All The Light We Cannot See (2014), Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Anthony Doerr: summary

“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 decide the history.” (page 84)

Anthony Doerr is an American novelist, the historical fiction is winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2015. The book richly deserves to keep the title. The 530-page bestseller was printed by Fourth Estate London in 2015. The WWII set in France and Germany. A German boy who loves the Principles Mechanics's Hertz met a Parisian girl who loves Darwin’s theory.  A symmetrical tale, it's told from both sides - German and Frenchman. This fiction encourages young reader to study math and technical sciences. 

With short chapter and told in the third person perspective, the book is a touching, and moving about war story linked to children’s perspective, occupier, and victim, high rank officer, pure math, mechanical sciences, family, patriotism, biology, orphanage, blindness, hope, valor, trigonometry, thermodynamics law, radio, mollusk, snail, key, riffle, family, and love. 

Mr. Doerr creates a set of well-developed and unforgettable character. The word and sentence flow together and the author also provided detailed descriptions enough to make me feel I am right there watching the events. Definitely recommended for fans any genre who love beautifully constructed story, but don’t expect a fast-paced historical drama. The book is very well-written in lyrical words. First time to read a novel in present tense, it's a little bit weird to me, I have rather more enjoyable in the past tense. Despite of it, I really thoroughly enjoyed my time with this fiction.

All The Light We Cannot See (2014), Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Anthony Doerr: summary

Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle (1934)

Marie-Laure LeBlanc was a tall and freckled six-year-old in Paris with rapidly deteriorating eyesight when her father sent her on a children’s tour of the museum where he worked. Later the doctors examined she suffered from congenital cataracts, bilateral, and irreparable. Marie-Laure would not see anything for the rest of her life. Her father, Monsieur LeBlanc, hadn’t had easy road. His father died in the war, his wife dead in childbirth, and his only little girl lived with blindness.

Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith for the National Museum of Natural History. All morning he stood at the front of the key pound and distributed keys to employees: zookeepers coming first, office staff arriving in a rush around eight, technician and librarians and scientific assistants trooping in next, scientists trickling in last. Everything was numbered and color-coded. Every employee from custodians to the director must carry his or her keys at all the times. No one was allowed to leave the keys on a desk. The museum possessed priceless jade from the thirteenth century, after all, and cavansite from India and rhodochrosite from Colorado.

For an hour each morning-even Sundays-he made her sit over a Braille workbook. In the afternoon he took her on his rounds. He led her down hallway into gallery after gallery. Some afternoons he left Marie-Laurie in the laboratory of Dr. Geffard, an aging mollusk expert whose beard smelly permanently of damp wool. On the back wall of Dr. Geffard’s lab cabinets that contained more drawers than she could count, he let her opened them one after another and held seashells in her hands- whelks, olives, imperial volutes from Thailand, spider conchs from Polynesia-the museum possessed more than thousand specimens, over known species in the world, and Marie-Laure got to handle most of them.

At home in the evening, her father stowed their shoes in the same cubby, hanged their coats on the same hooks. He served dinner on a round plate and described the locations of different foods by the hands of a clock. Potatoes at six o’clock, mushrooms at three.

Werner Pfennig grew up there three hundred miles northeast of Paris in a place called Zollaverin; a four-thousand-acre coal mining complex outside Essen, Germany. It’s steel country, anthracite country, a place full of hole.

Seven-year-old Werner and his younger sister, Jutta, were raised at Children’s House, a clinker-brick two-story orphanage on Vicktoriastrasse whose rooms were populated with the coughs of sick children and the crying of newborns and battered trunks inside which drowsed the last possessions of deceased parents: patchwork dresses, tarnished wedding cutlery, faded ambrotypes of fathers swallowed by the mines. There were no butter or meat. Fruit was a memory. The two snowy-haired children visited the mine complex where their father died. The coal mining was not far from the orphan house.

Frau Elena was a Protestant nun who was more fond of children than of supervision. She sang French folk songs in a screechy falsetto, harbors a weakness for sherry, and regularly fell asleep standing up. Some nights she let the children stay up late up while she told them stories in French about her girlhood cozied up against mountains, snow six feet deep on rooftops, town criers, and creeks smoking in the cold and frosted-dusted vineyards: a Christmas-Carol world.

Werner was eight years old and ferreting about the in the refuse behind the storage shed when he discovered what looked like a large spool of thread. It consisted of a wire-wrapped cylinder sandwiched between two discs of pinewoods. Three frayed electrical led sprouted from the top. One had a small earphone dangling from its end. When he found it, Jutta was six years old. Werner fixed it, later he and Jutta could listen music. The signal was weak enough that, though the earphone was six inches away, he couldn’t any trace of the song.

While the other children played hopscotch in the alley or swam in the canal, Werner sat alone in his upstairs dormer, experimenting with the radio receiver. Capacitor, inductor, turning coil, earpiece. Within a month he managed a broken earphone and a discarded doorbell soldered to a resistor, and made a loudspeaker. He redesigned the receiver entirely, adding new parts here and there and connecting it to a power source. Every evening he carried the radio and Frau Elena let her wards listened for an hour. They tuned in to newscasts, concerts, operas, national choirs, folk shows, a dozen children in a semicircle on the furniture, Frau Elena among them, hardly more substantial than a child herself.

As the weeks went by something new was rising. Mine production increased; unemployment dropped. Meat appeared at Sunday supper. Frau Elena bought a new couch, three new Bibles arrived from the consistory in Berlin; a laundry boiler was delivered to the back door. Werner got new trousers; Jutta got her new pair of shoes. Working telephones rang in the house of neighbors.

