All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

Dearest Marie-Laure—
Your parcels arrived, two of them, dated months apart. Joy is not a strong enough word.
They let me keep the toothbrush and comb though not the paper they were wrapped in. Nor
the soap. How I wish they would let us have soap! They said our next reposting would be to
a chocolate factory but it was cardboard. All day we manufacture cardboard. What do they
do with so much?
All my life, Marie-Laure, I have been the one carrying the keys. Now I hear them
jangling in the mornings when they come for us, and every time I reach in my own pocket,
only to find it empty.
When I dream, I dream I am in the museum.
Remember your birthdays? How there were always two things on the table when you
woke? I’m sorry it turned out like this. If you ever wish to understand, look inside
Etienne’s house, inside the house. I know you will do the right thing. Though I wish the gift
were better.
My angel is leaving, so if I can get this to you, I will. I do not worry about you because I
know you are very smart and keeping yourself safe. I am safe too so you should not worry.
Thank Etienne for reading this to you. Thank in your heart the brave soul who carries this
letter away from me and on its way to you.
Your Papa

---

Treatments
V
on Rumpel’s doctor says that fascinating research is being done on mustard gases. That the anti-
tumor properties of any number of chemicals are being explored. The prognosis is looking up: in
test subjects, lymphoid tumors have been seen to reduce in size. But the injections make von
Rumpel dizzy and weak. In the days following, he can hardly manage to comb his hair or convince
his fingers to button his coat. His mind plays tricks, too: he walks into a room and forgets why he’s
there. He stares at a superior and forgets what the man just said. The sounds of passing cars are
like the tines of forks dragged along his nerves.
Tonight he wraps himself in hotel blankets and orders soup and unwraps a bundle from Vienna.
The mousy brown librarian has sent copies of the Tavernier and the Streeter and even—most
remarkably—stencil duplicates of de Boodt’s 1604 
Gemmarum et Lapidum Historia,
written
entirely in Latin. Everything she could find concerning the Sea of Flames. Nine paragraphs total.
It takes all his concentration to bring the texts into focus. A goddess of the earth who fell in love
with a god of the sea. A prince who recovered from catastrophic injuries, who ruled from within a
blur of light. Von Rumpel closes his eyes and sees a flame-haired goddess charge through the
tunnels of the earth, drops of flame glowing in her wake. He hears a priest with no tongue say, 
The
keeper of the stone will live forever.
He hears his father say, 
See obstacles as opportunities,
Reinhold. See obstacles as inspirations.

---

Heaven
F
or a few weeks, Madame Manec gets better. She promises Etienne she will remember her age,
not try to be everything to everyone, not fight the war by herself. One day in early June, almost
exactly two years after the invasion of France, she and Marie-Laure walk through a field of Queen
Anne’s lace east of Saint-Malo. Madame Manec told Etienne that they were going to see if
strawberries were available at the Saint-Servan market, but Marie-Laure is certain that when they
stopped to greet a woman on the way here, Madame dropped off one envelope and picked up
another.
At Madame’s suggestion, they lie down in the weeds, and Marie-Laure listens to honeybees
mine the flowers and tries to imagine their journeys as Etienne described them: each worker
following a rivulet of odor, looking for ultraviolet patterns in the flowers, filling baskets on her
hind legs with pollen grains, then navigating, drunk and heavy, all the way home.
How do they know what parts to play, those little bees?
Madame Manec takes off her shoes and lights a cigarette and lets out a contented groan. Insects
drone: wasps, hoverflies, a passing dragonfly—Etienne has taught Marie-Laure to distinguish each
by its sound.
“What’s a roneo machine, Madame?”
“Something to help make pamphlets.”
“What does it have to do with that woman we met?”
“Nothing to trouble yourself over, dear.”
Horses nicker, and the wind comes off the sea gentle and cool and full of smells.
“Madame? What do I look like?”
“You have many thousands of freckles.”
“Papa used to say they were like stars in heaven. Like apples in a tree.”
“They are little brown dots, child. Thousands of little brown dots.”
“That sounds ugly.”
“On you, they are beautiful.”
“Do you think, Madame, that in heaven we will really get to see God face-to-face?”
“We might.”
“What if you’re blind?”
“I’d expect that if God wants us to see something, we’ll see it.”
“Uncle Etienne says heaven is like a blanket babies cling to. He says people have flown
airplanes ten kilometers above the earth and found no kingdoms there. No gates, no angels.”
Madame Manec cracks off a ragged chain of coughs that sends tremors of fear through Marie-
Laure. “You are thinking of your father,” she finally says. “You have to believe your father will
return.”
“Don’t you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don’t you ever want proof?”
Madame Manec rests a hand on Marie-Laure’s forehead. The thick hand that first reminded her
of a gardener’s or a geologist’s. “You must never stop believing. That’s the most important thing.”
The Queen Anne’s lace sways on its taproots, and the bees do their steady work. If only life
were like a Jules Verne novel, thinks Marie-Laure, and you could page ahead when you most
needed to, and learn what would happen. “Madame?”

