The Language Between Us
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2
The work assignments went up on a board outside the registration office at seven in the morning, hand-lettered in a clerk’s careful block print, and Anna found her name on the second line: HOFFMAN, A. — TRANSLATION, REG. OFFICE. Beneath it, in smaller letters, a note about hours, six to two, and a wage that came to almost nothing in dollars and everything in what it could buy at the commissary — a tin of milk powder, a bar of soap that wasn’t the harsh gray kind the camp issued for free, an orange, if the shipment had come in that week.
She left Heidi with the farmwife from the truck, a woman named Greta who had lost track of her own children somewhere between Breslau and here and seemed to need another child to watch over almost as much as Anna needed someone to watch Heidi, and reported to the registration office with the deliberate stiffness of a woman walking into a room where she did not yet know the rules.
The office had been a classroom once — she could tell from the chalk ledge still bolted along one wall, wiped clean but not painted over — and now held four long tables end to end, each with an American clerk on one side and a line of German civilians and internees on the other, waiting to be registered, re-registered, or asked questions they did not have answers to. Jackson was at the far table when she came in, sleeves rolled to the elbow, working through a stack of forms with a woman old enough to be his grandmother, and neither of them looked up when Anna crossed the room, which she noted and, without quite deciding to, was glad of.
A corporal with ink-stained fingers pointed her to an empty chair beside his table. “You’re the translator. Hoffman?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ve got a line halfway to the door and about six words of German, all of them useless.” He slid a stack of blank forms toward her. “Ask them name, birthdate, last address, and whether they’ve got family they’re trying to locate. Write down whatever they tell you, in English, on these. Don’t editorialize. If you don’t understand something, ask again before you guess.”
It was not so different, she thought, from the work she had done for two years in the signals room — listening to one language and rendering it faithfully into another, without opinion, without embellishment, the translator’s discipline of staying invisible inside the sentence. She had done it then for men planning a war that could not be won. She did it now for men trying to sort out what was left of the people that war had scattered, and found, to her own quiet surprise, that the second use of the same skill sat easier in her chest than the first ever had.
The morning went by in a steady procession of names and dates and the small tragedies people recited in flat voices because they had told the story too many times already to let it shake them anymore. A woman looking for her husband, last seen at a labor camp near Nuremberg. An old man who wanted to know whether his son’s unit had surrendered or been overrun, as if the answer might change what had already happened. A mother, not much older than Anna, holding a paper the corporal had handed her — a ration slip, some kind, with a line crossed out and rewritten — trying to work out, in halting German that Anna suspected was not her first language either, what had gone wrong with her allotment.
“He says there’s no children’s supplement on this,” the mother said, when Anna asked what the trouble was, nodding toward the American officer standing near the supply window, a stack of similar slips in his hand. “But I have three children. I don’t understand.”
Anna took the slip and looked at it, and saw at once what had happened — not fraud, not any failure on the mother’s part, but a clerk’s error, the kind of small mistake that multiplies itself a hundred times across a hundred forms when the people filling them out are exhausted and the forms themselves are printed in a language half of them are only beginning to read. The supplement code had been transcribed one digit short, turning a family ration into a single one.
She carried it herself to the officer at the supply window rather than send the mother to argue a case she had no English to make. “Excuse me,” she said, and held the slip out. “I believe there’s been an error in the code here. It should read four-one-one, for a family allotment. It’s been recorded as four-one, which reads as an individual ration.”
The officer, a lieutenant with the tired, overworked look of a man managing more paperwork than any one desk should hold, took the slip and frowned at it, then at her. “You sure about that?”
“I translated ration codes for the district office before the surrender,” Anna said, which was true enough, a small adjacent truth to the larger one she did not offer, that she had also once translated far worse things without complaint, and that this correction, small as it was, felt like the first work in a long while she could do without wanting to look away from herself afterward. “The four-one-one code has been standard since March. I would guess whoever filled this out copied from an older form.”
The lieutenant studied the slip a moment longer, then looked past her to the mother waiting by the registration table, three children’s names already written into Anna’s careful hand on the intake form beside her. Something in his face shifted, weighed the correction against the ten seconds it would cost him to make it, and settled.
“Get her a new one,” he said to the clerk beside him, and then, to Anna, with a note of something that might have been respect or might have simply been fatigue relieved of one more small burden, “Thanks.”
She did not see Jackson watching until she turned back toward the registration table and caught him mid-motion, his own line of German civilians briefly forgotten, his eyes on her with the same quiet, assessing attention he’d had at the truck the day before. He looked away when she noticed, back down to the form in front of him, but not quickly enough to pretend he hadn’t been looking, and Anna filed it away with everything else she was collecting about Staff Sergeant Jackson, a column that was, despite her best efforts to keep it empty, beginning to fill.
The rest of the morning went the way the first hour had, a slow, steady current of names and losses moving past her table, and Anna found the rhythm of it settling into her the way work always had, a place to put her hands and her mind that left less room than idleness did for the thoughts she preferred not to have. Around eleven, the corporal beside her leaned over during a lull to refill his inkwell and said, without much ceremony, “You’re better at this than the last one they had.”
“There was another translator?”
“Fellow from the DP camp outside Landshut, came over twice a week. Nice enough, but his English wasn’t half what yours is, and he had a habit of smoothing things over instead of saying them straight — you’d ask a woman if she had family unaccounted for and he’d tell you she said no, when what she’d actually said took him a full minute to get out.” The corporal shrugged, dipping his pen. “You just say what they say. Lieutenant likes that. Says it saves him from finding out later he built a file on somebody’s guess.”
It was, Anna thought, a strange thing to be praised for — the simple discipline of not editing what people told her, of letting their grief or their fear or their stubborn hope come through in her English exactly as sharp or as blunted as it had come to her in German — but she understood the shape of the compliment well enough, and it settled somewhere she had not expected it to reach, a small confirmation that the thing she was good at might still be worth something, even now, even here.
By the time the lunch bell rang and the line at her table thinned to nothing, her wrist ached from writing and her voice had gone rough from an hour of asking the same four questions in two languages, and she found she did not mind either discomfort nearly as much as she had expected to. She collected her wage — a handful of coins that would not have bought a loaf of bread in the Germany she remembered from before the war, and now bought, at the little commissary window, an orange and a tin of milk powder and, on impulse, a bar of lavender soap she had not seen the like of since before Rolf’s death — and walked back to the east wing to find Heidi asleep against Greta’s shoulder, worn out from a morning spent chasing the other children through the yard.
“She’s been no trouble,” Greta said, handing the child over with the easy competence of a woman who had done this for children not her own more than once these past months. “Ate everything I gave her, too. Good appetite on that one, when there’s food to be had.”
Anna thanked her, and gave her half the orange without being asked, because it seemed the only decent thing to do with a stroke of luck that had also, in its way, been a mercy she hadn’t earned alone, and carried Heidi back to their cot to nap through the worst heat of the afternoon before the second shift of work began.
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