All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

Right three degrees, repeat range
. Calm, weary voices directing fire. The same sort of voice
God uses, perhaps, when He calls souls to Him. This way, please.
Only numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.
It’s the same on
their side too.
“My great-grandfather,” Volkheimer says all of a sudden, “was a sawyer in the years before
steamships, when everything went by sail.”
Werner can’t be sure in the blackness, but he thinks Volkheimer is standing, running his fingertips
along one of the three splintered beams that hold up the ceiling. His knees bent to accommodate his
height. Like Atlas about to slip into the traces.
“Back then,” Volkheimer says, “all of Europe needed masts for their navies. But most of the
countries had cut down their big trees. England, Great-Grandfather said, didn’t have a tree worth
its wood on the whole island. So the masts for the British and Spanish navies, the Portuguese too,
would come from Prussia, from the woods where I grew up. Great-Grandfather knew where all the
giants were. Some of those trees would take a crew of five men three days to bring down. First the
wedges would go in, like needles, he said, in the hide of an elephant. The biggest trunks could
swallow a hundred wedges before they’d creak.”
The artillery screams; the cellar shudders.
“Great-Grandfather said he loved to imagine the big trees sledding behind teams of horses
across Europe, across rivers, across the sea to Britain, where they’d be stripped and treated and
raised up again as masts, where they’d see decades of battle, given a second life, sailing atop the
great oceans, until eventually they’d fall and die their second death.”
Another shell goes overhead and Werner imagines he hears the wood in the huge beams above
him splinter. 
That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fern or reed that lived one million
years ago, or maybe two million, or maybe one hundred million. Can you imagine one hundred
million years?
Werner says, “Where I’m from, they dug up trees. Prehistoric ones.”
Volkheimer says, “I was desperate to leave.”
“I was too.”
“And now?”
Bernd molders in the corner. Jutta moves through the world somewhere, watching shadows
disentangle themselves from night, watching miners limp past in the dawn. It was enough when
Werner was a boy, wasn’t it? A world of wildflowers blooming up through the shapes of rusty
cast-off parts. A world of berries and carrot peels and Frau Elena’s fairy tales. Of the sharp smell
of tar, and trains passing, and bees humming in the window boxes. String and spit and wire and a
voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams.

---

The Transmitter
I
t waits on the table tucked against the chimney. The twin marine batteries below it. A strange
machine, built years before, to talk to a ghost. As carefully as she can, Marie-Laure crawls to the
piano bench and eases herself up. Someone must have a radio—the fire brigade, if one remains, or
the resistance, or the Americans hurling missiles at the city. The Germans in their underground
forts. Maybe Etienne himself. She tries to imagine him hunched somewhere, his fingers twisting the
dials of a phantom radio. Maybe he assumes she is dead. Maybe he needs only to hear a flicker of
hope.
She runs her fingers along the stones of the chimney until she finds the lever her uncle installed
there. She presses her whole weight on it, and the antenna makes a faint grating noise above the
roof as it telescopes upward.
Too loud.
She waits. Counts to one hundred. No sound from downstairs.
Beneath the table, her fingers find switches: one for the microphone, the other for the transmitter,
she cannot remember which is which. Switch on one, then the other. Inside the big transmitter,
vacuum tubes thrum.
Is it too loud, Papa?