All the Light We Cannot See Page 17

  prisoner with a bucket of water. Every man in the school.

  They start. One by one, each instructor takes a full bucket from Volkheimer and flings its contents at the prisoner a few feet away. Cheers rise into the frozen night.

  At the first two or three dousings, the prisoner comes awake, rocking back on his heels. Vertical creases appear between his eyes; he looks like someone trying to remember something vital.

  Among the instructors in their dark capes, Dr. Hauptmann goes past, his gloved fingers pinching his collar around his throat. Hauptmann accepts his bucket and throws a sheet of water and doesn’t linger to watch it land.

  The water keeps coming. The prisoner’s face empties. He slumps over the ropes propping him up, and his torso slides down the stake, and every now and then Volkheimer comes out of the shadows, looming fantastically huge, and the prisoner straightens again.

  The upperclassmen vanish inside the castle. The buckets make a muted, frozen clanking as they are refilled. The sixteen-year-olds finish. The fifteen-year-olds finish. The cheers lose their gusto and a pure longing to flee floods Werner. Run. Run.

  Three boys until his turn. Two boys. Werner tries to float images in front of his eyes, but the only ones that come are wretched: the hauling machine above Pit Nine; the hunched miners walking as if they dragged the weight of enormous chains. The boy from the entrance exams trembling before he fell. Everyone trapped in their roles: orphans, cadets, Frederick, Volkheimer, the old Jewess who lives upstairs. Even Jutta.

  When his turn arrives, Werner throws the water like all the others and the splash hits the prisoner in the chest and a perfunctory cheer rises. He joins the cadets waiting to be released. Wet boots, wet cuffs; his hands have become so numb, they do not seem his own.

  Five boys later, it is Frederick’s turn. Frederick, who clearly cannot see well without his glasses. Who has not been cheering when each bucketful of water finds its mark. Who is frowning at the prisoner as though he recognizes something there.

  And Werner knows what Frederick is going to do.

  Frederick has to be nudged forward by the boy behind him. The upperclassman hands him a bucket and Frederick pours it out on the ground.

  Bastian steps forward. His face flares scarlet in the cold. “Give him another.”

  Again Frederick sloshes it onto the ice at his feet. He says in a small voice, “He is already finished, sir.”

  The upperclassman hands over a third pail. “Throw it,” commands Bastian. The night steams, the stars burn, the prisoner sways, the boys watch, the commandant tilts his head. Frederick pours the water onto the ground. “I will not.”

  Plage du Môle

  Marie-Laure’s father has been missing without word for twenty-nine days. She wakes to Madame Manec’s blocky pumps climbing to the third floor the fourth the fifth.

  Etienne’s voice on the landing outside his study: “Don’t.”

  “He won’t know.”

  “She is my responsibility.”

  Some unexpected steel emerges in Madame Manec’s voice. “I cannot stand by one moment longer.”

  She climbs the last flight. Marie-Laure’s door creaks open; the old woman crosses the floor and places her heavy-boned hand on Marie-Laure’s forehead. “You’re awake?”

  Marie-Laure rolls herself into the corner and speaks through linens. “Yes, Madame.”

  “I’m taking you out. Bring your cane.”

  Marie-Laure dresses herself; Madame Manec meets her at the bottom of the stairs with a heel of bread. She ties a scarf over Marie-Laure’s head, buttons her coat all the way to the collar, and opens the front door. Morning in late February, and the air smells rainy and calm.

  Marie-Laure hesitates, listening. Her heart beats two four six eight.

  “Hardly anyone is out yet, dear,” whispers Madame Manec. “And we are doing nothing wrong.”

  The gate creaks.

  “One step down, now straight on, that’s it.” The cobbled street presses up irregularly against Marie-Laure’s shoes; the tip of her cane catches, vibrates, catches again. A light rain falls on rooftops, trickles through runnels, beads up on her scarf. Sound ricochets between the high houses; she feels, as she did in her first hour here, as if she has stepped into a maze.

