They cross the Channel at midnight. There are twelve and they are named for songs: Stardust and Stormy Weather and In the Mood and Pistol-Packin’ Mama. LOCATION: 23
To the bombardiers, the walled city on its granite headland, drawing ever closer, looks like an unholy tooth, something black and dangerous, a final abscess to be lanced away. LOCATION: 29
the walls of the hotel toll like a struck bell. LOCATION: 80
“This is it?” he asks. “They’re really coming?” But who is there to answer? LOCATION: 81
Up and down the lanes, the last unevacuated townspeople wake, groan, sigh. Spinsters, prostitutes, men over sixty. Procrastinators, collaborators, disbelievers, drunks. Nuns of every order. The poor. The stubborn. The blind. LOCATION: 83
Saint-Malo: Water surrounds the city on four sides. Its link to the rest of France is tenuous: a causeway, a bridge, a spit of sand. We are Malouins first, say the people of Saint-Malo. Bretons next. French if there’s anything left over. LOCATION: 94 NOTE: French regionalism at its best.
Four years of occupation, and the roar of oncoming bombers is the roar of what? Deliverance? Extirpation? LOCATION: 103
Werner hears only the radio voices of his childhood. The Goddess of History looked down to earth. Only through the hottest fires can purification be achieved. He sees a forest of dying sunflowers. He sees a flock of blackbirds explode out of a tree. LOCATION: 146
Locusts, and an Old Testament proverb comes back to him from some cobwebbed hour of parish school: The locusts have no king, yet all of them go out in ranks LOCATION: 152
A demonic horde. Upended sacks of beans. A hundred broken rosaries. There are a thousand metaphors and all of them are inadequate: forty bombs per aircraft, four hundred and eighty altogether, seventy-two thousand pounds of explosives. LOCATION: 154
visitors could not distinguish his figure from light itself. LOCATION: 189
“Are all those doors to keep thieves from getting in?” “Maybe,” the guide says, and winks, “they’re there to keep the curse from getting out. LOCATION: 220
Marie-Laure frowns. It is just an iron door with a brass keyhole. LOCATION: 225
A color that is the absence of color. LOCATION: 240
Frau Elena is a Protestant nun from Alsace who is more fond of children than of supervision. LOCATION: 245
the economic collapse of Germany looming over them like the severe geometry of the mills. LOCATION: 262
Spaces she once knew as familiar—the four-room flat she shares with her father, the little tree-lined square at the end of their street—have become labyrinths bristling with hazards. LOCATION: 275
What is blindness? Where there should be a wall, her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin. LOCATION: 277
The despair doesn’t last. Marie-Laure is too young and her father is too patient. There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day toward success or failure. But no curses. LOCATION: 286
whole museums within the museum. LOCATION: 311
his mind accommodates a seemingly inexhaustible catalog of Latin binomial names. LOCATION: 314
“Now that shell, Laurette, belonged to a violet sea snail, a blind snail that lives its whole life on the surface of the sea. As soon as it is released into the ocean, it agitates the water to make bubbles, and binds those bubbles with mucus, and builds a raft. Then it blows around, feeding on whatever floating aquatic invertebrates it encounters. But if it ever loses its raft, it will sink and die LOCATION: 318 NOTE: Will Laurette find a raft?
To really touch something, she is learning—the bark of a sycamore tree in the gardens; a pinned stag beetle in the Department of Entomology; the exquisitely polished interior of a scallop shell in Dr. Geffard’s workshop—is to love it. LOCATION: 325 NOTE: "To really touch something … is to love it."
