All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

I hear you.
Needles in the haystack. Thorns in the paw of the lion. He finds them, and Volkheimer plucks
them out.
All winter the Germans drive their horses and sledges and tanks and trucks over the same roads,
packing down the snow, transforming it into a slick bloodstained ice-cement. And when April
finally comes, reeking of sawdust and corpses, the canyon walls of snow give way while the ice
on the roads remains stubbornly fixed, a luminous, internecine network of invasion: a record of the
crucifixion of Russia.
One night they cross a bridge over the Dnieper with the domes and blooming trees of Kiev
looming ahead and ash blowing everywhere and prostitutes bundled in the alleys. In a café, they sit
two tables down from an infantryman not much older than Werner. He stares into a newspaper with
twitching eyeballs and sips coffee and looks deeply surprised. Astonished.
Werner cannot stop studying him. Finally Neumann One leans over. “Know why he looks like
that?”
Werner shakes his head.
“Frostbite took his eyelids. Poor bastard.”
Mail does not reach them. Months pass and Werner does not write to his sister.

---

The Messages
O
ccupation authorities decree that every house must have a list of its occupants fixed to its door:
M. Etienne LeBlanc, age 62
. 
Mlle Marie-Laure LeBlanc, age 15.
Marie-Laure tortures herself
with daydreams of feasts laid out on long tables: platters of sliced pork loin, roasted apples,
banana flambé, pineapples with whipped cream.
One morning in the summer of 1943, she walks to the bakery in a slow-falling rain. The queue
stretches out the door. When Marie-Laure finally reaches the head of the line, Madame Ruelle
takes her hands and speaks very softly. “Ask if he can also read this.” Beneath the loaf comes a
folded piece of paper. Marie-Laure puts the loaf into her knapsack and bunches the paper in her
fist. She passes over a ration ticket, finds her way directly home, and dead-bolts the door behind
her.
Etienne shuffles downstairs.
“What does it say, Uncle?”
“It says, 
Monsieur Droguet wants his daughter in Saint-Coulomb to know that he is
recovering well.
”
“She said it’s important.”
“What does it mean?”
Marie-Laure removes her knapsack and reaches inside and tears off a hunk of bread. She says,
“I think it means that Monsieur Droguet wants his daughter to know that he is all right.”
Over the next weeks, more notes come. A birth in Saint-Vincent. A dying grandmother in La
Mare. Madame Gardinier in La Rabinais wants her son to know that she forgives him. If secret
messages lurk inside these missives—if 
Monsieur Fayou had a heart attack and passed gently
away
means 
Blow up the switching yard at Rennes
—Etienne cannot say. What matters is that
people must be listening, that ordinary citizens must have radios, that they seem to need to hear
from each other. He never leaves his house, sees no one save Marie-Laure, and yet somehow he
has found himself at the nexus of a web of information.
He keys the microphone and reads the numbers, then the messages. He broadcasts them on five
different bands, gives instructions for the next transmission, and plays a bit of an old record. At
most the whole exercise takes six minutes.
Too long. Almost certainly too long.
Yet no one comes. The two bells do not ring. No German patrols come banging up the stairs to
put bullets in their heads.
Although she has them memorized, most nights Marie-Laure asks Etienne to read her the letters
from her father. Tonight he sits on the edge of her bed.
Today I saw an oak tree disguised as a chestnut tree.