Chapter 10

The village outside Regensburg proved smaller than Anna had imagined it, a scatter of farmhouses and a single church spire visible from the rail platform, and she stood a moment on the empty station road with Heidi’s hand in hers, gathering the courage she had spent the whole of the journey trying to summon and had not, in the end, entirely managed to find.

The walk from the station took the better part of twenty minutes, past fields still bare with winter and a few farmhouses showing the same patched, improvised repairs Anna had grown used to seeing everywhere in the year since the surrender — a roof mended with mismatched tile, a window boarded where glass had once been, the small, visible evidence of a country still putting itself back together one household at a time. Heidi walked as far as her legs allowed before demanding to be carried, and Anna settled her on one hip for the last stretch, feeling the familiar ache in her shoulder that four days in a forest had first taught her to carry without complaint.

Ilse’s house sat at the village’s edge, a low, timbered building with a garden gone to winter bareness and smoke rising thin from its chimney, and the woman who opened the door at Anna’s knock looked both exactly as Anna remembered and entirely unfamiliar — older by more than the eighteen months that had actually passed, her hair gone fully gray where Anna remembered it only silvering, her frame thinner in a way that spoke of the same hunger the whole of Germany had lived through, though her eyes, when they found Heidi, sharpened with a recognition that had nothing to do with hunger at all.

“There she is,” Ilse said, and her voice broke on the words in a way that undid, in an instant, whatever careful composure either woman had planned to bring to this meeting. “There is my Rolf’s girl.”

She crouched, with some difficulty, to bring herself level with Heidi, who regarded her grandmother with the same grave, assessing stare she gave every new adult, and after a moment reached out one small hand to touch the older woman’s cheek, an unprompted, uncomplicated gesture that made Ilse’s eyes fill entirely.

“She has his eyes,” Ilse said, straightening with Anna’s help. “I would know them anywhere. Come in, both of you, out of the cold. I’ve kept the stove going since your letter came.”

The house inside was spare but warm, a single main room doing service as kitchen and sitting room both, with a narrow staircase leading to whatever slept above, and Ilse settled them at the table with the fussing, overattentive hospitality of a woman who had clearly spent the days since Anna’s letter preparing for this visit far beyond what her modest larder could easily afford — a loaf of bread still warm from the oven, a jar of preserves that had likely been saved for some greater occasion than this one, weak tea served in her best cups, chipped but carefully kept.

They spoke first of ordinary things, the safe, easy currency of two women feeling out the shape of a reunion neither had rehearsed enough — Heidi’s age, her words, the garden Ilse still tended alone since her own husband’s death years before the war had ever begun, the long and difficult road that had brought Anna and Heidi first to the camp and then to Erding. Ilse listened to the account of the forest, the arrest, the months of internment, with a stillness that Anna could not entirely read, some mixture of grief and fascination and something else beneath both that she did not yet have a name for.

“You survived it well,” Ilse said, when Anna’s account had run its course. “Better than I managed, some days, and I never left this house.”

“I do not know that I survived it well so much as survived it at all,” Anna said. “There were months I managed only because there was a child depending on me managing. I do not know what I would have done, left only to myself.”