Chapter 16

Larry’s discharge came through on the third of February, a formal ceremony of exactly the same brevity as their wedding had been — a stack of papers signed, a final pay voucher issued, a handshake from a CO who told him, with more warmth than Army protocol strictly required, that he was losing one of the better men he’d had the privilege of commanding. Larry came home to Erding that evening in civilian clothes for the first time since Anna had known him, the brown jacket and trousers he’d worn to their October reunion now a permanent fixture rather than a special occasion, and something in the sight of him standing at Frau Brandt’s gate without the uniform struck Anna as strange in a way she had not fully anticipated — as though a chapter of the man she loved had quietly closed itself, even as the whole of him remained exactly as familiar as ever.

“Feels lighter,” he said, when she asked how the discharge had sat with him. “Didn’t expect that. Thought I might feel something closer to loss, given how much of the last three years I’ve spent in that uniform. But mostly I just feel like a man finally free to start the next part of his life, instead of one still waiting on the Army’s permission to begin it.”

Frau Brandt studied him a long moment across the kitchen table that evening, taking in the unfamiliar civilian clothes with the same frank assessment she’d once given him on the station platform in October. “You look younger without it,” she observed. “Soldiers always do, once the uniform comes off. I noticed the same with my husband, after the first war ended — some weight in the shoulders that the cloth itself seemed to carry, gone the moment he changed into his own clothes again.” She poured him a cup of the evening’s tea without being asked, an old habit of hospitality that had become, over the months, simply the shape of how she cared for the people under her roof. “Enjoy the lightness while you have it. Ohio will bring its own weight soon enough, same as everywhere does.”

The Munich job offer arrived within the week, exactly as promised the previous year, and Larry accepted it with the same plain, unhurried satisfaction he brought to most decisions that mattered, though both of them understood the position to be temporary now, a bridge rather than a destination — three months, perhaps four, enough time to arrange their passage and settle Anna’s affairs at her own office before the whole of their small family crossed the ocean toward whatever Ohio held in store for them.

The War Brides Act paperwork proved more involved than either of them had fully anticipated, despite the year they’d already spent assembling documents for the marriage application — a fresh round of identity verification for Anna and Heidi both, medical examinations conducted at an Army clinic in Munich by a doctor whose bedside manner Anna found considerably less gentle than Corporal Ainsley’s had been, back at the camp, and a lengthy questionnaire regarding Anna’s finances, her intentions, her fitness to enter the United States as a dependent of an American citizen.

“They ask the same questions three different ways,” Anna observed, working through the latest form at Frau Brandt’s kitchen table one evening in late February, “as though hoping to catch me contradicting myself on some detail I have already stated plainly twice before.”

“Same as any Army form,” Larry said, without looking up from his own stack of paperwork. “Redundancy’s practically a religion with them. Figure it’s meant to catch liars, mostly, though I don’t doubt it catches a fair number of honest folks just getting tired and careless by the third asking.”

The medical examination proved the least pleasant part of the process, conducted in a cold, sparsely furnished room by a doctor whose brisk efficiency left little room for the kind of gentleness Anna had grown accustomed to from Corporal Ainsley’s care of Heidi back at the camp. He asked his questions in rapid succession, checked boxes on a form without much visible interest in the answers behind them, and pronounced her, at the end of twenty uncomfortable minutes, fit for entry under the Act’s requirements, as though she were livestock being cleared for transport rather than a woman about to cross an ocean toward the rest of her life.