All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel (44 page)

Well after midnight, a magnificent high tide arrives, the largest waves smashing against the bases of the ramparts, the sea green and aerated and networked with seething rafts of moonlit foam. Marie-Laure comes out of dreams to hear Etienne tapping on her bedroom door.

“I’m going out.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost dawn. I’ll only be an hour.”

“Why do you have to go?”

“It’s better if you don’t know.”

“What about curfew?”

“I’ll be quick.” Her great-uncle. Who has not been quick in the four years she has known him.

“What if the bombing starts?”

“It’s almost dawn, Marie. I should go while it’s still dark.”

“Will they hit any houses, Uncle? When they come?”

“They won’t hit any houses.”

“Will it be over quickly?”

“Quick as a swallow. You rest, Marie-Laure, and when you wake, I’ll be back. You’ll see.”

“I could read to you a bit? Now that I’m awake? We’re so close to the end.”

“When I’m back, we’ll read. We’ll finish it together.”

She tries to rest her mind, slow her breathing. Tries not to think about the little house now under her pillow and the terrible burden inside.

“Etienne,” Marie-Laure whispers, “are you ever sorry that we came here? That I got dropped in your lap and you and Madame Manec had to look after me? Did you ever feel like I brought a curse into your life?”

“Marie-Laure,” he says without hesitation. He squeezes her hand with both of his. “You are the best thing that has ever come into my life.”

Something seems to be banking up in the silence, a tide, a breaker rearing. But Etienne only says a second time, “You rest, and when you wake, I’ll be back,” and she counts his steps down the stairs.

E
tienne feels strangely good as he steps outside; he feels strong. He is glad Madame Ruelle has assigned him this final task. He has already transmitted the location of one air-defense battery: a cannon on a shelf of rampart beside the Hotel of Bees. He needs only to take the bearings of two more. Find two known points—he’ll choose the cathedral spire and the outer island of Le Petit Bé—then calculate the location of the third and unknown point. Simple triangle. Something other than ghosts on which his mind can fix.

He turns onto the rue d’Estrées, skirts behind the college, makes for the alley behind the Hôtel-Dieu. His legs feel young, his feet light. No one is about. Somewhere the sun eases up behind the fog. The city in the predawn is warm and fragrant and sleepy, and the houses on either side seem almost immaterial. For a moment he has a vision that he’s walking the aisle of a vast train carriage, all the other passengers asleep, the train gliding through darkness toward a city teeming with light: glowing archways, gleaming towers, fireworks rising.

As he approaches the dark bulwark of the ramparts, a man in uniform limps toward him out of the blackness.

M
arie-Laure wakes to the concussions of big guns firing. She crosses the landing and opens the wardrobe and, with the tip of her cane, reaches through the hanging shirts and raps three times on the false back wall. Nothing. Then she descends to the fifth floor and knocks on Etienne’s door. His bed is empty and cool.

He is not on the second floor, nor in the kitchen. The penny nail beside the door where Madame Manec used to hang the key ring is empty. His shoes are gone.

I’ll only be an hour.

She reins in her panic. Important not to assume the worst. In the foyer, she checks the trip wire: intact. Then she tears an end off yesterday’s loaf from Madame Ruelle and stands in the kitchen chewing. The water—miraculously—has been turned back on, so she fills the two galvanized buckets and carries them upstairs and sets them in the corner of her bedroom and thinks a moment and walks to the third floor and fills the bathtub to the rim.

Then she opens her novel. Captain Nemo has planted his flag on the South Pole, but if he doesn’t move the submarine north soon, they will become trapped in ice. The spring equinox has just passed; they face six months of unrelenting night.

Marie-Laure counts the chapters that remain. Nine. She is tempted to read on, but they are voyaging on the
Nautilus
together, she and Etienne, and as soon as he returns, they will resume. Any moment now.

She rechecks the little house under her pillow and fights the temptation to take out the stone and instead reinstalls the house inside the model city at the foot of her bed. Out the window, a truck roars to life.
Gulls pass, braying like donkeys, and in the distance the guns thud again, and the rattling of the truck fades, and Marie-Laure tries to concentrate on rereading a chapter earlier in the novel: make the raised dots form letters, the letters words, the words a world.

In the afternoon, the trip wire quivers, and the bell hidden beneath the third-floor table gives a single ring. In the attic high above her, a muted ring matches it. Marie-Laure lifts her fingers from the page, thinking, At last, but when she winds down the stairs and sets her hand on the dead bolt and calls, “Who is there?” she hears not the quiet voice of Etienne but the oily one of the perfumer Claude Levitte.

“Let me in, please.”

Even through the door she can smell him, peppermint, musk, aldehyde. Beneath that: Sweat. Fear.

She undoes both dead bolts and opens the door halfway.

He speaks through the half-open gate. “You need to come with me.”

“I am waiting for my great-uncle.”

“I have talked to your great-uncle.”

“You talked to him? Where?”

Marie-Laure can hear Monsieur Levitte cracking his knuckles one after the next. His lungs toiling inside his chest. “If you could see, mademoiselle, you’d have seen the evacuation orders. They’ve locked the city gates.”

She does not reply.

“They’re detaining every man between sixteen and sixty. They’ve been told to assemble at the tower of the château. Then they will be marched to Fort National at low tide. God be with them.”

Out on the rue Vauborel, everything sounds calm. Swallows swoop past the houses, and two doves bicker on a high gutter. A bicyclist goes rattling past. Then quiet. Have they really locked the city gates? Has this man really spoken to Etienne?

“Will you go with them, Monsieur Levitte?”

“I plan not to. You must get to a shelter immediately.” Monsieur Levitte sniffs. “Or to the crypts below Notre-Dame at Rocabey. Which
is where I sent Madame. It’s what your uncle asked me to do. Leave absolutely everything behind, and come with me now.”

“Why?”

“Your uncle knows why. Everybody knows why. It’s not safe here. Come along.”

“But you said the gates to the city are locked.”

“Yes, I did, girl, and that’s enough questions for now.” He sighs. “You are not safe, and I am here to help.”

“Uncle says our cellar is safe. He says if it has lasted for five hundred years, it will last a few more nights.”

The perfumer clears his throat. She imagines him extending his thick neck to look into the house, the coat on the rack, the crumbs of bread on the kitchen table. Everyone checking to see what everyone else has. Her uncle could not have asked the perfumer to escort her to a shelter—when is the last time Etienne has spoken to Claude Levitte? Again she thinks of the model upstairs, the stone inside. She hears Dr. Geffard’s voice:
That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much.

“Houses are burning at Paramé, mademoiselle. They’re scuttling ships at the port, they’re shelling the cathedral, and there’s no water at the hospital. The doctors are washing their hands in wine. Wine!” The edges of Monsieur Levitte’s voice flutter. She remembers Madame Manec saying once that every time a theft was reported in town, Monsieur Levitte would go to bed with his billfold stuffed between his buttocks.

Marie-Laure says, “I will stay.”

“Christ, girl, must I force you?”

She remembers the German pacing outside Harold Bazin’s gate, the edge of his newspaper rattling the bars, and closes the door a fraction. Someone has put the perfumer up to this. “Surely,” she says, “my great-uncle and I are not the only people sleeping beneath our own roof tonight.”

She tries her best to look impassive. Monsieur Levitte’s smell is overpowering.

“Mademoiselle.” Pleading now. “Be reasonable. Come with me and leave everything behind.”

“You may talk to my great-uncle when he returns.” And she bolts the door.

She can hear him standing out there. Working out some cost-benefit analysis. Then he turns and recedes down the street, dragging his fear like a cart behind him. Marie-Laure bends beside the hall table and finds the thread and resets the trip wire. What could he have seen? A coat, half of a loaf of bread? Etienne will be pleased. Out past the kitchen window, swifts swoop for insects, and the filaments of a spiderweb catch the light and shine for an instant and are gone.

And yet: what if the perfumer was telling the truth?

The daylight dulls to gold. A few crickets down in the cellar begin their song: a rhythmic
kree-kree,
evening in August, and Marie-Laure hikes her tattered stockings and goes into the kitchen and tears another hunk from Madame Ruelle’s loaf.

B
efore dark, the Austrians serve pork kidneys with whole tomatoes on hotel china, a single silver bee etched on the rim of every plate. Everyone sits on sandbags or ammunition boxes, and Bernd falls asleep over his bowl, and Volkheimer talks in the corner with the lieutenant about the radio in the cellar, and around the perimeter of the room the Austrians chew steadily beneath their steel helmets. Brisk, experienced men. Men who do not doubt their purpose.

When Werner is done with his food, he lets himself into the topfloor suite and stands in the hexagonal bathtub. He nudges the shutter, and it opens a few centimeters. The evening air is a benediction. Below the window, on one of the bastioned traces on the seaward side of the hotel, waits the big 88. Beyond the gun, beyond the embrasures, ramparts plunge forty feet to the green and white plumes of surf. To his left waits the city, gray and dense. Far in the east, a red glow rises from some battle just out of sight. The Americans have them pinned against the sea.

It seems to Werner that in the space between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other. He thinks of the girl who may or may not be in the city behind him. He envisions her running her cane along the runnels. Facing the world with her barren eyes, her wild hair, her bright face.

At least he protected the secrets of her house. At least he kept her safe.

New orders, signed by the garrison commander himself, have been posted on doors and market stalls and lampposts.
No person must
attempt to leave the old city. No one must walk in the streets without special authority.

Just before Werner closes the shutter, a single airplane comes through the dusk. From its belly issues a flock of white growing slowly larger.

Birds?

The flock is sundering, scattering: it is paper. Thousands of sheets. They gust down the slope of the roof, skitter across the parapets, stick flat in tidal eddies down on the beach.

Werner descends to the lobby, where an Austrian holds one to the light. “It’s in French,” he says.

Werner takes it. The ink so fresh it smudges beneath his fingers.
Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town,
it says.
Depart immediately to open country.

S
he is reading again:
Who could possibly calculate the minimum time required for us to get out? Might we not be asphyxiated before the
Nautilus
could surface? Was it destined to perish in this tomb of ice along with all those on board? The situation seemed terrible. But everyone faced it squarely and decided to do their duty to the end . . .

Werner listens. The crew chops through the icebergs that have trapped their submarine; it cruises north along the coast of South America, past the mouth of the Amazon, only to be chased by giant squid in the Atlantic. The propeller cuts out; Captain Nemo emerges from his cabin for the first time in weeks, looking grim.

Werner hauls himself off the floor, carrying the radio in one hand and dragging the battery in the other. He traverses the cellar until he finds Volkheimer in the gold armchair. He sets down the battery and runs his hand up the big man’s arm to his shoulder. Locates his huge head. Clamps the headphones over Volkheimer’s ears.

“Can you hear her?” says Werner. “It’s a strange and beautiful story, I wish you could understand French. A giant squid has lodged its giant beak into the propeller of the submarine, and now the captain has said they must surface and fight the beasts hand to hand.”

Volkheimer draws a slow breath. He does not move.

“She’s using the transmitter we were supposed to find. I found it. Weeks ago. They said it was a network of terrorists, but it was just an old man and a girl.”

Volkheimer says nothing.

“You knew all along, didn’t you? That I knew?”

Volkheimer must not be able to hear Werner through the headphones.

“She keeps saying, ‘Help me.’ She begs her father, her great-uncle. She says, ‘He is here. He will kill me.’ ”

A moan shudders through the rubble above them, and in the darkness Werner feels as if he is trapped inside the
Nautilus,
twenty meters down, while the tentacles of a dozen angry kraken lash its hull. He knows the transmitter must be high in the house. Close to the shelling. He says, “I saved her only to hear her die.”

Volkheimer shows no signs of having understood. Gone or resolved to go: is there much difference? Werner takes back the headphones and sits in the dust beside the battery.

The first mate,
she reads,
struggled furiously with other monsters which were climbing up the sides of the
Nautilus.
The crew were flailing away with their axes. Ned, Conseil and I also dug our weapons into their soft bodies. A violent odor of musk filled the air.