All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel

by Anthony Doerr

  We are young, they sing, we are steadfast, we have never compromised, we have so many castles yet to storm.

  Werner sways between exhaustion, confusion, and exhilaration. That his life has been so wholly redirected astounds him. He keeps any doubts at bay by memorizing lyrics or the routes to classrooms, by holding before his eyes a vision of the technical sciences laboratory: nine tables, thirty stools; coils, variable capacitors, amplifiers, batteries, soldering irons locked away in those gleaming cabinets.

  Above him, kneeling on his bunk, Frederick peers out the open window through a pair of antique field glasses and makes a record on the bed rail of birds he has sighted. One notch under red-necked grebe. Six notches under thrush nightingale. Out on the grounds, a group of ten-year-olds is carrying torches and swastika flags toward the river. The procession pauses, and a gust of wind tears at the torch flames. Then they march on, their song swirling up through the window like a bright, pulsing cloud.

  O take me, take me up into the ranks

  so that I do not die a common death!

  I do not want to die in vain, what

  I want is to fall on the sacrificial mound.

  Vienna

  Sergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel is forty-one years old, not so old that he cannot be promoted. He has moist red lips; pale, almost translucent cheeks like fillets of raw sole; and an instinct for correctness that rarely fails him. He has a wife who suffers his absences without complaint, and who arranges porcelain kittens by color, lightest to darkest, on two different shelves in their drawing room in Stuttgart. He also has two daughters whom he has not seen in nine months. The eldest, Veronika, is deeply earnest. Her letters to him include phrases like sacred resolve, proud accomplishments, and unparalleled in history.

  Von Rumpel’s particular gift is for diamonds: he can facet and polish stones as well as any Aryan jeweler in Europe, and he often spots fakes at a glance. He studied crystallography in Munich, apprenticed as a polisher in Antwerp, has even been—one glorious afternoon—to Charterhouse Street in London, to an unmarked diamond house, where he was asked to turn out his pockets and ushered up three staircases and through three locked doors and seated at a table where a man with a mustache waxed to knifepoints let him examine a ninety-two-carat raw diamond from South Africa.

  Before the war, the life of Reinhold von Rumpel was pleasant enough: he was a gemologist who ran an appraisal business out of a second-story shop behind Stuttgart’s old chancellery. Clients would bring in stones and he’d tell them what they were worth. Sometimes he’d recut diamonds or consult on high-level faceting projects. If occasionally he cheated a customer, he told himself that was part of the game.

  Because of the war, his job has expanded. Now Sergeant Major von Rumpel has the chance to do what no one has done in centuries—not since the Mogul Dynasty, not since the Khans. Perhaps not in history. The capitulation of France is only weeks past, and already he has seen things he did not dream he would see in six lifetimes. A seventeenth-century globe as big around as a small car, with rubies to mark volcanoes, sapphires clustered at the poles, and diamonds for world capitals. He has held—held!—a dagger handle at least four hundred years old, made of white jade and inlaid with emeralds. Just yesterday, on the road to Vienna, he took possession of a five-hundred-and-seventy-piece china set with a single marquise-cut diamond set into the rim of every single dish. Where the police confiscated these treasures and from whom, he does not ask. Already he has personally packed them into a crate and belted it shut and numbered it with white paint and seen it loaded inside a train car where it sits under twenty-four-hour guard.

  Waiting to be sent to high command. Waiting for more.

  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 simple 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.