Are You There?
He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne; he is everyone who has left her finally coming back. Through the panel he calls, “I am not killing you. I am hearing you. On radio. Is why I come.” He pauses, fumbling to translate. “The song, light of the moon?” She almost smiles.
We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.
Marie-Laure slides open the wardrobe. Werner takes her hand and helps her out. Her feet find the floor of her grandfather’s room.
“Mes souliers,” she says. “I have not been able to find my shoes.”
Second Can
The girl sits very still in the corner and wraps her coat around her knees. The way she tucks her ankles up against her bottom. The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing he hopes never to forget.
Guns boom to the east: the citadel being bombarded again, the citadel bombarding back.
Exhaustion breaks over him. In French he says, “There will be a—a Waffenruhe. Stopping in the fighting. At noon. So people can get out of the city. I can get you out.”
“And you know this is true?”
“No,” he says. “I do not know it is true.” Quiet now. He examines his trousers, his dusty coat. The uniform makes him an accomplice in everything this girl hates. “There is water,” he says, and crosses to the other sixth-floor room and does not look at von Rumpel’s body in her bed and retrieves the second bucket. Her whole head disappears inside its mouth, and her sticklike arms hug its sides as she gulps.
He says, “You are very brave.”
She lowers the bucket. “What is your name?”
He tells her. She says, “When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?”
He says, “Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did.”
Her glasses are gone, and her pupils look like they are full of milk, but strangely they do not unnerve him. He remembers a phrase of Frau Elena’s: belle laide. Beautiful ugly.
“What day is it?”
He looks around. Scorched curtains and soot fanned across the ceiling and cardboard peeling off the window and the very first pale light of predawn leaking through. “I don’t know. It’s morning.”
A shell screams over the house. He thinks: I only want to sit here with her for a thousand hours. But the shell detonates somewhere and the house creaks and Werner says, “There was a man who used that transmitter you have. Who broadcast lessons about science. When I was a boy. I used to listen to them with my sister.”
“That was the voice of my grandfather. You heard him?”
“Many times. We loved them.”
The window glows. The slow sandy light of dawn permeates the room. Everything transient and aching; everything tentative. To be here, in this room, high in this house, out of the cellar, with her: it is like medicine.
“I could eat bacon,” she says.
“What?”
“I could eat a whole pig.”
He smiles. “I could eat a whole cow.”
“The woman who used to live here, the housekeeper, she made the most wonderful omelets in the world.”
“When I was little,” he says, or hopes he says, “we used to pick berries by the Ruhr. My sister and me. We’d find berries as big as our thumbs.”
The girl crawls into the wardrobe and climbs a ladder and comes back down clutching a dented tin can. “Can you see what this is?”
“There’s no label.”
“I didn’t think there was.”
“Is it food?”
“Let’s open it and find out.”
With one stroke from the brick, he punctures the can with the tip of the knife. Immediately he can smell it: the perfume is so sweet, so outrageously sweet, that he nearly faints. What is the word? Pêches. Les pêches.
The girl leans forward; the freckles seem to bloom across her cheeks as she inhales. “We will share,” she says. “For what you did.”
He hammers the knife in a second time, saws away at the metal, and bends up the lid. “Careful,” he says, and passes it to her. She dips in two fingers, digs up a wet, soft, slippery thing. Then he does the same. That first peach slithers down his throat like rapture. A sunrise in his mouth.
They eat. They drink the syrup. They run their fingers around the inside of the can.
Birds of America
What wonders in this house! She shows him the transmitter in the attic: its double battery, its old-fashioned electrophone, the hand-machined antenna that can be raised and lowered along the chimney by an ingenious system of levers. Even a phonograph record that she says contains her grandfather’s voice, lessons in science for children. And the books! The lower floors are blanketed with them—Becquerel, Lavoisier, Fischer—a lifetime of reading. What it would be like to spend ten years in this tall narrow house, shuttered from the world, studying its secrets and reading its volumes and looking at this girl.
“Do you think,” he asks, “that Captain Nemo survived the whirlpool?”
Marie-Laure sits on the fifth-floor landing in her oversize coat as though waiting for a train. “No,” she says. “Yes. I don’t know. I suppose that is the point, no? To make us wonder?” She cocks her head. “He was a madman. And yet I didn’t want him to die.”
In the corner of her great-uncle’s study, amid a tumult of books, he finds a copy of Birds of America. A reprint, not nearly as large as the one he saw in Frederick’s living room, but dazzling nonetheless: four hundred and thirty-five engravings. He carries it out to the landing. “Has your uncle shown you this?”
“What is it?”
“Birds. Bird after bird after bird.”
Outside, shells fly back and forth. “We must get lower in the house,” she says. But for a moment they do not move.
California Partridge.
Common Gannet.
Frigate Pelican.
Werner can still see Frederick kneeling at his window, nose to the glass. Little gray bird hopping about in the boughs. Doesn’t look like much, does it?
“Could I keep a page from this?”
“Why not. We will leave soon, no? When it is safe?”
“At noon.”
“How will we know it is time?”
“When they stop shooting.”
Airplanes come. Dozens and dozens of them. Werner shivers uncontrollably. Marie-Laure leads him to the first floor, where ash and soot lie a half inch deep over everything, and he pushes capsized furniture out of the way and hauls open the cellar door and they climb down. Somewhere above, thirty bombers let fly their payloads and Werner and Marie-Laure feel the bedrock shake, hear the detonations across the river.
Could he, by some miracle, keep this going? Could they hide here until the war ends? Until the armies finish marching back and forth above their heads, until all they have to do is push open the door and shift some stones aside and the house has become a ruin beside the sea? Until he can hold her fingers in his palms and lead her out into the sunshine? He would walk anywhere to make it happen, bear anything; in a year or three years or ten, France and Germany would not mean what they meant now; they could leave the house and walk to a tourists’ restaurant and order a simple meal together and eat it in silence, the comfortable kind of silence lovers are supposed to share.
