All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr Page 0,33

her on his back. They pass the smashed gatehouse and the crashed car and turn not east toward the center of Evreux but west. Figures bicycle past. Pinched faces streaked with suspicion or fear or both. Perhaps it is the locksmith’s own eyes that have been streaked.

“Not so quickly,” begs Marie-Laure.

They rest in weeds twenty paces off the road. There is only plunging night and owls calling from the trees and bats straining insects above a roadside ditch. A diamond, the locksmith reminds himself, is only a piece of carbon compressed in the bowels of the earth for eons and driven to the surface in a volcanic pipe. Someone facets it, someone polishes it. It can harbor a curse no more than a leaf can, or a mirror, or a life. There is only chance in this world, chance and physics.

Anyway, what he carries is nothing more than a piece of glass. A diversion.

Behind him, over Evreux, a wall of clouds ignites once, twice. Lightning? On the road ahead, he can make out several acres of uncut hay and the gentle profiles of unlit farm buildings—a house and barn. No movement.

“Marie, I see a hotel.”

“You said the hotels were full.”

“This one looks friendly. Come. It’s not far.”

Again he carries his daughter. One more half mile. The windows of the house stay unlit as they approach. Its barn sits a hundred yards beyond. He tries to listen above the rush of blood in his ears. No dogs, no torches. Probably the farmers too have fled. He sets Marie-Laure in front of the barn doors and knocks softly and waits and knocks again.

The padlock is a brand-new single-latch Burguet; with his tools he picks it easily. Inside are oats and water buckets and horseflies flying sleepy loops but no horses. He opens a stall and helps Marie-Laure into the corner and pulls off her shoes.

“Voilà,” he says. “One of the guests has just brought his horses into the lobby, so it may smell for a moment. But now the porters are hurrying him out. See, there he goes. Goodbye, horse! Go sleep in the stables, please!”

Her expression is faraway. Lost.

A vegetable garden waits behind the house. In the dimness he can make out roses, leeks, lettuces. Strawberries, most still green. Tender white carrots with black earth clotted in their fibers. Nothing stirs: no farmer materializes in a window with a rifle. The locksmith brings back a shirtful of vegetables and fills a tin bucket at a spigot and eases shut the barn door and feeds his daughter in the dark. Then he folds his coat, lays her head on it, and wipes her face with his shirt.

Two cigarettes left. Inhale, exhale.

Walk the paths of logic. Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution. Every lock its key. You can go back to Paris or you can stay here or you can go on.

From outside comes the soft hooting of owls. Distant grumbling of thunder or ordnance or both. He says, “This hotel is very cheap, ma chérie. The innkeeper behind the desk said our room was forty francs a night but only twenty francs if we made our own bed.” He listens to her breathe. “So I said, ‘Oh, we can make our own bed.’ And he said, ‘Right, I’ll get you some nails and wood.’ ”

Marie-Laure still does not smile. “Now we go find Uncle Etienne?”

“Yes, Marie.”

“Who is seventy-six percent crazy?”

“He was with your grandfather—his brother—when he died. In the war. ‘Got a bit of gas in the head’ is how they used to say it. Afterward he saw things.”

“What kind of things?”

Creaking rumble of thunder closer now. The barn quakes lightly.

“Things that were not there.”

Spiders draw their webs between rafters. Moths flap against the windows. It starts to rain.

Entrance Exam

Entrance exams for the National Political Institutes of Education are held in Essen, eighteen miles south of Zollverein, inside a sweltering dance hall where a trio of truck-sized radiators is plugged in to the back wall. One of the radiators clangs and steams all day despite various attempts to shut it down. War ministry flags as big as tanks hang from the rafters.

There are one hundred recruits, all boys. A school representative in a black uniform arranges them in ranks four deep. Medals chime on his chest as he paces. “You are,” he declares, “attempting to enter the most elite schools in the world. The exams will last eight days. We will take only the purest, only the strongest.”