第三章: 1940年6月_所有我们看不到的光

# Château #

The first two hotels are full. The third will not unlock the door. Every so often the locksmith catches himself glancing over his shoulder.

Two days after fleeing Paris, Marie-Laure and her father enter the town of Evreux. Restaurants are either boarded up or thronged. Two women in evening gowns hunch hip to hip on the cathedral steps. A man lies facedown between market stalls, unconscious or worse.

"Papa," Marie-Laure is mumbling. Bewildered. "My feet."

He lights a cigarette: three left. "Not much farther now, Marie."

On the western edge of Evreux, the road empties and the countryside levels out. He checks and rechecks the address the director has given him. Monsieur François Giannot. 9 rue St. Nicolas. But Monsieur Giannot's house, when they reach it, is on fire. In the windless dusk, sullen heaps of smoke pump upward through the trees. A car has crashed into a corner of the gatehouse and torn the gate off its hinges. The house -- or what remains of it -- is grand: twenty French windows in the facade, big freshly painted shutters, manicured hedges out front. Un château.

He leads Marie-Laure up the gravel. His rucksack -- or perhaps it is the stone deep inside -- seems to grow heavier with each step. No puddles gleam in the gravel, no fire brigade swarms out front. Twin urns are toppled on the front steps. A burst chandelier sprawls across the entry stairs.

"I smell smoke, Papa."

The clanging of the cart recedes.

"What is burning, Papa?"

The boy acknowledges neither question nor questioner as he passes.

A boy comes toward them out of the smoky twilight, no older than Marie-Laure, streaked with ash, pushing a wheeled dining cart through the gravel. Silver tongs and spoons hanging from the cart chime and clank, and the wheels clatter and wallow. A little polished cherub grins at each corner.

"Do you know what happened to --?"

The locksmith says, "Is this the house of François Giannot?"

Marie-Laure yanks the hem of his coat. "Papa, please."

In her coat against the black trees, her face looks paler and more frightened than he has ever seen it. Has he ever asked so much of her?

"The house we have come so far to reach."

"Do you know the whereabouts of Monsieur Giannot?"

Over her head, he can see the smoldering remains of door frames glow and fade with the passage of the breeze. A hole in the roof frames the darkening sky.

Two more boys emerge from the soot carrying a portrait in a gilded frame, twice as tall as they are, the visage of some long-dead great-grandfather glowering at the night. The locksmith holds up his palms to delay them. "Was it airplanes?"

The other says, "Ran off yesterday. With the rest. London."

One says, "There's plenty more inside." The canvas of the painting ripples.

"What house?"

"A house has burned, Marie. People are stealing things."

The boys jog down the driveway with their prize and are swallowed by the gloom.

Sheets of blackened paper scuttle past their feet. Shadows whisper in the trees. A ruptured melon lolls in the drive like an amputated head. The locksmith is seeing too much. All day, mile after mile, he let himself imagine they would be greeted with food. Little potatoes with hot cores into which he and Marie-Laure would plunge forkfuls of butter. Shallots and mushrooms and hard-boiled eggs and béchamel. Coffee and cigarettes. He would hand Monsieur Giannot the stone, and Giannot would pull brass lorgnettes out of his breast pocket and fit their lenses over his calm eyes and tell him: real or fake. Then Giannot would bury it in the garden or conceal it behind a hidden panel somewhere in his walls, and that would be that. Duty fulfilled. Je ne m'en occupe plus. They would be given a private room, take baths; maybe someone would wash their clothes. Maybe Monsieur Giannot would tell humorous stories about his friend the director, and in the morning the birds would sing and a fresh newspaper would announce the end of the invasion, reasonable concessions. He would go back to the key pound, spend his evenings installing little sash windows in little wooden houses. Bonjour, bonjour. Everything as before.

"Don't tell him anything," says the first.

"London?" whispers Marie-Laure. "The friend of the director is in London?"

He leads Marie-Laure back to the road at a trot.

He swings the rucksack around to his front and wraps her arms around his neck and carries her on his back. They pass the smashed gatehouse and the crashed car and turn not east toward the center of Evreux but west. Figures bicycle past. Pinched faces streaked with suspicion or fear or both. Perhaps it is the locksmith's own eyes that have been streaked.

But nothing is as before. The trees seethe and the house smolders, and standing in the gravel of the driveway, the daylight nearly finished, the locksmith has an unsettling thought: Someone might be coming for us. Someone might know what I carry.

"Papa, my feet."

"Not so quickly," begs Marie-Laure.

They rest in weeds twenty paces off the road. There is only plunging night and owls calling from the trees and bats straining insects above a roadside ditch. A diamond, the locksmith reminds himself, is only a piece of carbon compressed in the bowels of the earth for eons and driven to the surface in a volcanic pipe. Someone facets it, someone polishes it. It can harbor a curse no more than a leaf can, or a mirror, or a life. There is only chance in this world, chance and physics.

Behind him, over Evreux, a wall of clouds ignites once, twice. Lightning? On the road ahead, he can make out several acres of uncut hay and the gentle profiles of unlit farm buildings -- a house and barn. No movement.

"Marie, I see a hotel."

"You said the hotels were full."

Anyway, what he carries is nothing more than a piece of glass. A diversion.

"This one looks friendly. Come. It's not far."

The padlock is a brand-new single-latch Burguet; with his tools he picks it easily. Inside are oats and water buckets and horseflies flying sleepy loops but no horses. He opens a stall and helps Marie-Laure into the corner and pulls off her shoes.

Again he carries his daughter. One more half mile. The windows of the house stay unlit as they approach. Its barn sits a hundred yards beyond. He tries to listen above the rush of blood in his ears. No dogs, no torches. Probably the farmers too have fled. He sets Marie-Laure in front of the barn doors and knocks softly and waits and knocks again.

"Voilà," he says. "One of the guests has just brought his horses into the lobby, so it may smell for a moment. But now the porters are hurrying him out. See, there he goes. Goodbye, horse! Go sleep in the stables, please!"

A vegetable garden waits behind the house. In the dimness he can make out roses, leeks, lettuces. Strawberries, most still green. Tender white carrots with black earth clotted in their fibers. Nothing stirs: no farmer materializes in a window with a rifle. The locksmith brings back a shirtful of vegetables and fills a tin bucket at a spigot and eases shut the barn door and feeds his daughter in the dark. Then he folds his coat, lays her head on it, and wipes her face with his shirt.

From outside comes the soft hooting of owls. Distant grumbling of thunder or ordnance or both. He says, "This hotel is very cheap, ma chérie. The innkeeper behind the desk said our room was forty francs a night but only twenty francs if we made our own bed." He listens to her breathe. "So I said, 'Oh, we can make our own bed.' And he said, 'Right, I'll get you some nails and wood.' "

Her expression is faraway. Lost.

Two cigarettes left. Inhale, exhale.

Walk the paths of logic. Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution. Every lock its key. You can go back to Paris or you can stay here or you can go on.

# Entrance Exam #

"He was with your grandfather -- his brother -- when he died. In the war. 'Got a bit of gas in the head' is how they used to say it. Afterward he saw things."

Creaking rumble of thunder closer now. The barn quakes lightly.

"What kind of things?"

"Things that were not there."

Marie-Laure still does not smile. "Now we go find Uncle Etienne?"

Spiders draw their webs between rafters. Moths flap against the windows. It starts to rain.

"Yes, Marie."

Entrance exams for the National Political Institutes of Education are held in Essen, eighteen miles south of Zollverein, inside a sweltering dance hall where a trio of truck-sized radiators is plugged in to the back wall. One of the radiators clangs and steams all day despite various attempts to shut it down. War ministry flags as big as tanks hang from the rafters.

There are one hundred recruits, all boys. A school representative in a black uniform arranges them in ranks four deep. Medals chime on his chest as he paces. "You are," he declares, "attempting to enter the most elite schools in the world. The exams will last eight days. We will take only the purest, only the strongest." A second representative distributes uniforms: white shirts, white shorts, white socks. The boys shuck their clothes where they stand.

