All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

Kids’ Club
. Jutta and Claudia Förster have taken three of the younger girls to a
puppet show in the market; Jutta has spoken no more than six words to Werner since his return.
You have been called,
says the letter. Werner is to report to the National Political Institute of
Education #6 at Schulpforta. He stands in the parlor of Children’s House, trying to absorb it.
Cracked walls, sagging ceiling, twin benches that have borne child after child after child for as
long as the mine has made orphans. He has found a way out.
Schulpforta. Tiny dot on the map, near Naumburg, in Saxony. Two hundred miles east. Only in
his most intrepid dreams did he allow himself to hope that he might travel so far. He carries the
sheet of paper in a daze to the alley where Frau Elena boils sheets amid billows of steam.
She rereads it several times. “We can’t pay.”
“We don’t need to.”
“How far?”
“Five hours by train. They’ve already paid the fare.”
“When?”
“Two weeks.”
Frau Elena: strands of hair stuck to her cheeks, maroon aprons under her eyes, pink rims around
her nostrils. Thin crucifix against her damp throat. Is she proud? She rubs her eyes and nods
absently. “They’ll celebrate this.” She hands the letter back and stares down the alley at the dense
ranks of clotheslines and coalbins.
“Who, Frau?”
“Everyone. The neighbors.” She laughs a sudden and startling laugh. “People like that vice
minister. The man who took your book.”
“Not Jutta.”

---

“No. Not Jutta.”
He rehearses in his head the argument he will present to his sister. 
Pflicht
. It means duty.
Obligation. Every German fulfilling his function. Put on your boots and go to work. 
Ein Volk, ein
Reich, ein Führer.
We all have parts to play, little sister. But before the girls arrive, news of his
acceptance has reverberated through the block. Neighbors come over one after another and
exclaim and wag their chins. Coal wives bring pig knuckles and cheese; they pass around Werner’s
acceptance letter; the ones who can read, read it aloud to the ones who cannot, and Jutta comes
home to a crowded, exhilarated room. The twins—Hannah and Susanne Gerlitz—sprint laps
around the sofa, looped up in the excitement, and six-year-old Rolf Hupfauer sings 
Rise! Rise! All
glory to the fatherland!
and several of the other children join in, and Werner doesn’t see Frau
Elena speak to Jutta in the corner of the parlor, doesn’t see Jutta run upstairs.
At the dinner bell, she does not come down. Frau Elena asks Hannah Gerlitz to lead the prayer,
and tells Werner she’ll talk to Jutta, that he ought to stay downstairs, all these people are here for
him. Every few breaths, the words flare in his mind like sparks: 
You have been called.
Each
minute that passes is one fewer in this house. In this life.
After the meal, little Siegfried Fischer, no older than five, walks around the table and tugs
Werner’s sleeve and hands him a photograph he has torn from a newspaper. In the picture, six
fighter-bombers float above a mountain range of clouds. Spangles of sun are frozen midglide
across the airplanes’ fuselages. The scarves of the pilots stretch backward.
Siegfried Fischer says, “You’ll show them, won’t you?” His face is fierce with belief; it seems
to draw a circle around all the hours Werner has spent at Children’s House, hoping for something
more.
“I will,” Werner says. The eyes of all the children are on him. “Absolutely I will.”

---

Occuper
M
arie-Laure wakes to church bells: two three four five. Faint smell of mildew. Ancient down
pillows with all the loft worn out. Silk wallpaper behind the lumpy bed where she sits. When she
stretches out both arms, she can almost touch walls on either side.
The reverberations of the bells cease. She has slept most of the day. What is the muffled roar she
hears? Crowds? Or is it still the sea?
She sets her feet on the floor. The wounds on the backs of her heels pulse. Where is her cane?
She shuffles so she does not bash her shins on something. Behind curtains, a window rises out of
her reach. Opposite the window, she finds a dresser whose drawers open only partway before
striking the bed.
The weather in this place: you can feel it between your fingers.
She gropes through a doorway into what? A hall? Out here the roar is fainter, barely a murmur.
“Hello?”
Quiet. Then a bustling far below, the heavy shoes of Madame Manec climbing flights of narrow,
curving steps, her smoker’s lungs coming closer, third floor, fourth—how tall is this house?—now
Madame’s voice is calling, “Mademoiselle,” and she is taken by the hand, led back into the room
in which she woke, and seated on the edge of the bed. “Do you need to use the toilet? You must,
then a bath, you had an excellent sleep, your father is in town trying the telegraph office, though I
assured him that’ll be about as profitable as trying to pick feathers out of molasses. Are you
hungry?”
Madame Manec plumps pillows, flaps the quilt. Marie-Laure tries to concentrate on something
small, something concrete. The model back in Paris. A single seashell in Dr. Geffard’s laboratory.
“Does this whole house belong to my great-uncle Etienne?”
“Every room.”
“How does he pay for it?”
Madame Manec laughs. “You get right to it, don’t you? Your great-uncle inherited the house from
his father, who was your great-grandfather. He was a very successful man with plenty of money.”
“You knew him?”
“I have worked here since Master Etienne was a little boy.”
“My grandfather too? You knew him?”
“I did.”
“Will I meet Uncle Etienne now?”
Madame Manec hesitates. “Probably not.”
“But he is here?”
“Yes, child. He is always here.”
“Always?”
Madame Manec’s big, thick hands enfold hers. “Let’s see about the bath. Your father will
explain when he returns.”
“But Papa doesn’t explain anything. He says only that Uncle was in the war with my
grandfather.”
“That’s right. But your great-uncle, when he came home”—Madame hunts for the proper
phrasing—“he was not the same as when he left.”

---

“You mean he was more scared of things?”
“I mean lost. A mouse in a trap. He saw dead people passing through the walls. Terrible things
in the corners of the streets. Now your great-uncle does not go outdoors.”
“Not ever?”
“Not for years. But Etienne is a wonder, you’ll see. He knows everything.”
Marie-Laure listens to the house timbers creak and the gulls cry and the gentle roar breaking
against the window. “Are we high in the air, Madame?”
“We are on the sixth floor. It’s a good bed, isn’t it? I thought you and your papa would be able to
rest well here.”
“Does the window open?”
“It does, dear. But it is probably best to leave it shuttered while—”
Marie-Laure is already standing atop the bed, running her palms along the wall. “Can one see
the sea from it?”
“We’re supposed to keep shutters and windows closed. But maybe just for a minute.” Madame
Manec turns a handle, pulls in the two hinged panes of the window, and nudges open the shutter.
Wind: immediate, bright, sweet, briny, luminous. The roar rises and falls.
“Are there snails out there, Madame?”
“Snails? In the ocean?” Again that laugh. “As many as raindrops. You’re interested in snails?”
“Yes yes yes. I have found tree snails and garden snails. But I have never found marine snails.”
“Well,” says Madame Manec. “You’ve turned up in the right place.”
Madame draws a warm bath in a third-floor tub. From the tub, Marie-Laure listens to her shut
the door, and the cramped bathroom groan beneath the weight of the water, and the walls creak, as
if she were in a cabin inside Captain Nemo’s