All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel (42 page)

Yes, yes, the perfumer is saying, his gaze flitting over von Rumpel’s insignia, a few years ago he helped authorities apprehend an out-of-towner who was taking measurements of buildings. He only did what he knew was right.

“Where was he living during those months, this Monsieur LeBlanc?”

The perfumer squints, calculating. His blue-ringed eyes trumpet one message:
I want. Give me.
All these aching creatures, thinks von Rumpel, toiling under different pressures. But von Rumpel is the predator here. He needs only to be patient. Indefatigable. Remove the obstacles one by one.

When he turns to go, the perfumer’s complacency splinters. “Wait, wait, wait.”

Von Rumpel keeps one hand on the door. “Where did Monsieur LeBlanc live?”

“With his uncle. Useless man. Off his nut, as they say.”

“Where?”

“Right
there,
.” He points. “Number four.”

A
full day passes before Werner can find an hour to return. A wooden door, iron gate across that. Blue trim on the windows. The morning fog is so dense that he cannot see the roofline. He entertains pipe dreams: the Frenchman will invite him in. They’ll drink coffee, discuss his long-ago broadcasts. Maybe they’ll investigate some important empirical problem that has been troubling him for years. Maybe he’ll show Werner the transmitter.

Laughable. If Werner rings the bell, the old man will assume he’s being arrested as a terrorist. That he might be shot where he stands. The antenna on the chimney in itself is cause for execution.

Werner could bang on the door, march the old man away. He would be a hero.

The mist begins to suffuse with light. Somewhere, someone opens a door and closes it again. Werner remembers how Jutta would write her letters in a flurry and scribble
The Professor, France
on the envelope and drop them into the mailbox in the square. Imagining her voice might find his ear as his had found hers. One in ten million.

All night he has practiced the French in his head:
Avant la guerre. Je vous ai entendu à la radio.
He will keep his rifle over his shoulder, hands at his sides; he will look small, elfin, no threat at all. The old man will be startled, but his fear will be manageable. He’ll listen. But as Werner stands in the slowly dispersing fog at the end of the rue Vauborel, rehearsing what he’ll say, the front door of Number 4 opens, and out steps not an eminent old scientist but a girl. A slender, pretty, auburn-haired girl with a very freckled face, in glasses and a gray dress, carrying a knapsack over one shoulder. She heads to her left, making directly for him, and Werner’s heart twists in his chest.

The street is too narrow; she will have caught him staring. But her head tracks in a curious way, her face tilted off to one side. Werner sees the roving cane and opaque lenses of her glasses and realizes that she is blind.

Her cane clicks along the cobbles. Already she is twenty paces away. No one seems to be watching; all the curtains are drawn. Fifteen paces away. Her stockings have runs in them and her shoes are too large and the woolen panels of her dress are mottled with stains. Ten paces, five. She passes within arm’s reach, her head slightly higher than his own. Without thinking, hardly understanding what he’s doing, Werner follows. The tip of her cane shudders as it knocks against the runnels, finding every storm drain. She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog. She turns right, then left, traverses half a block and steps neatly through the open door of a shop. A rectangular sign above it reads:
Boulangerie.

Werner stops. Above him, the mist gives way in shreds, and a deep summer blue reveals itself. A woman waters flowers; an old traveler in gabardine walks a poodle. On a bench sits a goitrous and sallow German sergeant major with shadows carved under his eyes. He lowers his paper, stares directly at Werner, then raises his newspaper again.

Why are Werner’s hands shaking? Why can’t he catch his breath?

The girl emerges from the bakery, steps neatly off the curbstone, and makes straight for him. The poodle squats to relieve itself on the cobbles, and the girl veers neatly to her left to skirt it. She approaches Werner for a second time, her lips working softly, counting to herself—
deux trois quatre
—coming so close he can count the freckles on her nose, smell the loaf of bread in her knapsack. A million droplets of fog bead up on the fuzz of her wool dress and along the warp of her hair, and the light outlines her in silver.

He stands riveted. Her long pale neck seems to him, as it passes, incredibly vulnerable.

She takes no notice of him; she seems to know nothing but the morning. This, he thinks, is the pure they were always lecturing about at Schulpforta.

