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Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.
We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

Flowers grow on her tiny wrought-iron balcony, and in summer she can estimate what time of day it is by feeling how wide the petals of the evening primroses have opened.

"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."

He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne; he is everyone who has left her finally coming back.

'Chapter 159: The Simultaneity of Instants' was gut-wrenching in its entirety. Unfortunately I can't paste here the whole thing for future me, but I will safeguard the final lines and their goosebumps:

[...] Werner hears Marie-Laure inhale, Marie-Laure hears Werner scrape three fingernails across the wood, a sound not unlike the sounds of a record coursing beneath the surface of a needle.
He says, "Es-tu là?"

All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?

Stick-thin, alabaster-pale Etienne LeBlanc runs down the rue de Dinan with Madame Ruelle, the baker's wife, on his heels: the least-robust rescue ever assembled.

You are alive.
I am only alive because I have not yet died.

A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: "Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth".

"Ready?" He sounds like her father when he was about to say something silly. In her memory, Marie-Laure hears the two policemen: "People have been arrested for less." And Madame Manec: "Don't you want to be alive before you die?"

Deep in Madame's voice, Marie-Laure hears water: atolls and archipelagoes and lagoons and fjords.
Etienne proves to be a tender nurse. Washcloths, broth, now and then a page from Pasteur or Rousseau. His manner forgiving her all transgressions past and present. He wraps Madame in quilts, but eventually she shivers so deeply, so profoundly, that he takes the big heavy rug off the floor and lays it on top of her.

They just say words, and what are words but sounds these men shape out of breath, weightless vapors they send into the air of the kitchen to dissipate and die.

"Don't you want to be alive before you die?"

"It's not a person you wish to fight, Madame, it's a system. How do you fight a system?"
"You try."

Into the stillness come the voices of his masters, echoing from one side of his head while memory speaks from the other.
Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever

"Your problem, Werner," says Frederick, "is that you still believe you own your life."

No one stops him. No shells come whistling in. Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.

[...] There is pride, too, though, pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That's how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body.

Sea of Flames. Grayish blue with a red hue at its center. Recorded at one hundred and thirty-three carats. Either lost or willed to the king of France in 1738 on the condition that it be locked away for two hundred years.
He looks up. Suspended lamps, rows of spines fading off into dusty gold. All of Europe, and he aims to find one pebble tucked inside its folds.

Every few breaths, the words flare in his mind like sparks: You have been called. Each minute that passes is one fewer in this house. In this life.

[...]but Marie-Laure is slipping into something like a dream: she's six, newly blind, and her father is sitting in his chair, whittling away at some tiny piece of wood, smoking a cigarette, and evening is settling over the hundred thousand rooftops of Paris, and all the walls around her are dissolving, the ceilings too, the whole city is disintegrating into smoke, and at last sleep falls over her like a shadow.

God, there are none so distant that fate cannot bring them together.

Calm yourself, she thinks. Concentrate on filling your lungs, draining them. Filling them again. She stays under her bed. She says, "Ce n'est pas la réalité."

Captain Nemo is about to take Professor Aronnax and his companions on an underwater stroll through oyster beds to hunt for pearls, but Aronnax is afraid of the prospect of sharks, and though she longs to know what will happen, the sentences disintegrate across the page. Words devolve into letters, letters into unintelligible bumps. She feels as if big mitts have been drawn over each hand.

His mind shapes itself around the problem, disorder becomes order, the obstacle reveals itself, and before long the radio is fixed.

"Papa says curses are only stories cooked up to deter thieves. He says there are sixty-five million specimens in this place, and if you have the right teacher, each can be as interesting as the last."

"You know how diamonds -how all crystals- grow, Laurette? By adding microscopic layers, a few thousand atoms every month, each stop the next. Millennia after millennia. That's how stories accumulate too. All the old stones accumulate stories [...]."

That morning Marie-Laure crawls beneath the counter of the key pound and lies on her stomach and sets all ten fingerprints in a line on a page. The French feels old-fashioned, the dots printed much closer together than she is used to.

An avalanche descends onto the city. A hurricane. Teacups drift off shelves. Paintings slip off nails. In another quarter second, the sirens are inaudible. Everything is inaudible. The roar becomes loud enough to separate membranes in the middle ear.

With the door shut, the sound of the sirens softens. Above then, the ceiling bulb flickers