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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.
“Papa, when will we leave?”
“As soon as I hear from Paris.”
“Why do we have to sleep in this little bedroom?”
“I’m sure we could clean out a downstairs room if you’d like.”
“What about the room across the hall from us?”
“Etienne and I agreed we would not use it.”
“Why not?”
“It belonged to your grandfather.”
“When can I go to the sea?”
“Not today, Marie.”
“Can’t we go for a walk around the block?”
“It’s too dangerous.”
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
Hauptmann
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.
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.”
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.
For a moment Werner is back inside his attic room at Children’s House, his head a swarm of
questions.
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