All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

fougères
in his vitrine, pinks and carmines and baby blues, and no one enters, and an
oscillating electric fan blows across his face to the left, then to the right, and he does not read or
move at all except to periodically reach a hand beneath his stool and grab a handful of biscuits
from a round tin and stuff them into his mouth.
Around four 
P.M.
, a small company of German soldiers strolls up the rue Vauborel. They are lean,
salmon-faced, and earnest; they have serious eyes; they carry their weapons barrel-down, slinging
them over their shoulders like clarinets. They laugh to one another and seem touched underneath
their helmets with a beneficent gold.
Claude understands that he ought to resent them, but he admires their competence and manners,
the clean efficiency with which they move. They always seem to be going somewhere and never
doubt that it is the right place to be going. Something his own country has lacked.
The soldiers turn down the rue St. Philippe and are gone. Claude’s fingers trace ovals across the
top of his vitrine. Upstairs his wife runs a vacuum cleaner; he can hear it coursing round and
round. He is nearly asleep when he sees the Parisian who has been living three doors down exit
the house of Etienne LeBlanc. A thin beak-nosed man who skulks outside the telegraph office,
whittling little wooden boxes.
The Parisian walks in the same direction as the German soldiers, placing the heel of one foot
against the toe of the other. He reaches the end of the street, scribbles something on a pad, turns
one hundred and eighty degrees, and walks back. When he reaches the end of the block, he stares
up at the Sajers’ house and makes several more notes. Glancing up, glancing down. Measuring.
Biting the eraser of his pencil as though uneasy.
Big Claude goes to the window. This too could be an opportunity. Occupation authorities will
want to know that a stranger is pacing off distances and making drawings of houses. They will
want to know what he looks like, who is sponsoring this activity. Who has sanctioned it.
This is good. This is excellent.

---

Time of the Ostriches
S
till they do not return to Paris. Still she does not go outside. Marie-Laure counts every day she
has been shut up in Etienne’s house. One hundred and twenty. One hundred and twenty-one. She
thinks of the transmitter in the attic, how it sent her grand-father’s voice flying over the sea—
Consider a single piece glowing in your family’s stove—
sailing like Darwin from Plymouth
Sound to Cape Verde to Patagonia to the Falkland Islands, over waves, across borders.
“Once you’re done with the model,” she asks her father, “does that mean I can go out?”
His sandpaper does not stop.
The stories Madame Manec’s visitors bring into the kitchen are terrifying and difficult to
believe. Parisian cousins nobody has heard from in decades now write letters begging for capons,
hams, hens. The dentist is selling wine through the mail. The perfumer is slaughtering lambs and
carrying them in suitcases on the train to Paris, where he sells the meat for an enormous profit.
In Saint-Malo, people are fined for locking their doors, for keeping doves, for hoarding meat.
Truffles disappear. Sparkling wine disappears. No eye contact. No chatter in doorways. No
sunbathing, no singing, no lovers strolling the ramparts in the evenings—such rules are not written
down, but they may as well be. Icy winds whirl in from the Atlantic and Etienne barricades
himself inside his brother’s old room and Marie-Laure endures the slow rain of hours by running
her fingers over his seashells down in his study, ordering them by size, by species, by morphology,
checking and rechecking their order, trying to make sure she has not missorted a single one.
Surely she could go out for a half hour? On the arm of her father? And yet each time her father
refuses, a voice echoes up from a chamber of her memory: