All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

wandered by himself into a Brazilian forest . . .”
After a few paragraphs, Marie-Laure says without preamble, “Tell me about that bedroom
upstairs. Across from the one I sleep in.”
He stops. Again his quick, nervous breaths.
“There’s a little door at the back of it,” she says, “but it’s locked. What’s through there?”
He is silent for long enough that she worries she has upset him. But then he stands, and his knees
crack like twigs.
“Are you getting one of your headaches, Uncle?”
“Come with me.”
They wind all the way up the stairs. On the sixth-floor landing, they turn left, and he pushes open
the door to what was once her grandfather’s room. She has already run her hands over its contents
many times: a wooden oar nailed to a wall, a window dressed with long curtains. Single bed.
Model ship on a shelf. At the back stands a wardrobe so large, she cannot reach its top nor stretch
her arms wide enough to touch both sides at once.
“These are his things?”
Etienne unlatches the little door beside the wardrobe. “Go on.”
She gropes through. Dry, confined heat. Mice scuttle. Her fingers find a ladder.
“It leads to the garret. It’s not high.”
Seven rungs. At the top, she stands; she has the sense of a long slope-walled space pressed
beneath the gable of the roof. The peak of the ceiling is just taller than she is.
Etienne climbs up behind her and takes her hand. Her feet find cables on the floor. They snake
between dusty boxes, overwhelm a sawhorse; he leads her through a thicket of them to what feels
like an upholstered piano bench at the far end, and helps her sit.
“This is the attic. That’s the chimney in front of us. Put your hands on the table; there you are.”
Metal boxes cover the tabletop: tubes, coils, switches, meters, at least one gramophone. This
whole part of the attic, she realizes, is some sort of machine. The sun bakes the slates above their
heads. Etienne secures a headset over Marie-Laure’s ears. Through the headphones, she can hear
him turn a crank, switch on something, and then, as if positioned directly in the center of her head,
a piano plays a sweet, simple song.
The song fades, and a staticky voice says, 
Consider a single piece glowing in your family’s
stove. See it, children? That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fern or reed that lived one
million years ago, or maybe two million, or maybe one hundred million . . .
After a little while, the voice gives way to the piano again. Her uncle pulls off the headset. “As
a boy,” he says, “my brother was good at everything, but his voice was what people commented on
most. The nuns at St. Vincent’s wanted to build choirs around it. We had a dream together, Henri
and I, to make recordings and sell them. He had the voice and I had the brains and back then
everyone wanted gramophones. And hardly anyone was making programs for children. So we
contacted a recording company in Paris, and they expressed interest, and I wrote ten different
scripts about science, and Henri rehearsed them, and finally we started recording. Your father was
just a boy, but he would come around to listen. It was one of the happiest times of my life.”

---

“Then there was the war.”
“We became signalmen. Our job, mine and your grandfather’s, was to knit telegraph wires from
command positions at the rear to field officers at the front. Most nights the enemy would shoot
pistol flares called ‘very lights’ over the trenches, short-lived stars suspended in the air from
parachutes, meant to illuminate possible targets for snipers. Every soldier within reach of the glare
would freeze while it lasted. Some hours, eighty or ninety of these flares would go off, one after
another, and the night would turn stark and strange in that magnesium glow. It would be so quiet,
the only sound the fizzling of the flares, and then you’d hear the whistle of a sniper’s bullet streak
out of the darkness and bury itself in the mud. We would stay as close together as we could. But I’d
become paralyzed sometimes; I could not move any part of my body, not even my fingers. Not even
my eyelids. Henri would stay right beside me and whisper those scripts, the ones we recorded.
Sometimes all night. Over and over. As though weaving some kind of protective screen around us.
Until morning came.”
“But he died.”
“And I did not.”
This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will
turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.
“Who built all of this, Uncle? This machine?”
“I did. After the war. Took me years.”
“How does it work?”
“It’s a radio transmitter. This switch here”—he guides her hand to it—“powers up the
microphone, and this one runs the phonograph. Here’s the premodulation amplifier, and these are
the vacuum tubes, and these are the coils. The antenna telescopes up along the chimney. Twelve
meters. Can you feel the lever? Think of energy as a wave and the transmitter as sending out
smooth cycles of those waves. Your voice creates a disruption in those cycles . . .”
She stops listening. It’s dusty and confusing and mesmerizing all at once. How old must all this
be? Ten years? Twenty? “What did you transmit?”
“The recordings of my brother. The gramophone company in Paris wasn’t interested anymore,
but every night I played the ten recordings we’d made, until most of them were worn out. And his
song.”
“The piano?”
“Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune.’ ” He touches a metal cylinder with a sphere stuck on top. “I’d just
tuck the microphone into the bell of the gramophone, and 
voilà
.”
She leans over the microphone, says, “Hello out there.” He laughs his feathery laugh. “Did it
ever reach any children?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“How far can it transmit, Uncle?”
“Far.”
“To England?”
“Easily.”
“To Paris?”
“Yes. But I wasn’t trying to reach England. Or Paris. I thought that if I made the broadcast
powerful enough, my brother would hear me. That I could bring him some peace, protect him as he
had always protected me.”
“You’d play your brother’s own voice to him? After he died?”
“And Debussy.”

---

“Did he ever talk back?”
The attic ticks. What ghosts sidle along the walls right now, trying to overhear? She can almost
taste her great-uncle’s fright in the air.
“No,” he says. “He never did.”

---