All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

Poor child.
Poor Monsieur LeBlanc.
Like they’re cursed.
If only her father would come through the kitchen door. Smile at the ladies, set his palms on
Marie-Laure’s cheeks. Five minutes with him. One minute.
After four days, Etienne comes out of his room. The stairs creak as he descends, and the women
in the kitchen fall silent. In a grave voice, he asks everyone to please leave. “I needed time to say
goodbye, and now I must look after myself and my niece. Thank you.”
As soon as the kitchen door has closed, he turns the dead bolts and takes Marie-Laure’s hands.
“All the lights are off now. Very good. Please, stand over here.”
Chairs slide away. The kitchen table slides away. She can hear him fumbling at the ring in the
center of the floor: the trapdoor comes up. He goes down into the cellar.
“Uncle? What do you need?”
“This,” he calls.
“What is it?”
“An electric saw.”
She can feel something bright kindle in her abdomen. Etienne starts up the stairs, Marie-Laure
trailing behind. Second floor, third, fourth fifth sixth, left turn into her grandfather’s room. He
opens the doors of the gigantic wardrobe, lifts out his brother’s old clothes, and places them on the
bed. He runs an extension cord out onto the landing and plugs it in. He says, “It will be loud.”
She says, “Good.”
Etienne climbs into the back of the wardrobe, and the saw yowls to life. The sound permeates
the walls, the floor, Marie-Laure’s chest. She wonders how many neighbors hear it, if somewhere
a German at his breakfast has cocked his head to listen.
Etienne removes a rectangle from the back of the wardrobe, then cuts through the attic door
behind it. He shuts down the saw and wriggles through the raw hole, up the ladder behind it, and

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into the garret. She follows. All morning Etienne crawls along the attic floor with cables and
pliers and tools her fingers do not understand, weaving himself into the center of what she
imagines as an intricate electronic net. He murmurs to himself; he fetches thick booklets or
electrical components from various rooms on the lower stories. The attic creaks; houseflies draw
electric-blue loops in the air. Late in the evening, Marie-Laure descends the ladder and falls
asleep in her grandfather’s bed to the sound of her great-uncle working above her.
When she wakes, barn swallows are chirring beneath the eaves and music is raining down
through the ceiling.
“Clair de Lune,” a song that makes her think of leaves fluttering, and of the hard ribbons of sand
beneath her feet at low tide. The music slinks and rises and settles back to earth, and then the young
voice of her long-dead grandfather speaks: 
There are ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood
vessels in the human body, children! Almost enough to wind around the earth two and a half
times . . .
Etienne comes down the seven ladder rungs and squeezes through the back of the wardrobe and
takes her hands in his. Before he speaks, she knows what he will say. “Your father asked me to
keep you safe.”
“I know.”
“This will be dangerous. It is not a game.”
“I want to do it. Madame would want—”
“Tell it to me. Tell me the whole routine.”
“Twenty-two paces down the rue Vauborel to the rue d’Estrées. Then right for sixteen storm
drains. Left on the rue Robert Surcouf. Nine more storm drains to the bakery. I go to the counter
and say, ‘One ordinary loaf, please.’ ”
“How will she reply?”
“She will be surprised. But I am supposed to say, ‘One ordinary loaf,’ and she is supposed to
say, ‘And how is your uncle?’ ”
“She will ask about me?”
“She is supposed to. That’s how she will know that you are willing to help. It’s what Madame
suggested. Part of the protocol.”
“And you will say?”
“I will say, ‘My uncle is well, thank you.’ And I will take the loaf and put it in my knapsack and
come home.”
“This will happen even now? Without Madame?”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“How will you pay?”
“A ration ticket.”
“Do we have any of those?”
“In the drawer downstairs. And you have money, don’t you?”
“Yes. We have some money. How will you come back home?”
“Straight back.”
“By which route?”
“Nine storm drains down the rue Robert Surcouf. Right on the rue d’Estrées. Sixteen drains back
to the rue Vauborel. I know it all, Uncle, I have it memorized. I’ve been to the bakery three hundred
times.”
“You mustn’t go anywhere else. You mustn’t go to the beaches.”
“I’ll come directly back.”

---

“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“Then go, Marie-Laure. Go like the wind.”

