was like being in the room with a feather. But his soul glowed with some fundamental kindness,
didn’t it?
We used to pick berries by the Ruhr. My sister and me.
She says, “His hands were smaller than mine.”
The woman clears her throat. “He was little for his age, always. But he looked out for me. It
was hard for him not to do what was expected of him. Have I said this correctly?”
“Perfectly.”
The aquaria bubble. The snails eat. What
agonies this woman endured, Marie-Laure cannot
guess. And the model house? Did Werner let himself back into the grotto to retrieve it? Did he
leave the stone inside? She says, “He said that you and he used to listen to my great-uncle’s
broadcasts. That you could hear them all the way in Germany.”
“Your great-uncle—?”
Now Marie-Laure wonders what memories crawl over the woman across from her. She is about
to say more when footfalls in the hall stop outside the laboratory door.
Max stumbles through
something unintelligible in French. Francis laughs and says, “No, no,
behind
as in the
back
of us,
not
behind
as in
derrière
.”
Jutta says, “I’m sorry.”
Marie-Laure laughs. “It is the obliviousness of our children that saves us.”
The door opens and Francis says, “You are all right, madame?”
“Yes, Francis. You may go.”
“We’ll go too,” says Jutta, and she pushes her stool back beneath the lab table. “I wanted you to
have the little house. Better with you than with me.”
Marie-Laure keeps her hands flat on the lab table. She imagines mother and son as they move
toward the door, small hand folded in big hand, and her throat wells. “Wait,” she says. “When my
great-uncle sold the house, after the war, he traveled back to Saint-Malo, and he salvaged the one
remaining recording of my grandfather. It was about the moon.”
“I remember. And light? On the other side?”
The creaking floor, the roiling tanks. Snails sliding along glass. Little house on the table
between her hands.
“Leave your address with Francis. The record is very old, but I’ll mail it to you. Max might like
it.”
Paper Airplane
“A
nd Francis said there are forty-two thousand
drawers of dried plants, and he showed me the
beak of a giant squid and a plesiosaur . . .” The gravel crunches beneath their shoes and Jutta has to
lean against a tree.
“Mutti?”
Lights veer toward her, then away. “I’m tired, Max. That’s all.”
She unfolds the tourist map and tries to understand the way back to their hotel. Few cars are out,
and most every window they pass is lit blue from a television. It’s the absence of all the bodies,
she thinks, that allows us to forget. It’s that the sod seals them over.
In the elevator, Max pushes 6 and up they go. The carpeted runner
to their room is a river of
maroon crossed with gold trapezoids. She hands Max the key, and he fumbles with the lock, then
opens the door.
“Did you show the lady how the house opened, Mutti?”
“I think she already knew.”
Jutta turns on the television and takes off her shoes. Max opens the balcony doors and folds an
airplane with hotel stationery. The half block of Paris that she can see reminds her of the cities she
drew as a girl: a hundred houses, a thousand windows, a wheeling flock of birds. On the
television, players in blue rush along a field two thousand miles away. The score is three to two.
But a goalkeeper has fallen, and a wing has toed the ball just enough that it rolls slowly toward the
goal line. No one is there to kick it away. Jutta picks up the phone beside the bed and dials nine
numbers and Max launches an airplane over the street. It sails a few dozen feet and hangs for an
instant, and then the voice of her husband says hello.
The Key
S
he sits
in her lab touching the
Dosinia
shells one after another in their tray. Memories strobe
past: the feel of her father’s trouser leg as she’d cling to it. Sand fleas skittering around her knees.
Captain Nemo’s submarine vibrating with his woeful dirge as it floated through the black.
She shakes the little house, though she knows it will not give itself away.
He went back for it. Carried it out. Died with it. What sort of a boy was he? She remembers
how he sat and paged through that book of Etienne’s.
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