“You learned French as a child,” Marie-Laure says, though how she manages to speak, she is not sure.
“Yes. This is my son, Max.”
“Guten Tag,” murmurs Max. His hand is warm and small.
“He has not learned French as a child,” says Marie-Laure, and both women laugh a moment before falling quiet.
The woman says, “I brought something—” Even through its newspaper wrapping, Marie-Laure knows it is the model house; it feels as if this woman has dropped a molten kernel of memory into her hands.
She can barely stand. “Francis,” she says to her assistant, “could you show Max something in the museum for a moment? Perhaps the beetles?”
“Of course, Madame.”
The woman says something to her son in German. Francis says, “Shall I close the door?”
“Please.”
The latch clicks. Marie-Laure can hear the aquaria bubble and the woman inhale and the rubber stoppers on the stool legs beneath her squeak as she shifts. With her finger, she finds the nicks on the house’s sides, the slope of its roof. How often she held it.
“My father made this,” she says.
“Do you know how my brother got it?”
Everything whirling through space, taking a lap around the room, then climbing back into Marie-Laure’s mind. The boy. The model. Has it never been opened? She sets the house down suddenly, as if it is very hot.
The woman, Jutta, must be watching her very closely. She says, as though apologizing, “Did he take it from you?”
Over time, thinks Marie-Laure, events that seem jumbled either become more confusing or gradually settle into place. The boy saved her life three times over. Once by not exposing Etienne when he should
have. Twice by taking that sergeant major out of the way. Three times by helping her out of the city.
“No,” she says.
“It was not,” says Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, “very easy to be good then.”
“I spent a day with him. Less than a day.” Jutta says, “How old were you?” “Sixteen during the siege. And you?” “Fifteen. At the end.”
“We all grew up before we were grown up. Did he—?” Jutta says, “He died.”
Of course. In the stories after the war, all the resistance heroes were dashing, sinewy types who could construct machine guns from paper clips. And the Germans either raised their godlike blond heads through open tank hatches to watch broken cities scroll past, or else were psychopathic, s*x-crazed torturers of beautiful Jewesses. Where did the boy fit? He made such a faint presence. It 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.”