He says she is his émerveillement. He says he will never leave her, not in a million years. LOCATION: 338
the voice seems to echo in the architecture of his head. LOCATION: 355
Werner likes everything. Violins, horns, drums, speeches—a mouth against a microphone in some faraway yet simultaneous evening—the sorcery of it holds him rapt. LOCATION: 410
You supply the foundation of the new order, the bullets in its guns, the armor on its tanks. LOCATION: 477
It says, He alone is to be thanked for the fact that, for German children, a German life has once again become worth living. LOCATION: 480
there is no darkness, not the kind they imagine. Everything is composed of webs and lattices and upheavals of sound and texture. LOCATION: 490
inside her chest pulses something huge, something full of longing, something unafraid. LOCATION: 521
The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light? LOCATION: 536
Consider a single piece glowing in your family’s stove. See it, children? That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fern or reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe two million, or maybe one hundred million. Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light they could and transformed the sun’s energy into itself. Into bark, twigs, stems. Because plants eat light, in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years—eons in which something like a month or a decade or even your whole life was just a puff of air, a snap of two fingers. And eventually the peat dried and became like stone, and someone dug it up, and the coal man brought it to your house, and maybe you yourself carried it to the stove, and now that sunlight—sunlight one hundred million years old—is heating your home tonight LOCATION: 542
Open your eyes, concludes the man, and see what you can with them before they close forever, LOCATION: 550
Ten years old, and onto the black screen of her imagination she can project anything: LOCATION: 566
Some things are simply more rare than others, and that’s why there are locks. LOCATION: 571
What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible LOCATION: 600
Electricity, Werner is learning, can be static by itself. But couple it with magnetism, and suddenly you have movement—waves. Fields and circuits, conduction and induction. Space, time, mass. The air swarms with so much that is invisible! How he wishes he had eyes to see the ultraviolet, eyes to see the infrared, eyes to see radio waves crowding the darkening sky, flashing through the walls of the house. LOCATION: 648
His mind shapes itself around the problem, disorder becomes order, the obstacle reveals itself, and before long the radio is fixed. LOCATION: 713
Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth. LOCATION: 718
the ever-quickening, ever-expanding machine that is Germany. LOCATION: 786
Good evening, he thinks. Or heil Hitler. Everyone is choosing the latter. LOCATION: 787
The war drops its question mark. LOCATION: 789
His handgun is black; it seems to draw all the light in the room toward it. LOCATION: 903
Herr Siedler smiles as if to say: You and I, son, we know history takes a longer course, don’t we? His teeth are very small. “Take your time with it. LOCATION: 927
This is the furnace of the country. LOCATION: 962
“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are. LOCATION: 965
His face is clean and committed; he is a man supremely confident in his privileges. LOCATION: 969
Light, electricity, ether. Space, time, mass. Heinrich Hertz’s Principles of Mechanics. Heissmeyer’s famous schools. Code breaking, rocket propulsion, all the latest. Open your eyes, the Frenchman on the radio used to say, and see what you can with them before they close forever. LOCATION: 997
We are mice, he thinks, and the sky swirls with hawks. LOCATION: 1046
Everyone should behave as if he carries the real thing. LOCATION: 1061
He can feel its tiny weight there, as though he has slipped it inside his own mind: a knot. LOCATION: 1062
The appetite for oxygen is such that objects heavier than housecats are dragged into the flames. LOCATION: 1079
Swifts, flushed from chimneys, catch fire and swoop like blown sparks out over the ramparts and extinguish themselves in the sea. LOCATION: 1080
her body seems to have detached itself from her voice, and her words make a faraway, desolate cadence. LOCATION: 1086
The notion occurs to her that the ground beneath Saint-Malo has been knitted together all along by the root structure of an immense tree, located at the center of the city, in a square no one ever walked her to, and the massive tree has been uprooted by the hand of God and the granite is coming with it, heaps and clumps and clods of stones pulling away as the trunk comes up, followed by the fat tendrils of roots—the root structure like another tree turned upside down and shoved into the soil, isn’t that how Dr. Geffard might have described it?—the ramparts crumbling, streets leaking away, block-long mansions falling like toys. LOCATION: 1087
She smells smoke and knows. Fire. The glass has shattered out of her bedroom window, and what she hears is the sound of something burning beyond the shutters. Something huge. The neighborhood. The entire town. LOCATION: 1095
In the absolute blackness, his vision is webbed with a thousand traveling wisps of red and blue. Flames? Phantoms? They lick along the floor, then rise to the ceiling, glowing strangely, serenely. LOCATION: 1117
Smoke: her great-uncle says it is a suspension of particles, billions of drifting carbon molecules. Bits of living rooms, cafés, trees. People. LOCATION: 1142
A light emerges, a light not kindled, Werner prays, by his own imagination: an amber beam wandering the dust. LOCATION: 1145
A diamond, the locksmith reminds himself, is only a piece of carbon compressed in the bowels of the earth for eons and driven to the surface in a volcanic pipe. Someone facets it, someone polishes it. It can harbor a curse no more than a leaf can, or a mirror, or a life. There is only chance in this world, chance and physics. Anyway, what he carries is nothing more than a piece of glass. A diversion. LOCATION: 1212
Walk the paths of logic. Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution. Every lock its key. You can go back to Paris or you can stay here or you can go on. LOCATION: 1229
interchangeable in their white uniforms like livestock before the eyes of the examiners. LOCATION: 1258
We will take only the purest, only the strongest. LOCATION: 1303
in the lulls between their footfalls, she can hear a deep, nearly subsonic roar. She tugs her father to a stop. “Armies.” “The ocean.” She cocks her head. “It’s the ocean, Marie. I promise. LOCATION: 1322
The sea murmuring in a language that travels through stones, air, and sky. LOCATION: 1325
What did Captain Nemo say? The sea does not belong to tyrants. LOCATION: 1325
she is old enough to suspect that what he presents as quaint and welcoming might in truth be harrowing and strange. LOCATION: 1329
Who do the roads belong to now? And the fields? The trees? LOCATION: 1340
she’s eating wedges of wet sunlight. LOCATION: 1363
Pflicht. It means duty. Obligation. Every German fulfilling his function. Put on your boots and go to work. Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. We all have parts to play, little sister. LOCATION: 1403
Every few breaths, the words flare in his mind like sparks: You have been called. LOCATION: 1411
“Everybody has misplaced someone,” murmurs Madame Manec, LOCATION: 1464
Her arms are wrapped around her head and her wool blanket is twisted around her midsection and her pillow is jammed into the crack between mattress and wall—even in sleep, a tableau of friction. LOCATION: 1503
His voice is low and soft, a piece of silk you might keep in a drawer and pull out only on rare occasions, just to feel it between your fingers. LOCATION: 1544
Stillness: this is what he radiates more than anything else. The stillness of a tree. Of a mouse blinking in the dark. LOCATION: 1556
No books, no cigarettes, no food, no personal possessions, nothing in your locker but uniforms, boots, knife, polish. No talking after lights-out. LOCATION: 1578
You will strip away your weakness, your cowardice, your hesitation. You will become like a waterfall, a volley of bullets—you will all surge in the same direction at the same pace toward the same cause. You will forgo comforts; you will live by duty alone. You will eat country and breathe nation. LOCATION: 1580
grooved by the boredom of countless boys before them—squires, monks, conscripts, cadets. LOCATION: 1593
The star-flooded nights, the dew-soaked dawns, the hushed ambulatories, the enforced asceticism—never has Werner felt part of something so single-minded. Never has he felt such a hunger to belong. LOCATION: 1605
For now, though, beneath the whip of the administration, they are all the same, all Jungm LOCATION: 1612
They are each a mound of clay, and the potter that is the portly, shiny-faced commandant is throwing four hundred identical pots. LOCATION: 1614
We are young, they sing, we are steadfast, we have never compromised, we have so many castles yet to storm. LOCATION: 1616
Sergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel is forty-one years old, not so old that he cannot be promoted. He has moist red lips; pale, almost translucent cheeks like fillets of raw sole; and an instinct for correctness that rarely fails him. He has a wife who suffers his absences without complaint, and who arranges porcelain kittens by color, lightest to darkest, on two different shelves in their drawing room in Stuttgart. He also has two daughters whom he has not seen in nine months. The eldest, Veronika, is deeply earnest. Her letters to him include phrases like sacred resolve, proud accomplishments, and unparalleled in history LOCATION: 1627
Rumor is that the führer is compiling a wish list of precious objects from all around Europe and Russia. They say he intends to remake the Austrian town of Linz into an empyrean city, the cultural capital of the world. A vast promenade, mausoleum, acropolis, planetarium, library, opera house—everything marble and granite, everything profoundly clean. At its core, he plans a kilometer-long museum: a trove of the greatest achievements in human culture. LOCATION: 1650
Her father says their weapons gleam as if they have never been fired. He says their boots are clean and their uniforms spotless. He says they look as if they have just stepped out of air-conditioned train cars. LOCATION: 1662
When the wind is blowing, which it almost always is, with the walls groaning and the shutters banging, the rooms overloaded and the staircase wound tightly up through its center, the house seems the material equivalent of her uncle’s inner being: apprehensive, isolated, but full of cobwebby wonders. LOCATION: 1699
he smokes so much it is as if he is turning himself into ash. LOCATION: 1735
Marie-Laure will indeed smell something, whether because her uncle is passing coffee grounds beneath her nose, or because they really are flying over the coffee trees of Borneo, she does not want to decide. LOCATION: 1754
“Ah,” he says, more quietly, his accent fading, the faintest touch of dread returning to his voice, “here we are. Home. LOCATION: 1759
Her uncle seems almost a child, monastic in the modesty of his needs and wholly independent of any sort of temporal obligations. LOCATION: 1838
And yet she can tell he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him. As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind. LOCATION: 1839
Henri would stay right beside me and whisper those scripts, the ones we recorded. Sometimes all night. Over and over. As though weaving some kind of protective screen around us. Until morning came. LOCATION: 1873
This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark. LOCATION: 1875
To Werner, he looks capable of severe and chronic violence. LOCATION: 1979
His very smell like that of coming winter, a tomb, the heavy inertia of time. LOCATION: 2139
his boot and Frederick’s touch the ground at the exact same moment. LOCATION: 2198
they seem to Werner to be running more fervently, more conclusively, than they have before. LOCATION: 2282
Everything becomes soaked in a hideous and wondrous slowness. LOCATION: 2301
part of him wants to scream: is this not wrong? But here it is right. LOCATION: 2303
Maybe Werner for his ten thousand small betrayals and Bernd for his innumerable crimes and Volkheimer for being the instrument, the executor of the orders, the blade of the Reich—maybe the three of them have some greater price to pay, some final sentence to be handed down. LOCATION: 2405
Once, when she was eight or nine, her father took her to the Panthéon in Paris to describe Foucault’s pendulum. Its bob, he said, was a golden sphere shaped like a child’s top. It swung from a wire that was sixty-seven meters long; because its trajectory changed over time, he explained, it proved beyond all doubt that the earth rotated. But what Marie-Laure remembered, standing at the rail as it whistled past, was her father saying that Foucault’s pendulum would never stop. It would keep swinging, she understood, after she and her father left the Panthéon, after she had fallen asleep that night. After she had forgotten about it, and lived her entire life, and died. Now it is as if she can hear the pendulum in the air in front of her: that huge golden bob, as wide across as a barrel, swinging on and on, never stopping. Grooving and regrooving its inhuman truth into the floor. LOCATION: 2428
“Your problem, Werner,” says Frederick, “is that you still believe you own your life. LOCATION: 2607
