All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

Eins, zwei,
Polizei, drei, vier, Offizier,
and how he would like to join her, push her higher and higher, sing
fünf, sechs, alte Hex, sieben, acht, gute Nacht!
Then her mother calls something Werner cannot
hear and takes the girl’s hand. They pass around a corner, little velvet cape trailing behind, and are
gone.
Not an hour later, he snares something winging in out of the static: a simple broadcast in Swiss
German. 
Hit nine, transmitting at 1600, this is KX46, do you receive?
He does not understand all
of it. Then it goes. Werner crosses the square and tunes the second transceiver himself. When they
speak again, he triangulates and plugs the numbers into the equation, then looks up and sees with
his naked eyes what looks very much like a wire antenna trailing down the side of an apartment
house flanking the square.
So easy.
Already Volkheimer’s eyes have come alive, a lion who has caught the scent. As though he and
Werner hardly need to speak to communicate.
“See the wire trailing down there?” Werner asks.
Voklheimer glasses the building with binoculars. “That window?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not too dense in here? All these flats?”
“That’s the window,” says Werner.
They go in. He does not hear any shots. Five minutes later, they call him up into a fifth-floor flat
wallpapered with a dizzying floral print. He expects to be asked to look over the equipment, as
usual, but there is none: no corpses, no transmitter, not even a simple listening set. Just ornate
lamps and an embroidered sofa and the swarming rococo wallpaper.
“Pry up the floorboards,” orders Volkheimer, but after Neumann Two pries up several and peers
down, it’s clear that the only thing under the boards is decades-old horsehair for insulation.
“Another flat, maybe? Another floor?”
Werner crosses into a bedroom and slides open the window and peers over an iron balcony.
What he thought was an antenna is nothing more than a painted rod run up the side of a pilaster,
probably meant to anchor a clothesline. Not an antenna at all. But he heard a transmission. Didn’t

---

he?
An ache reaches up through the base of his skull. He laces his hands behind his head and sits on
the edge of an unmade bed and looks at the clothes here—a slip folded over the back of a chair, a
pewter-backed hairbrush on the bureau, rows of tiny frosted bottles and pots on a vanity, all of it
inarticulably feminine to him, mysterious and confusing, in the way Herr Siedler’s wife confused
him four years before as she hitched up her skirt and knelt in front of her big radio.
A woman’s room. Wrinkled sheets, a smell like skin lotion in the air, and a photograph of a
young man—nephew? lover? brother?—on a dressing table. Maybe his math was wrong. Maybe
the signal scattered off the buildings. Maybe the fever has scrambled his wits. On the wallpaper in
front of him, roses appear to drift, rotate, swap places.
“Nothing?” calls Volkheimer from the other room, and Bernd calls back, “Nothing.”
In some alternate universe, Werner considers, this woman and Frau Elena could have been
friends. A reality more pleasant than this one. Then he sees, hung on the doorknob, a maroon
square of velvet, hood attached, a child’s cape, and at exactly that moment in the other bedroom,
Neumann Two makes a cry like a high, surprised gargle and there is a single shot, then a woman’s
scream, then more shots, and Volkheimer strides past, hurrying, and the rest follow, and they find
Neumann Two standing in front of a closet with both hands on his rifle and the smell of gunpowder
all around. On the floor is a woman, one arm swept backward as if she has been refused a dance,
and inside the closet is not a radio but a child sitting on her bottom with a bullet through her head.
Her moon eyes are open and moist and her mouth is stretched back in an oval of surprise and it is
the girl from the swings and she cannot be over seven years old.
Werner waits for the child to blink. Blink, he thinks, blink blink blink. Already Volkheimer is
closing the closet door, though it won’t close all the way because the girl’s foot is sticking out of it,
and Bernd is covering the woman on the bed with a blanket, and how could Neumann Two not
have known, but of course he didn’t, because that is how things are with Neumann Two, with
everybody in this unit, in this army, in this world, they do as they’re told, they get scared, they
move about with only themselves in mind.