his back partially to Volkheimer.

02  “Not without help.”

 

01  Werner does not know how to reply, so he does not.

02  He pokes the fire one last time, and sparks rise up the chimney.

 

01  “Can you do trigonometry, cadet?”

02  “Only what I have been able to teach myself, sir.”

03  Hauptmann takes a sheet of paper from a drawer and writes on it.

04  “Do you know what this is?”

05  Werner squints.

 

01         l = d／tanα + d／tanβ

 

01  “A formula, sir.”

 

01  “Do you comprehend its uses?”

 

01  “I believe it is a way to use two known points to find the location of a third and unknown point.”

 

229

01  Hauptmann’s blue eyes glitter; he looks like someone who has discovered something very valuable lying right in front of him on the ground.

02  “If I give you the known points and a distance between them, cadet, can you solve it?

03  Can you draw the triangle?”

 

01  “I believe so.”

 

01  “Sit at my desk, Pfennig.

02  Take my chair.

03  Here is a pencil.”

 

01  When he sits in the desk chair, the toes of Werner’s boots do not reach the ground.

02  The fire pumps heat into the room.

03  Block out giant Frank Volkheimer with his mammoth boots and cinder-block jar.

04  Block out the little aristocratic professor pacing in front of the hearth and the late hour and the dogs and the shelves brimming with interesting things.

05  There is only this.

 

01      tanα=sinα／conα

 

01      and sin(α+β)＝sinαcosβ + cosαsinβ

 

01  Now ｄ can be moved to the front of the equation.

 

01      ｄ＝ｌsinαsinβ／sin(α+β)

 

01  Werner plugs Hauptmann’s numbers into the equation.

02  He imagines two observers in a field pacing out the distance between them, then leveling their eyes on a far-off landmark: a sailing ship or a smokestack.

 

230

01  When Werner asks for a slide rule, the professor slips one onto the desk immediately, having expected the request.

02  Werner takes it without looking and begins to calculate the sins.

 

01  Volkheimer watches.

02  The little doctor paces, hands behind his back.

03  The fire pops.

04  The only sounds are the breathing of the dogs and clicking of the slide rule’s cursor.

 

01  Eventually Werner says, “Sixteen point four three, Herr Doktor.”

02  He draws the triangle and labels the distances of each segment and passes the paper back.

03  Hauptmann checks something in a leather book.

04  Volkheimer shifts slightly in his chair; his gaze is both interested and indolent.

05  The professor presses one of his palms flat to the desk while reading, frowning absently, as though waiting for a thought to pass.

06  Werner is seized with a sudden and foreboding dread, but then Hauptmann looks back at him, and the feeling subsides. 

 

01  “It says in your application paper that when you leave here, you wish to study electrical mechanics in Berlin.

02  And you are an orphan, is that collect?”

 

01  Another glance at Volkheimer.

02  Werner nods.

03  “My sister ―”

 

01  “A scientist’s work, cadet, is determined by two things.

02  His interests and the interests of his time.

 

231

01  Do you understand?”

 

01  “I think so.”

 

01  “We live in exceptional times, cadet.”

 

01  A thrill enters Werner’s chest.

02  Firelit rooms lined with books ― these are the places in which important things happen.

 

01  “You will work in the laboratory after dinner.

02  Every night.

03  Even Sundays.”

 

01  “Yes, sir.”

 

01  “Start tomorrow.”

 

01  “Yes, sir.”

 

01  “Volkheimer here will keep an eye out for you.

02  Take these biscuits.”

03  The professor produces a tin with a bow on it.

04  “And breathe, Pfennig.

05  You cannot hold your breath every time you’re in my laboratory.”

 

01  “Yes, sir.”

 

01  Cold air whistles through the halls, so pure it makes Werner dizzy.

02  A trio of moths swim against the ceiling of his bunkroom. 

03  He unlaces his boots and holds his trousers in the dark and sets the tin of biscuits on top.

04  Frederick peers over the edge of his bunk.

05  “Where did you go?” 

 

01  “I got cookies.” whispers Werner.

