All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel (45 page)

E
tienne begged his jailers, the guardian of the fort, dozens of his fellow prisoners. “My niece, my great-niece, she’s blind, she’s alone . . .” He told them he was sixty-three, not sixty, as they claimed, that his papers had been unfairly confiscated, that he was not a terrorist; he wobbled before the
Feldwebel
in charge and stumbled through the few German phrases he could stitch together—“
Sie müssen mich helfen! 
” “
Meine Nichte ist herein dort! 
”—but the
Feldwebel
shrugged like everybody else and looked back at the city burning across the water as if to say: what can anyone do in the face of that?

Then the stray American shell struck the fort, and the wounded howled down in the munitions cellar, and the dead were buried under rocks just above the tide line, and Etienne stopped talking.

The tide slips away, then climbs back up. Whatever energy Etienne has left goes into quieting the noise in his head. Sometimes he almost convinces himself that he can see through the smoldering skeletons of the seafront mansions at the northwestern corner of the city to the rooftop of his house. He almost convinces himself it stands. But then it disappears again behind a mantle of smoke.

No pillow, no blanket. The latrine is apocalyptic. Food comes irregularly, carried out from the citadel by the guardian’s wife across the quarter mile of rocks at low tide while shells explode in the city behind her. There’s never enough. Etienne diverts himself with fantasies of escape. Slip over a wall, swim several hundred meters, drag himself through the shorebreak. Scamper across the mined beach with no cover to one of the locked gates. Absurd.

Out here the prisoners see the shells smash into the city before they hear them. During the last war, Etienne knew artillerymen who could
peer through field glasses and discern their shells’ damage by the colors thrown skyward. Gray was stone. Brown was soil. Pink was flesh.

He shuts his eyes. He remembers lamplit hours in Monsieur Hébrard’s bookshop listening to the first radio he ever heard. He remembers climbing into the choir of the cathedral to listen to Henri’s voice as it rose toward the ceiling. He remembers the cramped restaurants with leaded windows and linenfold paneling where his parents took them to dinner; and the corsairs’ villas with scalloped friezes and Doric columns and gold coins mortared inside the walls; the storefronts of gunsmiths and shipmasters and money changers and hostelers; the graffiti Henri used to scratch into the stones of ramparts,
I cannot wait to leave, fuck this place
. He remembers the LeBlanc house, his house! Tall and narrow with the staircase spiraling up its center like a spire shell stood on end, where the ghost of his brother occasionally slipped between walls, where Madame Manec lived and died, where not so long ago he could sit on a davenport with Marie-Laure and pretend they flew over the volcanoes of Hawaii, over the cloud forests of Peru, where just a week ago she sat cross-legged on the floor and read to him about a pearl fishery off the coast of Ceylon, Captain Nemo and Aronnax in their diving suits, the impulsive Canadian Ned Land about to hurl his harpoon through the side of a shark . . . All of it is burning. Every memory he ever made.

Above Fort National, the dawn becomes deeply, murderously clear. The Milky Way a fading river. He looks across to the fires. He thinks: The universe is full of fuel.

B
y noon on the twelfth of August, Marie-Laure has read seven of the last nine chapters into the microphone. Captain Nemo has freed his ship from the giant squid only to stare into the eye of a hurricane. Pages later, he rammed a warship full of men, passing through its hull, Verne writes, like a sailmaker’s needle through cloth. Now the captain plays a mournful, chilling dirge on his organ as the
Nautilus
sleeps in the wastelands of the sea. Three pages are left. If Marie-Laure has brought anyone comfort by broadcasting the story, if her great-uncle, crouched in some dank cellar with a hundred men, tuned her in—if some trio of Americans reclined in the nighttime fields as they cleaned their weapons and traveled the dark gangways of the
Nautilus
with her—she cannot say.

But she is glad to be so near the end.

Downstairs the German has shouted twice in frustration, then fallen silent. Why not, she considers, just slide through the wardrobe and hand the little house to him and find out if he will spare her?

