All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

I know it’s cold.
But I’m right beside you, see?
Jutta, close your eyes.
Rödel steps forward and swings the hose and smacks Frederick with it across the shoulder.
Frederick takes a step backward. The wind slashes across the field. Bastian says, “Again.”
Everything becomes soaked in a hideous and wondrous slowness. Rödel rears back and strikes.
This time he catches Frederick on the jaw. Werner forces his mind to keep sending up images of
home: the laundry; Frau Elena’s overworked pink fingers; dogs in the alleys; steam blowing from
stacks—every part of him wants to scream: is this not wrong?
But here it is right.
It takes such a long time. Frederick withstands a third blow. “Again,” commands Bastian. On the
fourth, Frederick throws up his arms and the hose smacks against his forearms and he stumbles.
Rödel swings again, and Bastian says, “In your shining example, Christ, lead the way, ever and
always,” and the whole afternoon turns sideways, torn open; Werner watches the scene recede as
though observing it from the far end of a tunnel: a small white field, a group of boys, bare trees, a
toy castle, none of it any more real than Frau Elena’s stories about her Alsatian childhood or
Jutta’s drawings of Paris. Six more times he hears Rödel swing and the hose whistle and the
strangely dead smack of the rubber striking Frederick’s hands, shoulders, and face.
Frederick can walk for hours in the woods, can identify warblers fifty yards away simply by

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hearing their song. Frederick hardly ever thinks of himself. Frederick is stronger than he is in every
imaginable way. Werner opens his mouth but closes it again; he drowns; he shuts his eyes, his
mind.
At some point the beating stops. Frederick is facedown in the snow.
“Sir?” says Rödel, panting. Bastian takes back the length of hose from Rödel and drapes it
around his neck and reaches underneath his belly to hitch up his belt. Werner kneels beside
Frederick and turns him onto his side. Blood is running from his nose or eye or ear, maybe all
three. One of his eyes is already swollen shut; the other remains open. His attention, Werner
realizes, is on the sky. Tracing something up there.
Werner risks a glance upward: a single hawk, riding the wind.
Bastian says, “Up.”
Werner stands. Frederick does not move.
Bastian says, “Up,” more quietly this time, and Frederick gets to a knee. He stands, wobbling.
His cheek is gashed and leaks tendrils of blood. Splotches of moisture show on his back from
where the snow has melted into his shirt. Werner gives Frederick his arm.
“Cadet, are you the weakest?”
Frederick does not look at the commandant. “No, sir.”
Hawk still gyring up there. The portly commandant chews on a thought for a moment. Then his
clear voice rings out, flying above the company, urging them into a run. Fifty-seven cadets cross
the grounds and jog up the snowy path into the forest. Frederick runs in his place beside Werner,
his left eye swelling, twin networks of blood peeling back across his cheeks, his collar wet and
brown.
The branches seethe and clatter. All fifty-seven boys sing in unison.
We shall march onwards,
Even if everything crashes down in pieces;
For today the nation hears us,
And tomorrow the whole world!
Winter in the forests of old Saxony. Werner does not risk another glance toward his friend. He
quick-steps through the cold, an unloaded five-round rifle over his shoulder. He is almost fifteen
years old.

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The Arrest of the Locksmith
T
hey seize him outside of Vitré, hours from Paris. Two policemen in plain clothes bundle him off a
train while a dozen passengers stare. He is questioned in a van and again in an ice-cold mezzanine
office decorated with poorly executed watercolors of oceangoing steamers. The first interrogators
are French; an hour later they become German. They brandish his notebook and tool case. They
hold up his key ring and count seven different skeleton keys. What do these unlock, they want to
know, and how do you employ these tiny files and saws? What about this notebook full of
architectural measurements?
A model for my daughter.
Keys for the museum where I work.
Please.
They frog-march him to a cell. The door’s lock and hinges are so big and antiquarian, they must
be Louis XIV. Maybe Napoleon. Any hour now the director or his people will show up and explain
everything. Certainly this will happen.
In the morning the Germans run him through a second, more laconic spell of questioning while a
typist clatters away in the corner. They seem to be accusing him of plotting to destroy the Château
de Saint-Malo, though why they might believe this is not clear. Their French is barely adequate and
they seem more interested in their questions than his answers. They deny access to paper, to linens,
to a telephone. They have photographs of him.
He yearns for cigarettes. He lies faceup on the floor and imagines himself kissing Marie-Laure
once on each eye while she sleeps. Two days after his arrest, he is driven to a holding pen a few
miles outside Strasbourg. Through fence slats, he watches a column of uniformed schoolgirls walk
double-file in the winter sunshine.
Guards bring prepackaged sandwiches, hard cheese, sufficient water. In the pen, maybe thirty
others sleep on straw laid atop frozen mud. Mostly French but some Belgians, four Flemings, two
Walloons. All have been accused of crimes they speak of only with reticence, anxious about what
traps might lurk within any question he puts to them. At night they trade rumors in whispers. “We
will only be in Germany for a few months,” someone says, and the word goes twisting down the
line.
“Merely to help with spring planting while their men are at war.”
“Then they’ll send us home.”
Each man thinks this is impossible and then: It might be true. Just a few months. Then home.
No officially appointed lawyer. No military tribunal. Marie-Laure’s father spends three days
shivering in the holding pen. No rescue arrives from the museum, no limousine from the director
grinds up the lane. They will not let him write letters. When he demands to use a telephone, the
guards don’t bother to laugh. “Do you know the last time 
we
used a telephone?” Every hour is a
prayer for Marie-Laure. Every breath.
On the fourth day, all the prisoners are piled onto a cattle truck and driven east. “We are close to
Germany,” the men whisper. They can glimpse it on the far side of the river. Low clumps of naked
trees bracketed by snow-dusted fields. Black rows of vineyards. Four disconnected strands of gray
smoke melt into a white sky.
The locksmith squints. Germany? It looks no different from this side of the river.

