All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel(126)

Even before she nods, before he says, “I have something for you,” before she invites him through the screen door, she knows this will be about Werner.

The giant’s nylon pants swish as he follows her down the hall. When Albert looks up from the stove, he startles but only says, “Hello,” and “Watch your head,” and waves his cooking spoon as the giant dodges the light fixture.

When he offers dinner, the giant says yes. Albert pulls the table away from the wall and sets a fourth place. In his wooden chair, Volkheimer reminds Jutta of an image from one of Max’s picture books: an elephant squeezed into an airplane seat. The duffel bag he has brought waits on the hall table.

The conversation begins slowly.

He has come several hours on the train.

He walked here from the station.

He does not need sherry, thank you.

Max eats fast, Albert slowly. Jutta tucks her hands beneath her thighs to hide their shaking.

“Once they had the address,” Volkheimer says, “I asked if I might deliver it myself. They included a letter, see?” He takes a folded sheet of paper from his pocket.

Outside, cars pass, wrens trill.

A part of Jutta does not want to take the letter. Does not want to hear what this huge man has traveled a long way to say. Weeks go by when Jutta does not allow herself to think of the war, of Frau Elena, of the awful last months in Berlin. Now she can buy pork seven days a week. Now, if the house feels cold she twists a dial in the kitchen, and voilà. She does not want to be one of those middle-aged women who thinks of nothing but her own painful history. Sometimes she looks at the eyes of her older colleagues and wonders what they did when the electricity was out, when there were no candles, when the rain came through the ceiling. What they saw. Only rarely does she loosen the seals enough to allow herself to think of Werner. In many ways, her memories of her brother have become things to lock away. A math teacher at Helmoltz-Gymnasium in 1974 does not bring up a brother who attended the National Political Institute of Education at Schulpforta.

Albert says, “In the east, then?”

Volkheimer says, “I was with him at school, then out in the field. We were in Russia. Also Poland, Ukraine, Austria. Then France.”

Max crunches a sliced apple. He says, “How tall are you?”

“Max,” says Jutta.

Volkheimer smiles.

Albert says, “He was very bright, wasn’t he? Jutta’s brother?”

Volkheimer says, “Very.”

Albert offers a second helping, offers salt, offers sherry again. Albert is younger than Jutta, and during the war, he ran as a courier in Hamburg between bomb shelters. Nine years old in 1945, still a child.

“The last place I saw him,” says Volkheimer, “was in a town on the northern coast of France called Saint-Malo.”

From the loam of Jutta’s memory rises a sentence: What I want to write about today is the sea.

“We spent a month there. I think he might have fallen in love.”

Jutta sits straighter in her chair. It’s embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is. A town on the northern coast of France? Love? Nothing will be healed in this kitchen. Some griefs can never be put right.

Volkheimer pushes back from the table. “It was not my intention to upset you.” He hovers, dwarfing them.

“It’s all right,” says Albert. “Max, can you please take our guest to the patio? I’ll put out some cake.”

Max slides open the glass door for Volkheimer, and he ducks through. Jutta sets the plates in the sink. She is suddenly very tired. She only wants the big man to leave and to take the bag with him. She only wants a tide of normality to wash in and cover everything again.

Albert touches her elbow. “Are you all right?”

Jutta does not nod or shake her head, but slowly drags a hand over both eyebrows.

“I love you, Jutta.”

When she looks out the window, Volkheimer is kneeling on the cement beside Max. Max lays down two sheets of paper, and although she cannot hear them, she can see the huge man talking Max through a set of steps. Max watches intently, turning over the sheet when Volkheimer turns it over, matching his folds, wetting one finger, and running it along a crease.

Soon enough, they each have a wide-winged plane with a long forked tail. Volkheimer’s sails neatly out across the yard, flying straight and true, and smacks into the fence nose-first. Max claps.

Max kneels on the patio in the dusk, going over his airplane, checking the angle of its wings. Volkheimer kneels beside him, nodding, patient.

Jutta says, “I love you too.”





Duffel


Volkheimer is gone. The duffel waits on the hall table. She can hardly look at it.

Jutta helps Max into his pajamas and kisses him good night. She brushes her teeth, avoiding herself in the mirror, and goes back downstairs and stands looking out through the window in their front door. In the basement, Albert is running his trains through his meticulously painted world, beneath the underpass, over his electric drawbridge; it’s a small sound up here, but relentless, a sound that penetrates the timbers of the house.

Jutta brings the duffel up to the desk in her bedroom and sets it down on the floor and grades another of her students’ exams. Then another. She can hear the trains stop, then resume their monotonous drone.

She tries to grade a third exam but cannot concentrate; the numbers drift across the pages and collect at the bottom in unintelligible piles. She sets the bag in her lap.