"Who is seventy-six percent crazy?"

Werner counts twenty-six others in his age group. All but two are taller than he is. All but three are blond. None of them wear eyeglasses.

The boys spend that entire first morning in their new white outfits, filling out questionnaires on clipboards. There is no noise save the scribbling of pencils and the pacing of examiners and the clunking of the huge radiator.

Where is your mother from?

There are no options for past tense. He writes: Germany.

Where was your grandfather born? What color are your father's eyes? Has your mother ever worked in an office? Of one hundred and ten questions about his lineage, Werner can accurately answer only sixteen. The rest are guesses.

Where is your father from?

He remembers Frau Elena as she looked early this morning, standing in her nightdress beside the hall lamp, fussing over his bag, all the other children asleep. She seemed lost, dazed, as if she could not absorb how quickly things were changing around her. She said she was proud. She said Werner should do his best. "You're a smart boy," she said. "You'll do well." She kept adjusting and readjusting his collar. When he said, "It's only a week," her eyes filled slowly, as if some internal flood were gradually overwhelming her.

German.

What languages does your mother speak?

Germany.

In the evening, the boys spill out of the hall, some met by proud-looking parents with automobiles, others vanishing purposefully in twos and threes into the streets: all seem to know where they're going. Werner makes his way alone to a spartan hostel six blocks away, where he rents a bed for two marks a night and lies among muttering itinerants and listens to the pigeons and bells and shuddering traffic of Essen. It is the first night he has spent outside of Zollverein, and he cannot stop thinking of Jutta, who has not spoken to him since discovering he smashed their radio. Who stared at him with so much accusation in her face that he had to look away. Her eyes said, You are betraying me, but wasn't he protecting her?

In the afternoon, the recruits run. They crawl under obstacles, do push-ups, scale ropes suspended from the ceiling -- one hundred children passing sleek and interchangeable in their white uniforms like livestock before the eyes of the examiners. Werner comes in ninth in the shuttle runs. He comes in second to last on the rope climb. He will never be good enough.

"Schnee," the man mutters, and makes a notation. Snow. Werner's hair is lighter than the lightest color on the board.

On the second morning, there are raciological exams. They require little of Werner except to raise his arms or keep from blinking while an inspector shines a penlight into the tunnels of his pupils. He sweats and shifts. His heart pounds unreasonably. An onion-breathed technician in a lab coat measures the distance between Werner's temples, the circumference of his head, and the thickness and shape of his lips. Calipers are used to evaluate his feet, the length of his fingers, and the distance between his eyes and his navel. They measure his penis. The angle of his nose is quantified with a wooden protractor.

A second technician gauges Werner's eye color against a chromatic scale on which sixty or so shades of blue are displayed. Werner's color is himmelblau, sky blue. To assess his hair color, the man snips a lock of hair from Werner's head and compares it to thirty or so other locks clipped to a board, arrayed darkest to lightest.

They test his vision, draw his blood, take his fingerprints. By noon he wonders if there is anything left for them to measure.

The recruits speculate in eager whispers.

Verbal exams come next. How many Nationalpolitische Erzie-hungsanstalten are there? Twenty. Who are our greatest Olympians? He does not know. What is the birthday of the führer? April 20. Who is our greatest writer, what is the Treaty of Versailles, which is the nation's fastest airplane?

Day three involves more running, more climbing, more jumping. Everything is timed. The technicians, school representatives, and examiners -- each wearing uniforms in subtly different shades -- scribble on pads of graph paper with a very narrow gauge, and sheet after sheet of this paper gets closed into leather binders with a gold lightning bolt stamped on the front.

"I hear it's only four."

"I hear the schools have sailboats, falconries, rifle ranges."

They speak of the schools with yearning and bravado; they want desperately to be selected. Werner tells himself: So do I. So do I.

"I hear they will take only seven from each age group."

First to go is a stout farm kid from Herne. He scales the ladder quickly enough, but as soon as he's on the platform high above everyone else, his face goes white. His knees wobble dangerously.

And yet at other times, despite his ambitions, he is visited by instants of vertigo; he sees Jutta holding the smashed pieces of their radio and feels uncertainty steal into his gut.

The recruits scale walls; they run wind sprint after wind sprint. On the fifth day, three quit. On the sixth, four more give up. Each hour the dance hall seems to grow progressively warmer, so by the eighth day, the air, walls, and floor are saturated with the hot, teeming odor of boys. For their final test, each of the fourteen-year-olds is forced to climb a ladder haphazardly nailed to a wall. Once at the top, twenty-five feet above the floor, their heads in the rafters, they are supposed to step onto a tiny platform, close their eyes, and leap off, to be caught in a flag held by a dozen of the other recruits.

Someone mutters, "Pussy."

When he goes over, he goes sideways. The recruits on the ground manage to swing the flag around in time, but his weight tears the edges out of their hands, and he hits the floor arms first with a sound like a bundle of kindling breaking over a knee.

An examiner watches dispassionately. The boy on the platform peeks over the edge as if into a swirling abyss and shuts his eyes. He sways back and forth. Interminable seconds pass. The examiner peers at his stopwatch. Werner clutches the hem of the flag.

The boy beside Werner whispers, "Afraid of heights."

Then he starts to scream. Werner looks away. Four boys are ordered to carry the injured one out.

Soon most everyone in the dance hall has stopped to watch, even recruits in other age groups. The boy sways twice more, until it's clear he's about to faint. Even then no one moves to help him.

The boy sits up. Both of his forearms are bent at nauseating angles. He blinks at them curiously for a moment, as if scanning his memory for a clue that might explain how he got there.

We will take only the purest, only the strongest.

Werner watches from his place on the flag. When his turn comes, he tells himself, he must not waver. On the undersides of his eyelids he sees the interlaced ironwork of Zollverein, the fire-breathing mills, men teeming out of elevator shafts like ants, the mouth of Pit Nine, where his father was lost. Jutta in the parlor window, sealed behind the rain, watching him follow the corporal to Herr Siedler's house. The taste of whipped cream and powdered sugar and the smooth calves of Herr Siedler's wife.

One by one, the remaining fourteen-year-olds climb the ladder and tremble and leap. One sobs the whole way. Another sprains an ankle when he hits. The next waits at least two full minutes before jumping. The fifteenth boy looks out across the dance hall as if staring into a bleak, cold sea, then climbs back down.

Werner scampers up the ladder. The rungs have been roughly sawed, and his palms take splinters the whole way. From the top, the crimson flag with its white circle and black cross looks unexpectedly small. A pale ring of faces stares up. It's even hotter up here, torrid, and the smell of perspiration makes him light-headed.

The only place your brother is going, little girl, is into the mines.

Exceptional. Unexpected.

"Heil Hitler!" yells Werner.

In the morning an ancient furniture lorry stops for them. Her father lifts her into its bed, where a dozen people nestle beneath a waxed canvas tarp. The engine roars and pops; the truck rarely accelerates past walking speed.

Without hesitating, Werner steps to the edge of the platform and shuts his eyes and jumps. He hits the flag in its exact center, and the boys holding its edges give a collective groan.

The next boy starts up the ladder.

He rolls to his feet, uninjured. The examiner clicks his stopwatch, scribbles on his clipboard, looks up. Their eyes meet for a half second. Maybe less. Then the man goes back to his notations.

# Brittany #

A woman prays in a Norman accent; someone shares pâté; everything smells of rain. No Stukas swoop over them, machine guns blazing. No one in the truck has even seen a German. For half the morning, Marie-Laure tries to convince herself that the previous days have been some elaborate test concocted by her father, that the truck is moving not away from Paris but toward it, that tonight they'll return home. The model will be on its bench in the corner, and the sugar bowl will be in the center of the kitchen table, its little spoon resting on the rim. Out the open windows, the cheese seller on the rue des Patriarches will lock his door and shutter up those marvelous smells, as he has done nearly every evening she can remember, and the leaves of the chestnut tree will clatter and murmur, and her father will boil coffee and draw her a hot bath, and say, "You did well, Marie-Laure. I'm proud."

