All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr Page 0,88
floor. Skull splintering. I cannot go home, he thinks. And I cannot stay.
The Disappearance of Harold Bazin
Marie-Laure follows the odor of Madame Manec’s soup through the Place aux Herbes and holds the warm pot outside the alcove behind the library while Madame raps on the door.
Madame says, “Where is Monsieur Bazin?”
“Must have moved on,” says the librarian, though the doubt in his voice is only partially disguised.
“Where could Harold Bazin move to?”
“I’m not sure, Madame Manec. Please. It is cold.”
The door closes. Madame Manec swears. Marie-Laure thinks of Harold Bazin’s stories: lugubrious monsters made of sea foam, mermaids with fishy private parts, the romance of English sieges. “He’ll be back,” says Madame Manec, as much to herself as to Marie-Laure. But the next morning Harold Bazin is not back. Or the next.
Only half the group attends the following meeting.
“Do they think he was helping us?” whispers Madame Hébrard.
“Was he helping us?”
“I thought he was carrying messages.”
“What sort of messages?”
“It is getting too dangerous.”
Madame Manec paces; Marie-Laure can almost feel the heat of her frustration from across the room. “Leave, then.” Her voice smolders. “All of you.”
“Don’t be rash,” says Madame Ruelle. “We’ll take a break, a week or two. Wait for things to settle.”
Harold Bazin with his copper mask and boyish avidity and his breath like crushed insects. Where, Marie-Laure wonders, do they take people? The “Gasthaus” her father was taken to? Where they write letters home about wonderful food and mythical trees? The baker’s wife claims they’re sent to camps in the mountains. The grocer’s wife says they’re sent to nylon factories in Russia. It seems as likely to Marie-Laure that the people just disappear. The soldiers throw a bag over whomever they want to remove, run electricity through him, and then that person is gone, vanished. Expelled to some other world.
The city, thinks Marie-Laure, is slowly being remade into the model upstairs. Streets sucked empty one by one. Each time she steps outside, she becomes aware of all the windows above her. The quiet is fretful, unnatural. It’s what a mouse must feel, she thinks, as it steps from its hole into the open blades of a meadow, never knowing what shadow might come cruising above.
Everything Poisoned
New silk banners hang above the refectory tables, ablaze with slogans.
They say, Disgrace is not to fall but to lie.
They say, Be slim and slender, as fast as a greyhound, as tough as leather, as hard as Krupp steel.
Every few weeks another instructor vanishes, sucked up into the engine of the war. New instructors, elderly townsmen of unreliable sobriety and disposition, are brought in. All of them, Werner notices, are in some way broken: they limp, or are blind in one eye, or their faces are lopsided from strokes or the previous war. The cadets show less respect to the new instructors, who in turn have shorter tempers, and soon the school feels to Werner like a grenade with its pin pulled.
Strange things start happening with the electricity. It goes out for fifteen minutes, then surges. Clocks run fast, lightbulbs brighten, flare, and pop, and send a soft rain of glass falling into the corridors. Days of darkness ensue, the switches dead, the grid empty. The bunk rooms and showers become icy; for lighting, the caretaker resorts to torches and candles. All the gasoline is going to the war, and few cars come trundling through the school gates; food is delivered by the same withered mule, its ribs showing as it drags its cart.
More than once Werner slices the sausage on his plate to find pink worms squirming inside. The uniforms of the new cadets are stiffer and cheaper than his own; no longer do they have access to live ammunition for marksmanship. Werner would not be surprised if Bastian started handing out rocks and sticks.
And yet all the news is good. We are at the gates to the Caucasus, proclaims Hauptmann’s radio, we have taken oil fields, we will take Svalbard. We move with astounding speed. Five thousand seven hundred Russians killed, forty-five Germans lost.
Every six or seven days, the same two pallid casualty assistance officers enter the refectory, and four hundred faces go ashen from the effort of not turning to watch. The boys move only their eyes, only their thoughts, tracking in their minds the passage of the two officers as they move between tables, seeking out the next boy whose father has been killed.
The cadet they stop behind often tries to pretend that he doesn’t notice their presence.