 

01  “I heard an eagle owl tonight.”

 

01  “Hush,” hisses a boy two bunks down.

 

01  Werner passes up a biscuit.

02  Frederick whispers:

03  “Do you know about them?

04  They’re really rare.

05  Big as gliders.

06  This one was probably a young male looking for new territory.

07  He was in one of the poplar trees besides the parade ground.”

 

232

01  “Oh,” says Werner.

02  Greek letters move across the undersides of his eyelids: isosceles triangles, betas, sine curves. 

03  He sees himself in a white coat, striding past machines.

 

01    Some day he’ll probably win a big prize.

02    Cord breaking, rocket proportion, all the latest.

03    We live in exceptional times.

 

01  From the hall come the clicking boot heels of the bunk master.

02  Frederick tips back onto his bunk.

03  “I couldn’t see him,” he whispers,

04  “but I heard him perfectly.”

 

01  “Shut your face!” says a second boy.

02  “You’ll get us thrashed.”

 

01  Frederick says nothing more.

02  Werner stops chewing.

03  The bunk master’s boots go quiet: either he is gone or he has paused outside the door.

04  Out on the grounds, someone is splitting wood, and Werner listens to the ringing of the sledgehammer against the wedge and the quick, frightened breaths of the boys all around him.

 

 

 

THE PROFESSOR

 

233

01  Etienne is reading Darwin to Marie-Laure when he stops midsyllable.

 

01  “Uncle?” 

 

01  He breathes nervously, out of pursed lips, as if blowing on a spoonful of hot soup.

02  He whispers, “Someone’s here.”

 

01  Marie-Laure can hear nothing.

02  No footfalls, no knocks.

03  Madame Manec whisks a broom across the landing one floor up.

04  Etienne hands her the book.

05  She can hear him unplug a radio, then tangle himself in its cords.

06  “Uncle?” she says again, but he is leaving his study, floundering downstairs --- are they in danger? ― and she follows him to the kitchen, where she can hear him laboring to slide the kitchen table out of the way.

 

01  He pulls up a ring in the center of the floor.

02  Beneath a hatch waits a square hole out of which washes a damp, frightening smell.

 

01  “One step down, hurry now.”

 

01  Is this a cellar?

02  What has her uncle seen? 

03  She has set one foot on the top rung of a ladder when the blocky shoes of Madame Manec come clomping into the kitchen.

 

234

01  “Really, Master Etienne, please!”

 

01  Etienne’s voice from below: “I heard something.

02  Someone.”

 

01  “You are frightening her.

02  It’s nothing, Marie-Laure.

03  Come now.”

 

01  Marie-Laure backs out.

02  Below her, her great-uncle whispers nursery rhymes to himself.

 

01  “I can sit with him for a bit, Madame.”

02  Maybe we could read some more of our book, Uncle?

 

01  The cellar, she gathers, is merely a dank hole in the ground.

02  They sit awhile on a rolled carpet with the trapdoor open and listen to Madame Manec hum as she makes tea in the kitchen above them.

03  Etienne trembles lightly beside her.

 

01  “Did you know,” says Marie-Laure, “that the chance of being hit by lightning is one in one million?

02  Dr. Geffard taught me that.”

 

01  “In one year or in one life time?” 

 

01  “I’m not sure.”

 

01  “You should have asked.”

 

01  Again those quick, pursed exhalations.

02  As though his whole body urges him to flee.

 

01  “What happens if you go outside, Uncle?”

 

01  “I get uneasy.”

02  His voice is almost inaudible.

 

01  “But what makes you uneasy?”

 

01  “Being outside.”

 

235

01  “What part?”

 

01  “Big spaces.”

 

01  “Not all spaces are big.

02  Your street is not that big, is it?”

 

01  “Not as big as the street you are used to.”

 

01  “You like eggs and figs.

02  And tomatoes.

03  They were in our lunch.

04  They grow outside.”

 

01  He laughs softly.

02  “Of course they do.”

 

01  “Don’t you miss the world?”

 

01  He is quiet, so is she.

02  Both ride spirals of memory.

 

01  “I have the whole world here,” he says, and taps the cover of Darwin.

02  “And in my radios.

03  Right in my fingertips.”

 

01  Her uncle seems almost a child, monastic in the modesty of his needs and wholly independent of any sort of temporal obligations.

02  And yet she can tell he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him.

03  As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind.

 

01  “Could you read some more, please?” she asks, and Etienne opens the book and whispers, “Delight itself is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself into a Brazilian forest . . .”

 

01  After a few paragraphs, Marie-Laure says without preamble, “Tell me about that bedroom upstairs.

 

236

01  Across from the one I sleep in.”

 

01  He stops.

02  Again his quick, nervous breaths.

 

01  “There’s a little door at the back of it,” she says, “but it’s locked.

02  What’s through there?”

 

01  He is silent for a long enough that she worries she has upset him.

02  But then he stands, and his knees crack like twigs.

 

01  “Are you getting one of your headaches, Uncle?”

 

01  “Come with me.”

 

01  They wind all the way up the stairs.

02  On the sixth-floor landing, they turn left, and he pushes open the door to what was once her grandfather’s room.

03  She has already run her hands over its contents many times: a wooden oar nailed to a wall, a window dressed with long curtains.

04  Single bed.

05  Model ship on a shelf.

06  At the back stands a wardrobe so large, she cannot reach its top nor stretch her arms wide enough to touch both sides at once.

 

01  “These are his things?”

 

01  Etienne unlatches the little door beside the wardrobe.

02  “Go on.”

 

01  She gropes through.

02  Dry, confined heat.

03  Mice scuttle.

04  Her fingers find a ladder.

 

01  “It leads to the garret.

02  It’s not high.”

 

01  Seven rungs.

02  At the top, she stands; she has the sense of a long slope-walled space pressed beneath the gable of the roof.

03  The peak of the ceilings is just taller than she is.

 

01  Etienne climbs up behind her and takes her hand.

 

237

01  Her feet find cables on the floor.

02  They snake between dusty boxes, overwhelm a sawhorse; he leads her through a thicket of them to what feels like an upholstered piano bench at the far end, and helps her sit.

 

01  “This is the attic.

02  That’s the chimney in front of us.

03  Put your hands on the table; there you are.”

04  Metal boxes cover the tabletop: tubes, coils, switches, meters, at least one gramophone.

05  This whole part of the attic, she realizes, is some sort of machine.

06  The sun bakes the slates above their heads.

07  Etienne secures a headset over Marie-Laure’s ears.

08  Through the headphones, she can hear him turn a crank, switch on something, and then, as if positioned directly in the center of her head, a piano plays a sweet, simple song.

 

01  The song fades, and a staticky voice says, Consider a single piece growing in your family’s stove.

02  See it, children?

03  That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fern or reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe two million, or maybe hundred million . . .

 

01  After a little while, the voice gives way to the piano again.

02  Her uncle pulls off the headset.

03  “As a boy,” he says, “my brother was good at everything, but his voice was what people commented on most.

04  The nuns at St. Vincent’s wanted to build choirs around it.

05  We had a dream together, Henri and I, to make recordings and sell them.

06  He had the voice and I had the brains and back then everyone wanted gramophones.

 

238

01  And hardly anyone was making programs for children.

02  So we contacted a recording company in Paris, and they expressed interests, and I wrote ten different scripts about science, and Henri rehearsed them, and finally we started recording.

03  Your father was just a boy, but he would come around to listen.

04  It was one of the happiest times of my life.”

 

01  “Then there was the war.”

 

01  “We became signalmen.

02  Our job, mine and your grandfather’s, was to knit telegraph wires from command positions at the rear to field officers at the front.

03  Most nights the enemy would shoot pistol flares called ‘very lights’ over the trenches, short-lived stars suspended in the air from parachutes, meant to illuminate possible targets for snipers.

04  Every soldier within reach of the glare would freeze while it lasted.

05  Some hours, eighty or ninety of these flares would go off, one after another, and the night would turn stark and strange in that magnesium glow.

