All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

No louder than the breeze. The undertone of the fires.
She traces the lines of the cables until she is sure she has the microphone in her hand.
To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and
buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds
ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies
rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their
huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in
cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the
tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk
deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four
sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from
stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead
whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who
will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in
the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.
Rather than my reading it to you, maybe you could read it to me?
With her free hand, she opens the novel in her lap. Finds the lines with her fingers. Brings the
microphone to her lips.

---

Voice
O
n the morning of his fourth day trapped beneath whatever is left of the Hotel of Bees, Werner is
listening to the repaired transceiver, feathering the tuning knob back and forth, when a girl’s voice
says directly into his good ear: 
At three in the morning I was awakened by a violent blow.
He
thinks: It’s hunger, the fever, I’m imagining things, my mind is forcing the static to coalesce . . .
She says, 
I sat up in bed and tried to hear what was going on, but suddenly I was hurled out
into the middle of the room.
She speaks quiet, perfectly enunciated French; her accent is crisper than Frau Elena’s. He grinds
the headphones into his ear . . . 
Obviously,
she says, 
the
Nautilus 
had collided with something and
then heeled over at a sharp angle . . .
She rolls her 
R 
’s, draws out her 
S 
’s. With each syllable, the voice seems to burrow a bit deeper
into his brain. Young, high, hardly more than a whisper. If it is a hallucination, let it be.
One of these icebergs turned and struck the
Nautilus 
as it was cruising underwater. The
iceberg then slipped under its hull and lifted it with an irresistible force into shallower
water . . .
He can hear her wet the top of her mouth with her tongue. 
But who was to say that at that
moment we wouldn’t collide against the underside of the barrier, and thus be horribly squashed
between two surfaces of ice?
The static emerges again, threatening to wash her out, and he tries
desperately to fight it off; he is a child in his attic dormer, clinging to a dream he does not want to
leave, but Jutta has laid a hand on his shoulder and is whispering him awake.
We were suspended in the water, but ten meters on each side of the 
Nautilus 
rose a shining
wall of ice. Above and below there was the same wall.
She stops reading abruptly and the static roars. When she speaks again, her voice has become an
urgent hiss: 
He is here. He is right below me.
Then the broadcast cuts out. He feathers the tuner, switches bands: nothing. He takes off the
headset and moves in the total blackness toward where Volkheimer sits and grabs what he thinks is
his arm. “I heard something. Please . . .”
Volkheimer does not move; he seems made of wood. Werner yanks with all his strength, but he is
too little, too weak; the strength deserts him almost as soon as it came.
“Enough,” comes Volkheimer’s voice from the blackness. “It won’t do any good.” Werner sits on
the floor. Somewhere in the ruins above them, cats are howling. Starving. As is he. As is
Volkheimer.
A boy at Schulpforta once described for Werner a rally at Nuremberg: an ocean of banners and
flags, he said, masses of boys teeming in the lights, and the führer himself on an altar a half mile
away, spotlights illuminating pillars behind him, the atmosphere oversaturated with meaning and
anger and righteousness, Hans Schilzer crazy for it, Herribert Pomsel crazy for it, every boy at
Schulpforta crazy for it, and the only person in Werner’s life who could see through all that
stagecraft was his younger sister. How? How did Jutta understand so much more about how the
world worked? While he knew so little?