In the spring of Werner’s tenth year, the two oldest boys at Children’s House came back home from war- thirteen-year-old Hans Schilzer and fourteen-year-old Herribert Pomsel They were now members of the Hitler Youth. They chided younger children for admiring anything foreign: a British car, a French picture book. Their salutes were comical; their outfits verged on ridiculous. But Frau Elena watched the boys with wary eyes: not so long ago there were feral toddlers skulking in their cots and crying for their mothers. Now they had become adolescent thugs with split knuckles and postcards of the Fuhrer folded into their shirts pockets. Frau Elena spoke French less and less frequently whenever the two boys were present.

Forty two paces to the stairwell, forty two back. Marie-Laurie drew maps in her head. Botany smelled like glue and blotter paper and pressed flower. Paleontology smelled like rock dust, bone dust. Biology smelled formalin and old fruit; it was loaded with heavy cool jars in which floated things she had only had described for her: the pale coiled ropes of rattlesnakes, the served hands of gorillas. Entomology smelled like mothballs and oil: a preservative that, Dr. Geffard explained, was called naphthalene. Offices smelled of carbon paper, or cigar smoke, or brandy, or perfume. Or all four. In her imaginations, in her dreams, everything had colors. She had memories of her mother but imagined her as white, a soundless brilliance.

On night Werner and Jutta tuned in to a scratchy broadcast which a young man was talking in feathery, accented French about light. His voice was so ardent, so hypnotizing, that Werner found he understood every word. The Frenchman talked about optical illusions, electromagnetism; there was a pause and a peal static, as though a record was being flipped, and then he enthused about coal.

Rumors circulated through the Paris museum, moving fast, as quick and brightly colored as scarves. The museum was considering displaying a certain gemstone, a jewel more valuable than anything else in all the collection. The stone was from Japan, it’s very ancient, it belonged to a shogun in the eleventh century. A diamond, some people called it the Sheperd’s Stone, others call it the Kho-Ma, but soon enough everyone was calling it the Sea of Flames. The stone brought sorrow on anyone who carried it. Nine previous owners had committed suicide. Another rumors said the owner couldn’t die, but the people around him. Geffard explained to Marie-Laure how diamond or crystal grew. By adding microscopic layers, a few thousand atoms every month, each atop the next. Millenia after millenia.

Werner and Jutta found the Frenchman’s broadcasts again and again. They heard a program about sea creatures, another about North Pole. Jutta liked one on magnets, Werner’s favorite was about light: eclipses and sundials, auroras, and wavelengths. The Frenchman didn’t say where he was. Werner guessed he did broadcast from a huge mansion. He sounded rich. The voice and the piano again. All day Marie-Laurie lied on her stomach and read. Logic, reason, pure science. No fables and fairy tales. Her fingers walked the tightropes of sentences; in her imagination, she walked the decks of the speedy two-funneled frigate called the Abraham Lincoln.

A vice minister and his wife visited Children’s House. Everyone washed; everyone behaved. The children whispered, they were considering adopting. When the supper was ready, Werner sat at the boys‘ end of the table with a book in his lap. The children were nervous, Werner’s mind drifted; he was thinking about the book in his lap, the Principles of Mechanics by Heinrich Hertz. He discovered it in the church basement, water-stained and forgotten, decades old, and the rector let him brought it home, and Frau Elena let him keep it, and for several weeks Werner had been fighting through the thorny mathematics. Electricity, Werner was learning, could be static by itself.

One of the Hitler Youths, Herribert Pomsel, told him if it was a Jew book, but Werner defensed his favorite scientist was born in Hamburg. Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857-1894) was a German physicist who applied Maxwell’s theory to production and reception radio wave – and the unit of radio frequency wave - one cycle per second - is named the hertz, in honor of Heinrich Hertz. The vice minister pushed the book away, then glanced at his palms as though it had made them dirty. He declared to Jutta; the only place for Werner was going was into the mines. As soon as he turned fifteen. Same as every boy in the house.

The Germans were coming. The Germans, a gardener claimed, had sixty thousand troop glider; they could march for days without eating; they impregnated every school girl they met. A woman behind the ticket counter said Germans carried fog pills and wore rocket belts; their uniforms, were made of special cloth stronger than steel. They locked up the cripples and morons everywhere they went.

Hertz’s theory were interesting but he loved most was building things, working with hands, connecting his fingers to the engine of his mind. Werner repaired a neighbor’s sewing machine, the Children’s House grandfather clock. He built a pulley system to wind laundry from sunshine back indoors, and a simple alarm made from battery, a bell, wired so Frau Elena would know if a toddler had wandered outside.

Sometimes they paid him a few marks. Sometimes a coal mother cooked him sausages or wrapped biscuits in a napkin to take home to his sister. Even the poorest pit houses usually possessed a state-sponsored Volksempfanger VE301, a mass-produced radio stamped with an eagle and a swastika, incapable of shortwave, marked only for German frequencies. Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth.

Marie-Laure heard the voice of a boy said Germans would take blind girls before they took the gimps. The war dropped its question mark. Memo were distributed. The collection must be protected. Locks and keys were in greater demand than ever. Marie-Laure’s father worked until midnight, until one. There were fossils to be safeguarded, ancient manuscripts; there were pearls, gold nuggets, a sapphire as big as a mouse. There might be, thought Marie-Laure, the Sea of Flames.

All across Paris, people packed china into cellars, sewed pearls into hems, concealed gold rings inside book bindings. The whole city was dark. No streetlight, no light in windows. Marie-Laurie and her father left Paris. They headed to Saint-Malo.

A lance corporal with a pistol on his belt and a swastika band on his left arm stepped in from the rain. He looked for Werner as he said as the famous radio repairman. Herr Siedler wasn’t arresting him, he merely wanted him to fix his radio. The corporal told him about General Heissmeyer’s school, best school for smart boy like Werner. The school for mechanical science, code breaking, rocket propulsion. They wanted the working class, laborers. There was recruiting board in Essen, Herr Siedler gave his recommendation.

