Making the Radio
O
ne end of wire Werner crimps around a shorn pipe standing diagonally up from the floor. With
spit, he wipes clean the length of the wire and coils it a hundred times around the base of the pipe,
making a new tuning coil. The other end he slings through a bent strut wedged into the congestion
of timber, stone, and plaster that has become their ceiling.
Volkheimer watches from the shadows. A mortar shell explodes somewhere in the city, and a
flurry of dust sifts down.
The diode goes between free ends of the two wires and meets
the leads of the battery to
complete the circuit. Werner runs the beam of Volkheimer’s light over the entire operation. Ground,
antenna, battery. Finally he braces the flashlight between his teeth and raises the twin leads of the
earphone in front of his eyes and strips them against the threads of a screw and touches the naked
ends to the diode. Invisibly, electrons bumble down the wires.
The hotel above them—what is left of it—makes a series of unearthly groans. Timber splinters,
as though the rubble teeters on some final fulcrum. As though a single dragonfly could alight on it
and trigger an avalanche that will bury them for good.
Werner presses the bud of the earphone into his right ear.
It does not work.
He turns over the dented radio case, peers into it. Raps Volkheimer’s fading light back to life.
Settle the mind. Envision the distribution of current. He rechecks the fuses, valves, plug pins; he
toggles the receive/send switch, blows dust off the meter selector. Replaces the leads to the
battery. Tries the earphone again.
And there it is, as
if he is eight years old again, crouched beside his sister on the floor of
Children’s House: static. Rich and steady. In his memory, Jutta says his name, and on its tail comes
a second, less expected image: twin ropes strung from the front of Herr Siedler’s house, the great
smooth crimson banner hanging from them, unsoiled, deeply red.
Werner scans frequencies by feel. No squelch, no snap of Morse code, no voices. Static static
static static static. In his functioning ear,
in the radio, in the air. Volkheimer’s eyes stay on him.
Dust floats through the feeble beam of the flashlight: ten thousand particles, turning softly,
twinkling.
In the Attic
T
he German shuts the wardrobe
doors and hobbles away, and Marie-Laure stays on the bottom
rung of the ladder for a count of forty. Sixty. One hundred. The heart scrambling to deliver
oxygenated blood, the mind scrambling to unravel the situation.
A sentence Etienne once read
aloud returns:
Even the heart, which in higher animals, when agitated, pulsates with increased
energy, in the snail under similar excitement, throbs with a slower motion.
Slow the heart. Flex your feet. Make no sound. She presses her ear to the false panel on the back
of the wardrobe. What does she hear? Moths gnawing away at her grandfather’s ancient smocks?
Nothing.
Slowly, impossibly, Marie-Laure finds herself growing sleepy.
She feels for the cans in her pockets. How to open one now? Without making noise?
Only thing to do is climb. Seven rungs up into the long triangular tunnel of the garret. The raw-
timbered ceiling rises on both sides toward the peak, just higher than the top of her head.
Heat has lodged itself up here. No window, no exit. Nowhere else to run. No way out except the
way she has come.
Her outstretched fingers find an old shaving bowl, an umbrella stand,
and a crate full of who
knows what. The attic floorboards beneath her feet are as wide across as her hands. She knows
from experience how much noise a person walking on them makes.
Don’t knock anything over.
If the German opens the wardrobe again and yanks aside the hanging clothes and squeezes
through the door and climbs up into the attic, what will she do? Knock him on the head with the
umbrella stand? Jab him with the paring knife?
Scream.
Die.
Papa.
She
crawls along the center beam, from which the narrow planks of flooring emanate, toward
the stone bulk of the chimney at the far end. The center beam is thickest and will be quieter. She
hopes she has not become disoriented. She hopes he is not behind her, leveling a pistol at her back.
Bats cry almost inaudibly out the attic vent and somewhere far away, on a naval ship perhaps, or
way out past Paramé, a heavy gun fires.
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