All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

What took you so long, bluebird?
He’ll say, 
I will never leave you, not in a million years.

---

Hunting
I
n January 1943, Werner finds a second illegal transmission coming from an orchard on which a
shell has fallen, cracking most of the trees in half. Two weeks later, he finds a third, then a fourth.
Each new find seems only a variation of the last: the triangle closes in, each segment shrinking
simultaneously, the vertices growing closer, until they are reduced to a single point, a barn or a
cottage or a factory basement or some disgusting encampment in the ice.
“He is broadcasting now?”
“Yes.”
“In that shed?”
“Do you see the antenna along the eastern wall?”
Whenever he can, Werner records what the partisans say on magnetic tape. Everybody, he is
learning, likes to hear themselves talk. Hubris, like the oldest stories. They raise the antenna too
high, broadcast for too many minutes, assume the world offers safety and rationality when of
course it does not.
The captain sends word that he is thrilled with their progress; he promises holiday leaves,
steaks, brandy. All winter the Opel roves occupied territories, cities that Jutta recorded in their
radio log coming to life—Prague, Minsk, Ljubljana.
Sometimes the truck passes a group of prisoners and Volkheimer asks Neumann One to slow. He
sits up very straight, looking for any man as large as he is. When he sees one, he raps the dash.
Neumann One brakes, and Volkheimer postholes out into the snow, speaks to a guard, and wades in
among the prisoners, usually wearing only a shirt against the cold.
“His rifle is in the truck,” Neumann One will say. “Left his fucking rifle right here.”
Sometimes he’s too far away. Other times Werner hears him perfectly. “
Ausziehen,
” Volkheimer
will say, his breath pluming out in front of him, and almost every time, the big Russian will
understand. Take it off. A strapping Russian boy with the face of someone for whom no remaining
thing on earth could be surprising. Except perhaps this: another giant wading toward him.
Off come mittens, a wool shirt, a battered coat. Only when he asks for their boots do their faces
change: they shake their head, look up or look down, roll their eyes like frightened horses. To lose
their boots, Werner understands, means they will die. But Volkheimer stands and waits, big man
against big man, and always the prisoner caves. He stands in his wrecked socks in the trampled
snow and tries to make eye contact with the other prisoners, but none will look at him. Volkheimer
holds up various items, tries them on, hands them back if they do not fit. Then he stamps back to the
truck, and Neumann One drops the Opel into gear.
Creaking ice, villages burning in forests, nights where it becomes too cold even to snow—that
winter presents a strange and haunted season during which Werner prowls the static like he used to
prowl the alleys with Jutta, pulling her in the wagon through the colonies of Zollverein. A voice
materializes out of the distortion in his headphones, then fades, and he goes ferreting after it.
There, thinks Werner when he finds it again, 
there
: a feeling like shutting your eyes and feeling
your way down a mile-long thread until your fingernails find the tiny lump of a knot.
Sometimes days pass after hearing a first transmission before Werner snares the next; they
present a problem to solve, something to wrap his mind around: better, surely, than fighting in some
stinking, frozen trench, full of lice, the way the old instructors at Schulpforta fought in the first war.

---

This is cleaner, more mechanical, a war waged through the air, invisibly, and the front lines are
anywhere. Isn’t there a kind of ravishing delight in the chase of it? The truck bouncing along
through the darkness, the first signs of an antenna through the trees?