As soon as her father said his name, a woman opened the gate with warm welcoming. Madame Manec saw him as boy, she still recalled Marie-Laure’s father.

Everyone wanted to hear Werner’s stories; what were the exams like. Werner was to report to the National Political Institute of education at Schulpforta. 

The house was big, the great-uncle inherited the house from his father, who was her great-grandfather. He was a very successful man with plenty money. Mane had worked in the house since Uncle Etienne. He was in the war with Marie-Laurie’s grandfather. He wasn’t the same as he left. Etienne didn’t go outdoors. He was in his room on the fifth floor. Marie-Laure and her father occupied the sixth floor. Jutta worried her brother would become just like Hans and Herribet (Hitler’s Youth). If he stayed his life would end up in the mines. Jutta was barely twelve years old, still a child. Werner promised her to write letters every week. She reminded her about the broadcast from Paris called them devils who were committing atrocities.

After three days, she met his great-uncle. The pianos plinked along softly, it sounded as if a dozen were playing all at once, as if the sound came from every point of the compass. His voice was low and soft, a piece of silk you might keep in the drawer and pull out only on rare occasion, just to feel it between your fingers. He placed her hands on the big cabinet radio, then on a third no bigger than a toaster. He could hear Madrid, Brazil, London, and India once. He had the entire fifth floor-one big room, except for the landing –to himself. Her great-uncle seemed kind, curious, and entirely sane. 

Each boy was to carry a knife in a scabbard on the right side of the belt. They got parade uniform, field uniform, and gym uniform. There were four hundred of them, plus thirty instructors, and fifty more on the staff, cooks, groomsmen, and groundskeepers. Some cadets were as young as nine. The oldest were seventeen. Gothic faces, sharp noses, pointed chins. Blue eyes, all of them. Werner slept in a tiny dormitory with seven other fourteen-year-olds. The bunk above belonged to Frederick: a reedy boy, thin as a blade of grass, skin as pale as cream. Frederick was new too, he was from Berlin. His father was assistant to an ambassador.

On the second day, a withered phrenologist gave a presentation to the entire student body. On the projector white circles represented pure German blood, black circles indicated the proportion of foreign blood. He stated marriage between a pure German and one-quarter Jew was still permissible. The bunk master announced schedules of byzantine complication: studying mechanics, stating history, learning racial science, studying military history, orienteering, running with carrying the riffle above head, crawling, swimming, and then more running.

A sergeant major named Reinhold von Rumpel was forty-one years-old, not so old that he couldn’t be promoted, now his post in Vienna. He had a wife with who suffered his absences without complaint in Stuttgart. He also had two daughters whom he hadn’t seen in nine months. The eldest was deeply earnest. Her letter to him included phrases. Von Rumpel’s particular gift was for diamonds: he could facet and polish stones as well as any Aryans jeweler in Europe, and he often spotted fakes at a glance.

He studied crystallography in Munich. Before the war, the life of Reinhold von Rumpel was pleasant enough: he was a gemologist (the science dealing with natural and artificial gemstone materials) who ran an appraisal business out of a second-story shop. If occasionally he cheated a customer, he told himself that was part of the game. He found the story of a prince who could not be killed, a priest who warned of a goddess’s warth, a French prelate who believed he’d bought the same stone centuries later. Sea of Flames, grayish blue with a red hue at its center; recorded at one hundred and thirty-three carats.

A diminutive instructor of technical sciences named Dr. Hauptmann. Werner felt Dr. Hauptmann’s attention on him like a floodlight. Soon Werner was summoned to the office of the technical sciences professor. There he found Frank Volkheimer, an upperclassman, seventeen years old, a colossal boy from boreal village, a legend among the younger cadets. There were a rumor he crushed a communist’s windpipe with his hands. Dr. Hauptmann asked Werner to do trigonometry and he passed the exam. Since he was only an orphan, he would work in the laboratory after dinner every night. Volkheimer was assigned to keep an eye out of him.

As a boy, his brother Henri, Marie-Laure’s grandfather was good at everything, but his voice was what people commented on most. Henri and Etienne made recording and sold them. Etienne wrote ten different scripts about science. Then there was the war, the two brothers were signal men. Henri died. Etienne built the radio transmitter after the war. It could transmit to England.

 

His name was Claude Levitte but everyone called him Big Claude. For a decade he had run a parfumerie on the rue Vauborel: a strangling business that prospered only when cod were being salted and the stones of the town itself began to stink. New opportunities had arrived, Big Claude wasn’t one to miss the opportunity. He was paying farmers to butcher lambs and rabbits; Claude and his wife’s matching vinyl suitcases and carried them himself by train to Paris. He was nearly asleep when he saw the Parisians who had been living three doors down exit the house of Etienne LeBlanc. He went to the window, this could be an opportunity.

Rumpel visited the museum and took the blue stone as a big as pigeon’s egg. Volkheimer, like Hauptmann, seemed full of contradictions. To the other boys, the Giant was a brute, an instrument of pure strength, yet sometimes, when Hauptmann was away to Berlin, Volkheimer would disappear into the doctor’s office with a tube radio filled the lab with classical music. Mozart, Bach, even Italian Vivaldi. The more sentimental, the better.

The stone the museum had asked him to protect was not real. He found himself entertaining the brainless notion that stone he carried in the linen sachet in his pocket has brought him misfortune, had put Marie-Laurie in danger, may indeed had participated the whole invasion in France. Tried folding between pieces of felt and striking it with a hammer--it didn’t scatter. Tried holding it to candle flame, drowning it, boiling it. M. Daniel LeBlanc left his daughter and Uncle Etienne for Paris, he promised to her it was only ten days. He never spent a night a part from his daughter. The stone was in his pocket.

Every afternoon, no matter the weather, the commandant blew his whistle, he said that there are two kinds of death. You can fight like a lion. Or you can go as easy as lifting a hair from a cup of milk. The nothings, the bodies-they die easy.