The truck bounces from highway to country road to dirt lane. Weeds brush its flanks. Well after midnight, west of Cancale, they run out of fuel.

Marie-Laure shuffles along half-asleep. The road seems hardly wider than a path. The air smells like wet grain and hedge trimmings; in the lulls between their footfalls, she can hear a deep, nearly subsonic roar. She tugs her father to a stop. "Armies."

"Not much farther," her father whispers.

He carries her on his back. Now the barking of gulls. Smell of wet stones, of bird shit, of salt, though she never knew salt to have a smell. The sea murmuring in a language that travels through stones, air, and sky. What did Captain Nemo say? The sea does not belong to tyrants.

She cocks her head.

"The ocean."

"It's the ocean, Marie. I promise."

"We're crossing into Saint-Malo now," says her father, "the part they call the city within the walls." He narrates what he sees: a portcullis, defensive walls called ramparts, granite mansions, a steeple above rooftops. The echoes of his footfalls ricochet off tall houses and rain back onto them, and he labors beneath her weight, and she is old enough to suspect that what he presents as quaint and welcoming might in truth be harrowing and strange.

"Rue Vauborel," her father says between pants. "Here, it must be. Or here?" He pivots, retraces their steps, climbs an alley, then turns around.

Birds make strangled cries overhead. Her father turns left, right. It feels to Marie-Laure as if they have wound these past four days toward the center of a bewildering maze, and now they are tiptoeing past the pickets of some final interior cell. Inside which a terrible beast might slumber.

"Is there no one to ask?"

Finally they reach a gate, and he sets her down on a curbstone and pushes an electric buzzer, and she can hear it ring deep within a house. Nothing. He presses again. Again nothing. He presses a third time.

"This is the house of your uncle?"

They sit with their backs to the gate. Wrought iron and cool. A heavy wooden door just behind it. She leans her head on his shoulder; he pulls off her shoes. The world seems to sway gently back and forth, as though the town is drifting lightly away. As though back onshore, all of France is left to bite its fingernails and flee and stumble and weep and wake to a numb, gray dawn, unable to believe what is happening. Who do the roads belong to now? And the fields? The trees?

"There's not a single light, Marie. Everyone is asleep or pretending to be."

"He's sleeping. As we should be."

"It is."

"He doesn't know us," she says.

From deep inside the house behind them come footfalls.

Her father takes his final cigarette from his shirt pocket and lights it.

# Madame Manec #

As soon as her father says his name, the breathing on the other side of the door becomes a gasp, a held breath. The gate screeches; a door behind it gives way. "Jesus's mother," says a woman's voice. "You were so small --"

"My daughter, Madame. Marie-Laure, this is Madame Manec."

Marie-Laure attempts a curtsy. The hand that cups her cheek is strong: the hand of a geologist or a gardener.

"My God, there are none so distant that fate cannot bring them together. But, dear child, your stockings. And your heels! You must be famished."

They step into a narrow entry. Marie-Laure hears the gate clang shut, then the woman latching the door behind them. Two dead bolts, one chain. They are led into a room that smells of herbs and rising dough: a kitchen. Her father unbuttons her coat, helps her sit. "We are very grateful, I understand how late it is," he is saying, and the old woman -- Madame Manec -- is brisk, efficient, evidently overcoming her initial amazement; she brushes off their thank-yous; she scoots Marie-Laure's chair toward a tabletop. A match is struck; water fills a pot; an icebox clicks open and shut. There is the hum of gas and the tick-tick of heating metal. In another moment, a warm towel is on Marie-Laure's face. A jar of cool, sweet water in front of her. Each sip a blessing.

The old woman laughs: a laugh Marie-Laure warms to immediately. In an instant a fork is fitted into her hand.

Eggs crack. Butter pops in a hot pan. Her father is telling an abridged story of their flight, train stations, fearful crowds, omitting the stop in Evreux, but soon all of Marie-Laure's attention is absorbed by the smells blooming around her: egg, spinach, melting cheese.

An omelet arrives. She positions her face over its steam. "May I please have a fork?"

"Oh, the town is absolutely stuffed," Madame Manec is saying in her fairy-tale drawl as she moves about. She seems short; she wears blocky, heavy shoes. Hers is a low voice, full of pebbles -- a sailor's voice or a smoker's. "Some can afford hotels or rentals, but many are in the warehouses, on straw, not enough to eat. I'd take them in, but your uncle, you know, it might upset him. There's no diesel, no kerosene, British ships long gone. They burned everything they left behind, at first I couldn't believe any of it, but Etienne, he has the wireless going nonstop --"

"Marie," murmurs her father, "your manners."

A door opens, or a window, and Marie-Laure can hear the hypnotic voice of the sea.

"But they're --"

"We have plenty, you go ahead, child. I make them every year." When Marie-Laure has eaten two full cans of peaches, Madame Manec cleans Marie-Laure's feet with a rag and shakes out her coat and clanks dishes into a sink and says, "Cigarette?" and her father groans with gratitude and a match flares and the grown-ups smoke.

"And Etienne?" says her father.

"Not for twenty years."

"He still does not --?"

Probably the grown-ups are mouthing more to each other. Probably Marie-Laure should be more curious -- about her great-uncle who sees things that are not there, about the fate of everyone and everything she has ever known -- but her stomach is full, her blood has become a warm golden flow through her arteries, and out the open window, beyond the walls, the ocean crashes, only a bit of stacked stone left between her and it, the rim of Brittany, the farthest windowsill of France -- and maybe the Germans are advancing as inexorably as lava, but Marie-Laure is slipping into something like a dream, or perhaps it's the memory of one: she's six or seven years old, newly blind, and her father is sitting in the chair beside her bed, whittling away at some tiny piece of wood, smoking a cigarette, and evening is settling over the hundred thousand rooftops and chimneys of Paris, and all the walls around her are dissolving, the ceilings too, the whole city is disintegrating into smoke, and at last sleep falls over her like a shadow.

The eggs taste like clouds. Like spun gold. Madame Manec says, "I think she likes it," and laughs again.

Madame says, "Shuts himself up like a corpse one day, eats like an albatross the next."

A second omelet soon appears. Now it is her father who eats quickly. "How about peaches, dear?" murmurs Madame Manec, and Marie-Laure can hear a can opening, juice slopping into a bowl. Seconds later, she's eating wedges of wet sunlight.

The children shout, delighted, as he presents it. Jutta shows no interest.

# You Have Been Called #

"They said they'd accept only two from my age group. Maybe three." From the far end of the table, he can feel the heat of Jutta's attention. With the rest of the money from Herr Siedler, he purchased a People's Receiver for thirty-four marks eighty: a two-valve low-powered radio even cheaper than the state-sponsored Volksempfängers he has repaired in the houses of neighbors. Unmodified, its receiver can haul in only the big long-wave nationwide programs from Deutchlandsender. Nothing else. Nothing foreign.

Everyone wants to hear Werner's stories. What were the exams like, what did they make you do, tell us everything. The youngest children tug his sleeves; the older ones are deferential. This snowy-haired dreamer plucked out of the soot.

"Was there cheeses? Was there cakes?"

Martin Sachse asks, "Was there loads of math?"

"Did they let you shoot rifles?"

"Did you ride in tanks? I bet you rode in tanks."

Frau Elena is doing laundry. The little boys are clustered around the new radio: a half-hour program called Kids' Club. Jutta and Claudia Förster have taken three of the younger girls to a puppet show in the market; Jutta has spoken no more than six words to Werner since his return.

