All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr Page 0,136
behind, and come with me now.”
“Why?”
“Your uncle knows why. Everybody knows why. It’s not safe here. Come along.”
“But you said the gates to the city are locked.”
“Yes, I did, girl, and that’s enough questions for now.” He sighs. “You are not safe, and I am here to help.”
“Uncle says our cellar is safe. He says if it has lasted for five hundred years, it will last a few more nights.”
The perfumer clears his throat. She imagines him extending his thick neck to look into the house, the coat on the rack, the crumbs of bread on the kitchen table. Everyone checking to see what everyone else has. Her uncle could not have asked the perfumer to escort her to a shelter—when is the last time Etienne has spoken to Claude Levitte? Again she thinks of the model upstairs, the stone inside. She hears Dr. Geffard’s voice: That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much.
“Houses are burning at Paramé, mademoiselle. They’re scuttling ships at the port, they’re shelling the cathedral, and there’s no water at the hospital. The doctors are washing their hands in wine. Wine!” The edges of Monsieur Levitte’s voice flutter. She remembers Madame Manec saying once that every time a theft was reported in town, Monsieur Levitte would go to bed with his billfold stuffed between his buttocks.
Marie-Laure says, “I will stay.”
“Christ, girl, must I force you?”
She remembers the German pacing outside Harold Bazin’s gate, the edge of his newspaper rattling the bars, and closes the door a fraction. Someone has put the perfumer up to this. “Surely,” she says, “my great-uncle and I are not the only people sleeping beneath our own roof tonight.”
She tries her best to look impassive. Monsieur Levitte’s smell is overpowering.
“Mademoiselle.” Pleading now. “Be reasonable. Come with me and leave everything behind.”
“You may talk to my great-uncle when he returns.” And she bolts the door.
She can hear him standing out there. Working out some cost-benefit analysis. Then he turns and recedes down the street, dragging his fear like a cart behind him. Marie-Laure bends beside the hall table and finds the thread and resets the trip wire. What could he have seen? A coat, half of a loaf of bread? Etienne will be pleased. Out past the kitchen window, swifts swoop for insects, and the filaments of a spiderweb catch the light and shine for an instant and are gone.
And yet: what if the perfumer was telling the truth?
The daylight dulls to gold. A few crickets down in the cellar begin their song: a rhythmic kree-kree, evening in August, and Marie-Laure hikes her tattered stockings and goes into the kitchen and tears another hunk from Madame Ruelle’s loaf.
Leaflets
Before dark, the Austrians serve pork kidneys with whole tomatoes on hotel china, a single silver bee etched on the rim of every plate. Everyone sits on sandbags or ammunition boxes, and Bernd falls asleep over his bowl, and Volkheimer talks in the corner with the lieutenant about the radio in the cellar, and around the perimeter of the room the Austrians chew steadily beneath their steel helmets. Brisk, experienced men. Men who do not doubt their purpose.
When Werner is done with his food, he lets himself into the topfloor suite and stands in the hexagonal bathtub. He nudges the shutter, and it opens a few centimeters. The evening air is a benediction. Below the window, on one of the bastioned traces on the seaward side of the hotel, waits the big 88. Beyond the gun, beyond the embrasures, ramparts plunge forty feet to the green and white plumes of surf. To his left waits the city, gray and dense. Far in the east, a red glow rises from some battle just out of sight. The Americans have them pinned against the sea.
It seems to Werner that in the space between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other. He thinks of the girl who may or may not be in the city behind him. He envisions her running her cane along the runnels. Facing the world with her barren eyes, her wild hair, her bright face.
At least he protected the secrets of her house. At least he kept her safe.
New orders, signed by the garrison commander himself, have been posted on doors and market stalls and lampposts. No person must attempt to leave the old city. No one must walk in the streets without special authority.