All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel (30 page)

Etienne’s voice comes spiraling up from beside Marie-Laure. “Is that a good prison? I mean, one of the better ones?”

“I’m afraid there are no good German prisons.”

A truck passes in the street. The sea folds onto the Plage du Môle fifty yards away. She thinks: They just say words, and what are words but sounds these men shape out of breath, weightless vapors they send into the air of the kitchen to dissipate and die. She says: “You have come all this way to tell us things we already know.”

Madame Manec takes her hand.

Etienne murmurs, “We did not know about this place called Breitenau.”

The first policeman says, “You told the museum he has managed to smuggle out two letters?”

The second: “May we see them?”

Off goes Etienne, content to believe that someone is on the job. Marie-Laure ought to be happy too, but something makes her suspicious. She remembers something her father said back in Paris, on the first night of the invasion, as they waited for a train.
Everyone is looking out for himself.

The first policeman snaps flesh off his apple with his teeth. Are they looking at her? To be so close to them makes her feel faint. Etienne returns with both letters, and she can hear the men passing the pages back and forth.

“Did he speak of anything before he left?”

“Of any particular activities or errands we should be aware of?”

Their French is good, very Parisian, but who knows where their loyalties lie?
If your same blood doesn’t run in the arms and legs of the person you’re next to, you can’t trust anything.
Everything feels compressed and submarine to Marie-Laure just then, as if the five of them have been submerged into a murky aquarium overfull of fish, and their fins keep bumping as they shift about.

She says, “My father is not a thief.”

Madame Manec’s hand squeezes hers.

Etienne says, “He seemed concerned for his job, for his daughter. For France, of course. Who wouldn’t be?”

“Mademoiselle,” says the first man. He is talking directly to Marie-Laure. “Was there no specific thing he mentioned?”

“Nothing.”

“He had many keys at the museum.”

“He turned in his keys before he left.”

“May we look at whatever he brought here with him?”

The second man adds, “His bags, perhaps?”

“He took his rucksack with him,” says Marie-Laure, “when the director asked him to return.”

“May we look anyway?”

Marie-Laure can feel the gravity in the room increase. What do they hope to find? She imagines the radio equipment high above her: microphone, transceiver, all those dials and switches and cables.

Etienne says, “You may.”

They go into every room. Third floor fourth fifth. On the sixth, they stand in her grandfather’s old bedroom and open the huge wardrobe with its heavy doors and cross the hall and stand over the model of Saint-Malo in Marie-Laure’s room and whisper to each other and then tromp back downstairs.

They ask a total of one question: about three Free French flags rolled up in a second-floor closet. Why does Etienne have them?

“You put yourself in jeopardy keeping those,” says the second policeman.

“You would not want the authorities to think you are terrorists,” says the first. “People have been arrested for less.” Whether this is offered as favor or threat remains unclear. Marie-Laure thinks: Do they mean Papa?

The policemen finish their search and say good night with perfect politeness and leave.

Madame Manec lights a cigarette.

Marie-Laure’s stew is cold.

Etienne fumbles with the fireplace grate. He shoves the flags one after another into the fire. “No more. No more.” He says the second louder than the first. “Not here.”

Madame Manec’s voice: “They found nothing. There is nothing to find.”

The acrid smell of burning cotton fills the kitchen. Her great-uncle says, “You do what you like with your life, Madame. You have always been there for me, and I will try to be there for you. But you may no longer do these things in this house. And you may not do them with my great-niece.”

To My Dear Sister Jutta—

It is very difficult now. Even paper is hard to
XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX
We had
XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX
no heat in the
XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX
. Frederick used to say there is no such thing as free will and that every person’s path is predetermined for him just like
XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX
and that my mistake was that I
XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX.
I hope someday you can understand. Love to you and Frau Elena too.
Sieg heil.

I
n the weeks to come, Madame Manec is perfectly cordial; she walks with Marie-Laure to the beach most mornings, takes her to the market. But she seems absent, asking how Marie-Laure and Etienne are doing with perfect courtesy, saying good morning as if they are strangers. Often she disappears for half a day.

Marie-Laure’s afternoons become longer, lonelier. One evening she sits at the kitchen table while her great-uncle reads aloud.

The vitality which the snail’s eggs possess surpasses belief. We have seen certain species frozen in solid blocks of ice, and yet regain their activity when subjected to the influences of warmth.

Etienne pauses. “We should make supper. It doesn’t appear that Madame will be back tonight.” Neither of them moves. He reads another page.
They have been kept for years in pill boxes, and yet on subjecting them to moisture, have crawled about appearing as well as ever . . . The shell may be broken, and even portions of it removed, and yet after a certain lapse of time the injured parts will be repaired by a deposition of shelly matter at the fractured parts.