You have been called, says the letter. Werner is to report to the National Political Institute of Education #6 at Schulpforta. He stands in the parlor of Children's House, trying to absorb it. Cracked walls, sagging ceiling, twin benches that have borne child after child after child for as long as the mine has made orphans. He has found a way out.

But he does. Five days after he returns from Essen, the letter is hand-delivered to Children's House. An eagle and cross on a crisp envelope. No stamp. Like a dispatch from God.

Schulpforta. Tiny dot on the map, near Naumburg, in Saxony. Two hundred miles east. Only in his most intrepid dreams did he allow himself to hope that he might travel so far. He carries the sheet of paper in a daze to the alley where Frau Elena boils sheets amid billows of steam.

Werner says, "I didn't know the answers to half their questions. I'll never get in."

Frau Elena: strands of hair stuck to her cheeks, maroon aprons under her eyes, pink rims around her nostrils. Thin crucifix against her damp throat. Is she proud? She rubs her eyes and nods absently. "They'll celebrate this." She hands the letter back and stares down the alley at the dense ranks of clotheslines and coalbins.

"Everyone. The neighbors." She laughs a sudden and startling laugh. "People like that vice minister. The man who took your book."

"No. Not Jutta."

She rereads it several times. "We can't pay."

"We don't need to."

"Who, Frau?"

"Two weeks."

"Five hours by train. They've already paid the fare."

"When?"

"How far?"

"Not Jutta."

He rehearses in his head the argument he will present to his sister. Pflicht. It means duty. Obligation. Every German fulfilling his function. Put on your boots and go to work. Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. We all have parts to play, little sister. But before the girls arrive, news of his acceptance has reverberated through the block. Neighbors come over one after another and exclaim and wag their chins. Coal wives bring pig knuckles and cheese; they pass around Werner's acceptance letter; the ones who can read, read it aloud to the ones who cannot, and Jutta comes home to a crowded, exhilarated room. The twins -- Hannah and Susanne Gerlitz -- sprint laps around the sofa, looped up in the excitement, and six-year-old Rolf Hupfauer sings Rise! Rise! All glory to the fatherland! and several of the other children join in, and Werner doesn't see Frau Elena speak to Jutta in the corner of the parlor, doesn't see Jutta run upstairs.

At the dinner bell, she does not come down. Frau Elena asks Hannah Gerlitz to lead the prayer, and tells Werner she'll talk to Jutta, that he ought to stay downstairs, all these people are here for him. Every few breaths, the words flare in his mind like sparks: You have been called. Each minute that passes is one fewer in this house. In this life.

After the meal, little Siegfried Fischer, no older than five, walks around the table and tugs Werner's sleeve and hands him a photograph he has torn from a newspaper. In the picture, six fighter-bombers float above a mountain range of clouds. Spangles of sun are frozen midglide across the airplanes' fuselages. The scarves of the pilots stretch backward.

Siegfried Fischer says, "You'll show them, won't you?" His face is fierce with belief; it seems to draw a circle around all the hours Werner has spent at Children's House, hoping for something more.

# Occuper #

Marie-Laure wakes to church bells: two three four five. Faint smell of mildew. Ancient down pillows with all the loft worn out. Silk wallpaper behind the lumpy bed where she sits. When she stretches out both arms, she can almost touch walls on either side.

"I will," Werner says. The eyes of all the children are on him. "Absolutely I will."

The reverberations of the bells cease. She has slept most of the day. What is the muffled roar she hears? Crowds? Or is it still the sea?

She gropes through a doorway into what? A hall? Out here the roar is fainter, barely a murmur.

The weather in this place: you can feel it between your fingers.

Quiet. Then a bustling far below, the heavy shoes of Madame Manec climbing flights of narrow, curving steps, her smoker's lungs coming closer, third floor, fourth -- how tall is this house?-- now Madame's voice is calling, "Mademoiselle," and she is taken by the hand, led back into the room in which she woke, and seated on the edge of the bed. "Do you need to use the toilet? You must, then a bath, you had an excellent sleep, your father is in town trying the telegraph office, though I assured him that'll be about as profitable as trying to pick feathers out of molasses. Are you hungry?"

"Hello?"

She sets her feet on the floor. The wounds on the backs of her heels pulse. Where is her cane? She shuffles so she does not bash her shins on something. Behind curtains, a window rises out of her reach. Opposite the window, she finds a dresser whose drawers open only partway before striking the bed.

"I did."

Madame Manec hesitates. "Probably not."

"But he is here?"

"Will I meet Uncle Etienne now?"

"You knew him?"

Madame Manec plumps pillows, flaps the quilt. Marie-Laure tries to concentrate on something small, something concrete. The model back in Paris. A single seashell in Dr. Geffard's laboratory.

"Every room."

"Does this whole house belong to my great-uncle Etienne?"

Madame Manec laughs. "You get right to it, don't you? Your great-uncle inherited the house from his father, who was your great-grandfather. He was a very successful man with plenty of money."

"But Papa doesn't explain anything. He says only that Uncle was in the war with my grandfather."

Madame Manec's big, thick hands enfold hers. "Let's see about the bath. Your father will explain when he returns."

"Always?"

"I have worked here since Master Etienne was a little boy."

"Yes, child. He is always here."

"My grandfather too? You knew him?"

"That's right. But your great-uncle, when he came home"-- Madame hunts for the proper phrasing --"he was not the same as when he left."

"How does he pay for it?"

"Not ever?"

"You mean he was more scared of things?"

"I mean lost. A mouse in a trap. He saw dead people passing through the walls. Terrible things in the corners of the streets. Now your great-uncle does not go outdoors."

"Not for years. But Etienne is a wonder, you'll see. He knows everything."

Marie-Laure listens to the house timbers creak and the gulls cry and the gentle roar breaking against the window. "Are we high in the air, Madame?"

"It does, dear. But it is probably best to leave it shuttered while --"

"Does the window open?"

"We are on the sixth floor. It's a good bed, isn't it? I thought you and your papa would be able to rest well here."

"We're supposed to keep shutters and windows closed. But maybe just for a minute." Madame Manec turns a handle, pulls in the two hinged panes of the window, and nudges open the shutter. Wind: immediate, bright, sweet, briny, luminous. The roar rises and falls.

Marie-Laure is already standing atop the bed, running her palms along the wall. "Can one see the sea from it?"

"Are there snails out there, Madame?"

Madame draws a warm bath in a third-floor tub. From the tub, Marie-Laure listens to her shut the door, and the cramped bathroom groan beneath the weight of the water, and the walls creak, as if she were in a cabin inside Captain Nemo's Nautilus. The pain in her heels fades. She lowers her head below the level of the water. To never go outdoors! To hide for decades inside this strange, narrow house!

"Snails? In the ocean?" Again that laugh. "As many as raindrops. You're interested in snails?"

"Well," says Madame Manec. "You've turned up in the right place."

"Yes yes yes. I have found tree snails and garden snails. But I have never found marine snails."

For dinner she is buttoned into a starchy dress from some bygone decade. They sit at the square kitchen table, her father and Madame Manec at opposite sides, knees pressed to knees, windows jammed shut, shutters drawn. A wireless set mumbles the names of ministers in a harried, staccato voice -- de Gaulle in London, Pétain replacing Reynaud. They eat fish stewed with green tomatoes. Her father reports that no letters have been delivered or collected in three days. Telegraph lines are not functioning. The newest newspaper is six days old. On the radio, the announcer reads public service classifieds.

Madame Meyzieu seeks whereabouts of six daughters, sent by train to Redon.

L. Rabier seeks news of his wife, last seen at Gare d'Orsay.

Monsieur Cheminoux refugeed in Orange seeks his three children, left with luggage at Ivry-sur-Seine.

Mother sends prayers to Luc and Albert, wherever they are.

Francis in Genève seeks any information about Marie-Jeanne, last seen at Gentilly.

