All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr Page 0,71
going out. “Tighten up your ties, won’t you?” She applies powder beneath Frederick’s eyes and they walk to a bistro, the kind of restaurant Werner has never dreamed of entering, and a boy in a white jacket, barely older than they are, brings more wine.
A constant stream of diners come to their table to shake Werner’s and Frederick’s hands and ask Frederick’s mother in low sycophantic voices about her husband’s latest advancement. Werner notices a girl in the corner, radiant, dancing by herself, throwing her face to the ceiling. Eyes closed. The food is rich, and every now and then Frederick’s mother laughs, and Frederick absently touches the makeup on his face while his mother says, “Well, Fredde has all the best there at that school, all the best,” and seemingly every minute some new face comes along and kisses Frederick’s mother on both cheeks and whispers in her ear. When Werner overhears Frederick’s mother say to a woman, “Oh, the Schwartzenberger crone will be gone by year’s end, then we’ll have the top floor, du wirst schon sehen,” he glances at Frederick, whose smudged eyeglasses have gone opaque in the candlelight, whose makeup looks strange and lewd now, as though it has intensified the bruises rather than concealed them, and a feeling of great uneasiness overtakes him. He hears Rödel swing the hose, the smack of it across Frederick’s upflung palms. He hears the voices of the boys in his Kameradschaften back in Zollverein sing, Live faithfully, fight bravely, and die laughing. The bistro is overcrowded; everyone’s mouths move too quickly; the woman talking to Frederick’s mother is wearing a nauseating quantity of perfume; and in the watery light it seems suddenly as if the scarf trailing from the dancing girl’s neck is a noose.
Frederick says, “Are you all right?”
“Fine, it’s delicious,” but Werner feels something inside him screw tighter, tighter.
On the way home, Frederick and his mother walk ahead. She loops her slender arm through his and talks to him in a low voice. Fredde this, Fredde that. The street is empty, the windows dead, the electric signs switched off. Innumerable shops, millions sleeping in beds around them, and yet where are they all? As they reach Frederick’s block, a woman in a dress, leaning against a building, bends over and vomits on the sidewalk.
In the town house, Frederick pulls on pajamas made of jelly-green silk and folds his glasses on the nightstand and climbs barefoot into his brass childhood bed. Werner gets into a trundle bed that Frederick’s mother has apologized for three separate times, although its mattress is more comfortable than any he has slept on in his life.
The building falls quiet. Model automobiles glimmer on Frederick’s shelves.
“Do you ever wish,” whispers Werner, “that you didn’t have to go back?”
“Father needs me to be at Schulpforta. Mother too. It doesn’t matter what I want.”
“Of course it matters. I want to be an engineer. And you want to study birds. Be like that American painter in the swamps. Why else do any of this if not to become who we want to be?”
A stillness in the room. Out there in the trees beyond Frederick’s window hangs an alien light.
“Your problem, Werner,” says Frederick, “is that you still believe you own your life.”
When Werner wakes, it’s well past dawn. His head aches and his eyeballs feel heavy. Frederick is already dressed, wearing trousers, an ironed shirt, and a necktie, kneeling against the window with his nose against the glass. “Gray wagtail.” He points. Werner looks past him into the naked lindens.
“Doesn’t look like much, does he?” murmurs Frederick. “Hardly a couple of ounces of feathers and bones. But that bird can fly to Africa and back. Powered by bugs and worms and desire.”
The wagtail hops from twig to twig. Werner rubs his aching eyes. It’s just a bird.
“Ten thousand years ago,” whispers Frederick, “they came through here in the millions. When this place was a garden, one endless garden from end to end.”
He Is Not Coming Back
Marie-Laure wakes and thinks she hears the shuffle of Papa’s shoes, the clink of his key ring. Fourth floor fifth floor sixth. His fingers brush the doorknob. His body radiates a faint but palpable heat in the chair beside her. His little tools rasp across wood. He smells of glue and sandpaper and Gauloises bleues.
But it is only the house groaning. The sea throwing foam against rocks. Deceits of the mind.
On the twentieth morning without any word from her father, Marie-Laure does