All the Light We Cannot See Page 11

  This particular summer afternoon, in a dusty geological library in Vienna, Sergeant Major von Rumpel follows an underweight secretary wearing brown shoes, brown stockings, a brown skirt, and a brown blouse through stacks of periodicals. The secretary sets down a stepstool, climbs, reaches.

  Tavernier’s 1676 Travels in India.

  P. S. Pallas’s 1793 Travels Through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire.

  Streeter’s 1898 Precious Stones and Gems.

  Rumor is that the führer is compiling a wish list of precious objects from all around Europe and Russia. They say he intends to remake the Austrian town of Linz into an empyrean city, the cultural capital of the world. A vast promenade, mausoleum, acropolis, planetarium, library, opera house—everything marble and granite, everything profoundly clean. At its core, he plans a kilometer-long museum: a trove of the greatest achievements in human culture.

  The document is real, von Rumpel has heard. Four hundred pages.

  He sits at a table in the stacks. He tries to cross his legs but a slight swelling troubles his groin today: odd, though not painful. The mousy librarian brings books. He pages slowly through the Tavernier, the Streeter, Murray’s Sketches of Persia. He reads entries on the three-hundred-carat Orloff diamond from Moscow, the Nur-al-Ain, the forty-eight-and-a-half-carat Dresden Green. Toward evening, he finds it. The story of a prince who could not be killed, a priest who warned of a goddess’s wrath, a French prelate who believed he’d bought the same stone centuries later.

  Sea of Flames. Grayish blue with a red hue at its center. Recorded at one hundred and thirty-three carats. Either lost or willed to the king of France in 1738 on the condition that it be locked away for two hundred years.

  He looks up. Suspended lamps, rows of spines fading off into dusty gold. All of Europe, and he aims to find one pebble tucked inside its folds.

  The Boches

  Her father says their weapons gleam as if they have never been fired. He says their boots are clean and their uniforms spotless. He says they look as if they have just stepped out of air-conditioned train cars.

  The townswomen who stop by Madame Manec’s kitchen door in ones and twos say the Germans (they refer to them as the Boches) buy every postcard on every pharmacy rack; they say the Boches buy straw dolls and candied apricots and stale cakes from the window of the confectionery. The Boches buy shirts from Monsieur Verdier and lingerie from Monsieur Morvan; the Boches require absurd quantities of butter and cheese; the Boches have guzzled down every bottle of champagne the caviste would sell them.

  Hitler, the women whisper, is touring Parisian monuments.

  Curfews are installed. Music that can be heard outdoors is banned. Public dances are banned. The country is in mourning and we must behave respectfully, announces the mayor. Though what authority he retains is not clear.

  Every time she comes within earshot, Marie-Laure hears the fsst of her father lighting another match. His hands flutter between his pockets. Mornings he alternates between Madame Manec’s kitchen, the tobacco shop, and the post office, where he waits in interminable queues to use the telephone. Afternoons he repairs things around Etienne’s house—a loose cabinet door, a squeaking stair board. He asks Madame Manec about the reliability of the neighbors. He flips the locking clasp on his tool case over and over until Marie-Laure begs him to stop.

  One day Etienne sits with Marie-Laure and reads to her in his feathery voice; the next he suffers from what he calls a headache and sequesters himself inside his study behind a locked door. Madame Manec sneaks Marie-Laure chocolate bars, slices of cake; this morning they squeeze lemons into glasses full of water and sugar, and she lets Marie-Laure drink as much as she likes.

  “How long will he stay in there, Madame?”

  “Sometimes just a day or two,” Madame Manec says. “Sometimes longer.”

  One week in Saint-Malo becomes two. Marie begins to feel that her life, like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, has been interrupted halfway through. There was volume 1, when Marie-Laure and her father lived in Paris and went to work, and now there is volume 2, when Germans ride motorcycles through these strange, narrow streets and her uncle vanishes inside his own house.

  “Papa, when will we leave?”

  “As soon as I hear from Paris.”

  “Why do we have to sleep in this little bedroom?”

  “I’m sure we could clean out a downstairs room if you’d like.”

  “What about the room across the hall from us?”

  “Etienne and I agreed we would not use it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It belonged to your grandfather.”

  “When can I go to the sea?”

  “Not today, Marie.”

  “Can’t we go for a walk around the block?”

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  She wants to shriek. What dangers await? When she opens her bedroom window, she hears no screams, no explosions, only the calls of birds that her great-uncle calls gannets, and the sea, and the occasional throb of an airplane as it passes far overhead.

  She spends her hours learning the house. The first floor belongs to Madame Manec: clean, navigable, full of visitors who come through the kitchen door to trade in small-town scandal. There’s the dining room, the foyer, a hutch full of antique dishes in the hall that tremble whenever anyone walks past, and a door off the kitchen that leads to Madame’s room: a bed, a sink, a chamber pot.

  Eleven winding steps lead to the second floor, which is full of the smells of faded grandeur: an old sewing room, a former maid’s room. Right here on the landing, Madame Manec tells her, pallbearers dropped the coffin carrying Etienne’s great-aunt. “The coffin flipped over, and she slid down the whole flight. They were all horrified, but she looked entirely unaffected!”

  More clutter on the third floor: boxes of jars, metal disks, and rusty jigsaws; buckets of what might be electrical components; engineering manuals in piles around a toilet. By the fourth floor, things are piled everywhere, in the rooms and corridors and along the staircase: baskets of what must be machine parts, shoe boxes loaded with screws, antique dollhouses built by her great-grandfather. Etienne’s huge study colonizes the entire fifth floor, alternately deeply quiet or else full of voices or music or static.

  Then there’s the sixth floor: her grandfather’s tidy bedroom on the left, toilet straight ahead, the little room where she sleeps with her father on the right. When the wind is blowing, which it almost always is, with the walls groaning and the shutters banging, the rooms overloaded and the staircase wound tightly up through its center, the house seems the material equivalent of her uncle’s inner being: apprehensive, isolated, but full of cobwebby wonders.

  In the kitchen, Madame Manec’s friends fuss over Marie-Laure’s hair and freckles. In Paris, the women say, people are waiting in line five hours for a loaf of bread. People are eating pets, crushing pigeons with bricks for soup. There is no pork, no rabbit, no cauliflower. The headlights of cars are all painted blue, they say, and at night the city is as quiet as a graveyard: no buses, no trains, hardly any gasoline. Marie-Laure sits at the square table, a plate of cookies in front of her, and imagines the old women with veiny hands and milky eyes and oversize ears. From the kitchen window comes the wit wit wit of a barn swallow, footfalls on ramparts, halyards clinking against masts, hinges and chains creaking in the harbor. Ghosts. Germans. Snails.

  Hauptmann

  A rosy-cheeked and diminutive instructor of technical sciences named Dr. Hauptmann peels off his brass-buttoned coat and hangs it over the back of a chair. He orders the cadets in Werner’s class to collect hinged metal boxes from a locked cabinet at the back of the laboratory.

  Inside each are gears, lenses, fuses, springs, shackles, and resistors. There’s a fat coil of copper wire, a tiny instrument hammer, and a two-terminal battery as big as a shoe—finer equipment than Werner has had access to in his life. The little professor stands at the chalkboard drawing a wiring schematic for a simp
le Morse-code practice circuit. He sets down his chalk, presses his slender fingertips together, five to five, and asks the boys to assemble the circuit with the parts in their kits. “You have one hour.”

  Most of the boys blanch. They dump everything out on the tables and poke gingerly at the parts as if at trinkets imported from some future age. Frederick plucks random pieces out of his box and holds them to the light.

  For a moment Werner is back inside his attic room at Children’s House, his head a swarm of questions. What is lightning? How high could you jump if you lived on Mars? What is the difference between twice twenty-five and twice five and twenty? Then he takes the battery, two rectangles of sheet metal, some penny nails, and the instrument hammer from his box. In under a minute, he has built an oscillator to match the schematic.

  The little professor frowns. He tests Werner’s circuit, which works.

  “Right,” he says, and stands in front of Werner’s table and laces his hands behind his back. “Next take from your kit the disk-shaped magnet, a wire, a screw, and your battery.” Though his instructions seem meant for the class, he looks at Werner alone. “That is all you may use. Who can build a simple motor?”

  Some boys stir the parts in their kits halfheartedly. Most simply watch.

  Werner feels Dr. Hauptmann’s attention on him like a floodlight. He sticks the magnet to the screw’s head and holds the screw’s point to the positive terminal on the battery. When he runs the wire from the negative side of the battery to the head of the screw, both the screw and the magnet start to spin. The operation takes him no more than fifteen seconds.

  Dr. Hauptmann’s mouth is partially open. His face is flushed, adrenalized. “What is your name, cadet?”

  “Pfennig, sir.”

  “What else can you make?”

  Werner studies the parts on his table. “A doorbell, sir? Or a Morse beacon? An ohmmeter?”

  The other boys crane their necks. Dr. Hauptmann’s lips are pink and his eyelids are improbably thin. As though he is watching Werner even when he blinks. He says, “Make them all.”

