All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

palourdes—
with shallots
and serves them alongside mushrooms and quarters of two hard-boiled eggs: the only two eggs,
she reports, she could find in the city. Etienne talks in his soft voice about the eruption of Krakatoa,
how, in all of his earliest memories, ash from the East Indies turned the sunsets over Saint-Malo
bloodred, big veins of crimson glowing above the sea every evening; and to Marie-Laure, her
pockets lined with sand, her face aglow from wind, the occupation seems, for a moment, a
thousand miles away. She misses Papa, Paris, Dr. Geffard, the gardens, her books, her pinecones
—all are holes in her life. But over these past few weeks, her existence has become tolerable. At
least, out on the beaches, her privation and fear are rinsed away by wind and color and light.
Most afternoons, after making the morning rounds with Madame, Marie-Laure sits on her bed
with the window open and travels her hands over her father’s model of the city. Her fingers pass
the shipbuilder’s sheds on the rue de Chartres, pass Madame Ruelle’s bakery on the rue Robert
Surcouf. In her imagination she hears the bakers sliding about on the flour-slick floor, moving in
the way she imagines ice skaters must move, baking loaves in the same four-hundred-year-old
oven that Monsieur Ruelle’s great-great-grandfather used. Her fingers pass the cathedral steps—
here an old man clips roses in a garden; here, beside the library, Crazy Harold Bazin murmurs to
himself as he peers with his one eye into an empty wine bottle; here is the convent; here’s the
restaurant Chez Chuche beside the fish market; here’s Number 4 rue Vauborel, its door slightly
recessed, where downstairs Madame Manec kneels beside her bed, shoes off, rosary beads
slipping through fingers, a prayer for practically every soul in the city. Here, in a fifth-floor room,
Etienne walks beside his empty shelves, trailing his fingers over the places where his radios once
stood. And somewhere beyond the borders of the model, beyond the borders of France, in a place
her fingers cannot reach, her father sits in a cell, a dozen of his whittled models on a windowsill, a
guard coming toward him with what she wants very badly to believe is a feast—
quail and duck
and stewed rabbit. Chicken legs and potatoes fried with bacon and apricot tarts
—a dozen trays,
a dozen platters, as much as he can eat.

---

Nadel im Heuhaufen
M
idnight. Dr. Hauptmann’s hounds bound through frozen fields beside the school, drops of
quicksilver skittering through the white. Behind them comes Hauptmann in his fur cap, walking
with short strides as though counting paces over some great distance. In the rear comes Werner,
carrying the pair of transceivers he and Hauptmann have been testing for months.
Hauptmann turns, his face bright. “Nice spot here, good sight lines, set it down, Pfennig. I’ve
sent our friend Volkheimer ahead. He’s somewhere on the hill.” Werner sees no tracks, only a
humped swale of glitter in the moonlight, and the white forest beyond.
“He has the KX transmitter in an ammunition box,” Hauptmann says. “He is to conceal himself
and broadcast steadily until we find him or his battery dies. Even I do not know where he is.” He
smacks his gloved hands together, and the dogs swirl around him, their breath smoking. “Ten
square kilometers. Locate the transmitter, locate our friend.”
Werner looks out at the ten thousand snow-mantled trees. “Out there, sir?”
“Out there.” Hauptmann draws a flask from his pocket and unscrews it without looking at it.
“This is the fun part, Pfennig.”
Hauptmann stamps a clearing in the snow, and Werner sets up the first transceiver, uses
measuring tape to pace off two hundred meters, and sets up the second. He uncoils the grounding
wires, raises the aerials, and switches them on. Already his fingers are numb.
“Try eighty meters, Pfennig. Typically teams won’t know what band to search. But for tonight,
our first field test, we’ll cheat a bit.”
Werner puts on the headset and fills his ears with static. He dials up the RF gain, adjusts the
filter. Before long, he has tuned in both receivers to Volkheimer’s transmitter pinging along. “I
have him, sir.”
Hauptmann starts smiling in earnest. The dogs caper and sneeze with excitement. From his coat
he produces a grease pencil. “Just do it on the radio. Teams won’t always have paper, not in the
field.”
Werner sketches out the equation on the metal casing of the transceiver and starts plugging in
numbers. Hauptmann hands him a slide rule. In two minutes Werner has a vector and a distance:
two and a half kilometers.
“And the map?” Hauptmann’s little aristocratic face gleams with pleasure.
Werner uses a protractor and compass to draw the lines.
“Lead on, Pfennig.”
Werner folds the map into his coat pocket, packs up the transceivers, and carries one in each
hand like matching suitcases. Tiny snow crystals sift down through the moonlight. Soon the school
and its outbuildings look like toys on the white plain below. The moon slips lower, a half-lidded
eye, and the dogs stick close to their master, mouths steaming, and Werner sweats.
They drop into a ravine and climb out. One kilometer. Two.
“Sublimity,” Hauptmann says, panting, “you know what that is, Pfennig?” He is tipsy, animated,
almost prattling. Never has Werner seen him like this. “It’s the instant when one thing is about to
become something else. Day to night, caterpillar to butterfly. Fawn to doe. Experiment to result.
Boy to man.”
Far up a third climb, Werner unfolds the map and double-checks his bearings with a compass.

---

Everywhere the silent trees gleam. No tracks save their own. The school lost behind them. “Shall I
set out the transceivers again, sir?”
Hauptmann puts his fingers to his lips.
Werner triangulates again and sees how close they are to his original reading—under half a
kilometer. He repacks the transceivers and picks up his pace, hunting now, on the scent, all three
dogs sensing it too, and Werner thinks: I have found a way in, I am solving it, the numbers are
becoming real. And the trees unload siftings of snow and the dogs freeze and twitch their noses,
locked on a scent, pointing as if at a pheasant, and Hauptmann holds up a palm, and finally Werner,
coming up through a gap between trees, laboring as he carries the big cases, sees the form of a man
lying faceup in the snow, transmitter at his feet, antenna rising into the low branches.
The Giant.
The dogs tremble in their stances. Hauptmann keeps his palm up. With his other hand, he
unholsters his pistol. “This close, Pfennig, you cannot hesitate.”
Volkheimer’s left side faces them. Werner can see the vapor of his breath rise and disperse.
Hauptmann aims his Walther right at Volkheimer, and for a long and startling moment, Werner is
certain that his teacher is about to shoot the boy, that they are in grave danger, every single cadet,
and he cannot help but hear Jutta as she stood beside the canal: