All the Light We Cannot See Read online

  “Bäcker. Tell us, Bäcker. Who is the weakest member of this group?”

  Werner quails. He is smaller than every cadet in his year. He tries to expand his chest, stand as tall as he can. Bäcker’s gaze rakes across the rows. “Him, sir?”

  Werner exhales; Bäcker has chosen a boy far to Werner’s right, one of the few boys with black hair. Ernst Somebody. A safe enough choice: Ernst is in fact a slow runner. A boy who has yet to grow into his horsey legs.

  Bastian calls Ernst forward. The boy’s bottom lip trembles as he turns to face the group.

  “Getting all weepy won’t help,” says Bastian, and gestures vaguely to the far end of the field, where a line of trees cuts across the weeds. “You’ll have a ten-second head start. Make it to me before they make it to you. Got it?”

  Ernst neither nods nor shakes his head. Bastian feigns frustration. “When I raise my left hand, you run. When I raise my right hand, the rest of you fools run.” Off Bastian waddles, rubber hose around his neck, pistol swinging at his side.

  Sixty boys wait, breathing. Werner thinks of Jutta with her opalescent hair and quick eyes and blunt manners: she would never be mistaken for the weakest. Ernst Somebody is shaking everywhere now, all the way down to his wrists and ankles. When Bastian is maybe two hundred yards away, he turns and raises his left hand.

  Ernst runs with his arms nearly straight and his legs wide and unhinged. Bastian counts down from ten. “Three,” yells his faraway voice. “Two. One.” At zero, his right arm goes up and the group unleashes. The dark-haired boy is at least fifty yards in front of them, but immediately the pack begins to gain.

  Hurrying, scampering, running hard, fifty-nine fourteen-year-olds chase one. Werner keeps to the center of the group as it strings out, his heart beating in dark confusion, wondering where Frederick is, why they’re chasing this boy, and what they’re supposed to do if they catch him.

  Except in some atavistic part of his brain, he knows exactly what they’ll do.

  A few outrunners are exceptionally fast; they gain on the lone figure. Ernst’s limbs pump furiously, but he clearly is not accustomed to sprinting, and he loses steam. The grass waves, the trees are transected by sunlight, the pack draws closer, and Werner feels annoyed: Why couldn’t Ernst be faster? Why hasn’t he practiced? How did he make it through the entrance exams?

  The fastest cadet is lunging for the back of the boy’s shirt. He almost has him. Black-haired Ernst is going to be caught, and Werner wonders if some part of him wants it to happen. But the boy makes it to the commandant a split second before the others come pounding past.

  Mandatory Surrender

  Marie-Laure has to badger her father three times before he’ll read the notice aloud: Members of the population must relinquish all radio receivers now in their possession. Radio sets are to be delivered to 27 rue de Chartres before tomorrow noon. Anyone failing to carry out this order will be arrested as a saboteur.

  No one says anything for a moment, and inside Marie-Laure, an old anxiety lumbers to its feet. “Is he—?”

  “In your grandfather’s old room,” says Madame Manec.

  Tomorrow noon. Half the house, thinks Marie-Laure, is taken up by wireless receivers and the parts that go into them.

  Madame Manec raps on the door to Henri’s room and receives no reply. In the afternoon they box up the equipment in Etienne’s study, Madame and Papa unplugging radios and lowering them into crates, Marie-Laure sitting on the davenport listening to the sets go off one by one: the old Radiola Five; a G.M.R. Titan; a G.M.R. Orphée. A Delco thirty-two-volt farm radio that Etienne had shipped all the way from the United States in 1922.

  Her father wraps the largest in cardboard and uses an ancient wheeled dolly to thump it down the stairs. Marie-Laure sits with her fingers going numb in her lap and thinks of the machine in the attic, its cables and switches. A transmitter built to talk to ghosts. Does it qualify as a radio receiver? Should she mention it? Do Papa and Madame Manec know? They seem not to. In the evening, fog moves into the city, trailing a cold, fishy smell, and they eat potatoes and carrots in the kitchen and Madame Manec leaves a dish outside Henri’s door and taps but the door does not open and the food remains untouched.

  “What,” asks Marie-Laure, “will they do with the radios?”

  “Send them to Germany,” says Papa.

  “Or pitch them in the sea,” says Madame Manec. “Come, child, drink your tea. It’s not the end of the world. I’ll put an extra blanket on your bed tonight.”

  In the morning Etienne remains shut inside his brother’s room. If he knows what is happening in his house, Marie-Laure cannot tell. At ten A.M. her father starts wheeling loads to the rue de Chartres, one trip, two trips, three, and when he comes back and loads the dolly with the last radio, Etienne still has not appeared. Marie-Laure holds Madame Manec’s hand as she listens to the gate clang shut, to the cart’s axle bounce as her father pushes it down the rue Vauborel, and to the silence that reinstalls itself after he’s gone.

  Museum

  Sergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel wakes early. He upholsters himself in his uniform, pockets his loupe and tweezers, rolls up his white gloves. By six A.M. he’s in the hotel lobby in full dress, polish on his shoes, pistol case snapped shut. The hotelkeeper brings him bread and cheese in a basket made from dark wicker, covered nicely with a cotton napkin: everything shipshape.

  There is great pleasure in being out in the city before the sun is up, streetlights glowing, the hum of a Parisian day commencing. As he walks up the rue Cuvier and turns into the Jardin des Plantes, the trees look misty and significant: parasols held up just for him.

  He likes being early.

  At the entrance to the Grand Gallery, two night warders stiffen. They glance at the stripes on his collar patch and sleeves; the cords in their throats tighten. A small man in black flannel comes down the staircase apologizing in German; he says he is the assistant director. He did not expect the sergeant major for another hour.

  “We can speak French,” says von Rumpel.

  Behind him scurries a second man with eggshell skin and an evident terror of eye contact.

  “We would be honored to show you the collections, Sergeant Major,” breathes the assistant director. “This is the mineralogist, Professor Hublin.” Hublin blinks twice, gives the impression of a penned animal. The pair of warders watch from the end of the corridor.

  “May I take your basket?”

  “It’s no trouble.”

  The Gallery of Mineralogy is so long, von Rumpel can hardly see the end of it. In sections, display case after display case sits vacant, little shapes on their felted shelves marking the silhouettes of whatever has been removed. Von Rumpel strolls with his basket on his arm, forgetting to do anything but look. What treasures they left behind! A gorgeous set of yellow topaz crystals on a gray matrix. A great pink hunk of beryl like a crystallized brain. A violet column of tourmaline from Madagascar that looks so rich he cannot resist the urge to stroke it. Bournonite; apatite on muscovite; natural zircon in a spray of colors; dozens more minerals he cannot name. These men, he thinks, probably handle more gemstones in a week than he has seen in his lifetime.

  Each piece is registered in huge organizational folios that have taken centuries to amass. The pallid Hublin shows him pages. “Louis XIII began the collection as a Cabinet of Medicines, jade for kidneys, clay for the stomach, and so on. There were already two hundred thousand entries in the catalog by 1850, a priceless mineral heritage . . .”

  Every now and then von Rumpel pulls his notebook from his pocket and makes a notation. He takes his time. When they reach the end, the assistant director laces his fingers across his belt. “We hope you are impressed, Sergeant Major? You enjoyed your tour?”

  “Very much.” The electric lights in the ceiling are far apart, and the silence in the huge space is oppressive. “But,” he says, enunciating very slowly, “what about the collections that are not on public display?”

 
The assistant director and the mineralogist exchange a glance. “You have seen everything we can show you, Sergeant Major.”

  Von Rumpel keeps his voice polite. Civilized. Paris is not Poland, after all. Waves must be made carefully. Things cannot simply be seized. What did his father used to say? See obstacles as opportunities, Reinhold. See obstacles as inspirations. “Is there somewhere,” he says, “we can talk?”

  The assistant director’s office occupies a dusty third-floor corner that overlooks the gardens: walnut-paneled, underheated, decorated with pinned butterflies and beetles in alternating frames. On the wall behind his half-ton desk hangs the only image: a charcoal portrait of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

  The assistant director sits behind the desk, and von Rumpel sits in front with his basket between his feet. The mineralogist stands. A long-necked secretary brings tea.

  Hublin says, “We are always acquiring, yes? All across the world, industrialization endangers mineral deposits. We collect as many types of minerals as exist. To a curator, none is superior to any other.”

  Von Rumpel laughs. He appreciates that they are trying to play the game. But don’t they understand that the winner has already been determined? He sets down his cup of tea and says, “I would like to see your most protected specimens. I am most specifically interested in a specimen I believe you have only recently brought out from your vaults.”

  The assistant director sweeps his left hand through his hair and releases a blizzard of dandruff. “Sergeant Major, the minerals you’ve seen have aided discoveries in electrochemistry, in the fundamental laws of mathematical crystallography. The role of a national museum is to operate above the whims and fashions of collectors, to safeguard for future generations the—”

  Von Rumpel smiles. “I will wait.”

  “You misunderstand us, monsieur. You have seen everything we can show you.”

  “I will wait to see what you cannot show me.”

  The assistant director peers into his tea. The mineralogist shifts from foot to foot; he appears to be wrestling with an interior fury. “I am quite gifted at waiting,” von Rumpel says in French. “It is my one great skill. I was never much good at athletics or mathematics, but even as a boy, I possessed unnatural patience. I would wait with my mother while she got her hair styled. I would sit in the chair and wait for hours, no magazine, no toys, not even swinging my legs back and forth. All the mothers were very impressed.”