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It may as well be the edge of a cliff.

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Four

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8 August 1944

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The Fort of La Cité
S
ergeant Major von Rumpel climbs a ladder in the dark. He can feel the lymph nodes on either
side of his neck compressing his esophagus and trachea. His weight like a rag on the rungs.
The two gunners inside the periscope turret watch from beneath the rims of their helmets. Not
offering help, not saluting. The turret is crowned with a steel dome and is used primarily to range
larger guns positioned farther below. It offers views of the sea to the west; the cliffs below, all
strung with entangling wire; and directly across the water, a half mile away, the burning city of
Saint-Malo.
Artillery has stopped for the moment, and the predawn fires inside the walls take on a steady
middle life, an adulthood. The western edge of the city has become a holocaust of crimson and
carmine from which rise multiple towers of smoke. The largest has curdled into a pillar like the
cloud of tephra and ash and steam that billows atop an erupting volcano. From afar, the smoke
appears strangely solid, as though carved from luminous wood. All along its perimeter, sparks rise
and ash falls and administrative documents flutter: utility plans, purchase orders, tax records.
With binoculars, von Rumpel watches what might be bats go flaming and careening out over the
ramparts. A geyser of sparks erupts deep within a house—an electrical transformer or hoarded fuel
or maybe a delayed-action bomb—and it looks to him as if lightning lashes the town from within.
One of the gunners makes unimaginative comments about the smoke, a dead horse he can see at
the base of the walls, the intensity of certain quadrants of fire. As though they are noblemen in
grandstands viewing fortress warfare in the years of the Crusaders. Von Rumpel tugs his collar
against the bulges in his throat, tries to swallow.
The moon sets and the eastern sky lightens, the hem of night pulling away, taking stars with it one
by one until only two are left. Vega, maybe. Or Venus. He never learned.
“Church spire is gone,” says the second gunner.
A day ago, above the zigzag rooftops, the cathedral spire pointed straight up, higher than
everything else. Not this morning. Soon the sun is above the horizon and the orange of flames gives
way to the black of smoke, rising along the western walls and blowing like a caul across the
citadel.
Finally, for a few seconds, the smoke parts long enough for von Rumpel to peer into the serrated
maze of the city and pick out what he’s looking for: the upper section of a tall house with a broad
chimney. Two windows visible, the glass out. One shutter hanging, three in place.
Number 4 rue Vauborel. Still intact. Seconds pass; smoke veils it again.
A single airplane tracks across the deepening blue, incredibly high. Von Rumpel retreats down
the long ladder into the tunnels of the fort below. Trying not to limp, not to think of the bulges in his
groin. In the underground commissary, men sit against the walls spooning oatmeal from their
upturned helmets. The electric lights cast them in alternating pools of glare and shadow.
Von Rumpel sits on an ammunition box and eats cheese from a tube. The colonel in charge of
defending Saint-Malo has made speeches to these men, speeches about valor, about how any hour
the Hermann Göring Division will break the American line at Avranches, how reinforcements will
pour in from Italy and possibly Belgium, tanks and Stukas, truckloads of fifty-millimeter mortars,
how the people of Berlin believe in them like a nun believes in God, how no one will abandon his
post and if he does he’ll be executed as a deserter, but von Rumpel is thinking now of the vine

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inside of him. A black vine that has grown branches through his legs and arms. Gnawing his
abdomen from the inside. Here in this peninsular fortress just outside Saint-Malo, cut off from the
retreating lines, it seems only a matter of time until Canadians and Brits and the bright American
eyes of the Eighty-third Division will be swarming the city, scouring the homes for marauding
Huns, doing whatever it is they do when they take prisoners.
Only a matter of time until the black vine chokes off his heart.
“What?” says a soldier beside him.
Von Rumpel sniffs. “I do not think I said anything.”
The soldier squints back into the oatmeal in his helmet.
Von Rumpel squeezes out the last of the vile, salty cheese and drops the empty tube between his
feet. The house is still there. His army still holds the city. For a few hours the fires will burn, and
then the Germans will swarm like ants back to their positions and fight for another day.
He will wait. Wait and wait and wait, and when the smoke clears, he will go in.

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