All the Light We Cannot See

Visitor


“You learned French as a child,” Marie-Laure says, though how she manages to speak, she is not sure.

“Yes. This is my son, Max.”

“Guten Tag,” murmurs Max. His hand is warm and small.

“He has not learned French as a child,” says Marie-Laure, and both women laugh a moment before falling quiet.

The woman says, “I brought something—” Even through its newspaper wrapping, Marie-Laure knows it is the model house; it feels as if this woman has dropped a molten kernel of memory into her hands.

She can barely stand. “Francis,” she says to her assistant, “could you show Max something in the museum for a moment? Perhaps the beetles?”

“Of course, Madame.”

The woman says something to her son in German.

Francis says, “Shall I close the door?”

“Please.”

The latch clicks. Marie-Laure can hear the aquaria bubble and the woman inhale and the rubber stoppers on the stool legs beneath her squeak as she shifts. With her finger, she finds the nicks on the house’s sides, the slope of its roof. How often she held it.

“My father made this,” she says.

“Do you know how my brother got it?”

Everything whirling through space, taking a lap around the room, then climbing back into Marie-Laure’s mind. The boy. The model. Has it never been opened? She sets the house down suddenly, as if it is very hot.

The woman, Jutta, must be watching her very closely. She says, as though apologizing, “Did he take it from you?”

Over time, thinks Marie-Laure, events that seem jumbled either become more confusing or gradually settle into place. The boy saved her life three times over. Once by not exposing Etienne when he should have. Twice by taking that sergeant major out of the way. Three times by helping her out of the city.

“No,” she says.

“It was not,” says Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, “very easy to be good then.”

“I spent a day with him. Less than a day.”
     



Jutta says, “How old were you?”

“Sixteen during the siege. And you?”

“Fifteen. At the end.”

“We all grew up before we were grown up. Did he—?”

Jutta says, “He died.”

Of course. In the stories after the war, all the resistance heroes were dashing, sinewy types who could construct machine guns from paper clips. And the Germans either raised their godlike blond heads through open tank hatches to watch broken cities scroll past, or else were psychopathic, sex-crazed torturers of beautiful Jewesses. Where did the boy fit? He made such a faint presence. It was like being in the room with a feather. But his soul glowed with some fundamental kindness, didn’t it?

We used to pick berries by the Ruhr. My sister and me.

She says, “His hands were smaller than mine.”

The woman clears her throat. “He was little for his age, always. But he looked out for me. It was hard for him not to do what was expected of him. Have I said this correctly?”

“Perfectly.”

The aquaria bubble. The snails eat. What agonies this woman endured, Marie-Laure cannot guess. And the model house? Did Werner let himself back into the grotto to retrieve it? Did he leave the stone inside? She says, “He said that you and he used to listen to my great-uncle’s broadcasts. That you could hear them all the way in Germany.”

“Your great-uncle—?”

Now Marie-Laure wonders what memories crawl over the woman across from her. She is about to say more when footfalls in the hall stop outside the laboratory door. Max stumbles through something unintelligible in French. Francis laughs and says, “No, no, behind as in the back of us, not behind as in derrière.”

Jutta says, “I’m sorry.”

Marie-Laure laughs. “It is the obliviousness of our children that saves us.”

The door opens and Francis says, “You are all right, madame?”

“Yes, Francis. You may go.”

“We’ll go too,” says Jutta, and she pushes her stool back beneath the lab table. “I wanted you to have the little house. Better with you than with me.”

Marie-Laure keeps her hands flat on the lab table. She imagines mother and son as they move toward the door, small hand folded in big hand, and her throat wells. “Wait,” she says. “When my great-uncle sold the house, after the war, he traveled back to Saint-Malo, and he salvaged the one remaining recording of my grandfather. It was about the moon.”

“I remember. And light? On the other side?”

The creaking floor, the roiling tanks. Snails sliding along glass. Little house on the table between her hands.

“Leave your address with Francis. The record is very old, but I’ll mail it to you. Max might like it.”





Paper Airplane


“And Francis said there are forty-two thousand drawers of dried plants, and he showed me the beak of a giant squid and a plesiosaur . . .” The gravel crunches beneath their shoes and Jutta has to lean against a tree.

“Mutti?”

Lights veer toward her, then away. “I’m tired, Max. That’s all.”

She unfolds the tourist map and tries to understand the way back to their hotel. Few cars are out, and most every window they pass is lit blue from a television. It’s the absence of all the bodies, she thinks, that allows us to forget. It’s that the sod seals them over.

In the elevator, Max pushes 6 and up they go. The carpeted runner to their room is a river of maroon crossed with gold trapezoids. She hands Max the key, and he fumbles with the lock, then opens the door.

“Did you show the lady how the house opened, Mutti?”

“I think she already knew.”

Jutta turns on the television and takes off her shoes. Max opens the balcony doors and folds an airplane with hotel stationery. The half block of Paris that she can see reminds her of the cities she drew as a girl: a hundred houses, a thousand windows, a wheeling flock of birds. On the television, players in blue rush along a field two thousand miles away. The score is three to two. But a goalkeeper has fallen, and a wing has toed the ball just enough that it rolls slowly toward the goal line. No one is there to kick it away. Jutta picks up the phone beside the bed and dials nine numbers and Max launches an airplane over the street. It sails a few dozen feet and hangs for an instant, and then the voice of her husband says hello.





