All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr Page 0,84

snails. Hundreds of them. Thousands.

“So many,” she whispers.

“I don’t know why. Maybe because they’re safe from gulls? Here, feel this, I’ll turn it over.” Hundreds of tiny, squirming hydraulic feet beneath a horny, ridged top: a sea star. “Blue mussels here. And here’s a dead stone crab, can you feel his claw? Watch your head now.”

The surf breaks nearby; water purls past her shoes. Marie-Laure wades forward; the floor of the room is sandy, the water barely ankle-deep. From what she can tell, it’s a low grotto, maybe four yards long and half as wide, shaped like a loaf of bread. At the far end is a thick grate through which lustrous, clear sea wind washes. Her fingertips discover barnacles, weeds, a thousand more snails. “What is this place?”

“Remember I told you about the dogs of the watch? A long time ago, city kennel keepers would keep the mastiffs in here, dogs as big as horses. At night a curfew bell would ring, and the dogs would be let loose onto the beaches to eat any sailor who dared come ashore. Somewhere beneath those mussels is a stone with the date 1165 scratched into it.”

“But the water?”

“Even at the highest tides, it doesn’t get more than waist-deep. Back then the tides might have been lower. We used to play in here as boys. Me and your grandfather. Sometimes your great-uncle too.”

The tide flows past their feet. Everywhere mussels click and sigh. She thinks of the wild old seamen who lived in this town, smugglers and pirates, sailing over the dark seas, winding their ships between ten thousand reefs.

“Harold, we should go now,” calls Madame Manec, her voice echoing. “This is no place for a young girl.”

Marie-Laure calls, “It’s fine, Madame.” Hermit crabs. Anemones sending out a tiny jet of seawater when she pokes them. Galaxies of snails. A story of life immanent in each.

Finally Madame Manec coaxes them out of the kennel, and Crazy Harold leads Marie-Laure back through the gate and locks it behind them. Before they reach the Place Broussais, Madame Manec walking out front, he taps Marie-Laure’s shoulder. His whisper comes in her left ear; his breath smells like crushed insects. “Could you find that place again, do you think?”

“I think so.”

He puts something iron in her hand. “Do you know what it is?”

Marie-Laure closes her fist. “It’s a key.”

Intoxicated

Every day there is word of another victory, another advance. Russia collapses like an accordion. In October the student body gathers around a big wireless to listen to the führer declare Operation Typhoon. German companies plant flags miles from Moscow; Russia will be theirs.

Werner is fifteen. A new boy sleeps in Frederick’s bed. Sometimes at night, Werner sees Frederick when he is not there. His face appears over the edge of the upper bunk, or his silhouette presses binoculars to the windowpane. Frederick: who did not die but did not recover. Broken jaw, cracked skull, brain trauma. No one was punished, no one questioned. A blue automobile came to the school and Frederick’s mother got out and walked into the commandant’s residence and emerged soon afterward, tilted against the weight of Frederick’s duffel bag, looking very small. She climbed back into the car and it drove away.

Volkheimer is gone; there are stories that he has become a fearsome sergeant in the Wehrmacht. That he led a platoon into the last town on the road to Moscow. Hacked off the fingers of dead Russians and smoked them in a pipe.

The newest crop of cadets grow wild in their urgency to prove themselves. They sprint, shout, hurl themselves over obstacles; in field exercises they play a game where ten boys get red armbands and ten get black. The game ends when one team has all twenty.

It seems to Werner as if all the boys around him are intoxicated. As if, at every meal, the cadets fill their tin cups not with the cold mineralized water of Schulpforta but with a spirit that leaves them glazed and dazzled, as if they ward off a vast and inevitable tidal wave of anguish only by staying forever drunk on rigor and exercise and gleaming boot leather. The eyes of the most bullheaded boys radiate a shining determination: every ounce of their attention has been trained to ferret out weakness. They study Werner with suspicion when he returns from Hauptmann’s lab. They do not trust that he’s an orphan, that he’s often alone, that his accent carries a whisper of the French he learned