06  It would be so quiet, the only sound the fizzing of the flares, and then you’d hear the whistle of a sniper’s bullet streak out of the darkness and bury itself in the mud.

07  We would stay as close together as we could.

08  But I’d become paralyzed sometimes; I could not move any part of my body, not even my fingers.

09  Not even my eyelids.

10  Henry would stay right beside me and whisper those scripts, the ones we recorded.

 

239

01  Sometimes all night.

02  Over and over.

03  As though weaving some kind of protective screen around us.

04  Until morning came.”

 

01  “But he died.”

 

01  “And I did not.”

 

01  This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear.

02  That a light you are a powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.

 

01  “Who built all of this, Uncle?

02  This machine?”

 

01  “I did.

02  After the war.

03  Took me years.”

 

01  “How does it work?”

 

01  “It’s a radio transmitter.

02  This switch here” ― he guides her hands to it ― “powers up the microphone, and this one runs the phonograph.

03  Here’s the premodulation amplifier, and these are the vacuum tubes, and these are the coils.

04  The antenna telescopes up along the chimney.

05  Twelve meters.

06  Can you feel the lever?

07  Think of energy as a wave and the transmitter as sending out smooth cycles of those waves.

08  Your voice creates a disruption in those cycles. . .”

 

01  She stops listening.

02  It’s dusty and confusing and mesmerizing all at once.

03  How old must all this be?

04  Ten years?

05  Twenty?

06  “What did you transmit?”

 

01  “The recordings of my brother.

02  The gramophone company in Paris wasn’t interested anymore, but every night I played the ten recordings we’d made, until most of them were worn out.

 

240

01 And his song?”

 

01  “The piano?”

 

01  “Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’.”

02  He touches a metal cylinder with a sphere stuck on top.

03  “I’d just tuck the microphone into the bell of the gramophone, and voila.”

 

01  She leans over the microphone, says, “Hello out there.”

02  He laughs his feathery laugh.

03  “Did it ever reach any children?” she asks.

 

01  “I don’t know.”

 

01  “How far can it transmit, Uncle?”

 

01  “Far.”

 

01  “To England?”

 

01  “Easily.”

 

01  “To Paris?”

 

01  “Yes.

02  But I wasn’t trying to reach England.

03  Or Paris.

04  I thought that if I made the broadcast powerful enough, my brother would hear me.

05  That I could bring him some peace, protect him as he had always protected me.”

 

01  “You’d play your brother’s own voice to him?

02  After he died?”

 

01  “And Debussy.”

 

01  “Did he ever talk back?”

 

01  The attic ticks.

02  What ghosts sidle along the walls right now, trying to overhear?

03  She can almost taste her great-uncle’s fright in the air.

 

01  “No,” he says.

02  “He never did.”

 

 

 

241

01  To My Dear Sister Jutta ―

 

01  Some of the boys whisper that Dr. Hauptmann is connected to very powerful ministers.

02  He won’t answer  ■■■■sensor marks■■■■

03  But he wants me to assist him all the time!

04  I go to his workshop in the evening and he sets me to work on circuits for a radio he is testing.

05  Trigonometry too.

06  He says to be as creative as I can; he says creativity fuels the Reich.

07  He has this big upperclassman, they call him the Giant, stand over me with a stopwatch to test how fast I can calculate.

08  Triangles triangles triangles.

09  I probably do fifty calculations a night.

10  They don’t tell me why.

11  You would not believe the copper wire here; they have ■■■■sensor marks■■■■

12  Everyone gets out the way when the Giant comes through.

 

01  Dr. Hauptmann says we can do anything, build anything.

 

 

242

01  He says the führer has collected scientists to help him control the weather.

02  He says the führer will develop a rocket that can reach Japan.

03  He says the führer will build a city on the moon.

 

01  To My Dear Sister Jutta ―

02    Today in field exercises the commandant told us about Reiner Schicker.

03  He was a young corporal and his captain needed someone to go behind enemy lines to map their defenses.

04  The captain asked for volunteers and Reiner Schicker was the only one who stood up.

05  But the next day Reiner Schicker got caught.

06  The very next day!

07  The Poles captured him and tortured him with electricity.

08  They gave him so much like electricity that his brain liquefied, said the commandant, but before they did, Reiner Schicker set something amazing.