They seized Daniel LeBlanc outside of Vitre, hours from Paris. First interrogators were French and hour later they became German. They seemed accusing him of plotting to destroy the Chateau de Saint-Malo, though why they might believe this was not clear. On fourth day, all the prisoners were piled onto a cattle truck and driven east.

For two weeks Frederick has limped around the bruised and slow footed and puffy, and not once had he spoken to Werner with anything more than his gentle brand of distracted kindness. Not once he accused Werner of betrayal, even though Werner did nothing while Frederick was beaten. He wrote his mother told about Werner and his mother paid his ticket. They disembarked at a dim charcoal colored station in Berlin. The largest city Werner had ever seen. Capital of science, seat of the fuhrer, nursery to Bohr, Einstein, Staudinger, Bayer. Somewhere in the streets, plastic was invented, X-rays were discovered, continental drift was identified. Frederick’s mother set table in a fancy restaurant. Werner enjoyed his time in Berlin.

A prisoner escaped from a work camp. He looked Polish or Russian. The prisoner’s ankles were cuffed and his arms bound wrists to forearms. Since the visit to Berlin, a great dread had been blooming inside Werner’s chest. It came gradually, as slow-moving as the sun passage across the sky, but now he found himself writing letters to Jutta in which he must skirt the truth, must contend that everything was fine when things didn’t feel fine. Every cadet accepted his bucket and threw a sheet of water and didn’t linger to watch it landed. The water kept coming. When his turn arrived, Werner threw the water like all the others. It’s Frederick’s turn, he poured the water onto the ground. For a week the dead prisoner remained strapped to the stake in the courtyard, his flesh frozen gray. Three times in nine days, Frederick was chosen as the weakest in field exercise.

The museum replied to Etienne’s appeals; they reported Marie-Laurie’s father never arrived. Marie-Laure’s father had been missing without word for twenty nine days. In three months, Sergeant Major von Rumpel had traveled to Berlin and Stuttgart; he had assessed the value of a hundred confiscated rings, dozen diamond bracelets, a Latvian cigarette case; now back in Paris, he had slept at the Grand Hotel. He believed he held the one-hundred-and- thirty three-carat Sea of Flames.

In technical sciences, Dr. Hauptmann introduced the law of thermodynamics. The cadets studied entropy, the degree of randomness of disorder in a system. Life was in chaos, there must be order. German would represent an ordering to the chaos – even down to the genes- an ordering the evolution of the species. Winnowing out the inferior, the unruly, and the chaff. The great project of the Reich, the great project of human being had ever embarked upon. The entropy of a closed system never decreases. Every process must be by law decay.

A group of boys took Frederick out and set up torches in the snow and told him to shoot the torches with his riffle—to prove he had adequate eyesight. Twenty boys closed over Frederick’s body like a rats. His bed with blood in it. They took him to Leipzig for surgery. Werner was fifteen, when a new boy slept in Frederick’s bed.

Volksheimer was gone; there were stories that he had become a fearsome sergeant in the Wehrmacht. He led a platoon into the last town the road to Moscow. It seemed to Werner all the boys around him were intoxicated. They studied Werner with suspicion when he returned from Hauptmann’s lab. They didn’t trust him as an orphan, he was often alone, his accent carried a whisper of French he learned as a child.

Jutta sent him a letter, she now worked at the laundry. Madam Manec warned Etienne about the maps, tides, and radios. A woman in Rennes was given nine month in prison for naming one of her hogs, Goebbels, a palm reader in Cancale was shot for predicting the Gaulle would return in the spring. It’s already too dangerous, people had eyes, the perfumer.

For Werner, doubts turned regularly. Racial purity, political purity. Dr. Hauptmann was moved to Berlin. Werner was summoned by a young cadet to the commandant’s office. The commandant urged disciplinary action, but Dr. Hauptmann recommended Werner would be eager to offer his skills to the Reich. The former technical sciences professor, Dr. Hauptmann had called their attention to the discrepancy. He had arranged Werner would be sent to special technology division of the Wehrmacht. Werner was still seventeen but they were changing his age into eighteen. He left Schulpforta, sent him to the front.

The museum has written to wardens and prison directors all over Germany. Marie-Laure’s father was believed in Breitenau, Germany. Their French was good, very Parisian. They looked after for the museum’s keys. They searched every room and they asked about three French flags rolled up in a second-floor closet. They found nothing. Madame Manec got sick. Etienne summoned a doctor who prescribed rest, aspirin, and aromatic violet comfits. For the first time since fever, Madame Manec wasn’t in the kitchen when Marie-Laure woke. Over the next hour the kitchen filled with the women including Madame Ruelle, the woman from the bakery. Madame Manec was dead.

Boots in the hall. The footfalls traveled toward Madame Manec’s room. She had her cane, Etienne’s coat, the two cans, the knife, and the brick. Model house in her pocket and the stone inside that. If the German opened his grandfather’s wardrobe again and yanked aside the hanging clothes, Marie-Laurie didn’t know what to do. 

Von Rumpel’s doctor said the anti-tumor properties of any number of chemicals were being explored. Lymphoid tumors had been reduced in size, but the injection made Von Rumpel dizzy and weak. In the days following, he could hardly manage to comb his hair or convince his fingers to button his coat. The librarian had sent him copies of anything concerning the Sea of Flames.

Werner spent the last of his money on the train fare. He visited Frederick in Berlin. Frederick’s mother has warned him, her son wouldn’t recognized Werner. He lost his memories. Frederick thought Werner was his mama. Soon Werner joined Volkheimer in the front. He was an expert in electromagnetic wave. He scanned frequencies by feel. No squelch, no snap of Morse code, no voices.

