Poor child.
Poor Monsieur LeBlanc.
Like they’re cursed.
If only her father would come through the kitchen door. Smile at the ladies, set his palms on Marie-Laure’s cheeks. Five minutes with him. One minute.
After four days, Etienne comes out of his room. The stairs creak as he descends, and the women in the kitchen fall silent. In a grave voice, he asks everyone to please leave. “I needed time to say goodbye, and now I must look after myself and my niece. Thank you.”
As soon as the kitchen door has closed, he turns the dead bolts and takes Marie-Laure’s hands. “All the lights are off now. Very good. Please, stand over here.”
Chairs slide away. The kitchen table slides away. She can hear him fumbling at the ring in the center of the floor: the trapdoor comes up. He goes down into the cellar.
“Uncle? What do you need?”
“This,” he calls.
“What is it?”
“An electric saw.”
She can feel something bright kindle in her abdomen. Etienne starts up the stairs, Marie-Laure trailing behind. Second floor, third, fourth fifth sixth, left turn into her grandfather’s room. He opens the doors of the gigantic wardrobe, lifts out his brother’s old clothes, and places them on the bed. He runs an extension cord out onto the landing and plugs it in. He says, “It will be loud.”
She says, “Good.”
Etienne climbs into the back of the wardrobe, and the saw yowls to life. The sound permeates the walls, the floor, Marie-Laure’s chest. She wonders how many neighbors hear it, if somewhere a German at his breakfast has cocked his head to listen.
Etienne removes a rectangle from the back of the wardrobe, then cuts through the attic door behind it. He shuts down the saw and wriggles through the raw hole, up the ladder behind it, and into the garret. She follows. All morning Etienne crawls along the attic floor with cables and pliers and tools her fingers do not understand, weaving himself into the center of what she imagines as an intricate electronic net. He murmurs to himself; he fetches thick booklets or electrical components from various rooms on the lower stories. The attic creaks; houseflies draw electric-blue loops in the air. Late in the evening, Marie-Laure descends the ladder and falls asleep in her grandfather’s bed to the sound of her great-uncle working above her.
When she wakes, barn swallows are chirring beneath the eaves and music is raining down through the ceiling.
“Clair de Lune,” a song that makes her think of leaves fluttering, and of the hard ribbons of sand beneath her feet at low tide. The music slinks and rises and settles back to earth, and then the young voice of her long-dead grandfather speaks: There are ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood vessels in the human body, children! Almost enough to wind around the earth two and a half times . . .
Etienne comes down the seven ladder rungs and squeezes through the back of the wardrobe and takes her hands in his. Before he speaks, she knows what he will say. “Your father asked me to keep you safe.”
“I know.”
“This will be dangerous. It is not a game.”
“I want to do it. Madame would want—”
“Tell it to me. Tell me the whole routine.”
“Twenty-two paces down the rue Vauborel to the rue d’Estrées. Then right for sixteen storm drains. Left on the rue Robert Surcouf. Nine more storm drains to the bakery. I go to the counter and say, ‘One ordinary loaf, please.’?”
“How will she reply?”
“She will be surprised. But I am supposed to say, ‘One ordinary loaf,’ and she is supposed to say, ‘And how is your uncle?’?”
“She will ask about me?”
“She is supposed to. That’s how she will know that you are willing to help. It’s what Madame suggested. Part of the protocol.”
“And you will say?”
“I will say, ‘My uncle is well, thank you.’ And I will take the loaf and put it in my knapsack and come home.”
“This will happen even now? Without Madame?”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“How will you pay?”
“A ration ticket.”
“Do we have any of those?”
“In the drawer downstairs. And you have money, don’t you?”
“Yes. We have some money. How will you come back home?”
“Straight back.”
“By which route?”
“Nine storm drains down the rue Robert Surcouf. Right on the rue d’Estrées. Sixteen drains back to the rue Vauborel. I know it all, Uncle, I have it memorized. I’ve been to the bakery three hundred times.”
“You mustn’t go anywhere else. You mustn’t go to the beaches.”
“I’ll come directly back.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“Then go, Marie-Laure. Go like the wind.”
East
They ride in boxcars through Lodz, Warsaw, Brest. For miles, out the open door, Werner sees no sign of humans save the occasional railcar capsized beside the tracks, twisted and scarred by some kind of explosion. Soldiers clamber on and off, lean, pale, each carrying a pack, rifle, and steel helmet. They sleep despite noise, despite cold, despite hunger, as though desperate to stay removed from the waking world for as long as possible.
Rows of pines divide endless metal-colored plains. The day is sunless. Neumann Two wakes and urinates out the door and takes the pillbox from his coat and swallows two or three more tablets. “Russia,” he says, though how he has marked the transition, Werner cannot guess.
The air smells of steel.
At dusk the train stops and Neumann Two leads Werner on foot through rows of ruined houses, beams and bricks lying in charred heaps. What walls stand are lined with the black crosshatchings of machine-gun fire. It’s nearly dark when Werner is delivered to a musclebound captain dining alone on a sofa that consists of a wooden frame and springs. In a tin bowl, in the captain’s lap, steams a cylinder of boiled gray meat. He studies Werner awhile without saying anything, wearing a look not of disappointment but tired amusement.
“Not making them any bigger, are they?”
“No, sir.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen, sir.”
The captain laughs. “Twelve, more like.” He slices off a circle of meat and chews a long time and finally reaches into his mouth with two fingers and flings away a string of gristle. “You’ll want to acquaint yourself with the equipment. See if you can do better than the last one they sent.”