All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel(113)

“We’ll die together, Ned my friend.”

Marie-Laure turns on the transmitter. She thinks of the whelks in Harold Bazin’s kennel, ten thousand of them; how they cling; how they draw themselves up into the spirals of their shells; how, when they’re tucked into that grotto, the gulls cannot come in to carry them up into the sky and drop them on the rocks to break them.





Visitor


Von Rumpel drinks from a bottle of skunked wine he has found in the kitchen. Four days in this house, and how many mistakes he has made! The Sea of Flames could have been in the Paris Museum all along—that simpering mineralogist and the assistant director laughing as he slunk away, duped, fooled, inveigled. Or the perfumer could have betrayed him, taking the diamond from the girl after marching her away. Or Levitte might have walked her right out of the city while she carried it in her ratty knapsack; or the old man could have jammed it up his rectum and is just now shitting it out, twenty million francs in a pile of feces.

Or maybe the stone was never real at all. Maybe it was all hoax, all story.

He had been so certain. Certain he had found the hiding spot, solved the puzzle. Certain the stone would save him. The girl didn’t know, the old man was out of the picture—everything was set up perfectly. What is certain now? Only the murderous bloom inside his body, only the corruption it brings to every cell. In his ears comes the voice of his father: You are only being tested.

Someone calls to him in German. “Ist da wer??”

Father?

“You in there!”

Von Rumpel listens. Sounds drawing nearer through the smoke. He crawls to the window. Sets his helmet on his head. Thrusts his head over the shattered sill.

A German infantry corporal squints up from the street. “Sir? I didn’t expect . . . Is the house clear, sir?”

“Empty, yes. Where are you headed, Corporal?”

“The fortress at La Cité, sir. We are evacuating. Leaving everything. We still hold the chateau and the Bastion de la Hollande. All other personnel are to fall back.”

Von Rumpel braces his chin on the sill, feeling as if his head might separate from his neck and go tumbling down to explode on the street.

“The entire town will be inside the bomb line,” the corporal says.

“How long?”

“There will be a cease-fire tomorrow. Noon, they say. To get civilians out. Then they resume the assault.”

Von Rumpel says, “We’re giving up the city?”

A shell detonates not far away, and the echoes of the blast shunt down between the wrecked houses, and the soldier in the street claps a hand over his helmet. Bits of stone skitter across the cobbles.

He calls, “You are with which unit, Sergeant Major?”

“Continue with your work, Corporal. I’m nearly done here.”





Final Sentence


Volkheimer does not stir. The liquid at the bottom of the paint bucket, however toxic it was, is gone. Werner has heard nothing from the girl on any frequency for how long? An hour? More? She read about the Nautilus getting sucked down into a whirlpool, waves higher than houses, the submarine standing on end, its steel ribs cracking, and then she read what he assumed was the last line of the book: Thus, to that question asked six thousand years ago by Ecclesiastes, “That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?” only two men now have the right to answer: Captain Nemo and myself.

Then the transmitter snapped off and the absolute darkness closed around him. For these past days—how many?—it has felt as though the hunger were a hand inside him, thrusting around in the cavity of his chest, reaching up to his shoulder blades, then down into his pelvis. Scraping at his bones. Today, though—or is it tonight?—the hunger peters out like a flame for which no fuel remains. Emptiness and fullness, in the end, somehow the same.

Werner blinks up to see the Viennese girl in her cape descend through the ceiling as if it is no more than a shadow. She carries a paper sack full of withered greens and seats herself amid the rubble. Around her swirls a cloud of bees.

He can see nothing, but he can see her.

She counts on her fingers. For tripping in line, she says. For working too slowly. For arguing over bread. For loitering too long in the camp toilet. For sobbing. For not organizing her things according to protocol.

It’s surely nonsense, yet something hangs inside it, some truth he does not want to allow himself to apprehend, and as she speaks, she ages, silver hair lays down on her head, her collar frays; she becomes an old woman—his understanding of who hovers at the rim of his consciousness.

For complaining of headaches.

For singing.

For speaking at night in her bunk.

For forgetting her birth date during evening muster.

For unloading the shipment too slowly.

For not turning in her keys correctly.

For failing to inform the guard.

For rising from bed too late.

Frau Schwartzenberger—that’s who she is. The Jewess in Frederick’s elevator.

She runs out of fingers as she counts.

For closing her eyes while being addressed.

For hoarding crusts.

For attempting to enter the park.

For having inflamed hands.

For asking for a cigarette.

For a failure of imagination and in the darkness, it feels as if ?Werner has reached bottom, as if he has been whirling deeper all this time, like the Nautilus sucked under the maelstrom, like his father descending into the pits: a one-way dive from Zollverein past Schulpforta, past the horrors of Russia and Ukraine, past the mother and daughter in Vienna, his ambition and shame becoming one and the same, to the nadir in this basement on the rim of the continent where the apparition chants nonsense—Frau Schwartzenberger walks toward him, transforming herself as she approaches from woman to girl—her hair becomes red again, her skin smooths, a seven-year-old girl presses her face up against his, and in the center of her forehead he can see a hole blacker than the blackness around him, at the bottom of which teems a dark city full of souls, ten thousand, five hundred thousand, all these faces staring up from alleys, from windows, from smoldering parks, and he hears thunder.