But new opportunities have arrived, and Big Claude is not one to miss an opportunity. He is paying farmers near Cancale to butcher lambs and rabbits; Claude buckles the meat into his wife’s matching vinyl suitcases and carries them himself by train to Paris. It is easy: some weeks he can make as much as five hundred francs. Supply and demand. There is always paperwork, of course; some official up the chain catches a whiff and wants a percentage. It takes a mind like Claude’s to navigate the complexities of the business.
Today he is overheating; sweat trickles down his back and sides. Saint-Malo roasts. October is here, and bright cold winds ought to pour off the ocean; leaves ought to tumble down the alleys. But the wind has come and gone. As if deciding it did not like the changes here.
All afternoon Claude hunkers inside his shop above the hundreds of little bottles of florals and orientals and fougères in his vitrine, pinks and carmines and baby blues, and no one enters, and an oscillating electric fan blows across his face to the left, then to the right, and he does not read or move at all except to periodically reach a hand beneath his stool and grab a handful of biscuits from a round tin and stuff them into his mouth.
Around four P.M., a small company of German soldiers strolls up the rue Vauborel. They are lean, salmon-faced, and earnest; they have serious eyes; they carry their weapons barrel-down, slinging them over their shoulders like clarinets. They laugh to one another and seem touched underneath their helmets with a beneficent gold.
Claude understands that he ought to resent them, but he admires their competence and manners, the clean efficiency with which they move. They always seem to be going somewhere and never doubt that it is the right place to be going. Something his own country has lacked.
The soldiers turn down the rue St. Philippe and are gone. Claude’s fingers trace ovals across the top of his vitrine. Upstairs his wife runs a vacuum cleaner; he can hear it coursing round and round. He is nearly asleep when he sees the Parisian who has been living three doors down exit the house of Etienne LeBlanc. A thin beak-nosed man who skulks outside the telegraph office, whittling little wooden boxes.
The Parisian walks in the same direction as the German soldiers, placing the heel of one foot against the toe of the other. He reaches the end of the street, scribbles something on a pad, turns one hundred and eighty degrees, and walks back. When he reaches the end of the block, he stares up at the Sajers’ house and makes several more notes. Glancing up, glancing down. Measuring. Biting the eraser of his pencil as though uneasy.
Big Claude goes to the window. This too could be an opportunity. Occupation authorities will want to know that a stranger is pacing off distances and making drawings of houses. They will want to know what he looks like, who is sponsoring this activity. Who has sanctioned it.
This is good. This is excellent.
Time of the Ostriches
Still they do not return to Paris. Still she does not go outside. Marie-Laure counts every day she has been shut up in Etienne’s house. One hundred and twenty. One hundred and twenty-one. She thinks of the transmitter in the attic, how it sent her grand-father’s voice flying over the sea—Consider a single piece glowing in your family’s stove—sailing like Darwin from Plymouth Sound to Cape Verde to Patagonia to the Falkland Islands, over waves, across borders.
“Once you’re done with the model,” she asks her father, “does that mean I can go out?”
His sandpaper does not stop.
The stories Madame Manec’s visitors bring into the kitchen are terrifying and difficult to believe. Parisian cousins nobody has heard from in decades now write letters begging for capons, hams, hens. The dentist is selling wine through the mail. The perfumer is slaughtering lambs and carrying them in suitcases on the train to Paris, where he sells the meat for an enormous profit.
In Saint-Malo, people are fined for locking their doors, for keeping doves, for hoarding meat. Truffles disappear. Sparkling wine disappears. No eye contact. No chatter in doorways. No sunbathing, no singing, no lovers strolling the ramparts in the evenings—such rules are not written down, but they may as well be. Icy winds whirl in from the Atlantic and Etienne barricades himself inside his brother’s old room and Marie-Laure endures the slow rain of hours by running her fingers over his seashells down in his study, ordering them by size, by species, by morphology, checking and rechecking their order, trying to make sure she has not missorted a single one.
Surely she could go out for a half hour? On the arm of her father? And yet each time her father refuses, a voice echoes up from a chamber of her memory: They’ll probably take the blind girls before they take the gimps.
Make them do things.
Outside the city walls, a few military boats cruise to and fro, and the flax is bundled and shipped and woven into rope or cables or parachute cord, and airborne gulls drop oysters or mussels or clams, and the sudden clatter on the roof makes Marie-Laure bolt upright in bed. The mayor announces a new tax, and some of Madame Manec’s friends mutter that he has sold them out, that they need un homme à poigne, but others ask what the mayor is supposed to do. It becomes known as the time of the ostriches.
“Do we have our heads in the sand, Madame? Or do they?”
“Maybe everybody does,” she murmurs.
Madame Manec has taken to falling asleep at the table beside Marie-Laure. It takes her a long time to carry meals the five flights to Etienne’s room, wheezing the whole way. Most mornings, Madame is baking before anyone is awake; at midmorning she goes out into the city, cigarette in her mouth, to bring cakes or pots of stew to the sick or the stranded, and upstairs Marie-Laure’s father works on the model, sanding, nailing, cutting, measuring, each day working more frenetically than the last, as if against some deadline known only to him.
Weakest
The warrant officer in charge of field exercises is the commandant, an overzealous schoolmaster named Bastian with an expansive walk and a round belly and a coat quivering with war medals. His face is scarred from smallpox, and his shoulders look as though they’ve been hewn from soft clay. He wears hobnailed jackboots every second of every day, and the cadets joke that he kicked his way out of the womb with them.
Bastian demands that they memorize maps, study the angle of the sun, cut their own belts from cowhide. Every afternoon, whatever the weather, he stands in a field bawling state-sown dicta: “Prosperity depends on ferocity. The only things that keep your precious grandmothers in their tea and cookies are the fists at the end of your arms.”