All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

For closing her eyes while being addressed.
For hoarding crusts.
For attempting to enter the park.
For having inflamed hands.
For asking for a cigarette.
For a failure of imagination
and in the darkness, it feels as if Werner has reached bottom, as if
he has been whirling deeper all this time, like the 
Nautilus
sucked under the maelstrom, like his
father descending into the pits: a one-way dive from Zollverein past Schulpforta, past the horrors
of Russia and Ukraine, past the mother and daughter in Vienna, his ambition and shame becoming

---

one and the same, to the nadir in this basement on the rim of the continent where the apparition
chants nonsense—Frau Schwartzenberger walks toward him, transforming herself as she
approaches from woman to girl—her hair becomes red again, her skin smooths, a seven-year-old
girl presses her face up against his, and in the center of her forehead he can see a hole blacker than
the blackness around him, at the bottom of which teems a dark city full of souls, ten thousand, five
hundred thousand, all these faces staring up from alleys, from windows, from smoldering parks,
and he hears thunder.
Lightning.
Artillery.
The girl evaporates.
The ground quakes. The organs inside his body shake. The beams groan. Then the slow trickle
of dust and the shallow, defeated breaths of Volkheimer a meter away.

---

Music #1
S
ometime after midnight on August 13, after surviving in her great-uncle’s attic for five days,
Marie-Laure holds a record with her left hand while she runs the fingers of her right gently through
its grooves, reconstructing the whole song in her head. Each rise and fall. Then she slots the record
on the spindle of Etienne’s electrophone.
No water for a day and a half. No food for two. The attic smells of heat and dust and
confinement and her own urine in the shaving bowl in the corner.
We’ll die together, Ned my friend.
The siege, it seems, will never end. Masonry crashes into the streets; the city falls to pieces;
still this one house does not fall.
She takes the unopened can out of her great-uncle’s coat pocket and sets it in the center of the
attic floor. For so long she has saved it. Maybe because it offers some last tie to Madame Manec.
Maybe because if she opens it and finds it spoiled, the loss will kill her.
She places the can and brick beneath the piano bench, where she knows she can find them again.
Then she double-checks the record on the spindle. Lowers the arm, places the needle at the outside
edge. Finds the microphone switch with her left hand, the transmitter switch with her right.
She is going to turn it up as loud as it will go. If the German is in the house, he will hear. He’ll
hear piano music draining down through the upper stories and cock his head, and then he’ll rove
the sixth floor like a slavering demon. Eventually he’ll set his ear to the doors of the wardrobe,
where it will be louder still.
What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of
crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models. Mazes in the nodules on murex shells and
in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated
than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one
wet kilogram within which spin universes.
She places the microphone into the bell-shaped speaker of the electrophone, switches on the
record player, and the plate begins to spin. The attic crackles. In her mind she walks a path in the
Jardin des Plantes, the air golden, the wind green, the long fingers of willows drifting across her
shoulders. Ahead is her father; he extends a hand, waiting.
The piano starts to play.
Marie-Laure reaches beneath the bench and locates the knife. She crawls along the floor to the
top of the seven-rung ladder and sits with her feet dangling and the diamond inside the house in her
pocket and the knife in her fist.
She says, “Come and get me.”

---

Music #2
B
eneath the stars over the city, everything sleeps. Gunners sleep, nuns in a crypt beneath the
cathedral sleep, children in old corsairs’ cellars sleep in the laps of sleeping mothers. The doctor
in the basement of the Hôtel-Dieu sleeps. Wounded Germans in the tunnels below the fort of La
Cité sleep. Behind the walls of Fort National, Etienne sleeps. Everything sleeps save the snails
climbing the rocks and the rats scurrying among the piles.
In a hole beneath the ruins of the Hotel of Bees, Werner sleeps too. Only Volkheimer is awake.
He sits with the big radio in his lap where Werner has set it and the dying battery between his feet
and static whispering in both ears not because he believes he will hear anything but because this is
where Werner has left the headphones. Because he does not have the will to push them off.
Because he convinced himself hours ago that the plaster heads on the other side of the cellar will
kill him if he moves.
Impossibly, the static coalesces into music.
Volkheimer’s eyes open as wide as they can. Straining the blackness for every stray photon. A
single piano runs up scales. Then back down. He listens to the notes and the silences between
them, and then finds himself leading horses through a forest at dawn, trudging through snow behind
his great-grandfather, who walks with a saw draped over his huge shoulders, the snow squeaking
beneath boots and hooves, all the trees above them whispering and creaking. They reach the edge
of a frozen pond, where a pine grows as tall as a cathedral. His great-grandfather goes to his knees
like a penitent, fits the saw into a groove in the bark, and begins to cut.
Volkheimer stands. Finds Werner’s leg in the darkness, puts the headphones on Werner’s ears.
“Listen,” he says, “listen, listen . . .”
Werner comes awake. Chords float past in transparent riffles. “Clair de Lune.” Claire: a girl so
clear you can see right through her.
Volkheimer says, “Hook the light to the battery.”
“Why?”
“Do it.”
Even before the song has stopped playing, Werner disconnects the radio from the battery,
unscrews the bezel and bulb from the dead field light, touches it to the leads, and gives them a
sphere of light. At the back corner of the cellar, Volkheimer drags blocks of masonry and pieces of
timber and shattered sections of wall out of the rubble, stopping now and then only to lean over his
knees and catch his breath. He stacks them into a barrier. Then he pulls Werner behind this
makeshift bunker, unscrews the base of a grenade and yanks the pull cord to ignite the five-second
fuse. Werner sets one hand over his helmet, and Volkheimer throws the grenade at the place where
the stairwell used to be.

---

Music #3
V
on Rumpel’s daughters were fat, roiling little babies, weren’t they? Both of them always
dropping their rattles or rubber pacifiers and tangling themselves in blankets, why so tortured,
little angels? But they grew! Despite all his absences. And they could sing, especially Veronika.
Maybe they weren’t going to be famous, but they could sing well enough to please a father. They’d
wear their big felt boots and those awful shapeless dresses their mother made for them, primroses
and daisies embroidered along the collars, and fold their hands behind their backs, and belt out
lyrics they were too young to understand.