09  He said, “I only regret that I have one life to lose for my country.” 

 

01  Everyone says there is a great test coming.

02  A test harder than all the other tests.

03  Frederic says that story about Reiner Schicker is ■■■■sensor marks■■■■

04  Just being around the Giant ― his name is Frank Volkheimer ― means the other boys treat me with respect.

05  I come up only to his waist practically.

06  He seems a man, not a boy.

 

 

243

01  He posses the loyalty of Reiner Schicker.

02  In his hands and heart and bones.

03  Please tell Frau Elena I am eating lots here but that there no one makes flour cakes like hers or at all really.

04  Tell little Siegfried to look lively.

05  I think of you everyday.

06  Sieg heil.

 

01  To My Dear Sister Jutta ― 

02    Yesterday was Sunday and for field exercises we went into the forest.

03  Most hunters are at the front so the woods are full of marten and deer.

04  The other boys sat in the blinds and talked about magnificent victories and how soon we will cross the Channel and destroy the ■■■■sensor marks■■■■ and Dr. Hauptmann’s dogs came back with three rabbits one for each but Frederick, he came back with about a thousand berries in his shirt and his sleeves were ripped from the brambles and his binocular bag was torn open and I said, You’re going to catch hell and he looked down at his clothes like he’d never seen them before!

05  Frederick knows all the birds just by hearing them.

06  Above the lake we heard skylarks and lapwings and plovers and a harrier hen and probably ten others I’ve forgotten.

07  You would like Frederick I think.

08  He sees what other people don’t.

09  Hope your cough is better and Frau Elena’s too.

10  Seig Heil.

 

 

 

 

PERFUMER

 

244

01  His name is Claude Levitte but everyone calls him Big Claude.

02  For a decade he has run a parfumerie on the rue Vauborel: a straggling business that prospers only when the cod are being salted and the stones of the town itself begin to stink.

 

01  But new opportunities have arrived, and Big Claude is not one to miss an opportunity.

02  He is paying farmers near Cancale to butcher lambs and rabbits; Claude buckles the meat into his wife’s matching vinyl suitcases and carries them himself by trains to Paris.

03  It is easy: some weeks he can make as much as five hundred francs.

04  Supply and demand.

05  There is always paperwork, of course; some official up the chain catches a whiff and wants a percentage.

06  It takes a mind like Claude’s to navigate the complexities of the business.

 

01  Today he is overheating; sweat trickles down his back and sides.

02  Saint-Malo roasts.

03  October is here, and bright cold winds ought to pour off the ocean; leaves ought to tumble down the alleys.

 

 

245

01  But the wind has come and gone.

02  As if deciding it did not like the changes here.

 

01  All afternoon Claude hunkers inside his shop above the hundreds of little bottles of florals and orientals and fougeres in his vitrine, pinks and carmines and baby blues, and no one enters, and an oscillating electric fan blows across his face to the left, then to the right, and he does not read or move at all except to periodically reach a hand beneath his stool and grab a handful of biscuits from a round tin and stuff them into his mouth.

 

01  Around four p.m., a small company of German soldiers strolls up the rue Vauborel.

02  They are lean, salmon-faced, and earnest; they have serious eyes; they carry their weapons barrel-down, slinging them over their shoulders like clarinets.

03  They laugh to one another and seem touched underneath their helmets with a beneficent gold.

 

01  Claude understands that he ought to resent them, but he admires their competence and manners, the clean efficiency with which they move.

02  They always seem to be going somewhere and never doubt that it is the right place to be going.

03  Something his own country has lacked.

 

01  The soldiers turn down the rue St. Philippe and are gone.

02  Claude’s fingers trace ovals across the top of his vitrine.

03  Upstairs his wife runs a vacuum cleaner; he can hear it coursing round and round.

 

246

01  He is nearly asleep when he sees the Parisian who has been living three doors down exit the house of Etienne LeBlanc.

