Volkheimer
T
he
engineer is a taciturn, pungent man named Walter Bernd whose pupils are misaligned. The
driver is a gap-toothed thirty-year-old they call Neumann One. Werner knows that Volkheimer,
their sergeant, cannot be older than twenty, but in the hard pewter-colored light of dawn, he looks
twice that. “Partisans are hitting the trains,” he explains. “They’re organized,
and the captain
believes they’re coordinating their attacks with radios.”
“The last technician,” says Neumann One, “didn’t find anything.”
“It’s good equipment,” says Werner. “I should have them both functioning in an hour.”
A gentleness flows into Volkheimer’s eyes and hangs there a moment. “Pfennig,” he says,
looking at Werner, “is nothing like our last technician.”
They begin. The Opel bounces down roads that are hardly more than cattle trails. Every few
miles they stop and set up a transceiver on some hump or ridge. They leave Bernd and skinny,
leering Neumann Two—one with a rifle and the other wearing headphones. Then they drive a few
hundred yards, enough to build the base of a triangle, calculating distance all the way, and Werner
switches on the primary receiver. He raises the truck’s aerial, puts on the headset, and scans the
spectra, trying to find anything that is not sanctioned. Any voice that is not allowed.
Along the flat,
immense horizon, multiple fires seem always to be burning. Most of the time
Werner rides facing backward, looking at land they are leaving, back toward Poland, back into the
Reich.
No one shoots at them. Few voices come shearing out of the static, and the ones he does hear are
German. At night Neumann One pulls tins of little sausages out of ammunition boxes, and Neumann
Two makes tired jokes about whores he remembers or invents, and in nightmares Werner watches
the shapes of boys close over Frederick, though when he draws closer, Frederick transforms into
Jutta, and she stares at Werner with accusation while the boys carry off her limbs one by one.
Every hour Volkheimer pokes his head into the back of the Opel and meets Werner’s eyes.
“Nothing?”
Werner shakes his head. He fiddles with the batteries, reconsiders the antennas,
triple-checks
fuses. At Schulpforta, with Dr. Hauptmann, it was a game. He could guess Volkheimer’s frequency;
he always knew whether Volkheimer’s transmitter was transmitting. Out here he doesn’t know how
or when or where or even if transmissions are being broadcast; out here he chases ghosts. All they
do is expend fuel driving past smoldering cottages and chewed-up artillery pieces and unmarked
graves, while Volkheimer passes his giant hand over his close-cropped head, growing more uneasy
by the day. From miles away comes the thunder of big guns, and still the German transport trains
are being hit, bending tracks and flipping cattle cars and maiming the führer’s soldiers and filling
his officers with fury.
Is that a partisan there, that old man with the saw cutting trees? That one leaning over the engine
of that car? What about those three women collecting water at the creek?
Frosts show up at night, throwing a silver sheet across the landscape, and Werner wakes in the
back of the truck with his fingers mashed in his armpits and his breath showing and the tubes of the
transceiver glowing a faint blue. How deep will the snow be? Six feet, ten? A hundred?
Miles deep, thinks Werner. We will drive over everything that once was.
Fall
S
torms rinse the sky, the beaches, the streets, and a red sun dips into the sea, setting all the west-
facing granite in Saint-Malo on fire, and three limousines with wrapped mufflers glide down the
rue de la Crosse like wraiths, and a dozen or so German officers, accompanied by men carrying
stage lights and movie cameras, climb the steps to the Bastion de la Hollande and stroll the
ramparts in the cold.
From his fifth-floor window, Etienne watches them through a brass telescope, nearly twenty in
all: captains and majors and even a lieutenant colonel holding his coat at the collar and gesturing at
forts on the outer islands, one of the enlisted men trying to light a cigarette in the wind, the others
laughing as his hat goes flying over the battlements.
Across the street, from the front door of Claude Levitte’s house, three women spill out laughing.
Lights burn in Claude’s windows, though the rest of the block has no electricity. Someone opens a
third-story window and throws out a shot glass,
and off it goes spinning, over and over, down
toward the rue Vauborel, and out of sight.
Etienne lights a candle and climbs to the sixth floor. Marie-Laure has fallen asleep. From his
pocket, he takes a coil of paper and unrolls it. He has already given up trying to crack the code: he
has written out the numbers,
gridded them, added, multiplied; nothing has come of it. And yet it
has. Because Etienne has stopped feeling nauseated in the afternoons; his vision has stayed clear,
his heart untroubled. Indeed, it has been over a month since he has had to curl up against the wall
in his study and pray that he does not see ghosts shambling through the walls. When Marie-Laure
comes through the front door with the bread, when he’s opening
the tiny scroll in his fingers,
lowering his mouth to the microphone, he feels unshakable; he feels alive.
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