All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

I want. Give me.
All these aching creatures, thinks von Rumpel, toiling under different pressures. But von Rumpel is
the predator here. He needs only to be patient. Indefatigable. Remove the obstacles one by one.
When he turns to go, the perfumer’s complacency splinters. “Wait, wait, wait.”
Von Rumpel keeps one hand on the door. “Where did Monsieur LeBlanc live?”
“With his uncle. Useless man. Off his nut, as they say.”
“Where?”
“Right 
there,
.” He points. “Number four.”

---

Boulangerie
A
full day passes before Werner can find an hour to return. A wooden door, iron gate across that.
Blue trim on the windows. The morning fog is so dense that he cannot see the roofline. He
entertains pipe dreams: the Frenchman will invite him in. They’ll drink coffee, discuss his long-
ago broadcasts. Maybe they’ll investigate some important empirical problem that has been
troubling him for years. Maybe he’ll show Werner the transmitter.
Laughable. If Werner rings the bell, the old man will assume he’s being arrested as a terrorist.
That he might be shot where he stands. The antenna on the chimney in itself is cause for execution.
Werner could bang on the door, march the old man away. He would be a hero.
The mist begins to suffuse with light. Somewhere, someone opens a door and closes it again.
Werner remembers how Jutta would write her letters in a flurry and scribble 
The Professor,
France
on the envelope and drop them into the mailbox in the square. Imagining her voice might
find his ear as his had found hers. One in ten million.
All night he has practiced the French in his head: 
Avant la guerre. Je vous ai entendu à la
radio.
He will keep his rifle over his shoulder, hands at his sides; he will look small, elfin, no
threat at all. The old man will be startled, but his fear will be manageable. He’ll listen. But as
Werner stands in the slowly dispersing fog at the end of the rue Vauborel, rehearsing what he’ll
say, the front door of Number 4 opens, and out steps not an eminent old scientist but a girl. A
slender, pretty, auburn-haired girl with a very freckled face, in glasses and a gray dress, carrying a
knapsack over one shoulder. She heads to her left, making directly for him, and Werner’s heart
twists in his chest.
The street is too narrow; she will have caught him staring. But her head tracks in a curious way,
her face tilted off to one side. Werner sees the roving cane and opaque lenses of her glasses and
realizes that she is blind.
Her cane clicks along the cobbles. Already she is twenty paces away. No one seems to be
watching; all the curtains are drawn. Fifteen paces away. Her stockings have runs in them and her
shoes are too large and the woolen panels of her dress are mottled with stains. Ten paces, five. She
passes within arm’s reach, her head slightly higher than his own. Without thinking, hardly
understanding what he’s doing, Werner follows. The tip of her cane shudders as it knocks against
the runnels, finding every storm drain. She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as
articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog. She turns right, then left,
traverses half a block and steps neatly through the open door of a shop. A rectangular sign above it
reads: 
Boulangerie.
Werner stops. Above him, the mist gives way in shreds, and a deep summer blue reveals itself.
A woman waters flowers; an old traveler in gabardine walks a poodle. On a bench sits a goitrous
and sallow German sergeant major with shadows carved under his eyes. He lowers his paper,
stares directly at Werner, then raises his newspaper again.
Why are Werner’s hands shaking? Why can’t he catch his breath?
The girl emerges from the bakery, steps neatly off the curbstone, and makes straight for him. The
poodle squats to relieve itself on the cobbles, and the girl veers neatly to her left to skirt it. She
approaches Werner for a second time, her lips working softly, counting to herself—