Saint-Malo
J
utta’s grades are in, and Max is off school, and besides, he’d just go to the pool every day, pester
his father with riddles, fold three hundred of those airplanes the giant taught him, and wouldn’t it
be good for him to visit another country,
learn some French, see the ocean? She poses these
questions to Albert, but both of them know that she is the one who must grant permission. To go
herself, to take their son.
On the twenty-sixth of June, an hour before dawn, Albert makes six ham sandwiches and wraps
them in foil. Then he drives Jutta and Max to the station in the Prinz 4 and kisses her on the lips,
and she boards the train with Werner’s notebook and the model house in her purse.
The journey takes all day. By Rennes, the sun has dropped low over the horizon, and the smell
of warm manure comes through the open windows, and lines of pollarded trees whisk past. Gulls
and crows in equal numbers follow a tractor through its wake of dust. Max eats a second ham
sandwich
and rereads a comic book, and sheets of yellow flowers glow in the fields, and Jutta
wonders if any of them grow over the bones of her brother.
Before dark, a well-dressed man with a prosthetic leg boards the train. He sits beside her and
lights a cigarette. Jutta clutches her bag between her knees; she is certain that he was wounded in
the war, that he will try to start a conversation, that her deficient French will betray her. Or that
Max will say something. Or that the man can already tell. Maybe she smells German.
He’ll say,
You did this to me.
Please. Not in front of my son.
But
the train jolts into motion, and the man finishes his cigarette and gives her a preoccupied
smile and promptly falls asleep.
She turns the little house over in her fingers. They come into Saint-Malo around midnight, and
the cabdriver leaves them at a hotel on the Place Chateaubriand. The clerk accepts the money
Albert exchanged for her, and Max leans against her hip, half-asleep, and she is so afraid to try her
French that she goes to bed hungry.
In the morning Max pulls her through a gap in the old walls and out onto a beach. He runs across
the sand at full tilt, then stops and stares up at the ramparts rearing above him as though imagining
pennants and cannons and medieval archers ranged along the parapets.
Jutta cannot tear her eyes away from the ocean. It is emerald green and incomprehensibly large.
A single white sail veers out of the harbor. A pair of trawlers on the horizon appear and disappear
between waves.
Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain
everything anyone could ever feel.
They pay a coin to climb the tower of the château. “Come on,”
Max says, and charges up the
winding narrow stairs, and Jutta huffs along behind, each quarter turn presenting a narrow window
of blue sky, Max practically hauling her up the steps.
From the top, they watch the small figures of tourists stroll past shopwindows. She has read
about the siege; she has studied photos of the old town before the war. But now, looking across at
the huge dignified houses, the hundreds of rooftops, she can see no traces of bombings or craters or
crushed buildings. The town appears to have been entirely replaced.
They order galettes for lunch. She expects stares, but no one takes any notice. The waiter seems
to neither know nor care that she is German. In the afternoon, she leads Max out through a high arch
on the far side of the city called the Porte de Dinan. They cross the quay and climb to a matching
headland across the mouth of a river from the old city. Inside the park
wait the ruins of a fort
overgrown with weeds. Max pauses at all the steep edges along the trail and throws pebbles down
into the sea.
Every hundred paces along the path, they come across a big steel cap beneath which a soldier
would direct cannon fire at whomever was trying to take the hill. Some of these pillboxes are so
scarred by assault that she can hardly imagine the fire and speed and terror of the projectiles
showering onto them. A foot of steel looks as if it has been transformed into warm butter and
gouged by the fingers of a child.
What it must have sounded like, to stand in there.
Now they
are filled with crisps bags, cigarette filters, paper wrappers. American and French
flags fly from a hilltop at the center of the park. Here, signs say, Germans holed up in underground
tunnels to fight to the last man.
Three teenagers pass laughing and Max watches them with great intensity. On a pocked and
lichen-splotched cement wall is bolted a small stone plaque.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
