Von Rumpel listens. Sounds drawing nearer through the smoke. He crawls to the window. Sets his helmet on his head. Thrusts his head over the shattered sill.
A German infantry corporal squints up from the street. “Sir? I didn’t expect . . . Is the house clear, sir?”
“Empty, yes. Where are you headed, Corporal?”
“The fortress at La Cité, sir. We are evacuating. Leaving everything. We still hold the château and the Bastion de la Hollande. All other personnel are to fall back.”
Von Rumpel braces his chin on the sill, feeling as if his head might separate from his neck and go tumbling down to explode on the street.
“The entire town will be inside the bomb line,” the corporal says.
“How long?”
“There will be a cease-fire tomorrow. Noon, they say. To get civilians out. Then they resume the assault.”
Von Rumpel says, “We’re giving up the city?”
A shell detonates not far away, and the echoes of the blast shunt down between the wrecked houses, and the soldier in the street claps a hand over his helmet. Bits of stone skitter across the cobbles.
He calls, “You are with which unit, Sergeant Major?”
“Continue with your work, Corporal. I’m nearly done here.”
Final Sentence
Volkheimer does not stir. The liquid at the bottom of the paint bucket, however toxic it was, is gone. Werner has heard nothing from the girl on any frequency for how long? An hour? More? She read about the Nautilus getting sucked down into a whirlpool, waves higher than houses, the submarine standing on end, its steel ribs cracking, and then she read what he assumed was the last line of the book: Thus, to that question asked six thousand years ago by Ecclesiastes, “That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?” only two men now have the right to answer: Captain Nemo and myself.
Then the transmitter snapped off and the absolute darkness closed around him. For these past days—how many?—it has felt as though the hunger were a hand inside him, thrusting around in the cavity of his chest, reaching up to his shoulder blades, then down into his pelvis. Scraping at his bones. Today, though—or is it tonight?—the hunger peters out like a flame for which no fuel remains. Emptiness and fullness, in the end, somehow the same.
Werner blinks up to see the Viennese girl in her cape descend through the ceiling as if it is no more than a shadow. She carries a paper sack full of withered greens and seats herself amid the rubble. Around her swirls a cloud of bees.
He can see nothing, but he can see her.
She counts on her fingers. For tripping in line, she says. For working too slowly. For arguing over bread. For loitering too long in the camp toilet. For sobbing. For not organizing her things according to protocol.
It’s surely nonsense, yet something hangs inside it, some truth he does not want to allow himself to apprehend, and as she speaks, she ages, silver hair lays down on her head, her collar frays; she becomes an old woman—his understanding of who hovers at the rim of his consciousness.
For complaining of headaches.
For singing.
For speaking at night in her bunk.
For forgetting her birth date during evening muster.
For unloading the shipment too slowly.
For not turning in her keys correctly.
For failing to inform the guard.
For rising from bed too late.
Frau Schwartzenberger—that’s who she is. The Jewess in Frederick’s elevator.
She runs out of fingers as she counts.
For closing her eyes while being addressed.
For hoarding crusts.
For attempting to enter the park.
For having inflamed hands.
For asking for a cigarette.
For a failure of imagination and in the darkness, it feels as if ?Werner has reached bottom, as if he has been whirling deeper all this time, like the Nautilus sucked under the maelstrom, like his father descending into the pits: a one-way dive from Zollverein past Schulpforta, past the horrors of Russia and Ukraine, past the mother and daughter in Vienna, his ambition and shame becoming one and the same, to the nadir in this basement on the rim of the continent where the apparition chants nonsense—Frau Schwartzenberger walks toward him, transforming herself as she approaches from woman to girl—her hair becomes red again, her skin smooths, a seven-year-old girl presses her face up against his, and in the center of her forehead he can see a hole blacker than the blackness around him, at the bottom of which teems a dark city full of souls, ten thousand, five hundred thousand, all these faces staring up from alleys, from windows, from smoldering parks, and he hears thunder.
Lightning.
Artillery.
The girl evaporates.
The ground quakes. The organs inside his body shake. The beams groan. Then the slow trickle of dust and the shallow, defeated breaths of Volkheimer a meter away.
Music #1
Sometime after midnight on August 13, after surviving in her great-uncle’s attic for five days, Marie-Laure holds a record with her left hand while she runs the fingers of her right gently through its grooves, reconstructing the whole song in her head. Each rise and fall. Then she slots the record on the spindle of Etienne’s electrophone.
No water for a day and a half. No food for two. The attic smells of heat and dust and confinement and her own urine in the shaving bowl in the corner.
We’ll die together, Ned my friend.
The siege, it seems, will never end. Masonry crashes into the streets; the city falls to pieces; still this one house does not fall.
She takes the unopened can out of her great-uncle’s coat pocket and sets it in the center of the attic floor. For so long she has saved it. Maybe because it offers some last tie to Madame Manec. Maybe because if she opens it and finds it spoiled, the loss will kill her.
She places the can and brick beneath the piano bench, where she knows she can find them again. Then she double-checks the record on the spindle. Lowers the arm, places the needle at the outside edge. Finds the microphone switch with her left hand, the transmitter switch with her right.
She is going to turn it up as loud as it will go. If the German is in the house, he will hear. He’ll hear piano music draining down through the upper stories and cock his head, and then he’ll rove the sixth floor like a slavering demon. Eventually he’ll set his ear to the doors of the wardrobe, where it will be louder still.
What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models. Mazes in the nodules on murex shells and in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.