This Light Between Us

by Andrew Fukuda

  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.

  “Will they separate us?” Mother asks.

  “No,” Frank says, taking her arm.

  “But this place is so big. Maybe men and women will be housed separately. Maybe they will take you boys from me.”

  Frank’s voice grows resolute. “I won’t let them, Mother. Now stop speaking in Japanese.”

  The soldiers continue to yell. Keep moving, don’t dawdle. You can collect your luggage from your designated location later. Proceed to the registration tables.

  It’s the wind you notice first. Then the dust. It comes sweeping across the open plains, a gathering force that catches you unawares. Too late, you shut your eyelids, turn your back to it. But it’s already there, the thousand prickly grains under your eyelids, grating against the wet of your eyeballs; too late you close your mouth but the dust is already coating your tongue, dotting the wet roof of your mouth, slipping in between your teeth. Already it has sieved through the tiny sleeve openings of jackets and necklines of sweaters until you feel it crawling all over your body.

  Dust, sand, everywhere. For the rest of your life you will never feel rid of it. You will slap at your clothes unconsciously, you will be forever flapping out towels and hats and scarfs. When you cough, even fifty years later, you will think you can still feel a few grains of dust rattling around in your lungs, refusing to be dislodged.

  Alex glances around. Past the cordon of soldiers, past the flood of internees moving toward the registration tables. He stares at the square mile of what will eventually become thirty-six blocks of tar-paper barracks. Enough to house over ten thousand men, women, and children. But for now, the Bainbridge Islanders are the first group to arrive at this still-unfinished compound. The Issei grandparents are pioneers yet again, but this time unwillingly, in a harsh land they want no part of.

  “Name.” The soldier sitting before the opened registration book doesn’t even glance up.

  “Maki.”

  “Spell it.”

  “M-A-K-I.” Frank looks down at the book. “No. I said I not Y. And there’s no E.”

  “God, these Jap names. Spell it again.”

  “M-A-K-I.”

  They are handed a piece of paper, told where to go. Block 16 Barrack 4 Room F.

  “Where is it?” Mother asks.

  The soldier impatiently thrusts a thumb backward. An action that could mean That way or Get lost.

  Frank and Alex, with Mother between them, join others trudging along the road. Everyone walks in a state of shock. The road is lined with soldiers, their bayonets pointing inward. The soldiers yell continuously at them, urging them to move faster, and the new arrivals stumble along, hurrying.

  “Why are you rushing us?” Frank yells back at the soldiers. “We’re in the middle of nowhere! With nothing to do and nowhere to go. So what’s the damned hurry?”

  Mother, waddling beside him, tries to calm him. But when the next set of soldiers yell the same instructions, Frank explodes. “Go to hell! Just shoot me, why don’t you!” His neck is flushed, his face beet red. The soldiers leer back at him, some laughing, some gripping their weapons. An acne-riddled soldier tells him to be quiet. “Or what?” Frank snaps back. “Or what? You gonna throw me in prison? Look around, you lugheads, I’m already in prison!”

  “Frank,” Alex says. “Frank!”

  Frank doesn’t answer. He moves along, face hard as flint.

  * * *

  The camp isn’t finished yet. They walk across planks of wood over open trenches and ditches to get to their barrack. It sits on concrete footings, the flooring raised about two feet off the ground. Crudely constructed, the rough pine paneling sided with tar paper left exposed. A shack, by any other description, identical to the hundreds of other barracks laid out in regimented formation.

  Never judge a book by its cover. This is what they tell themselves.

  But once inside, their worst fears are confirmed. The book is worse than the cover. The walls are just wood sheeting, splintery and thin. No paint or insulation or plaster covers them. The floor is composed of wood planks with large knotholes slapped together. No linoleum covering.

  Placed around the room are seven army cots, metal skeletons. None with a mattress or a pillow. An oil furnace in the corner, standing cold as a tombstone. No desk, no chair, no running water, no toilet. Only a single bulb, unlit, hangs from a cord dangling from an overhead beam. Beneath it, coarse army blankets are thrown in a pile. Frank walks to the far side. The wall—no more than a thin partition—doesn’t reach the peaked roof, leaving a three-foot triangular space.

  “What the hell?” Frank says.

  “At least we’re together,” Mother says. She gazes at the seven cots. “You think they’ll make us share the room with others?”

  “Probably,” Frank says, dejected. “I say we take this corner.”

  A few minutes later, another family moves into the barrack. Not into this room, but the adjacent one. Their voices sail over the thin wall, through the three-foot space between the top of the wall and the peaked roof, their words as clear as if there were no partition at all. Privacy will be nonexistent here.

  They speak of rumors about a mattress pickup location. At another block. But when Frank and Alex get there they’re only handed three sacks and told to go to another building. There, a crowd is already knee-deep in a huge pile of straw and ticking, stuffing their sacks.

  Alex and Frank jump right in. They ignore the jabs of pain as splinters pierce their skin. But there’s no need to rush or jostle for position. There’s an ocean of ticking, enough for the ten thousand or more internees expected to eventually fill this compound in the coming months.

  Frank stops. “Listen. What’s that?”

  They all hear it, then. Gong. Gong. Gong.

  “What should we do?” an older man asks Frank.

  Frank sees everyone looking at him. “We go to it.” He steps forward and starts walking, never once turning around to see the crowd following after him.

  The gongs ring out from a mess hall. Outside, a line has already formed. Everyone hugs the lee side of the mess hall, still only partially built, faces turned away from the wind.

  Dinner is slopped into metal containers. Canned, cold food: string beans, Vienna sausage, apricots. The rice—perhaps the only food many Issei might have otherwise eaten—
is ruined by the apricot syrup poured over it. The internees, with nowhere to sit, squat against the walls. They stare glumly at the food, trying to conjure up the will to eat. A gust of wind materializes out of nowhere, catching everyone by surprise. Sand and dust coat their food. Some still gamely try to eat, their stomachs rumbling with hunger, only to have to spit it out.

  Back in their barracks, there is nothing to do but sit. The single light bulb does not work. Nobody unpacks: it is too dark to see. They lie down in the same clothes they have worn for three days. Every few minutes, light from the watchtower slashes through the room, a cold invasive stark white. A scalpel.

  Alex, like everyone else, finds sleep elusive. He is freezing. He is shaking. He should be safe and snug in his own bed on Bainbridge Island, an all-American sixteen-year-old living life to the hilt. Going out on dates. Hanging out in soda shops. Mastering the Lindy hop, or dancing in a zoot suit with a bobby-soxer. Doing homework, falling asleep in church pews. Discovering first love, learning to kiss, driving jalopies in the backcountry. Thinking about prom, Yale School of Art. But instead he’s lying on a cot in the middle of the desert surrounded by strangers.

  The wind howls outside, whistles through gaps in the floor and walls.

  He turns to the wall, mashes his face against the unsanded plank of pine. From the other side, another gust of wind thumps against the barrack.

  Around him, the stifled crying begins.

  19

  APRIL 2, 1942

  They wake up early to find themselves blanketed in dust. Dust that during the night gusted in through knotholes and slats. Now it covers their hair, faces, floor. Most of the internees rise gamely, ready to face the day; a few sob on their cots, unable to rise, covered in dust like prophets of old in sackcloth, repenting in dust and ashes.