This Light Between Us: A Novel of World War II

“What?”

“It was the last thing she said. I put her on the train, and she turned around. And she said, ‘If you see Alex, tell him this. Tell him I said, I am still the leaping frog.’”

“I am still the leaping frog?”

Monsieur Schäfer nods. “What does it mean?”

Alex closes his eyes, feels them wet and shimmering behind his eyelids.

64

* * *

Dearest Alex,

Day 93. Here I am, still hiding in this small room in the factory. Speaking in whispers. Constantly shushing Djangela, the little Sinti boy. Walking with soft careful feet. I have lost track of the date. I have lost track of who I am. I am a ghost.

It is unbearable.

There is only one thing I can do to keep sane: I think of the future. I imagine myself in that world. When this war is finally finished. When I no longer have to hide in this tiny room. When I will be free, when I can walk the streets without fear, without shame, without the star, with my face tilted upward to take in the full sunshine. When my life is restored.

Oh, Alex, promise me one thing: when this war is over, come to Paris. Join the Cité Internationale Universitaire program in the 14th arrondissement. They offer excellent fine arts classes for talented artists. Many American exchange students studied there before the war, and they all lived in a beautiful residence called the Fondation des États-Unis. Sorbonne is not far from there.

I will show you Paris. I will take you everywhere. Because even now, even after all Paris has done to me, all the ways she has failed me, hurt me, even arrested me and let me be taken away, all the ways she has betrayed me—I still love her. Maybe Alex, maybe loving a city, a country, is like loving a person: you love her despite her faults, you forgive her constantly, you always believe in her, fight for her, you never give up on her.

And in my beloved Paris I will take you to the bookstalls along the Seine and we will bargain fiercely with the bouquinistes. I’ll take you to the Ile Saint Louis in the summer and we’ll sit on a bench and share ice cream. We will go to the Île aux Cygnes and stare at the replica Statute of Liberty and pretend we have gone to Manhattan together. I will take you under all the bridges where I painted the leaping frog as resistance graffiti, the Pont Alexandre III, the Pont des Arts, and you will laugh at my horrible painting skills, how my leaping frog looks more like a squashed escargot.

In the autumn we will go to the Jardin des Tuileries and drink hot chocolate and eat crêpes. When the cold of winter arrives, we will go to one jazz club after another in the Latin Quarter, and drink in the music until sunrise. We will sit on the grass of the Square du Vert-Galant on beautiful spring afternoons and there I will look at your latest drawings, and you will read my latest stories. We will talk about your classmates, and gossip about my Sorbonne classmates, about our professors, those we admire and those we hate. Sometimes I will force you to speak to me in French to help you improve. Or we won’t talk at all; we’ll sit side by side in an intimate silence and drift in and out of lazy naps. I will take you to the theater, to the exact seat where I once whistled in the dark at a Nazi newsreel.

All these places in the city I love, Alex. I can almost feel myself already there with you, the sun warm on my face, the gentle breeze in my hair, the smells of a boulangerie surrounding us, the sound of a street musician in the background, and your presence next to me, your hand in mine. It will be so good to be warmed under the same sunlight as you, to later lie under the same moonlight.

Oh, Alex, forgive me for this. For letting my imagination get ahead of me. But it is the only way I can escape my lonely existence, and this awful small room, and my

And there the letter ends: the very moment when the French police must have barged into the room and snatched her and the Sinti family away. He stares at the blank rest of the page, the sheer shock of white, the violent, vulgar emptiness of it. A decisive snip, a string cut, Charlie vanished.

65

APRIL 1945

BAVARIA, GERMANY

Defeat hangs in the air.

It is everywhere in Germany, this sense of closure, permeating every city and town and village. In the countryside, the German army is teetering, barely putting up any resistance.

Alex is on the side of the victors, but in his heart he feels as defeated as the Germans. He is as joyless and dejected as this miserable cold spring. The barren land is as hard as ice, and instead of the fragrance of blossoming Palmkätzchen and crocuses in the air, there is the stink of rot and wet ash. Alex feels a bleakness in his bones he cannot rid himself of. He is tired all the time. He has not smiled in weeks, in months.

In late April, Alex and a second lieutenant named Clay Ohtani—who’s been in Europe so long he claims to be conversant in French, Italian, and now German—come upon a farmhouse. Smoke tendrils rise from the chimney. A German soldier is sitting outside in a lounge chair, dozing in the sun.

“We’ve got the building surrounded,” Clay announces, awakening the soldier in crude German. “Tell your mates to come out with arms raised.”

The German soldier rubs his eyes, then rises and saunters inside with all the casualness of a man going to take a long piss. A minute later, a dozen haggard German soldiers file out with arms raised. They surrender without fuss, only wanting to know how far the prison is, and does Clay have any chocolate to spare?

* * *

In late April, C Company from the 522nd Artillery Battalion peels off from the 442nd Regiment, and crosses the Danube River into Bavaria. There are rumors that they’re headed to the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s private alpine retreat in the mountains of Berchtesgaden.

“There’s one reason, and one reason alone why we’ve been ordered there,” Clay says, one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding down the mess kit bouncing in his lap. “Hitler’s up there, I’m telling you.”

“Hope so,” Chuck Yamazaki says from the front passenger seat, chewing loudly. “God, I’d love to wring his little neck.”

“Listen,” Clay says with seriousness. “If Hitler’s really up there, I’m calling dibs. I’m the one who’s gonna put a bullet in his head, understood? No one else touch him.”

Stanley Sakamoto laughs from the back seat. “Tell you what we should do. Before we slit his throat, we tie him up. Then shave off that silly moustache. Then we say, Die, Führer!” He smacks his thigh, laughing. “That’ll really put us in the history books.”

“You’re such an idiot, you know that?”

Clay turns to Alex in the back seat. “What about you? Any ideas how we should do in Hitler?”

Alex taps the map spread out on his lap. “Let’s just focus on the assignment. Reconnoiter the area for possible howitzer targets.”

“Always the killjoy, Maki, I swear.” He opens his mess kit, stuffs a piece of bread into his mouth, chews loudly. “And whatever the hell does ‘reconnoiter’ mean?”

Over the next hour, they drive quickly through the German countryside. Snow covers the fields even this late in April beneath a drab, overhanging gray sky.

Clay says, “What’s that?”

“What?”

“Over there.” He points at a mound of snow by the road.

“Probably just a dead horse under there.”

Less than a minute later, Clay points again. “Look. Another one.” He slows the jeep.

“Don’t stop,” Stanley says. “Just keep going.”

But at the next mound, Clay

slows to a stop. This mound the largest of the three. The four soldiers disembark the jeep, approach the mound carefully.

“What do you think? Two horses?”

Clay pokes the mound with the butt of his rifle. Chunks of snow fall away.

A human face stares out.

“Oh!” he flinches, jumping back.

Cautiously, they brush off the top layer of snow. Beneath it, bodies clothed in striped outfits. Others are naked, their clothes ripped off, their arms and legs entangled like broken-off bare tree branches.

“Let’s go.”

“God, there must be a dozen bodies in here.”

“Let’s go.”

They hop on the jeep, drive away.

But they come across more mounds, with growing frequency. Some are large, others small, the size of a single person. Or a child, perhaps. A dog, they tell themselves. Just a dog.

“What the hell happened here?” Clay turns to Alex. “Where are we exactly?”

Alex bends over the map. “Near this town called Hurlach.”

“Hurlach. Never heard of it.”

“It’s just south of a place called ‘Da-chow.’”

Clay shakes his head. “Never heard of ‘Da-chow,’ either.”

Ten minutes later. “What’s that over there?” Alex says.

Clay slows the jeep.

None of the men says anything. It’s a camp. Enclosed by barbed-wire fences, and filled with rows of black barracks. Something is just wrong about this camp. They all feel it instantly.

“It’s off our route,” Clay says. “What do we do?”

“Drive to it,” Alex says.

“Germans, though.”

Alex peers through his binoculars. “I don’t see any. The camp looks unguarded.”

They drive slowly to the gate. Stanley radios in to headquarters for instructions. A dead horse lies in a roadside ditch.

Alex gets off.

“Hey, Maki, we should wait.”

He ignores them, walks to the gate. There are people on the other side of the fence. Standing in bare feet in the mud and snow. Staring back at him listlessly. He looks past them deeper into the campgrounds. More people standing or lying in the snow. Everything so still, like a black-and-white photograph.