In the days following the death Madame Manec, the neighbors cook enough potato soup to a last week. After four days, Etienne asked everyone to please leave. As soon as the kitchen door had closed, he turned the dead bolts and took Marie-Laurie’s hand. All the lights were off now.

The engineer was a taciturn, pungent man, named Walter Bernd whose pupil were misaligned. Partisans hit the trains. They’re organized, and the captain believed they were coordinating their attacks with radios. The last technician didn’t find anything. Werner did it.

Storms rinsed the sky, the beaches, the streets, and a red sun dipped into the sea, setting all the west-facing granite in Saint-Malo on fire, and three limousines, and a dozen or so Germans officer, accompanied by men carrying stage light and movie cameras. 

From his fifth-floor window, Etienne watched them through a brass telescope, nearly twenty in all: captains, majors, and even a lieutenant colonel holding his coat at the collar and gesturing at forts on the outer islands. Etienne lightened a candle and climbed to the sixth floor. He had already given up trying to crack the code: he has written out the numbers, gridded them, added, multiplied, nothing has come of it. He broadcasted again, the songs played on.

Werner found a second illegal transmission coming from an orchard on which a shell has fallen, cracking most of half the trees in half. Two weeks later, he found a third, then a fourth. Creaking ice, villages burning in forests. Nights where it became too cold too snow-that winter presented a strange and haunted season during which Werner prowled the static like he used to prowl the alleys with Jutta, pulling her in the wagon through the colonies of Zollverein.

That was cleaner, more mechanical, a war waged through the air, invisibly, and the front lines were everywhere. Mail didn’t reach them. Months passed and he didn’t write to his sister. Werner had not written Jutta almost a year. Still he managed to find the illegal transmission, one every two weeks or so. He salvaged the inferior Soviet equipment, milled from marginal steel, clumsily soldered; it was all so unsystematic. Werner thought they were all insurgents, all partisans, every single person they saw. Anyone who was not a German wanted Germans dead, even the most sycophantic of them.

What he felt on the worst days of that relentless winter-while rust colonized the truck and riffles and radios, while German divisions retreated all around them. The smoking, ruined villages, the broken pieces of brick in the street, the frozen corpses, the shattered walls, the upturned cars, the barking dogs, the scurrying rats and lice.

The total entropy any system will decrease only if the entropy of another system will increase. Nature demands symmetry.

Werner shivered in the back of the truck. His blood sloshed back and forth inside him like mercury. He felt he was gazing down into the circuitry of enormous radio.

In French village far to the south of Saint-Malo, a German truck crossing a bridge was blown up. Six German soldiers died. Terrorists were blamed. The occupation authorities were blaming the attack on an elaborate network of anti-occupation radio broadcast.

The war that killed Marie-Laure’s grandfather killed sixteen million others. One and half million French boys alone, most of them younger than Etienne was. Two million on German side. March the dead in a single-file line, and for eleven days and eleven nights, they’d walk past the door.

On her sixteenth, for all of Marie-Laure’s four years in Saint-Malo, the bells at church had marked the hours. But now the bells had ceased. She didn’t know how long she had been trapped in the attic or even if it was day or night. The Germans in their underground forts.

Werner was listening to the repaired transceiver, feathering the tuning knob back and forth, when a girl’s voice and the music. The encoded numbered were followed by announcements, births, and baptisms and engagements, and deaths.

Von Rumpel had a call from Paris. They found information about Daniel LeBlanc. He was accused conspiracy. They found drawings and skeleton keys, they also gave him the name of informer, Claude.   

The last days of May 1944 in Saint-Malo felt to Marie-Laure like the last days of May 1940 in Paris: huge and swollen and redolent. They searched day and night. A high house on the edge of the sea. A spectacularly good location from which to broadcast. From street level, the antenna was all but invisible. The house was tall and narrow. Claude Levitte, the perfumer, squinted, calculating. He just made a deal with Von Rumpel and pointed Etienne’s house.

Marie-Laure got caught by the Germans while she collected snails on the beach. It should take her twenty-one, Etienne had counted many times. It had been thirty minutes. She could be lost. Etienne made it to the bakery in an icy sweat and cut to the front of the queue. Sometimes she visited sea, before coming home. Her great uncle found her in the grotto, shivering, wet to her thighs wholly intact, crouched Marie-Laure with the ruins of a loaf of the bread in her lap. 

Werner thought of her, whether he wished or not. Girl with the cane, the granddaughter or daughter of the broadcasting Frenchman. Etienne felt strangely good as he stepped outside; he felt strong. He was glad Madame Ruelle has assigned him final task. He had already transmitted the location of one air-defense battery. He needed only to take the bearings of two more. She was reading again on the broadcast. Werner listened. She kept saying, “help me, she begged her father, her great-uncle, he was here, he would kill me.”

Etienne begged his jailers, the guardian of the fort. His great-niece was blind, alone. He told them he was sixty-three, not sixty as they claimed. Then the stray American shell struck the fort, and Etienne stooped talking. Marie-Laure had read seven of the last nine chapters into the microphone. Downstairs the German has shouted twice in frustration, then fallen silent.

The sixth floor, the stairs appeared to the end. He rifled up, he expected the flash of gun barrels. In front of him tottered a German officer in field dress. The five bars and three diamonds of a sergeant major. Von Rumpel aimed his pistol at Werner’s chest. Marie-Laure slid open the wardrobe and Werner took her hands and helped her out. He examined his trousers, his dusty coat. The uniform made him in accomplice in everything the girl hated. He crossed to the bed and didn’t look at von Rumpel’s body in her bed.

Werner told her about the broadcast that he heard when he was a boy. Marie-Laure explained that was her grandfather’s voice. She showed him the transmitter in the attic. Even a phonograph record that contained her grandfather’s voice, lessons in science for children, and the books.

