All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

Jungmänner
. They hustle through the gates together, gulp fried eggs in the refectory together, march
across the quadrangle, perform roll call, salute the colors, shoot rifles, run, bathe, and suffer
together. They are each a mound of clay, and the potter that is the portly, shiny-faced commandant
is throwing four hundred identical pots.
We are young,
they sing, 
we are steadfast, we have never compromised, we have so many
castles yet to storm.
Werner sways between exhaustion, confusion, and exhilaration. That his life has been so wholly
redirected astounds him. He keeps any doubts at bay by memorizing lyrics or the routes to
classrooms, by holding before his eyes a vision of the technical sciences laboratory: nine tables,
thirty stools; coils, variable capacitors, amplifiers, batteries, soldering irons locked away in those
gleaming cabinets.
Above him, kneeling on his bunk, Frederick peers out the open window through a pair of antique
field glasses and makes a record on the bed rail of birds he has sighted. One notch under 
red-
necked grebe
. Six notches under 
thrush nightingale
. Out on the grounds, a group of ten-year-olds
is carrying torches and swastika flags toward the river. The procession pauses, and a gust of wind
tears at the torch flames. Then they march on, their song swirling up through the window like a
bright, pulsing cloud.
O take me, take me up into the ranks
so that I do not die a common death!
I do not want to die in vain, what
I want is to fall on the sacrificial mound.

---

Vienna
S
ergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel is forty-one years old, not so old that he cannot be
promoted. He has moist red lips; pale, almost translucent cheeks like fillets of raw sole; and an
instinct for correctness that rarely fails him. He has a wife who suffers his absences without
complaint, and who arranges porcelain kittens by color, lightest to darkest, on two different
shelves in their drawing room in Stuttgart. He also has two daughters whom he has not seen in nine
months. The eldest, Veronika, is deeply earnest. Her letters to him include phrases like 
sacred
resolve, proud accomplishments,
and 
unparalleled in history
.
Von Rumpel’s particular gift is for diamonds: he can facet and polish stones as well as any
Aryan jeweler in Europe, and he often spots fakes at a glance. He studied crystallography in
Munich, apprenticed as a polisher in Antwerp, has even been—one glorious afternoon—to
Charterhouse Street in London, to an unmarked diamond house, where he was asked to turn out his
pockets and ushered up three staircases and through three locked doors and seated at a table where
a man with a mustache waxed to knifepoints let him examine a ninety-two-carat raw diamond from
South Africa.
Before the war, the life of Reinhold von Rumpel was pleasant enough: he was a gemologist who
ran an appraisal business out of a second-story shop behind Stuttgart’s old chancellery. Clients
would bring in stones and he’d tell them what they were worth. Sometimes he’d recut diamonds or
consult on high-level faceting projects. If occasionally he cheated a customer, he told himself that
was part of the game.
Because of the war, his job has expanded. Now Sergeant Major von Rumpel has the chance to
do what no one has done in centuries—not since the Mogul Dynasty, not since the Khans. Perhaps
not in history. The capitulation of France is only weeks past, and already he has seen things he did
not dream he would see in six lifetimes. A seventeenth-century globe as big around as a small car,
with rubies to mark volcanoes, sapphires clustered at the poles, and diamonds for world capitals.
He has held—held!—a dagger handle at least four hundred years old, made of white jade and
inlaid with emeralds. Just yesterday, on the road to Vienna, he took possession of a five-hundred-
and-seventy-piece china set with a single marquise-cut diamond set into the rim of every single
dish. Where the police confiscated these treasures and from whom, he does not ask. Already he has
personally packed them into a crate and belted it shut and numbered it with white paint and seen it
loaded inside a train car where it sits under twenty-four-hour guard.
Waiting to be sent to high command. Waiting for more.
This particular summer afternoon, in a dusty geological library in Vienna, Sergeant Major von
Rumpel follows an underweight secretary wearing brown shoes, brown stockings, a brown skirt,
and a brown blouse through stacks of periodicals. The secretary sets down a stepstool, climbs,
reaches.
Tavernier’s 1676