All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

Night and fog,
whisper the women who come by
to check on Marie-Laure. 
For every Kraut lost, they’ll kill ten of us.
Police go door-to-door
demanding any able-bodied man come out for a day’s work. Dig trenches, unload railway wagons,
push barrows of cement bags, construct invasion obstacles in a field or on a beach. Everyone who
can must work to strengthen the Atlantic Wall. Etienne stands squinting in the doorway with his
doctor’s notes in his hand. Cold air blowing over him and fear billowing backward into the hall.
Madame Ruelle whispers that occupation authorities are blaming the attack on an elaborate
network of anti-occupation radio broadcasts. She says that crews are busy locking away the
beaches behind a network of concertina wire and huge wooden jacks called 
chevaux de frise
.
Already they have restricted access to the walkways atop the ramparts.
She hands over a loaf and Marie-Laure carries it home. When Etienne breaks it open, there is
yet another piece of paper inside. Nine more numbers. “I thought they might take a break,” he says.
Marie-Laure is thinking of her father. “Maybe,” she says, “it is even more important now?”
He waits until dark. Marie-Laure sits in the mouth of the wardrobe, the false back open, and
listens to her uncle switch on the microphone and transmitter in the attic. His mild voice speaks
numbers into the garret. Then music plays, soft and low, full of cellos tonight, and it cuts out
midstream.
“Uncle?”
It takes him a long time to come down the ladder. He takes her hand. He says, “The war that
killed your grandfather killed sixteen million others. One and a half million French boys alone,
most of them younger than I was. Two million on the German side. March the dead in a single-file
line, and for eleven days and eleven nights, they’d walk past our door. This is not rearranging
street signs, what we’re doing, Marie. This is not misplacing a letter at the post office. These
numbers, they’re more than numbers. Do you understand?”
“But we are the good guys. Aren’t we, Uncle?”
“I hope so. I hope we are.”

---

Rue des Patriarches
V
on Rumpel enters an apartment house in the 5th arrondissement. The simpering landlady on the
first floor takes the sheaf of ration tickets he offers and buries them in her housecoat. Cats swarm
her ankles. Behind her, an overdecorated flat reeks of dead apple blossoms, confusion, old age.
“When did they leave, Madame?”
“Summer of 1940.” She looks as if she might hiss.
“Who pays the rent?”
“I don’t know, Monsieur.”
“Do the checks come from the Natural History Museum?”
“I can’t say.”
“When was the last time someone came?”
“No one comes. The checks are mailed.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know.”
“And no one leaves or enters the flat?”
“Not since that summer,” she says, and retreats with her vulture face and vulture fingernails into
the redolent dark.
Up he goes. A single dead bolt on the fourth floor marks the locksmith’s flat. Inside, the
windows are boarded over with wood veneer, and an airless, pearly light seeps through the
knotholes. As though he has climbed into a dark box hung inside a column of pure light. Cabinets
hang open, sofa cushions sit slightly cockeyed, a kitchen chair is toppled on its side. Everything
speaks of a hasty departure or a rigorous search or both. A black rim of algae rings the toilet bowl
where the water has slipped away. He inspects the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, some fiendish and
immitigable hope flaring within him: 
What if—?
Along the top of a workbench stand tiny benches, tiny lampposts, tiny trapezoids of polished
wood. Little vise, little box of nails, little bottles of glue long since hardened. Beside the bench,
beneath a dropcloth, a surprise: a complicated model of the 5th arrondissement. The buildings are
unpainted but otherwise beautifully detailed. Shutters, doors, windows, storm drains. No people.
A toy?
In the closet hang a few moth-eaten girl’s dresses and a sweater on which embroidered goats
chew flowers. Dusty pinecones line the windowsill, arranged large to small. On the floor of the
kitchen, friction strips have been nailed into the wood. A place of quiet discipline. Calm. Order. A
single line of twine runs between the table and the bathroom. A clock stands dead without glass on
its face. It’s not until he finds three huge spiral-bound folios of Jules Verne in Braille that he solves
it.
A safe maker. Brilliant with locks. Lives within walking distance of the museum. Employed
there all his adult life. Humble, no visible aspirations for wealth. A blind daughter. Plenty of
reasons to be loyal.
“Where are you hiding?” he says aloud to the room. The dust swirls in the strange light.
Inside a bag or a box. Tucked behind a baseboard or stashed in a compartment beneath the
floorboards or plastered up inside a wall. He opens the kitchen drawers and checks behind them.
But the previous searchers would have checked all of this.

---

Slowly his attention returns to the scale model of the neighborhood. Hundreds of tiny houses
with mansard roofs and balconies. It is this exact neighborhood, he realizes, colorless and
depopulated and miniaturized. A tiny spectral version of it. One building in particular appears
smoothed and worn by the insistence of fingers: the building he’s in. Home.
He puts his eye to street level, becomes a god looming over the Latin Quarter. With two fingers,
he could pinch out anyone he chooses, nudge half a city into shadow. Flip it upside down. He sets
his fingers atop the roof of the apartment house in which he kneels. Wiggles it back and forth. It
lifts free of the model easily, as though designed to do so. He rotates it in front of his eyes:
eighteen little windows, six balconies, a tiny entrance door. Down here—behind this window—
lurks the little landlady with her cats. And here, on the fourth floor, himself.
On its bottom he finds a tiny hole, not at all unlike the keyhole in the jewel safe in the museum he
saw three years before. The house is, he realizes, a container. A receptacle. He plays with it
awhile, trying to solve it. Turns it over, tries the bottom, the side.
His heart rate soars. Something wet and feverish rises onto his tongue.
Do you have something inside of you?
Von Rumpel sets the little house on the floor, raises his foot, and crushes it.

