All the Light We Cannot See
Page 35“Then there was the war.”
“We became signalmen. Our job, mine and your grandfather’s, was to knit telegraph wires from command positions at the rear to field officers at the front. Most nights the enemy would shoot pistol flares called ‘very lights’ over the trenches, short-lived stars suspended in the air from parachutes, meant to illuminate possible targets for snipers. Every soldier within reach of the glare would freeze while it lasted. Some hours, eighty or ninety of these flares would go off, one after another, and the night would turn stark and strange in that magnesium glow. It would be so quiet, the only sound the fizzling of the flares, and then you’d hear the whistle of a sniper’s bullet streak out of the darkness and bury itself in the mud. We would stay as close together as we could. But I’d become paralyzed sometimes; I could not move any part of my body, not even my fingers. Not even my eyelids. Henri would stay right beside me and whisper those scripts, the ones we recorded. Sometimes all night. Over and over. As though weaving some kind of protective screen around us. Until morning came.”
“But he died.”
“And I did not.”
This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.
“Who built all of this, Uncle? This machine?”
“I did. After the war. Took me years.”
“How does it work?”
“It’s a radio transmitter. This switch here”—he guides her hand to it—“powers up the microphone, and this one runs the phonograph. Here’s the premodulation amplifier, and these are the vacuum tubes, and these are the coils. The antenna telescopes up along the chimney. Twelve meters. Can you feel the lever? Think of energy as a wave and the transmitter as sending out smooth cycles of those waves. Your voice creates a disruption in those cycles . . .”
She stops listening. It’s dusty and confusing and mesmerizing all at once. How old must all this be? Ten years? Twenty? “What did you transmit?”
“The piano?”
“Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune.’?” He touches a metal cylinder with a sphere stuck on top. “I’d just tuck the microphone into the bell of the gramophone, and voilà.”
She leans over the microphone, says, “Hello out there.” He laughs his feathery laugh. “Did it ever reach any children?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“How far can it transmit, Uncle?”
“Far.”
“To England?”
“Easily.”
“To Paris?”
“You’d play your brother’s own voice to him? After he died?”
“And Debussy.”
“Did he ever talk back?”
The attic ticks. What ghosts sidle along the walls right now, trying to overhear? She can almost taste her great-uncle’s fright in the air.
“No,” he says. “He never did.”
To My Dear Sister Jutta—
Some of the boys whisper that Dr. Hauptmann is connected to very powerful ministers. He won’t answer XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX. But he wants me to assist him all the time! I go to his workshop in the evenings and he sets me to work on circuits for a radio he is testing. Trigonometry too. He says to be as creative as I can; he says creativity fuels the Reich. He has this big upperclassman, they call him the Giant, stand over me with a stopwatch to test how fast I can calculate. Triangles triangles triangles. I probably do fifty calculations a night. They don’t tell me why. You would not believe the copper wire here; they have XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX. Everyone gets out of the way when the Giant comes through.
Dr. Hauptmann says we can do anything, build anything. He says the führer has collected scientists to help him control the weather. He says the führer will develop a rocket that can reach Japan. He says the führer will build a city on the moon.
To My Dear Sister Jutta—
Everyone says there is a great test coming. A test harder than all the other tests.
Frederick says that story about Reiner Schicker is XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX XXXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX Just being around the Giant—his name is Frank Volkheimer—means the other boys treat me with respect. I come up only to his waist practically. He seems a man, not a boy. He possesses the loyalty of Reiner Schicker. In his hands and heart and bones. Please tell Frau Elena I am eating lots here but that no one makes flour cakes like hers or at all really. Tell little Siegfried to look lively. I think of you every day. Sieg heil.
To My Dear Sister Jutta—
Yesterday was Sunday and for field exercises we went into the forest. Most hunters are at the front so the woods are full of marten and deer. The other boys sat in the blinds and talked about magnificent victories and how soon we will cross the Channel and destroy the XXXCENSOR MARKS HEREXXXX and Dr. Hauptmann’s dogs came back with three rabbits one for each but Frederick, he came back with about a thousand berries in his shirt and his sleeves were ripped from the brambles and his binocular bag was torn open and I said, You’re going to catch hell and he looked down at his clothes like he’d never seen them before! Frederick knows all the birds just by hearing them. Above the lake we heard skylarks and lapwings and plovers and a harrier hen and probably ten others I’ve forgotten. You would like Frederick I think. He sees what other people don’t. Hope your cough is better and Frau Elena’s too. Sieg heil.
Perfumer
His name is Claude Levitte but everyone calls him Big Claude. For a decade he has run a parfumerie on the rue Vauborel: a straggling business that prospers only when the cod are being salted and the stones of the town itself begin to stink.