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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.
Everything Poisoned
N
ew silk banners hang above the refectory tables, ablaze with slogans.
They say,
Disgrace is not to fall but to lie.
They say,
Be slim and slender, as fast as a greyhound, as tough as leather, as hard as Krupp
steel.
Every few weeks another instructor vanishes, sucked up into the engine of the war. New
instructors, elderly townsmen of unreliable sobriety and disposition, are brought in. All of them,
Werner notices, are in some way broken: they limp, or are blind in one eye, or their faces are
lopsided from strokes or the previous war. The cadets show less respect to the new instructors,
who in turn have shorter tempers, and soon the school feels to Werner like a grenade with its pin
pulled.
Strange things start happening with the electricity. It goes out for fifteen minutes, then surges.
Clocks run fast, lightbulbs brighten, flare, and pop, and send a soft rain of glass falling into the
corridors. Days of darkness ensue, the switches dead, the grid empty. The bunk rooms and showers
become icy; for lighting, the caretaker resorts to torches and candles. All the gasoline is going to
the war, and few cars come trundling through the school gates; food is delivered by the same
withered mule, its ribs showing as it drags its cart.
More than once Werner slices the sausage on his plate to find pink worms squirming inside. The
uniforms of the new cadets are stiffer and cheaper than his own; no longer do they have access to
live ammunition for marksmanship. Werner would not be surprised if Bastian started handing out
rocks and sticks.
And yet all the news is good.
We are at the gates to the Caucasus,
proclaims Hauptmann’s
radio,
we have taken oil fields, we will take Svalbard. We move with astounding speed. Five
thousand seven hundred Russians killed, forty-five Germans lost.
Every six or seven days, the same two pallid casualty assistance officers enter the refectory, and
four hundred faces go ashen from the effort of not turning to watch. The boys move only their eyes,
only their thoughts, tracking in their minds the passage of the two officers as they move between
tables, seeking out the next boy whose father has been killed.
The cadet they stop behind often tries to pretend that he doesn’t notice their presence. He puts
his fork in his mouth and chews, and usually it is then that the taller officer, a sergeant, sets a hand
on the boy’s shoulder. The boy looks up at them with a full mouth and an unsteady face, and
follows the officers out, and the big oak double doors creak shut, and the lunchroom slowly
exhales and edges back to life.
Reinhard Wöhlmann’s father falls. Karl Westerholzer’s father falls. Martin Burkhard’s father
falls, and Martin tells everybody—on the very same night his shoulder is tapped—that he is happy.
“Doesn’t everything,” he says, “die at last and too soon? Who would not be honored to fall? To be
a paving stone on the road to final victory?” Werner looks for uneasiness in Martin’s eyes but
cannot find it.
For Werner, doubts turn up regularly. Racial purity, political purity—Bastian speaks to a horror
of any sort of corruption, and yet, Werner wonders in the dead of night, isn’t life a kind of
corruption? A child is born, and the world sets in upon it. Taking things from it, stuffing things into
it. Each bite of food, each particle of light entering the eye—the body can never be pure. But this is
what the commandant insists upon, why the Reich measures their noses, clocks their hair color.
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