Over his uniform he pulled on some of Etienne’s tweed trousers, along with a shirt whose sleeves were too long. If they run into Germans, he would speak only French, said he was helping her leave the city. If they run into American, he would say he was deserting. There must be a collection point, somewhere they were gathering refugees. He found a white pillowcase and fold it into her coat. Werner convinced her they wouldn’t shoot the girl whit white flag. After giving her direction, he went in the other direction and that’s the last time he saw her. He didn’t looked away until she was out of his sight. When he opened his hand, there was a little iron key in his palm.

Madame Ruelle, the bakery owner, found Marie-Laure that evening in a requisitioned school. In the morning, the Americans took the chateau and the last anti-air battery and freed the prisoners held at Fort National. Madame Ruelle pulled Etienne out of the processing queue, and he wrapped Marie-Laure in his arms. Madame Ruelle was allowed back into the city to check on the condition of the bakery but Etienne and Marie-Laure traveled in the other direction, toward Rennes. They would head to Paris.

Werner was captured a mile south of Saint-Malo by three French resistance fighters in streetclothes roving the streets in a lorry. First they believed they rescued a little white-haired old man, then they heard his accent. A day after his arrest, he was marched east in a group of twenty to join larger group. Twice medics tried giving him bowls of gruel, but it wouldn’t stay down. His fever was returning; the sludge they drank in the cellar had poisoned him. American watched a boy left the sick tent and moved against the background of the tree. He has warned to stop but Werner had crossed the edge of the field, where he stepped on a trigger land mine set there by his own army three months before, and disappeared in a fountain of earth.  

In January 1945, Frau Elena, and the last girls living at Children’s House including Jutta Pfening were transported from Essen to Berlin to work in a machine parts factory. At least half of the girls working in the factory couldn’t read or write, so Jutta read them letters that came from boyfriends or brothers or fathers at the front. All spring the bombers came, every single night, their only goal seemingly to burn the city to its root. In the fall, at Zollverin, she received two letters announcing his brother’s death. Each mentioned a different place of burial.

In 1974 Frank Volkheimer was fifty-one years old. The war has haunted his brain. He was just a boy. They all were. The eyes of men who were about to die haunted him, he killed them all over again.

Jutta Wette thought sixth-form algebra in Essen: integers, probability, parabolas. Her husband, Albert, was a kind, slow-moving, and balding accountant. Their son, Max, was six, fond of mud, dogs, and questions no one answer. Volkheimer delivered Werner’s duffel bag by himself to Werner’s sister. For something so old, the zipper on the duffel opened smoothly. Inside was a thick envelope, a package covered in newspaper, the notebook, a model house, an old sealed envelope for Frederick, the bunkmate. He also told about Werner’s girl. Jutta visited LeBlanc house in Saint-Malo and brought the locked model house with her to trace Marie-Laurie. A neighbor gave her LeBlanc’s address in Paris.

Marie-Laure managed a small laboratory at the museum of Natural History in Paris and has contributed in significant ways to study and literature of mollusks. She has named two new subspecies. As a doctoral student, she traveled to three continents for harvesting snails.

Despite hiring an investigator, spending thousands of francs, and poring through reams German documentation, Marie and Etienne were never able to determine what exactly happened to her father. They confirmed he had been a prisoner at a labor camp called Breitenau in 1942. There was also a record made by a camp doctor at a subcamp in Kassel, Germany, that a Daniel LeBlanc contracted influenza in 1943. Jutta visited her and they shared the war story. Marie-Laure shared her story - a day with Werner- the smaller hand - the broadcast. She shook the model house, the iron key dropped into her palms.

Frederick lived with his mother outside west Berlin. He got a letter from a woman in Essen. The doctors claimed Frederick retains no memories. Marie-Laure lived to see the century turn and spent beautiful morning with her grandson in early March 2014.

******
March 13, 2017

Sekapur Sirih

Dua dunia remaja diangkat sejak usia enam tahun. Satu sisi, remaja seperti Werner warga Jerman dibesarkan di sebuah panti asuhan di daerah Essen. Walau kehidupan  terbatas, tidak membekukan ketertarikan dan keahlian bidang mekanika, ilmu fisika dan matematika. Kelihaian memperbaiki radio dan alat elektronik di desanya mengenalkan pada pejabat Hitler yang membawanya bertemu dengan profesor sains tentu dengan tes ketat. Sementara kehidupan Marie–Laure, gadis kecil dari kota Paris yang menjadi korban Hitler harus pindah ke kota kecil ke rumah paman ayahnya dan menjalani hidup ketakutan, dan bersembunyi dari pengejaran Jerman. Paman ayahnya adalah keluarga kaya sehinga mereka masih bisa tidur nyenyak dan makan enak dilayani seorang pelayan. Gadis buta dan cantik itu sangat tertarik pada teori Darwin.

Novel bestseller ini dicetak pada tahun 2015 oleh Fourth Estate London, sementara cetakan originalnya tahun 2014. Fiksi ini adalah pemenang Pulitzer tahun 2015. Penulis berkebangsaan Amerika. Disampaikan dengan perlahan dalam rangkaian bahasa indah. Tokoh Marie-Laure meminati ilmu alam termasuk teori Darwin, sempat menyinggung Borneo (Kalimantan). Fiksi brilian ini memacu semangat generasi muda untuk belajar ilmu alam dan matematika, fisika, dan sains. Dibuktikan pada fiksi ini, peranan penting ilmu fisika, matematika murni, dan gelombang elektromagnetik bagi kehidupan, terlebih lagi  ketika itu masa perang. Orang yang memiliki keahlian sains mendapat perhatian lebih.

