All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr Page 0,140

runs out of fingers as she counts.

For closing her eyes while being addressed.

For hoarding crusts.

For attempting to enter the park.

For having inflamed hands.

For asking for a cigarette.

For a failure of imagination and in the darkness, it feels as if  Werner has reached bottom, as if he has been whirling deeper all this time, like the Nautilus sucked under the maelstrom, like his father descending into the pits: a one-way dive from Zollverein past Schulpforta, past the horrors of Russia and Ukraine, past the mother and daughter in Vienna, his ambition and shame becoming one and the same, to the nadir in this basement on the rim of the continent where the apparition chants nonsense—Frau Schwartzenberger walks toward him, transforming herself as she approaches from woman to girl—her hair becomes red again, her skin smooths, a seven-year-old girl presses her face up against his, and in the center of her forehead he can see a hole blacker than the blackness around him, at the bottom of which teems a dark city full of souls, ten thousand, five hundred thousand, all these faces staring up from alleys, from windows, from smoldering parks, and he hears thunder.

Lightning.

Artillery.

The girl evaporates.

The ground quakes. The organs inside his body shake. The beams groan. Then the slow trickle of dust and the shallow, defeated breaths of Volkheimer a meter away.

Music #1

Sometime after midnight on August 13, after surviving in her great-uncle’s attic for five days, Marie-Laure holds a record with her left hand while she runs the fingers of her right gently through its grooves, reconstructing the whole song in her head. Each rise and fall. Then she slots the record on the spindle of Etienne’s electrophone.

No water for a day and a half. No food for two. The attic smells of heat and dust and confinement and her own urine in the shaving bowl in the corner.

We’ll die together, Ned my friend.

The siege, it seems, will never end. Masonry crashes into the streets; the city falls to pieces; still this one house does not fall.

She takes the unopened can out of her great-uncle’s coat pocket and sets it in the center of the attic floor. For so long she has saved it. Maybe because it offers some last tie to Madame Manec. Maybe because if she opens it and finds it spoiled, the loss will kill her.

She places the can and brick beneath the piano bench, where she knows she can find them again. Then she double-checks the record on the spindle. Lowers the arm, places the needle at the outside edge. Finds the microphone switch with her left hand, the transmitter switch with her right.

She is going to turn it up as loud as it will go. If the German is in the house, he will hear. He’ll hear piano music draining down through the upper stories and cock his head, and then he’ll rove the sixth floor like a slavering demon. Eventually he’ll set his ear to the doors of the wardrobe, where it will be louder still.

What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models. Mazes in the nodules on murex shells and in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.

She places the microphone into the bell-shaped speaker of the electrophone, switches on the record player, and the plate begins to spin. The attic crackles. In her mind she walks a path in the Jardin des Plantes, the air golden, the wind green, the long fingers of willows drifting across her shoulders. Ahead is her father; he extends a hand, waiting.

The piano starts to play.

Marie-Laure reaches beneath the bench and locates the knife. She crawls along the floor to the top of the seven-rung ladder and sits with her feet dangling and the diamond inside the house in her pocket and the knife in her fist.

She says, “Come and get me.”

Music #2

Beneath the stars over the city, everything sleeps. Gunners sleep, nuns in a crypt beneath the cathedral sleep, children in old corsairs’ cellars sleep in the laps of sleeping mothers. The doctor in the basement of the Hôtel-Dieu sleeps. Wounded Germans in the tunnels below the fort of La Cité sleep. Behind the walls of Fort National, Etienne sleeps. Everything sleeps save the