  Both Frenchmen fidget. Beyond the door of the office, what ears listen? “Please sit if you’d like,” von Rumpel says to Hublin, and pats the chair next to him. But Hublin does not sit. Time passes. Von Rumpel swallows the last of his tea and sets the cup very carefully on the edge of the assistant director’s desk. Somewhere an electric fan whirs to life, runs awhile, and shuts down.

  Hublin says, “It’s not clear what we’re waiting for, Sergeant Major.”

  “I’m waiting for you to be truthful.”

  “If I might—”

  “Stay,” says von Rumpel. “Sit. I’m sure if one of you were to call out instructions, the mademoiselle who looks like a giraffe will hear, will she not?”

  The assistant director crosses and recrosses his legs. By now it is past noon. “Perhaps you would like to see the skeletons?” tries the assistant director. “The Hall of Man is quite spectacular. And our zoological collection is beyond—”

  “I would like to see the minerals you do not reveal to the public. One in particular.”

  Hublin’s throat splotches pink and white. He does not take a seat. The assistant director seems resigned to an impasse and pulls a thick perfect-bound stack of paper from a drawer and begins to read. Hublin shifts as if to leave, but von Rumpel merely says, “Please, stay until we have resolved this.”

  Waiting, thinks von Rumpel, is a kind of war. You simply tell yourself that you must not lose. The assistant director’s telephone rings, and he reaches to pick it up, but von Rumpel holds up a hand, and the phone rings ten or eleven times and then falls quiet. What might be a full half hour passes, Hublin staring at his shoelaces, the assistant director making occasional notes in his manuscript with a silver pen, von Rumpel remaining completely motionless, and then there is a distant tapping on the door.

  “Gentlemen?” comes the voice.

  Von Rumpel calls, “We are fine, thank you.”

  The assistant director says, “I have other matters to attend to, Sergeant Major.”

  Von Rumpel does not raise his voice. “You will wait here. Both of you. You will wait here with me until I see what I have come to see. And then we will all go back to our important jobs.”

  The mineralogist’s chin trembles. The fan starts again, then dies. A five-minute timer, guesses von Rumpel. He waits for it to start and die one more time. Then he lifts his basket into his lap. He points to the chair. His voice is gentle. “Sit, Professor. You will be more comfortable.”

  Hublin does not sit. Two o’clock out in the city, and bells toll in a hundred churches. Walkers down on the paths. The last of autumn’s leaves spiraling to earth.

  Von Rumpel unrolls the napkin across his lap, lifts out the cheese. He breaks the bread slowly, sending a rich cascade of crust onto his napkin. As he chews, he can almost hear their guts rumbling. He offers them nothing. When he finishes, he wipes the corners of his mouth. “You read me wrong, messieurs. I am not an animal. I am not here to raze your collections. They belong to all of Europe, to all of humanity, do they not? I am here only for something small. Something smaller than the bone of your kneecaps.” He looks at the mineralogist as he says it. Who looks away, crimson.

  The assistant director says, “This is absurd, Sergeant Major.”

  Von Rumpel folds his napkin and places it back in the basket and sets the basket on the ground. He licks the tip of his finger and picks the crumbs off his tunic one by one. Then he looks directly at the assistant director. “The Lycée Charlemagne, is that right? On the rue Charlemagne?”

  The skin around the assistant director’s eyes stretches.

  “Where your daughter goes to school?” Von Rumpel turns in his chair. “And the College Stanislas, isn’t it, Dr. Hublin? Where your twin sons attend? On the rue Notre-Dame des Champs? Wouldn’t those handsome boys be preparing to walk home right now?”

  Hublin sets his hands on the back of the empty chair beside him, and his knuckles become very white.

  “One with a violin and the other a viola, am I correct? Crossing all those busy streets. That is a long walk for ten-year-old boys.”

  The assistant director is sitting very upright. Von Rumpel says, “I know it is not here, messieurs. Not even the lowest janitor would be so stupid as to leave the diamond here. But I would like to see where you have kept it. I would like to know what sort of place you believe is safe enough.”

  Neither of the Frenchmen says anything. The assistant director resumes looking at his manuscript, though it is clear to von Rumpel that he is no longer reading. At four o’clock the secretary raps on the door and again von Rumpel sends her away. He practices concentrating only on blinking. Pulse in his neck. Tock tock tock tock. Others, he thinks, would do this with less finesse. Others would use scanners, explosives, pistol barrels, muscle. Von Rumpel uses the cheapest of materials, only minutes, only hours.

  Five bells. The light leaches out of the gardens.

