Are You There?
H
e is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne; he is everyone
who has left her finally coming back.
Through the panel he calls, “I am not killing you. I am
hearing you. On radio. Is why I come.”
He pauses, fumbling to translate. “The song,
light of the
moon?” She almost smiles.
We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide.
Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins
stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical
swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of
our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.
Marie-Laure slides open the wardrobe. Werner takes her hand and helps her out. Her feet find
the floor of her grandfather’s room.
“
Mes souliers,
” she says. “I have not been able to find my shoes.”
Second Can
T
he girl sits very still in the corner and wraps her coat around her knees. The way she tucks her
ankles up against her bottom. The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing
he hopes never to forget.
Guns boom to the east: the citadel being bombarded again, the citadel bombarding back.
Exhaustion breaks over him. In French he says, “There will be a—a
Waffenruhe
. Stopping in the
fighting. At noon. So people can get out of the city. I can get you out.”
“And you know this is true?”
“No,” he says. “I do not know it is true.” Quiet now. He examines his trousers, his dusty coat.
The uniform makes him an accomplice in everything this girl hates. “There is water,” he says, and
crosses to the other sixth-floor room and does not look at von Rumpel’s
body in her bed and
retrieves the second bucket. Her whole head
disappears inside its mouth,
and her sticklike arms
hug its sides as she gulps.
He says, “You are very brave.”
She lowers the bucket. “What is your name?”
He tells her. She says, “When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father
left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life.
Don’t you do the same?”
He says, “Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did.”
Her
glasses are gone, and her pupils look
like they are full of milk,
but strangely they do not
unnerve him. He remembers a phrase of Frau Elena’s:
belle laide
. Beautiful ugly.
“What day is it?”
He looks around. Scorched curtains and soot fanned across the ceiling
and cardboard peeling
off the window and the very first pale light of predawn leaking through. “I don’t know. It’s
morning.”
A shell screams over the house. He thinks: I only want to sit here with her for a thousand hours.
But the shell detonates somewhere and the house creaks and Werner says, “There was a man who
used that transmitter you have. Who broadcast lessons about science. When I was a boy. I used to
listen to them with my sister.”
“That was the voice of my grandfather. You heard him?”
“Many times. We loved them.”
The window glows. The slow sandy light of dawn permeates the room. Everything transient and
aching; everything tentative. To be here, in this room, high in this house, out of the cellar, with her:
it is like medicine.
“I could eat bacon,” she says.
“What?”
“I could eat a whole pig.”
He smiles. “I could eat a whole cow.”
“The woman who used to live here, the housekeeper, she made the most wonderful omelets in
the world.”
“When I was little,” he says, or hopes he says, “we used to pick berries by the Ruhr. My sister
and me. We’d find berries as big as our thumbs.”
The girl crawls into the wardrobe and climbs a ladder and comes back down clutching a dented
tin can. “Can you see what this is?”
“There’s no label.”
“I didn’t think there was.”
“Is it food?”
“Let’s open it and find out.”
With one stroke from the brick, he punctures the can with the tip of the knife. Immediately he can
smell it: the perfume is so sweet, so outrageously sweet, that he nearly faints. What is the word?
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