Frederick pours the water onto the ground. “I will not. LOCATION: 2677
the labyrinth of Saint-Malo has opened onto a portal of sound larger than anything she has ever experienced. LOCATION: 2697
Frederick’s dreaminess, his otherness—it’s on him like a scent, and everyone can smell it. LOCATION: 2776
The entropy of a closed system never decreases. Every process must by law decay. LOCATION: 2802
Hubert Bazin loves to talk about the walls and warlocks and pirates of Saint-Malo. Over the centuries, he tells Marie-Laure, the city ramparts have kept out bloodthirsty marauders, Romans, Celts, Norsemen. Some say sea monsters. For thirteen hundred years, he says, the walls kept out bloodthirsty English sailors who would park their ships offshore and launch flaming projectiles at the houses, who would try to burn everything and starve everybody, who would stop at nothing to kill them all. LOCATION: 2824
She misses Papa, Paris, Dr. Geffard, the gardens, her books, her pinecones—all are holes in her life. But over these past few weeks, her existence has become tolerable. At least, out on the beaches, her privation and fear are rinsed away by wind and color and light. LOCATION: 2834
“Sublimity,” Hauptmann says, panting, “you know what that is, Pfennig?” He is tipsy, animated, almost prattling. Never has Werner seen him like this. “It’s the instant when one thing is about to become something else. Day to night, caterpillar to butterfly. Fawn to doe. Experiment to result. Boy to man. LOCATION: 2870
Something in Werner’s soul shuts its scaly eyes, and the little professor raises his pistol and fires it into the sky. LOCATION: 2884
Werner is succeeding. He is being loyal. He is being what everybody agrees is good. And yet every time he wakes and buttons his tunic, he feels he is betraying something. LOCATION: 2935
the truth is a machine whose gears are not meshing. LOCATION: 3009
The nurse’s face seems to occupy multiple distances, a mask atop a mask atop a mask. LOCATION: 3027
A story of life immanent in each. LOCATION: 3067
They sprint, shout, hurl themselves over obstacles; in field exercises they play a game where ten boys get red armbands and ten get black. The game ends when one team has all twenty. LOCATION: 3082
It seems to Werner as if all the boys around him are intoxicated. LOCATION: 3083
at every meal, the cadets fill their tin cups not with the cold mineralized water of Schulpforta but with a spirit that leaves them glazed and dazzled, as if they ward off a vast and inevitable tidal wave of anguish only by staying forever drunk on rigor and exercise and gleaming boot leather. LOCATION: 3083
Anything that can be used they say must be used. Just like all of us here. LOCATION: 3142
“If your same blood doesn’t run in the arms and legs of the person you’re next to, you can’t trust anything. And even then. It’s not a person you wish to fight, Madame, it’s a system. How do you fight a system? LOCATION: 3170
Martin Burkhard’s father falls, and Martin tells everybody—on the very same night his shoulder is tapped—that he is happy. “Doesn’t everything,” he says, “die at last and too soon? Who would not be honored to fall? To be a paving stone on the road to final victory?” Werner looks for uneasiness in Martin’s eyes but cannot find it. LOCATION: 3247
Lately the commandant speaks more and more intimately of the führer and the latest thing—prayers, petroleum, loyalty—that he requires. The führer requires trustworthiness, electricity, boot leather. Werner is beginning to see, approaching his sixteenth birthday, that what the führer really requires is boys. Great rows of them walking to the conveyor belt to climb on. Give up cream for the führer, sleep for the führer, aluminum for the führer. Give up Reinhard Wöhlmann’s father and Karl Westerholzer’s father and Martin Burkhard’s father. LOCATION: 3261
He looks as if he is slowly being engulfed by something beyond his control. LOCATION: 3267
the certainty that the instruments of the Reich could see through walls, through skin, into the very soul of each subject. LOCATION: 3355
She gives him a look that one trapped person gives another; LOCATION: 3443
The city seems utterly still, as though everyone is listening, waiting for someone to slip. LOCATION: 3481
each eye a stagnant pool LOCATION: 3483
to Marie-Laure this is a double cruelty: that everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun. LOCATION: 3671
Stare into the wires, concentrate, assess. Eventually a pattern will assert itself. LOCATION: 3740 NOTE: This text is a radio and its words are its wires.
