All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel

by Anthony Doerr

  Twelve

  * * *

  1974

  Volkheimer

  Frank Volkheimer’s third-floor walk-up in the suburbs of Pforzheim, Germany, possesses three windows. A single billboard, mounted on the cornice of the building across the alley, dominates the view; its surface gleams three yards beyond the glass. Printed on it are processed meats, cold cuts as tall as he is, reds and pinks, gray at the edges, garnished with parsley sprigs the size of shrubs. At night the billboard’s four cheerless electric spotlights bathe his apartment in a strange reflected glare.

  He is fifty-one years old.

  April rain falls slantwise through the billboard’s spotlights and Volkheimer’s television flickers blue and he ducks habitually as he passes through the doorway between his kitchen and the main room. No children, no pets, no houseplants, few books on the shelves. Just a card table, a mattress, and a single armchair in front of the television where he now sits, a tin of butter cookies in his lap. He eats them one after another, all the floral discs, then the ones shaped like pretzels, and finally the clovers.

  On the television, a black horse helps free a man trapped beneath a fallen tree.

  Volkheimer installs and repairs rooftop TV antennas. He puts on a blue jumpsuit every morning, faded where it strains over his huge shoulders, too short around the ankles, and walks to work in big black boots. Because he is strong enough to move the big extension ladders by himself, and perhaps also because he rarely speaks, Volkheimer responds to most calls alone. People telephone the branch office to request an installation, or to complain about ghost signals, interference, starlings on the wires, and out goes Volkheimer. He splices a broken line, or pokes a bird’s nest off a boom, or elevates an antenna on struts.

  Only on the windiest, coldest days does Pforzheim feel like home. Volkheimer likes feeling the air slip under the collar of his jumpsuit, likes seeing the light blown clean by the wind, the far-off hills powdered with snow, the town’s trees (all planted in the years after the war, all the same age) glittering with ice. On winter afternoons he moves among the antennas like a sailor through rigging. In the late blue light, he can watch the people in the streets below, hurrying home, and sometimes gulls soar past, white against the dark. The small, secure weight of tools along his belt, the smell of intermittent rain, and the crystalline brilliance of the clouds at dusk: these are the only times when Volkheimer feels marginally whole.

  But on most days, especially the warm ones, life exhausts him; the worsening traffic and graffiti and company politics, everyone grousing about bonuses, benefits, overtime. Sometimes, in the slow heat of summer, long before dawn, Volkheimer paces in the harsh dazzle of the billboard lights and feels his loneliness on him like a disease. He sees tall ranks of firs swaying in a storm, hears their heartwood groan. He sees the earthen floor of his childhood home, and the spiderwebbed light of dawn coming through conifers. Other times the eyes of men who are about to die haunt him, and he kills them all over again. Dead man in Lodz. Dead man in Lublin. Dead man in Radom. Dead man in Cracow.

  Rain on the windows, rain on the roof. Before he goes to bed, Volkheimer descends three flights of stairs to the atrium to check his mail. He has not checked his mail in over a week, and among two flyers and a paycheck and a single utility bill is a small package from a veterans’ service organization located in West Berlin. He carries the mail upstairs and opens the package.

  Three different objects have been photographed against the same white background, carefully numbered notecards taped beside each.

  14-6962. A canvas soldier’s bag, mouse gray, with two padded straps.

  14-6963. A little model house, made from wood, partially crushed.

  14-6964. A soft-covered rectangular notebook with a single word across the front: Fragen.

  The house he does not recognize, and the bag could have been any soldier’s, but he knows the notebook instantly. W.P. inked on the bottom corner. Volkheimer sets two fingers on the photograph as though he could pluck out the notebook and sift through its pages.

  He was a just a boy. They all were. Even the largest of them.

  The letter explains that the organization is trying to deliver items to next of kin of dead soldiers whose names have been lost. It says they believe that he, Staff Sergeant Frank Volkheimer, served as ranking officer of a unit that included the owner of this bag, a bag that was collected by a United States Army prisoner-of-war processing camp in Bernay, France, in the year 1944.

  Does he know to whom these items belonged?

  He sets the photographs on the table and stands with his big hands at his sides. He hears jouncing axles, grumbling tailpipes, rain on canvas. Clouds of gnats buzzing. The march of jackboots and the full-throated shouts of boys.

  Static, then the guns.

  But was it decent to leave him out there like that? Even after he was dead?

  What you could be.

  He was small. He had white hair and ears that stuck out. He buttoned the collar of his jacket up around his throat when he was cold and drew his hands up inside the sleeves. Volkheimer knows whom those items belonged to.

  Jutta

  Jutta Wette teaches sixth-form algebra in Essen: integers, probability, parabolas. Every day she wears the same outfit: black slacks with a nylon blouse—alternately beige, charcoal, or pale blue. Occasionally the canary-yellow one, if she’s feeling unrestrained. Her skin is milky and her hair remains white as paper.

  Jutta’s husband, Albert, is a kind, slow-moving, and balding accountant whose great passion is running model trains in the basement. For a long time Jutta believed she could not get pregnant, and then, one day, when she was thirty-seven years old, she did. Their son, Max, is six, fond of mud, dogs, and questions no one can answer. More than anything lately, Max likes to fold complicated designs of paper airplanes. He comes home from school, kneels on the kitchen floor, and forms airplane after airplane with unswerving, almost frightening devotion, evaluating different wingtips, tails, noses, mostly seeming to love the praxis of it, the transformation of something flat into something that can fly.