  Far above them, someone shakes a duster out a window. A cat mewls. What terrors gnash their teeth out here? What was Papa so anxious to protect her from? They make one turn, then a second, and then Madame Manec steers her left where Marie-Laure does not expect her to, where the city walls, furred with moss, have been scrolling along unbroken, and they’re stepping through a gateway.

  “Madame?”

  They pass out of the city.

  “Stairs here, mind yourself, one down, two, there you are, easy as cake . . .”

  The ocean. The ocean! Right in front of her! So close all this time. It sucks and booms and splashes and rumbles; it shifts and dilates and falls over itself; the labyrinth of Saint-Malo has opened onto a portal of sound larger than anything she has ever experienced. Larger than the Jardin des Plantes, than the Seine, larger than the grandest galleries of the museum. She did not imagine it properly; she did not comprehend the scale.

  When she raises her face to the sky, she can feel the thousand tiny spines of raindrops melt onto her cheeks, her forehead. She hears Madame Manec’s raspy breathing, and the deep sounding of the sea among the rocks, and the calls of someone down the beach echoing off the high walls. In her mind she can hear her father polishing locks. Dr. Geffard walking along the rows of his drawers. Why didn’t they tell her it would be like this?

  “That’s Monsieur Radom calling to his dog,” says Madame Manec. “Nothing to worry about. Here’s my arm. Sit down and take off your shoes. Roll up your coat sleeves.”

  Marie-Laure does as she is told. “Are they watching?”

  “The Boches? So what if they are? An old woman and a girl? I’ll tell them we’re digging clams. What can they do?”

  “Uncle says they’ve buried bombs in the beaches.”

  “Don’t you worry about that. He is frightened of an ant.”

  “He says the moon pulls the ocean back.”

  “The moon?”

  “Sometimes the sun pulls too. He says that around the islands, the tides make funnels that can swallow boats whole.”

  “We aren’t going anywhere near there, dear. We’re just on the beach.”

  Marie-Laure unwinds her scarf and Madame Manec takes it. Briny, weedy, pewter-colored air slips down her collar.

  “Madame?”

  “Yes?”

  “What do I do?”

  “Just walk.”

  She walks. Now there are cold round pebbles beneath her feet. Now crackling weeds. Now something smoother: wet, unwrinkled sand. She bends and spreads her fingers. It’s like cold silk. Cold, sumptuous silk onto which the sea has laid offerings: pebbles, shells, barnacles. Tiny slips of wrack. Her fingers dig and reach; the drops of rain touch the back of her neck, the backs of her hands. The sand pulls the heat from her fingertips, from the soles of her feet.

  A months-old knot inside Marie-Laure begins to loosen. She moves along the tide line, almost crawling at first, and imagines the beach stretching off in either direction, ringing the promontory, embracing the outer islands, the whole filigreed tracery of the Breton coastline with its wild capes and crumbling batteries and vine-choked ruins. She imagines the walled city behind her, its soaring ramparts, its puzzle of streets. All of it suddenly as small as Papa’s model. But what surrounds the model is not something her father conveyed to her; what’s beyond the model is the most compelling thing.

  A flock of gulls squalls overhead. Each of the hundred thousand tiny grains of sand in her fists grinds against its neighbor. She feels her father pick her up and spin her around three times.

  No occupation soldier comes to arrest them; no one even speaks to them. In three hours Marie-Laure’s numb fingers discover a stranded jellyfish, an encrusted buoy, and a thousand polishe
d stones. She wades to her knees and soaks the hem of her dress. When Madame Manec finally leads her—damp and dazzled—back to the rue Vauborel, Marie-Laure climbs all five flights and raps on the door of Etienne’s study and stands before him, wet sand stuck all over her face.

  “You were gone a long time,” he murmurs. “I worried.”

