All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

terre; au haricot, je suis dans l’eau—
trying and failing to summon the courage to go out. She no
longer begs Madame Manec to take her to the train station, to write another letter, to spend another
futile afternoon at the prefecture trying to petition occupation authorities to locate her father. She
becomes unreachable, sullen. She does not bathe, does not warm herself by the kitchen fire, ceases
to ask if she can go outdoors. She hardly eats. “The museum says they’re searching, child,”
whispers Madame Manec, but when she tries to press her lips to Marie-Laure’s forehead, the girl
jerks backward as if burned.
The museum replies to Etienne’s appeals; they report that Marie-Laure’s father never arrived.
“Never arrived?” says Etienne aloud.
This becomes the question that drags its teeth through Marie-Laure’s mind. Why didn’t he make
it to Paris? If he couldn’t, why didn’t he return to Saint-Malo?
I will never leave you, not in a million years.
She wants only to go home, to stand in their four-room flat and hear the chestnut tree rustle
outside her window; hear the cheese seller raise his awning; feel her father’s fingers close around
hers.
If only she had begged him to stay.
Now everything in the house scares her: the creaking stairs, shuttered windows, empty rooms.
The clutter and silence. Etienne tries performing silly experiments to cheer her: a vinegar volcano,
a tornado in a bottle. “Can you hear it, Marie? Spinning in there?” She does not feign interest.
Madame Manec brings her omelets, cassoulet, brochettes of fish, fabricating miracles out of ration
tickets and the dregs of her cupboards, but Marie-Laure refuses to eat.
“Like a snail,” she overhears Etienne say outside her door. “Curled up so tight in there.”
But she is angry. At Etienne for doing so little, at Madame Manec for doing so much, at her
father for not being here to help her understand his absence. At her eyes for failing her. At
everything and everyone. Who knew love could kill you? She spends hours kneeling by herself on
the sixth floor with the window open and the sea hurling arctic air into the room, her fingers on the
model of Saint-Malo slowly going numb. South to the Gate of Dinan. West to the Plage du Môle.
Back to the rue Vauborel. Every second Etienne’s house grows colder; every second it feels as if
her father slips farther away.

---

Prisoner
O
ne February morning, the cadets are roused from their beds at two 
A.M.
and driven out into the
glitter. In the center of the quadrangle, torches burn. Keg-chested Bastian waddles out with his
bare legs showing beneath his coat.
Frank Volkheimer emerges from the shadows, dragging a tattered and skeletal man in
mismatched shoes. Volkheimer sets him down beside the commandant, where a stake has been
driven into the snow. Methodically Volkheimer ties the man’s torso to the stake.
A vault of stars hangs overhead; the collective breath of the cadets mingles slowly,
nightmarishly above the courtyard.
Volkheimer retreats; the commandant paces.
“You boys would not believe what a creature this is. What a foul beast, a centaur, an
Untermensch
.”
Everyone cranes to see. The prisoner’s ankles are cuffed and his arms bound from wrists to
forearms. His thin shirt has split at the seams and he gazes into some middle distance with
hypothermic slackness. He looks Polish. Russian, maybe. Despite his fetters, he manages to sway
lightly back and forth.
Bastian says, “This man escaped from a work camp. Tried to violate a farmhouse and steal a
liter of fresh milk. He was stopped before he could do something more nefarious.” He gestures
vaguely beyond the walls. “This barbarian would tear out your throats in a second if we let him.”
Since the visit to Berlin, a great dread has been blooming inside Werner’s chest. It came
gradually, as slow-moving as the sun’s passage across the sky, but now he finds himself writing
letters to Jutta in which he must skirt the truth, must contend that everything is fine when things do
not feel fine. He descends into dreams in which Frederick’s mother mutates into a leering, small-
mouthed demon and lowers Dr. Hauptmann’s triangles over his head.
A thousand frozen stars preside over the quad. The cold is invasive, mindless.
“This look?” Bastian says, and flourishes his fat hand. “The way he’s got nothing left? A
German soldier never reaches this point. There’s a name for this look. It’s called ‘circling the
drain.’ ”
The boys try not to shiver. The prisoner blinks down at the scene as if from a very high perch.
Volkheimer returns carrying a clattering raft of buckets; two other seniors uncoil a water hose
across the quadrangle. Bastian explains: First the instructors. Then upperclassmen. Everyone will
file past and soak the prisoner with a bucket of water. Every man in the school.
They start. One by one, each instructor takes a full bucket from Volkheimer and flings its
contents at the prisoner a few feet away. Cheers rise into the frozen night.
At the first two or three dousings, the prisoner comes awake, rocking back on his heels. Vertical
creases appear between his eyes; he looks like someone trying to remember something vital.
Among the instructors in their dark capes, Dr. Hauptmann goes past, his gloved fingers pinching
his collar around his throat. Hauptmann accepts his bucket and throws a sheet of water and doesn’t
linger to watch it land.
The water keeps coming. The prisoner’s face empties. He slumps over the ropes propping him
up, and his torso slides down the stake, and every now and then Volkheimer comes out of the
shadows, looming fantastically huge, and the prisoner straightens again.

