All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr Page 0,160

day, she is happy. When she’s standing beneath a tree, for instance, listening to the leaves vibrating in the wind, or when she opens a package from a collector and that old ocean odor of shells comes washing out. When she remembers reading Jules Verne to Hélène, and Hélène falling asleep beside her, the hot, hard weight of the girl’s head against her ribs.

There are hours, though, when Hélène is late, and anxiety rides up through Marie-Laure’s spine, and she leans over a lab table and becomes aware of all the other rooms in the museum around her, the closets full of preserved frogs and eels and worms, the cabinets full of pinned bugs and pressed ferns, the cellars full of bones, and she feels all of a sudden that she works in a mausoleum, that the departments are systematic graveyards, that all these people—the scientists and warders and guards and visitors—occupy galleries of the dead.

But such moments are few and far between. In her laboratory, six saltwater aquariums gurgle reassuringly; on the back wall stand three cabinets with four hundred drawers in each, salvaged years ago from the office of Dr. Geffard. Every fall, she teaches a class to undergraduates, and her students come and go, smelling of salted beef, or cologne, or the gasoline of their motor scooters, and she loves to ask them about their lives, to wonder what adventures they’ve had, what lusts, what secret follies they carry in their hearts.

One Wednesday evening in July, her assistant knocks quietly on the open door to the laboratory. Tanks bubble and filters hum and aquarium heaters click on or off. He says there is a woman to see her. Marie-Laure keeps both hands on the keys of her Braille typewriter. “A collector?”

“I don’t think so, Doctor. She says that she got your address from a museum in Brittany.”

First notes of vertigo.

“She has a boy with her. They’re waiting at the end of the hall. Shall I tell her to try tomorrow?”

“What does she look like?”

“White hair.” He leans closer. “Badly dressed. Skin like poultry. She says she would like to see you about a model house?”

Somewhere behind her Marie-Laure hears the tinkling sound of ten thousand keys quivering on ten thousand hooks.

“Dr. LeBlanc?”

The room has tilted. In a moment she will slide off the edge.

Visitor

“You learned French as a child,” Marie-Laure says, though how she manages to speak, she is not sure.

“Yes. This is my son, Max.”

“Guten Tag,” murmurs Max. His hand is warm and small.

“He has not learned French as a child,” says Marie-Laure, and both women laugh a moment before falling quiet.

The woman says, “I brought something—” Even through its newspaper wrapping, Marie-Laure knows it is the model house; it feels as if this woman has dropped a molten kernel of memory into her hands.

She can barely stand. “Francis,” she says to her assistant, “could you show Max something in the museum for a moment? Perhaps the beetles?”

“Of course, Madame.”

The woman says something to her son in German.

Francis says, “Shall I close the door?”

“Please.”

The latch clicks. Marie-Laure can hear the aquaria bubble and the woman inhale and the rubber stoppers on the stool legs beneath her squeak as she shifts. With her finger, she finds the nicks on the house’s sides, the slope of its roof. How often she held it.

“My father made this,” she says.

“Do you know how my brother got it?”

Everything whirling through space, taking a lap around the room, then climbing back into Marie-Laure’s mind. The boy. The model. Has it never been opened? She sets the house down suddenly, as if it is very hot.

The woman, Jutta, must be watching her very closely. She says, as though apologizing, “Did he take it from you?”

Over time, thinks Marie-Laure, events that seem jumbled either become more confusing or gradually settle into place. The boy saved her life three times over. Once by not exposing Etienne when he should have. Twice by taking that sergeant major out of the way. Three times by helping her out of the city.

“No,” she says.

“It was not,” says Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, “very easy to be good then.”

“I spent a day with him. Less than a day.”

Jutta says, “How old were you?”

“Sixteen during the siege. And you?”

“Fifteen. At the end.”

“We all grew up before we were grown up. Did he—?”

Jutta says, “He died.”

Of course. In the stories after the war, all the resistance heroes were dashing, sinewy types who could construct machine guns from paper clips.