All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel

by Anthony Doerr

  Werner waits for the child to blink. Blink, he thinks, blink blink blink. Already Volkheimer is closing the closet door, though it won’t close all the way because the girl’s foot is sticking out of it, and Bernd is covering the woman on the bed with a blanket, and 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.

  Neumann One shoulders out, something rancid in his eyes. Neumann Two stands there with his new haircut, his fingers playing senseless trills on the stock of his rifle. “Why did they hide?” he says.

  Volkheimer tucks the child’s foot gently back inside the closet. “There’s no radio here,” he says, and shuts the door. Threads of nausea reach up around Werner’s windpipe.

  Outside, the streetlamps shudder in a late wind. Clouds ride west over the city.

  Werner climbs into the Opel, feeling as if the buildings are rearing around him, growing taller and warping. He sits with his forehead against the listening decks and is sick between his shoes.

  So really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.

  Bernd climbs in and pulls the door shut and the Opel comes to life, tilting as it rounds a corner, and Werner can feel the streets rising around them, whorling slowly into an engulfing spiral, into the center of which the truck will arc downward, tracing deeper and deeper all the time.

  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

  On the floor outside Marie-Laure’s bedroom door waits something big wrapped in newsprint and twine. From the stairwell, Etienne says, “Happy sixteenth birthday.”

  She tears away the paper. Two books, one stacked atop the other.

  Three years and four months have passed since Papa left Saint-Malo. One thousand two hundred and twenty-four days. Almost four years have passed since she has felt Braille, and yet the letters rise from her memory as if she left off reading yesterday.

  Jules. Verne. Twenty. Thousand. Leagues. Part. One. Part. Two.

  She throws herself at her great-uncle and hangs her arms around his neck.

  “You said you never got to finish. I thought, rather than my reading it to you, maybe you could read it to me?”

  “But how—?”

  “Monsieur Hébrard, the bookseller.”

  “When nothing is available? And they’re so expensive—”

  “You have made a lot of friends in this town, Marie-Laure.”

  She stretches out on the floor and opens to the first page. “I’m going to start it all over again. From the beginning.”

  “Perfect.”

  “ ‘Chapter One,’ ” she reads. “ ‘A Shifting Reef.’ ” The year 1866 was marked by a strange event, an unexplainable occurrence, which is undoubtedly still fresh in everyone’s memory . . . She gallops through the first ten pages, the story coming back: worldwide curiosity about what must be a mythical sea monster, famed marine biologist Professor Pierre Aronnax setting off to discover the truth. Is it monster or moving reef? Something else? Any page now, Aronnax will plunge over the rail of the frigate; not long afterward, he and the Canadian harpooner Ned Land will find themselves on Captain Nemo’s submarine.

  Beyond the carton-covered window, rain sifts down from a platinum-colored sky. A dove scrabbles along the gutter calling hoo hoo hoo. Out in the harbor a sturgeon makes a single leap like a silver horse and then is gone.

  Telegram

  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.

  Every night he sends telegrams from the district office in Saint-Malo. Among the sixteen official communiqués sent on the thirtieth of April, 1944, is a missive to Berlin.

  = NOTICE OF TERRORIST BROADCASTS IN CÔTES D’ARMOR WE BELIEVE SAINT-LUNAIRE OR DINARD OR SAINT-MALO OR CANCALE = REQUEST ASSISTANCE TO LOCATE AND ELIMINATE

  Dot dot dash dash, off it goes into the wires belted across Europe.

  Eight

  * * *

  9 August 1944

  Fort National

  On the third afternoon of the siege of Saint-Malo, the shelling lulls, as though all the artillerymen abruptly fell asleep at their guns. Trees burn, cars burn, houses burn. German soldiers drink wine in blockhouses. A priest in the college cellar scatters holy water on the walls. Two horses, gone mad with fear, kick through the door of the garage in which they’ve been shut and gallop between the smoldering houses on the Grand Rue.

  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.

  In the Attic

  For all of Marie-Laure’s four years in Saint-Malo, the bells at St. Vincent’s have marked the hours. But now the bells have ceased. She does not know how long she has been trapped in the attic or even if it is day or night. Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

  Her thirst becomes so acute, she considers biting into her own arm to drink the liquid that courses there. She takes the cans of food from her great-uncle’s coat and sets her lips on their rims. Both taste of tin. Their contents just a millimeter away.

  Don’t risk it, says the voice of her father. Don’t risk the noise.

  Just one, Papa. I will save the other. The German is gone. Almost certainly he is gone by now.

  Why hasn’t the trip wire sprung?

  Because he cut the wire. Or I slept through the bell. Any of a half dozen other reasons.

  Why would he leave when what he seeks is here?

  Who knows what he seeks?

  You know what he seeks.

  I am so hungry, Papa.

