All the Light We Cannot See(136)

That cowlike, petrified Claudia could achieve such a miracle, that she would be good enough to share it.

What young women are left dress themselves in rags, cower in basements. Jutta hears that grandmothers are rubbing granddaughters with feces, sawing off their hair with bread knives, anything to make them less appealing to the Russians.

She hears mothers are drowning daughters.

She hears you can smell the blood on them from a mile away.

“Not much longer now,” says Frau Elena, her palms out in front of the stove as the water refuses to boil.

The Russians come for them on a cloudless day in May. There are only three of them, and they come only that one time. They break into the printing company below, hunting liquor, but find none and are soon bashing holes in the walls. A crack and a shudder, a bullet zinging off an old dismantled press, and in the upstairs apartment Frau Elena sits in her striped ski parka, an abridged New Testament zipped into the pocket, holding the hands of the girls and moving her lips in soundless prayer.

Jutta allows herself to believe that they won’t come up the staircase. For several minutes they don’t. Until they do, and their boots thump all the way up.

“Stay calm,” Frau Elena tells the girls. Hannah and Susanne and Claudia and Jutta—none of them is older than sixteen. Frau Elena’s voice is low and deflated, but it does not seem afraid. Disappointed, maybe. “Stay calm and they won’t shoot. I’ll make sure to go first. After that they’ll be gentler.”

Jutta laces her hands behind her head to keep them from shaking. Claudia seems mute, deaf.

“And close your eyes,” says Frau Elena.

Hannah sobs.

Jutta says, “I want to see them.”

“Keep them open, then.”

The footsteps stop at the top of the stairwell. The Russians go into the closet, and they hear the handles of mops being kicked drunkenly and a crate of dictionaries go thudding down the stairs, and then someone rattles the knob. One says something to another and the jamb splinters and the door bangs open.

One is an officer. Two cannot be a day older than seventeen. All are filthy beyond comprehension, but somewhere in the previous hours, they have taken the liberty of splashing themselves with women’s perfume. The two boys, in particular, smell toxically of it. They seem partly like sheepish schoolboys and partly like lunatics with an hour left to live. The first has only a rope for a belt and is so thin, he does not have to unknot it to slide off his trousers. The second laughs: a strange, puzzled laugh, as if he does not quite believe the Germans would come to his country and leave a city like this behind. The officer sits by the door with his legs straight out in front of him and peers out into the street. Hannah screams for a half second but quickly muffles it with her own hand.

Frau Elena leads the boys into the other room. She makes a single noise: a cough, as though she has something stuck in her throat.

Claudia goes next. She offers up only moans.

Jutta does not allow herself to make a single sound. Everything is strangely orderly. The officer goes last, trying each of them in turn, and he speaks single words while he is on top of Jutta, his eyes open but not seeing. It is not clear from his compressed, pained face if the words are endearments or insults. Beneath the cologne, he smells like a horse.

Years later, Jutta will hear the words he spoke repeated in her memory—Kirill, Pavel, Afanasy, Valentin—and she will decide they were the names of dead soldiers. But she could be wrong.

Before the Russians leave, the youngest fires his weapon into the ceiling twice, and plaster rains gently down onto Jutta, and in the loud reverberating echo, she can hear Susanne on the floor beside her, not sobbing but merely breathing very quietly as she listens to the officer buckle himself back up. Then the three men spill into the street and Frau Elena zips herself into her ski parka, barefoot, rubbing her left arm with her right hand, as if trying to warm that one small segment of herself.





Paris


Etienne rents the same flat on the rue des Patriarches where Marie-Laure grew up. He buys the newspapers every day to scan the lists of released prisoners, and listens incessantly to one of three radios. De Gaulle this, North Africa that. Hitler, Roosevelt, Danzig, Bratislava, all these names, none of them her father’s.

Every morning they walk to the Gare d’Austerlitz to wait. A big station clock rattles off a relentless advance of seconds, and Marie-Laure sits beside her great-uncle and listens to the wasted and wretched shamble off the trains.

Etienne sees soldiers with hollows in their cheeks like inverted cups. Thirty-year-olds who look eighty. Men in threadbare suits putting hands to the tops of their heads to take off hats that are no longer there. Marie-Laure deduces what she can from the sounds of their shoes: those are small, those weigh a ton, those hardly exist at all.