This Light Between Us: A Novel of World War II

Alex, awakened by all the noise, tries to settle into a comfortable position. He can’t. Too much noise, too much fear, too many people pressing in on all sides.

He sighs, then takes out Charlie’s most recent letter, still unopened. He’d meant to save it for later, but he needs escape now. But with curtains drawn across the window, it’s too dark to read.

He pulls the curtain up and over his head, ducking under it like a child playing hide-and-seek. Pressed up against the window and sealed off from everyone else, he blinks as bright moonlight washes over him. Outside, the grand sweep of the moonlit landscape passes slowly by, its barrenness broken up by the occasional wild bush or dried riverbed. It is an alien landscape of a distant, uninhabitable planet.

He opens the envelope, pulls out the letter. Five pages, all double-sided. A long letter. Good. He reads. When he is done, he turns back to the last page and reads it again.

And so last night I did something I know was dangerous. And stupid.

I went outside after curfew. I heard that the Éclaireurs Israélites de France move at night, and I hope to find a runner. So I can join this resistance group. After my parents fell asleep, I went out.

Paris after curfew was so quiet and empty. The buildings were dark and silent. Like tombstones. Because there was no gasoline traffic, the night was filled with the smell of flowers, trees, shrubs. It felt like I was walking in a cemetery at night.

I saw no one on the empty streets. Not a resistance runner, not a gendarme, not a single German solider. But I did not mind. Because it felt like Paris was all mine. And each step I took felt like I was getting back my city. Mine again, mine. Down rue de l’Ecole-de-Médecine, rue Antoine-Dubois, rue de Médicis. Mine, mine.

I kept walking for many hours. It was dangerous. One time a car drove by, its headlamps covered in a blue cloth. But I hid in a dark alley.

I walked to the Jardin du Luxembourg. It was so empty and beautiful, I felt my heart breaking a little. Are you like that sometimes, Alex? When something is so beautiful, you have no words, but your heart trembles, like it is cracking apart? At the Grand Basin, the pond water was so still, it was like a mirror reflecting the stars and moon above. A small toy sailing boat floated on the lake’s surface. It looked so lonely and lost. I stared at it for a long time, until tears went down my face.

I found myself thinking of you. I thought of how you are the only one I can talk to these days. The only one who understands me. And suddenly, I am wishing with great feeling that you could be there with me. So I could show you this beautiful night, and show off my wonderful Paris to you. I would take your hand and walk the empty streets with you. We would walk everywhere. An American boy and a Parisian girl. We would smell the grass and look up at the stars. We would look down into the Seine, and see our reflections. And maybe we would find a secret place to draw our graffiti together, a frog jumping out of a pot. Our little drawing of resistance, no?

In Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester says to Jane something I memorized: “I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you.”

Oh, Alex, maybe this is too much for you. Maybe I should keep all these emotions to myself. But my heart breaks with so much loneliness and anger and sadness. And I wish I could pull this string and bring you close to me tonight.

Your dearest friend,

Charlie

Alex folds the letter, holds it against his chest. He leans forward, pressing his forehead against the ice-cold window. He stares into the stark white-glazed landscape, slowly drifting past him, the alien eternity of it. “Charlie,” he whispers.

* * *

Even before dawn, half the train is awake. The stink of halitosis, the moist tinge of diarrhea, the cries of the colicky newborn fill the carriage. Stomachs growl, and tongues begin to wag with complaint. Hatsue, a girl he knows from school, is sitting three rows back, and has not stopped sobbing since yesterday; Alex suspects she’s left behind a secret boyfriend, a hakujin, if the rumors are true. Many finally take off their leather boots, bought just days ago on account of a rumor: they will be taken to a desolate desert, and forced out at gunpoint—the bayonetted rifles seem to confirm this—where they will be abandoned and forced to fend against rattlesnakes. They will wander for months, years, forgotten, their numbers dwindling to a hundred, a few dozen, until they will all perish.

“Where are we?” somebody asks.

“Are we in Washington?”

“Are we in California?”

“Are we in Canada?”

“Are we arriving today?”

“Can we open the shades now, Mommy?”

Frank, fed up with all the insecurity, all the timidity, all the confusion, stands up and moves over to the window. He pulls the shade up. Immediately, a shaft of light blazes into the interior. The effect is instant: darkness driven out, gray murkiness destroyed by bright clarity. For a moment no one speaks. Then someone lifts up another set of shades. And another. Light fills the carriage.