  Try to think about something else.

  Roaring falls of clear, cool water.

  You will survive, ma chérie.

  How can you know?

  Because of the diamond in your coat pocket. Because I left it here to protect you.

  All it has done is put me in more danger.

  Then why hasn’t the house been hit? Why hasn’t it caught fire?

  It’s a rock, Papa. A pebble. There is only luck, bad or good. Chance and physics. Remember?

  You are alive.

  I am only alive because I have not yet died.

  Do not open the can. He will hear you. He will not hesitate to kill you.

  How can he kill me if I cannot die?

  Round and round the questions run; Marie-Laure’s mind threatens to boil over. Just now she has pulled herself up onto the piano bench at the end of the attic and is running her hands over Etienne’s transmitter, trying to apprehend its switches and coils—here the phonograph, here the microphone, here one of four leads connected to the pair of batteries—when she hears something below her.

  A voice.

  Very carefully, she lowers herself off the bench and presses her ear to the floor.

  He is directly below her. Urinating into the sixth-floor toilet. Dribbling out a sad intermittent trickle and groaning as though the process causes him torment. Between groans, he calls, “Das Häuschen fehlt, wo bist du Häuschen?”

  Something is wrong with him.

 
“Das Häuschen fehlt, wo bist du Häuschen?”

  No replies. Whom is he talking to?

  From somewhere beyond the house come the thump of distant mortars and the screech of shells hurtling overhead. She listens to the German move from the toilet toward her bedroom. Limping that same limp. Muttering. Unhinged. Häuschen: what does it mean?

  The springs of her mattress creak; she would know that sound anywhere. Has he been sleeping in her bed all this time? Six deep reports sound one after the other, deeper than antiaircraft guns, farther away. Naval guns. Then come drums, cymbals, the gongs of explosions, drawing a crimson lattice over the roof. The lull is ending.

  Abyss in her gut, desert in her throat—Marie-Laure takes one of the cans of food from her coat. The brick and the knife within reach.

  Don’t.

  If I keep listening to you, Papa, I will die of starvation with food in my hands.

  Her bedroom below remains quiet. The shells come patiently, each round whizzing over at a predictable interval, scratching a long scarlet parabola over the roof. She uses their noise to open the can. EEEEEEEEEE goes the shell, ding goes the brick onto the knife, the knife onto the can. Dull terrible detonation somewhere. Shell splinters zinging into the walls of a dozen houses.

  EEEEEEEE ding. EEEEEEEE ding. With each blow a prayer. Do not let him hear.

  Five bashes and it’s leaking liquid. With the sixth, she manages to saw open a quadrant and bend up the lid with the blade of the knife.

  She raises it and drinks. Cool, salty: it is beans. Canned cooked green beans. The water they have been boiled in is supremely tasty; her whole body seems to reach up to absorb it. She empties the can. Inside her head, her father has gone quiet.

  The Heads

  Werner weaves the antenna through the rubbled ceiling and touches it to a twisted pipe. Nothing. On his hands and knees, he drags the aerial around the circumference of the cellar, as though roping Volkheimer into the golden armchair. Nothing. He switches off the dying flashlight and mashes the headset against his good ear and shuts his eyes against the darkness and turns on the repaired transceiver and runs the needle up and down the tuning coil, condensing all his senses into one.

  Static static static static static.

  Maybe they are buried too deeply. Maybe the rubble of the hotel creates an electromagnetic shadow. Maybe something fundamental is broken in the radio that Werner has not identified. Or maybe the führer’s super-scientists have engineered a weapon to end all weapons and this whole corner of Europe is a shattered waste and Werner and Volkheimer are the only ones left.

  He takes off the headphones and breaks the connection. The rations are long gone, the canteens are empty, and the sludge in the bottom of the bucket full of paintbrushes is undrinkable. Both he and Volkheimer have gagged down several mouthfuls, and Werner is not sure he can stomach any more.

  The battery inside the radio is nearly dead. Once it’s gone, they’ll have the big American eleven-volt with the black cat printed on the side. And then?

  How much oxygen does a person’s respiratory system exchange for carbon dioxide every hour? There was a time when Werner would have loved to solve that puzzle. Now he sits with Volkheimer’s two stick grenades in his lap, feeling the last bright things inside him fizzle out. Turning the shaft of one and then the other. He’d ignite their fuses just to light this place up, just to see again.

  Volkheimer has taken to switching on his field light and focusing its frail beam into the far corner, where eight or nine white plaster heads stand on two shelves, several toppled onto their sides. They look like the heads of mannequins, only more skillfully fashioned, three with mustaches, two bald, one wearing the cap of a soldier. Even with the light off, the heads assume strange power in the dark: pure white, not quite visible but not entirely invisible, embedded into Werner’s retinas, almost glowing in the blackness.

