Chapter 17

The ship was called the SS Zeeland, a converted troop transport pressed into new service that spring for the growing tide of war brides making the same crossing Anna and Heidi now prepared to make, and its size alone struck Anna dumb for the better part of an hour after they boarded, a vessel larger than any building she had stood inside since before the war had reduced so much of Germany’s architecture to rubble and memory.

“Never seen a ship this size myself,” Larry admitted, watching her reaction with quiet amusement, “not up close, anyhow. Crossed to England once, my first year in, on something smaller and considerably less comfortable than this. Reckon the Army’s decided war brides deserve better treatment than raw recruits ever got.”

The dock at Bremerhaven had been chaos that morning, a crush of families and luggage and Army personnel processing departures with the same brisk efficiency Anna had grown accustomed to over two years of paperwork, and she had held Heidi’s hand tightly through the worst of the crowding, watching Larry manage their bags and their documents with the same steady competence he brought to everything, until at last they stood at the base of the gangway and the whole enormous fact of the ship rose up before them, waiting to carry them somewhere none of the paperwork could quite prepare her to imagine.

Their quarters proved modest but adequate, a shared cabin with three other families making the same journey, and Anna found herself, over the ship’s first days at sea, settling into an easy companionship with the women around her that reminded her, in its shape if not its details, of the camp’s own women’s quarters two years before — the same instinctive solidarity of people crossing an uncertain threshold together, trading what comfort and practical wisdom they could offer each other against the uncertainty waiting on the other side.

There was a Bavarian woman named Ilse — a coincidence of naming that struck Anna as strange enough to mention in her first letter home — travelling with two young sons to meet a husband stationed in Texas, and an Austrian woman, quieter than the rest, who kept mostly to herself except when her small son’s seasickness required the collective sympathy of the whole cabin. And there was a woman named Greta, sharing nothing but a first name with the Greta from Anna’s own camp days, whose sharp, unsentimental humor reminded Anna enough of her old friend that she found herself, more than once, half expecting to turn and find the resemblance carried further than it did.

The women spent their evenings, once the children had finally been coaxed to sleep, trading what fragments of information they’d gathered about the lives waiting for them on the other side of the ocean — towns and cities none of them had seen, in-laws known only through careful, hopeful letters, the quiet anxieties of women who had each, in their own way, staked everything on the honesty of a man’s promises made across a war-torn distance. Anna found herself, more than once, offering what reassurance she could to women more nervous than she felt herself to be, surprised at her own steadiness on the matter, and understood, turning the surprise over, that two years of watching Larry keep every promise he’d ever made her had built in her a confidence she hadn’t fully recognized until it was tested against the uncertainty other women around her were still carrying.

The crossing itself proved rougher than Anna had anticipated, the Atlantic in late May offering up several days of swells that left half the ship’s passengers confined to their bunks, Heidi among them, pale and miserable in a way that reminded Anna, with an ache she hadn’t expected, of the fever that had first brought Larry properly into their lives two years before.