The Language Between Us
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 13
Spring came to Erding slowly that year, the way Anna had come to understand it always did in Bavaria, winter loosening its hold by inches rather than any decisive turn, and it was in the first properly warm week of April that Larry proposed the visit he had been turning over, he admitted, since the night Anna first told him of Regensburg.
“Seems wrong, somehow,” he said, sitting at Frau Brandt’s kitchen table with a cup of coffee going cold in front of him, “that I’ve never met the woman myself. She’s given me her blessing secondhand, through you, and I’m grateful for it, more grateful than I’ve rightly said. But a blessing like that deserves to be thanked in person, seems to me, not just carried back and forth in letters and secondhand accounts.”
“She would like that, I think,” Anna said. “Though I confess I am nervous on your behalf. She is not an easy woman to sit across from, when the subject is difficult. I do not say that to discourage you. Only to prepare you.”
“Wasn’t expecting easy,” Larry said. “Don’t know that I’ve had much practice with easy, this whole year through. Figure I can manage one more difficult conversation, if it means doing right by a woman who did right by you.”
Frau Brandt, passing through the kitchen with a basket of early spring greens from the garden, paused long enough to add her own opinion to the matter, unasked as usual. “Bring her something,” the widow said, setting the basket down. “Not flowers — every man thinks of flowers, and flowers wilt before the gesture’s even properly landed. Something that lasts. She has spent a year rebuilding a life from nothing, same as the rest of us. A woman in that position remembers who brought her something useful, long after she’s forgotten who brought her something merely pretty.”
Larry considered this with the same careful weight he gave most unexpected advice, and by the time the weekend arrived he had procured, through channels Anna did not ask too closely about, a proper wool blanket and a tin of real coffee, rare enough in the spring of 1946 to function as a small fortune in trade, wrapped together with a note in his own careful hand thanking her in advance for the hospitality he hoped she’d extend him.
“Frau Brandt’s idea,” he admitted, when Anna raised an eyebrow at the coffee. “Seemed like good counsel. Figured I’d rather arrive with something that says I understand what this year’s actually cost everybody, instead of pretending flowers could stand in for that.”
“It is a good instinct,” Anna said. “Better than flowers would have been, certainly.”
They took the train together the following weekend, the three of them, Heidi perched between them with her face pressed to the window for most of the journey, narrating the passing countryside in her own distinctive blend of German and English to an audience of exactly no one who required the narration. Larry had dressed with more care than Anna had seen him bring to any of his visits before now, his uniform pressed and his boots polished to a shine that spoke of a man who understood the weight of the impression he meant to make, and Anna found herself, watching him fuss with his collar somewhere past Landshut, unexpectedly tender toward the nervousness he was trying so plainly to hide.
“She does not bite,” Anna said, amused.
“Didn’t say I thought she would.” Larry gave up on the collar and let his hands fall still in his lap. “Just want her to see what you see in me, is all. Man doesn’t often get the chance to make a case for himself to the mother of the fellow he’s replacing, and I’d rather not waste it fumbling my collar the whole visit through.”
“You are not replacing him,” Anna said, quietly, taking his hand. “You never have been. You are simply the man who came after, and loved us both regardless of what came before you. Ilse understands that distinction as well as I do, by now. You need not perform anything for her. Only be who you already are.”
Ilse met them at the station herself, a gesture Anna had not expected and understood, watching the older woman’s careful, deliberate walk down the platform toward them, to be its own small act of courage — a woman who rarely left her own village now making the effort to stand in a public place and be seen greeting an American soldier as though the seeing of it held no shame she needed to hide from.
“Staff Sergeant Jackson,” Ilse said, extending her hand with old-fashioned formality before Larry had even fully closed the distance between them, though something in her eyes, studying his face, suggested she was taking his measure with rather more care than the formal greeting let on.
“Ma’am,” Larry said, taking her hand carefully, as though she were something that might break under too firm a grip, which struck Anna, watching, as exactly the right instinct for a first meeting with a woman who had buried both a husband and a son to two different wars. “Larry, if you’d rather. Or Lawrence, if that suits you better. Anna tells me you’re partial to the formal version, when the occasion calls for it.”
Something in Ilse’s expression eased slightly at that, the ghost of a smile crossing features that had been, until that moment, carefully composed. “Larry will do,” she said. “I find I have had enough of formality this past year to last several lifetimes. Come. I have made a proper meal for the occasion, though I will warn you now that a proper German meal in this year of rationing is a more modest affair than either of us would like it to be.”
The meal, when it came, proved more generous than Ilse’s warning had suggested, a testament, Anna suspected, to weeks of careful saving and trading with neighbors for exactly this occasion, and Larry ate with the plain, unaffected appreciation of a man who understood the cost behind a meal like this without needing it explained to him, complimenting each dish with a sincerity that could not have been mistaken for mere politeness. He noticed, too, the coffee he’d brought sitting proudly on the sideboard, clearly already put to use in the pot Ilse had served alongside the meal, and said nothing of it, though Anna caught him glancing at it once with a small, satisfied quiet that told her the gift had landed exactly as Frau Brandt had promised it would.
Ilse watched him throughout the meal with the same careful, assessing attention she had brought to their greeting at the station, asking questions between courses that Anna recognized, by now, as the same pattern the review board had once used on her own file — not accusations, exactly, but a methodical testing for cracks in a story that might not hold up under pressure.
“You are a farmer’s son, Anna tells me,” Ilse said, midway through the meal, buttering a heel of bread with the same brisk efficiency Anna had come to associate with women who had survived a great deal by refusing to let their hands sit idle. “What will you do, once the Army no longer requires you? Return to the farm, or stay in this work you have found here?”
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