“567, 32, 3011, 2300, 110, 90, 146, 7751. LOCATION: 3759
“What do they mean, Uncle?” “I don’t know.” “Do they translate into words?” “I suppose they must. LOCATION: 3761 NOTE: Stare long enough and a pattern will emerge.
We will drive over everything that once was. LOCATION: 3793
Debussy or Ravel or Massenet or Charpentier. LOCATION: 3810
in the candlelight, in the sweet rush of the concerto, Marie-Laure bites her lower lip, and her face gives off a secondary glow, reminding him of the marshes beyond the town walls, in those winter dusks when the sun has set but isn’t fully swallowed, and big patches of reeds catch red pools of light and burn—places he used to go with his brother, in what seems like lifetimes ago. This, he thinks, is what the numbers mean. LOCATION: 3825 NOTE: Hope.
Neumann One says, “The true Aryan is as blond as Hitler, as slim as Göring, and as tall as Goebbels LOCATION: 3843 NOTE: Brunette, fat, and short…
All day they have moved through this strange and desolate region and have seen nothing but sunflowers. Werner runs the needle through the frequencies, switches bands, retunes the transceiver again, scouring the static. The air swarms with it day and night, a great, sad, sinister Ukrainian static that seems to have been here long before humans figured out how to hear it. LOCATION: 3845
Dvee-nat-set, shayst-nat-set, davt-set-adeen, nonsense, terrible nonsense, pipelined directly into his head; it’s like reaching into a sack full of cotton and finding a razor blade inside, everything constant and undeviating and then that one dangerous thing, so sharp you can hardly feel it open your skin. LOCATION: 3855
These partisans may have been involved in some dark forest magic, but they should not have been tinkering with the higher magic of radio. LOCATION: 3904
Back to the intersection with the rue d’Estrées. Instead of turning left onto the rue Vauborel, Marie-Laure continues straight. Fifty steps to the ramparts, a hundred or so more along the base of the walls to the mouth of the alley that grows ever narrower. LOCATION: 3934
Everybody, he is learning, likes to hear themselves talk. Hubris, like the oldest stories. They raise the antenna too high, broadcast for too many minutes, assume the world offers safety and rationality when of course it does not. LOCATION: 3958
Sometimes days pass after hearing a first transmission before Werner snares the next; they present a problem to solve, something to wrap his mind around: better, surely, than fighting in some stinking, frozen trench, full of lice, the way the old instructors at Schulpforta fought in the first war. This is cleaner, more mechanical, a war waged through the air, invisibly, and the front lines are anywhere. Isn’t there a kind of ravishing delight in the chase of it? LOCATION: 3977
Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters. LOCATION: 4020
Once in the glass, as dark as blood, the Bordeaux seems almost as though it is a living thing. Von Rumpel takes pleasure in knowing that he is the only person in the world who will have the privilege of tasting it before it is gone. LOCATION: 4053
as Werner crouches in the mud behind the Opel, he feels as if he is shitting out the last of his civilization. LOCATION: 4076
What he feels on the worst days of that relentless winter—while rust colonizes the truck and rifles and radios, while German divisions retreat all around them—is a deep scorn for all the humans they pass. LOCATION: 4088
The total entropy of any system, said Dr. Hauptmann, will decrease only if the entropy of another system will increase. Nature demands symmetry. Ordnung muss sein. LOCATION: 4092
A safe maker. Brilliant with locks. Lives within walking distance of the museum. Employed there all his adult life. Humble, no visible aspirations for wealth. A blind daughter. Plenty of reasons to be loyal. LOCATION: 4160
It is all unraveling, Werner can feel it; the fabric of the war tearing apart. LOCATION: 4185
It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world—what pretensions humans have! LOCATION: 4187
Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? LOCATION: 4188
Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them? LOCATION: 4189
When Russian prisoners are chained by threes and fours to fences while German privates tuck live grenades in their pockets and run? LOCATION: 4189
Neumann One, who, if he were not scheduled to die ten weeks from now in the Allied invasion of Normandy, might have become a barber later in life, who would have smelled of talc and whiskey and put his index finger into men’s ears to position their heads, whose pants and shirts always would have been covered with clipped hairs, who, in his shop, would have taped postcards of the Alps around the circumference of a big cheap wavery mirror, who would have been faithful to his stout wife for the rest of his life—Neumann One says, “Time for haircuts. LOCATION: 4193
how could Neumann Two not have known, but of course he didn’t, because that is how things are with Neumann Two, with everybody in this unit, in this army, in this world, they do as they’re told, they get scared, they move about with only themselves in mind. Name me someone who does not. LOCATION: 4245
A new garrison commander has arrived on the Emerald Coast, a colonel. Trim, smart, efficient. Won medals at Stalingrad. Wears a monocle. Invariably accompanied by a gorgeous French secretary-interpreter who may or may not have consorted with Russian royalty. He is average-sized and prematurely gray, but by some contrivance of carriage and posture, he makes the men who stand before him feel smaller. The rumor is that this colonel ran an entire automobile company before the war. That he is a man who understands the power of the German soil, who feels its dark prehistoric vigor thudding in his very cells. That he will never acquiesce. LOCATION: 4273
Around four o’clock, an American field howitzer, two miles away, lets fly a single improperly ranged shell. It sails over the city walls and bursts against the northern parapet of Fort National, where three hundred and eighty Frenchmen are being held against their will with minimal cover. Nine are killed instantly. One of them still clutching the hand of bridge he was playing when the shell struck. LOCATION: 4288
Right three degrees, repeat range. Calm, weary voices directing fire. The same sort of voice God uses, perhaps, when He calls souls to Him. This way, please. LOCATION: 4420
Only numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way. It’s the same on their side too. LOCATION: 4422
To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. LOCATION: 4452
the atmosphere oversaturated with meaning and anger and righteousness, LOCATION: 4486
But God is only a white cold eye, a quarter-moon poised above the smoke, blinking, blinking, as the city is gradually pounded to dust. LOCATION: 4491
The room Werner and Bernd are given, on the top floor of a requisitioned hotel in the city within the walls, is like a place that time wants no part of: three-hundred-year-old stucco quatrefoils and palmate capitals and spiraling horns of fruit festoon the ceiling. LOCATION: 4588
I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads. It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel. LOCATION: 4598
Levitte the perfumer is flabby and plump, basted in his own self-importance. LOCATION: 4657
She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog. LOCATION: 4687
What do you seek, little snail? Do you live only in this one moment, or do you worry like Professor Aronnax for your future? LOCATION: 4711
God’s truth? How long do these intolerable moments last for God? A trillionth of a second? The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness. That’s God’s truth. LOCATION: 4768
War, Etienne thinks distantly, is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk. LOCATION: 4786
A great change has occurred in the countenance of Neumann Two, as though he looks not at his former companions but into his last hours on earth. As though he is about to ride in some black chariot at a forty-five-degree angle down into the abyss. Neumann One raises a single steady hand. His mouth is expressionless, but in the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, Werner can see despair. “In the end,” murmurs Volkheimer as the truck heaves away, “none of us will avoid it. LOCATION: 4810
Things are just things. Stories are just stories. LOCATION: 4871
“I saved her only to hear her die. LOCATION: 4997
During the last war, Etienne knew artillerymen who could peer through field glasses and discern their shells’ damage by the colors thrown skyward. Gray was stone. Brown was soil. Pink was flesh. LOCATION: 5015
All of it is burning. Every memory he ever made. LOCATION: 5026
Above Fort National, the dawn becomes deeply, murderously clear. The Milky Way a fading river. He looks across to the fires. He thinks: The universe is full of fuel. LOCATION: 5026
Claire: a girl so clear you can see right through her. LOCATION: 5133
They said what he needed was certainty. Purpose. Clarity. That pigeon-chested commandant Bastian with his grandmother’s walk; he said they would strip the hesitation out of him. We are a volley of bullets, we are cannonballs. We are the tip of the sword. Who is the weakest? LOCATION: 5188