---

“Yes, Marie.”
“What do you think they eat in heaven?”
“I’m not so sure they need to eat in heaven.”
“Not eat! You would not like that, would you?”
But Madame Manec does not laugh the way Marie-Laure expects her to. She doesn’t say
anything at all. Her breath clatters in and out.
“Did I offend you, Madame?”
“No, child.”
“Are we in danger?”
“No more than any other day.”
The grasses toss and shimmy. The horses nicker. Madame Manec says, almost whispering,
“Now that I think about it, child, I expect heaven is a lot like this.”

---

Frederick
W
erner spends the last of his money on train fare. The afternoon is bright enough, but Berlin seems
not to want to accept the sunlight, as though its buildings have become gloomier and dirtier and
more splotchy in the months since he last visited. Though perhaps what has changed are the eyes
that see it.
Rather than ring the bell right away, Werner laps the block three times. The apartment windows
are uniformly dark; whether unlit or blacked out, he cannot tell. At a certain point on each circuit,
he passes a storefront filled with undressed mannequins, and though he knows each time that it is
merely a trick of the light, he cannot stop his eyes from seeing them as corpses strung up by wires.
Finally he rings the bell for #2. No one buzzes down, and he notices from the nameplates that
they are no longer in #2. Their name is on #5.
He rings. A returning buzz issues from inside.
The lift is out of order, so he walks up.
The door opens. Franny. With the downy face and swinging flaps of skin under her arms. She
gives him a look that one trapped person gives another; then Frederick’s mother swishes out of a
side room wearing tennis clothes. “Why, Werner—”
She loses herself momentarily in troubled reverie, surrounded by sleek furniture, some of it
wrapped in thick wool blankets. Does she blame him? Does she think he is partially responsible?
Perhaps he is? But then she comes awake and kisses him on both cheeks, and her bottom lip
quivers lightly. As if his materialization is preventing her from keeping certain shadows at bay.
“He won’t know you. Don’t try to make him remember. It will only upset him. But you are here.
I suppose that’s something. I was about to go, very sorry I cannot stay. Show him in, Franny.”
The maid leads him into a grand drawing room, its ceilings aswirl with plaster flourishes, its
walls painted a delicate eggshell blue. No paintings have been hung yet and the shelves wait empty
and cardboard boxes stand open on the floor. Frederick sits at a glass-topped table at the back of
the room, both table and boy looking small amid the clutter. His hair has been combed hard to one
side, and his loose cotton shirt has bunched up behind his shoulders so that his collar is skewed.
His eyes do not rise to meet his visitor’s.
He wears his same old black-framed glasses. Someone has been feeding him, and the spoon
rests on the glass table and blobs of porridge cling to Frederick’s whiskers and his place mat,
which is a woolen thing featuring happy pink-cheeked children in clogs. Werner cannot look at it.
Franny bends and pushes three more spoonfuls into Frederick’s mouth and wipes his chin, folds
up his place mat, and walks through a swinging door into what must be a kitchen. Werner stands
with his hands crossed in front of his belt.
One year. More than that. Frederick has to shave now, Werner realizes. Or someone has to shave
him.
“Hello, Frederick.”
Frederick rolls his head back and looks toward Werner through his smudged lenses down the
line of his nose.
“I’m Werner. Your mother said you might not remember? I’m your friend from school.”
Frederick seems not so much to be looking at Werner as through him. On the table is a stack of
paper, on top of which a thick and clumsy spiral has been drawn by a heavy hand.

---

“Did you make this?” Werner lifts the topmost drawing. Beneath that page is another, then
another, thirty or forty spirals, each taking up a whole sheet, all in the same severe lead. Frederick
drops his chin to his chest, possibly a nod. Werner glances around: a trunk, a box of linens, the
pale blue of the walls and the rich white of the wainscot. Late sunlight glides through tall French
windows, and the air tastes of silver polish. This fifth-floor apartment is indeed nicer than the
second-floor one—the ceilings high and decorated with punched tin and stucco flourishes: fruits,
flowers, banana leaves.
Frederick’s lip is curled and his upper teeth show and a string of drool swings from his chin and
touches the paper. Werner, unable to bear it a second longer, calls for the maid. Franny peeks out of
the swinging door. “Where,” he asks, “is that book? The one with the birds? In the gold
slipcover?”
“I don’t think we ever had a book like that.”
“No, you did—”
Franny only shakes her head and laces her fingers across her apron.
Werner lifts the flaps of boxes, peering in. “Surely it’s around here.”
Frederick has begun to draw a new spiral on a blank sheet.
“Maybe in this?”
Franny stands beside Werner and plucks his wrist off the crate he is about to open. “I do not
think,” she repeats, “we ever had a book like that.”
Werner’s whole body has started to itch. Out the huge windows, the lindens toss back and forth.
The light fades. An unlit sign atop a building two blocks away reads,