Frank isn’t done. He slides the upper-set windows to the side. A small opening only, but fresh air glides in. Alex takes a deep lungful; already he can feel the cobwebs of his mind blown away, the stink of anxiety and desperation driven out.

Frank sits down, his jaw set. “All we needed was one person to speak up. To take action. One lousy person.”

Everyone stares out the windows at the barren landscape. It is unfathomably huge, this America, so full of emptiness and unconquered wilderness.

* * *

Another day passes. At dusk, the train slows to cross a wooden trestle over a dry riverbed that’s nothing but rocks and stones. He sees two boys standing there. Alex is surprised. The boys have materialized out of nowhere; there is no nearby town, no road, no parent, no vehicle. Just these two boys, neither older than ten. They turn their heads to gaze at the passing train. The setting sun behind them has rendered them into mere silhouettes and Alex can’t make out their expressions. He thinks perhaps they will pick up rocks to throw at the train. Or raise angry fists, or pull the corners of their eyes down, or flip their white middle fingers at this unexpected gift: a whole train of the enemy just begging to be made into targets. When one of them starts raising an arm, Alex beats him to the punch, extending his middle finger and pressing it against the glass for the boy to see.

Except the boy doesn’t. Raise his middle finger, that is. Instead, his small hand waves side to side in greeting. Hello, hello. A second later, the other boy does the same. Two boys, standing in a dry riverbed, waving at the passing train. Hello, hello.

And then, before Alex can lower his middle finger and pull back his hand from the window, they are gone.

* * *

That night as the 227 Bainbridge Islanders continue their journey to an unknown destination, across the world in Poland at around the same time the first train carrying 1,112 French Jews arrives at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

PART TWO

MANZANAR WAR RELOCATION CENTER

18

APRIL 1, 1942

On April Fools’ day the train comes to a loud, rattling stop. Soldiers walk down the aisle, carrying their rifles for the first time in days, and order everyone off. On stiff legs, 227 Bainbridge Islanders stumble out. Their clothes, worn with pride the day they left Bainbridge Island, are now wrinkled. Skin sags off their bones like damp laundry on a clothesline.

They are herded into assigned buses, told where to sit. It’s even more cramped than the train, but they’re too tired to complain. They’re ordered to pull down the shades. In the darkened interior, their eyes swell like those of a terrified horse kicking the stall in panic.

Many hours later, they are finally allowed to raise the shades. And this is what they see: nothing. Just a barren wasteland stretching as far as the eye can see to the north, east, and south. Not a single tree in the flat monotony. Only to the west do the Sierra Nevada mountains break the drudgery of the lands

cape, and they do this dramatically, majestically. Towering high, cragged and snowcapped, these Sierra Nevada mountains resemble in many ways the Swiss Alps.

But there are no oohs and ahhs. No words of admiration. No fingers pointing at the splendor. Only a hushed anxiety. Everyone feels it. They are drawing near to the end of their journey. And yet they are out in the middle of nowhere. It is no place for humans.

Are we? they wonder. Human?

In the distance, something emerges. A dark stain on the flat landscape, a filthy puddle. Shapes emerge within it. Dots lined up in regimented fashion. Small shacks, like matchboxes.

They draw closer. Now they see a barbed-wire fence around the square-mile perimeter. Inside, rows and columns of shacks, hundreds of them. Two watchtowers with weapons pointed inward, with six more watchtowers still under construction.

“No,” someone whispers. “No way.”

“It’s not for us,” someone says. “It’s just a storage facility. Those are only warehouses.”

But instead of driving past, the convoy of buses turns into the compound. No one says a word. Even the children are quiet. Wide-eyed and stunned. For Alex, as the bus pulls into the compound, this feels like a last moment. A last moment of freedom, of independence. He takes a long breath and holds it in.

The soldiers in the camp wear a different uniform from the ones who escorted them from Bainbridge Island. Fresher-looking, crisper, and because of that, more intimidating. A cordon of these soldiers is lined up along the road. Their rifles and belts of live ammunition are on full display as they bark orders to the dazed, blinking people stumbling out of the bus. They are the first of thousands to arrive at Manzanar.