In his smile Werner recognizes an assumption that they are kindred, comrades. Accomplices. That each has come to this house seeking the same thing. LOCATION: 5223
Werner thinks about the men in the sunflowers and a hundred others: each lay dead in his hut or truck or bunker, wearing the look of someone who had caught the tune of a familiar song. A crease between the eyes, a slackness to the mouth. A look that said: So soon? But doesn’t it play for everybody too soon? LOCATION: 5235
The Simultaneity of LOCATION: 5243
We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us. LOCATION: 5274
He says, “You are very brave.” She lowers the bucket. “What is your name?” He tells her. She says, “When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?” He says, “Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did. LOCATION: 5288
The window glows. The slow sandy light of dawn permeates the room. Everything transient and aching; everything tentative. LOCATION: 5298
He would walk anywhere to make it happen, bear anything; in a year or three years or ten, France and Germany would not mean what they meant now; they could leave the house and walk to a tourists’ restaurant and order a simple meal together and eat it in silence, the comfortable kind of silence lovers are supposed to share. LOCATION: 5334
Any moment they will be seen, by either Americans or his own army, and made to do something. Work, join, confess, die. LOCATION: 5351
Her voice like a bright, clear window of sky. LOCATION: 5356
He thinks of the old broken miners he’d see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop. LOCATION: 5376
Their son, Max, is six, fond of mud, dogs, and questions no one can answer. More than anything lately, Max likes to fold complicated designs of paper airplanes. He comes home from school, kneels on the kitchen floor, and forms airplane after airplane with unswerving, almost frightening devotion, evaluating different wingtips, tails, noses, mostly seeming to love the praxis of it, the transformation of something flat into something that can fly. LOCATION: 5612
It’s embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is. A town on the northern coast of France? Love? Nothing will be healed in this kitchen. Some griefs can never be put right. LOCATION: 5658
There are no plaques for the Germans who died here. LOCATION: 5731
Every fall, she teaches a class to undergraduates, and her students come and go, smelling of salted beef, or cologne, or the gasoline of their motor scooters, and she loves to ask them about their lives, to wonder what adventures they’ve had, what lusts, what secret follies they carry in their hearts. LOCATION: 5787
It’s the absence of all the bodies, she thinks, that allows us to forget. It’s that the sod seals them over. LOCATION: 5842
Beneath her fingernails, the frost makes billions of tiny diadems and coronas on the slats of the bench, a lattice of dumbfounding complexity. LOCATION: 5929
Michel presses against her side and becomes very quiet. Only his hands are moving. Little clicks rising, buttons being pressed. “What are you playing?” “Warlords.” “You play against your computer?” “Against Jacques.” “Where is Jacques?” The boy’s attention stays on the game. It does not matter where Jacques is: Jacques is inside the game. She sits and her cane flexes against the gravel and the boy clicks his buttons in spasmodic flurries. After a while he exclaims, “Ah!” and the game makes several resolving chirps. “You’re all right?” “He has killed me.” Awareness returns to Michel’s voice; he is looking up again. “Jacques, I mean. I am dead.” “In the game?” “Yes. But I can always begin again.” Below them the wind washes frost from the trees. She concentrates on feeling the sun touch the backs of her hands. On the warmth of her grandson beside her. LOCATION: 5930
Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived—maybe a million times more. LOCATION: 5943
Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of television programs, of e-mail, vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again, I’m going to be late and Maybe we should get reservations? and Pick up avocados and What did he say? and ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous, hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying invisibly over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscapes we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? LOCATION: 5945
That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it. LOCATION: 5952