  Flying Couch

  Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot. At noon the following day, various Bretons troop in to drop off weapons, farmers on mule carts from miles away, plodding old sailors with antique pistols, a few hunters with outrage in their eyes gazing at the floor as they turn in their rifles.

  In the end it’s a pathetic pile, maybe three hundred weapons in all, half of them rusted. Two young gendarmes pile them into the back of a truck and drive up the narrow street and across the causeway and are gone. No speeches, no explanations.

  “Please, Papa, can’t I go out?”

  “Soon, little dove.” But he is distracted; he smokes so much it is as if he is turning himself into ash. Lately he stays up working frenetically on a model of Saint-Malo that he claims is for her, adding new houses every day, framing ramparts, mapping streets, so that she can learn the town the way she learned their neighborhood in Paris. Wood, glue, nails, sandpaper: rather than comforting her, the noises and smells of his manic diligence make her more anxious. Why will she have to learn the streets of Saint-Malo? How long will they be here?

  In the fifth-floor study, Marie-Laure listens to her great-uncle read another page of The Voyage of the “Beagle.” Darwin has hunted rheas in Patagonia, studied owls outside Buenos Aires, and scaled a waterfall in Tahiti. He pays attention to slaves, rocks, lightning, finches, and the ceremony of pressing noses in New Zealand. She loves especially to hear about the dark coasts of South America with their impenetrable walls of trees and offshore breezes full of the stink of rotting kelp and the cries of whelping seals. She loves to imagine Darwin at night, leaning over the ship’s rail to stare into bioluminescent waves, watching the tracks of penguins marked by fiery green wakes.

  “Bonsoir,” she says to Etienne, standing on the davenport in his study. “I may be only a girl of twelve, but I am a brave French explorer who has come to help you with your adventures.”

  Etienne adopts a British accent. “Good evening, mademoiselle, why don’t you come to the jungle with me and eat these butterflies, they are as big as dinner plates and may not be poisonous, who knows?”

  “I would love to eat your butterflies, Monsieur Darwin, but first I will eat these cookies.”

  Other evenings they play Flying Couch. They climb onto the davenport and sit side by side, and Etienne says, “Where to tonight, mademoiselle?”

  “The jungle!” Or: “Tahiti!” Or: “Mozambique!”

  “Oh, it’s a long journey this time,” Etienne will say in an entirely new voice, smooth, velvety, a conductor’s drawl. “That’s the Atlantic Ocean far below, it’s shining under the moonlight, can you smell it? Feel how cold it is up here? Feel the wind in your hair?”

  “Where are we now, Uncle?”

  “We’re in Borneo, can’t you tell? We’re skimming the treetops now, big leaves are glimmering below us, and there are coffee bushes over there, smell them?” and Marie-Laure will indeed smell something, whether because her uncle is passing coffee grounds beneath her nose, or because they really are flying over the coffee trees of Borneo, she does not want to decide.

  They visit Scotland, New York City, Santiago. More than once they put on winter coats and visit the moon. “Can’t you feel how lightweight we are, Marie? You can move by hardly twitching a muscle!” He sets her in his wheeled desk chair and pants as he whirls her in circles until she cannot laugh anymore for the pain of it.

  “Here, try some nice fresh moon flesh,” he says, and into her mouth goes something that tastes a lot like cheese. Always at the end they sit side by side again and pound the cushions, and slowly the room rematerializes around them. “Ah,” he says, more quietly, his accent fading, the faintest touch of dread returning to his voice, “here we are. Home.”

  The Sum of Angles

  Werner is summoned to the office of the technical sciences professor. A trio of sleek long-legged hounds swirl around him as he enters. The room is lit by a pair of green-shaded banker’s lamps, and in the shadows Werner can see shelves crowded with encyclopedias, models of windmills, miniature telescopes, prisms. Dr. Hauptmann stands behind his big desk wearing his brass-buttoned coat, as though he too has just arrived. Tight curls frame his ivory forehead; he tugs off his leather gloves one finger at a time. “Drop a log on the fire, please.”

  Werner tacks across the room and stirs the coals to life. In the corner, he realizes, sits a third person, a massive figure camped sleepily in an armchair intended for a much smaller man. He is Frank Volkheimer, an upperclassman, seventeen years old, a colossal boy from some boreal village, a legend among the younger cadets. Supposedly Volkheimer has carried three first-years across the river by holding them above his head; supposedly he has lifted the tail end of the commandant’s automobile high enough to slip a jack under the axle. There is a rumor that he crushed a communist’s windpipe with his hands. Another that he grabbed the muzzle of a stray dog and cut out its eyes just to inure himself to the suffering of other beings.