Terjemahan dalam Bahasa Indonesia: Cahaya yang Tidak Dapat Kita Lihat (2014) karya Anthony Doerr

Gadis kecil cantik berusia enam tahun, baru saja meninggalkan ruang dokter. Ia akan kehilangan penglihatan selamanya. Seperti tetangganya bilang, LeBlanc seperti mendapat kutukan. Ayahnya sendiri tewas dalam perang, istrinya meninggal saat melahirkan, dan kini gadis kecilnya Marie-Laure hidup dalam kebutaan. Daniel LeBlanc bekerja pada museum sejarah di kota Paris sebagai kepala kunci. Setiap pagi ia membagikan kunci-kunci pada para karyawan. Pengamanan kunci sangat ketat dan tertib. Banyak benda-benda berharga disimpan di museum termasuk lukisan maestro Rembrandt, batu-batu berharga termasuk rumor legenda berlian yang tersohor dan besar bernama Sea of Flames.

Werner berumur tujuh tahun ketika ia dan adiknya Jutta terpaksa dikirim ke sebuah panti asuhan di Zollaverein. Ayahnya meninggal saat kecelakaan kerja di tambang batu bara yang tidak jauh dari panti asuhan di mana mereka tinggal. Essen adalah daerah yang dipadati industri. Panti asuhan yang dipadati bayi hingga berusia belasan tahun dengan makanan yang terbatas. Saat berusia delapan tahun Werner Pfening menemukan kumparan alat elektronik seperti dan dengan buku Prinsip-prinsip Mekanika karya Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, fisikawan Jerman (berdarah Jahudi) yang mengaplikasikan teori gelombang elektromagnetik Maxwell pada produk masal radio, dan satuan gelombang pun diabadikan dari namanya yakni Hertz.

Berbulan-bulan kumparan tadi ditambah dan dirangkai oleh tangan kreatif Werner menjadi radio. Pengasuh panti Nona Elena juga menikmati berita dan alunan musik dari radio itu. Werner dan utta sama menikamati kisah anak, ilmu alam dan sains, musik dan piano yang diperdengarkan. Di dalam panti Nona Elena mengajari mereka lagu-lagu Perancis dan bahasanya. Keduanya sangat tertarik dengan siaran seorang lelaki tua yang menyiarkan berita tentang ilmu matematika, fisika, mekanika dan memainkan piano. Walau berbahasa Perancis tetapi keduanya mampu mengerti yang disampaikan oleh pria Perancis itu. Jutta menduga lelaki itu pastilah orang kaya, yang tinggal di rumah besar, memiliki piano besar. Suara lelaki itu bagus dan frekuensinya statis.

Tidak lama Werner menjadi terkenal sebagai tukang perbaiki radio dan elektronika. Ada yang membawa radio rusak, bel rusak, perabotan elektronik rusak, Werner diberi sedikit uang dan bahkan diupah dengan makanan. Seorang pejabat Nazi memperbaiki radionya pada Werner, lelaki kecil itu pun mendapat makanan dan uang banyak. Herr Siedler merekomendasikan Werner mendaftar di sekolah teknik. Setelah melewati tes trigonometri, ia pun diterima.

Dr. Hauptmann seorang profesor yang memberikan pelajaran teknik sains, pria bertubuh kecil itu memberi pandangan tajam pada Werner. Apalagi setelah mendapati Werner hanyalah anak yatim piatu, meminta anak itu bekerja setiap malam sehabis makan di laboratorium yang diawasi seorang senior bernama Frank Volkeimer.

Bukan rumor lagi, tentara Jerman pun tiba di kota Paris. Penduduk kota itu banyak yang lari, termasuk Marie-Laure dan ayahnya. Menuju kota Saint-Malo, kota ynag terleatak menghadap pantai. Di sana mereka mendatangi rumah paman ayahnya dan rumah warisan kakek buyut Marie-Laure. Rumah yang sangat besar berlantai enam. Paman Etienne adalah paman dari Daniel LeBlanc. Ayah Daniel telah meninggal dalam perang, kini rumah kakeknya ditinggali saudara ayahnya Etienne. Henri dan Etienne adalah bersaudara yang meminati sains dan musik.

Suara Hendri, kakek Marie-Laure sangat bagus, sehingga kedua bersaudara itu merekam dan menjualnya. Tetapi perang mengubah paman Etienne, ia sangat terpukul dengan kematian saudaranya Henri. Ia lebih banyak di lantai enam dan dilayani pelayan bernama Ibu Manec, wanita yang sudah mengasuhnya sejak kecil. Setelah tiga hari tinggal di rumah itu, akhirnya ia ketemu dengan Paman Etienne. Keduanya pun berteman. Ayah Marie-Laure pergi menuju Paris tetapi semanjak itu tiada kabar darinya. Ia telah diinterogasi oleh Jerman, dituduh konspirasi. Ia dikirim dan penjarakan di Jerman.

Sain-Malo pun dibanjiri tentara Jerman, dan mengumpulkan semua radio. Seorang pejabat Jerman bertugas di Vienna bernama von Rumple sangat ahli dalam benda-benda berharga. Sebelum perang ia pernah belajar benda-benda berharga termasuk batu mulia. Ia dengan mudah mampu menafsir keaslian permata dan berlian. Ia pun mendengar rumor tentang berlian Sea of Flames yang melegenda itu. Petugas museum Paris sempat mengelak akan batu itu, dan ia diberi berlian yang diyakininya asli.

Werner pun menjalani masa studi kemiliteran, matematika dan teknik sains. Ia mendapat teman. Frederick tidur tepat di atas dipannya. Lelaki itu adalah putra asisten duta besar. Ia anak Berlin, tidak banyak bicara, dan termasuk kader lemah. Werner mengenangnya sebagai anak yang baik, ketika libur tiba, ia pun mengajak Werner ke rumahnya. Sebuah apartemen besar dengan lift-nya di kota Berlin. Werner sangat menyukai kota Berlin. Kota yang melahirkan banyak penemu,  sudut-sudut jalan tempat dilahirkan temuan plastik dan X-ray. Werner sangat menyukai ibu Frederick yang ramah dan baik. Ia menyaksikan kasih sayang keluarga selama di Berlin. Ibu Frederick mengajaknya makan malam ke tempat mewah.