---

The upperclassmen vanish inside the castle. The buckets make a muted, frozen clanking as they
are refilled. The sixteen-year-olds finish. The fifteen-year-olds finish. The cheers lose their gusto
and a pure longing to flee floods Werner. Run. Run.
Three boys until his turn. Two boys. Werner tries to float images in front of his eyes, but the only
ones that come are wretched: the hauling machine above Pit Nine; the hunched miners walking as if
they dragged the weight of enormous chains. The boy from the entrance exams trembling before he
fell. Everyone trapped in their roles: orphans, cadets, Frederick, Volkheimer, the old Jewess who
lives upstairs. Even Jutta.
When his turn arrives, Werner throws the water like all the others and the splash hits the
prisoner in the chest and a perfunctory cheer rises. He joins the cadets waiting to be released. Wet
boots, wet cuffs; his hands have become so numb, they do not seem his own.
Five boys later, it is Frederick’s turn. Frederick, who clearly cannot see well without his
glasses. Who has not been cheering when each bucketful of water finds its mark. Who is frowning
at the prisoner as though he recognizes something there.
And Werner knows what Frederick is going to do.
Frederick has to be nudged forward by the boy behind him. The upperclassman hands him a
bucket and Frederick pours it out on the ground.
Bastian steps forward. His face flares scarlet in the cold. “Give him another.”
Again Frederick sloshes it onto the ice at his feet. He says in a small voice, “He is already
finished, sir.”
The upperclassman hands over a third pail. “Throw it,” commands Bastian. The night steams,
the stars burn, the prisoner sways, the boys watch, the commandant tilts his head. Frederick pours
the water onto the ground. “I will not.”

---

Plage du Môle
M
arie-Laure’s father has been missing without word for twenty-nine days. She wakes to Madame
Manec’s blocky pumps climbing to the third floor the fourth the fifth.
Etienne’s voice on the landing outside his study: “Don’t.”
“He won’t know.”
“She is my responsibility.”
Some unexpected steel emerges in Madame Manec’s voice. “I cannot stand by one moment
longer.”
She climbs the last flight. Marie-Laure’s door creaks open; the old woman crosses the floor and
places her heavy-boned hand on Marie-Laure’s forehead. “You’re awake?”
Marie-Laure rolls herself into the corner and speaks through linens. “Yes, Madame.”
“I’m taking you out. Bring your cane.”
Marie-Laure dresses herself; Madame Manec meets her at the bottom of the stairs with a heel of
bread. She ties a scarf over Marie-Laure’s head, buttons her coat all the way to the collar, and
opens the front door. Morning in late February, and the air smells rainy and calm.
Marie-Laure hesitates, listening. Her heart beats two four six eight.
“Hardly anyone is out yet, dear,” whispers Madame Manec. “And we are doing nothing wrong.”
The gate creaks.
“One step down, now straight on, that’s it.” The cobbled street presses up irregularly against
Marie-Laure’s shoes; the tip of her cane catches, vibrates, catches again. A light rain falls on
rooftops, trickles through runnels, beads up on her scarf. Sound ricochets between the high houses;
she feels, as she did in her first hour here, as if she has stepped into a maze.
Far above them, someone shakes a duster out a window. A cat mewls. What terrors gnash their
teeth out here? What was Papa so anxious to protect her from? They make one turn, then a second,
and then Madame Manec steers her left where Marie-Laure does not expect her to, where the city
walls, furred with moss, have been scrolling along unbroken, and they’re stepping through a
gateway.
“Madame?”
They pass out of the city.
“Stairs here, mind yourself, one down, two, there you are, easy as cake . . .”
The ocean. The ocean! Right in front of her! So close all this time. It sucks and booms and
splashes and rumbles; it shifts and dilates and falls over itself; the labyrinth of Saint-Malo has
opened onto a portal of sound larger than anything she has ever experienced. Larger than the Jardin
des Plantes, than the Seine, larger than the grandest galleries of the museum. She did not imagine it
properly; she did not comprehend the scale.
When she raises her face to the sky, she can feel the thousand tiny spines of raindrops melt onto
her cheeks, her forehead. She hears Madame Manec’s raspy breathing, and the deep sounding of
the sea among the rocks, and the calls of someone down the beach echoing off the high walls. In
her mind she can hear her father polishing locks. Dr. Geffard walking along the rows of his
drawers. Why didn’t they tell her it would be like this?
“That’s Monsieur Radom calling to his dog,” says Madame Manec. “Nothing to worry about.
Here’s my arm. Sit down and take off your shoes. Roll up your coat sleeves.”

