All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel

by Anthony Doerr

  The assistant director sits behind the desk, and von Rumpel sits in front with his basket between his feet. The mineralogist stands. A long-necked secretary brings tea.

  Hublin says, “We are always acquiring, yes? All across the world, industrialization endangers mineral deposits. We collect as many types of minerals as exist. To a curator, none is superior to any other.”

  Von Rumpel laughs. He appreciates that they are trying to play the game. But don’t they understand that the winner has already been determined? He sets down his cup of tea and says, “I would like to see your most protected specimens. I am most specifically interested in a specimen I believe you have only recently brought out from your vaults.”

  The assistant director sweeps his left hand through his hair and releases a blizzard of dandruff. “Sergeant Major, the minerals you’ve seen have aided discoveries in electrochemistry, in the fundamental laws of mathematical crystallography. The role of a national museum is to operate above the whims and fashions of collectors, to safeguard for future generations the—”

  Von Rumpel smiles. “I will wait.”

  “You misunderstand us, monsieur. You have seen everything we can show you.”

  “I will wait to see what you cannot show me.”

  The assistant director peers into his tea. The mineralogist shifts from foot to foot; he appears to be wrestling with an interior fury. “I am quite gifted at waiting,” von Rumpel says in French. “It is my one great skill. I was never much good at athletics or mathematics, but even as a boy, I possessed unnatural patience. I would wait with my mother while she got her hair styled. I would sit in the chair and wait for hours, no magazine, no toys, not even swinging my legs back and forth. All the mothers were very impressed.”

  Both Frenchmen fidget. Beyond the door of the office, what ears listen? “Please sit if you’d like,” von Rumpel says to Hublin, and pats the chair next to him. But Hublin does not sit. Time passes. Von Rumpel swallows the last of his tea and sets the cup very carefully on the edge of the assistant director’s desk. Somewhere an electric fan whirs to life, runs awhile, and shuts down.

  Hublin says, “It’s not clear what we’re waiting for, Sergeant Major.”

  “I’m waiting for you to be truthful.”

  “If I might—”

  “Stay,” says von Rumpel. “Sit. I’m sure if one of you were to call out instructions, the mademoiselle who looks like a giraffe will hear, will she not?”

  The assistant director crosses and recrosses his legs. By now it is past noon. “Perhaps you would like to see the skeletons?” tries the assistant director. “The Hall of Man is quite spectacular. And our zoological collection is beyond—”

  “I would like to see the minerals you do not reveal to the public. One in particular.”

  Hublin’s throat splotches pink and white. He does not take a seat. The assistant director seems resigned to an impasse and pulls a thick perfect-bound stack of paper from a drawer and begins to read. Hublin shifts as if to leave, but von Rumpel merely says, “Please, stay until we have resolved this.”

  Waiting, thinks von Rumpel, is a kind of war. You simply tell yourself that you must not lose. The assistant director’s telephone rings, and he reaches to pick it up, but von Rumpel holds up a hand, and the phone rings ten or eleven times and then falls quiet. What might be a full half hour passes, Hublin staring at his shoelaces, the assistant director making occasional notes in his manuscript with a silver pen, von Rumpel remaining completely motionless, and then there is a distant tapping on the door.

  “Gentlemen?” comes the voice.

  Von Rumpel calls, “We are fine, thank you.”

  The assistant director says, “I have other matters to attend to, Sergeant Major.”

  Von Rumpel does not raise his voice. “You will wait here. Both of you. You will wait here with me until I see what I have come to see. And then we will all go back to our important jobs.”

  The mineralogist’s chin trembles. The fan starts again, then dies. A five-minute timer, guesses von Rumpel. He waits for it to start and die one more time. Then he lifts his basket into his lap. He points to the chair. His voice is gentle. “Sit, Professor. You will be more comfortable.”

  Hublin does not sit. Two o’clock out in the city, and bells toll in a hundred churches. Walkers down on the paths. The last of autumn’s leaves spiraling to earth.

