A schnauzer trots after him, whining. No one shouts down from a window to warn him away from mines. Indeed, in four blocks he sees only one soul, a woman outside what was, the day before, the movie-house. Dustpan in one hand, broom nowhere to be seen. She looks up at him, dazed. Through an open door behind her, rows of seats have crumpled beneath great slabs of ceiling. Beyond them, the screen stands unblemished, not even stained by smoke.
“Show’s not till eight,” she says in her Breton French, and he nods as he limps past. On the rue Vauborel, vast quantities of slate tiles have slid off roofs and detonated in the streets. Scraps of burned paper float overhead. No gulls. Even if the house has caught fire, he thinks, the diamond will be there. He will pluck it from the ashes like a warm egg.
But the tall, slender house remains nearly unscathed. Eleven windows on the facade, most of the glass out. Blue window frames, old granite of grays and tans. Four of its six flower boxes hang on. The mandated list of occupants clings to its front door.
M. Etienne LeBlanc, age 63.
Mlle Marie-Laure LeBlanc, age 16.
All the dangers he is willing to endure. For the Reich. For himself.
No one stops him. No shells come whistling in. Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.
What They Have
When is it day and when night? Time seems better measured by flashes: Volkheimer’s field light flicks off, flicks on.
Werner watches Volkheimer’s ash-dusted face in the reflected glow, his ministrations as he leans over Bernd. Drink, says Volkheimer’s mouth as he holds his canteen to Bernd’s lips, and shadows lunge across the broken ceiling like a circle of wraiths preparing to feast.
Bernd twists his face away, panic in his eyes, and tries to examine his leg.
The flashlight switches off and the darkness rushes back.
In Werner’s duffel, he has his childhood notebook, his blanket, and dry socks. Three rations. This is all the food they have. Volkheimer has none. Bernd has none. They have only two canteens of water, each half-empty. Volkheimer has also discovered a bucket of paintbrushes in a corner with some watery sludge in the bottom, but how desperate will they have to become to drink that?
Two stick grenades: Model 24s, one in each of the side pockets of Volkheimer’s coat. Hollow wood handles on the bottom, high-explosive charges in a steel can on top—handheld bombs the boys at Schulpforta called potato mashers. Twice already Bernd has begged Volkheimer to try one on the impacted mess of the stairwell, to see if they can blast their way out. But to use a grenade down here, in such close quarters, beneath rubble presumably littered with live 88-millimeter shells, would be suicide.
Then there’s the rifle: Volkheimer’s bolt-action Karabiner 98K, loaded with five rounds. Enough, thinks Werner. Plenty. They would need only three, one for each.
Sometimes, in the darkness, Werner thinks the cellar may have its own faint light, perhaps emanating from the rubble, the space going a bit redder as the August day above them progresses toward dusk. After a while, he is learning, even total darkness is not quite darkness; more than once he thinks he can see his spread fingers when he passes them in front of his eyes.
Werner thinks of his childhood, the skeins of coal dust suspended in the air on winter mornings, settling on windowsills, in the children’s ears, in their lungs, except down here in this hole, the white dust is the inverse, as if he is trapped in some deep mine that is the same but also the opposite of the one that killed his father.
Dark again. Light again. Volkheimer’s antic ash-dusted face materializes in front of Werner, his rank insignia partially torn off one shoulder. With the beam of his field light, he shows Werner that he is holding two bent screwdrivers and a box of electrical fuses. “The radio,” he says into Werner’s good ear.
“Have you slept at all?”
Volkheimer turns the light onto his own face. Before we run out of battery, says his mouth.
Werner shakes his head. The radio is hopeless. He wants to close his eyes, forget, give up. Wait for the rifle barrel to touch his temple. But Volkheimer wants to make an argument that life is worth living.
The filaments of the bulb inside his field light glow yellow: weaker already. Volkheimer’s illuminated mouth is red against the blackness. We are running out of time, his lips say. The building groans. Werner sees green grass, crackling flies, sunlight. The gates of a summer estate opening wide. When death comes for Bernd, it might as well come for him also. Save a second trip.
Your sister, says Volkheimer. Think of your sister.
Trip Wire
Her bladder will not hold much longer. She scales the cellar steps and holds her breath and hears nothing for thirty heartbeats. Forty. Then she pushes open the trapdoor and climbs into the kitchen.
No one shoots her. She hears no explosions.
Marie-Laure crunches over the fallen kitchen shelves and crosses into Madame Manec’s tiny apartment, the two cans swinging heavily in her great-uncle’s coat. Throat stinging, nostrils stinging. The smoke slightly thinner in here.
She relieves herself in the bedpan at the foot of Madame Manec’s bed. Pulls up her stockings and rebuttons her great-uncle’s coat. Is it afternoon? She wishes for the thousandth time that she could talk to her father. Would it be better to go out into the city, especially if it is still daylight, and try to find someone?
A soldier would help her. Anyone would. Though even as the thought rises, she doubts it.
The unsteady feeling in her legs, she knows, stems from hunger. In the tumult of the kitchen, she cannot find a can opener, but she does find a paring knife in Madame Manec’s knife drawer and the large coarse brick Madame used to prop open the fireplace grate.
She will eat whatever is inside one of the two cans. Then she will wait a bit longer in case her uncle comes home, in case she hears anyone pass by, the town crier, a fireman, an American serviceman with gallantry on his mind. If she hears no one by the time she is hungry again, she will go out into what is left of the street.
First she climbs to the third floor to drink from the bathtub. With her lips against its surface, she takes long inward pulls. Pooling, burbling in her gut. A trick she and Etienne have learned over a hundred insufficient meals: before you eat, drink as much water as you can, and you will feel full more quickly. “At least, Papa,” she says out loud, “I was smart about the water.”
Then she sits on the third-floor landing with her back against the telephone table. She braces one of the cans between her thighs, holds the point of the knife against its lid, and raises the brick to tap down on the knife handle. But before she can bring the brick down, the trip wire behind her jerks, and the bell rings, and someone enters the house.
Five
* * *
January 1941
January Recess
The commandant makes a speech about virtue and family and the emblematic fire that Schulpforta boys carry everywhere they go, a bowl of pure flame to stoke the nation’s hearths, führer this and führer that, his words crashing into Werner’s ears in a familiar battery, one of the most daring boys muttering afterward, “Oh, I’ve got a hot bowl of something in my core.”
In the bunk room, Frederick leans over the rim of his bed. His face presents a map of purples and yellows. “Why don’t you come to Berlin? Father will be working, but you could meet Mother.”