All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

Atelier de Réparation
B
ernd the engineer squirms in pain, grinding his face into the back of the golden armchair.
Something wrong with his leg and something worse with his chest.
The radio is hopeless. The power cable has been severed and the lead to the aboveground
antenna is lost and Werner would not be surprised if the selector panel is broken. In the weakening
amber of Volkheimer’s field light, he stares at one crushed plug after another.
The bombing seems to have destroyed the hearing in his left ear. His right, as far as he can tell,
is gradually coming back. Beyond the ringing, he begins to hear.
Ticking of fires as they cool.
Groaning of the hotel above.
Strange miscellaneous dripping.
And Volkheimer as he hacks intermittently, insanely, at the rubble blocking the stairwell.
Volkheimer’s technique, apparently, is this: he crouches beneath the buckled ceiling, panting,
holding a piece of twisted rebar in one hand. He switches on his flashlight and scans the packed
stairwell for anything he might drag out of it. Memorizing positions. Then he switches off the light,
to preserve its battery, and goes at his task in the darkness. When the light comes back on, the mess
of the stairwell looks the same. An impacted welter of metal and brickwork and timber so thick
that it’s hard to believe twenty men could get through.
Please,
Volkheimer says. Whether he knows he is saying it aloud or not, Werner cannot say. But
Werner hears it in his right ear like a distant prayer. 
Please. Please.
As though everything in the
war to this point was tolerable to twenty-one-year-old Frank Volkheimer but not this final
injustice.
The fires above ought to have sucked the last oxygen out of this hole by now. They all should
have asphyxiated. Debts paid, accounts settled. And yet they breathe. The three splintered beams in
the ceiling hold up God knows what load: ten tons of carbonized hotel and the corpses of eight
anti-aircraft men and untold unexploded ordnance. Maybe Werner for his ten thousand small
betrayals and Bernd for his innumerable crimes and Volkheimer for being the instrument, the
executor of the orders, the blade of the Reich—maybe the three of them have some greater price to
pay, some final sentence to be handed down.
First a corsair’s cellar, built to safeguard gold, weapons, an eccentric’s beekeeping equipment.
Then a wine cellar. Then a handyman’s nook. 
Atelier de réparation,
thinks Werner, a chamber in
which to make reparations. As appropriate a place as any. Certainly there would be people in the
world who believe these three have reparations to make.

---

Two Cans
W
hen Marie-Laure wakes, the little model house is pinned beneath her chest, and she is sweating
through her great-uncle’s coat.
Is it dawn? She climbs the ladder and presses her ear to the trapdoor. No more sirens. Maybe
the house burned to the ground while she slept. Or else she slept through the last hours of the war
and the city has been liberated. There could be people in the streets: volunteers, gendarmes, fire
brigades. Even Americans. She should go up through the trapdoor and walk out the front door onto
the rue Vauborel.
But what if Germany has held the city? What if Germans are right now marching from house to
house, shooting whomever they please?
She will wait. At any moment Etienne could be making his way toward her, fighting with his last
breath to reach her.
Or he is crouched somewhere, cradling his head. Seeing demons.
Or he is dead.
She tells herself to save the bread, but she is famished and the loaf is getting stale, and before
she knows it, she has finished it.
If only she had brought her novel down with her.
Marie-Laure roves the cellar in her stocking feet. Here’s a rolled rug, its hollow filled with
what smell like wood shavings: mice. Here’s a crate that contains old papers. Antique lamp.
Madame Manec’s canning supplies. And here, at the back of a shelf near the ceiling, two small
miracles. Full cans! Hardly any food remains in the entire kitchen—only cornmeal and a sheaf of
lavender and two or three bottles of skunked Beaujolais—but down here in the cellar, two heavy
cans.
Peas? Beans? Corn kernels, maybe. Not oil, she prays; aren’t oil cans smaller? When she shakes
them, they offer no clues. Marie-Laure tries to calculate the chances that one might contain
Madame Manec’s peaches, the white peaches from Languedoc that she’d buy by the crate and peel
and quarter and boil with sugar. The whole kitchen would fill with their smell and color, Marie-
Laure’s fingers sticky with them, a kind of rapture.
Two cans Etienne missed.
But to raise one’s hopes is to risk their falling further. Peas. Or beans. These would be more
than welcome. She deposits one can in each pocket of her uncle’s coat, and checks again for the
little house in the pocket of her dress, and sits on a trunk and clasps her cane in both hands and
tries not to think about her bladder.
Once, when she was eight or nine, her father took her to the Panthéon in Paris to describe
Foucault’s pendulum. Its bob, he said, was a golden sphere shaped like a child’s top. It swung from
a wire that was sixty-seven meters long; because its trajectory changed over time, he explained, it
proved beyond all doubt that the earth rotated. But what Marie-Laure remembered, standing at the
rail as it whistled past, was her father saying that Foucault’s pendulum would never stop. It would
keep swinging, she understood, after she and her father left the Panthéon, after she had fallen
asleep that night. After she had forgotten about it, and lived her entire life, and died.
Now it is as if she can hear the pendulum in the air in front of her: that huge golden bob, as wide
across as a barrel, swinging on and on, never stopping. Grooving and regrooving its inhuman truth

---

into the floor.

---

Number 4 rue Vauborel
A
shes, ashes: snow in August. The shelling resumed sporadically after breakfast, and now, around
six 
P.M.
, has ceased. A machine gun fires somewhere, a sound like a chain of beads passing through
fingers. Sergeant Major von Rumpel carries a canteen, a half dozen ampules of morphine, and his
field pistol. Over the seawall. Over the causeway toward the huge smoldering bulwark of Saint-
Malo. Out in the harbor, the jetty has been shattered in multiple places. A half-submerged fishing
boat drifts stern up.
Inside the old city, mountains of stone blocks, sacks, shutters, branches, iron grillework, and
chimney pots fill the rue de Dinan. Smashed flower boxes and charred window frames and
shattered glass. Some buildings still smoke, and though von Rumpel keeps a damp handkerchief
pressed over his mouth and nose, he has to stop several times to gather his breath.
Here a dead horse, starting to bloat. Here a chair upholstered in striped green velvet. Here the
torn shreds of a canopy proclaim a brasserie. Curtains swing idly from broken windows in the
strange, flickering light; they unnerve him. Swallows fly to and fro, looking for lost nests, and
someone very far away might be screaming, or it might be the wind. The blasts have stripped many
shop signs off their brackets, and the gibbets hang forsaken.
A schnauzer trots after him, whining. No one shouts down from a window to warn him away
from mines. Indeed, in four blocks he sees only one soul, a woman outside what was, the day
before, the movie-house. Dustpan in one hand, broom nowhere to be seen. She looks up at him,
dazed. Through an open door behind her, rows of seats have crumpled beneath great slabs of
ceiling. Beyond them, the screen stands unblemished, not even stained by smoke.
“Show’s not till eight,” she says in her Breton French, and he nods as he limps past. On the rue
Vauborel, vast quantities of slate tiles have slid off roofs and detonated in the streets. Scraps of
burned paper float overhead. No gulls. Even if the house has caught fire, he thinks, the diamond
will be there. He will pluck it from the ashes like a warm egg.
But the tall, slender house remains nearly unscathed. Eleven windows on the facade, most of the
glass out. Blue window frames, old granite of grays and tans. Four of its six flower boxes hang on.
The mandated list of occupants clings to its front door.