This Light Between Us: Part Four–Epilogue

Took only two markers, then three salvoes. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

Instead all I did was protest here. Which was the right thing to do, I guess, but many nights I lie awake wondering what waving placards and screaming into the wind really achieved.

He envisioned a provincial little beach town. But instead it’s a bustling city: alive, vibrant, with a mind of its own.

There he walks on a wide promenade alongside a rocky beach.

A dilapidated pier extends out from the promenade, and he sees, at the end the Palais de la Jetée, a massive building modeled after London’s Crystal Palace.

It’s been razed down to a husk, its metal stripped by the Nazis for building warplanes.

Even the kitchen is tidy, not a utensil out of place. Only a bookshelf set off against the far wall is in disarray, stuffed with books every which way.

The brashness of youth in both men’s eyes, their arms draped comfortably around each other.

Stares at that moment captured in time: his arm around Charlie’s father, invincible in their youth.

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.

Defeat hangs in the air. It is everywhere in Germany, this sense of closure, permeating every city and town and village.

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 minute later, a dozen haggard German soldiers file out with arms raised.

“Let’s just focus on the assignment. Reconnoiter the area for possible howitzer targets.”

There are people on the other side of the fence. Standing in bare feet in the mud and snow. Staring back at him listlessly.

More inmates stumble out of barracks, triangular structures that resemble thatched roofs.

The crowd still milling about, gawking at them.

The only thing he feels is the hot sensation clamping on his rib cage like a vise.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

He presses the doorbell. He is expecting a chime. Instead an ungainly buzzing sound comes from inside.

She says that this apartment was afterward requisitioned by the Germans.

He stares down at the uneven wood, the knots and whorls like the scutes of a shell.

The cold sand turns wet and squelchy under his feet, makes sucking sounds.