All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

Ici a été tué Buy Gaston Marcel agé
de 18 ans, mort pour la France le 11 août 1944.
Jutta sits on the ground. The sea is heavy and
slate-gray. There are no plaques for the Germans who died here.
Why has she come? What answers did she hope to find? On their second morning, they sit in the
Place Chateaubriand across from the historical museum, where sturdy benches face flower beds
ringed by shin-high metal half loops. Beneath awnings, tourists browse over blue-and-white-
striped sweaters and framed watercolors of corsair ships; a father sings as he puts his arm around
a daughter.
Max looks up from his book and says, “Mutti, what goes around the world but stays in a
corner?”
“I don’t know, Max.”
“A postage stamp.”
He smiles at her.
She says, “I’ll be right back.”
The man behind the museum counter is bearded, maybe fifty. Old enough to remember. She
opens her purse and unwraps the partially crushed wooden house and says in her best French, “My
brother had this. I believe he found it here. During the war.”
The man shakes his head, and she returns the house to her purse. Then he asks to see it again. He
holds the model under the lamp and turns it so that its recessed front door faces him.
“
Oui,
” he says finally. He gestures for her to wait outside, and a moment later, he locks the door
behind him and leads her and Max down streets narrow and sloping. After a dozen rights and lefts,
they stand in front of the house. A real-life counterpart to the little one that Max is right now
rotating in his hands.
“Number four rue Vauborel,” says the man. “The LeBlanc house. Been subdivided into holiday
flats for years.”
Lichens splotch the stone; leached minerals have left filigrees of stains. Flower boxes adorn the
windows, foaming over with geraniums. Could Werner have made the model? Bought it?
She says, “And was there a girl? Do you know about a girl?”
“Yes, there was a blind girl who lived in this house during the war. My mother told stories about

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her. As soon as the war ended, she moved away.”
Green dots strobe across Jutta’s vision; she feels as if she has been staring at the sun.
Max pulls her wrist. “Mutti, Mutti.”
“Why,” she says, lurching through the French, “would my brother have a miniature reproduction
of this house?”
“Maybe the girl who lived here would know? I can find her address for you.”
“Mutti, Mutti, look,” Max says, and yanks her hard enough to win her attention. She glances
down. “I think this little house opens. I think there’s a way to open it.”

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Laboratory
M
arie-Laure LeBlanc manages a small laboratory at the Museum of Natural History in Paris and
has contributed in significant ways to the study and literature of mollusks: a monograph on the
evolutionary rationale for the folds in West African cancellate nutmeg shells; an often-cited paper
on the sexual dimorphism of Caribbean volutes. She has named two new subspecies of chitons. As
a doctoral student, she traveled to Bora Bora and Bimini; she waded onto reefs in a sun hat with a
collecting bucket and harvested snails on three continents.
Marie-Laure is not a collector in the way that Dr. Geffard was, an amasser, always looking to
scurry down the scales of order, family, genus, species, and subspecies. She loves to be among the
living creatures, whether on the reefs or in her aquaria. To find the snails crawling along the rocks,
these tiny wet beings straining calcium from the water and spinning it into polished dreams on their
backs—it is enough. More than enough.
She and Etienne traveled while he could. They went to Sardinia and Scotland and rode on the
upper deck of a London airport bus as it skimmed below trees. He bought himself two nice
transistor radios, died gently in the bathtub at age eighty-two, and left her plenty of money.
Despite hiring an investigator, spending thousands of francs, and poring through reams of
German documentation, Marie-Laure and Etienne were never able to determine what exactly
happened to her father. They confirmed he had been a prisoner at a labor camp called Breitenau in
1942. And there was a record made by a camp doctor at a subcamp in Kassel, Germany, that a
Daniel LeBlanc contracted influenza in the first part of 1943. That’s all they have.
Marie-Laure still lives in the flat where she grew up, still walks to the museum. She has had two
lovers. The first was a visiting scientist who never returned, and the second was a Canadian
named John who scattered things—ties, coins, socks, breath mints—around any room he entered.
They met in graduate school; he flitted from lab to lab with a prodigious curiosity but little
perseverance. He loved ocean currents and architecture and Charles Dickens, and his variousness
made her feel limited, overspecialized. When Marie-Laure got pregnant, they separated peaceably,
with no flamboyance.
Hélène, their daughter, is nineteen now. Short-haired, petite, an aspiring violinist. Self-
possessed, the way children of a blind parent tend to be. Hélène lives with her mother, but the
three of them—John, Marie-Laure, and Hélène—eat lunch together every Friday.
It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from
which the rest of your life spiraled. Marie-Laure still cannot wear shoes that are too large, or
smell a boiled turnip, without experiencing revulsion. Neither can she listen to lists of names.
Soccer team rosters, citations at the end of journals, introductions at faculty meetings—always they
seem to her some vestige of the prison lists that never contained her father’s name.
She still counts storm drains: thirty-eight on the walk home from her laboratory. Flowers grow
on her tiny wrought-iron balcony, and in summer she can estimate what time of day it is by feeling
how wide the petals of the evening primroses have opened. When Hélène is out with her friends
and the apartment seems too quiet, Marie-Laure walks to the same brasserie: Le Village Monge,
just outside the Jardin des Plantes, and orders roasted duck in honor of Dr. Geffard.
Is she happy? For portions of every day, she is happy. When she’s standing beneath a tree, for
instance, listening to the leaves vibrating in the wind, or when she opens a package from a

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collector and that old ocean odor of shells comes washing out. When she remembers reading Jules
Verne to Hélène, and Hélène falling asleep beside her, the hot, hard weight of the girl’s head
against her ribs.
There are hours, though, when Hélène is late, and anxiety rides up through Marie-Laure’s spine,
and she leans over a lab table and becomes aware of all the other rooms in the museum around her,
the closets full of preserved frogs and eels and worms, the cabinets full of pinned bugs and
pressed ferns, the cellars full of bones, and she feels all of a sudden that she works in a
mausoleum, that the departments are systematic graveyards, that all these people—the scientists
and warders and guards and visitors—occupy galleries of the dead.
But such moments are few and far between. In her laboratory, six saltwater aquariums gurgle
reassuringly; on the back wall stand three cabinets with four hundred drawers in each, salvaged
years ago from the office of Dr. Geffard. Every fall, she teaches a class to undergraduates, and her
students come and go, smelling of salted beef, or cologne, or the gasoline of their motor scooters,
and she loves to ask them about their lives, to wonder what adventures they’ve had, what lusts,
what secret follies they carry in their hearts.
One Wednesday evening in July, her assistant knocks quietly on the open door to the laboratory.
Tanks bubble and filters hum and aquarium heaters click on or off. He says there is a woman to see
her. Marie-Laure keeps both hands on the keys of her Braille typewriter. “A collector?”
“I don’t think so, Doctor. She says that she got your address from a museum in Brittany.”
First notes of vertigo.
“She has a boy with her. They’re waiting at the end of the hall. Shall I tell her to try tomorrow?”
“What does she look like?”
“White hair.” He leans closer. “Badly dressed. Skin like poultry. She says she would like to see
you about a model house?”
Somewhere behind her Marie-Laure hears the tinkling sound of ten thousand keys quivering on
ten thousand hooks.
“Dr. LeBlanc?”
The room has tilted. In a moment she will slide off the edge.

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Visitor
“Y
ou learned French as a child,” Marie-Laure says, though how she manages to speak, she is not
sure.
“Yes. This is my son, Max.”
“