All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

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—and then her grandfather’s song, “Clair de Lune,” strains over her like a blue mist.
Airplanes make low, lazy passes over the city. Sometimes they sound so close that Marie-Laure
fears they might graze the rooftops, knock over chimneys with their bellies. But no planes crash, no
houses explode. Nothing seems to change at all except Marie-Laure grows: she can no longer wear
any of the clothes her father carried here in his rucksack three years before. And her shoes pinch;
she takes to wearing three pairs of socks and a pair of Etienne’s old tasseled loafers.
The rumors are that only essential personnel and those with medical reasons will be allowed to
stay in Saint-Malo. “We’re not leaving,” says Etienne. “Not when we might finally be doing some
good. If the doctor won’t give us notes, we’ll pay for them some other way.”
For portions of every day, she manages to lose herself in realms of memory: the faint
impressions of the visual world before she was six, when Paris was like a vast kitchen, pyramids
of cabbages and carrots everywhere; bakers’ stalls overflowing with pastries; fish stacked like
cordwood in the fishmongers’ booths, the runnels awash in silver scales, alabaster gulls swooping
down to carry off entrails. Every corner she turned billowed with color: the greens of leeks, the
deep purple glaze of eggplants.
Now her world has turned gray. Gray faces and gray quiet and a gray nervous terror hanging
over the queue at the bakery and the only color in the world briefly kindled when Etienne climbs
the stairs to the attic, knees cracking, to read one more string of numbers into the ether, to send
another of Madame Ruelle’s messages, to play a song. That little attic bursting with magenta and
aquamarine and gold for five minutes, and then the radio switches off, and the gray rushes back in,
and her uncle stumps back down the stairs.

---

Fever
M
aybe it comes from the stew in some nameless Ukrainian kitchen; maybe partisans have
poisoned the water; maybe Werner simply sits too long in too many damp places with the headset
over his ears. Regardless, the fever comes, and with it terrible diarrhea, and as Werner crouches in
the mud behind the Opel, he feels as if he is shitting out the last of his civilization. Whole hours
pass during which he can do no more than press his cheek against the wall of the truck shell
seeking something cold. Then the shivers take over, hard and fast, and he cannot warm his body; he
wants to leap into a fire.
Volkheimer offers coffee; Neumann Two offers the tablets that Werner knows by now are not for
backaches. He declines both, and 1943 becomes 1944. Werner has not written Jutta in almost a
year. The last letter he has from her is six months old and begins: 
Why don’t you write?
Still he manages to find illegal transmissions, one every two weeks or so. He salvages the
inferior Soviet equipment, milled from marginal steel, clumsily soldered; it’s all so unsystematic.
How can they fight a war with such lousy equipment? The resistance is pitched to Werner as
supremely organized; they are dangerous, disciplined insurgents; they follow the words of
ferocious, lethal leaders. But he sees firsthand how they can be so loosely allied as to be basically
ineffectual—they are wretched and filthy; they live in holes. They are ragtag desperadoes with
nothing to lose.
And it seems he can never make headway into understanding which theory is closer to the truth.
Because really, Werner thinks, they are all insurgents, all partisans, every single person they see.
Anyone who is not a German wants the Germans dead, even the most sycophantic of them. They
shy away from the truck as it rattles into town; they hide their faces, their families; their shops brim
with shoes plucked off the dead.
Look at them.
What he feels on the worst days of that relentless winter—while rust colonizes the truck and
rifles and radios, while German divisions retreat all around them—is a deep scorn for all the
humans they pass. The smoking, ruined villages, the broken pieces of brick in the street, the frozen
corpses, the shattered walls, the upturned cars, the barking dogs, the scurrying rats and lice: how
can they live like that? Out here in the forests, in the mountains, in the villages, they are supposed
to be pulling up disorder by the root. The total entropy of any system, said Dr. Hauptmann, will
decrease only if the entropy of another system will increase. Nature demands symmetry.