All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

zvou kaz vukalov
—who knows what horrors he’s
dispensing, troop positions, train schedules; he might be giving artillery gunners the truck’s
location right now—and Volkheimer is walking out of the sunflowers, as large a target as a human
has ever presented, holding his rifle like a baton; it seems impossible that the cottage could ever
accommodate him, as though Volkheimer will engulf the house instead of the other way around.
First the shots come through the air around the headphones. A fraction of a second later, they
come through the headphones themselves, so loud that Werner almost tears them off. Then even the
static cuts out, and the silence in the headphones feels like something massive moving through
space, a ghostly airship slowly descending.
Neumann One opens and closes the bolt of his rifle.
Werner remembers crouching next to his cot with Jutta after the Frenchman would sign off, the

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windows rattling from some passing coal train, the echo of the broadcast seeming to glimmer in the
air for a moment, as though he could reach out and let it float down into his hands.
Volkheimer returns with ink spattered on his face. He raises two huge fingers to his forehead,
pushes his helmet back, and Werner can see that it is not ink. “Set the house afire,” he says.
“Quickly. Don’t waste diesel.” He looks at Werner. His voice tender, almost melancholy. “Salvage
the equipment.”
Werner sets down the headphones, puts on his helmet. Swifts swoop out over the sunflowers.
His vision makes slow loops, as though something has gone wrong with his balance. Neumann One
hums in front of him as he carries a can of fuel through the stalks. They break through the
sunflowers toward the cottage, stepping through Aaron’s rod, wild carrot, all the leaves browned
from frost. Beside the front door a dog lies in the dust, chin on its paws, and for a moment Werner
thinks it is only sleeping.
The first dead man is on the floor with an arm trapped beneath him and a crimson mess where
his head should be. On the table is a second man: slumped as if sleeping on his ear, only the edges
of his wound showing, a whorish purple. Blood that has spread across the table thickens like
cooling wax. It looks almost black. Strange to think of his voice still flying through the air, already
a country away, growing weaker every mile.
Torn pants, grimy jackets, one of the men in suspenders; they do not wear uniforms.
Neumann One tears down a potato-sack curtain and takes it outside and Werner can hear him
splash it with diesel. Neumann Two pulls the suspenders off the second dead man and takes some
braided shallots from the lintel and bundles them against his chest and leaves.
In the kitchen, a small brick of cheese sits half eaten. A knife beside it with a faded wooden
handle. Werner opens a single cupboard. Inside dwells a den of superstition: jars of dark liquids,
unlabeled pain remedies, molasses, tablespoons stuck to the wood, something marked, in Latin,
belladonna,
something else marked with an 
X
.
The transmitter is poor, high-frequency: probably salvaged from a Russian tank. It seems little
more than a handful of components shoveled into a box. The ground-plane antenna installed beside
the cottage might have sent the transmissions thirty miles, if that.
Werner goes out, looks back at the house, bone-white in the failing light. He thinks of the kitchen
cupboard with its strange potions. The dog that did not do its job. These partisans may have been
involved in some dark forest magic, but they should not have been tinkering with the higher magic
of radio. He slings his rifle and carries the big battered transmitter—its leads, its inferior
microphone—through the flowers to the Opel, its engine running, Neumann Two and Volkheimer
already in the cab. He hears Dr. Hauptmann: