This Light Between Us: A Novel of World War II

Inside, he presses the top button (so strange to think that Charlie’s fingers have pressed this very button many times before). The elevator heaves upward with a groan. Charlie has been in here thousands of times. Are there molecules of her breath still lingering? He closes his eyes, inhales deeply.

The elevator doors open.

There are only two apartments on this floor, each on either end of the long hallway. He walks to the nearer door. The family nameplate has been scrubbed off and in its place a brass covering with German words.

He presses the doorbell. He is expecting a chime. Instead an ungainly buzzing sound comes from inside. No response. He presses the doorbell again, holding it down. No one comes.

He is about to turn away when he notices something. Tucked in the upper right corner, discreet, is a small mezuzah. Exactly how Charlie described it in her letters.

He feels his heart beat faster. With a trembling finger he presses the doorbell again. Then he starts pounding on the door, heavy thumps over and over. Approaching footsteps.

He cannot breathe. Charlie? Charlie?

The door swings open.

A large rotund woman with a broom in one hand and a garbage bag in the other scowls at him. “Qui êtes-vous?” she demands. “Que voulez-vous, monsieur?” Her breath hot and full of garlic.

He doesn’t understand. The words are coming too quickly. He tries to look over her shoulder into the apartment, but she steps forward, not afraid to use her ample bosom to push him backward.

He retreats two steps. He’s drawing a blank, can barely recall even a single French word. “Madame Lévy? Are you … êtes-vous Madame Lévy?”

“Non. Je suis la concierge.” The woman blinks at him. As if for the first time taking in his American military uniform, his Asian face. Her eyes suddenly widen with realization. “Monsieur Maki?” she stammers. “Êtes-vous Monsieur Alex Maki?”

* * *

She brings him into the apartment. It is stuffy inside, even with many windows opened. Furniture has been pushed off to the side, bookshelves emptied, the walls stripped bare of any paintings. All the smaller household items—plants, vases, lamps, anything remotely decorative—are missing. Perhaps stored away. Or stolen.

The apartment does not look lived in. Not for at least a few months.

He looks around for evidence of Charlie. A woman’s jacket or scarf draped over the sofa, her favorite books, a well-thumbed copy of Jane Eyre lying around. But there is nothing.

The concierge is trying to explain something to him. Rapidly in French, something about coming up here to air out the place once a week, and clean it up a little—

He ignores her, looks around. On a bureau against the wall he sees a small photo frame, lying facedown and apparently forgotten. He walks over, picks it up. He is momentarily confused. It is not the portrait of Charlie’s family he was expecting, but a photo showing a family of four sitting before a church, the two boys grinning. In the background, street awnings hang with German words.

He turns the frame over. Undoes the small metal latches on the back. When he pulls away the backing, he finds another photograph tucked behind the displayed one. This portrait is of a dignified-looking man with his wife. Both in their forties, perhaps. And standing between them, their teenage daughter.

Charlie.

He gasps.

His first time seeing her. And she is as he imagined her. She is the Charlie of his visions. The trinity of moles at the corner of her eyes. Except here she is radiant with life, her hair long, her eyes burning with a ferocity undimmed even in this black-and-white photograph. A small smile threatening to leak out of her lips. A sparkling, healthier Charlie than the one in his visions. But the same one.

He doesn’t understand how this can be. He doesn’t understand anything anymore. He flips the photo over. On the back, cursive handwriting he recognizes as Charlie’s: L’amour d’une famille est quelque chose de merveilleux. He turns to the concierge. “La famille Lévy. Où sont-ils?”

She sets down the bag of trash, the broom. When she speaks it is with simple words, with gesturing hands. Even then Alex understands perhaps only a quarter of what she says. But it is enough. It is too much. The concierge does not know the whereabouts of Monsieur and Madame Lévy. She has heard little since that night of the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, she tells him. They simply vanished into thin air. She says that this apartment was afterward requisitioned by the Germans. High-ranking soldiers lived in this apartment, drank in here, slept in here, spoke their filthy German in here.

Alex stares at the concierge. She has spoken only of the parents. “Et Charlie Lévy. Savez-vous où elle est?”

She shakes her head. Lowers her eyes. “Je ne sais pas.” She is lying. She knows something. He can see it in her tightened grip on her meaty forearm. The white imprints it leaves there.

I have been looking for her for a long time, he wants to tell her but can’t. I have thought about her every day during this war. In the Vosges Forest. In every slit trench at night, shaking with cold. In the French Alps staring at snowcapped mountains. I have worried over her. I have ached for her. I have been looking for her for a very long time and now you are my last hope.

But he does not know how to say this. “S’il vous plaît,” he simply whispers, his voice the rasp of sandpaper. “S’il vous plaît.”

She hesitates; her eyes avert down to the floor.

“Je suis désolée,” she finally says. She looks up at him and her eyes are big and soft. She has heard things from the other tenants in this building, she tells him. And from the other concierges in the neighborhood. Rumors about Charlie—no, more than just rumors, these were eyewitness accounts that Charlie … Her words drift away. She will not look at him.

He feels himself pitching forward, the floor canting left and right. He grips the top of a dining chair. “She did not survive?” he says. “Charlie didn’t make it?”

The concierge frowns, not understanding. So he has to ask it in French, and these three simple words are like razors on his tongue. “Est-elle morte?”

The concierge pauses; she laces her fingers across her apron. And then she nods. Just once. The shortest, and most decisive and most obscene motion humanly possible.

He pulls back the dining chair, sits down. On the table are large scrolls of paper, some tubed, some simply rubber-banded. Maps and diagrams, all written in German. His heart turning to chalk, crumbling.

“Vous êtiez de si bons amis,” she says quietly as if to comfort him. “Chaque fois que je lui donnais une de vos lettres, elle rayonnait de bonheur.”

He isn’t really listening. It’s all noise to him now. Nothing matters anymore.

She falls silent. Outside, the faint hum of Paris traffic.

He gets up to leave. His legs unsteady, his face numb. There is nothing more to see or say or do. He starts walking to the door. Then stops, remembering the reason why he came. Promise me, Alex, Charlie had written, that you will one day come and visit my room. I have much to show you there.

He turns to the concierge. “Puis-je voir la chambre de Charlie, s’il vous plaît,” he says. “Où est-elle?”

“Sa chambre?”

“Oui.”

She leads him down the hallway. Outside the closed door she tells him Charlie’s room has been unused for years now. Paris suffered three harsh winters, colder than any in recent memory; and with coal shortages, it was difficult to keep large, airy apartments warm. So the German soldiers did what most wealthy Parisians did in these apartments: they permanently closed off entire rooms, never opening them. Including Charlie’s.

The door is unlocked, she tells him, walking away.

* * *

It takes him a minute to finally put his hand on the knob. He turns it, pushes open the door.

It swings open with a loud screech, the hinges creaky with winters-long hibernation. He steps into the room. Charlie’s room.

It is dark inside, and musty. He sees very little apart from

the rims of light from drawn curtains across the room. He treads carefully over to the window, slowly getting used to the darkness. His fingers touch the thick heavy cloth of the curtains, and he flings them wide open.

A rush of light, blinding, floods his eyes. He blinks. Outside her window, Paris in all her glory. The Eiffel Tower looming over him, the gardens spread below. Charlie had spoken of this view often in her letters, but he never imagined the tower to be this close. He brushes away a spider’s web wrapped around the window handle. The window opens with a rusty protest. A flue of fresh air whistles in, the first air in years.