He presses his back against a wall. The tip of her cane just misses the toe of his boot. Then she’s past, dress swaying lightly, cane roving back and forth, and he watches her continue up the street until the fog swallows her.

A
German antiair battery shoots an American plane out of the sky. It crashes into the sea off Paramé, and its American pilot wades ashore to be taken prisoner. Etienne sees it as a calamity, but Madame Ruelle radiates glee. “Movie-star handsome,” she whispers as she hands Marie-Laure a loaf. “I bet they’ll all look like him.”

Marie-Laure smiles. Every morning it’s the same: the Americans ever closer, the Germans fraying at the seams. Every afternoon Marie-Laure reads to Etienne from part 2 of
Twenty Thousand Leagues,
both of them in new territory now.
Ten thousand leagues in three and a half months,
writes Professor Aronnax.
Where were we going now, and what did the future have in store for us?

Marie-Laure puts the loaf in her knapsack, leaves the bakery, and winds toward the ramparts to Harold Bazin’s grotto. She closes the gate, lifts the hem of her dress, and wades into the shallow pool, praying she does not crush any creatures as she steps.

The tide is rising. She finds barnacles, an anemone as soft as silk; she sets her fingers as lightly as she can on a
Nassarius
. It stops moving immediately, sucking its head and foot inside its shell. Then it resumes, the twin wands of its horns extending, dragging its whorled shell atop the sled of its body.

What do you seek, little snail? Do you live only in this one moment, or do you worry like Professor Aronnax for your future?

When the snail has crossed the pool and started up the far wall, Marie-Laure picks up her cane and climbs out in her dripping oversized loafers. She steps through the gate and is about to lock it behind her when a male voice says, “Good morning, mademoiselle.”

She stumbles, almost trips. Her cane goes clattering.

“What’s in your sack there?”

He speaks proper French, but she can tell that he is German. His body obstructs the alley. The hem of her dress drips; her shoes squelch out water; to both sides rise sheer walls. She keeps her right fist clenched around a spar of the open gate.

“What is that back there? A hidey-hole?” His voice sounds terribly close, but it’s hard to know for certain in a place so congested with echoes. She can feel Madame Ruelle’s loaf pulsing on her back like something alive. Lodged inside it—almost certainly—is a coiled-up slip of paper. On which numbers will spell out a death sentence. For her great-uncle, for Madame Ruelle. For them all.

She says, “My cane.”

“It has rolled behind you, dear.”

Behind the man unspools the alley and then the hanging curtain of ivy and then the city. A place where she could scream and be heard.

“May I pass, monsieur?”

“Of course.”

But he does not seem to move. The gate creaks lightly.

“What do you want, monsieur?” Impossible to keep her voice from trembling. If he asks again about the knapsack, her heart will burst.

“What do you do in there?”

“We’re not allowed on the beaches.”

“So you come here?”

“To collect snails. I must be getting along, monsieur. May I please retrieve my cane?”

“But you have not collected any snails, mademoiselle.”

“May I pass?”

“First answer a question about your father.”

“Papa?” Something cold inside her grows colder. “Papa will be here any moment.”

Now the man laughs, and his laugh echoes up between the walls. “Any moment, you say? Your papa who’s in a prison five hundred kilometers away?”

Threads of terror spill through her chest. I should have listened, Papa. I never should have gone outside.

“Come now,
petite cachotière,
” says the man, “don’t look so frightened,” and she can hear him reaching for her; she smells rot on his breath, hears oblivion in his voice, and something—a fingertip?—grazes her wrist as she jerks away and clangs the gate shut in his face.

He slips; it takes longer than she expects for him to get to his feet. Marie-Laure turns the key in the lock and pockets it and finds her cane as she retreats into the low space of the kennel. The man’s desolate voice pursues her, even as his body remains on the other side of the locked gate.

“Mademoiselle, you made me drop my newspaper. I am just a lowly sergeant major here to ask a question. One simple question and then I will leave.”

The tide murmurs; the snails teem. Is the ironwork too narrow for him to squeeze through? Are its hinges strong enough? She prays that they are. The bulk of the rampart holds her in its breadth. Every ten seconds or so, a new sheet of cold seawater comes flowing in. Marie-Laure can hear the man pacing out there, one-pause-two one-pause-two, a lurching hobble. She tries to imagine the watchdogs that Harold Bazin said lived here for centuries: dogs as big as horses. Dogs that ripped the calves off men. She crouches over her knees. She is the Whelk. Armored. Impervious.

T
hirty minutes. It should take Marie-Laure twenty-one; Etienne has counted many times. Once twenty-three. Often shorter. Never longer.

Thirty-one.

It is a four-minute walk to the bakery. Four there and four back, and somewhere along the way, those other thirteen or fourteen minutes disappear. He knows she usually goes to the sea—she comes back smelling of seaweed, shoes wet, sleeves decorated with algae or sea fennel or the weed Madame Manec called
pioka
. He does not know where she goes exactly, but he has always assured himself that she keeps herself safe. That her curiosity sustains her. That she is more capable in a thousand ways than he is.

Thirty-two minutes. Out his fifth-floor windows, he can see no one. She could be lost, scraping her fingers along walls at the edge of town, drifting farther away every second. She could have stepped in front of a truck, drowned in a puddle, been seized by a mercenary with foulness on his mind. Someone could have found out about the bread, the numbers, the transmitter.

Bakery in flames.

He hurries downstairs and peers out the kitchen door into the alley. Cat sleeping. Trapezoid of sunlight on the east-facing wall. This is all his fault.

Now Etienne hyperventilates. At thirty-four minutes by his wristwatch, he puts on his shoes and a hat that belonged to his father. Stands in the foyer summoning all his resolve. When he last went out, almost twenty-four years ago, he tried to make eye contact, to present what might be considered a normal appearance. But the attacks were sly,
unpredictable, devastating; they sneaked up on him like bandits. First a terrible ominousness would fill the air. Then any light, even through closed eyelids, became excruciatingly bright. He could not walk for the thundering of his own feet. Little eyeballs blinked at him from the cobblestones. Corpses stirred in the shadows. When Madame Manec would help him home, he’d crawl into the darkest corner of his bed and belt pillows around his ears. All his energy would go into ignoring the pounding of his own pulse.

His heart beats icily in a faraway cage. Headache coming, he thinks. Terrible terrible terrible headache.

Twenty heartbeats. Thirty-five minutes. He twists the latch, opens the gate. Steps outside.

M
arie-Laure tries to remember everything she knows about the lock and latch on the gate, everything she has felt with her fingers, everything her father would have told her. Iron rod threaded through three rusted loops, old mortise lock with a rusty cam. Would a gunshot break it? The man calls out now and then as he runs the edge of his newspaper over the bars of the gate. “Arrived in June, not arrested until January. What was he doing all that time? Why was he measuring buildings?”

She crouches against the wall of the grotto, knapsack in her lap. The water surges to her knees: cold, even in July. Can he see her? Carefully Marie-Laure opens her knapsack, breaks open the loaf hidden inside, and fishes with her fingers for the coil of paper. There. She counts to three and slips the piece of paper into her mouth.

“Just tell me,” the German calls, “if your father left anything with you or spoke about carrying something for the museum where he used to work. Then I will walk away. I won’t tell anyone about this place. God’s truth.”

The paper disintegrates into mush between her teeth. At her feet, the snails go about their work: chewing, scavenging, sleeping. Their mouths, Etienne has taught her, contain something like thirty teeth per row, eighty rows of teeth, two and a half thousand teeth per snail, grazing, scratching, rasping. High above the ramparts, gulls course through an open sky. God’s truth? How long do these intolerable moments last for God? A trillionth of a second? The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness. That’s God’s truth.

“They have me doing all this busywork,” says the German. “A Jean Jouvenet in Saint-Brieuc, six Monets in the area, a Fabergé egg in a manor house near Rennes. I get so tired. Don’t you know how long I’ve searched?”

Why couldn’t Papa have stayed? Wasn’t she the most important thing? She swallows the pulped shreds of the paper. Then she rocks forward on her heels. “He left me
nothing
.” She is surprised to hear how angry she is. “Nothing! Just a dumb model of this town and a broken promise. Just Madame, who is dead. Just my great-uncle, who is frightened of an ant.”