Chapter 12

The ring did not go unnoticed at the Munich office, though Anna had not meant to display it so plainly, had in fact spent her first morning back at work trying to decide whether to wear it at all, given the uncertain reception a German woman engaged to an American might expect from colleagues who had, themselves, lived through six years of learning to see Americans as the enemy before circumstance had asked them to see them as anything else. She wore it in the end because hiding it felt, to her, too near the kind of managing she had promised herself she would no longer do, and because Frau Brandt, catching her hesitating over the small velvet box that morning, had settled the matter with her usual brisk finality.

“You did not survive what you survived to spend the rest of your life pretending to be less happy than you are,” the widow said, “for the comfort of people who have no earned claim on your happiness in the first place. Wear it, and let them make of it what they will.”

Wanda noticed first, within the hour, her sharp eyes catching the light off the modest gold band before Anna had even settled at her desk, and said nothing for a long moment, only studied Anna’s face with the same flat, assessing look she brought to a suspicious document.

“An American,” Wanda said, finally, not quite a question.

“Yes.”

“Well.” Wanda returned to her own stack of papers, though something in her posture had softened by a degree Anna could not fully name. “I hope he is a decent one. I have seen the other kind come through this office, in the family-tracing files. Men who married quickly and left more quickly still, once their enlistment ended and the ocean made the promises easier to forget.” She glanced up again, something almost gentle beneath the customary flatness of her tone. “But I have also watched you long enough, these past months, to trust you would not have chosen a fool. Congratulations, Anna. Truly.”

The professor, when he noticed later that morning, offered only a small, courtly bow over her hand and a line of poetry she did not recognize, delivered in the same dry, understated register he brought to everything, and Major Whitfield, passing through the outer office on some errand of his own, paused long enough to say, with real warmth beneath the gruffness, “Good man, Jackson. Saw his file once, helping with a transfer request. Don’t often see a soldier’s paperwork that clean. You’ve chosen well, Frau Hoffman, for whatever an old major’s opinion is worth to you.”

It was not universal goodwill, she knew even as she accepted the kindnesses offered her that week — there were glances in the corridor she did not examine too closely, a clerk in the records office who found sudden urgent business elsewhere whenever Anna’s engagement came up in conversation nearby, the ordinary friction of a country still working out, case by case, person by person, what it meant to have lost a war and now be asked to build a peace alongside the men who had won it. But the goodwill she did receive mattered more, she found, for having been offered without her needing to ask for it, the same quiet, unforced decency that had characterized nearly everything Larry himself had ever given her.

There was one exchange that week that stayed with her longer than the others, an encounter in the office corridor with a woman named Frau Reiniger, older than Anna by a generation, who had worked as a typist for the office since its opening and had lost, Anna knew from the ordinary gossip of the workplace, both her sons somewhere on the Eastern Front. Frau Reiniger stopped her outside the records room, her expression unreadable, and studied the ring on Anna’s hand for a long moment before speaking.

“You will go to America, then,” the older woman said. It was not quite a question, and not quite an accusation either, though something bitter moved beneath the words.

“Eventually. Once the Army permits it.”

“And leave Germany behind you. Leave all of this — “ Frau Reiniger gestured vaguely at the corridor, the office, the whole rubble-strewn city beyond its windows, though Anna understood she meant something larger than the building itself. “Leave it to the rest of us to rebuild, while you begin again somewhere the bombs never fell.”