That night she and her father wind up the twisting staircase and go to bed side by side on the same lumpy bed in the same sixth-floor bedroom with the fraying silk wallpaper. Her father fusses with his rucksack, with the door latch, with his matches. Soon enough there is the familiar smell of his cigarettes: Gauloises bleues. She hears wood pop and groan as the two halves of the window pull open. The welcome hiss of wind washes in, or maybe it's the sea and the wind, her ears unable to unbraid the two. With it come the scents of salt and hay and fish markets and distant marshes and absolutely nothing that smells to her of war.

A. Cotteret wants his mother to know he is safe in Laval.

"Everybody has misplaced someone," murmurs Madame Manec, and Marie-Laure's father switches off the wireless, and the tubes click as they cool. Upstairs, faintly, the same voice keeps reading names. Or is it her imagination? She hears Madame Manec stand and collect the bowls and her father exhale cigarette smoke as though it is very heavy in his lungs and he is glad to be rid of it.

"I expect he's in his room on the fifth floor."

"It means they'll park their trucks in the squares."

"Lucky to have Madame Manec too. She's a genius with food, isn't she, Papa? She is maybe just a little bit better at cooking than you are?"

Quiet. Twenty heartbeats. Thirty.

"Where is Uncle Etienne?"

"Just a very little bit better."

Marie-Laure is glad to hear a smile enter his voice. But beneath it she can sense his thoughts fluttering like trapped birds. "What does it mean, Papa, they'll occupy us?"

"We are lucky to have him, Marie."

"Seeing things that are not there?"

"Will they make us speak their language?"

"Is it like occupation, Papa? Like the sort of job a person does?"

"Can we visit the ocean tomorrow, Papa?"

"They might make us advance our clocks by one hour."

The house creaks. Gulls cry. He lights another cigarette.

"It's like military control, Marie. That's enough questions for now."

"Probably not tomorrow."

"How can one country make another change its clocks? What if everybody refuses?"

"I know so."

"No."

"You do not know so."

Marie-Laure tries to lie very still. She can almost hear the machinery of her father's mind churning inside his skull. "It will be okay," she whispers. Her hand finds his forearm. "We will stay here awhile and then we will go back to our apartment and the pinecones will be right where we left them and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea will be on the floor of the key pound where we left it and no one will be in our beds."

"I do not know so. I believe so."

"Then a lot of people will be early. Or late."

"They're still there."

"I lined up the pinecones largest to smallest."

"Remember our apartment, Papa? With my books and our model and all those pinecones on the windowsill?"

The distant anthem of the sea. The clopping of someone's boot heels on cobbles far below. She wants very badly for her father to say, Yes, that's it absolutely, ma chérie, but he says nothing.

"Do you think so?"

"Are German soldiers climbing into our beds right now, Papa?"

"Of course."

Why can't Jutta be happy for him? Why, even at the moment of his escape, must some inexplicable warning murmur in a distant region of his mind?

He cannot concentrate on schoolwork or simple conversations or Frau Elena's chores. Every time he shuts his eyes, some vision of the school at Schulpforta overmasters him: vermilion flags, muscular horses, gleaming laboratories. The best boys in Germany. At certain moments he sees himself as an emblem of possibility to which all eyes have turned. Though at other moments, flickering in front of him, he sees the big kid from the entrance exams: his face gone bloodless atop the platform high above the dance hall. How he fell. How no one moved to help him.

# Don't Tell Lies #

Siegfried Fischer says, "And the falconries!"

Martin Sachse says, "Tell us again about the hand grenades!"

Three times he readies his argument and three times Jutta turns on a heel and strides away. Hour after hour she helps Frau Elena with the smaller children or walks to the market or finds some other excuse to be helpful, to be busy, to be out.

Before he knows it, there's only one day before his departure. He wakes before dawn and finds Jutta asleep in her cot in the girls' dormitory. Her arms are wrapped around her head and her wool blanket is twisted around her midsection and her pillow is jammed into the crack between mattress and wall -- even in sleep, a tableau of friction. Above her bed are papered her fantastical pencil drawings of Frau Elena's village, of Paris with a thousand white towers beneath whirling flocks of birds.

He says her name.

To his surprise, she sits up. They step outside before anyone else is awake. He leads her without speaking. They climb one fence, then another. Jutta's untied shoelaces trail behind her. Thistles bite their knees. The rising sun makes a pinhole on the horizon.

"She won't listen," Werner tells Frau Elena.

"Will you walk with me?"

"Keep trying."

They stop at the edge of an irrigation canal. In winters past, Werner used to tow her in their wagon to this very spot, and they would watch skaters race along the frozen canal, farmers with blades fixed to their feet and frost caked in their beards, five or six rushing by all at once, tightly packed, in the midst of an eight- or nine-mile race between towns. The look in the skaters' eyes was of horses who have run a long way, and it was always exciting for Werner to see them, to feel the air disturbed by their speed, to hear their skates clapping along, then fading -- a sensation as if his soul might tear free of his body and go sparking off with them. But as soon as they'd continued around the bend and left behind only the white etchings of their skates in the ice, the thrill would fade, and he'd tow Jutta back to Children's House feeling lonely and forsaken and more trapped in his life than before.

She twines herself tighter into her blanket.

"I know you're angry --"

"So you want me to stay? Go down in the mines?"

He says, "No skaters came last winter."

"Broadcasts from Paris. They'd say the opposite of everything Deutschlandsender says. They'd say we were devils. That we were committing atrocities. Do you know what atrocities means?"

"You'll become just like Hans and Herribert."

The mine complex is a smoldering black mountain range behind her. Even now Werner can hear a mechanical drumbeat thudding in the distance, first shift going down in the elevators as the owl shift comes up -- all those boys with tired eyes and soot-stained faces rising in the elevators to meet the sun -- and for a moment he apprehends a huge and terrible presence looming just beyond the morning.

His sister gazes into the ditch. Her eyes are mauve. Her hair is snarled and untamable and perhaps even whiter than his. Schnee.

She says, "None'll come this year either."

They watch a bicyclist far down the path. Jutta clamps her hands in her armpits. "You know what I used to listen to? On our radio? Before you ruined it?"

"Spend enough time with boys like that and you will."

"I won't."

"Hush, Jutta. Please."

"Is it right," Jutta says, "to do something only because everyone else is doing it?"

"I'll write you letters every week. Twice a week if I can. You don't have to show them to Frau Elena if you don't want to."

"Please, Jutta."

"It's not forever, Jutta. Two years, maybe. Half the boys who get admitted don't manage to graduate. But maybe I'll learn something; maybe they'll teach me to be a proper engineer. Maybe I can learn to fly an airplane, like little Siegfried says. Don't shake your head, we've always wanted to see the inside of an airplane, haven't we? I'll fly us west, you and me, Frau Elena too if she wants. Or we could take a train. We'll ride through forests and villages de montagnes, all those places Frau Elena talked about when we were small. Maybe we could ride all the way to Paris."

Jutta shuts her eyes.

The burgeoning light. The tender hissing of the grass. Jutta opens her eyes but doesn't look at him. "Don't tell lies. Lie to yourself, Werner, but don't lie to me."

Doubts: slipping in like eels. Werner shoves them back. Jutta is barely twelve years old, still a child.

Ten hours later, he's on a train.

For three days she does not meet her great-uncle. Then, feeling her way to the toilet on the fourth morning after their arrival, she steps on something small and hard. She crouches and locates it with her fingers.

# Etienne #

Whorled and smooth. A sculpture of vertical folds incised by a tapering spiral. The aperture broad and oval. She whispers, "A whelk."

"Marie-Laure." His voice is low and soft, a piece of silk you might keep in a drawer and pull out only on rare occasions, just to feel it between your fingers. She reaches into space, and a cool bird-boned hand takes hers. He is feeling better, he says. "I am sorry I have not been able to meet you sooner."

One stride in front of the first shell, she finds another. Then a third and a fourth. The trail of seashells arcs past the toilet and down a flight to the closed fifth-floor door she knows by now is his. Beyond which issues the concerted whispers of pianos playing. A voice says, "Come in."

