All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day toward success or failure. But no curses.

In another half second her father’s hands are in her armpits, swinging her up, and Marie-Laure smiles, and he laughs a pure, contagious laugh, one she will try to remember all her life, father and daughter turning in circles on the sidewalk in front of their apartment house, laughing together while snow sifts through the branches above.

Open your eyes, concludes the man, and see what you can with them before they close forever,

Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth. Out of loudspeakers all around Zollverein, the staccato voice of the Reich grows like some imperturbable tree; its subjects lean toward its branches as if toward the lips of God. And when God stops whispering, they become desperate for someone who can put things right.

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”

Walk the paths of logic. Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution. Every lock its key.

Marie-Laure tries to lie very still. She can almost hear the machinery of her father’s mind churning inside his skull. “It will be okay,” she whispers. Her hand finds his forearm. “We will stay here awhile and then we will go back to our apartment and the pinecones will be right where we left them and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea will be on the floor of the key pound where we left it and no one will be in our beds.”

“Is it right,” Jutta says, “to do something only because everyone else is doing it?”

“This one is stereo. Heterodyne. I assembled it myself.” She imagines a diminutive pianist, dressed in a tuxedo, playing inside the machine.

This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.

Madame Manec has taken to falling asleep at the table beside Marie-Laure. It takes her a long time to carry meals the five flights to Etienne’s room, wheezing the whole way. Most mornings, Madame is baking before anyone is awake; at midmorning she goes out into the city, cigarette in her mouth, to bring cakes or pots of stew to the sick or the stranded, and upstairs Marie-Laure’s father works on the model, sanding, nailing, cutting, measuring, each day working more frenetically than the last, as if against some deadline known only to him.

A months-old knot inside Marie-Laure begins to loosen.

“Here, Uncle.” From her pockets, she brings up shells. Barnacles, cowries, thirteen lumps of quartz gritty with sand. “I brought you this. And this and this and this.”

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

If your same blood doesn’t run in the arms and legs of the person you’re next to, you can’t trust anything.

“Madame? What do I look like?”

“Don’t you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don’t you ever want proof?”

When do you stop believing ?

Madame Manec says, almost whispering, “Now that I think about it, child, I expect heaven is a lot like this.”

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

There, thinks Werner when he finds it again, there: a feeling like shutting your eyes and feeling your way down a mile-long thread until your fingernails find the tiny lump of a knot.

“But we are the good guys. Aren’t we, Uncle?” “I hope so. I hope we are.”

in this army, in this world, they do as they’re told, they get scared, they move about with only themselves in mind. Name me someone who does not.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

She empties the can. Inside her head, her father has gone quiet.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?

Jutta, he thinks, I finally listened.

“School,” she says. “I would like to go to school.”

From the loam of Jutta’s memory rises a sentence: What I want to write about today is the sea.

And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.