  Silent and watchful and unblinking.

  Tricks of the mind.

  Faces, look away.

  In the blackness, he crawls toward Volkheimer: a comfort to find his friend’s huge knee in the darkness. The rifle beside him. Bernd’s corpse somewhere beyond.

  Werner says, “Did you ever hear the stories they told about you?”

  “Who?”

  “The boys at Schulpforta.”

  “A few I heard.”

  “Did you like it? Being the Giant? Having everyone afraid of you?”

  “It is not so fun being asked how tall you are all the time.”

  A shell detonates somewhere aboveground. Somewhere out there the city burns, the sea breaks, barnacles beat their feathery arms.

  “How tall are you?”

  Volkheimer snorts once, a bark of a laugh.

  “Do you think Bernd was right about the grenades?”

  “No,” says Volkheimer, his voice coming alert. “They would kill us.”

  “Even if we built some kind of barrier?”

  “We’d be crushed.”

  Werner tries to make out the heads across the cellar in the blackness. If not the grenades, then what? Does Volkheimer really believe someone is going to come and save them? That they deserve saving?

  “So we’re just going to wait?”

  Volkheimer doesn’t answer.

  “For how long?”

  When the radio batteries die, the American eleven-volt should run the transceiver for one more day. Or he could wire the bulb from Volkheimer’s field light to it. The battery will give them one more day of static. Or one more day of light. But they will not need light to use the rifle.

  Delirium

  A purple fringe flutters around von Rumpel’s vision. Something must have gone wrong with the morphine: he may have taken too much. Or else the disease has advanced far enough to alter his sight.

  Ash drifts through the window like snow. Is it dawn? The glow in the sky could be the light from fires. Sheets soaked in sweat, his uniform as wet as if he has been swimming in his sleep. Taste of blood in his mouth.

  He crawls to the end of the bed and looks at the model. He has studied every square inch of it. Bashed a corner to pieces with the butt of a wine bottle. The structures in it are mostly hollow—the château, the cathedral, the market—but why bother to smash them all when one is missing, the very house he needs?

  Out in the forsaken city, every other structure, it seems, is burning or collapsing, but here in front of him is the inverse in miniature: the city remains, but the house he occupies is gone.

  Could the girl have carried it out with her when she fled? Possible. The uncle didn’t have it when they sent him to Fort National. He was well searched; he carried nothing but his papers—von Rumpel made sure of it.

  Somewhere a wall goes to pieces, a thousand kilograms of masonry crashing down.

  That the house stands while so many others have been destroyed is evidence enough. The stone must be inside. He simply needs to find it while there is time. Clamp it to his heart and wait for the goddess to thrust her fiery hand through its planes and burn away his afflictions. Burn his way out of this citadel, out of this siege, out of this disease. He will be saved. He simply has to drag himself up from this bed and keep looking. Do it more methodically. As many hours as it takes. Tear the place apart. Begin in the kitchen. One more time.

  Water

  Marie-Laure hears the springs of her bed groan. Hears the German limp out of her room and go down the stairs. Is he leaving? Giving up?

  It starts to rain. Thousands of tiny drops thrum onto the roof. Marie-Laure stands on her tiptoes and presses her ear to the roofing beneath the slates. Listens to the drops trickle down. What was the prayer? The one Madame Manec muttered to herself on Bastille Day as the fireworks went up?

  Lord Our God Your Grace is a purifying fire.

  She has to marshal her mind. Use perception and logic. As her father would, as Jules Verne’s great marine biologist Professor Pierre Aronnax would. The German does not know about the attic. She has the stone in her pocket; she has one
can of food. These are advantages.

  The rain is good too: it will stifle the fires. Could she capture some of it to drink? Punch a hole in the slates? Use it in some other way? Maybe to cover her noise?

  She knows exactly where the two galvanized buckets are: just inside the door of her room. She can get to them, maybe even carry one back up.

  No, carrying it up would be impossible. Too heavy, too noisy, all that water sloshing everywhere. But she could go to one and lower her face into it. She could fill the empty can of beans.

  The very thought of her lips against water—the tip of her nose touching its surface—summons up a biological craving beyond anything she has experienced. In her mind she falls into a lake; water fills her ears and mouth; her throat opens. One sip and she could think more clearly. She waits for her father’s voice in her head to raise an objection, but none comes.

  The distance through the front of the wardrobe, across Henri’s room, across the landing, and to her doorway runs twenty-one paces, give or take. She takes the knife and the empty can from the floor and tucks them in her pocket. She creeps down the seven ladder rungs and stays fixed for a long time against the back of the wardrobe. Listening listening listening. The little wooden house is a bump against her ribs as she crouches. Inside its tiny attic, does some tiny likeness of Marie-Laure wait, listening? Does that tiny version of her feel this same thirst?