All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

Berlin smokes Junos
.
Franny has already retreated back into the kitchen.
Werner watches Frederick create another crude spiral, the pencil locked in his fist.
“I’m leaving Schulpforta, Frederick. They’re changing my age and sending me to the front.”
Frederick lifts the pencil, studying, then reapplies it.
“Less than a week.”
Frederick works his mouth as if to chew air. “You look pretty,” he says. He does not look
directly at Werner, and his words are close to moans. “You look pretty, very pretty, Mama.”
“I’m not your mama,” hisses Werner. “Come on, now.” Frederick’s expression is entirely
without artifice. Somewhere in the kitchen, the maid is listening. There is no other sound, not of
traffic or airplanes or trains or radios or the specter of Frau Schwartzenberger rattling the cage of
the elevator. No chanting no singing no silk banners no bands no trumpets no mother no father no
slick-fingered commandant dragging a finger across his back. The city seems utterly still, as though
everyone is listening, waiting for someone to slip.
Werner looks at the blue of the walls and thinks of 
Birds of America,
yellow-crowned heron,
Kentucky warbler, scarlet tanager, bird after glorious bird, and Frederick’s gaze remains stuck in
some terrible middle ground, each eye a stagnant pool into which Werner cannot bear to look.

---

Relapse
I
n late June 1942, for the first time since her fever, Madame Manec is not in the kitchen when
Marie-Laure wakes. Could she already be at the market? Marie-Laure taps on her door, waits a
hundred heartbeats. She opens the rear door and calls into the alley. Glorious warm June dawn.
Pigeons and cats. Screech of laughter from a neighboring window.
“Madame?”
Her heart accelerates. She taps again on Madame Manec’s door.
“Madame?”
When she lets herself in, she hears the rattle first. As though a weary tide stirs stones in the old
woman’s lungs. Sour odors of sweat and urine rise from the bed. Her hands find Madame’s face,
and the old woman’s cheek is so hot that Marie-Laure’s fingers recoil as though scalded. She
scrambles upstairs, stumbling, shouting, “Uncle! Uncle!” the whole house turning scarlet in her
mind, roof turning to smoke, flames chewing through walls.
Etienne crouches on his popping knees beside Madame, then scurries to the telephone and
speaks a few words. He returns to Madame Manec’s bedside at a trot. Over the next hour the
kitchen fills with women, Madame Ruelle, Madame Fontineau, Madame Hébrard. The first floor
becomes too crowded; Marie-Laure paces the staircase, up and down, up and down, as though
working her way up and down the spire of an enormous seashell. The doctor comes and goes, the
occasional woman closes her bony hand around Marie-Laure’s shoulder, and at exactly two
o’clock by the bonging of the cathedral bells, the doctor returns with a man who says nothing
beyond good afternoon, who smells of dirt and clover, who lifts Madame Manec and carries her
out into the street and sets her on a horse cart as though she is a bag of milled oats and the horse’s
shoes clop away and the doctor strips the bedsheets and Marie-Laure finds Etienne in the corner of
the kitchen whispering: Madame is dead, Madame is dead.

---

Six

---

8 August 1944

---

Someone in the House
A
presence, an inhalation. Marie-Laure trains all of her senses on the entryway three flights below.
The outer gate sighs shut, then the front door closes.
In her head, her father reasons: