Chapter 11

He came the following weekend, sooner than his usual leave allowed, on the strength of a note Anna had sent ahead of her — nothing more than I have seen Ilse. I need to tell you of it in person — and she understood, watching him come off the train with none of his usual unhurried ease, that the brevity of the note had worried him more than she’d intended it to.

“You’re well?” he asked, before he’d even properly greeted her, his eyes moving over her face with the quick, assessing concern of a man braced for bad news. “Heidi’s well? The visit didn’t go badly?”

“We are both well,” Anna said, and found, seeing his worry, that she wanted to set it down as quickly as she could manage. “The visit did not go badly, Larry. It went better than I had any right to hope for. I only wanted to tell you of it properly, and a letter did not seem sufficient to the size of it.”

Something in his shoulders eased, though the careful attention in his eyes did not fully leave him, and he took her hand as they walked from the platform, Heidi trotting ahead of them toward Frau Brandt’s waiting arms, already chattering about the train in a mixture of German and English that had, over the winter, become entirely her own private language.

Frau Brandt, watching the two of them approach from the garden gate, took one look at Anna’s face and seemed to read something there that satisfied whatever question she’d been carrying since Anna’s return from Regensburg the week before. “Go on, the both of you,” she said, scooping Heidi up onto her own hip with the practiced ease of a woman who had, by now, more than earned the title of grandmother even without the blood claim to it. “I’ll see to her supper. You’ve clearly got a great deal to say to each other, and none of it wants a two-year-old’s commentary interrupting it every third sentence.”

Supper that evening was quieter than usual, Larry watching Anna with the careful, waiting patience of a man who understood that whatever she meant to tell him would come in its own time and not before, and it was not until the meal had been cleared and Heidi tucked into bed with the wooden horse still clutched against her chest that Anna finally reached for her coat and asked him to walk with her.

They walked out to the garden that evening after supper, the same low stone wall where he had first kissed her in October, though the season had turned enough since then that they stood bundled against a cold that made their breath show in the lamplight spilling from the kitchen window.

“Tell me,” Larry said, simply, and Anna found that she had rehearsed this moment more than once on the long train ride back from Regensburg and still did not know, now that it had arrived, quite where to begin.

“She wept, when I told her of you,” Anna said. “I want you to know that first, because I do not want you thinking the tears were unhappy ones, though I confess I feared they might be, in the moment before she spoke. She wept because she had been carrying something for a year that no one else had been able to help her set down, and I found, without entirely planning it, that I was able to hand it to her — because you had first handed it to me.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her of the two guilts,” Anna said. “The one that belongs to this country, truly and rightly, for what was done in the camps — the guilt the newsreels and the trials are only beginning to make Germany answer for, and will go on making us answer for long after either of us is gone from this earth. And I told her of the second guilt, the one I had been carrying without knowing its proper name until you helped me see it clearly — the guilt of loving a man who wore that uniform, as though loving him made me complicit in what other men, far above him, chose to build with the power that uniform represented.” She turned to face him fully, her breath clouding between them in the cold. “I told her what you told me. That Rolf did not build the camps. That he did not choose the government he served, any more than either of us chose the wars we were born into. That he died in the snow outside a city he probably could not have found on a map before the Army sent him there, trying only to survive a fight he did not start and to look after the men beside him while he did it. I told her that is not innocence, but it is not the same crime as the one this country must answer for, and that we do not honor the dead by loading them with a guilt that was never rightly theirs to carry.”