All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel(67)
Werner clenches his eyes. A memory of his attic bedroom swamps him: clicking of mouse feet in the walls, sleet tapping the window. The ceiling so sloped he could stand only in the spot closest to the door. And the feeling that somewhere just behind his vision, ranged like spectators in a gallery, his mother and father and the Frenchman from the radio were all watching him through the rattling window to see what he would do.
He sees Jutta’s crestfallen face, bent over the pieces of their broken radio. He has the sensation that something huge and empty is about to devour them all.
“That’s not what I meant,” Werner says into his blanket. But Frederick says nothing more, and both boys lie motionless a long time, watching the blue spokes of moonlight rotate through the room.
Old Ladies’ Resistance Club
Madame Ruelle, the baker’s wife—a pretty-voiced woman who smells mostly of yeast but also sometimes of face powder or the sweet perfume of sliced apples—straps a stepladder to the roof of her husband’s car and drives the Route de Carentan at dusk with Madame Guiboux and rearranges road signs with a ratchet set. They return drunk and laughing to the kitchen of Number 4 rue Vauborel.
“Dinan is now twenty kilometers to the north,” says Madame Ruelle.
“Right in the middle of the sea!”
Three days later, Madame Fontineau overhears that the German garrison commander is allergic to goldenrod. Madame Carré, the florist, tucks great fistfuls of it into an arrangement headed for the chateau.
The women funnel a shipment of rayon to the wrong destination. They intentionally misprint a train timetable. Madame Hébrard, the postmistress, slides an important-looking letter from Berlin into her underpants, takes it home, and starts her evening fire with it.
They come spilling into Etienne’s kitchen with gleeful reports that someone has heard the garrison commander sneezing, or that the dog shit placed on a brothel doorstep reached the target of a German’s shoe bottom perfectly. Madame Manec pours sherry or cider or Muscadet; someone sits stationed by the door to serve as sentry. Small and stooped Madame Fontineau boasts that she tied up the switchboard at the chateau for an hour; dowdy and strapping Madame Guiboux says she helped her grandsons paint a stray dog the colors of the French flag and sent it running through the Place Chateaubriand.
The women cackle, thrilled. “What can I do?” asks the ancient widow Madame Blanchard. “I want to do something.”
Madame Manec asks everyone to give Madame Blanchard their money. “You’ll get it back,” she says, “don’t worry. Now, Madame Blanchard, you’ve had beautiful handwriting all your life. Take this fountain pen of Master Etienne’s. On every five-franc note, I want you to write, Free France Now. No one can afford to destroy money, right? Once everyone has spent their bills, our little message will go out all over Brittany.”
The women clap. Madame Blanchard squeezes Madame Manec’s hand and wheezes and blinks her glossy eyes in pleasure.
Sometimes Etienne comes down grumbling, one shoe on, and the whole kitchen goes quiet while Madame Manec fixes his tea and sets it on a tray and Etienne carries it back upstairs. Then the women start up again, scheming, gabbling. Madame Manec brushes Marie-Laure’s hair in long absentminded strokes. “Seventy-six years old,” she whispers, “and I can still feel like this? Like a little girl with stars in my eyes?”
Diagnosis
The military doctor takes Sergeant Major von Rumpel’s temperature. Inflates the blood pressure cuff. Examines his throat with a penlight. This very morning von Rumpel inspected a fifteenth-century davenport and supervised its installment onto a railcar meant for Marshal G?ring’s hunting lodge. The private who brought it to him described plundering the villa they took it from; he called it “shopping.”
The davenport makes von Rumpel think of an eighteenth-century Dutch tobacco box made out of brass and copper and encrusted with tiny diamonds that he examined earlier this week, and the tobacco box sends his thoughts, as inexorably as gravity, back to the Sea of Flames. In his weaker moments, he imagines walking in some future hour between arcades of pillars in the great Führermuseum at Linz, his heels clacking smartly on the marble, twilight cascading through high windows. He sees a thousand crystalline display cases, so clear they seem to float above the floor; inside them wait the world’s mineral treasures, harvested from every hole on the globe: dioptase and topaz and amethyst and California rubellite.
What was the phrase? Like stars flung off the brows of archangels.
And in the very center of the gallery, a spotlight falls through the ceiling onto a pedestal; there, inside a glass cube, glows a small blue stone . . .
The doctor asks von Rumpel to lower his trousers. Though the business of war has not let up for even a day, von Rumpel has been happy for months. His responsibilities are doubling; there are not, it turns out, a lot of Aryan diamond experts in the Reich. Just three weeks ago, outside a tiny sun-streaked station west of Bratislava, he examined an envelope full of perfectly clear, well-faceted stones; behind him rumbled a truck full of paintings wrapped in paper and packed in straw. The guards whispered that a Rembrandt was in there, and pieces of a famous altarpiece from Cracow. All being sent to a salt mine somewhere deep beneath the Austrian village of Altaussee, where a mile-long tunnel drops into a glittering arcade filled with shelving three stories high, upon which the high command is stacking Europe’s finest art. They will assemble everything under one unassailable roof, a temple to the human endeavor. Visitors will marvel at it for a thousand years.