She expects fustiness, an elderly funk, but the room smells mildly of soap and books and dried seaweed. Not unlike Dr. Geffard's laboratory.

"Great-Uncle?"

He has the entire fifth floor -- one big room, except for the landing -- to himself. Three windows open onto the rue Vauborel in the front, three more onto the alley in the back. There is a small and ancient bed, his coverlet smooth and tight. A tidy desk, a davenport.

"How many radios do you have, Uncle?"

"Let me show you." He brings her hands to a shelf. "This one is stereo. Heterodyne. I assembled it myself." She imagines a diminutive pianist, dressed in a tuxedo, playing inside the machine. Next he places her hands on a big cabinet radio, then on a third no bigger than a toaster. Eleven sets in all, he says, boyish pride slipping into his voice. "I can hear ships at sea. Madrid. Brazil. London. I heard India once. Here at the edge of the city, so high in the house, we get superb reception."

The pianos plink along softly; it sounds as if a dozen are playing all at once, as if the sound comes from every point of the compass.

He lets her dig through a box of fuses, another of switches. He leads her to bookshelves next: the spines of hundreds of books; a birdcage; beetles in matchboxes; an electric mousetrap; a glass paperweight inside which, he says, a scorpion has been entombed; jars of miscellaneous connectors; a hundred more things she cannot identify.

Madame Manec brings sandwiches. Etienne doesn't have any Jules Verne, but he does have Darwin, he says, and reads to her from The Voyage of the "Beagle," translating English to French as he goes -- the variety of species among the jumping spiders appears almost infinite… Music spirals out of the radios, and it is splendid to drowse on the davenport, to be warm and fed, to feel the sentences hoist her up and carry her somewhere else.

Six blocks away at the telegraph office, Marie-Laure's father presses his face to the window to watch two German motorcycles with sidecars roar through the Porte Saint-Vincent. The shutters of the town are drawn, but between slats, over sills, a thousand eyes peer out. Behind the motorcycles roll two trucks. In the rear glides a single black Mercedes. Sunlight flashes from the hood ornaments and chrome fittings as the little procession grinds to a stop on the ringed gravel drive in front of the soaring lichen-streaked walls of the Château de Saint-Malo. An elderly, preternaturally tanned man -- the mayor, somebody explains -- waits with a white handkerchief in his big sailor's hands, a barely perceptible shake showing in his wrists.

"That's the tour," he says, almost whispering. Her great-uncle seems kind, curious, and entirely sane. Stillness: this is what he radiates more than anything else. The stillness of a tree. Of a mouse blinking in the dark.

The Germans climb out of their vehicles, more than a dozen of them. Their boots gleam and their uniforms are tidy. Two carry carnations; one urges along a beagle on a rope. Several gaze openmouthed up at the facade of the château.

# Jungmänner #

It's a castle out of a storybook: eight or nine stone buildings sheltered below hills, rust-colored roofs, narrow windows, spires and turrets, weeds sprouting from between roof tiles. A pretty little river winds through athletics fields. Not in the clearest hour of Zollverein's clearest day has Werner breathed air so unadulterated by dust.

A short man in a field captain's uniform emerges from the backseat of the Mercedes and brushes something invisible from the sleeve of his coat. He exchanges a few words with a thin aide-de-camp, who translates to the mayor. The mayor nods. Then the short man disappears through the huge doors. Minutes later, the aide-de-camp flings open the shutters of an upstairs window and gazes a moment across the rooftops before unfurling a crimson flag over the brick and securing its eyelets to the sill.

Do they understand?

A one-armed bunk master sets forth rules in a belligerent torrent. "This is your parade uniform, this is your field uniform, this is your gym uniform. Suspenders crossed in the back, parallel in the front. Sleeves rolled to the elbow. Each boy is to carry a knife in a scabbard on the right side of the belt. Raise your right arm when you wish to be called upon. Always align in rows of ten. No books, no cigarettes, no food, no personal possessions, nothing in your locker but uniforms, boots, knife, polish. No talking after lights-out. Letters home will be posted on Wednesdays. You will strip away your weakness, your cowardice, your hesitation. You will become like a waterfall, a volley of bullets -- you will all surge in the same direction at the same pace toward the same cause. You will forgo comforts; you will live by duty alone. You will eat country and breathe nation."

The boys shout that they do. There are four hundred of them, plus thirty instructors and fifty more on the staff, NCOs and cooks, groomsmen and groundskeepers. Some cadets are as young as nine. The oldest are seventeen. Gothic faces, sharp noses, pointed chins. Blue eyes, all of them.

Werner sleeps in a tiny dormitory with seven other fourteen-year-olds. The bunk above belongs to Frederick: a reedy boy, thin as a blade of grass, skin as pale as cream. Frederick is new too. He's from Berlin. His father is assistant to an ambassador. When Frederick speaks, his attention floats up, as though he's scanning the sky for something.

Frederick flutters his fingers and asks, "Do you like birds?"

"Sure."

"Hooded crows are smarter than most mammals. Even monkeys. I've seen them put nuts they can't crack in the road and wait for cars to run over them to get at the kernel. Werner, you and I are going to be great friends, I'm sure of it."

"Do you know about hooded crows?"

He and Werner eat their first meal in their starchy new uniforms at a long wooden table in the refectory. Some boys talk in whispers, some sit alone, some gulp food as if they have not eaten in days. Through three arched windows, dawn sends a sheaf of hallowed golden rays.

Werner shakes his head.

A portrait of the führer glowers over every classroom. Learning happens on backless benches, at wooden tables grooved by the boredom of countless boys before them -- squires, monks, conscripts, cadets. On Werner's first day, he walks past the half-open door of the technical sciences laboratory and glimpses a room as big as Zollverein's drugstore lined with brand-new sinks and glass-fronted cabinets inside which wait sparkling beakers and graduated cylinders and balances and burners. Frederick has to urge him along.

On their second day, a withered phrenologist gives a presentation to the entire student body. The lights in the refectory dim, a projector whirs, and a chart full of circles appears on the far wall. The old man stands beneath the projection screen and whisks the tip of a billiards cue through the grids. "White circles represent pure German blood. Circles with black indicate the proportion of foreign blood. Notice group two, number five." He raps the screen with his cue and it ripples. "Marriage between a pure German and one-quarter Jew is still permissible, you see?"

Afternoons, they lash themselves into a snarl of cartridge belts and run. Run to the troughs; run to the flag; run up the hill. Run carrying each other on your backs, run carrying your rifle above your head. Run, crawl, swim. Then more running.

A half hour later, Werner and Frederick are reading Goethe in poetics. Then they're magnetizing needles in field exercises. The bunk master announces schedules of byzantine complication: Mondays are for mechanics, state history, racial sciences. Tuesdays are for horsemanship, orienteering, military history. Everyone, even the nine-year-olds, will be taught to clean, break down, and fire a Mauser rifle.

The star-flooded nights, the dew-soaked dawns, the hushed ambulatories, the enforced asceticism -- never has Werner felt part of something so single-minded. Never has he felt such a hunger to belong. In the rows of dormitories are cadets who talk of alpine skiing, of duels, of jazz clubs and governesses and boar hunting; boys who employ curse words with virtuosic skill and boys who talk about cigarettes named for cinema stars; boys who speak of "telephoning the colonel" and boys who have baronesses for mothers. There are boys who have been admitted not because they are good at anything in particular but because their fathers work for ministries. And the way they talk: "One mustn't expect figs from thistles!" "I'd pollinate her in a blink, you shit!" "Bear up and funk it, boys!" There are cadets who do everything right -- perfect posture, expert marksmanship, boots polished so perfectly that they reflect clouds. There are cadets who have skin like butter and irises like sapphires and ultra-fine networks of blue veins laced across the backs of their hands. For now, though, beneath the whip of the administration, they are all the same, all Jungmänner. They hustle through the gates together, gulp fried eggs in the refectory together, march across the quadrangle, perform roll call, salute the colors, shoot rifles, run, bathe, and suffer together. They are each a mound of clay, and the potter that is the portly, shiny-faced commandant is throwing four hundred identical pots.