  “Here, Uncle.” From her pockets, she brings up shells. Barnacles, cowries, thirteen lumps of quartz gritty with sand. “I brought you this. And this and this and this.”

  Lapidary

  In three months, Sergeant Major von Rumpel has traveled to Berlin and Stuttgart; he has assessed the value of a hundred confiscated rings, a dozen diamond bracelets, a Latvian cigarette case in which a lozenge of blue topaz twinkled; now, back in Paris, he has slept at the Grand Hôtel for a week and sent forth his queries like birds. Every night the moment returns to him: when he clasped that pear-shaped diamond between his thumb and forefinger, made huge by the lens of his loupe, and believed he held the one-hundred-and-thirty-three-carat Sea of Flames.

  He stared into the stone’s ice-blue interior, where miniature mountain ranges seemed to send back fire, crimsons and corals and violets, polygons of color twinkling and coruscating as he rotated it, and he almost convinced himself that the stories were true, that centuries ago a sultan’s son wore a crown that blinded visitors, that the keeper of the diamond could never die, that the fabled stone had caromed down through the pegs of history and dropped into his palm.

  There was joy in that moment—triumph. But an unexpected fear mixed with it; the stone looked like something enchanted, not meant for human eyes. An object that, once looked at, could never be forgotten.

  But. Eventually reason won out. The joints of the diamond’s facets were not quite as sharp as they should have been. The girdle just slightly waxy. More telling, the stone betrayed no delicate cracks, no pinpoints, not a single inclusion. A real diamond, his father used to say, is never entirely free of inclusions. A real diamond is never perfect.

  Had he expected it to be real? To be kept precisely where he wished it would be? To win such a victory in a single day?

  Of course not.

  One might think von Rumpel would be frustrated, but he is not. On the contrary, he feels quite hopeful. The museum would never have commissioned such a high-quality fake if they did not possess the real thing somewhere. Over the past weeks in Paris, in the hours between other tasks, he has narrowed a list of seven lapidaries to three, then to one: a half-Algerian named Dupont who came of age cutting opal. It appears Dupont was making money before the war by faceting spinels into false diamonds for dowagers and baronesses. Also for museums.

  One February midnight, von Rumpel lets himself into Dupont’s fastidious shop not far from Sacré-Coeur. He examines a copy of Streeter’s Precious Stones and Gems; drawings of cleavage panes; trigonometric charts used for faceting. When he finds several painstaking iterations of a mold that match exactly the size and pear-cut shape of the stone in the vault at the museum, he knows he has his man.

  At von Rumpel’s request, Dupont is furnished with forged food-ration tickets. Now von Rumpel waits. He prepares his questions: Did you make other replicas? How many? Do you know who has them now?

  On the last day of February 1941, a dapper little Gestapo man comes to him with the news that the unwitting Dupont has tried to use the forged tickets. He has been arrested. Kinderleicht: child’s play.

  It’s an attractive and drizzly winter’s night, scraps of melting snow shored up against the edges of the Place de la Concorde, the city looking ghostly, its windows jeweled with raindrops. A close-cropped corporal checks von Rumpel’s identification and points him not to a cell but to a high-ceilinged third-story office where a typist sits behind a desk. On the wall behind her, a painted wisteria vine frays into a tangled modernist spray of color that makes von Rumpel uneasy.

  Dupont is cuffed to a cheap dining chair in the center of the room. His face has the color and polish of tropical wood. Von Rumpel expected a mélange of fear and indignation and hunger, but Dupont sits upright. One of the lenses of his eyeglasses is already fractured, but otherwise he looks well enough.

  The typist twists her cigarette into an ashtray, a bright red smear of lipstick on its butt. The ashtray is full: fifty stubs squashed in there, limbless, somehow gory.

  “You can go,” says von Rumpel, nodding at her, and levels his attention on the lapidary.

  “He cannot speak German, sir.”

  “We will be fine,” he says in French. “Shut the door, please.”

  Dupont looks up, some gland within him leaching courage into his blood. Von Rumpel does not have to force the smile; it comes easily enough. He hopes for names, but all he needs is a number.

  Dearest Marie-Laure—

  We are in Germany now and it is fine. I’ve managed to find an angel who will try to get this to you. The winter firs and alders are very beautiful here. And—you are not going to believe this, but you will have to trust me—they serve us wonderful food. First-class: quail and duck and stewed rabbit. Chicken legs and potatoes fried with bacon and apricot tarts. Boiled beef with carrots. Coq au vin on rice. Plum tarts. Fruits and crème glacée. As much as we can eat. I so look forward to the meals!

  Be polite to your uncle and Madame too. Thank them for reading this to you. And know that I am always with you, that I am right beside you.

  Your Papa

  Entropy

  For a week the dead prisoner remains strapped to the stake in the courtyard, his flesh frozen gray. Boys stop and ask the corpse directions; someone dresses him in a cartridge belt and helmet. After several days, a pair of crows take to standing on his shoulders, chiseling away with their beaks, and eventually the custodian comes out with two third-year boys and they hack the corpse’s feet out of the ice with a maul and tip him into a cart and roll him away.

  Three times in nine days, Frederick is chosen as the weakest in field exercises. Bastian walks out farther than ever, and counts more quickly than ever, so that Frederick has to run four or five hundred yards, often through deep snow, and the boys race after him as if their lives depend on it. Each time he is caught; each time he is drubbed while Bastian looks on; each time Werner does nothing to stop it.

  Frederick lasts seven blows before falling. Then six. Then three. He never cries out and never asks to leave, and this in particular seems to make the commandant quake with homicidal frustration. Frederick’s dreaminess, his otherness—it’s on him like a scent, and everyone can smell it.

  Werner tries to lose himself in his work in Hauptmann’s lab. He has constructed a prototype of their transceiver and tests fuses and valves and handsets and plugs—but even in those late hours, it is as if the sky has dimmed and the school has become a darker, ever more diabolical place. His stomach bothers him. He gets diarrhea. He wakes in distant quarters of the night and sees Frederick in his bedroom in Berlin, wearing his eyeglasses and necktie, freeing trapped birds from the pages of a massive book.

  You’re a smart boy. You’ll do well.

  One evening when Hauptmann is down the hall in his office, Werner glances over at imperious, sleepy Volkheimer in the corner and says, “That prisoner.”

  Volkheimer blinks, stone turning to flesh. “They do that every year.” He takes off his cap and runs one hand over the dense stubble of his hair. “They say he’s a Pole, a Red, a Cossack. He stole liquor or kerosene or money. Every year it’s the same.”

  Under the seams of the hour, boys struggle in a dozen different arenas. Four hundred children crawling along the edge of a razor.

  “Always the same phrase too,” Volkheimer adds. “ ‘Circling the drain.’ ”

  “But was it decent to leave him out there like that? Even after he was dead?”

  “Decency does not matter to them.” Then Hauptmann’s crisp boot heels come clicking into the room, and Volkheimer leans back into the corner, and his eye sockets refill with shadow, and Werner does not have the chance to
ask him which them he means.

  Boys leave dead mice in Frederick’s boots. They call him a poof, Blowjob, countless other juvenile sobriquets. Twice, a fifth-year takes Frederick’s field glasses and smears the lenses with excrement.

  Werner tells himself that he tries. Every night he polishes Frederick’s boots for him until they shine a foot deep—one less reason for a bunk master, or Bastian, or an upperclassman to jump on him. Sunday mornings in the refectory, they sit quietly in a sunbeam and Werner helps him with his schoolwork. Frederick whispers that in the spring, he hopes to find skylark nests in the grasses outside the school walls. Once he lifts his pencil and stares into space and says, “Lesser spotted woodpecker,” and Werner hears a bird’s distant thrumming travel across the grounds and through the wall.

