After several hours the commandant’s assistant calls him in and sets down his ballpoint and looks across his desk as though Werner is one among a vast series of trivial problems he must put right. “It has come to our attention, cadet, that your age has been recorded incorrectly.”
“Sir?”
“You are eighteen years old. Not sixteen, as you have claimed.”
Werner puzzles. The absurdity is plain: he remains smaller than most of the fourteen-year-olds.
“Our former technical sciences professor, Dr. Hauptmann, has called our attention to the discrepancy. He has arranged that you will be sent to a special technology division of the Wehrmacht.”
“A division, sir?”
“You have been here under false pretenses.” His voice is oily and pleased; his chin is nonexistent. Out a window the school band practices a triumphal march. Werner watches a Nordic-looking boy stagger beneath the weight of a tuba.
“The commandant urged disciplinary action, but Dr. Hauptmann suggested that you would be eager to offer your skills to the Reich.” From behind his desk, the assistant produces a folded uniform—slate-gray, eagle on the breast, Litzen on the collar. Then a green-black coal-scuttle helmet, obviously too large.
The band blares, then stops. The band instructor screams names.
The commandant’s assistant says, “You are very lucky, cadet. To serve is an honor.”
“When, sir?”
“You’ll receive instructions within a fortnight. That is all.”
Pneumonia
Breton spring, and a great onslaught of damp invades the coast. Fog on the sea, fog in the streets, fog in the mind. Madame Manec gets sick. When Marie-Laure holds her hand over Madame’s chest, heat seems to steam up out of her sternum as though she cooks from the inside. Her breathing devolves into trains of oceanic coughs.
“I watch the sardines,” murmurs Madame, “and the termites, and the crows . . .”
Etienne summons a doctor who prescribes rest, aspirin, and aromatic violet comfits. Marie-Laure sits with Madame through the worst of it, strange hours when the old woman’s hands go very cold and she talks about being in charge of the world. She is in charge of everything, but no one knows. It is a tremendous burden, she says, to be responsible for every little thing, every infant born, every leaf falling from every tree, every wave that breaks onto the beach, every ant on its journey.
Deep in Madame’s voice, Marie-Laure hears water: atolls and archipelagoes and lagoons and fjords.
Etienne proves to be a tender nurse. Washcloths, broth, now and then a page from Pasteur or Rousseau. His manner forgiving her all transgressions past and present. He wraps Madame in quilts, but eventually she shivers so deeply, so profoundly, that he takes the big heavy rag rug off the floor and lays it on top of her.
Dearest Marie-Laure—
Your parcels arrived, two of them, dated months apart. Joy is not a strong enough word. They let me keep the toothbrush and comb though not the paper they were wrapped in. Nor the soap. How I wish they would let us have soap! They said our next reposting would be to a chocolate factory but it was cardboard. All day we manufacture cardboard. What do they do with so much?
All my life, Marie-Laure, I have been the one carrying the keys. Now I hear them jangling in the mornings when they come for us, and every time I reach in my own pocket, only to find it empty.
When I dream, I dream I am in the museum.
Remember your birthdays? How there were always two things on the table when you woke? I’m sorry it turned out like this. If you ever wish to understand, look inside Etienne’s house, inside the house. I know you will do the right thing. Though I wish the gift were better.
My angel is leaving, so if I can get this to you, I will. I do not worry about you because I know you are very smart and keeping yourself safe. I am safe too so you should not worry. Thank Etienne for reading this to you. Thank in your heart the brave soul who carries this letter away from me and on its way to you.
Your Papa
Treatments
Von Rumpel’s doctor says that fascinating research is being done on mustard gases. That the anti-tumor properties of any number of chemicals are being explored. The prognosis is looking up: in test subjects, lymphoid tumors have been seen to reduce in size. But the injections make von Rumpel dizzy and weak. In the days following, he can hardly manage to comb his hair or convince his fingers to button his coat. His mind plays tricks, too: he walks into a room and forgets why he’s there. He stares at a superior and forgets what the man just said. The sounds of passing cars are like the tines of forks dragged along his nerves.
Tonight he wraps himself in hotel blankets and orders soup and unwraps a bundle from Vienna. The mousy brown librarian has sent copies of the Tavernier and the Streeter and even—most remarkably—stencil duplicates of de Boodt’s 1604 Gemmarum et Lapidum Historia, written entirely in Latin. Everything she could find concerning the Sea of Flames. Nine paragraphs total.
It takes all his concentration to bring the texts into focus. A goddess of the earth who fell in love with a god of the sea. A prince who recovered from catastrophic injuries, who ruled from within a blur of light. Von Rumpel closes his eyes and sees a flame-haired goddess charge through the tunnels of the earth, drops of flame glowing in her wake. He hears a priest with no tongue say, The keeper of the stone will live forever. He hears his father say, See obstacles as opportunities, Reinhold. See obstacles as inspirations.
Heaven
For a few weeks, Madame Manec gets better. She promises Etienne she will remember her age, not try to be everything to everyone, not fight the war by herself. One day in early June, almost exactly two years after the invasion of France, she and Marie-Laure walk through a field of Queen Anne’s lace east of Saint-Malo. Madame Manec told Etienne that they were going to see if strawberries were available at the Saint-Servan market, but Marie-Laure is certain that when they stopped to greet a woman on the way here, Madame dropped off one envelope and picked up another.
At Madame’s suggestion, they lie down in the weeds, and Marie-Laure listens to honeybees mine the flowers and tries to imagine their journeys as Etienne described them: each worker following a rivulet of odor, looking for ultraviolet patterns in the flowers, filling baskets on her hind legs with pollen grains, then navigating, drunk and heavy, all the way home.
How do they know what parts to play, those little bees?
Madame Manec takes off her shoes and lights a cigarette and lets out a contented groan. Insects drone: wasps, hoverflies, a passing dragonfly—Etienne has taught Marie-Laure to distinguish each by its sound.
“What’s a roneo machine, Madame?”
“Something to help make pamphlets.”
“What does it have to do with that woman we met?”
“Nothing to trouble yourself over, dear.”
Horses nicker, and the wind comes off the sea gentle and cool and full of smells.
“Madame? What do I look like?”
“You have many thousands of freckles.”
“Papa used to say they were like stars in heaven. Like apples in a tree.”
“They are little brown dots, child. Thousands of little brown dots.”
“That sounds ugly.”