  It’s a Thursday afternoon in early June, the school year nearly over, and they are at the public swimming pool. Slate-colored clouds veil the sky, and children shout in the shallow end, and parents talk or read magazines or doze in their chairs, and everything is normal. Albert stands at the snack counter in his swim trunks, with his little towel draped over his wide back, and contemplates his selection of ice cream.

  Max swims awkwardly, windmilling one arm forward and then the other, periodically looking up to make sure his mother is watching. When he’s done, he wraps himself in a towel and climbs into the chair beside her. Max is compact and small and his ears stick out. Water droplets shine in his eyelashes. Dusk seeps down through the overcast and a slight chill drops into the air and one by one families leave to walk or bike or ride the bus home. Max plucks crackers out of a cardboard box and crunches them loudly. “I love Leibniz Zoo crackers, Mutti,” he says.

  “I know, Max.”

  Albert drives them home in their little NSU Prinz 4, the clutch rattling, and Jutta takes a stack of end-of-term exams from her school bag and grades them at the kitchen table. Albert puts on water for noodles and fries onions. Max takes a clean sheet of paper from the drawing table and starts to fold.

  On the front door come knocks, three.

  For reasons Jutta does not fully understand, her heartbeat begins to thud in her ears. The point of her pencil hovers over the page. It’s only someone at the door—a neighbor or a friend or the little girl, Anna, from down the street, who sits upstairs with Max sometimes and gives him directions for how to best construct elaborate towns out of plastic blocks. But the knock does not sound anything like Anna’s.

  Max bounds to the door, airplane in hand.

  “Who is it, dear?”

  Max does not reply, which means it is someone he does not know. She crosses into the hall, and there in her door frame stands a giant.


  Max crosses his arms, intrigued and impressed. His airplane on the ground at his feet. The giant takes off his cap. His massive head shines. “Frau Wette?” He wears a tent-sized silver sweatsuit with maroon splashes along the sides, zipper pulled to the base of his throat. Gingerly, he presents a faded canvas duffel bag.

  The bullies in the square. Hans and Herribert. His very size invokes them all. This man has come, she thinks, to other doors and not bothered to knock.

  “Yes?”

  “Your maiden name was Pfennig?”

  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.

  When they were first married and Albert went away on trips for work, Jutta would wake in the predawn hours and remember those first nights after Werner left for Schulpforta and feel all over again the searing pain of his absence.

  For something so old, the zipper on the duffel opens smoothly. Inside is a thick envelope and a package covered in newspaper. When she unwraps the newspaper, she finds a model house, tall and narrow, no bigger than her fist.

  The envelope contains the notebook she sent him forty years before. His book of questions. That crimped, tiny cursive, each letter sloping slightly farther uphill. Drawings, schematics, pages of lists.

  Something that looks like a blender powered by bicycle pedals.

  A motor for a model airplane.

  Why do some fish have whiskers?

  Is it true that all cats are gray when the candles are out?

  When lightning strikes the sea, why don’t all the fish die?

  After three pages, she has to close the notebook. Memories cartwheel out of her head and tumble across the floor. Werner’s cot in the attic, the wall above it papered over with her drawings of imaginary cities. The first-aid box and the radio and the wire threaded out the window and through the eave. Downstairs, the trains run through Albert’s three-level layout, and in the next room her son wages battles in his sleep, lips murmuring, eyelids flexing, and Jutta wills the numbers to climb back up and find their places on her students’ exams.

  She reopens the notebook.

  Why does a knot hold?

  If five cats catch five rats in five minutes, how many cats will it require to catch 100 rats in 100 minutes?

  Why does a flag flutter in the wind rather than stand straight out?

  Tucked between the last two pages, she finds an old sealed envelope. He has written For Frederick across the front. Frederick: the bunkmate Werner used to write about, the boy who loved birds.

  He sees what other people don’t.
/>   What the war did to dreamers.

  When Albert finally comes up, she keeps her head down and pretends to be grading exams. He peels himself out of his clothes and groans lightly as he gets into bed, and switches off his lamp, and says good night, and still she sits.

  Saint-Malo

  Jutta’s grades are in, and Max is off school, and besides, he’d just go to the pool every day, pester his father with riddles, fold three hundred of those airplanes the giant taught him, and wouldn’t it be good for him to visit another country, learn some French, see the ocean? She poses these questions to Albert, but both of them know that she is the one who must grant permission. To go herself, to take their son.

  On the twenty-sixth of June, an hour before dawn, Albert makes six ham sandwiches and wraps them in foil. Then he drives Jutta and Max to the station in the Prinz 4 and kisses her on the lips, and she boards the train with Werner’s notebook and the model house in her purse.

  The journey takes all day. By Rennes, the sun has dropped low over the horizon, and the smell of warm manure comes through the open windows, and lines of pollarded trees whisk past. Gulls and crows in equal numbers follow a tractor through its wake of dust. Max eats a second ham sandwich and rereads a comic book, and sheets of yellow flowers glow in the fields, and Jutta wonders if any of them grow over the bones of her brother.

  Before dark, a well-dressed man with a prosthetic leg boards the train. He sits beside her and lights a cigarette. Jutta clutches her bag between her knees; she is certain that he was wounded in the war, that he will try to start a conversation, that her deficient French will betray her. Or that Max will say something. Or that the man can already tell. Maybe she smells German.

  He’ll say, You did this to me.

  Please. Not in front of my son.

  But the train jolts into motion, and the man finishes his cigarette and gives her a preoccupied smile and promptly falls asleep.