All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr Page 0,117
and her mouth is stretched back in an oval of surprise and it is the girl from the swings and she cannot be over seven years old.
Werner waits for the child to blink. Blink, he thinks, blink blink blink. Already Volkheimer is closing the closet door, though it won’t close all the way because the girl’s foot is sticking out of it, and Bernd is covering the woman on the bed with a blanket, and how could Neumann Two not have known, but of course he didn’t, because that is how things are with Neumann Two, with everybody in this unit, in this army, in this world, they do as they’re told, they get scared, they move about with only themselves in mind. Name me someone who does not.
Neumann One shoulders out, something rancid in his eyes. Neumann Two stands there with his new haircut, his fingers playing senseless trills on the stock of his rifle. “Why did they hide?” he says.
Volkheimer tucks the child’s foot gently back inside the closet. “There’s no radio here,” he says, and shuts the door. Threads of nausea reach up around Werner’s windpipe.
Outside, the streetlamps shudder in a late wind. Clouds ride west over the city.
Werner climbs into the Opel, feeling as if the buildings are rearing around him, growing taller and warping. He sits with his forehead against the listening decks and is sick between his shoes.
So really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.
Bernd climbs in and pulls the door shut and the Opel comes to life, tilting as it rounds a corner, and Werner can feel the streets rising around them, whorling slowly into an engulfing spiral, into the center of which the truck will arc downward, tracing deeper and deeper all the time.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
On the floor outside Marie-Laure’s bedroom door waits something big wrapped in newsprint and twine. From the stairwell, Etienne says, “Happy sixteenth birthday.”
She tears away the paper. Two books, one stacked atop the other.
Three years and four months have passed since Papa left Saint-Malo. One thousand two hundred and twenty-four days. Almost four years have passed since she has felt Braille, and yet the letters rise from her memory as if she left off reading yesterday.
She throws herself at her great-uncle and hangs her arms around his neck.
“You said you never got to finish. I thought, rather than my reading it to you, maybe you could read it to me?”
“But how—?”
“Monsieur Hébrard, the bookseller.”
“When nothing is available? And they’re so expensive—”
“You have made a lot of friends in this town, Marie-Laure.”
She stretches out on the floor and opens to the first page. “I’m going to start it all over again. From the beginning.”
“Perfect.”
“ ‘Chapter One,’ ” she reads. “ ‘A Shifting Reef.’ ” The year 1866 was marked by a strange event, an unexplainable occurrence, which is undoubtedly still fresh in everyone’s memory . . . She gallops through the first ten pages, the story coming back: worldwide curiosity about what must be a mythical sea monster, famed marine biologist Professor Pierre Aronnax setting off to discover the truth. Is it monster or moving reef? Something else? Any page now, Aronnax will plunge over the rail of the frigate; not long afterward, he and the Canadian harpooner Ned Land will find themselves on Captain Nemo’s submarine.
Beyond the carton-covered window, rain sifts down from a platinum-colored sky. A dove scrabbles along the gutter calling hoo hoo hoo. Out in the harbor a sturgeon makes a single leap like a silver horse and then is gone.
Telegram
A new garrison commander has arrived on the Emerald Coast, a colonel. Trim, smart, efficient. Won medals at Stalingrad. Wears a monocle. Invariably accompanied by a gorgeous French secretary-interpreter who may or may not have consorted with Russian royalty.
He is average-sized and prematurely gray, but by some contrivance of carriage and posture, he makes the men who stand before him feel smaller. The rumor is that this colonel ran an entire automobile company before the war. That he is a man who understands the power of the German soil, who feels its dark prehistoric vigor thudding in his very cells. That he will never acquiesce.
Every night he sends telegrams from the district office in Saint-Malo. Among the sixteen official communiqués sent on the thirtieth of April, 1944, is a missive to Berlin.
= NOTICE OF TERRORIST BROADCASTS IN CÔTES D’ARMOR WE BELIEVE SAINT-LUNAIRE OR DINARD OR SAINT-MALO OR CANCALE = REQUEST ASSISTANCE TO LOCATE AND ELIMINATE