Weakest
The warrant officer in charge of field exercises is the commandant, an overzealous schoolmaster named Bastian with an expansive walk and a round belly and a coat quivering with war medals. His face is scarred from smallpox, and his shoulders look as though they’ve been hewn from soft clay. He wears hobnailed jackboots every second of every day, and the cadets joke that he kicked his way out of the womb with them.
Bastian demands that they memorize maps, study the angle of the sun, cut their own belts from cowhide. Every afternoon, whatever the weather, he stands in a field bawling state-sown dicta: “Prosperity depends on ferocity. The only things that keep your precious grandmothers in their tea and cookies are the fists at the end of your arms.”
An antique pistol dangles from his belt; the most eager cadets look up at him with shining eyes. To Werner, he looks capable of severe and chronic violence.
“The corps is a body,” he explains, twirling a length of rubber hose so that its tip whirs inches from a boy’s nose. “No different from a man’s body. Just as we ask you to each drive the weakness from your own bodies, so you must also learn to drive the weaknesses from the corps.”
One October afternoon, Bastian plucks a pigeon-toed boy from the line. “You’ll be first. Who are you?”
“B?cker, sir.”
“B?cker. Tell us, B?cker. Who is the weakest member of this group?”
Werner quails. He is smaller than every cadet in his year. He tries to expand his chest, stand as tall as he can. B?cker’s gaze rakes across the rows. “Him, sir?”
Werner exhales; B?cker has chosen a boy far to Werner’s right, one of the few boys with black hair. Ernst Somebody. A safe enough choice: Ernst is in fact a slow runner. A boy who has yet to grow into his horsey legs.
Bastian calls Ernst forward. The boy’s bottom lip trembles as he turns to face the group.
“Getting all weepy won’t help,” says Bastian, and gestures vaguely to the far end of the field, where a line of trees cuts across the weeds. “You’ll have a ten-second head start. Make it to me before they make it to you. Got it?”
Ernst neither nods nor shakes his head. Bastian feigns frustration. “When I raise my left hand, you run. When I raise my right hand, the rest of you fools run.” Off Bastian waddles, rubber hose around his neck, pistol swinging at his side.
Sixty boys wait, breathing. Werner thinks of Jutta with her opalescent hair and quick eyes and blunt manners: she would never be mistaken for the weakest. Ernst Somebody is shaking everywhere now, all the way down to his wrists and ankles. When Bastian is maybe two hundred yards away, he turns and raises his left hand.
Ernst runs with his arms nearly straight and his legs wide and unhinged. Bastian counts down from ten. “Three,” yells his faraway voice. “Two. One.” At zero, his right arm goes up and the group unleashes. The dark-haired boy is at least fifty yards in front of them, but immediately the pack begins to gain.
Hurrying, scampering, running hard, fifty-nine fourteen-year-olds chase one. Werner keeps to the center of the group as it strings out, his heart beating in dark confusion, wondering where Frederick is, why they’re chasing this boy, and what they’re supposed to do if they catch him.
Except in some atavistic part of his brain, he knows exactly what they’ll do.
A few outrunners are exceptionally fast; they gain on the lone figure. Ernst’s limbs pump furiously, but he clearly is not accustomed to sprinting, and he loses steam. The grass waves, the trees are transected by sunlight, the pack draws closer, and Werner feels annoyed: Why couldn’t Ernst be faster? Why hasn’t he practiced? How did he make it through the entrance exams?
The fastest cadet is lunging for the back of the boy’s shirt. He almost has him. Black-haired Ernst is going to be caught, and Werner wonders if some part of him wants it to happen. But the boy makes it to the commandant a split second before the others come pounding past.
Mandatory Surrender
Marie-Laure has to badger her father three times before he’ll read the notice aloud: Members of the population must relinquish all radio receivers now in their possession. Radio sets are to be delivered to 27 rue de Chartres before tomorrow noon. Anyone failing to carry out this order will be arrested as a saboteur.
No one says anything for a moment, and inside Marie-Laure, an old anxiety lumbers to its feet. “Is he—?”
“In your grandfather’s old room,” says Madame Manec.
Tomorrow noon. Half the house, thinks Marie-Laure, is taken up by wireless receivers and the parts that go into them.
Madame Manec raps on the door to Henri’s room and receives no reply. In the afternoon they box up the equipment in Etienne’s study, Madame and Papa unplugging radios and lowering them into crates, Marie-Laure sitting on the davenport listening to the sets go off one by one: the old Radiola Five; a G.M.R. Titan; a G.M.R. Orphée. A Delco thirty-two-volt farm radio that Etienne had shipped all the way from the United States in 1922.
Her father wraps the largest in cardboard and uses an ancient wheeled dolly to thump it down the stairs. Marie-Laure sits with her fingers going numb in her lap and thinks of the machine in the attic, its cables and switches. A transmitter built to talk to ghosts. Does it qualify as a radio receiver? Should she mention it? Do Papa and Madame Manec know? They seem not to. In the evening, fog moves into the city, trailing a cold, fishy smell, and they eat potatoes and carrots in the kitchen and Madame Manec leaves a dish outside Henri’s door and taps but the door does not open and the food remains untouched.
“What,” asks Marie-Laure, “will they do with the radios?”
“Send them to Germany,” says Papa.
“Or pitch them in the sea,” says Madame Manec. “Come, child, drink your tea. It’s not the end of the world. I’ll put an extra blanket on your bed tonight.”
In the morning Etienne remains shut inside his brother’s room. If he knows what is happening in his house, Marie-Laure cannot tell. At ten A.M. her father starts wheeling loads to the rue de Chartres, one trip, two trips, three, and when he comes back and loads the dolly with the last radio, Etienne still has not appeared. Marie-Laure holds Madame Manec’s hand as she listens to the gate clang shut, to the cart’s axle bounce as her father pushes it down the rue Vauborel, and to the silence that reinstalls itself after he’s gone.