We are young, they sing, we are steadfast, we have never compromised, we have so many castles yet to storm.

O, take me, take me up into the ranks

Werner sways between exhaustion, confusion, and exhilaration. That his life has been so wholly redirected astounds him. He keeps any doubts at bay by memorizing lyrics or the routes to classrooms, by holding before his eyes a vision of the technical sciences laboratory: nine tables, thirty stools; coils, variable capacitors, amplifiers, batteries, soldering irons locked away in those gleaming cabinets.

Above him, kneeling on his bunk, Frederick peers out the open window through a pair of antique field glasses and makes a record on the bed rail of birds he has sighted. One notch under red-necked grebe. Six notches under thrush nightingale. Out on the grounds, a group of ten-year-olds is carrying torches and swastika flags toward the river. The procession pauses, and a gust of wind tears at the torch flames. Then they march on, their song swirling up through the window like a bright, pulsing cloud.

I do not want to die in vain, what

so that I do not die a common death!

I want is to fall on the sacrificial mound.

# Vienna #

Sergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel is forty-one years old, not so old that he cannot be promoted. He has moist red lips; pale, almost translucent cheeks like fillets of raw sole; and an instinct for correctness that rarely fails him. He has a wife who suffers his absences without complaint, and who arranges porcelain kittens by color, lightest to darkest, on two different shelves in their drawing room in Stuttgart. He also has two daughters whom he has not seen in nine months. The eldest, Veronika, is deeply earnest. Her letters to him include phrases like sacred resolve, proud accomplishments, and unparalleled in history.

Von Rumpel's particular gift is for diamonds: he can facet and polish stones as well as any Aryan jeweler in Europe, and he often spots fakes at a glance. He studied crystallography in Munich, apprenticed as a polisher in Antwerp, has even been -- one glorious afternoon -- to Charterhouse Street in London, to an unmarked diamond house, where he was asked to turn out his pockets and ushered up three staircases and through three locked doors and seated at a table where a man with a mustache waxed to knifepoints let him examine a ninety-two-carat raw diamond from South Africa.

Before the war, the life of Reinhold von Rumpel was pleasant enough: he was a gemologist who ran an appraisal business out of a second-story shop behind Stuttgart's old chancellery. Clients would bring in stones and he'd tell them what they were worth. Sometimes he'd recut diamonds or consult on high-level faceting projects. If occasionally he cheated a customer, he told himself that was part of the game.

Because of the war, his job has expanded. Now Sergeant Major von Rumpel has the chance to do what no one has done in centuries -- not since the Mogul Dynasty, not since the Khans. Perhaps not in history. The capitulation of France is only weeks past, and already he has seen things he did not dream he would see in six lifetimes. A seventeenth-century globe as big around as a small car, with rubies to mark volcanoes, sapphires clustered at the poles, and diamonds for world capitals. He has held -- held!-- a dagger handle at least four hundred years old, made of white jade and inlaid with emeralds. Just yesterday, on the road to Vienna, he took possession of a five-hundred-and-seventy-piece china set with a single marquise-cut diamond set into the rim of every single dish. Where the police confiscated these treasures and from whom, he does not ask. Already he has personally packed them into a crate and belted it shut and numbered it with white paint and seen it loaded inside a train car where it sits under twenty-four-hour guard.

Streeter's 1898 Precious Stones and Gems.

This particular summer afternoon, in a dusty geological library in Vienna, Sergeant Major von Rumpel follows an underweight secretary wearing brown shoes, brown stockings, a brown skirt, and a brown blouse through stacks of periodicals. The secretary sets down a stepstool, climbs, reaches.

Waiting to be sent to high command. Waiting for more.

Tavernier's 1676 Travels in India.

P. S. Pallas's 1793 Travels Through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire.

Rumor is that the führer is compiling a wish list of precious objects from all around Europe and Russia. They say he intends to remake the Austrian town of Linz into an empyrean city, the cultural capital of the world. A vast promenade, mausoleum, acropolis, planetarium, library, opera house -- everything marble and granite, everything profoundly clean. At its core, he plans a kilometer-long museum: a trove of the greatest achievements in human culture.

The document is real, von Rumpel has heard. Four hundred pages.

Sea of Flames. Grayish blue with a red hue at its center. Recorded at one hundred and thirty-three carats. Either lost or willed to the king of France in 1738 on the condition that it be locked away for two hundred years.

He looks up. Suspended lamps, rows of spines fading off into dusty gold. All of Europe, and he aims to find one pebble tucked inside its folds.

He sits at a table in the stacks. He tries to cross his legs but a slight swelling troubles his groin today: odd, though not painful. The mousy librarian brings books. He pages slowly through the Tavernier, the Streeter, Murray's Sketches of Persia. He reads entries on the three-hundred-carat Orloff diamond from Moscow, the Nur-al-Ain, the forty-eight-and-a-half-carat Dresden Green. Toward evening, he finds it. The story of a prince who could not be killed, a priest who warned of a goddess's wrath, a French prelate who believed he'd bought the same stone centuries later.

# The Boches #

Her father says their weapons gleam as if they have never been fired. He says their boots are clean and their uniforms spotless. He says they look as if they have just stepped out of air-conditioned train cars.

Hitler, the women whisper, is touring Parisian monuments.

The townswomen who stop by Madame Manec's kitchen door in ones and twos say the Germans (they refer to them as the Boches) buy every postcard on every pharmacy rack; they say the Boches buy straw dolls and candied apricots and stale cakes from the window of the confectionery. The Boches buy shirts from Monsieur Verdier and lingerie from Monsieur Morvan; the Boches require absurd quantities of butter and cheese; the Boches have guzzled down every bottle of champagne the caviste would sell them.

Curfews are installed. Music that can be heard outdoors is banned. Public dances are banned. The country is in mourning and we must behave respectfully, announces the mayor. Though what authority he retains is not clear.

Every time she comes within earshot, Marie-Laure hears the fsst of her father lighting another match. His hands flutter between his pockets. Mornings he alternates between Madame Manec's kitchen, the tobacco shop, and the post office, where he waits in interminable queues to use the telephone. Afternoons he repairs things around Etienne's house -- a loose cabinet door, a squeaking stair board. He asks Madame Manec about the reliability of the neighbors. He flips the locking clasp on his tool case over and over until Marie-Laure begs him to stop.

One week in Saint-Malo becomes two. Marie begins to feel that her life, like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, has been interrupted halfway through. There was volume 1, when Marie-Laure and her father lived in Paris and went to work, and now there is volume 2, when Germans ride motorcycles through these strange, narrow streets and her uncle vanishes inside his own house.

"Sometimes just a day or two," Madame Manec says. "Sometimes longer."

One day Etienne sits with Marie-Laure and reads to her in his feathery voice; the next he suffers from what he calls a headache and sequesters himself inside his study behind a locked door. Madame Manec sneaks Marie-Laure chocolate bars, slices of cake; this morning they squeeze lemons into glasses full of water and sugar, and she lets Marie-Laure drink as much as she likes.

"As soon as I hear from Paris."

"I'm sure we could clean out a downstairs room if you'd like."

"Papa, when will we leave?"

"How long will he stay in there, Madame?"

"Why do we have to sleep in this little bedroom?"

"Not today, Marie."

"Why not?"

She spends her hours learning the house. The first floor belongs to Madame Manec: clean, navigable, full of visitors who come through the kitchen door to trade in small-town scandal. There's the dining room, the foyer, a hutch full of antique dishes in the hall that tremble whenever anyone walks past, and a door off the kitchen that leads to Madame's room: a bed, a sink, a chamber pot.

