All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

petite cachotière,
” says the man, “don’t look so frightened,” and she can hear him
reaching for her; she smells rot on his breath, hears oblivion in his voice, and something—a
fingertip?—grazes her wrist as she jerks away and clangs the gate shut in his face.
He slips; it takes longer than she expects for him to get to his feet. Marie-Laure turns the key in
the lock and pockets it and finds her cane as she retreats into the low space of the kennel. The
man’s desolate voice pursues her, even as his body remains on the other side of the locked gate.
“Mademoiselle, you made me drop my newspaper. I am just a lowly sergeant major here to ask
a question. One simple question and then I will leave.”
The tide murmurs; the snails teem. Is the ironwork too narrow for him to squeeze through? Are
its hinges strong enough? She prays that they are. The bulk of the rampart holds her in its breadth.
Every ten seconds or so, a new sheet of cold seawater comes flowing in. Marie-Laure can hear the
man pacing out there, one-pause-two one-pause-two, a lurching hobble. She tries to imagine the
watchdogs that Harold Bazin said lived here for centuries: dogs as big as horses. Dogs that ripped
the calves off men. She crouches over her knees. She is the Whelk. Armored. Impervious.

---

Agoraphobia
T
hirty minutes. It should take Marie-Laure twenty-one; Etienne has counted many times. Once
twenty-three. Often shorter. Never longer.
Thirty-one.
It is a four-minute walk to the bakery. Four there and four back, and somewhere along the way,
those other thirteen or fourteen minutes disappear. He knows she usually goes to the sea—she
comes back smelling of seaweed, shoes wet, sleeves decorated with algae or sea fennel or the
weed Madame Manec called 
pioka
. He does not know where she goes exactly, but he has always
assured himself that she keeps herself safe. That her curiosity sustains her. That she is more
capable in a thousand ways than he is.
Thirty-two minutes. Out his fifth-floor windows, he can see no one. She could be lost, scraping
her fingers along walls at the edge of town, drifting farther away every second. She could have
stepped in front of a truck, drowned in a puddle, been seized by a mercenary with foulness on his
mind. Someone could have found out about the bread, the numbers, the transmitter.
Bakery in flames.
He hurries downstairs and peers out the kitchen door into the alley. Cat sleeping. Trapezoid of
sunlight on the east-facing wall. This is all his fault.
Now Etienne hyperventilates. At thirty-four minutes by his wristwatch, he puts on his shoes and
a hat that belonged to his father. Stands in the foyer summoning all his resolve. When he last went
out, almost twenty-four years ago, he tried to make eye contact, to present what might be
considered a normal appearance. But the attacks were sly, unpredictable, devastating; they sneaked
up on him like bandits. First a terrible ominousness would fill the air. Then any light, even through
closed eyelids, became excruciatingly bright. He could not walk for the thundering of his own feet.
Little eyeballs blinked at him from the cobblestones. Corpses stirred in the shadows. When
Madame Manec would help him home, he’d crawl into the darkest corner of his bed and belt
pillows around his ears. All his energy would go into ignoring the pounding of his own pulse.
His heart beats icily in a faraway cage. Headache coming, he thinks. Terrible terrible terrible
headache.
Twenty heartbeats. Thirty-five minutes. He twists the latch, opens the gate. Steps outside.

---

Nothing
M
arie-Laure tries to remember everything she knows about the lock and latch on the gate,
everything she has felt with her fingers, everything her father would have told her. Iron rod
threaded through three rusted loops, old mortise lock with a rusty cam. Would a gunshot break it?
The man calls out now and then as he runs the edge of his newspaper over the bars of the gate.
“Arrived in June, not arrested until January. What was he doing all that time? Why was he
measuring buildings?”
She crouches against the wall of the grotto, knapsack in her lap. The water surges to her knees:
cold, even in July. Can he see her? Carefully Marie-Laure opens her knapsack, breaks open the
loaf hidden inside, and fishes with her fingers for the coil of paper. There. She counts to three and
slips the piece of paper into her mouth.
“Just tell me,” the German calls, “if your father left anything with you or spoke about carrying
something for the museum where he used to work. Then I will walk away. I won’t tell anyone
about this place. God’s truth.”
The paper disintegrates into mush between her teeth. At her feet, the snails go about their work:
chewing, scavenging, sleeping. Their mouths, Etienne has taught her, contain something like thirty
teeth per row, eighty rows of teeth, two and a half thousand teeth per snail, grazing, scratching,
rasping. High above the ramparts, gulls course through an open sky. 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.
“They have me doing all this busywork,” says the German. “A Jean Jouvenet in Saint-Brieuc, six
Monets in the area, a Fabergé egg in a manor house near Rennes. I get so tired. Don’t you know
how long I’ve searched?”
Why couldn’t Papa have stayed? Wasn’t she the most important thing? She swallows the pulped
shreds of the paper. Then she rocks forward on her heels. “He left me 
nothing
.” She is surprised to
hear how angry she is. “Nothing! Just a dumb model of this town and a broken promise. Just
Madame, who is dead. Just my great-uncle, who is frightened of an ant.”
Outside the gate, the German falls quiet. Considering her reply, perhaps. Something in her
exasperation convincing him.
“Now,” she calls, “you keep your word and go away.”

