This Light Between Us: A Novel of World War II

Alex is in no mood to play. Or talk. He reaches into his jacket pocket, takes out the drawing.

Charlie Lévy stares up at him. The edges of the page are tattered, the penciling faded. A large water stain has claimed the bottom half. But her eyes seem as alive as the first day he drew her. He stares for many minutes, until his eyes grow heavy.

A warm sensation suddenly presses the base of his spine. His eyes fly open.

This sensation. He’s felt it before, back in Manzanar. While watching The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Then later, in Rose Park.

It can’t be. He waits. Nothing. He was just being foolish, he should just close his eyes—

Again. But even warmer now.

He throws off his blanket, stands up. Folds up the sketch, puts it into his pocket.

The three soldiers, snapping cards, turn to him. “Eat something bad?” Laughing.

He ignores them, leaps off the back of the truck. Stops after a few steps, turns back to the soldiers. “Give me the key.”

“Key?”

“For the motorbike. Now.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so. Besides, it’s out of gas. You know that, that’s why I’m stuck here—”

“Shut up, give it to me,” Alex says. “Direct order.”

The soldier snorts. “We’re the same rank.”

“Give it to me.”

He stands up. “Come and get it, asshole.”

Two minutes later, Alex is tearing down the road on the bike, the icy wind slicing into his newly bruised and bleeding face. He hardly feels the pain, though. The only thing he feels is the hot sensation clamping on his rib cage like a vise. He doesn’t understand what’s going on, not really, but all he can think is—

She’s alive. She’s alive. Charlie’s alive and she’s nearby.

He pulls back on the throttle, ignoring the gas needle on E, willing the motorbike to travel another mile, and another, faster, faster. He sees a small cottage just off the road. Smoke curls out of a chimney, thick and black, even against the night sky. He thinks briefly about stopping to siphon gas—

The sensation surges. Urgent. Hotter. He’s getting closer.

But then a minute later, the bike, already running on fumes, coughs, sputters.

He lets it coast to a stop. He gets off, not bothering with the kickstand, simply lets the bike fall to its side. The headlight fades out, plunging Alex into darkness.

He spins around, searching. Nothing moves in the snow-covered fields.

“Charlie!”

The cold landscape stares indifferently back.

This is the moment. He feels it in his bones. The moment his heart has ached for, only he hasn’t realized how much until now. This is the hope that carried him through the hell of Bruyères and Biffontaine and the Vosges Forest.

“Charlie!” he shouts, louder now. He spins, certain he will see her standing. In the moonlight, a sparkle in her eyes. You came, he can almost hear her, you found me, Alex.

But the road is empty. Nothing moves.

He stays where he is for two minutes. Five.

A silence pervades the land. No sound of traffic or insects or birds, just a hush, like the universe is holding its breath. Or has stopped breathing altogether.

Overhead, clouds slowly tear apart. Sickly moonlight filters through, creeps forward on the land. Past the road, into the woods. He sees other things now. Along the road, the mounds of snow. He shudders. This whole time, he’s been standing so close to dead bodies.

He walks to the other side of the road. And that’s when he sees the person.

It is by a tree at the edge of the forest, sitting slumped against the trunk, its shape in the shadows vague and lackluster.

“Charlie?”

He takes a cautious step toward it, then another, faster, his boots crunching on the packed snow.

He stops. His breath frosting out before him, curling like a question mark.

It is a young boy. In a fetal position, arms clasped around bent legs, dressed in striped pajamas. Eyes half-open, blue lips parted. A face ravaged by hunger, by sorrow, his sunken cheeks evidence of a drawn-out, unspeakable suffering. Only nine, maybe ten years old. The age when Alex first started to draw. When he first started to write to Charlie.

The boy is dead. Of course. A Jewish boy in a German countryside in the middle of a winter night during wartime must be dead. Still, Alex reaches forward, touches the boy’s face.

Cold and hard and lifeless as flint.

Expected. Yet Alex jerks his hand back, still he gasps.

It is the youth of this boy. Death incongruent with it. The suffering etched into the innocence.

He thinks: I cannot leave him like this. He deserves a proper burial.

But the ground, even at the edge of the forest, is icy and hard. Alex does what he can. He uses the butt of his carbine to loosen the earth. He gets on his knees and uses his helmet to dig. The grating sound of metal against rock, a gritty, ugly sound that seems to travel for miles. His arms, numb with exhaustion and cold, become cement blocks of fatigue. His fingers shred to bloody ribbons.

After fifteen minutes, he has done little but scrape the ice-hardened topsoil.

He needs a shovel. A pickaxe. Three other soldiers. He needs a heart, a will, a resolve. But he has none of these.

He stands up, exhausted. He stares at the open eyes, the parted lips, the expression of despair frozen in time. He takes off his jacket and gently lays it over the boy. Never mind that the boy is dead and this jacket won’t make a damn difference. Somehow it matters.

Alex turns, starts walking away. The wind already cutting through his thin shirt. A few strides later, he stops. He’s forgotten to remove something from the jacket. His sketch of Charlie.

He pauses. For a long moment, he does not move. He does not breathe. Then he takes a step, and another. Not toward the boy, but back to the camp. His jacket untouched, the sketch left behind. Ice crunches and snaps under his boots. The wind is brutal, a butcher’s knife clawing all the way to his skeleton. But even with this wind and dropping temperature, he does not get any colder. What is already frozen cannot get colder.

67

* * *

September 5, 1945

Dear Frank,

I’m coming home. Just got my papers. Will leave France and be back on Bainbridge Island in only a few weeks. Can’t believe it. Doesn’t feel real.

I have a one-week leave before my departure. My first real leave

where I get to go anywhere I want. So I’ve decided to head up to Paris. Not to see Charlie. I think she … I think she passed, judging from all I’ve read and heard. Don’t really want to talk about it.

But I’m still going to Paris. To fulfill a promise I made to her a long time ago.

Alex

68

SEPTEMBER 12, 1945

RUE DE BUENOS-AIRES, PARIS, FRANCE

No. 4 rue de Buenos-Aires, 7th arrondissement. How often he has scrawled that address down on the front of stamped envelopes, hundreds of times before the war. So strange to be standing here finally. To see that white 4, painted so nonchalantly in a square block of blue like an afterthought.

Over the years, Charlie had described her apartment building in bits and pieces, leaving it to Alex to fill in the gaps. Standing before the building now, Alex marvels at how close reality matches his imagination. The elegant façades, the intricate cut stonework of carved-head statues and clusters of grapes, the curled balconies around the curved corners of the building. The only aspect of this upscale neighborhood Charlie never really described is its affluence. Its wealth is evident in its wide, tree-lined streets, its proximity to the Eiffel Tower, the Seine River, the Champ de Mars, the attire of its residents sitting outdoors in ritzy cafés.

He walks over to the door marked CONCIERGE by the main entrance. From what Charlie wrote before, the concierge manages the general affairs of the apartment building: cleans the stairways, delivers the mail, possesses keys to the apartments, takes note of the comings and goings of the residents. She’s the one he needs to see.

But there is no answer. So he pushes open the metal-grilled main entrance and walks into the lobby. It is dark inside, and empty. He waits for the elevator, his heart beginning to thump faster. When it arrives an elderly woman with a cane steps out. The concierge? No, she is too old, far too well dressed. She barely glances at Alex as she passes.