First she will finish. Then she’ll decide.

Again she opens the model house and tips the stone into her palm. What would happen if the goddess took away the curse? Would the fires go out, would the earth heal over, would doves return to the windowsills? Would Papa come back?

Fill your lungs. Beat your heart. She keeps the knife beside her. Fingertips pressed to the lines of the novel. The Canadian harpooner Ned Land has found his window for escape. “
The sea’s bad,
” he says to Professor Aronnax, “
and the wind’s blowing strong . . .
”

“I’m with you, Ned.”

“But let me tell you that if we’re caught, I’m going to defend myself, even if I die doing it.”

“We’ll die together, Ned my friend.”

Marie-Laure turns on the transmitter. She thinks of the whelks in Harold Bazin’s kennel, ten thousand of them; how they cling; how they draw themselves up into the spirals of their shells; how, when they’re tucked into that grotto, the gulls cannot come in to carry them up into the sky and drop them on the rocks to break them.

V
on Rumpel drinks from a bottle of skunked wine he has found in the kitchen. Four days in this house, and how many mistakes he has made! The Sea of Flames could have been in the Paris Museum all along—that simpering mineralogist and the assistant director laughing as he slunk away, duped, fooled, inveigled. Or the perfumer could have betrayed him, taking the diamond from the girl after marching her away. Or Levitte might have walked her right out of the city while she carried it in her ratty knapsack; or the old man could have jammed it up his rectum and is just now shitting it out, twenty million francs in a pile of feces.

Or maybe the stone was never real at all. Maybe it was all hoax, all story.

He had been so certain. Certain he had found the hiding spot, solved the puzzle. Certain the stone would save him. The girl didn’t know, the old man was out of the picture—everything was set up perfectly. What is certain now? Only the murderous bloom inside his body, only the corruption it brings to every cell. In his ears comes the voice of his father:
You are only being tested.

Someone calls to him in German. “
Ist da wer? 
”

Father?

“You in there!”

Von Rumpel listens. Sounds drawing nearer through the smoke. He crawls to the window. Sets his helmet on his head. Thrusts his head over the shattered sill.

A German infantry corporal squints up from the street. “Sir? I didn’t expect . . . Is the house clear, sir?”

“Empty, yes. Where are you headed, Corporal?”

“The fortress at La Cité, sir. We are evacuating. Leaving everything. We still hold the château and the Bastion de la Hollande. All other personnel are to fall back.”

Von Rumpel braces his chin on the sill, feeling as if his head might separate from his neck and go tumbling down to explode on the street.

“The entire town will be inside the bomb line,” the corporal says.

“How long?”

“There will be a cease-fire tomorrow. Noon, they say. To get civilians out. Then they resume the assault.”

Von Rumpel says, “We’re giving up the city?”

A shell detonates not far away, and the echoes of the blast shunt down between the wrecked houses, and the soldier in the street claps a hand over his helmet. Bits of stone skitter across the cobbles.

He calls, “You are with which unit, Sergeant Major?”

“Continue with your work, Corporal. I’m nearly done here.”

V
olkheimer does not stir. The liquid at the bottom of the paint bucket, however toxic it was, is gone. Werner has heard nothing from the girl on any frequency for how long? An hour? More? She read about the
Nautilus
getting sucked down into a whirlpool, waves higher than houses, the submarine standing on end, its steel ribs cracking, and then she read what he assumed was the last line of the book:
Thus, to that question asked six thousand years ago by Ecclesiastes, “That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?” only two men now have the right to answer: Captain Nemo and myself
.

Then the transmitter snapped off and the absolute darkness closed around him. For these past days—how many?—it has felt as though the hunger were a hand inside him, thrusting around in the cavity of his chest, reaching up to his shoulder blades, then down into his pelvis. Scraping at his bones. Today, though—or is it tonight?—the hunger peters out like a flame for which no fuel remains. Emptiness and fullness, in the end, somehow the same.

