Chapter 15

The notice came down through the ordinary channels on the twelfth of December, a full day after the ban had actually lifted, which struck Anna, when Larry told her of it, as fitting in its own small way — that a change so long awaited should arrive not with any grand announcement but simply as one more line in one more bulletin, buried among notices about coal deliveries and train schedules, as though the Army itself understood that the news mattered more to the people it concerned than to the bureaucracy reporting it.

She had been at the Munich office when the news reached her, secondhand, from Wanda, who had heard it from a clerk in the records office and come straight to Anna’s desk without waiting for the lunch bell, her usual reserve entirely abandoned for the occasion. “It’s lifted,” Wanda said, breathless in a way Anna had never once seen her, not even over the office’s most desperate family-tracing cases. “The ban. I heard it not ten minutes ago. You’ll want to go home early, I should think, and tell that sergeant of yours before some other clerk beats you to the telling of it.”

Anna had gone home early, catching an earlier train than her usual schedule allowed, and found Larry already waiting at Frau Brandt’s gate when she arrived, having heard the same news through his own channels and come straight from Augsburg without bothering to change out of his working uniform, the bulletin itself crumpled slightly in one hand from the speed of his own journey.

“Effective immediately,” Larry read aloud, from the copy he’d carried with him on the train, his voice not quite steady with the effort of keeping it plain. “Personnel wishing to marry German nationals may submit applications through their commanding officers, subject to standard background review and command approval.” He looked up at her, something disbelieving still working behind his eyes despite the year of certainty that had led them here. “That’s it. That’s the whole of what we’ve been waiting on. Four sentences in a bulletin nobody but the two of us will ever think twice about reading.”

“Four sentences,” Anna agreed, “that took a year, and a war before that, and every letter we ever wrote each other, to arrive at.” She reached for his hand across Frau Brandt’s kitchen table, the folder of paperwork sitting between them exactly where it had sat for the better part of two months, waiting on exactly this notice to become useful at last. “Shall we submit it today?”

“Already asked my CO to expect it,” Larry said, standing and reaching for his coat. “Told him a week ago I’d be bringing him a complete application the moment the ban lifted, and he laughed and said he’d never seen a man so ready to do the Army’s paperwork for it. Figure there’s no sense waiting another day, now that the day’s finally here.”

Frau Brandt, catching the whole of the exchange from the doorway where she’d been listening without any real pretense of not listening, allowed herself a rare, unguarded smile. “I will tell Heidi tonight that her mother is to be married properly,” she said. “Though I suspect the news will mean rather less to her than the promise of more cake, whenever the actual ceremony comes. Children have a clearer sense of priorities than the rest of us manage, most days.”

The application moved faster than either of them had dared hope, Larry’s CO proving as good as his word about expediting what he plainly considered an overdue formality, and the approval came through in the second week of January, a plain typed letter that Anna read three times before she trusted the words on the page to mean what they plainly said.

Request approved, it read, in its entirety beyond the formal preamble. Staff Sergeant Lawrence R. Jackson is authorized to marry Anna Hoffman, née [maiden name], German national, subject to completion of civil marriage formalities under German law and subsequent registration with this command.

“Subsequent registration,” Larry read over her shoulder, something wry in his voice despite the evident emotion beneath it. “Never thought I’d hear the happiest sentence of my life delivered in language that dry.”