All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr Page 0,147

finish marching back and forth above their heads, until all they have to do is push open the door and shift some stones aside and the house has become a ruin beside the sea? Until he can hold her fingers in his palms and lead her out into the sunshine? He would walk anywhere to make it happen, bear anything; in a year or three years or ten, France and Germany would not mean what they meant now; they could leave the house and walk to a tourists’ restaurant and order a simple meal together and eat it in silence, the comfortable kind of silence lovers are supposed to share.

“Do you know,” Marie-Laure asks in a gentle voice, “why he was here? That man upstairs?”

“Because of the radio?” Even as he says it, he wonders.

“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe that’s why.”

In another minute they’re asleep.

Cease-fire

Gritty summer light spills through the open trapdoor into the cellar. It might already be afternoon. No guns firing. For a few heartbeats, Werner watches her sleep.

Then they hurry. He cannot find the shoes she asks for, but he finds a pair of men’s loafers in a closet and helps her put them on. Over his uniform he pulls on some of Etienne’s tweed trousers, along with a shirt whose sleeves are too long. If they run into Germans, he will speak only French, say he is helping her leave the city. If they run into Americans, he will say he is deserting.

“There will be a collection point,” he says, “somewhere they’re gathering refugees,” though he’s not sure he says it correctly. He finds a white pillowcase in an upturned cabinet and folds it into her coat pocket. “When it comes time, hold this as high as you can.”

“I will try. And my cane?”

“Here.”

In the foyer, they hesitate. Neither sure what waits on the other side of the door. He remembers the overheated dance hall from the entrance exams four years before: ladder bolted to the wall, crimson flag with its white circle and black cross below. You step forward; you jump.

Outside, mountains of rubble hunker everywhere. Chimneys stand with their bricks raw to the light. Smoke troweled across the sky. He knows that the shells have been coming from the east, that six days ago the Americans were almost to Paramé, so he moves Marie-Laure in that direction.

Any moment they will be seen, by either Americans or his own army, and made to do something. Work, join, confess, die. From somewhere comes the sound of fire: the sound of dried roses being crumbled in a fist. No other sounds; no motors, no airplanes, no distant pop of gunfire or howling of wounded men or yapping of dogs. He takes her hand to help her over the piles. No shells fall and no rifles crack and the light is soft and shot through with ash.

Jutta, he thinks, I finally listened.

For two blocks they see nobody. Maybe Volkheimer is eating—this is what Werner would like to imagine, gigantic Volkheimer eating by himself at a little table with a view of the sea.

“It’s so quiet.”

Her voice like a bright, clear window of sky. Her face a field of freckles. He thinks: I don’t want to let you go.

“Are they watching us?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

A block ahead, he sees movement: three women carrying bundles. Marie-Laure pulls at his sleeve. “What is this cross street?”

“The rue des Lauriers.”

“Come,” she says, and walks with her cane tapping back and forth in her right hand. They turn right and left, past a walnut tree like a giant charred toothpick jammed into the ground, past two crows picking at something unidentifiable, until they reach the base of the ramparts. Airborne creepers of ivy hang from an archway over a narrow alley. Far to his right, Werner can see a woman in blue taffeta drag a great overstuffed suitcase over a curbstone. A boy in pants meant for a younger child follows, beret thrown back on his head, some kind of shiny jacket on.

“There are civilians leaving, mademoiselle. Shall I call to them?”

“I need only a moment.” She leads him deeper down the alley. Sweet, unfettered ocean air pours through a gap in the wall he cannot see: the air throbs with it.

At the end of the alley they reach a narrow gate. She reaches inside her coat and produces a key. “Is the tide high?”

He can just see through the gate into a low space, bounded by a grate on the