Werner blinks up to see the Viennese girl in her cape descend through the ceiling as if it is no more than a shadow. She carries a paper sack full of withered greens and seats herself amid the rubble. Around her swirls a cloud of bees.

He can see nothing, but he can see her.

She counts on her fingers.
For tripping in line,
she says.
For working too slowly. For arguing over bread. For loitering too long in the camp toilet. For sobbing. For not organizing her things according to protocol.

It’s surely nonsense, yet something hangs inside it, some truth he does not want to allow himself to apprehend, and as she speaks, she
ages, silver hair lays down on her head, her collar frays; she becomes an old woman—his understanding of who hovers at the rim of his consciousness.

For complaining of headaches.

For singing.

For speaking at night in her bunk.

For forgetting her birth date during evening muster.

For unloading the shipment too slowly.

For not turning in her keys correctly.

For failing to inform the guard.

For rising from bed too late.

Frau Schwartzenberger—that’s who she is. The Jewess in Frederick’s elevator.

She runs out of fingers as she counts.

For closing her eyes while being addressed.

For hoarding crusts.

For attempting to enter the park.

For having inflamed hands.

For asking for a cigarette.

For a failure of imagination
and in the darkness, it feels as if  Werner has reached bottom, as if he has been whirling deeper all this time, like the
Nautilus
sucked under the maelstrom, like his father descending into the pits: a one-way dive from Zollverein past Schulpforta, past the horrors of Russia and Ukraine, past the mother and daughter in Vienna, his ambition and shame becoming one and the same, to the nadir in this basement on the rim of the continent where the apparition chants nonsense—Frau Schwartzenberger walks toward him, transforming herself as she approaches from woman to girl—her hair becomes red again, her skin smooths, a seven-year-old girl presses her face up against his, and in the center of her forehead he can see a hole blacker than the blackness around him, at the bottom of which teems a dark city full of souls, ten thousand, five hundred thousand, all these faces staring up from alleys, from windows, from smoldering parks, and he hears thunder.

Lightning.

Artillery.

The girl evaporates.

The ground quakes. The organs inside his body shake. The beams groan. Then the slow trickle of dust and the shallow, defeated breaths of Volkheimer a meter away.

S
ometime after midnight on August 13, after surviving in her great-uncle’s attic for five days, Marie-Laure holds a record with her left hand while she runs the fingers of her right gently through its grooves, reconstructing the whole song in her head. Each rise and fall. Then she slots the record on the spindle of Etienne’s electrophone.

No water for a day and a half. No food for two. The attic smells of heat and dust and confinement and her own urine in the shaving bowl in the corner.

We’ll die together, Ned my friend.

The siege, it seems, will never end. Masonry crashes into the streets; the city falls to pieces; still this one house does not fall.

She takes the unopened can out of her great-uncle’s coat pocket and sets it in the center of the attic floor. For so long she has saved it. Maybe because it offers some last tie to Madame Manec. Maybe because if she opens it and finds it spoiled, the loss will kill her.

She places the can and brick beneath the piano bench, where she knows she can find them again. Then she double-checks the record on the spindle. Lowers the arm, places the needle at the outside edge. Finds the microphone switch with her left hand, the transmitter switch with her right.

She is going to turn it up as loud as it will go. If the German is in the house, he will hear. He’ll hear piano music draining down through the upper stories and cock his head, and then he’ll rove the sixth floor like a slavering demon. Eventually he’ll set his ear to the doors of the wardrobe, where it will be louder still.

What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in
his models. Mazes in the nodules on murex shells and in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.

She places the microphone into the bell-shaped speaker of the electrophone, switches on the record player, and the plate begins to spin. The attic crackles. In her mind she walks a path in the Jardin des Plantes, the air golden, the wind green, the long fingers of willows drifting across her shoulders. Ahead is her father; he extends a hand, waiting.