All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel(70)

We are a volley of bullets, sing the newest cadets, we are cannonballs. We are the tip of the sword.

Werner thinks of home all the time. He misses the sound of rain on the zinc roof above his dormer; the feral energy of the orphans; the scratchy singing of Frau Elena as she rocks a baby in the parlor. The smell of the coking plant coming in under the dawn, the first reliable smell of every day. Mostly he misses Jutta: her loyalty, her obstinacy, the way she always seems to recognize what is right.

Though in Werner’s weaker moments, he resents those same qualities in his sister. Perhaps she’s the impurity in him, the static in his signal that the bullies can sense. Perhaps she’s the only thing keeping him from surrendering totally. If you have a sister back home, you’re supposed to think of her as a pretty girl in a propaganda poster: rosy-cheeked, brave, steadfast. She’s whom you fight for. Whom you die for. But Jutta? Jutta sends letters that the school censor blacks out almost completely. She asks questions that should not be asked. Only Werner’s affiliation with Dr. Hauptmann—his privileged status as the favorite of the technical sciences professor—keeps him safe. A company in Berlin is producing their transceiver, and already some of their units are coming back from what Hauptmann calls “the field,” blown apart or burned or drowned in mud or defective, and Werner’s job is to rebuild them while Hauptmann talks into his telephone or writes requisitions for replacement parts or spends whole fortnights away from the school.

Weeks pass without a letter to Jutta. Werner writes four lines, a smattering of platitudes—I am fine; I am so busy—and hands it to the bunk master. Dread swamps him.

“You have minds,” Bastian murmurs one evening in the refectory, each boy hunching almost imperceptibly farther over his food as the commandant’s finger grazes the back of his uniform. “But minds are not to be trusted. Minds are always drifting toward ambiguity, toward questions, when what you really need is certainty. Purpose. Clarity. Do not trust your minds.”

Werner sits in the lab late at night, alone again, and trolls the frequencies on the Grundig tube radio that Volkheimer used to borrow from Hauptmann’s office, searching for music, for echoes, for what, he is not sure. He sees circuits break apart and re-form. He sees Frederick staring into his book of birds; he sees the furor of the mines at Zollverein, the shunting cars, the banging locks, the trundling conveyors, smokestacks silting the sky day and night; he sees Jutta slashing back and forth with a lit torch as darkness encroaches from all sides. Wind presses against the walls of the lab—wind, the commandant loves to remind them, that comes all the way from Russia, a Cossack wind, the wind of candle-eating barbarians with hogs’ heads who will stop at nothing to drink the blood of German girls. Gorillas who must be wiped off the earth.

Static static.

Are you there?

Finally he shuts off the radio. Into the stillness come the voices of his masters, echoing from one side of his head while memory speaks from the other.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.





The Blade and the Whelk


The H?tel-Dieu dining room is big and somber and full of people talking about U-boats off Gibraltar and the inequities of currency exchange and four-stroke marine diesel engines. Madame Manec orders two bowls of chowder that she and Marie-Laure promptly finish. She says she does not know what to do next—should they keep waiting?—so she orders two more.

At last a man in rustling clothing sits down with them. “You are sure your name is Madame Walter?”

Madame Manec says, “You are sure your name is René?”

A pause.

“And her?”

“My accomplice. She can tell if someone is lying just by hearing him speak.”

He laughs. They talk about the weather. Sea air exudes from the man’s clothes, as if he has been blown here by a gale. While he talks, he makes ungainly movements and bumps the table so that the spoons clatter in their bowls. Finally he says, “We admire your efforts, Madame.”

The man who calls himself René starts talking extremely softly. Marie-Laure catches only phrases: “Look for special insignia on their license plates. WH for army, WL for air force, WM for navy. And you could note—or find someone who could—every vessel that comes in and out of the harbor. This information is very much in demand.”

Madame Manec is quiet. If more is said that Marie-Laure cannot overhear—if there is a pantomime going on between them, notes passed, stratagems agreed upon—she cannot say. Some level of accord is reached, and soon enough she and Madame Manec are back in the kitchen at Number 4 rue Vauborel. Madame Manec clatters around in the cellar and hauls up canning supplies. This very morning, she announces, she has managed to procure what might be the last two crates of peaches in France. She hums as she helps Marie-Laure with the peeler.

“Madame?”

“Yes, Marie.”

“What is a pseudonym?”

“It is a fake name, an alternate name.”

“If I were to have one, what sort of name could I choose?”

“Well,” says Madame Manec. She pits and quarters another peach. “You can be anything. You can be the Mermaid if you like. Or Daisy? Violet?”

“How about the Whelk? I think I would like to be the Whelk.”

“The Whelk. That is an excellent pseudonym.”