“Do you know,” Marie-Laure asks in a gentle voice, “why he was here? That man upstairs?”
“Because of the radio?” Even as he says it, he wonders.
“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe that’s why.”
In another minute they’re asleep.
Cease-fire
Gritty summer light spills through the open trapdoor into the cellar. It might already be afternoon. No guns firing. For a few heartbeats, Werner watches her sleep.
Then they hurry. He cannot find the shoes she asks for, but he finds a pair of men’s loafers in a closet and helps her put them on. Over his uniform he pulls on some of Etienne’s tweed trousers, along with a shirt whose sleeves are too long. If they run into Germans, he will speak only French, say he is helping her leave the city. If they run into Americans, he will say he is deserting.
“There will be a collection point,” he says, “somewhere they’re gathering refugees,” though he’s not sure he says it correctly. He finds a white pillowcase in an upturned cabinet and folds it into her coat pocket. “When it comes time, hold this as high as you can.”
“I will try. And my cane?”
“Here.”
In the foyer, they hesitate. Neither sure what waits on the other side of the door. He remembers the overheated dance hall from the entrance exams four years before: ladder bolted to the wall, crimson flag with its white circle and black cross below. You step forward; you jump.
Outside, mountains of rubble hunker everywhere. Chimneys stand with their bricks raw to the light. Smoke troweled across the sky. He knows that the shells have been coming from the east, that six days ago the Americans were almost to Paramé, so he moves Marie-Laure in that direction.
Any moment they will be seen, by either Americans or his own army, and made to do something. Work, join, confess, die. From somewhere comes the sound of fire: the sound of dried roses being crumbled in a fist. No other sounds; no motors, no airplanes, no distant pop of gunfire or howling of wounded men or yapping of dogs. He takes her hand to help her over the piles. No shells fall and no rifles crack and the light is soft and shot through with ash.
Jutta, he thinks, I finally listened.
For two blocks they see nobody. Maybe Volkheimer is eating—this is what Werner would like to imagine, gigantic Volkheimer eating by himself at a little table with a view of the sea.
“It’s so quiet.”
Her voice like a bright, clear window of sky. Her face a field of freckles. He thinks: I don’t want to let you go.
“Are they watching us?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
A block ahead, he sees movement: three women carrying bundles. Marie-Laure pulls at his sleeve. “What is this cross street?”
“The rue des Lauriers.”
“Come,” she says, and walks with her cane tapping back and forth in her right hand. They turn right and left, past a walnut tree like a giant charred toothpick jammed into the ground, past two crows picking at something unidentifiable, until they reach the base of the ramparts. Airborne creepers of ivy hang from an archway over a narrow alley. Far to his right, Werner can see a woman in blue taffeta drag a great overstuffed suitcase over a curbstone. A boy in pants meant for a younger child follows, beret thrown back on his head, some kind of shiny jacket on.
“There are civilians leaving, mademoiselle. Shall I call to them?”
“I need only a moment.” She leads him deeper down the alley. Sweet, unfettered ocean air pours through a gap in the wall he cannot see: the air throbs with it.
At the end of the alley they reach a narrow gate. She reaches inside her coat and produces a key. “Is the tide high?”
He can just see through the gate into a low space, bounded by a grate on the far side. “There is water down there. We have to hurry.”
But she is already passing through the gate and descending into the grotto in her big shoes, moving with confidence, running her fingers along the walls as though they are old friends she thought she might never meet again. The tide pushes a low riffle through the pool, and it washes over her shins and dampens the hem of her dress. From her coat, she takes some small wooden thing and sets it in the water. She speaks lightly, her voice echoing: “You need to tell me, is it in the ocean? It must be in the ocean.”
“It is in. We must go, mademoiselle.”
“Are you certain it’s in the water?”
“Yes.”
She climbs out, breathless. Pushes him back through the gate and locks it behind them. He hands her the cane. Then they head back down the alley, her shoes squelching as she goes. Out through the hanging ivy. Turn left. Straight ahead a ragged stream of people crosses an intersection: a woman, a child, two men carrying a third on a stretcher, all three with cigarettes in their mouths.
The darkness returns to Werner’s eyes, and he feels faint. Soon his legs will give out. A cat sits in the road licking a paw and smoothing it over its ears and watching him. He thinks of the old broken miners he’d see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.
“Now,” he says in the clearest French he can muster, “here’s the pillowcase. You run your hand along that wall. Can you feel it? You’ll reach an intersection, keep going straight. The street looks mostly clear. Keep the pillowcase high. Right out in front like this, do you understand?”
She turns to him and chews her bottom lip. “They will shoot.”
“Not with that white flag. Not a girl. There are others ahead. Follow this wall.” He sets her hand against it a second time. “Hurry. Remember the pillowcase.”
“And you?”
“I will go in the other direction.”
She turns her face toward his, and though she cannot see him, he feels he cannot bear her gaze. “Won’t you come with me?”
“It will be better for you if no one sees you with me.”
“But how will I find you again?”
“I don’t know.”
She reaches for his hand, sets something in his palm, and squeezes his hand into a fist. “Goodbye, Werner.”
“Goodbye, Marie-Laure.”
Then she goes. Every few paces, the tip of her cane strikes a broken stone in the street, and it takes a while to pick her way around it. Step step pause. Step step again. Her cane testing, the wet hem of her dress swinging, the white pillowcase held aloft. He does not look away until she is through the intersection, down the next block, and out of sight.
He waits to hear voices. Guns.
They will help her. They must.
When he opens his hand, there is a little iron key in his palm.