02  A thin, beak-nosed man who skulks outside the telegraph office, whittling little wooden boxes.

 

01  The Parisian walks in the same direction as the German soldiers, placing the heel of one foot against the toe of the other.

02  He reaches the end of the street, scribbles something on a pad, turns one hundred and eighty degrees, and walks back.

03  When he reaches the end of the block, he stares up at the Sajers’ house and makes several more notes.

04  Glancing up, glancing down.

05  Measuring.

06  Biting the eraser of his pencil as though uneasy.

 

01  Big Claude goes to the window.

02  This too could be an opportunity.

03  Occupation authorities will want to know that a stranger is pacing off distances and making drawings of houses.   

04  They will want to know what he looks like, who is sponsoring this activity.

05  Who has sanctioned it.

 

01  This is good.

02  This is excellent.

 

 

 

 

TIME OF THE OSTRICHES

 

247

01  Still they do not return to Paris.

02  Still she does not go outside.

03  Marie-Laure counts everyday she has been shut up in Etienne’s house.

04  One hundred and twenty.

05  One hundred and twenty-one.

06  She thinks of the transmitter in the attic, how it sent her Grandfather’s voice flying over the sea ― 

Consider a single piece glowing in your family’s stove ― sailing like Darwin from Plymouth Sound to Cape Verde to Patagonia to the Falkland Islands, over waves, across borders.

 

01  “Once you’re done with the model,” she asks her father, “does that mean I can go out?”

 

01  His sandpaper does not stop.

 

01  The stories Madame Manec’s visitors bring into the kitchen are terrifying and difficult to believe.

02  Parisian cousins nobody has heard from in decades now write letters begging for capons, hams, hens.

03  The dentist is selling wine through the mail.

04  The perfumer is slaughtering lambs and carrying them in suitcases on the train to Paris, where he sells the meat for an enormous profit.

 

248

01  In Saint-Malo, people are fined for locking their doors, for keeping doves, for hoarding meat.

02  Truffles disappear.

03  Sparkling wine disappears.

04  No eye contact.

05  No chatter in doorways.

06  No sunbathing, no singing, no lovers strolling the ramparts in the evenings ― such rules are not written down, but they may as well be.

07  Icy winds whirl in from the Atlantic and Etienne barricades himself inside his brother’s old room and Marie-Laure endures the slow rain of hours by running her fingers over his seashells down in his study, ordering them by size, by species, by morphology, checking and rechecking their order, trying to make sure she has not missorted a single one.

 

01  Surely she could go out for a half hour? 

02  On the arm of her father?

03  And yet each time her father refuses, a voice echoes up from a chamber of her memory: They’ll probably take the blind girls before they take the gimps.

 

01  Make them do things.

 

01  Outside the city walls, a few military boats cruise to and fro, and the flax is bundled and shipped and woven into rope or cables or parachute cord, and airborne gulls drop oysters or mussels or clams, and the sudden clatter on the roof makes Marie-Laure bolt upright in bed.

 

249

00  The mayor announces a new tax, and some of Madame Manec’s friends mutter that he has sold them out, that they need un homme à poigne, but others ask what the mayor is supposed to do.

01  It becomes known as the time of the ostriches.

 

01  “Do we have our heads in the sand, Madame?

02  Or do they?”

 

01  “Maybe everybody does,” she murmurs.

 

01  Madame Manec has taken to falling asleep at the table beside Marie-Laure.

02  It takes her a long time to carry meals the five flights to Etienne’s room, wheezing the whole way.

03  Most mornings, Madame is baking before anyone is awake; at midmorning she goes out into the city, cigarette in her mouth, to bring cakes or pots of stew to the sick or the stranded, and upstairs Marie-Laure’s father works on the model, sanding, nailing, cutting, measuring, each day working more frenetically than the last, as if against some deadline known only to him.