All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

the center of the kitchen table where the sugar bowl ought to be. She slides a hidden drawer out of the base, finds a hidden compartment beneath the drawer, takes out a wooden key, and slots the key inside the chimney. Inside waits a square of Swiss chocolate.
    “Four minutes,” says her father, laughing. “I’ll have to work harder next year.”
    For a long time, though, unlike his puzzle boxes, his model of their neighborhood makes little sense to her. It is not like the real world. The miniature intersection of rue de Mirbel and rue Monge, for example, just a block from their apartment, is nothing like the real intersection. The real one presents an amphitheater of noise and fragrance: in the fall it smells of traffic and castor oil, bread from the bakery, camphor from Avent’s pharmacy, delphiniums and sweet peas and roses from the flower stand. On winter days it swims with the odor of roasting chestnuts; on summer evenings it becomes slow and drowsy, full of sleepy conversations and the scraping of heavy iron chairs.
    But her father’s model of the same intersection smells only of dried glue and sawdust. Its streets are empty, its pavements static; to herfingers, it serves as little more than a tiny and insufficient facsimile. He persists in asking Marie-Laure to run her fingers over it, to recognize different houses, the angles of streets. And one cold Tuesday in December, when Marie-Laure has been blind for over a year, her father walks her up rue Cuvier to the edge of the Jardin des Plantes.
    “Here, ma chérie, is the path we take every morning. Through the cedars up ahead is the Grand Gallery.”
    “I know, Papa.”
    He picks her up and spins her around three times. “Now,” he says, “you’re going to take us home.”
    Her mouth drops open.
    “I want you to think of the model, Marie.”
    “But I can’t possibly!”
    “I’m one step behind you. I won’t let anything happen. You have your cane. You know where you are.”
    “I do not!”
    “You do.”
    Exasperation. She cannot even say if the gardens are ahead or behind.
    “Calm yourself, Marie. One centimeter at a time.”
    “It’s far, Papa. Six blocks, at least.”
    “Six blocks is exactly right. Use logic. Which way should we go first?”
    The world pivots and rumbles. Crows shout, brakes hiss, someone to her left bangs something metal with what might be a hammer. She shuffles forward until the tip of her cane floats in space. The edge of a curb? A pond, a staircase, a cliff? She turns ninety degrees. Three steps forward. Now her cane finds the base of a wall. “Papa?”
    “I’m here.”
    Six paces seven paces eight. A roar of noise—an exterminator just leaving a house, pump bellowing—overtakes them. Twelve paces farther on, the bell tied around the handle of a shop door rings, and two women come out, jostling her as they pass.
    Marie-Laure drops her cane; she begins to cry.
    Her father lifts her, holds her to his narrow chest.
    “It’s so big,” she whispers.
    “You can do this, Marie.”
    She cannot.

Something Rising
    W hile the other children play hopscotch in the alley or swim in the canal, Werner sits alone in his upstairs dormer, experimenting with the radio receiver. In a week he can dismantle and rebuild it with his eyes closed. Capacitor, inductor, tuning coil, earpiece. One wire goes to ground, the other to sky. Nothing he’s encountered before has made so much sense.
    He harvests parts from supply sheds: snips of copper wire, screws, a bent screwdriver. He charms the druggist’s wife into giving him a broken earphone; he salvages a solenoid from a discarded doorbell, solders it to a resistor, and makes a loudspeaker. Within a month he manages to redesign the receiver entirely, adding new parts here and there and connecting it to a power source.
    Every evening he carries his radio downstairs, and Frau Elena lets her wards listen for an hour. They tune in to newscasts, concerts, operas, national choirs, folk shows, a