knapsack. A million droplets of fog bead up on the fuzz of her wool dress and along the warp of
her hair, and the light outlines her in silver.
He stands riveted. Her long pale neck seems to him, as it passes, incredibly vulnerable.
She
takes no notice of him; she seems to know nothing but the morning. This, he thinks, is the
pure they were always lecturing about at Schulpforta.
He presses his back against a wall. The tip of her cane just misses the toe of his boot. Then
she’s past, dress swaying lightly, cane roving back and forth, and he watches her continue up the
street until the fog swallows her.
Grotto
A
German antiair battery shoots an American plane out of the sky.
It crashes into the sea off
Paramé, and its American pilot wades ashore to be taken prisoner. Etienne sees it as a calamity,
but Madame Ruelle radiates glee. “Movie-star handsome,” she whispers as she hands Marie-Laure
a loaf. “I bet they’ll all look like him.”
Marie-Laure smiles. Every morning it’s the same: the Americans ever closer,
the Germans
fraying at the seams. Every afternoon Marie-Laure reads to Etienne from part 2 of
Twenty
Thousand Leagues,
both of them in new territory now.
Ten thousand leagues in three and a half
months,
writes Professor Aronnax.
Where were we going now, and what did the future have in
store for us?
Marie-Laure puts the loaf in her knapsack, leaves the bakery, and winds toward the ramparts to
Harold Bazin’s grotto. She closes the gate, lifts the hem of her dress, and wades into the shallow
pool, praying she does not crush any creatures as she steps.
The tide is rising. She finds barnacles, an anemone as soft as silk; she sets her fingers as lightly
as she can on a
Nassarius
. It stops moving immediately, sucking its head and foot inside its shell.
Then it resumes, the twin wands of its horns extending, dragging its whorled shell atop the sled of
its body.
What do you seek, little snail? Do you
live only in this one moment, or do you worry like
Professor Aronnax for your future?
When the snail has crossed the pool and started up the far wall, Marie-Laure picks up her cane
and climbs out in her dripping oversized loafers. She steps through the gate and is about to lock it
behind her when a male voice says, “Good morning, mademoiselle.”
She stumbles, almost trips. Her cane goes clattering.
“What’s in your sack there?”
He speaks proper French, but she can tell that he is German. His body obstructs the alley. The
hem of her dress drips; her shoes squelch out water; to both sides rise sheer walls. She keeps her
right fist clenched around a spar of the open gate.
“What is that back there? A hidey-hole?” His voice sounds terribly close, but it’s hard to know
for certain in a place so congested with echoes. She can feel Madame Ruelle’s loaf pulsing on her
back like something alive. Lodged inside it—almost certainly—is a coiled-up slip of paper. On
which numbers will spell out a death sentence. For her great-uncle, for Madame Ruelle. For them
all.
She says, “My cane.”
“It has rolled behind you, dear.”
Behind the man unspools the alley and then the hanging curtain of ivy and then the city. A place
where she could scream and be heard.
“May I pass, monsieur?”
“Of course.”
But he does not seem to move. The gate creaks lightly.
“What do you want, monsieur?” Impossible to keep her voice from trembling. If he asks again
about the knapsack, her heart will burst.
“What do you do in there?”
“We’re not allowed on the beaches.”
“So you come here?”
“To collect snails. I must be getting along, monsieur. May I please retrieve my cane?”
“But you have not collected any snails, mademoiselle.”
“May I pass?”
“First answer a question about your father.”
“Papa?” Something cold inside her grows colder. “Papa will be here any moment.”
Now the man laughs, and his laugh echoes up between the walls. “Any moment, you say? Your
papa who’s in a prison five hundred kilometers away?”
Threads of terror spill through her chest. I should have listened, Papa. I never should have gone
outside.
“Come now,
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