---

East
T
hey ride in boxcars through Lodz, Warsaw, Brest. For miles, out the open door, Werner sees no
sign of humans save the occasional railcar capsized beside the tracks, twisted and scarred by some
kind of explosion. Soldiers clamber on and off, lean, pale, each carrying a pack, rifle, and steel
helmet. They sleep despite noise, despite cold, despite hunger, as though desperate to stay
removed from the waking world for as long as possible.
Rows of pines divide endless metal-colored plains. The day is sunless. Neumann Two wakes
and urinates out the door and takes the pillbox from his coat and swallows two or three more
tablets. “Russia,” he says, though how he has marked the transition, Werner cannot guess.
The air smells of steel.
At dusk the train stops and Neumann Two leads Werner on foot through rows of ruined houses,
beams and bricks lying in charred heaps. What walls stand are lined with the black crosshatchings
of machine-gun fire. It’s nearly dark when Werner is delivered to a musclebound captain dining
alone on a sofa that consists of a wooden frame and springs. In a tin bowl, in the captain’s lap,
steams a cylinder of boiled gray meat. He studies Werner awhile without saying anything, wearing
a look not of disappointment but tired amusement.
“Not making them any bigger, are they?”
“No, sir.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen, sir.”
The captain laughs. “Twelve, more like.” He slices off a circle of meat and chews a long time
and finally reaches into his mouth with two fingers and flings away a string of gristle. “You’ll want
to acquaint yourself with the equipment. See if you can do better than the last one they sent.”
Neumann Two leads Werner to the open back of an unwashed Opel Blitz, a cross-country three-
ton truck with a wooden shell built onto the back. Dented gasoline cans are strapped to one flank.
Bullet trails have left wandering perforations down the other. The leaden dusk drains away.
Neumann Two brings Werner a kerosene lantern. “Gadgets are inside.”
Then he vanishes. No explanations. Welcome to war. Tiny moths swirl in the lantern light.
Fatigue settles into every part of Werner. Is this Dr. Hauptmann’s idea of a reward or a
punishment? He longs to sit on the benches in Children’s House again, to hear Frau Elena’s songs,
to feel the heat pumping off the potbelly stove and the high voice of Siegfried Fischer rhapsodizing
about U-boats and fighter planes, to see Jutta drawing at the far end of the table, sketching out the
thousand windows of her imaginary city.
Inside the truck box lives a smell: clay, spilled diesel mixed with something putrid. Three
square windows reflect the lantern light. It’s a radio truck. On a bench along the left wall sit a pair
of grimy listening decks the size of bed pillows. A folding RF antenna that can be raised and
lowered from inside. Three headsets, a weapon rack, storage lockers. Wax pencils, compasses,
maps. And here, in battered cases, wait two of the transceivers he designed with Dr. Hauptmann.
To see them all the way out here soothes him, as though he has turned and found an old friend
floating beside him in the middle of the sea. He tugs the first transceiver from its case and
unscrews the back plate. Its meter is cracked, several fuses are blown, and the transmitter plug is
missing. He fishes for tools, a socket key, copper wire. He looks out the open door across the

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silent camp to where stars are spun in thousands across the sky.
Do Russian tanks wait out there? Training their guns on the lantern light?
He remembers Herr Siedler’s big walnut Philco. Stare into the wires, concentrate, assess.
Eventually a pattern will assert itself.
When he next looks up, a soft glow shows behind a line of distant trees, as if something is
burning out there. Dawn. A half mile away, two boys with sticks slouch behind a drove of bony
cattle. Werner is opening the second transceiver case when a giant appears in the back of the truck
shell.
“Pfennig.”
The man hangs his long arms from the top bar of the truck canopy; he eclipses the ruined village,
the fields, the rising sun.
“Volkheimer?”

---

One Ordinary Loaf
T
hey stand in the kitchen with the curtains drawn. She still feels the exhilaration of leaving the
bakery with the warm weight of the loaf in her knapsack.
Etienne tears apart the bread. “There.” He sets a tiny paper scroll, no bigger than a cowrie shell,
in her palm.
“What does it say?”
“Numbers. Lots of them. The first three might be frequencies, I can’t be sure. The fourth—
twenty-three hundred—might be an hour.”
“Will we do it now?”
“We’ll wait until it is dark.”
Etienne works wires up through the house, threading them behind walls, connecting one to a bell
on the third floor, beneath the telephone table, another to a second bell in the attic, and a third to
the front gate. Three times he has Marie-Laure test it: she stands in the street and swings open the
outer gate, and from deep inside the house come two faint rings.
Next he builds a false back into the wardrobe, installing it on a sliding track so it can be opened
from either side. At dusk they drink tea and chew the mealy, dense bread from the Ruelles’ bakery.
When it is fully dark, Marie-Laure follows her great-uncle up the stairs, through the sixth-floor
room, and up the ladder into the attic. Etienne raises the heavy telescoping antenna alongside the
line of the chimney. He flips switches, and the attic fills with a delicate crackle.
“Ready?” He sounds like her father when he was about to say something silly. In her memory,
Marie-Laure hears the two policemen: