All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

What I want to write about today is the sea.

---

“We spent a month there. I think he might have fallen in love.”
Jutta sits straighter in her chair. It’s embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is. A town on
the northern coast of France? Love? Nothing will be healed in this kitchen. Some griefs can never
be put right.
Volkheimer pushes back from the table. “It was not my intention to upset you.” He hovers,
dwarfing them.
“It’s all right,” says Albert. “Max, can you please take our guest to the patio? I’ll put out some
cake.”
Max slides open the glass door for Volkheimer, and he ducks through. Jutta sets the plates in the
sink. She is suddenly very tired. She only wants the big man to leave and to take the bag with him.
She only wants a tide of normality to wash in and cover everything again.
Albert touches her elbow. “Are you all right?”
Jutta does not nod or shake her head, but slowly drags a hand over both eyebrows.
“I love you, Jutta.”
When she looks out the window, Volkheimer is kneeling on the cement beside Max. Max lays
down two sheets of paper, and although she cannot hear them, she can see the huge man talking
Max through a set of steps. Max watches intently, turning over the sheet when Volkheimer turns it
over, matching his folds, wetting one finger, and running it along a crease.
Soon enough, they each have a wide-winged plane with a long forked tail. Volkheimer’s sails
neatly out across the yard, flying straight and true, and smacks into the fence nose-first. Max claps.
Max kneels on the patio in the dusk, going over his airplane, checking the angle of its wings.
Volkheimer kneels beside him, nodding, patient.
Jutta says, “I love you too.”

---

Duffel
V
olkheimer is gone. The duffel waits on the hall table. She can hardly look at it.
Jutta helps Max into his pajamas and kisses him good night. She brushes her teeth, avoiding
herself in the mirror, and goes back downstairs and stands looking out through the window in their
front door. In the basement, Albert is running his trains through his meticulously painted world,
beneath the underpass, over his electric drawbridge; it’s a small sound up here, but relentless, a
sound that penetrates the timbers of the house.
Jutta brings the duffel up to the desk in her bedroom and sets it down on the floor and grades
another of her students’ exams. Then another. She can hear the trains stop, then resume their
monotonous drone.
She tries to grade a third exam but cannot concentrate; the numbers drift across the pages and
collect at the bottom in unintelligible piles. She sets the bag in her lap.
When they were first married and Albert went away on trips for work, Jutta would wake in the
predawn hours and remember those first nights after Werner left for Schulpforta and feel all over
again the searing pain of his absence.
For something so old, the zipper on the duffel opens smoothly. Inside is a thick envelope and a
package covered in newspaper. When she unwraps the newspaper, she finds a model house, tall
and narrow, no bigger than her fist.
The envelope contains the notebook she sent him forty years before. His book of questions. That
crimped, tiny cursive, each letter sloping slightly farther uphill. Drawings, schematics, pages of
lists.
Something that looks like a blender powered by bicycle pedals.
A motor for a model airplane.
Why do some fish have whiskers?
Is it true that all cats are gray when the candles are out?
When lightning strikes the sea, why don’t all the fish die?
After three pages, she has to close the notebook. Memories cartwheel out of her head and tumble
across the floor. Werner’s cot in the attic, the wall above it papered over with her drawings of
imaginary cities. The first-aid box and the radio and the wire threaded out the window and through
the eave. Downstairs, the trains run through Albert’s three-level layout, and in the next room her
son wages battles in his sleep, lips murmuring, eyelids flexing, and Jutta wills the numbers to
climb back up and find their places on her students’ exams.
She reopens the notebook.