  They call him the Giant. Even in the low, flickering light, Werner sees that veins climb Volkheimer’s forearms like vines.

  “A student has never built the motor,” says Hauptmann, his back partially to Volkheimer. “Not without help.”

  Werner does not know how to reply, so he does not. He pokes the fire one last time, and sparks rise up the chimney.

  “Can you do trigonometry, cadet?”

  “Only what I have been able to teach myself, sir.”

  Hauptmann takes a sheet of paper from a drawer and writes on it. “Do you know what this is?”

  Werner squints.

  “A formula, sir.”

  “Do you comprehend its uses?”

  “I believe it is a way to use two known points to find the location of a third and unknown point.”

  Hauptmann’s blue eyes
glitter; he looks like someone who has discovered something very valuable lying right in front of him on the ground. “If I give you the known points and a distance between them, cadet, can you solve it? Can you draw the triangle?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Sit at my desk, Pfennig. Take my chair. Here is a pencil.”

  When he sits in the desk chair, the toes of Werner’s boots do not reach the ground. The fire pumps heat into the room. Block out giant Frank Volkheimer with his mammoth boots and cinder-block jaw. Block out the little aristocratic professor pacing in front of the hearth and the late hour and the dogs and the shelves brimming with interesting things. There is only this.

  tan α = sin α / cos α

  and sin(α + β) = sin α cos β + cos α sin β

  Now d can be moved to the front of the equation.

  Werner plugs Hauptmann’s numbers into the equation. He imagines two observers in a field pacing out the distance between them, then leveling their eyes on a far-off landmark: a sailing ship or a smokestack. When Werner asks for a slide rule, the professor slips one onto the desk immediately, having expected the request. Werner takes it without looking and begins to calculate the sines.

  Volkheimer watches. The little doctor paces, hands behind his back. The fire pops. The only sounds are the breathing of the dogs and clicking of the slide rule’s cursor.

  Eventually Werner says, “Sixteen point four three, Herr Doktor.” He draws the triangle and labels the distances of each segment and passes the paper back. Hauptmann checks something in a leather book. Volkheimer shifts slightly in his chair; his gaze is both interested and indolent. The professor presses one of his palms flat to the desk while reading, frowning absently, as though waiting for a thought to pass. Werner is seized with a sudden and foreboding dread, but then Hauptmann looks back at him, and the feeling subsides.

  “It says in your application papers that when you leave here, you wish to study electrical mechanics in Berlin. And you are an orphan, is that correct?”

  Another glance at Volkheimer. Werner nods. “My sister—”

  “A scientist’s work, cadet, is determined by two things. His interests and the interests of his time. Do you understand?”

  “I think so.”

  “We live in exceptional times, cadet.”

  A thrill enters Werner’s chest. Firelit rooms lined with books—these are the places in which important things happen.

  “You will work in the laboratory after dinner. Every night. Even Sundays.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Start tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Volkheimer here will keep an eye out for you. Take these biscuits.” The professor produces a tin with a bow on it. “And breathe, Pfennig. You cannot hold your breath every time you’re in my laboratory.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cold air whistles through the halls, so pure it makes Werner dizzy. A trio of moths swim against the ceiling of his bunkroom. He unlaces his boots and folds his trousers in the dark and sets the tin of biscuits on top. Frederick peers over the edge of his bunk. “Where did you go?”

  “I got cookies,” whispers Werner.

  “I heard an eagle owl tonight.”

  “Hush,” hisses a boy two bunks down.

  Werner passes up a biscuit. Frederick whispers: “Do you know about them? They’re really rare. Big as gliders. This one was probably a young male looking for new territory. He was in one of the poplar trees beside the parade ground.”

  “Oh,” says Werner. Greek letters move across the undersides of his eyelids: isosceles triangles, betas, sine curves. He sees himself in a white coat, striding past machines.

  Someday he’ll probably win a big prize.

  Code breaking, rocket propulsion, all the latest.

  We live in exceptional times.

  From the hall come the clicking boot heels of the bunk master. Frederick tips back onto his bunk. “I couldn’t see him,” he whispers, “but I heard him perfectly.”

  “Shut your face!” says a second boy. “You’ll get us thrashed.”

  Frederick says nothing more. Werner stops chewing. The bunk master’s boots go quiet: either he is gone or he has paused outside the door. Out on the grounds, someone is splitting wood, and Werner listens to the ringing of the sledgehammer against the wedge and the quick, frightened breaths of the boys all around him.