The Language Between Us
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 1
The road south had been full of soldiers for three days, and Anna Hoffman had learned to tell the sound of a retreating column from the sound of one still willing to fight. Retreat moved like water finding the lowest ground, quiet and constant, wheels and boots and the occasional cough of an engine giving out. What she heard now, coming up behind her from the trees, was neither. It was deliberate. It was looking for something.
She pulled Heidi tighter against her hip and left the road.
The forest floor gave way under her shoes, soft with two years of fallen needles, and she kept to the tree line where the light broke into pieces and made her harder to see. Heidi had gone quiet an hour ago, the fixed stillness of a child too tired to complain, her small fist closed around a fold of Anna’s collar. The pack on Anna’s other shoulder held what remained of their life: two changes of clothes, a tin cup, the photograph of Rolf that she no longer let herself look at more than once a day, and a heel of bread she was rationing in pieces the size of her thumbnail.
She had been walking toward the Americans for four days. It had seemed, when she left the house in Cham with Heidi wrapped in a blanket and nothing else, like the only sane direction left. The Russians were coming from the east, and everyone who had lived through the last winter of the war had heard enough, from enough people who would have no reason to lie, to know what direction not to run. The Americans took prisoners. The Americans, whatever else might be said of them, mostly did not shoot women carrying children.
Mostly.
The uniform was the problem, and she knew it, had known it since she put it on that last morning at the signals office and told herself it no longer mattered what she wore, because the war was already lost and nothing that happened to her now would matter to history. She had been wrong about that. It mattered to whoever stopped her on this road. It would mark her before she said a single word, before anyone asked what she had actually done for two years behind a headset in a requisitioned schoolhouse, translating intercepted English radio traffic into German for officers who no longer had anywhere to send the reports.
She heard the trucks before she saw them, engines downshifting on the grade, and then voices — American voices, unhurried, the flat weariness of men who had done this before and were tired of doing it. She stopped where she was, in a stand of birch too thin to hide behind, and understood that stopping had already decided the matter. Heidi lifted her head off Anna’s shoulder and looked toward the sound with the frank curiosity of a two-year-old who did not yet know that some sounds were worth fearing.
“Sei still, Liebling,” Anna murmured. Be still. Not a command Heidi would obey for long, but the last quiet moment felt worth asking for.
A man came through the trees first, rifle low but not lowered all the way, and stopped when he saw her. He was young — they were all young, she had noticed, these Americans, boys with the sunburn of a foreign spring on the backs of their necks — and his eyes went from her face to the gray wool of her collar to the child on her hip and back to her face, working through some private arithmetic she could not follow.
“Hände hoch,” he said, the German coming out of him stiff and rehearsed, the accent thick enough that she understood him more from the gesture of his rifle than from the words.
She could not raise her hands and hold Heidi at the same time, and for a moment neither of them moved, caught on that small, absurd problem. Then a second man arrived, older, a sergeant by the stripes on his sleeve, and took in the scene — the uniform, the child, the woman’s hands still half-lifted and shaking with the effort of trying to obey an order that made no physical sense — and said something short to the first soldier that made him lower the rifle another few inches.
“It’s all right,” the sergeant said, in English, and then, more carefully, in German that was better than the private’s but still a soldier’s German, learned from a phrasebook and a few months of practice, not from any classroom. “You don’t have to hold your hands up. Just — stay where you are.”
“I am not armed,” Anna said, and heard her own voice come out steadier than she felt, the English arriving easily because English had been her work for two years and fear had not yet found a way to take that from her. “I have only my daughter and our clothing.”
The sergeant’s eyebrows went up a fraction at the English, and something in his posture eased, the way a man’s shoulders come down when a problem turns out to be simpler than he expected. “You speak English.”
“I was a translator,” Anna said. “Signals auxiliary. I am not — “ She stopped herself before she said the word soldier, because the wool on her shoulders said that plainly enough and there was no use arguing with cloth. “I did not fight. I read radio traffic and wrote it down in German for the officers.”
“That’s for someone else to sort out,” the sergeant said, not unkindly, but with the flat finality of a man reciting a line he had said many times before to many women in many uniforms. “You’ll need to come with us.”
Heidi, who had been watching the exchange with the grave attention small children give to adult voices they cannot understand, chose that moment to reach a hand toward the private’s canteen, hanging from his belt within her reach, and say, with perfect clarity, “Wasser.”
It broke something in the moment — the private laughed, short and startled, and even the sergeant’s mouth moved at one corner before he caught it and put his face back in order. He unhooked the canteen and held it out, not to Heidi, who was too small to manage it, but to Anna, who took it with a nod that cost her more than she wanted it to.
“Thank you,” she said, and gave Heidi a mouthful, and watched the child’s throat work at it, and thought, not for the first time in four days, that she would have walked through worse than a rifle to keep that small sound of swallowing going.
They put her in the back of a truck with three other women, none of whom she knew, all of whom had the same gray, hollowed-out look of people who had spent the war’s last weeks moving instead of sleeping. One of them, older, with a farmwife’s hands, made room on the bench without being asked and helped steady Heidi when the truck lurched onto the road. Nobody spoke much. There did not seem to be anything left to say that four days of walking had not already said.
The interrogation, when it came, took most of an afternoon and happened in a requisitioned house that still had someone else’s curtains in the windows and someone else’s dishes drying by the sink, as if the family that lived there had simply stepped out and would be back any moment to find their home full of American officers and their belongings. A captain with tired eyes and a translator of his own — a German-American corporal from Milwaukee whose grandparents’ language sat oddly formal in his mouth — asked her the same handful of questions in different arrangements, over and over, testing for cracks in a story that had no cracks because it was simply true.
Where had she served. What had her duties been. Had she ever visited a camp, any camp, for any reason. Had she ever handled prisoners, questioned prisoners, guarded prisoners. Did she know the names of any officers who had.
She answered all of it in English, which seemed to surprise the captain less the longer the interview went on, and somewhere in the second hour she understood that they were not accusing her of any one thing so much as ruling things out, working down a list until nothing was left on it but the truth: a twenty-four-year-old widow who had spent the war copying English words into German ones, in a room with no windows, three floors below the street.
Heidi slept through most of it, worn out past caring, curled on Anna’s lap with her thumb in her mouth, and Anna kept one hand resting on the child’s back the entire time, less for Heidi’s comfort than her own, a fixed point to hold to while the questions went around and around.
“You’re not being held on suspicion of anything beyond your status as an enemy national,” the captain said finally, in the flat, procedural voice of a man closing a file. “Your service record, as far as we can establish it today, is clerical. You’ll be processed and transferred to a civilian internment facility. Women and children only. You understand this is not a punishment. It’s procedure.”
“I understand,” Anna said, because there was nothing else useful to say, and because four days of walking toward exactly this outcome had at least prepared her for the shape of it, even if nothing had prepared her for how small she would feel sitting in a stranger’s kitchen chair while a man decided, on paper, what she was.
The camp sat in a valley that had probably been pretty once, before the war took the color out of everything, a cluster of low buildings behind a wire fence that looked more like it was meant to keep track of people than to keep them from leaving. Anna watched it come up through the slats of the truck bed — a converted school, she guessed, from the shape of the main building, with a yard where laundry lines had been strung between what must once have been goalposts.
The truck stopped inside the gate with a jolt that woke Heidi fully, and the tailgate came down, and the other women began climbing out ahead of her, stiff-legged, reaching up to help each other down the way people help each other when they have stopped expecting anyone else to do it for them.
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