  Von Rumpel unrolls the napkin across his lap, lifts out the cheese. He breaks the bread slowly, sending a rich cascade of crust onto his napkin. As he chews, he can almost hear their guts rumbling. He offers them nothing. When he finishes, he wipes the corners of his mouth. “You read me wrong, messieurs. I am not an animal. I am not here to raze your collections. They belong to all of Europe, to all of humanity, do they not? I am here only for something small. Something smaller than the bone of your kneecaps.” He looks at the mineralogist as he says it. Who looks away, crimson.

  The assistant director says, “This is absurd, Sergeant Major.”

  Von Rumpel folds his napkin and places it back in the basket and sets the basket on the ground. He licks the tip of his finger and picks the crumbs off his tunic one by one. Then he looks directly at the assistant director. “The Lycée Charlemagne, is that right? On the rue Charlemagne?”

  The skin around the assistant director’s eyes stretches.

  “Where your daughter goes to school?” Von Rumpel turns in his chair. “And the College Stanislas, isn’t it, Dr. Hublin? Where your twin sons attend? On the rue Notre-Dame des Champs? Wouldn’t those handsome boys be preparing to walk home right now?”

  Hublin sets his hands on the back of the empty chair beside him, and his knuckles become very white.

  “One with a violin and the other a viola, am I correct? Crossing all those busy streets. That is a long walk for ten-year-old boys.”

  The assistant director is sitting very upright. Von Rumpel says, “I know it is not here, messieurs. Not even the lowest janitor would be so stupid as to leave the diamond here. But I would like to see where you have kept it. I would like to know what sort of place you believe is safe enough.”

  Neither of the Frenchmen says anything. The assistant director resumes looking at his manuscript, though it is clear to von Rumpel that he is no longer reading. At four o’clock the secretary raps on the door and again von Rumpel sends her away. He practices concentrating only on blinking. Pulse in his neck. Tock tock tock tock. Others, he thinks, would do this with less finesse. Others would use scanners, explosives, pistol barrels, muscle. Von Rumpel uses the cheapest of materials, only minutes, only hours.

  Five bells. The light leaches out of the gardens.

  “Sergeant Major, please,” says the assistant director. His hands flat on his desk. Looking up now. “It is very late. I must relieve myself.”

  “Feel free.” Von Rumpel gestures with one hand at a metal trash can beside the desk.

  The mineralogist wrinkles his face. Again the phone rings. Hublin chews his cuticles. Pain shows in the assistant director’s face. The fan whirs. Out in the gardens, the daylight unwinds from the trees and still von Rumpel waits.

  “Your colleague,” he says to the mineralogist, “he’s a logical man, isn’t he? He doubts the legends. But you, you seem more fiery. You don’t want to believe, you tell yourself not to believe. But you do believe.” He shakes his head. “You’ve held the diamond. You’ve felt its power.”

  “This is ridiculous,” says Hublin. His eyes roll like a frightened colt’s. “This is not civilized behavior. Are our children safe, Sergeant Major? I demand that you let us determine if our children are safe.”

  “A man of science, and yet you believe the myths. You believe in the might of reason, but you also believe in fairy tales. Goddesses and curses.”

  The assistant director inhales sharply. “Enough,” he says. “Enough.”

  Von Rumpel’s pulse soars: has it already happened? So easily? He could wait two more days, three, while ranks of men broke against him
like waves.

  “Are our children safe, Sergeant Major?”

  “If you wish them to be.”

  “May I use the telephone?”

  Von Rumpel nods. The assistant director reaches for the handset, says “Sylvie” into it, listens awhile, then sets it down. The woman enters with a ring of keys. From a drawer inside the assistant director’s desk, she produces another key on a chain. Simple, elegant, long-shafted.

  A small locked door at the back of the main-floor gallery. It takes two keys to open it, and the assistant director seems inexperienced with the lock. They lead von Rumpel down a corkscrewing stone staircase; at the bottom, the assistant director unlocks a second gate. They wind through warrens of hallways, past a warder who drops his newspaper and sits ramrod straight as they pass. In an unassuming storeroom filled with dropcloths and pallets and crates, behind a sheet of plywood, the mineralogist reveals a simple combination safe that the assistant director opens rather easily.

  No alarms. Only the one guard.

  Inside the safe is a second, far more interesting box. It is heavy enough that it requires both the assistant director and the mineralogist to lift it out.

  Elegant, its joinery invisible. No brand name, no combination dial. It is presumably hollow but with no discernible hinges, no nails, no attachment points; it looks like a solid block of highly polished wood. Custom work.

  The mineralogist fits a key into a tiny, almost invisible hole on the bottom; when it turns, two more tiny keyholes open on the opposite side. The assistant director inserts matching keys into those holes; they unlock what looks like five different shafts.

  Three overlapping cylinder locks, each dependent on the next.

  “Ingenious,” whispers von Rumpel.

  The entire box falls gently open.

  Inside sits a small felt bag.

  He says, “Open it.”

  The mineralogist looks at the assistant director. The assistant director picks up the bag and unties its throat and upends a wrapped bundle into his palm. With a single finger, he nudges apart the folds. Inside lies a blue stone as big as a pigeon’s egg.

  The Wardrobe

  Townspeople who violate blackout are fined or rounded up for questioning, though Madame Manec reports that at the Hôtel-Dieu, lamps burn all night long, and German officers go stumbling in and out at every hour, tucking in shirts and adjusting trousers. Marie-Laure keeps herself awake, waiting to hear her uncle stir. Finally she hears the door across the hall tick open and feet brush the boards. She imagines a storybook mouse creeping out from its hole.

  She climbs out of bed, trying not to wake her father, and crosses into the hall. “Uncle,” she whispers. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “Marie-Laure?” His very smell like that of coming winter, a tomb, the heavy inertia of time.

  “Are you well?”

  “Better.”

  They stand on the landing. “There was a notice,” says Marie-Laure. “Madame has left it on your desk.”

  “A notice?”

  “Your radios.”

  He descends to the fifth floor. She can hear him sputtering. Fingers traveling across his newly empty shelves. Old friends gone. She prepares for shouts of anger but catches half-hyperventilated nursery rhymes instead: . . . à la salade je suis malade au céleri je suis guéri . . .

  She takes his elbow, helps him to the davenport. He is still murmuring, trying to talk himself off some innermost ledge, and she can feel fear pumping off him, virulent, toxic; it reminds her of fumes billowing off the vats of formalin in the Department of Zoology.

  Rain taps at the windowpanes. Etienne’s voice comes from a long way off. “All of them?”

  “Not the radio in the attic. I did not mention it. Does Madame Manec know about it?”

  “We have never spoken of it.”

  “Is it hidden, Uncle? Could someone see it if the house were searched?”

  “Who would search the house?”

  A silence follows.

  He says, “We could still turn it in. Say we overlooked it?”

  “The deadline was yesterday at noon.”

  “They might understand.”

  “Uncle, do you really believe they will understand that you have overlooked a transmitter that can reach England?”

  More agitated breaths. The wheeling of the night on its silent trunnions. “Help me,” he says. He finds an automobile jack in a third-floor room, and together they go up to the sixth floor and shut the door of her grandfather’s room and kneel beside the massive wardrobe without risking the light of a single candle. He slides the jack under the wardrobe and cranks up the left side. Under its feet he slips folded rags; then he jacks up the other side and does the same. “Now, Marie-Laure, put your hands here. And push.” With a thrill, she understands: they are going to park the wardrobe in front of the little door leading to the attic.

  “All your might, ready? One two three.”

  The huge wardrobe slides an inch. The heavy mirrored doors knock lightly as it glides. She feels as if they are pushing a house across ice.

  “My father,” says Etienne, panting, “used to say Christ Himself could not have carried this wardrobe up here. That they must have built the house around it. Another now, ready?”

  They push, rest, push, rest. Eventually the wardrobe settles in front of the little door, and the entrance to the attic is walled off. Etienne jacks up each foot again, pulls out the rags, and sinks to the floor, breathing hard, and Marie-Laure sits beside him. Before dawn rolls across the city, they are asleep.

