Caleigh Stanier

Ms. Basile
English 9/9H
18 December 2017

Prose/Poetry Project Script Commented [1]: I decided to omit the second poem,
just because it was difficult to connect all the other
characters to it without making the project exceptionally
long.
All The Light We Cannot See
Congenital cataracts. Bilateral. Irreparable. “Can you see this?” ask the doctors.
“Can you see this?” Marie Laure will not see anything for the rest of her life. Spaces she
once knew as familiar- the four room flat she shares with her father - the little tree-lined
square at the end of their street - have become labyrinths bristling with hazards.
Drawers are never where they should be. The toilet is an abyss. A glass of water is too
near, too far; her fingers too big, always too big.
(...)Her father quizzes her. Vault key or padlock key, Marie? Cupboard key or
dead bolt key? He tests her on the locations of displays, on the continents of cabinets.
He is constantly placing some unexpected thing into her hands: a lightbulb, a fossilized
fish, a flamingo feather.
For an hour each morning - even Sundays - he makes her sit over a Braille
workbook. A is one dot in the upper corner. B is two dots in a vertical line.
(...) At home in the evenings, (...) Marie Laure crosses six evenly paced friction
steps on the kitchen tiles to reach the table. (...) [Her father] serves her dinner on a
round plate and describes the locations of different foods by the hands of a clock.
Potatoes at six o’clock, ma chérie. Mushrooms at three. Then he lights a cigarette and
goes to work on his miniatures at a workbench in the corner of the kitchen. He is
building a scale model of their entire neighborhood, the tall-windowed houses, the rain
gutters, the lavarie and boulangerie and the little place at the end of the street with its
four benches and ten trees. On warm nights Marie Laure opens her bedroom window
and listens to the evening as it settles over the balconies and gables and chimneys,
languid and peaceful, until the real neighborhood and the miniature one get mixed up in
her mind.

Introduction

Marie Laure LeBlanc’s father is her guardian, her teacher, her stronghold. Growing up
as a blind teenage girl in Paris, Marie spends her days in the Natural History museum,
wandering through the Jardin des Plantes, learning to categorize the shells of mollusks
and whelks by feel, sprawled out on the floor of her father’s locksmith office, pouring
over Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in Braille, or running her fingers
through the scale model of the city her father built for her to memorize. In this novel, All
the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, the dark forces of World War II rip Marie
and her father apart, flinging Marie to the Saint-Malo, an old city on the coast coast of
France, with her great uncle, Etienne, and throwing her father in a prison camp. Li-
Young Lee’s poem, The Gift, explores the idea of passing down care for the people you
love like, just as Marie and her father find ways to pass their love for each other through
their mazes of war and darkness.

The Gift

To pull the metal splinter from my palm

my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,

but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

For all of Marie-Laure’s four years in Saint-Malo, the bells at St. Vincent’s have marked
the hours. But now the bells have ceased. She does not know how long she has been
trapped in the attic or even if it is day or night. Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it
once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.
Her thirst becomes so acute, she considers biting into her own arm to drink the
liquid that courses there. She takes the cans of food from her great-uncle’s coat and
sets her lips on their rims. Both taste of tin. Their contents just a millimeter away,
Don’t risk it, says the voice of her father. Don’t risk the noise.
Just one, Papa. I will save the other. The German is gone. Almost certainly he is
gone by now.
Why hasn’t he tripped the wire spring?
Because he cut the wire. Or I slept through the bell. Any of a half a dozen other
reasons.
Why would he leave when what he seeks is here?
Who knows what he seeks?
 You know what he seeks?
I am so hungry, Papa.
Try to think about something else.
Roaring falls of clear, cool water.
You will survive, ma chérie.
But how can you know?
Because of the diamond in your coat pocket. Because I left it here to protect you.
And all it has done is put me in more danger.
Then why hasn’t the house been hit? Why hasn’t it caught fire?
It’s a rock, Papa. A pebble. There is only luck, bad or good. Chance and physics.
Remember?
You are alive.
I am only alive because I have not yet died.
Do not open the can. He will hear you. He will not hesitate to kill you.
How can he kill me if I cannot die? (...)

Abyss in her gut, desert in her throat - Marie Laure takes one of the cans of food from
her coat. The brick and the knife within reach.

Don’t.
If I keep listening to you, Papa, I will die of starvation with food in my hands.

Had you entered that afternoon

you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down

so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
 Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

Etienne rents the same flat on the rue des Patriarches where Marie Laure grew up. He
buys the newspapers every day to scan the lists of released prisoners, and listens
incessantly to one of three radios. De Gaulle this, North Africa that. Hitler, Roosevelt,
Danzig, Bratislava, all these names, but none of them her father’s.
Every morning they walk to the Gare D’Austerlitz to wait. A big station clock
rattles off a relentless advance of seconds, and Marie Laure sits beside her great-uncle
and listens to the wasted and wretched shamble off the trains.
Etienne sees soldiers with hollows in their cheeks, like inverted cups. Thirty-year-
olds who look eighty. Men in threadbare suits putting hands to the tops of their heads to
take off hats that are no longer there. Marie Laure deduces what she can from the
sounds of their shoes: those are small, those weigh a ton, those hardly exist at all.
In the evenings Etienne makes phone calls, petitions repatriation authorities, and
writes letters. She finds she can sleep only two or three hours at a time. Phantom shells
wake her. (...)
Papa might be anywhere. He might be that voice just now drawing nearer. Those
footfalls to her right. He might be in a cell, in a ditch, a thousand miles away. He might
be long dead. (...)
Even those who have returned, she can tell, have returned different, older than
they should be, as though they have been on another planet where years pass more
quickly.
“There is a chance,” Etienne says, “that we will never find out what happened.
We have to be prepared for that.”
Marie Laure hears Madame Manec [in her head]: You must never stop believing.