All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

Dieu merci.
”
She rubs her temples with both hands. “You can go to bed now, Jutta,” she says.
Jutta hesitates.
“I fixed it,” says Werner.
“That’s a good boy, Werner.” Frau Elena takes a long pull of sherry and her eyes close and her
head rocks back. “We saved you some supper.” Jutta walks to the stairs, uncertainty in her eyes.
In the kitchen, everything looks coal-stained and cramped. Frau Elena brings a plate; on it sits a
single boiled potato cut in two.
“Thank you,” says Werner. The taste of the cake is still in his mouth. The pendulum swings on
and on in the old grandfather clock. The cake, the whipped cream, the thick carpet, the pink
fingernails and long calves of Fräulein Siedler—these sensations whirl through Werner’s head as
if on a carousel. He remembers towing Jutta to Pit Nine, where their father disappeared, evening
after evening, as if their father might come shuffling out of the elevators.
Light, electricity, ether. Space, time, mass. Heinrich Hertz’s 
Principles of Mechanics.
Heissmeyer’s famous schools. 
Code breaking, rocket propulsion, all the latest.
Open your eyes,
the Frenchman on the radio used to say, 
and see what you can with them
before they close forever.
“Werner?”
“Yes, Frau?”
“Aren’t you hungry?”
Frau Elena: as close to a mother as he will ever have. Werner eats, though he is not hungry. Then
he gives her the seventy-five marks, and she blinks at the amount and gives fifty back.
Upstairs, after he has heard Frau Elena go to the toilet and climb into her own bed and the house
has become utterly quiet, Werner counts to one hundred. Then he rises from his cot and takes the
little shortwave radio out of the first-aid box—six years old and bristling with his modifications,
replacement wires, a new solenoid, Jutta’s notations orbiting the tuning coil—and carries it into
the alley behind the house and crushes it with a brick.

---

Exodus
P
arisians continue to press through the gates. By 1 
A.M.
, the gendarmes have lost control, and no
trains have arrived or departed in over four hours. Marie-Laure sleeps on her father’s shoulder.
The locksmith hears no whistles, no rattling couplings: no trains. At dawn he decides it will be
better to go on foot.
They walk all morning. Paris thins steadily into low houses and stand-alone shops broken by
long strands of trees. Noon finds them picking their way through deadlocked traffic on a new
motorway near Vaucresson, a full ten miles west of their apartment, as far from home as Marie-
Laure has ever been.
At the crest of a low hill, her father looks over his shoulder: vehicles are backed up as far as he
can see, carryalls and vans, a sleek new cloth-top wraparound V-12 wedged between two mule
carts, some cars with wooden axles, some run out of gasoline, some with households of furniture
strapped to the roof, a few with entire bristling farmyards crammed onto trailers, chickens and pigs
in cages, cows clomping alongside, dogs panting against windshields.
The entire procession slogs past at little more than walking speed. Both lanes are clogged—
everyone staggers west, away. A woman bicycles wearing dozens of costume necklaces. A man
tows a leather armchair on a handcart, a black kitten cleaning itself on the center cushion. Women
push baby carriages crammed with china, birdcages, crystalware. A man in a tuxedo walks along
calling, “For the love of God, let me through,” though no one steps aside, and he moves no more
quickly than anyone else.
Marie-Laure stays at her father’s hip with her cane in her fist. With each step, another
disembodied question spins around her: