All the Light We Cannot See: a novel



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All the Light We Cannot See

You are only being
tested.
Someone calls to him in German. “
Ist da wer? 

Father?
“You in there!”
Von Rumpel listens. Sounds drawing nearer through the smoke. He crawls to the window. Sets
his helmet on his head. Thrusts his head over the shattered sill.
A German infantry corporal squints up from the street. “Sir? I didn’t expect . . . Is the house
clear, sir?”
“Empty, yes. Where are you headed, Corporal?”
“The fortress at La Cité, sir. We are evacuating. Leaving everything. We still hold the château
and the Bastion de la Hollande. All other personnel are to fall back.”
Von Rumpel braces his chin on the sill, feeling as if his head might separate from his neck and
go tumbling down to explode on the street.
“The entire town will be inside the bomb line,” the corporal says.
“How long?”
“There will be a cease-fire tomorrow. Noon, they say. To get civilians out. Then they resume the
assault.”
Von Rumpel says, “We’re giving up the city?”
A shell detonates not far away, and the echoes of the blast shunt down between the wrecked
houses, and the soldier in the street claps a hand over his helmet. Bits of stone skitter across the
cobbles.
He calls, “You are with which unit, Sergeant Major?”
“Continue with your work, Corporal. I’m nearly done here.”


Final Sentence
V
olkheimer does not stir. The liquid at the bottom of the paint bucket, however toxic it was, is
gone. Werner has heard nothing from the girl on any frequency for how long? An hour? More? She
read about the 
Nautilus
getting sucked down into a whirlpool, waves higher than houses, the
submarine standing on end, its steel ribs cracking, and then she read what he assumed was the last
line of the book: 
Thus, to that question asked six thousand years ago by Ecclesiastes, “That
which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?” only two men now have the right to
answer: Captain Nemo and myself
.
Then the transmitter snapped off and the absolute darkness closed around him. For these past
days—how many?—it has felt as though the hunger were a hand inside him, thrusting around in the
cavity of his chest, reaching up to his shoulder blades, then down into his pelvis. Scraping at his
bones. Today, though—or is it tonight?—the hunger peters out like a flame for which no fuel
remains. Emptiness and fullness, in the end, somehow the same.
Werner blinks up to see the Viennese girl in her cape descend through the ceiling as if it is no
more than a shadow. She carries a paper sack full of withered greens and seats herself amid the
rubble. Around her swirls a cloud of bees.
He can see nothing, but he can see her.
She counts on her fingers. 
For tripping in line,
she says. 
For working too slowly. For arguing
over bread. For loitering too long in the camp toilet. For sobbing. For not organizing her
things according to protocol.
It’s surely nonsense, yet something hangs inside it, some truth he does not want to allow himself
to apprehend, and as she speaks, she ages, silver hair lays down on her head, her collar frays; she
becomes an old woman—his understanding of who hovers at the rim of his consciousness.
For complaining of headaches.
For singing.
For speaking at night in her bunk.
For forgetting her birth date during evening muster.
For unloading the shipment too slowly.
For not turning in her keys correctly.
For failing to inform the guard.
For rising from bed too late.
Frau Schwartzenberger—that’s who she is. The Jewess in Frederick’s elevator.
She runs out of fingers as she counts.

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