they are moving past the gate onto the rue Cuvier, brushing through
what might be sandbags or
silent police officers or something else newly planted in the middle of the sidewalk.
Six blocks, thirty-eight storm drains. She counts them all. Because of the sheets of wood veneer
her father has tacked over its windows, their apartment is stuffy and hot. “This will just take a
moment, Marie-Laure. Then I’ll explain.” Her father shoves things into what might be his canvas
rucksack.
Food,
she thinks, trying to identify everything by its sound. Coffee. Cigarettes. Bread?
Something thumps again and the windowpanes tremble. Their dishes rattle in the cupboards.
Automobile horns bleat. Marie-Laure goes to the model neighborhood and runs her fingers over the
houses. Still there. Still there. Still there.
“Go to the toilet, Marie.”
“I don’t have to.”
“It may be a while until you can go again.”
He buttons
her into her winter overcoat, though it is the middle of June,
and they bustle
downstairs. On the rue des Patriarches, she hears a distant stamping, as though thousands of people
are on the move. She walks beside her father with her cane telescoped in one fist, her other hand
on his rucksack, everything disconnected from logic, as in nightmares.
Right, left. Between turns run long stretches of paving stones. Soon they are walking streets, she
is sure, that she has never been on, streets beyond the boundaries of her father’s model.
Marie-
Laure has long since lost count of her strides when they reach a crowd dense enough that she can
feel heat spilling off of it.
“It will be cooler on the train, Marie. The director has arranged tickets for us.”
“Can we go in?”
“The gates are locked.”
The crowd gives off a nauseating tension.
“I’m scared, Papa.”
“Keep hold of me.”
He leads her in a new direction. They cross a seething thoroughfare, then go up an alley that
smells like a muddy ditch. Always there is the muted rattling of her father’s
tools inside his
rucksack and the distant and incessant honking of automobile horns.
In a minute they find themselves amid another throng. Voices echo off a high wall; the smell of
wet garments crowds her. Somewhere someone shouts names through a bullhorn.
“Where are we, Papa?”
“Gare Saint-Lazare.”
A baby cries. She smells urine.
“Are there Germans, Papa?”
“No,
ma chérie
.”
“But soon?”
“So they say.”
“What will we do when they get here?”
“We will be on a train by then.”
In the space to her right, a child screeches. A man with panic in his voice demands the crowd
make way. A woman nearby moans, “Sebastien? Sebastien?” over and over.
“Is it night yet?”
“It’s only now getting dark. Let’s rest a moment. Save our breath.”
Someone says, “The Second Army mauled, the Ninth cut off. France’s best fleets wasted.”
Someone says, “We will be overrun.”
Trunks slide across tiles and a little dog yaps and a conductor’s whistle blows and some kind of
big machinery coughs to a start and then dies. Marie-Laure tries to calm her stomach.
“But we have tickets, for God’s sake!” shouts someone behind her.
There is a scuffle. Hysteria ripples through the crowd.
“What does it look like, Papa?”
“What, Marie?”
“The station. The night.”
She hears the sparking of his lighter, the suck and flare of tobacco as his cigarette ignites.
“Let’s see. The whole city is dark. No streetlights, no lights in windows.
There are projector
lights moving through the sky now and then. Looking for airplanes. There’s a woman in a gown.
And another carrying a stack of dishes.”
“And the armies?”
“There are no armies, Marie.”
His hand finds hers. Her fear settles slightly. Rain trickles through a downspout.
“What are we doing now, Papa?”
“Hoping for a train.”
“What is everybody else doing?”
“They’re hoping too.”
Herr Siedler
A
knock after curfew. Werner and Jutta are doing schoolwork with a half-dozen other children at
the long wooden table. Frau Elena pins her party insignia through her lapel before opening the
door.
A lance corporal with a pistol on his belt and a swastika band on his left arm steps in from the
rain. Beneath
the low ceiling of the room, the man looks absurdly tall. Werner thinks of the
shortwave radio tucked into the old wooden first-aid cabinet beneath his cot. He thinks:
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