All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

We are a volley of bullets,
sing the newest cadets, 
we are cannonballs. We are the tip of the
sword.
Werner thinks of home all the time. He misses the sound of rain on the zinc roof above his
dormer; the feral energy of the orphans; the scratchy singing of Frau Elena as she rocks a baby in
the parlor. The smell of the coking plant coming in under the dawn, the first reliable smell of every
day. Mostly he misses Jutta: her loyalty, her obstinacy, the way she always seems to recognize
what is right.
Though in Werner’s weaker moments, he resents those same qualities in his sister. Perhaps she’s
the impurity in him, the static in his signal that the bullies can sense. Perhaps she’s the only thing
keeping him from surrendering totally. If you have a sister back home, you’re supposed to think of
her as a pretty girl in a propaganda poster: rosy-cheeked, brave, steadfast. She’s whom you fight
for. Whom you die for. But Jutta? Jutta sends letters that the school censor blacks out almost
completely. She asks questions that should not be asked. Only Werner’s affiliation with Dr.
Hauptmann—his privileged status as the favorite of the technical sciences professor—keeps him
safe. A company in Berlin is producing their transceiver, and already some of their units are
coming back from what Hauptmann calls “the field,” blown apart or burned or drowned in mud or
defective, and Werner’s job is to rebuild them while Hauptmann talks into his telephone or writes

---

requisitions for replacement parts or spends whole fortnights away from the school.
Weeks pass without a letter to Jutta. Werner writes four lines, a smattering of platitudes—
I am
fine; I am so busy
—and hands it to the bunk master. Dread swamps him.
“You have minds,” Bastian murmurs one evening in the refectory, each boy hunching almost
imperceptibly farther over his food as the commandant’s finger grazes the back of his uniform.
“But minds are not to be trusted. Minds are always drifting toward ambiguity, toward questions,
when what you really need is certainty. Purpose. Clarity. Do not trust your minds.”
Werner sits in the lab late at night, alone again, and trolls the frequencies on the Grundig tube
radio that Volkheimer used to borrow from Hauptmann’s office, searching for music, for echoes,
for what, he is not sure. He sees circuits break apart and re-form. He sees Frederick staring into
his book of birds; he sees the furor of the mines at Zollverein, the shunting cars, the banging locks,
the trundling conveyors, smokestacks silting the sky day and night; he sees Jutta slashing back and
forth with a lit torch as darkness encroaches from all sides. Wind presses against the walls of the
lab—wind, the commandant loves to remind them, that comes all the way from Russia, a Cossack
wind, the wind of candle-eating barbarians with hogs’ heads who will stop at nothing to drink the
blood of German girls. Gorillas who must be wiped off the earth.
Static static.
Are you there?
Finally he shuts off the radio. Into the stillness come the voices of his masters, echoing from one
side of his head while memory speaks from the other.
Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

---

The Blade and the Whelk
T
he Hôtel-Dieu dining room is big and somber and full of people talking about U-boats off
Gibraltar and the inequities of currency exchange and four-stroke marine diesel engines. Madame
Manec orders two bowls of chowder that she and Marie-Laure promptly finish. She says she does
not know what to do next—should they keep waiting?—so she orders two more.
At last a man in rustling clothing sits down with them. “You are sure your name is Madame
Walter?”
Madame Manec says, “You are sure your name is René?”
A pause.
“And her?”
“My accomplice. She can tell if someone is lying just by hearing him speak.”
He laughs. They talk about the weather. Sea air exudes from the man’s clothes, as if he has been
blown here by a gale. While he talks, he makes ungainly movements and bumps the table so that the
spoons clatter in their bowls. Finally he says, “We admire your efforts, Madame.”
The man who calls himself René starts talking extremely softly. Marie-Laure catches only
phrases: “Look for special insignia on their license plates.