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parts will be repaired by a deposition of shelly matter at the fractured parts.
“There’s hope for me yet!” says Etienne, and laughs, and Marie-Laure is reminded that her
great-uncle was not always so fearful, that he had a life before this war and before the last one too;
that he was once a young man who dwelled in the world and loved it as she does.
Eventually Madame Manec comes through the kitchen door and locks it behind her and Etienne
says good evening rather coldly and after a moment Madame Manec says it back. Somewhere in
the city, Germans are loading weapons or drinking brandy and history has become some nightmare
from which Marie-Laure desperately wishes she could wake.
Madame Manec takes a pot from the hanging rack and fills it with water. Her knife falls through
what sounds like potatoes, the blade striking the wooden cutting board beneath.
“Please, Madame,” says Etienne. “Allow me. You are exhausted.”
But he does not get up, and Madame Manec keeps chopping potatoes, and when she is done,
Marie-Laure hears her push a load of them into the water with the back of her knife. The tension in
the room makes Marie-Laure feel dizzy, as if she can sense the planet rotating.
“Sink any U-boats today?” murmurs Etienne. “Blow up any German tanks?”
Madame Manec snaps open the door of the icebox. Marie-Laure can hear her rummage through a
drawer. A match flares; a cigarette lights. Soon enough a bowl of undercooked potatoes appears
before Marie-Laure. She feels around the tabletop for a fork but finds none.
“Do you know what happens, Etienne,” says Madame Manec from the other side of the kitchen,
“when you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water?”
“You will tell us, I am sure.”
“It jumps out. But do you know what happens when you put the frog in a pot of cool water and
then slowly bring it to a boil? You know what happens then?”
Marie-Laure waits. The potatoes steam.
Madame Manec says, “The frog cooks.”
Orders
W
erner is summoned by an eleven-year-old in full regalia to the commandant’s office. He waits on
a wooden bench in a slowly building panic. They must suspect something. Maybe they have
discovered some fact about his parentage that even he doesn’t know, something ruinous. He
remembers when the lance corporal came through the door of Children’s House to escort him to
Herr Siedler’s: the certainty that the instruments of the Reich could see through walls, through skin,
into the very soul of each subject.
After several hours the commandant’s assistant calls him in and sets down his ballpoint and
looks across his desk as though Werner is one among a vast series of trivial problems he must put
right. “It has come to our attention, cadet, that your age has been recorded incorrectly.”
“Sir?”
“You are eighteen years old. Not sixteen, as you have claimed.”
Werner puzzles. The absurdity is plain: he remains smaller than most of the fourteen-year-olds.
“Our former technical sciences professor, Dr. Hauptmann, has called our attention to the
discrepancy. He has arranged that you will be sent to a special technology division of the
Wehrmacht.”
“A division, sir?”
“You have been here under false pretenses.” His voice is oily and pleased; his chin is
nonexistent. Out a window the school band practices a triumphal march. Werner watches a Nordic-
looking boy stagger beneath the weight of a tuba.
“The commandant urged disciplinary action, but Dr. Hauptmann suggested that you would be
eager to offer your skills to the Reich.” From behind his desk, the assistant produces a folded
uniform—slate-gray, eagle on the breast, Litzen on the collar. Then a green-black coal-scuttle
helmet, obviously too large.
The band blares, then stops. The band instructor screams names.
The commandant’s assistant says, “You are very lucky, cadet. To serve is an honor.”
“When, sir?”
“You’ll receive instructions within a fortnight. That is all.”
Pneumonia
B
reton spring, and a great onslaught of damp invades the coast. Fog on the sea, fog in the streets,
fog in the mind. Madame Manec gets sick. When Marie-Laure holds her hand over Madame’s
chest, heat seems to steam up out of her sternum as though she cooks from the inside. Her breathing
devolves into trains of oceanic coughs.
“I watch the sardines,” murmurs Madame, “and the termites, and the crows . . .”
Etienne summons a doctor who prescribes rest, aspirin, and aromatic violet comfits. Marie-
Laure sits with Madame through the worst of it, strange hours when the old woman’s hands go very
cold and she talks about being in charge of the world. She is in charge of everything, but no one
knows. It is a tremendous burden, she says, to be responsible for every little thing, every infant
born, every leaf falling from every tree, every wave that breaks onto the beach, every ant on its
journey.
Deep in Madame’s voice, Marie-Laure hears water: atolls and archipelagoes and lagoons and
fjords.
Etienne proves to be a tender nurse. Washcloths, broth, now and then a page from Pasteur or
Rousseau. His manner forgiving her all transgressions past and present. He wraps Madame in
quilts, but eventually she shivers so deeply, so profoundly, that he takes the big heavy rag rug off
the floor and lays it on top of her.
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