  In technical sciences, Dr. Hauptmann introduces the laws of thermodynamics. “Entropy, who can say what that is?”

  The boys hunch over their desks. No one raises a hand. Hauptmann stalks the rows. Werner tries not to twitch a single muscle.

  “Pfennig.”

  “Entropy is the degree of randomness or disorder in a system, Doctor.”

  His eyes fix on Werner’s for a heartbeat, a glance both warm and chilling. “Disorder. You hear the commandant say it. You hear your bunk masters say it. There must be order. Life is chaos, gentlemen. And what we represent is an ordering to that chaos. Even down to the genes. We are ordering the evolution of the species. Winnowing out the inferior, the unruly, the chaff. This is the great project of the Reich, the greatest project human beings have ever embarked upon.”

  Hauptmann writes on the blackboard. The cadets inscribe the words into their composition books. The entropy of a closed system never decreases. Every process must by law decay.

  The Rounds

  Although Etienne continues to offer objections, Madame Manec walks Marie-Laure to the beach every morning. The girl knots her shoes herself, feels her way down the stairwell, and waits in the foyer with her cane in her fist while Madame Manec finishes up in the kitchen.

  “I can find my own way,” Marie-Laure says the fifth time they step out. “You don’t have to lead.”

  Twenty-two paces to the intersection with the rue d’Estrées. Forty more to the little gate. Nine steps down and she’s on the sand and the twenty thousand sounds of the ocean engulf her.

  She collects pinecones dropped by trees who knows how far away. Thick hanks of rope. Slick globules of stranded polyps. Once a drowned sparrow. Her greatest pleasure is to walk to the north end of the beach at low tide and squat below an island that Madame Manec calls Le Grand Bé and let her fingers whisk around in the tidepools. Only then, with her toes and fingers in the cold sea, does her mind seem to fully leave her father; only then does she stop wondering how much of his letter was true, when he’ll write again, why he has been imprisoned. She simply listens, hears, breathes.

  Her bedroom fills with pebbles, seaglass, shells: forty scallops along the windowsill, sixty-one whelks along the top of the armoire. She arranges them by species whenever she can, then by size. Smallest on the left, largest on the right. She fills jars, pails, trays; the room assumes the smell of the sea.

  Most mornings, after the beach, she makes the rounds with Madame Manec, going to the vegetable market, occasionally to the butcher’s, then delivering food to whichever neighbors Madame Manec decides are most in need. They climb an echoing stairwell, rap on a door; an old woman invites them in, asks for news, insists all three of them drink a thimbleful of sherry. Madame Manec’s energy, Marie-Laure is learning, is extraordinary; she burgeons, shoots off stalks, wakes early, works late, concocts bisques without a drop of cream, loaves with less than a cup of flour. They clomp together through the narrow streets, Marie-Laure’s hand on the back of Madame’s apron, following the odors of her stews and cakes; in such moments Madame seems like a great moving wall of rosebushes, thorny and fragrant and crackling with bees.

  Still-warm bread to an ancient widow named Madame Blanchard. Soup to Monsieur Saget. Slowly Marie-Laure’s brain becomes a three-dimensional map in which exist glowing landmarks: a thick plane tree in the Place aux Herbes; nine potted topiaries outside the Hôtel Continental; six stairs up a passageway called the rue du Connétable.

  Several days a week, Madame brings food to Crazy Harold Bazin, a veteran of the Great War who sleeps in an alcove behind the library in sun or snow. Who lost his nose, left ear, and eye to shellfire. Who wears an enameled copper mask over half his face.

  Harold Bazin loves to talk about the walls and warlocks and pirates of Saint-Malo. Over the centuries, he tells Marie-Laure, the city ramparts have kept out bloodthirsty marauders, Romans, Celts, Norsemen. Some say sea monsters. For thirteen hundred years, he says, the walls kept out bloodthirsty English sailors