All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel (53 page)

When she has finished the dishes, she leads Frederick out onto the elevated patio, as is their routine, where he sits with his bib still around his neck, staring into oblivion. She’ll try him again on the bird print tomorrow.

It’s fall, and starlings fly in great pulsing swarms above the city. Sometimes she thinks he perks up when he sees them, hears all those wings rushing and rushing and rushing.

As she sits, looking out through the line of trees into the great empty
parking lot, a dark shape sweeps through the nimbus of a streetlamp. It disappears and then reemerges, and suddenly and silently it lands on the deck railing not six feet away.

It’s an owl. As big as a child. It swivels its neck and blinks its yellow eyes and in her head roars a single thought:
You’ve come for me.

Frederick sits up straight.

The owl hears something. It holds there, listening as hard as she has ever seen anything listen. Frederick stares and stares.

Then it goes: three audible wing beats and the darkness swallows it.

“You saw it?” she whispers. “Did you see it, Fredde?”

He keeps his gaze turned toward the shadows. But there are only the plastic bags rustling in the branches above them and the dozens of spheres of artificial light glowing in the parking lot beyond.

“Mutti?” says Frederick. “Mutti?”

“I’m here, Fredde.”

She puts her hand on his knee. His fingers lock around the arms of the chair. His whole body becomes rigid. Veins stand out in his neck.

“Frederick? What is it?”

He looks at her. His eyes do not blink. “What are we doing, Mutti?”

“Oh, Fredde. We’re just sitting. We’re just sitting and looking out at the night.”

S
he lives to see the century turn. She lives still.

It’s a Saturday morning in early March, and her grandson Michel collects her from her flat and walks her through the Jardin des Plantes. Frost glimmers in the air, and Marie-Laure shuffles along with the ball of her cane out in front and her thin hair blown to one side and the leafless canopies of the trees drifting overhead as she imagines schools of Portuguese men-of-war drift, trailing their long tentacles behind them.

Skim ice has formed atop puddles in the gravel paths. Whenever she finds some with her cane, she stops and bends and tries to lift the thin plate without breaking it. As though raising a lens to her eye. Then she sets it carefully back down.

The boy is patient, taking her elbow only when she seems to need it.

They make for the hedge maze in the northwest corner of the gardens. The path they’re on begins to ascend, twisting steadily to the left. Climb, pause, catch your breath. Climb again. When they reach the old steel gazebo at the very top, he leads her to its narrow bench and they sit.

No one else here: too cold or too early or both. She listens to the wind sift through the filigree of the crown of the gazebo, and the walls of the maze hold steady around them, Paris murmuring below, the drowsy purr of a Saturday morning.

“You’ll be twelve next Saturday, won’t you, Michel?”

“Finally.”

“You are in a hurry to be twelve?”

“Mother says I can drive the moped when I am twelve.”

“Ah.” Marie-Laure laughs. “The moped.”

Beneath her fingernails, the frost makes billions of tiny diadems and coronas on the slats of the bench, a lattice of dumbfounding complexity.

Michel presses against her side and becomes very quiet. Only his hands are moving. Little clicks rising, buttons being pressed.

“What are you playing?”

“Warlords.”

“You play against your computer?”

“Against Jacques.”

“Where is Jacques?”

The boy’s attention stays on the game. It does not matter where Jacques is: Jacques is inside the game. She sits and her cane flexes against the gravel and the boy clicks his buttons in spasmodic flurries. After a while he exclaims, “Ah!” and the game makes several resolving chirps.

“You’re all right?”

“He has killed me.” Awareness returns to Michel’s voice; he is looking up again. “Jacques, I mean. I am dead.”

“In the game?”

“Yes. But I can always begin again.”

Below them the wind washes frost from the trees. She concentrates on feeling the sun touch the backs of her hands. On the warmth of her grandson beside her.

“Mamie? Was there something you wanted for your twelfth birthday?”

“There was. A book by Jules Verne.”

“The same one Maman read to me? Did you get it?”

“I did. In a way.”

“There were lots of complicated fish names in that book.”

She laughs. “And corals and mollusks, too.”

“Especially mollusks. It’s a beautiful morning, Mamie, isn’t it?”

“Very beautiful.”

People walk the paths of the gardens below, and the wind sings anthems in the hedges, and the big old cedars at the entrance to the
maze creak. Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived—maybe a million times more. Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of television programs, of e-mail, vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again,
I’m going to be late
and
Maybe we should get reservations?
and
Pick up avocados
and
What did he say?
and ten thousand
I miss yous,
fifty thousand
I love yous,
hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying invisibly over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscapes we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.

We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

Michel takes her arm and they wind back down the path, through the gate onto the rue Cuvier. She passes one storm drain two storm drains three four five, and when they reach her building, she says, “You may leave me here, Michel. You can find your way?”

“Of course.”

“Until next week, then.”

He kisses her once on each cheek. “Until next week, Mamie.”

She listens until his footsteps fade. Until all she can hear are the sighs of cars and the rumble of trains and the sounds of everyone hurrying through the cold.

I
am indebted to the American Academy in Rome, to the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Thank you to Francis Geffard, who brought me to Saint-Malo for the first time. Thank you to Binky Urban and Clare Reihill for their enthusiasm and confidence. And thanks especially to Nan Graham, who waited a decade, then gave this book her heart, her pencil, and so many of her hours.

Additional debts are owed to Jacques Lusseyran’s
And There Was Light,
Curzio Malaparte’s
Kaputt
, and Michel Tournier’s
The Ogre;
to Cort Conley, who kept a steady stream of curated material flowing into my mailbox; to early readers Hal and Jacque Eastman, Matt Crosby, Jessica Sachse, Megan Tweedy, Jon Silverman, Steve Smith, Stefani Nellen, Chris Doerr, Dick Doerr, Michèle Mourembles, Kara Watson, Cheston Knapp, Meg Storey, and Emily Forland; and especially to my mother, Marilyn Doerr, who was my Dr. Geffard, my Jules Verne.

The largest thanks go to Owen and Henry, who have lived with this book all their lives, and to Shauna, without whom this could not exist, and upon whom all this depends.

© ISABELLE SELBY

ANTHONY DOERR
is the author of the story collections
Memory Wall
and
The Shell Collector
, the novel
About Grace
, and the memoir
Four Seasons in Rome
. He has won numerous prizes both in the United States and overseas, including four O. Henry Prizes, three Pushcart Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Raised in Cleveland, Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.

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ALSO BY ANTHONY DOERR

Memory Wall

Four Seasons in Rome

About Grace

The Shell Collector

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Anthony Doerr

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