The Key


She sits in her lab touching the Dosinia shells one after another in their tray. Memories strobe past: the feel of her father’s trouser leg as she’d cling to it. Sand fleas skittering around her knees. Captain Nemo’s submarine vibrating with his woeful dirge as it floated through the black.

She shakes the little house, though she knows it will not give itself away.

He went back for it. Carried it out. Died with it. What sort of a boy was he? She remembers how he sat and paged through that book of Etienne’s.

Birds, he said. Bird after bird after bird.

She sees herself walk out of the smoking city, trailing a white pillowcase. Once she is out of his sight, he turns and lets himself back through Harold Bazin’s gate. The rampart a huge crumbling bulwark above him. The sea settling on the far side of the grate. She sees him solve the puzzle of the little house. Maybe he drops the diamond into the pool among the thousands of snails. Then he closes the puzzle box and locks the gate and trots away.

Or he puts the stone back into the house.

Or slips it into his pocket.

From her memory, Dr. Geffard whispers: That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.

She twists the chimney ninety degrees. It turns as smoothly as if her father just built it. When she tries to slide off the first of the three wooden roof panels, she finds it stuck. But with the end of a pen, she manages to lever off the panels one two three.

Something drops into her palm.

An iron key.





Sea of ?Flames


From the molten basements of the world, two hundred miles down, it comes. One crystal in a seam of others. Pure carbon, each atom linked to four equidistant neighbors, perfectly knit, octahedral, unsurpassed in hardness. Already it is old: unfathomably so. Incalculable eons tumble past. The earth shifts, shrugs, stretches. One year, one day, one hour, a great upflow of magma gathers a seam of crystals and drives it toward the surface, mile after burning mile; it cools inside a huge, smoking xenolith of kimberlite, and there it waits. Century after century. Rain, wind, cubic miles of ice. Bedrock becomes boulders, boulders become stones; the ice retreats, a lake forms, and galaxies of freshwater clams flap their million shells at the sun and close and die and the lake seeps away. Stands of prehistoric trees rise and fall and rise again in succession. Until another year, another day, another hour, when a storm claws one particular stone out of a canyon and sends it into a clattering flow of alluvium, where eventually it finds, one evening, the attention of a prince who knows what he is looking for.
     



It is cut, polished; for a breath, it passes between the hands of men.

Another hour, another day, another year. Lump of carbon no larger than a chestnut. Mantled with algae, bedecked with barnacles. Crawled over by snails. It stirs among the pebbles.





Frederick


He lives with his mother outside west Berlin. Their apartment is a middle unit in a triplex. Its only windows offer a view of sweet-gum trees, a vast and barely used supermarket parking lot, and an expressway beyond.

Frederick sits on the back patio most days and watches the wind drive discarded plastic bags across the lot. Sometimes they spin high into the air and fly unpredictable loops before catching on the branches or disappearing from view. He makes pencil drawings of spirals, messy, heavy-leaded corkscrews. He’ll cover a sheet of paper with two or three, then flip it over and fill the other side. The apartment is jammed with them: thousands on the counters, in drawers, on the toilet tank. His mother used to throw the sheets away when Frederick wasn’t looking, but lately she has given up.

“Like a factory, that boy,” she used to say to friends, and smiled a desperate smile meant to make her appear brave.

Few friends come over now. Few are left.

One Wednesday—but what are Wednesdays to Frederick?—his mother comes in with the mail. “There’s a letter,” she says, “for you.”

Her instinct in the decades since the war has been to hide. Hide herself, hide what happened to her boy. She was not the only widow made to feel as if she had been complicit in an unspeakable crime. Inside the large envelope is a letter and a smaller envelope. The letter comes from a woman in Essen who traces the course of the smaller envelope from her brother to an American prisoner-of-war camp in France, to a military storage facility in New Jersey, to a veterans’ service organization in West Berlin. Then to a former sergeant, then to the woman writing the letter.

Werner. She can still picture the boy: white hair, shy hands, a melting smile. Frederick’s one friend. Aloud she says, “He was very small.”

Frederick’s mother shows him the unopened envelope—it is wrinkled, sepia-colored, and old, his name written in small cursive letters—but he shows no interest. She leaves it on the counter as dusk falls, and measures out a cup of rice and sets it to boil, and switches on every lamp and overhead fixture as she always does, not to see, but because she is alone, because the apartments on either side are vacant, and because the lights make her feel as if she is expecting someone.

She purees his vegetables. She puts the spoon in Frederick’s mouth and he hums as he swallows: he is happy. She wipes his chin and sets a sheet of paper in front of him and he takes his pencil and begins to draw.

She fills the sink with soapy water. Then she opens the envelope.

Inside is a folded print of two birds in full color. Aquatic Wood Wagtail. Male 1. Female 2. Two birds on a stalk of Indian turnip. She peers back into the envelope for a note, an explanation, but finds none.

The day she bought that book for Fredde: the bookseller took so long to wrap it. She did not understand its attraction but knew that her son would love it.

The doctors claim Frederick retains no memories, that his brain maintains only basic functions, but there are moments when she wonders. She flattens out the creases as well as she can and drags the floor lamp closer and places the print before her son. He tilts his head and she tries to convince herself he is studying it. But his eyes are gray and chambered and shallow, and after a moment he returns to his spirals.

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.”





Thirteen




* * *





2014





She 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.





Acknowledgments





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.