“You try.”
“What would you have me do?”
“Dig out that old thing in the attic. You used to know more about radios than anyone in town. Anyone in Brittany, perhaps.”
“They’ve taken all the receivers.”
“Not all. People have hidden things everywhere. You’d only have to read numbers, is how I understand it, numbers on strips of paper. Someone—I don’t know who, maybe Harold Bazin—will bring them to Madame Ruelle, and she’ll collect them and bake the messages right into the bread. Right into it!” She laughs; to Marie-Laure, her voice sounds twenty years younger.
“Harold Bazin. You are trusting Harold Bazin? You are cooking secret codes into bread?”
“What fat Kraut is going to eat those awful loaves? They take all the good flour for themselves. We bring home the bread, you transmit the numbers, then we burn the piece of paper.”
“This is ridiculous. You act like children.”
“It’s better than not acting at all. Think of your nephew. Think of Marie-Laure.”
Curtains flap and papers rustle and the two adults have a standoff in the study. Marie-Laure has crept so close to her great-uncle’s doorway that she can touch the door frame.
Madame Manec says, “Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”
“Marie is almost fourteen years old, Madame. Not so young, not during war. Fourteen-year-olds die the same as anybody else. But I want fourteen to be young. I want—”
Marie-Laure scoots back up a step. Have they seen her? She thinks of the stone kennel Crazy Harold Bazin led her to: the snails gathered in their multitudes. She thinks of the many times her father put her on his bicycle: she’d balance on the seat, and he would stand on the pedals, and they’d glide out into the roar of some Parisian boulevard. She’d hold his hips and bend her knees, and they’d fly between cars, down hills, through gauntlets of odor and noise and color.
Etienne says, “I am going back to my book, Madame. Shouldn’t you be preparing dinner?”
No Out
In January 1942, Werner goes to Dr. Hauptmann in his glowing, firelit office, twice as warm as the rest of the castle, and asks to be sent home. The little doctor is sitting behind his big desk with an anemic-looking roasted bird on a dish in front of him. Quail or dove or grouse. Rolls of schematics on his right. His hounds splay on the rug before the fire.
Werner stands with his cap in his hands. Hauptmann shuts his eyes and runs a fingertip across one eyebrow. Werner says, “I will work to pay the train fare, sir.”
The blue fretwork of veins in Hauptmann’s forehead pulsates. He opens his eyes. “You?” The dogs look up as one, a three-headed hydra. “You who gets everything? Who comes here and listens to concerts and nibbles chocolates and warms yourself by the fire?”
A shred of roasted bird dances on Hauptmann’s cheek. Perhaps for the first time, Werner sees in his teacher’s thinning blond hair, in his black nostrils, in his small, almost elfin ears, something pitiless and inhuman, something determined only to survive.
“Perhaps you believe you are somebody now? Somebody of importance?”
Werner clenches his cap behind his back to keep his shoulders from quaking. “No, sir.”
Hauptmann folds his napkin. “You are an orphan, Pfennig, with no allies. I can make you whatever I want to make you. A troublemaker, a criminal, an adult. I can send you to the front and make sure you are crouched in a trench in the ice until the Russians cut off your hands and feed them to you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You will be given your orders when the school is ready to give you your orders. No sooner. We serve the Reich, Pfennig. It does not serve us.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You will come to the lab tonight. As usual.”
“Yes, sir.”
“No more chocolates. No more special treatment.”
In the hall with the door shut behind him, Werner presses his forehead against the wall, and a vision of his father’s last moments comes to him, the crushing press of the tunnels, the ceiling lowering. Jaw pinned against the floor. Skull splintering. I cannot go home, he thinks. And I cannot stay.
The Disappearance of ?Harold Bazin
Marie-Laure follows the odor of Madame Manec’s soup through the Place aux Herbes and holds the warm pot outside the alcove behind the library while Madame raps on the door.
Madame says, “Where is Monsieur Bazin?”
“Must have moved on,” says the librarian, though the doubt in his voice is only partially disguised.
“Where could Harold Bazin move to?”
“I’m not sure, Madame Manec. Please. It is cold.”
The door closes. Madame Manec swears. Marie-Laure thinks of Harold Bazin’s stories: lugubrious monsters made of sea foam, mermaids with fishy private parts, the romance of English sieges. “He’ll be back,” says Madame Manec, as much to herself as to Marie-Laure. But the next morning Harold Bazin is not back. Or the next.
Only half the group attends the following meeting.
“Do they think he was helping us?” whispers Madame Hébrard.
“Was he helping us?”
“I thought he was carrying messages.”
“What sort of messages?”
“It is getting too dangerous.”
Madame Manec paces; Marie-Laure can almost feel the heat of her frustration from across the room. “Leave, then.” Her voice smolders. “All of you.”
“Don’t be rash,” says Madame Ruelle. “We’ll take a break, a week or two. Wait for things to settle.”
Harold Bazin with his copper mask and boyish avidity and his breath like crushed insects. Where, Marie-Laure wonders, do they take people? The “Gasthaus” her father was taken to? Where they write letters home about wonderful food and mythical trees? The baker’s wife claims they’re sent to camps in the mountains. The grocer’s wife says they’re sent to nylon factories in Russia. It seems as likely to Marie-Laure that the people just disappear. The soldiers throw a bag over whomever they want to remove, run electricity through him, and then that person is gone, vanished. Expelled to some other world.
The city, thinks Marie-Laure, is slowly being remade into the model upstairs. Streets sucked empty one by one. Each time she steps outside, she becomes aware of all the windows above her. The quiet is fretful, unnatural. It’s what a mouse must feel, she thinks, as it steps from its hole into the open blades of a meadow, never knowing what shadow might come cruising above.