Kader dikejutkan dengan suara, seorang tahanan yang lari dari kamp. Wajahnya seperti Polandia atau Rusia, tubuh berbalut baju lusuh diikatkan pada tiang dipertontonkan di tengah lapangan bersalju. Setiap anak menambah kedingannya, dengan melemparkan seember air ke tubuhnya. Ketika giliran Frederick tiba, remaja itu menokak, dan menjatuhkan airnya di tanah. Suatu malam Frederick tidak berada pada dipannya. Ia telah tersungkur penuh darah. Dua puluh anak telah menyiksanya dan dia dibawa ke rumah sakit untuk operasi. Tempat tidurnya telah ditempati kader baru.

Walau umur sebenarnya masih tujuh belas, umurnya sengaja ditambahkan agar dapat dikirim ke garda terdepan, daerah paling berbahaya, sebagai pelacak transmisi. Ia pun akhirnya tergabung dengan ilmuwan dan teknisi lain, termasuk seniornya Volkheimer. Keahlian Werner tidak diragukan lagi, berhasil melacak gelombang radio musuh. Orang seperti Werner sangat dibutuhkan, terlebih banyaknya tentara Jerman yang terbunuh. Dan diduga oleh pemberontak lokal yang dikordinir jaringan gelombang radio. Dengan mengendarai truk Opel, regu Werner menyusuri berbagai daerah dari Rusia, Polandia hingga Perancis. Mereka membunuh siapa saja yang bukan Jerman, yang mereka anggap sebagai musuh. Werner telah terbiasa melintasi mayat-mayat lelaki perempuan, rumah, jembatan terbakar.

Sebuah gelombang radio statis mengudara dengan suara gadis muda merdu dalam bahasa Perancis, terkadang memutarkan musik klasik Mozart, terkadang juga membacakan cerita dari novel. Tetapi Werner juga mencium ada kode sandi yang disisipkan dalam pemberitaan. Gadis itu selalu meminta pertolongan: ayahku hilang, pamanku dipenjara, tolong selamatkan aku, mereka akan membunuhku, mereka ada di sini.

Ia jatuh cinta dengan pemilik suara itu, selalu ingin mendengar suaranya. Ia mampu mengerti bahasa Perancis. Pemuda itu ingin menyelamatkan gadisnya. Setelah berbulan-bulan akhirnya mereka menuju Saint-Malo. Rupanya von Rumpel juga telah di sana untuk mencari berlian, ia telah mengetahui apa yang dipegangnya bukanlah Sea of Flame. Salah satu tetangga Etienne, seorang penjual parfum bernama Claude telah melaporkan operasi Etienne dan menunjukkan rumah di mana LeBlanc tinggal.

Dua misi dengan dua tujuan bertolak belakang: Sersan Mayor Rumpel ingin mendapatkan batu dan ingin membunuh Marie-Laure, Werner ingin menemui gadis pujaannya, Marie-Laure, hendak menyelamatkan gadis itu. Rumpel ingin membunuh Werner, tetapi sersan mayor itu terbunuh duluan. Marie-Laure pun selamat dibawa keluar dari rumah itu oleh Werner. Tidak berselang lama, tentara Amerika telah menguasi kota itu, Paman Etienne dibebaskan dan kembali bersama keponakannya. Mereka menuju Paris.

Werner dan regunya tertangkap dan menjadi tawanan perang, tetapi dia sakit keras, keracunan makanan. Ia melarikan diri dari tenda medis, dan menginjak ranjau yang dipasang oleh Jerman beberapa bulan sebelumnya. Werner pun tewas dalam ledakan. Jutta mendapat surat tentang kematian saudaranya. Dua surat berbeda dan tempat penguburan berbeda.

Dalam usianya yang ke lima puluh Volkheimer selalu dihantui kesadisan perang, ia sering didatangi oleh wajah-wajah yang dibunuhnya. Ia kembali mengingat kawannya Werner. Hatinya tergerak mencari saudari Werner ke kota Essen, membagi kisahnya  serta menyerahkan ransel milik Werner yang sudah menahun berdiam di apartemennya.

Jutta telah menikah dengan seorang akuntan, dan memiliki seorang anak lelaki. Ia sendiri mengajar ilmu pasti di sebuah sekolah. Dalam tas itu, Jutta mendapati sebendel surat, buku harian, dan model rumah kecil. Ia mengunjungi rumah keluarga LeBlanc di Saint-Malo, beruntungnya seorang tetangga memberinya alamat keluarga LeBlanc di Paris.

Dr. Marie-Laure LeBlanc mengepalai sebuah laboratorium kecil pada Musem Sejarah Nasional di Paris, ia menjadi salah satu ilmuwan yang berkontribusi signifikan dalam penelitian moluska. Tidak jarang ia terbang ke tiga benua untuk penelitiannya. Ia memberi dua nama spesis baru. Ia dan pamannya telah menyewa investigator dan menghabiskan banyak uang mencari keberadaan ayahnya, tetapi tidak ada berita pasti tentang ayahnya. 

Jutta mengunjungi Marie-Laure, kedua wanita itu bertukar cerita tentang Werner dan perang. Rumah mini memodelkan rumah Etienne diberikan padanya, tempat batu mulia disimpan.

Jutta juga menyurati Frederick. Lelaki itu kehilangan memori, ia tidak mampu mengingat apapun, ia tetap disuapi ibunya seperti anak kecil. Marie-Laurie pun baru tersadar bila batu berharga itu tidak hilang, sesaat setelah sebuah kunci terjatuh ditangannya. Marie-Laure berumur panjang dan menikmati pagi indah bersama cucunya awal Maret 2014.

******
13 Maret 2017