  Blackbirds

  Roll call. Breakfast. Phrenology, rifle training, drills. Black-haired Ernst leaves the school five days after he is chosen as the weakest in Bastian’s exercise. Two others leave the following week. Sixty becomes fifty-seven. Every evening Werner works in Dr. Hauptmann’s lab, alternately plugging numbers into triangulation formulas or engineering: Hauptmann wants him to improve the efficiency and power of a directional radio transceiver he is designing. It needs to be quickly retuned to transmit on multiple frequencies, the little doctor says, and it needs to be able to measure the angle of the transmissions it receives. Can Werner manage this?

  He reconfigures nearly everything in the design. Some nights Hauptmann grows talkative, explaining the role of a solenoid or resistor in great detail, even classifying a spider hanging from a rafter, or enthusing about gatherings of scientists in Berlin, where practically every conversation, he says, seems to unveil some new possibility. Relativity, quantum mechanics—on such nights he seems happy enough talking about whatever Werner asks.

  Yet the very next night, Hauptmann’s manner will be frighteningly closed; he invites no questions and supervises Werner’s work in silence. That Dr. Hauptmann might have ties so far up—that the telephone on his desk connects him with men a hundred miles away who could probably wag a finger and send a dozen Messerschmitts streaming up from an airfield to strafe some city—intoxicates Werner.

  We live in exceptional times.

  He wonders if Jutta has forgiven him. Her letters consist mostly of banalities—we are busy; Frau Elena says hello—or else arrive in his bunkroom so full of censor marks that their meaning has disintegrated. Does she grieve over his absence? Or has she calcified her feelings, protected herself, as he is learning to do?

  Volkheimer, like Hauptmann, seems full of contradictions. To the other boys, the Giant is a brute, an instrument of pure strength, and yet sometimes, when Hauptmann is away in Berlin, Volkheimer will disappear into the doctor’s office and return with a Grundig tube radio and hook up the shortwave antenna and fill the lab with classical music. Mozart, Bach, even the Italian Vivaldi. The more sentimental, the better. The huge boy will lean back in a chair, so that it makes squeaking protestations beneath his bulk, and let his eyelids slip to half-mast.

  Why always triangles? What is the purpose of the transceiver they are building? What two points does Hauptmann know, and why does he need to know the third?

&nbs
p; “It’s only numbers, cadet,” Hauptmann says, a favorite maxim. “Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.”

  Werner tries out various theories on Frederick, but Frederick, he’s learning, moves about as if in the grip of a dream, his trousers too big around the waist, the hems already falling out. His eyes are both intense and vague; he hardly seems to realize when he misses targets in marksmanship. Most nights Frederick murmurs to himself before falling asleep: bits of poems, the habits of geese, bats he’s heard swooping past the windows.

  Birds, always birds.

  “. . . now, arctic terns, Werner, they fly from the south pole to the north pole, true navigators of the globe, probably the most migratory creatures ever to live, seventy thousand kilometers a year . . .”

  A metallic wintery light settles over the stables and vineyard and rifle range, and songbirds streak over the hills, great scattershot nets of passerines on their way south, a migratory throughway running right over the spires of the school. Once in a while a flock descends into one of the huge lindens on the grounds and seethes beneath its leaves.

  Some of the senior boys, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, cadets who are allowed freer access to ammunition, develop a fondness for firing volleys into the trees to see how many birds they can hit. The tree looks uninhabited and calm; then someone fires, and its crown shatters in all directions, a hundred birds exploding into flight in a half second, shrieking as though the whole tree has flown apart.

  In the dormitory window one night, Frederick rests his forehead against the glass. “I hate them. I hate them for that.”

  The dinner bell rings, and everyone trots off, Frederick coming in last with his taffy-colored hair and wounded eyes, bootlaces trailing. Werner washes Frederick’s mess tin for him; he shares homework answers, shoe polish, sweets from Dr. Hauptmann; they run next to each other during field exercises. A brass pin weighs lightly on each of their lapels; one hundred and fourteen hobnailed boots spark against pebbles on the trail. The castle with its towers and battlements looms below them like some misty vision of foregone glory. Werner’s blood gallops through his ventricles, his thoughts on Hauptmann’s transceiver, on solder, fuses, batteries, antennas; his boot and Frederick’s touch the ground at the exact same moment.