All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

I’ll only be an hour.
She reins in her panic. Important not to assume the worst. In the foyer, she checks the trip wire:
intact. Then she tears an end off yesterday’s loaf from Madame Ruelle and stands in the kitchen
chewing. The water—miraculously—has been turned back on, so she fills the two galvanized
buckets and carries them upstairs and sets them in the corner of her bedroom and thinks a moment
and walks to the third floor and fills the bathtub to the rim.
Then she opens her novel. Captain Nemo has planted his flag on the South Pole, but if he doesn’t
move the submarine north soon, they will become trapped in ice. The spring equinox has just
passed; they face six months of unrelenting night.
Marie-Laure counts the chapters that remain. Nine. She is tempted to read on, but they are
voyaging on the 
Nautilus
together, she and Etienne, and as soon as he returns, they will resume.
Any moment now.
She rechecks the little house under her pillow and fights the temptation to take out the stone and
instead reinstalls the house inside the model city at the foot of her bed. Out the window, a truck
roars to life. Gulls pass, braying like donkeys, and in the distance the guns thud again, and the
rattling of the truck fades, and Marie-Laure tries to concentrate on rereading a chapter earlier in
the novel: make the raised dots form letters, the letters words, the words a world.
In the afternoon, the trip wire quivers, and the bell hidden beneath the third-floor table gives a
single ring. In the attic high above her, a muted ring matches it. Marie-Laure lifts her fingers from
the page, thinking, At last, but when she winds down the stairs and sets her hand on the dead bolt
and calls, “Who is there?” she hears not the quiet voice of Etienne but the oily one of the perfumer
Claude Levitte.
“Let me in, please.”
Even through the door she can smell him, peppermint, musk, aldehyde. Beneath that: Sweat.
Fear.
She undoes both dead bolts and opens the door halfway.
He speaks through the half-open gate. “You need to come with me.”
“I am waiting for my great-uncle.”
“I have talked to your great-uncle.”
“You talked to him? Where?”
Marie-Laure can hear Monsieur Levitte cracking his knuckles one after the next. His lungs
toiling inside his chest. “If you could see, mademoiselle, you’d have seen the evacuation orders.
They’ve locked the city gates.”
She does not reply.
“They’re detaining every man between sixteen and sixty. They’ve been told to assemble at the

---

tower of the château. Then they will be marched to Fort National at low tide. God be with them.”
Out on the rue Vauborel, everything sounds calm. Swallows swoop past the houses, and two
doves bicker on a high gutter. A bicyclist goes rattling past. Then quiet. Have they really locked the
city gates? Has this man really spoken to Etienne?
“Will you go with them, Monsieur Levitte?”
“I plan not to. You must get to a shelter immediately.” Monsieur Levitte sniffs. “Or to the crypts
below Notre-Dame at Rocabey. Which is where I sent Madame. It’s what your uncle asked me to
do. Leave absolutely everything behind, and come with me now.”
“Why?”
“Your uncle knows why. Everybody knows why. It’s not safe here. Come along.”
“But you said the gates to the city are locked.”
“Yes, I did, girl, and that’s enough questions for now.” He sighs. “You are not safe, and I am
here to help.”
“Uncle says our cellar is safe. He says if it has lasted for five hundred years, it will last a few
more nights.”
The perfumer clears his throat. She imagines him extending his thick neck to look into the house,
the coat on the rack, the crumbs of bread on the kitchen table. Everyone checking to see what
everyone else has. Her uncle could not have asked the perfumer to escort her to a shelter—when is
the last time Etienne has spoken to Claude Levitte? Again she thinks of the model upstairs, the
stone inside. She hears Dr. Geffard’s voice: