All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr Page 0,40
of six daughters, sent by train to Redon.
“Everybody has misplaced someone,” murmurs Madame Manec, and Marie-Laure’s father switches off the wireless, and the tubes click as they cool. Upstairs, faintly, the same voice keeps reading names. Or is it her imagination? She hears Madame Manec stand and collect the bowls and her father exhale cigarette smoke as though it is very heavy in his lungs and he is glad to be rid of it.
That night she and her father wind up the twisting staircase and go to bed side by side on the same lumpy bed in the same sixth-floor bedroom with the fraying silk wallpaper. Her father fusses with his rucksack, with the door latch, with his matches. Soon enough there is the familiar smell of his cigarettes: Gauloises bleues. She hears wood pop and groan as the two halves of the window pull open. The welcome hiss of wind washes in, or maybe it’s the sea and the wind, her ears unable to unbraid the two. With it come the scents of salt and hay and fish markets and distant marshes and absolutely nothing that smells to her of war.
“Can we visit the ocean tomorrow, Papa?”
“Probably not tomorrow.”
“Where is Uncle Etienne?”
“I expect he’s in his room on the fifth floor.”
“Seeing things that are not there?”
“We are lucky to have him, Marie.”
“Lucky to have Madame Manec too. She’s a genius with food, isn’t she, Papa? She is maybe just a little bit better at cooking than you are?”
“Just a very little bit better.”
Marie-Laure is glad to hear a smile enter his voice. But beneath it she can sense his thoughts fluttering like trapped birds. “What does it mean, Papa, they’ll occupy us?”
“It means they’ll park their trucks in the squares.”
“Will they make us speak their language?”
“They might make us advance our clocks by one hour.”
The house creaks. Gulls cry. He lights another cigarette.
“Is it like occupation, Papa? Like the sort of job a person does?”
“It’s like military control, Marie. That’s enough questions for now.”
Quiet. Twenty heartbeats. Thirty.
“How can one country make another change its clocks? What if everybody refuses?”
“Then a lot of people will be early. Or late.”
“Remember our apartment, Papa? With my books and our model and all those pinecones on the windowsill?”
“Of course.”
“I lined up the pinecones largest to smallest.”
“They’re still there.”
“Do you think so?”
“I know so.”
“You do not know so.”
“I do not know so. I believe so.”
“Are German soldiers climbing into our beds right now, Papa?”
“No.”
Marie-Laure tries to lie very still. She can almost hear the machinery of her father’s mind churning inside his skull. “It will be okay,” she whispers. Her hand finds his forearm. “We will stay here awhile and then we will go back to our apartment and the pinecones will be right where we left them and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea will be on the floor of the key pound where we left it and no one will be in our beds.”
The distant anthem of the sea. The clopping of someone’s boot heels on cobbles far below. She wants very badly for her father to say, Yes, that’s it absolutely, ma chérie, but he says nothing.
Don’t Tell Lies
He cannot concentrate on schoolwork or simple conversations or Frau Elena’s chores. Every time he shuts his eyes, some vision of the school at Schulpforta overmasters him: vermilion flags, muscular horses, gleaming laboratories. The best boys in Germany. At certain moments he sees himself as an emblem of possibility to which all eyes have turned. Though at other moments, flickering in front of him, he sees the big kid from the entrance exams: his face gone bloodless atop the platform high above the dance hall. How he fell. How no one moved to help him.
Why can’t Jutta be happy for him? Why, even at the moment of his escape, must some inexplicable warning murmur in a distant region of his mind?
Martin Sachse says, “Tell us again about the hand grenades!”
Siegfried Fischer says, “And the falconries!”
Three times he readies his argument and three times Jutta turns on a heel and strides away. Hour after hour she helps Frau Elena with the smaller children or walks to the market or finds some other excuse to be helpful, to be busy, to be out.
“She won’t listen,” Werner tells Frau Elena.
“Keep trying.”
Before he knows it, there’s only one day before his departure. He wakes before dawn and finds Jutta asleep in her cot in the girls’ dormitory. Her arms are wrapped around her head and her wool