All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

What is lightning? How high could you jump if you lived on Mars? What is the
difference between twice twenty-five and twice five and twenty?
Then he takes the battery, two
rectangles of sheet metal, some penny nails, and the instrument hammer from his box. In under a
minute, he has built an oscillator to match the schematic.
The little professor frowns. He tests Werner’s circuit, which works.
“Right,” he says, and stands in front of Werner’s table and laces his hands behind his back.
“Next take from your kit the disk-shaped magnet, a wire, a screw, and your battery.” Though his
instructions seem meant for the class, he looks at Werner alone. “That is all you may use. Who can
build a simple motor?”
Some boys stir the parts in their kits halfheartedly. Most simply watch.
Werner feels Dr. Hauptmann’s attention on him like a floodlight. He sticks the magnet to the
screw’s head and holds the screw’s point to the positive terminal on the battery. When he runs the
wire from the negative side of the battery to the head of the screw, both the screw and the magnet
start to spin. The operation takes him no more than fifteen seconds.
Dr. Hauptmann’s mouth is partially open. His face is flushed, adrenalized. “What is your name,
cadet?”
“Pfennig, sir.”
“What else can you make?”
Werner studies the parts on his table. “A doorbell, sir? Or a Morse beacon? An ohmmeter?”
The other boys crane their necks. Dr. Hauptmann’s lips are pink and his eyelids are improbably
thin. As though he is watching Werner even when he blinks. He says, “Make them all.”

---

Flying Couch
P
osters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of
firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot. At noon the following day, various Bretons
troop in to drop off weapons, farmers on mule carts from miles away, plodding old sailors with
antique pistols, a few hunters with outrage in their eyes gazing at the floor as they turn in their
rifles.
In the end it’s a pathetic pile, maybe three hundred weapons in all, half of them rusted. Two
young gendarmes pile them into the back of a truck and drive up the narrow street and across the
causeway and are gone. No speeches, no explanations.
“Please, Papa, can’t I go out?”
“Soon, little dove.” But he is distracted; he smokes so much it is as if he is turning himself into
ash. Lately he stays up working frenetically on a model of Saint-Malo that he claims is for her,
adding new houses every day, framing ramparts, mapping streets, so that she can learn the town the
way she learned their neighborhood in Paris. Wood, glue, nails, sandpaper: rather than comforting
her, the noises and smells of his manic diligence make her more anxious. Why will she have to
learn the streets of Saint-Malo? How long will they be here?
In the fifth-floor study, Marie-Laure listens to her great-uncle read another page of 
The Voyage
of the
“
Beagle
.” Darwin has hunted rheas in Patagonia, studied owls outside Buenos Aires, and
scaled a waterfall in Tahiti. He pays attention to slaves, rocks, lightning, finches, and the ceremony
of pressing noses in New Zealand. She loves especially to hear about the dark coasts of South
America with their impenetrable walls of trees and offshore breezes full of the stink of rotting kelp
and the cries of whelping seals. She loves to imagine Darwin at night, leaning over the ship’s rail
to stare into bioluminescent waves, watching the tracks of penguins marked by fiery green wakes.
“
Bonsoir,
” she says to Etienne, standing on the davenport in his study. “I may be only a girl of
twelve, but I am a brave French explorer who has come to help you with your adventures.”
Etienne adopts a British accent. “Good evening, mademoiselle, why don’t you come to the
jungle with me and eat these butterflies, they are as big as dinner plates and may not be poisonous,
who knows?”
“I would love to eat your butterflies, Monsieur Darwin, but first I will eat these cookies.”
Other evenings they play Flying Couch. They climb onto the davenport and sit side by side, and
Etienne says, “Where to tonight, mademoiselle?”
“The jungle!” Or: “Tahiti!” Or: “Mozambique!”
“Oh, it’s a long journey this time,” Etienne will say in an entirely new voice, smooth, velvety, a
conductor’s drawl. “That’s the Atlantic Ocean far below, it’s shining under the moonlight, can you
smell it? Feel how cold it is up here? Feel the wind in your hair?”
“Where are we now, Uncle?”
“We’re in Borneo, can’t you tell? We’re skimming the treetops now, big leaves are glimmering
below us, and there are coffee bushes over there, smell them?” and Marie-Laure will indeed smell
something, whether because her uncle is passing coffee grounds beneath her nose, or because they
really are flying over the coffee trees of Borneo, she does not want to decide.
They visit Scotland, New York City, Santiago. More than once they put on winter coats and visit
the moon. “Can’t you feel how lightweight we are, Marie? You can move by hardly twitching a

---

muscle!” He sets her in his wheeled desk chair and pants as he whirls her in circles until she
cannot laugh anymore for the pain of it.
“Here, try some nice fresh moon flesh,” he says, and into her mouth goes something that tastes a
lot like cheese. Always at the end they sit side by side again and pound the cushions, and slowly
the room rematerializes around them. “Ah,” he says, more quietly, his accent fading, the faintest
touch of dread returning to his voice, “here we are. Home.”