  “Sergeant Major, please,” says the assistant director. His hands flat on his desk. Looking up now. “It is very late. I must relieve myself.”

  “Feel free.” Von Rumpel gestures with one hand at a metal trash can beside the desk.

  The mineralogist wrinkles his face. Again the phone rings. Hublin chews his cuticles. Pain shows in the assistant director’s face. The fan whirs. Out in the gardens, the daylight unwinds from the trees and still von Rumpel waits.

  “Your colleague,” he says to the mineralogist, “he’s a logical man, isn’t he? He doubts the legends. But you, you seem more fiery. You don’t want to believe, you te
ll yourself not to believe. But you do believe.” He shakes his head. “You’ve held the diamond. You’ve felt its power.”

  “This is ridiculous,” says Hublin. His eyes roll like a frightened colt’s. “This is not civilized behavior. Are our children safe, Sergeant Major? I demand that you let us determine if our children are safe.”

  “A man of science, and yet you believe the myths. You believe in the might of reason, but you also believe in fairy tales. Goddesses and curses.”

  The assistant director inhales sharply. “Enough,” he says. “Enough.”

  Von Rumpel’s pulse soars: has it already happened? So easily? He could wait two more days, three, while ranks of men broke against him like waves.

  “Are our children safe, Sergeant Major?”

  “If you wish them to be.”

  “May I use the telephone?”

  Von Rumpel nods. The assistant director reaches for the handset, says “Sylvie” into it, listens awhile, then sets it down. The woman enters with a ring of keys. From a drawer inside the assistant director’s desk, she produces another key on a chain. Simple, elegant, long-shafted.

  A small locked door at the back of the main-floor gallery. It takes two keys to open it, and the assistant director seems inexperienced with the lock. They lead von Rumpel down a corkscrewing stone staircase; at the bottom, the assistant director unlocks a second gate. They wind through warrens of hallways, past a warder who drops his newspaper and sits ramrod straight as they pass. In an unassuming storeroom filled with dropcloths and pallets and crates, behind a sheet of plywood, the mineralogist reveals a simple combination safe that the assistant director opens rather easily.

  No alarms. Only the one guard.

  Inside the safe is a second, far more interesting box. It is heavy enough that it requires both the assistant director and the mineralogist to lift it out.

  Elegant, its joinery invisible. No brand name, no combination dial. It is presumably hollow but with no discernible hinges, no nails, no attachment points; it looks like a solid block of highly polished wood. Custom work.

  The mineralogist fits a key into a tiny, almost invisible hole on the bottom; when it turns, two more tiny keyholes open on the opposite side. The assistant director inserts matching keys into those holes; they unlock what looks like five different shafts.

  Three overlapping cylinder locks, each dependent on the next.

  “Ingenious,” whispers von Rumpel.

  The entire box falls gently open.

  Inside sits a small felt bag.

  He says, “Open it.”

  The mineralogist looks at the assistant director. The assistant director picks up the bag and unties its throat and upends a wrapped bundle into his palm. With a single finger, he nudges apart the folds. Inside lies a blue stone as big as a pigeon’s egg.

  The Wardrobe

  Townspeople who violate blackout are fined or rounded up for questioning, though Madame Manec reports that at the Hôtel-Dieu, lamps burn all night long, and German officers go stumbling in and out at every hour, tucking in shirts and adjusting trousers. Marie-Laure keeps herself awake, waiting to hear her uncle stir. Finally she hears the door across the hall tick open and feet brush the boards. She imagines a storybook mouse creeping out from its hole.

  She climbs out of bed, trying not to wake her father, and crosses into the hall. “Uncle,” she whispers. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “Marie-Laure?” His very smell like that of coming winter, a tomb, the heavy inertia of time.

  “Are you well?”

  “Better.”

  They stand on the landing. “There was a notice,” says Marie-Laure. “Madame has left it on your desk.”

  “A notice?”

  “Your radios.”

  He descends to the fifth floor. She can hear him sputtering. Fingers traveling across his newly empty shelves. Old friends gone. She prepares for shouts of anger but catches half-hyperventilated nursery rhymes instead: . . . à la salade je suis malade au céleri je suis guéri . . .

  She takes his elbow, helps him to the davenport. He is still murmuring, trying to talk himself off some innermost ledge, and she can feel fear pumping off him, virulent, toxic; it reminds her of fumes billowing off the vats of formalin in the Department of Zoology.

  Rain taps at the windowpanes. Etienne’s voice comes from a long way off. “All of them?”

  “Not the radio in the attic. I did not mention it. Does Madame Manec know about it?”

  “We have never spoken of it.”

  “Is it hidden, Uncle? Could someone see it if the house were searched?”

  “Who would search the house?”

  A silence follows.

  He says, “We could still turn it in. Say we overlooked it?”

  “The deadline was yesterday at noon.”