"Etienne and I agreed we would not use it."

"It's too dangerous."

"Can't we go for a walk around the block?"

"What about the room across the hall from us?"

"It belonged to your grandfather."

She wants to shriek. What dangers await? When she opens her bedroom window, she hears no screams, no explosions, only the calls of birds that her great-uncle calls gannets, and the sea, and the occasional throb of an airplane as it passes far overhead.

"When can I go to the sea?"

Eleven winding steps lead to the second floor, which is full of the smells of faded grandeur: an old sewing room, a former maid's room. Right here on the landing, Madame Manec tells her, pallbearers dropped the coffin carrying Etienne's great-aunt. "The coffin flipped over, and she slid down the whole flight. They were all horrified, but she looked entirely unaffected!"

Then there's the sixth floor: her grandfather's tidy bedroom on the left, toilet straight ahead, the little room where she sleeps with her father on the right. When the wind is blowing, which it almost always is, with the walls groaning and the shutters banging, the rooms overloaded and the staircase wound tightly up through its center, the house seems the material equivalent of her uncle's inner being: apprehensive, isolated, but full of cobwebby wonders.

More clutter on the third floor: boxes of jars, metal disks, and rusty jigsaws; buckets of what might be electrical components; engineering manuals in piles around a toilet. By the fourth floor, things are piled everywhere, in the rooms and corridors and along the staircase: baskets of what must be machine parts, shoe boxes loaded with screws, antique dollhouses built by her great-grandfather. Etienne's huge study colonizes the entire fifth floor, alternately deeply quiet or else full of voices or music or static.

In the kitchen, Madame Manec's friends fuss over Marie-Laure's hair and freckles. In Paris, the women say, people are waiting in line five hours for a loaf of bread. People are eating pets, crushing pigeons with bricks for soup. There is no pork, no rabbit, no cauliflower. The headlights of cars are all painted blue, they say, and at night the city is as quiet as a graveyard: no buses, no trains, hardly any gasoline. Marie-Laure sits at the square table, a plate of cookies in front of her, and imagines the old women with veiny hands and milky eyes and oversize ears. From the kitchen window comes the wit wit wit of a barn swallow, footfalls on ramparts, halyards clinking against masts, hinges and chains creaking in the harbor. Ghosts. Germans. Snails.

Inside each are gears, lenses, fuses, springs, shackles, and resistors. There's a fat coil of copper wire, a tiny instrument hammer, and a two-terminal battery as big as a shoe -- finer equipment than Werner has had access to in his life. The little professor stands at the chalkboard drawing a wiring schematic for a simple Morse-code practice circuit. He sets down his chalk, presses his slender fingertips together, five to five, and asks the boys to assemble the circuit with the parts in their kits. "You have one hour."

A rosy-cheeked and diminutive instructor of technical sciences named Dr. Hauptmann peels off his brass-buttoned coat and hangs it over the back of a chair. He orders the cadets in Werner's class to collect hinged metal boxes from a locked cabinet at the back of the laboratory.

# Hauptmann #

Most of the boys blanch. They dump everything out on the tables and poke gingerly at the parts as if at trinkets imported from some future age. Frederick plucks random pieces out of his box and holds them to the light.

Some boys stir the parts in their kits halfheartedly. Most simply watch.

For a moment Werner is back inside his attic room at Children's House, his head a swarm of questions. What is lightning? How high could you jump if you lived on Mars? What is the difference between twice twenty-five and twice five and twenty? Then he takes the battery, two rectangles of sheet metal, some penny nails, and the instrument hammer from his box. In under a minute, he has built an oscillator to match the schematic.

Werner feels Dr. Hauptmann's attention on him like a floodlight. He sticks the magnet to the screw's head and holds the screw's point to the positive terminal on the battery. When he runs the wire from the negative side of the battery to the head of the screw, both the screw and the magnet start to spin. The operation takes him no more than fifteen seconds.

"Right," he says, and stands in front of Werner's table and laces his hands behind his back. "Next take from your kit the disk-shaped magnet, a wire, a screw, and your battery." Though his instructions seem meant for the class, he looks at Werner alone. "That is all you may use. Who can build a simple motor?"

The little professor frowns. He tests Werner's circuit, which works.

In the end it's a pathetic pile, maybe three hundred weapons in all, half of them rusted. Two young gendarmes pile them into the back of a truck and drive up the narrow street and across the causeway and are gone. No speeches, no explanations.

"Pfennig, sir."

Dr. Hauptmann's mouth is partially open. His face is flushed, adrenalized. "What is your name, cadet?"

The other boys crane their necks. Dr. Hauptmann's lips are pink and his eyelids are improbably thin. As though he is watching Werner even when he blinks. He says, "Make them all."

Werner studies the parts on his table. "A doorbell, sir? Or a Morse beacon? An ohmmeter?"

"What else can you make?"

# Flying Couch #

Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot. At noon the following day, various Bretons troop in to drop off weapons, farmers on mule carts from miles away, plodding old sailors with antique pistols, a few hunters with outrage in their eyes gazing at the floor as they turn in their rifles.

"Soon, little dove." But he is distracted; he smokes so much it is as if he is turning himself into ash. Lately he stays up working frenetically on a model of Saint-Malo that he claims is for her, adding new houses every day, framing ramparts, mapping streets, so that she can learn the town the way she learned their neighborhood in Paris. Wood, glue, nails, sandpaper: rather than comforting her, the noises and smells of his manic diligence make her more anxious. Why will she have to learn the streets of Saint-Malo? How long will they be here?

In the fifth-floor study, Marie-Laure listens to her great-uncle read another page of The Voyage of the "Beagle." Darwin has hunted rheas in Patagonia, studied owls outside Buenos Aires, and scaled a waterfall in Tahiti. He pays attention to slaves, rocks, lightning, finches, and the ceremony of pressing noses in New Zealand. She loves especially to hear about the dark coasts of South America with their impenetrable walls of trees and offshore breezes full of the stink of rotting kelp and the cries of whelping seals. She loves to imagine Darwin at night, leaning over the ship's rail to stare into bioluminescent waves, watching the tracks of penguins marked by fiery green wakes.

"Please, Papa, can't I go out?"

Other evenings they play Flying Couch. They climb onto the davenport and sit side by side, and Etienne says, "Where to tonight, mademoiselle?"

"I would love to eat your butterflies, Monsieur Darwin, but first I will eat these cookies."

"Bonsoir," she says to Etienne, standing on the davenport in his study. "I may be only a girl of twelve, but I am a brave French explorer who has come to help you with your adventures."

Etienne adopts a British accent. "Good evening, mademoiselle, why don't you come to the jungle with me and eat these butterflies, they are as big as dinner plates and may not be poisonous, who knows?"

"The jungle!" Or: "Tahiti!" Or: "Mozambique!"

"Oh, it's a long journey this time," Etienne will say in an entirely new voice, smooth, velvety, a conductor's drawl. "That's the Atlantic Ocean far below, it's shining under the moonlight, can you smell it? Feel how cold it is up here? Feel the wind in your hair?"

"Where are we now, Uncle?"

"We're in Borneo, can't you tell? We're skimming the treetops now, big leaves are glimmering below us, and there are coffee bushes over there, smell them?" and Marie-Laure will indeed smell something, whether because her uncle is passing coffee grounds beneath her nose, or because they really are flying over the coffee trees of Borneo, she does not want to decide.

Werner is summoned to the office of the technical sciences professor. A trio of sleek long-legged hounds swirls around him as he enters. The room is lit by a pair of green-shaded banker's lamps, and in the shadows Werner can see shelves crowded with encyclopedias, models of windmills, miniature telescopes, prisms. Dr. Hauptmann stands behind his big desk wearing his brass-buttoned coat, as though he too has just arrived. Tight curls frame his ivory forehead; he tugs off his leather gloves one finger at a time. "Drop a log on the fire, please."