Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
On the floor outside Marie-Laure’s bedroom door waits something big wrapped in newsprint and twine. From the stairwell, Etienne says, “Happy sixteenth birthday.”
She tears away the paper. Two books, one stacked atop the other.
Three years and four months have passed since Papa left Saint-Malo. One thousand two hundred and twenty-four days. Almost four years have passed since she has felt Braille, and yet the letters rise from her memory as if she left off reading yesterday.
Jules. Verne. Twenty. Thousand. Leagues. Part. One. Part. Two.
She throws herself at her great-uncle and hangs her arms around his neck.
“You said you never got to finish. I thought, rather than my reading it to you, maybe you could read it to me?”
“But how—?”
“Monsieur Hébrard, the bookseller.”
“When nothing is available? And they’re so expensive—”
“You have made a lot of friends in this town, Marie-Laure.”
She stretches out on the floor and opens to the first page. “I’m going to start it all over again. From the beginning.”
“Perfect.”
“?‘Chapter One,’?” she reads. “?‘A Shifting Reef.’?” The year 1866 was marked by a strange event, an unexplainable occurrence, which is undoubtedly still fresh in everyone’s memory . . . She gallops through the first ten pages, the story coming back: worldwide curiosity about what must be a mythical sea monster, famed marine biologist Professor Pierre Aronnax setting off to discover the truth. Is it monster or moving reef? Something else? Any page now, Aronnax will plunge over the rail of the frigate; not long afterward, he and the Canadian harpooner Ned Land will find themselves on Captain Nemo’s submarine.
Beyond the carton-covered window, rain sifts down from a platinum-colored sky. A dove scrabbles along the gutter calling hoo hoo hoo. Out in the harbor a sturgeon makes a single leap like a silver horse and then is gone.
Telegram
A new garrison commander has arrived on the Emerald Coast, a colonel. Trim, smart, efficient. Won medals at Stalingrad. Wears a monocle. Invariably accompanied by a gorgeous French secretary-interpreter who may or may not have consorted with Russian royalty.
He is average-sized and prematurely gray, but by some contrivance of carriage and posture, he makes the men who stand before him feel smaller. The rumor is that this colonel ran an entire automobile company before the war. That he is a man who understands the power of the German soil, who feels its dark prehistoric vigor thudding in his very cells. That he will never acquiesce.
Every night he sends telegrams from the district office in Saint-Malo. Among the sixteen official communiqués sent on the thirtieth of April, 1944, is a missive to Berlin.
= NOTICE OF TERRORIST BROADCASTS IN C?TES D’ARMOR WE BELIEVE SAINT-LUNAIRE OR DINARD OR SAINT-MALO OR CANCALE = REQUEST ASSISTANCE TO LOCATE AND ELIMINATE
Dot dot dash dash, off it goes into the wires belted across Europe.
Eight
* * *
9 August 1944
Fort National
On the third afternoon of the siege of Saint-Malo, the shelling lulls, as though all the artillerymen abruptly fell asleep at their guns. Trees burn, cars burn, houses burn. German soldiers drink wine in blockhouses. A priest in the college cellar scatters holy water on the walls. Two horses, gone mad with fear, kick through the door of the garage in which they’ve been shut and gallop between the smoldering houses on the Grand Rue.
Around four o’clock, an American field howitzer, two miles away, lets fly a single improperly ranged shell. It sails over the city walls and bursts against the northern parapet of Fort National, where three hundred and eighty Frenchmen are being held against their will with minimal cover. Nine are killed instantly. One of them still clutching the hand of bridge he was playing when the shell struck.
In the Attic
For all of Marie-Laure’s four years in Saint-Malo, the bells at St. Vincent’s have marked the hours. But now the bells have ceased. She does not know how long she has been trapped in the attic or even if it is day or night. Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.
Her thirst becomes so acute, she considers biting into her own arm to drink the liquid that courses there. She takes the cans of food from her great-uncle’s coat and sets her lips on their rims. Both taste of tin. Their contents just a millimeter away.
Don’t risk it, says the voice of her father. Don’t risk the noise.
Just one, Papa. I will save the other. The German is gone. Almost certainly he is gone by now.
Why hasn’t the trip wire sprung?
Because he cut the wire. Or I slept through the bell. Any of a half dozen other reasons.
Why would he leave when what he seeks is here?
Who knows what he seeks?
You know what he seeks.
I am so hungry, Papa.
Try to think about something else.
Roaring falls of clear, cool water.
You will survive, ma chérie.
How can you know?
Because of the diamond in your coat pocket. Because I left it here to protect you.
All it has done is put me in more danger.
Then why hasn’t the house been hit? Why hasn’t it caught fire?
It’s a rock, Papa. A pebble. There is only luck, bad or good. Chance and physics. Remember?
You are alive.
I am only alive because I have not yet died.
Do not open the can. He will hear you. He will not hesitate to kill you.
How can he kill me if I cannot die?
Round and round the questions run; Marie-Laure’s mind threatens to boil over. Just now she has pulled herself up onto the piano bench at the end of the attic and is running her hands over Etienne’s transmitter, trying to apprehend its switches and coils—here the phonograph, here the microphone, here one of four leads connected to the pair of batteries—when she hears something below her.
A voice.
Very carefully, she lowers herself off the bench and presses her ear to the floor.
He is directly below her. Urinating into the sixth-floor toilet. Dribbling out a sad intermittent trickle and groaning as though the process causes him torment. Between groans, he calls, “Das H?uschen fehlt, wo bist du H?uschen?”
Something is wrong with him.
“Das H?uschen fehlt, wo bist du H?uschen?”
No replies. Whom is he talking to?
From somewhere beyond the house come the thump of distant mortars and the screech of shells hurtling overhead. She listens to the German move from the toilet toward her bedroom. Limping that same limp. Muttering. Unhinged. H?uschen: what does it mean?
The springs of her mattress creak; she would know that sound anywhere. Has he been sleeping in her bed all this time? Six deep reports sound one after the other, deeper than antiaircraft guns, farther away. Naval guns. Then come drums, cymbals, the gongs of explosions, drawing a crimson lattice over the roof. The lull is ending.
Abyss in her gut, desert in her throat—Marie-Laure takes one of the cans of food from her coat. The brick and the knife within reach.
Don’t.
If I keep listening to you, Papa, I will die of starvation with food in my hands.
Her bedroom below remains quiet. The shells come patiently, each round whizzing over at a predictable interval, scratching a long scarlet parabola over the roof. She uses their noise to open the can. EEEEEEEEEE goes the shell, ding goes the brick onto the knife, the knife onto the can. Dull terrible detonation somewhere. Shell splinters zinging into the walls of a dozen houses.
EEEEEEEE ding. EEEEEEEE ding. With each blow a prayer. Do not let him hear.
Five bashes and it’s leaking liquid. With the sixth, she manages to saw open a quadrant and bend up the lid with the blade of the knife.
She raises it and drinks. Cool, salty: it is beans. Canned cooked green beans. The water they have been boiled in is supremely tasty; her whole body seems to reach up to absorb it. She empties the can. Inside her head, her father has gone quiet.