---

Forty Minutes
F
og gives way to sunshine. It assaults the cobblestones, the houses, the windows. Etienne makes it
to the bakery in an icy sweat and cuts to the front of the queue. Madame Ruelle’s face looms,
moon-white.
“Etienne? But—?”
Vermilion spots open and close in his vision.
“Marie-Laure—”
“She is not—?”
Before he can shake his head, Madame Ruelle is lifting the hinged counter and ushering him out;
she has him under the arm. The women in the queue are muttering, intrigued or scandalized or both.
Madame Ruelle helps him onto the rue Robert Surcouf. The face of Etienne’s watch appears to
distend. Forty-one minutes? He can hardly do the math. Her hands grip his shoulder.
“Where could she have gone?”
Tongue so dry, thoughts so sluggish. “Sometimes . . . she visits . . . the sea. Before coming
home.”
“But the beaches are closed. The ramparts too.” She looks off over his head. “It must be
something else.”
They huddle in the middle of the street. Somewhere a hammer rings. War, Etienne thinks
distantly, is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or
parachute silk. Has he traded all those numbers for Marie-Laure’s life?
“No,” he whispers, “she goes to the sea.”
“If they find the bread,” Madame Ruelle whispers, “we will all die.”
He glances again at his watch, but it’s a sun burning his retinas. A single side of salted bacon
twists in the butcher’s otherwise empty window, and three schoolboys stand on a bench watching
him, waiting for him to fall, and just as he is certain the morning is about to shatter, Etienne sees in
his memory the rusted gate leading to the crumbling kennel beneath the ramparts. A place where he
used to play with his brother, Henri, and Harold Bazin. A small dripping cavern where a boy could
shout and dream.
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. The cathedral bells chime one
two three four, all the way to eight; Etienne turns down the rue du Boyer and reaches the slightly
angled base of the ramparts, traveling the paths of his youth, navigating by instinct; he turns right,
passes through the curtain of swinging ivy, and ahead, behind the same locked gate, in the grotto,
shivering, wet to her thighs, wholly intact, crouches Marie-Laure with the ruins of a loaf of bread
in her lap. “You came,” she says when she lets them in, when he takes her face in his hands. “You
came . . .”

---

The Girl
W
erner thinks of her, whether he wishes to or not. Girl with a cane, girl in a gray dress, girl made
of mist. That air of otherworldliness in the snarls of her hair and the fearlessness of her step. She
takes up residence inside him, a living doppelgänger to face down the dead Viennese girl who
haunts him every night.
Who is she? Daughter of the broadcasting Frenchman? Granddaughter? Why would he endanger
her so?
Volkheimer keeps them out in the field, roving villages along the Rance River. It seems certain
that the broadcasts will be blamed for something, and Werner will be found out. He thinks of the
colonel with his perfect jawline and flared pants; he thinks of the sallow sergeant major eyeing
him over the top of the newspaper. Do they already know? Does Volkheimer? What can save him
now? There were nights when he’d stare with Jutta out the attic window of Children’s House and
pray for the ice to grow out from the canals, to reach across the fields and envelop the tiny pit
houses, crush the machinery, pave over everything, so they’d wake in the morning to find
everything they knew was gone. This is the sort of miracle he needs now.
On the first of August, a lieutenant comes to Volkheimer. The demand for men on the lines, he
says, is overwhelming. Anyone not essential to the defense of Saint-Malo must go. He needs at
least two. Volkheimer looks them over, each in turn. Bernd too old. Werner the only one who can
repair the equipment.
Neumann One. Neumann Two.
An hour later, both are seated in the back of a troop carrier with their rifles between their knees.
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.”
That night Volkheimer drives the Opel east along a coastal road toward Cancale, and Bernd
takes the first transceiver out to a knoll in a field, and Werner operates the second from the back of
the truck, and Volkheimer stays folded into the driver’s seat, his huge knees jammed against the
wheel. Fires—perhaps on ships—burn far out to sea, and the stars shudder in their constellations.
At two twelve 
A.M.
, Werner knows, the Frenchman will broadcast again, and Werner will have to
switch off the transceiver or else pretend that he hears only static.
He will cover the signal meter with his palm. He will keep his face completely motionless.

---

Little House
E
tienne says he never should have let her take on so much. Never should have put her in such
danger. He says she can no longer go outside. In truth, Marie-Laure is relieved. The German haunts
her: in nightmares, he’s a spider crab three meters high; he clacks his claws and whispers