“There’s hope for me yet!” says Etienne, and laughs, and Marie-Laure is reminded that her great-uncle was not always so fearful, that he had a life before this war and before the last one too; that he was once a young man who dwelled in the world and loved it as she does.

Eventually Madame Manec comes through the kitchen door and locks it behind her and Etienne says good evening rather coldly and after a moment Madame Manec says it back. Somewhere in the city, Germans are loading weapons or drinking brandy and history has become some nightmare from which Marie-Laure desperately wishes she could wake.

Madame Manec takes a pot from the hanging rack and fills it with water. Her knife falls through what sounds like potatoes, the blade striking the wooden cutting board beneath.

“Please, Madame,” says Etienne. “Allow me. You are exhausted.”

But he does not get up, and Madame Manec keeps chopping potatoes, and when she is done, Marie-Laure hears her push a load of them into the water with the back of her knife. The tension in the room makes Marie-Laure feel dizzy, as if she can sense the planet rotating.

“Sink any U-boats today?” murmurs Etienne. “Blow up any German tanks?”

Madame Manec snaps open the door of the icebox. Marie-Laure can hear her rummage through a drawer. A match flares; a cigarette lights. Soon enough a bowl of undercooked potatoes appears before Marie-Laure. She feels around the tabletop for a fork but finds none.

“Do you know what happens, Etienne,” says Madame Manec from the other side of the kitchen, “when you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water?”

“You will tell us, I am sure.”

“It jumps out. But do you know what happens when you put the frog in a pot of cool water and then slowly bring it to a boil? You know what happens then?”

Marie-Laure waits. The potatoes steam.

Madame Manec says, “The frog cooks.”

W
erner is summoned by an eleven-year-old in full regalia to the commandant’s office. He waits on a wooden bench in a slowly building panic. They must suspect something. Maybe they have discovered some fact about his parentage that even he doesn’t know, something ruinous. He remembers when the lance corporal came through the door of Children’s House to escort him to Herr Siedler’s: the certainty that the instruments of the Reich could see through walls, through skin, into the very soul of each subject.

After several hours the commandant’s assistant calls him in and sets down his ballpoint and looks across his desk as though Werner is one among a vast series of trivial problems he must put right. “It has come to our attention, cadet, that your age has been recorded incorrectly.”

“Sir?”

“You are eighteen years old. Not sixteen, as you have claimed.”

Werner puzzles. The absurdity is plain: he remains smaller than most of the fourteen-year-olds.

“Our former technical sciences professor, Dr. Hauptmann, has called our attention to the discrepancy. He has arranged that you will be sent to a special technology division of the Wehrmacht.”

“A division, sir?”

“You have been here under false pretenses.” His voice is oily and pleased; his chin is nonexistent. Out a window the school band practices a triumphal march. Werner watches a Nordic-looking boy stagger beneath the weight of a tuba.

“The commandant urged disciplinary action, but Dr. Hauptmann suggested that you would be eager to offer your skills to the Reich.” From behind his desk, the assistant produces a folded uniform—
slate-gray, eagle on the breast, Litzen on the collar. Then a green-black coal-scuttle helmet, obviously too large.

The band blares, then stops. The band instructor screams names.

The commandant’s assistant says, “You are very lucky, cadet. To serve is an honor.”

“When, sir?”

“You’ll receive instructions within a fortnight. That is all.”

B
reton spring, and a great onslaught of damp invades the coast. Fog on the sea, fog in the streets, fog in the mind. Madame Manec gets sick. When Marie-Laure holds her hand over Madame’s chest, heat seems to steam up out of her sternum as though she cooks from the inside. Her breathing devolves into trains of oceanic coughs.

“I watch the sardines,” murmurs Madame, “and the termites, and the crows . . .”

Etienne summons a doctor who prescribes rest, aspirin, and aromatic violet comfits. Marie-Laure sits with Madame through the worst of it, strange hours when the old woman’s hands go very cold and she talks about being in charge of the world. She is in charge of everything, but no one knows. It is a tremendous burden, she says, to be responsible for every little thing, every infant born, every leaf falling from every tree, every wave that breaks onto the beach, every ant on its journey.

Deep in Madame’s voice, Marie-Laure hears water: atolls and archipelagoes and lagoons and fjords.

Etienne proves to be a tender nurse. Washcloths, broth, now and then a page from Pasteur or Rousseau. His manner forgiving her all transgressions past and present. He wraps Madame in quilts, but eventually she shivers so deeply, so profoundly, that he takes the big heavy rag rug off the floor and lays it on top of her.

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

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.