All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr Page 0,41

blanket is twisted around her midsection and her pillow is jammed into the crack between mattress and wall—even in sleep, a tableau of friction. Above her bed are papered her fantastical pencil drawings of Frau Elena’s village, of Paris with a thousand white towers beneath whirling flocks of birds.

He says her name.

She twines herself tighter into her blanket.

“Will you walk with me?”

To his surprise, she sits up. They step outside before anyone else is awake. He leads her without speaking. They climb one fence, then another. Jutta’s untied shoelaces trail behind her. Thistles bite their knees. The rising sun makes a pinhole on the horizon.

They stop at the edge of an irrigation canal. In winters past, Werner used to tow her in their wagon to this very spot, and they would watch skaters race along the frozen canal, farmers with blades fixed to their feet and frost caked in their beards, five or six rushing by all at once, tightly packed, in the midst of an eight- or nine-mile race between towns. The look in the skaters’ eyes was of horses who have run a long way, and it was always exciting for Werner to see them, to feel the air disturbed by their speed, to hear their skates clapping along, then fading—a sensation as if his soul might tear free of his body and go sparking off with them. But as soon as they’d continued around the bend and left behind only the white etchings of their skates in the ice, the thrill would fade, and he’d tow Jutta back to Children’s House feeling lonely and forsaken and more trapped in his life than before.

He says, “No skaters came last winter.”

His sister gazes into the ditch. Her eyes are mauve. Her hair is snarled and untamable and perhaps even whiter than his. Schnee.

She says, “None’ll come this year either.”

The mine complex is a smoldering black mountain range behind her. Even now Werner can hear a mechanical drumbeat thudding in the distance, first shift going down in the elevators as the owl shift comes up—all those boys with tired eyes and soot-stained faces rising in the elevators to meet the sun—and for a moment he apprehends a huge and terrible presence looming just beyond the morning.

“I know you’re angry—”

“You’ll become just like Hans and Herribert.”

“I won’t.”

“Spend enough time with boys like that and you will.”

“So you want me to stay? Go down in the mines?”

They watch a bicyclist far down the path. Jutta clamps her hands in her armpits. “You know what I used to listen to? On our radio? Before you ruined it?”

“Hush, Jutta. Please.”

“Broadcasts from Paris. They’d say the opposite of everything Deutschlandsender says. They’d say we were devils. That we were committing atrocities. Do you know what atrocities means?”

“Please, Jutta.”

“Is it right,” Jutta says, “to do something only because everyone else is doing it?”

Doubts: slipping in like eels. Werner shoves them back. Jutta is barely twelve years old, still a child.

“I’ll write you letters every week. Twice a week if I can. You don’t have to show them to Frau Elena if you don’t want to.”

Jutta shuts her eyes.

“It’s not forever, Jutta. Two years, maybe. Half the boys who get admitted don’t manage to graduate. But maybe I’ll learn something; maybe they’ll teach me to be a proper engineer. Maybe I can learn to fly an airplane, like little Siegfried says. Don’t shake your head, we’ve always wanted to see the inside of an airplane, haven’t we? I’ll fly us west, you and me, Frau Elena too if she wants. Or we could take a train. We’ll ride through forests and villages de montagnes, all those places Frau Elena talked about when we were small. Maybe we could ride all the way to Paris.”

The burgeoning light. The tender hissing of the grass. Jutta opens her eyes but doesn’t look at him. “Don’t tell lies. Lie to yourself, Werner, but don’t lie to me.”

Ten hours later, he’s on a train.

Etienne

For three days she does not meet her great-uncle. Then, feeling her way to the toilet on the fourth morning after their arrival, she steps on something small and hard. She crouches and locates it with her fingers.

Whorled and smooth. A sculpture of vertical folds incised by a tapering spiral. The aperture broad and oval. She whispers, “A whelk.”

One stride in front of the first shell, she finds another. Then a third and a fourth. The trail of seashells arcs past the toilet and down a flight to the