---

White City
I
n April 1944 the Opel rattles into a white city full of empty windows. “Vienna,” says Volkheimer,
and Neumann Two fulminates about Hapsburg palaces and Wiener schnitzel and girls whose
vulvas taste like apple strudel. They sleep in a once stately Old World suite with the furniture
shored up against the walls and chicken feathers clogging the marble sinks and newspapers tacked
clumsily across the windows. Down below, a switching yard presents a wilderness of train tracks.
Werner thinks of Dr. Hauptmann with his curls and fur-lined gloves, whose Viennese youth Werner
imagined spent in vibrant cafés where scientists-to-be discussed Bohr and Schopenhauer, where
marble statues stared down from ledges like kindly godparents.
Hauptmann, who, presumably, is still in Berlin. Or at the front, like everyone else.
The city commander has no time for them. A subordinate tells Volkheimer there are reports of
resistance broadcasts washing out of the Leopoldstadt. Round and round the district they drive.
Cold fog hangs in the budding trees, and Werner sits in the back of the truck and shivers. The place
smells to him of carnage.
For five days he hears nothing on his transceiver but anthems and recorded propaganda and
broadcasts from beleaguered colonels requesting supplies, gasoline, men. It is all unraveling,
Werner can feel it; the fabric of the war tearing apart.
“That’s the Staatsoper,” says Neumann Two one night. The facade of a grand building rises
gracefully, pilastered and crenelated. Stately wings soar on either side, somehow both heavy and
light. It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to
sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing
indifference of the world—what pretensions humans have! Why bother to make music when the
silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff
them? When Russian prisoners are chained by threes and fours to fences while German privates
tuck live grenades in their pockets and run?
Opera houses! Cities on the moon! Ridiculous. They would all do better to put their faces on the
curbs and wait for the boys who come through the city dragging sledges stacked with corpses.
At midmorning Volkheimer orders them to park in the Augarten. The sun burns away the fog and
reveals the first blooms on the trees. Werner can feel the fever flickering inside him, a stove with
its door latched. Neumann One, who, if he were not scheduled to die ten weeks from now in the
Allied invasion of Normandy, might have become a barber later in life, who would have smelled
of talc and whiskey and put his index finger into men’s ears to position their heads, whose pants
and shirts always would have been covered with clipped hairs, who, in his shop, would have
taped postcards of the Alps around the circumference of a big cheap wavery mirror, who would
have been faithful to his stout wife for the rest of his life—Neumann One says, “Time for haircuts.”
He sets a stool on the sidewalk and throws a mostly clean towel over Bernd’s shoulders and
snips away. Werner finds a state-sponsored station playing waltzes and sets the speaker in the open
back door of the Opel so all can hear. Neumann One cuts Bernd’s hair, then Werner’s, then pouchy,
wrecked Neumann Two’s. Werner watches Volkheimer climb onto the stool and close his eyes
when a particularly plangent waltz comes on, Volkheimer who has killed a hundred men by now at
least, probably more, walking into pathetic radio-transmitting shacks in his huge expropriated
boots, sneaking up behind some emaciated Ukrainian with headphones on his ears and a

---

microphone at his lips and shooting him in the back of the head, then going to the truck to tell
Werner to collect the transmitter, making the order calmly, sleepily, even with the pieces of the man
on the transmitter like that.
Volkheimer who always makes sure there is food for Werner. Who brings him eggs, who shares
his broth, whose fondness for Werner remains, it seems, unshakable.
The Augarten proves a thorny place to search, full of narrow streets and tall apartment houses.
Transmissions both pass through the buildings and reflect off them. That afternoon, long after the
stool has been put away and the waltzes have stopped, while Werner sits with his transceiver
listening to nothing, a little redheaded girl in a maroon cape emerges from a doorway, maybe six
or seven years old, small for her age, with big clear eyes that remind him of Jutta’s. She runs
across the street to the park and plays there alone, beneath the budding trees, while her mother
stands on the corner and bites the tips of her fingers. The girl climbs into the swing and pendulums
back and forth, pumping her legs, and watching her opens some valve in Werner’s soul. This is
life, he thinks, this is why we live, to play like this on a day when winter is finally releasing its
grip. He waits for Neumann Two to come around the truck and say something crass, to spoil it, but
he doesn’t, and neither does Bernd, maybe they don’t see her at all, maybe this one pure thing will
escape their defilement, and the girl sings as she swings, a high song that Werner recognizes, a
counting song that girls jumping rope in the alley behind Children’s House used to sing,