All the Light We Cannot See

“It will be cooler on the train, Marie. The director has arranged tickets for us.”

“Can we go in?”

“The gates are locked.”

The crowd gives off a nauseating tension.

“I’m scared, Papa.”

“Keep hold of me.”

He leads her in a new direction. They cross a seething thoroughfare, then go up an alley that smells like a muddy ditch. Always there is the muted rattling of her father’s tools inside his rucksack and the distant and incessant honking of automobile horns.

In a minute they find themselves amid another throng. Voices echo off a high wall; the smell of wet garments crowds her. Somewhere someone shouts names through a bullhorn.

“Where are we, Papa?”

“Gare Saint-Lazare.”

A baby cries. She smells urine.

“Are there Germans, Papa?”

“No, ma chérie.”

“But soon?”

“So they say.”

“What will we do when they get here?”

“We will be on a train by then.”

In the space to her right, a child screeches. A man with panic in his voice demands the crowd make way. A woman nearby moans, “Sebastien? Sebastien?” over and over.

“Is it night yet?”

“It’s only now getting dark. Let’s rest a moment. Save our breath.”

Someone says, “The Second Army mauled, the Ninth cut off. France’s best fleets wasted.”

Someone says, “We will be overrun.”

Trunks slide across tiles and a little dog yaps and a conductor’s whistle blows and some kind of big machinery coughs to a start and then dies. Marie-Laure tries to calm her stomach.

“But we have tickets, for God’s sake!” shouts someone behind her.

There is a scuffle. Hysteria ripples through the crowd.

“What does it look like, Papa?”

“What, Marie?”

“The station. The night.”

She hears the sparking of his lighter, the suck and flare of tobacco as his cigarette ignites.

“Let’s see. The whole city is dark. No streetlights, no lights in windows. There are projector lights moving through the sky now and then. Looking for airplanes. There’s a woman in a gown. And another carrying a stack of dishes.”

“And the armies?”

“There are no armies, Marie.”

His hand finds hers. Her fear settles slightly. Rain trickles through a downspout.

“What are we doing now, Papa?”

“Hoping for a train.”

“What is everybody else doing?”

“They’re hoping too.”

Herr Siedler (#ulink_71829810-c67a-5214-80ef-9c636754d6d5)

A knock after curfew. Werner and Jutta are doing schoolwork with a half-dozen other children at the long wooden table. Frau Elena pins her party insignia through her lapel before opening the door.

A lance corporal with a pistol on his belt and a swastika band on his left arm steps in from the rain. Beneath the low ceiling of the room, the man looks absurdly tall. Werner thinks of the shortwave radio tucked into the old wooden first-aid cabinet beneath his cot. He thinks: They know.

The lance corporal looks around the room—the coal stove, the hanging laundry, the undersize children—with equal measures of condescension and hostility. His handgun is black; it seems to draw all the light in the room toward it.

Werner risks a single glance at his sister. Her attention stays fixed on the visitor. The corporal picks up a book from the parlor table—a children’s book about a talking train—and turns every one of its pages before dropping it. Then he says something that Werner can’t hear.

Frau Elena folds her hands over her apron, and Werner can see she has done so to keep them from shaking. “Werner,” she calls in a slow, dreamlike voice, without taking her eyes from the corporal. “This man says he has a wireless in need of—”

“Bring your tools,” the man says.

On the way out, Werner looks back only once: Jutta’s forehead and palms are pressed against the glass of the living room window. She is backlit and too far away and he cannot read her expression. Then the rain obscures her.

Werner is half the corporal’s height and has to take two strides for every one of the man’s. He follows past company houses and the sentry at the bottom of the hill to where the mining officials reside. Rain falls slant through the lights. The few people they pass give the corporal a wide berth.

Werner risks no questions. With every heartbeat comes a sharp longing to run.

They approach the gate of the largest house in the colony, a house he has seen a thousand times but never so close. A large crimson flag, heavy with rainwater, hangs from the sill of an upstairs window.

The corporal raps on a rear door. A maid in a high-waisted dress takes their coats, expertly flips off the water, and hangs them on a brass-footed rack. The kitchen smells of cake.

The corporal steers Werner into a dining room where a narrow-faced woman with three fresh daisies stuck through her hair sits in a chair turning the pages of a magazine. “Two wet ducks,” she says, and looks back at her magazine. She does not ask them to sit.