---

The Sum of Angles
W
erner is summoned to the office of the technical sciences professor. A trio of sleek long-legged
hounds swirl around him as he enters. The room is lit by a pair of green-shaded banker’s lamps,
and in the shadows Werner can see shelves crowded with encyclopedias, models of windmills,
miniature telescopes, prisms. Dr. Hauptmann stands behind his big desk wearing his brass-
buttoned coat, as though he too has just arrived. Tight curls frame his ivory forehead; he tugs off his
leather gloves one finger at a time. “Drop a log on the fire, please.”
Werner tacks across the room and stirs the coals to life. In the corner, he realizes, sits a third
person, a massive figure camped sleepily in an armchair intended for a much smaller man. He is
Frank Volkheimer, an upperclassman, seventeen years old, a colossal boy from some boreal
village, a legend among the younger cadets. Supposedly Volkheimer has carried three first-years
across the river by holding them above his head; supposedly he has lifted the tail end of the
commandant’s automobile high enough to slip a jack under the axle. There is a rumor that he
crushed a communist’s windpipe with his hands. Another that he grabbed the muzzle of a stray dog
and cut out its eyes just to inure himself to the suffering of other beings.
They call him the Giant. Even in the low, flickering light, Werner sees that veins climb
Volkheimer’s forearms like vines.
“A student has never built the motor,” says Hauptmann, his back partially to Volkheimer. “Not
without help.”
Werner does not know how to reply, so he does not. He pokes the fire one last time, and sparks
rise up the chimney.
“Can you do trigonometry, cadet?”
“Only what I have been able to teach myself, sir.”
Hauptmann takes a sheet of paper from a drawer and writes on it. “Do you know what this is?”
Werner squints.
“A formula, sir.”
“Do you comprehend its uses?”
“I believe it is a way to use two known points to find the location of a third and unknown point.”
Hauptmann’s blue eyes glitter; he looks like someone who has discovered something very
valuable lying right in front of him on the ground. “If I give you the known points and a distance
between them, cadet, can you solve it? Can you draw the triangle?”
“I believe so.”
“Sit at my desk, Pfennig. Take my chair. Here is a pencil.”
When he sits in the desk chair, the toes of Werner’s boots do not reach the ground. The fire
pumps heat into the room. Block out giant Frank Volkheimer with his mammoth boots and cinder-
block jaw. Block out the little aristocratic professor pacing in front of the hearth and the late hour
and the dogs and the shelves brimming with interesting things. There is only this.

---

tan α = sin α / cos α
and sin(α + β) = sin α cos β + cos α sin β
Now 
d
can be moved to the front of the equation.
Werner plugs Hauptmann’s numbers into the equation. He imagines two observers in a field
pacing out the distance between them, then leveling their eyes on a far-off landmark: a sailing ship
or a smokestack. When Werner asks for a slide rule, the professor slips one onto the desk
immediately, having expected the request. Werner takes it without looking and begins to calculate
the sines.
Volkheimer watches. The little doctor paces, hands behind his back. The fire pops. The only
sounds are the breathing of the dogs and clicking of the slide rule’s cursor.
Eventually Werner says, “Sixteen point four three, Herr Doktor.” He draws the triangle and
labels the distances of each segment and passes the paper back. Hauptmann checks something in a
leather book. Volkheimer shifts slightly in his chair; his gaze is both interested and indolent. The
professor presses one of his palms flat to the desk while reading, frowning absently, as though
waiting for a thought to pass. Werner is seized with a sudden and foreboding dread, but then
Hauptmann looks back at him, and the feeling subsides.
“It says in your application papers that when you leave here, you wish to study electrical
mechanics in Berlin. And you are an orphan, is that correct?”
Another glance at Volkheimer. Werner nods. “My sister—”
“A scientist’s work, cadet, is determined by two things. His interests and the interests of his
time. Do you understand?”
“I think so.”
“We live in exceptional times, cadet.”
A thrill enters Werner’s chest. Firelit rooms lined with books—these are the places in which
important things happen.
“You will work in the laboratory after dinner. Every night. Even Sundays.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Start tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Volkheimer here will keep an eye out for you. Take these biscuits.” The professor produces a
tin with a bow on it. “And breathe, Pfennig. You cannot hold your breath every time you’re in my
laboratory.”
“Yes, sir.”
Cold air whistles through the halls, so pure it makes Werner dizzy. A trio of moths swim against
the ceiling of his bunkroom. He unlaces his boots and folds his trousers in the dark and sets the tin
of biscuits on top. Frederick peers over the edge of his bunk. “Where did you go?”
“I got cookies,” whispers Werner.
“I heard an eagle owl tonight.”
“Hush,” hisses a boy two bunks down.
Werner passes up a biscuit. Frederick whispers: “Do you know about them? They’re really rare.
Big as gliders. This one was probably a young male looking for new territory. He was in one of the

---

poplar trees beside the parade ground.”
“Oh,” says Werner. Greek letters move across the undersides of his eyelids: isosceles triangles,
betas, sine curves. He sees himself in a white coat, striding past machines.