---

Marie-Laure does as she is told. “Are they watching?”
“The 
Boches
? So what if they are? An old woman and a girl? I’ll tell them we’re digging clams.
What can they do?”
“Uncle says they’ve buried bombs in the beaches.”
“Don’t you worry about that. He is frightened of an ant.”
“He says the moon pulls the ocean back.”
“The moon?”
“Sometimes the sun pulls too. He says that around the islands, the tides make funnels that can
swallow boats whole.”
“We aren’t going anywhere near there, dear. We’re just on the beach.”
Marie-Laure unwinds her scarf and Madame Manec takes it. Briny, weedy, pewter-colored air
slips down her collar.
“Madame?”
“Yes?”
“What do I do?”
“Just walk.”
She walks. Now there are cold round pebbles beneath her feet. Now crackling weeds. Now
something smoother: wet, unwrinkled sand. She bends and spreads her fingers. It’s like cold silk.
Cold, sumptuous silk onto which the sea has laid offerings: pebbles, shells, barnacles. Tiny slips
of wrack. Her fingers dig and reach; the drops of rain touch the back of her neck, the backs of her
hands. The sand pulls the heat from her fingertips, from the soles of her feet.
A months-old knot inside Marie-Laure begins to loosen. She moves along the tide line, almost
crawling at first, and imagines the beach stretching off in either direction, ringing the promontory,
embracing the outer islands, the whole filigreed tracery of the Breton coastline with its wild capes
and crumbling batteries and vine-choked ruins. She imagines the walled city behind her, its soaring
ramparts, its puzzle of streets. All of it suddenly as small as Papa’s model. But what surrounds the
model is not something her father conveyed to her; what’s beyond the model is the most compelling
thing.
A flock of gulls squalls overhead. Each of the hundred thousand tiny grains of sand in her fists
grinds against its neighbor. She feels her father pick her up and spin her around three times.
No occupation soldier comes to arrest them; no one even speaks to them. In three hours Marie-
Laure’s numb fingers discover a stranded jellyfish, an encrusted buoy, and a thousand polished
stones. She wades to her knees and soaks the hem of her dress. When Madame Manec finally leads
her—damp and dazzled—back to the rue Vauborel, Marie-Laure climbs all five flights and raps on
the door of Etienne’s study and stands before him, wet sand stuck all over her face.
“You were gone a long time,” he murmurs. “I worried.”
“Here, Uncle.” From her pockets, she brings up shells. Barnacles, cowries, thirteen lumps of
quartz gritty with sand. “I brought you this. And this and this and this.”

---

Lapidary
I
n three months, Sergeant Major von Rumpel has traveled to Berlin and Stuttgart; he has assessed
the value of a hundred confiscated rings, a dozen diamond bracelets, a Latvian cigarette case in
which a lozenge of blue topaz twinkled; now, back in Paris, he has slept at the Grand Hôtel for a
week and sent forth his queries like birds. Every night the moment returns to him: when he clasped
that pear-shaped diamond between his thumb and forefinger, made huge by the lens of his loupe,
and believed he held the one-hundred-and-thirty-three-carat Sea of Flames.
He stared into the stone’s ice-blue interior, where miniature mountain ranges seemed to send
back fire, crimsons and corals and violets, polygons of color twinkling and coruscating as he
rotated it, and he almost convinced himself that the stories were true, that centuries ago a sultan’s
son wore a crown that blinded visitors, that the keeper of the diamond could never die, that the
fabled stone had caromed down through the pegs of history and dropped into his palm.
There was joy in that moment—triumph. But an unexpected fear mixed with it; the stone looked
like something enchanted, not meant for human eyes. An object that, once looked at, could never be
forgotten.
But. Eventually reason won out. The joints of the diamond’s facets were not quite as sharp as
they should have been. The girdle just slightly waxy. More telling, the stone betrayed no delicate
cracks, no pinpoints, not a single inclusion.