Chapter 3

By the middle of June, the camp had settled into a rhythm that no longer felt, to Anna, like captivity so much as a kind of waiting room the whole of Bavaria seemed to be sitting in together. The mornings belonged to the registration office, where the line of names never quite ran dry no matter how many were processed, and the afternoons belonged to Heidi, who had put back enough weight in three weeks that her wrists no longer looked like they belonged to a smaller child, and whose cough from the fever in May had not returned.

The four-o’clock milk distribution had become, without anyone declaring it so, the one part of the day when the camp’s separate compartments — the American staff, the German internees, the Red Cross volunteers who came out from the relief station in town — all stood together in the same yard for the same half hour, waiting on the same slow-moving line. Anna had taken to bringing Heidi herself instead of sending her with Greta, partly because the child had started asking for her by name in the afternoons, and partly, though she was slower to admit this reason even to herself, because the line ran past the spot where Jackson generally stood, overseeing the distribution with a clipboard he rarely consulted.

He had not, in three weeks, said anything to her that could not have been overheard by every person in the yard. She had noticed that, the way she noticed most things about him now, filed without comment into the crowded column she still refused to name. He asked after Heidi’s health the way any decent man might ask after a sick child he’d helped see through a fever. He mentioned, once, that the boiler in the east wing had finally been repaired, as if it were simply camp news and not something he’d had a hand in pushing along faster than the requisition forms alone would have managed. He never stood close enough, or stayed long enough, to give the other soldiers or the other women anything to remark on, and Anna understood, without either of them saying so, that this was deliberate — that whatever careful thing was happening between them was being built, on his side at least, with an eye toward never giving her cause to be talked about.

It was Greta, inevitably, who talked about it anyway.

“He watches you the way a man watches weather he’s decided he likes,” she said one afternoon, in the line for milk, with Heidi between them chasing a moth that had wandered into the yard. “Doesn’t matter if it’s raining. He’ll say it’s a fine day regardless.”

“He is careful not to watch me at all,” Anna said. “That’s rather the point.”

“Mm,” Greta said, which by now Anna understood to mean that Greta had decided the matter some time ago and did not feel the need to argue it further.

“You say that as though it settles something,” Anna said.

“It settles what I think. What you do with it is your own business.” Greta shifted her weight, easing a hip that had bothered her, she’d said once, since a winter spent sleeping in a rail yard outside Breslau, and watched Heidi make another unsuccessful lunge at the moth. “I had a husband who watched me that way, once. Before all this. It’s not a thing you mistake for something else, once you’ve seen it plainly.”

“I have not asked you to compare him to your husband.”

“No,” Greta agreed. “You haven’t asked me anything at all. Which is its own kind of answer, if you think about it.” She said it without malice, the way she said most things, a woman who had lost enough in the war that she no longer troubled herself with tact when a plainer truth would serve, and let the subject drop as easily as she’d raised it, turning instead to scold Heidi gently for getting milk on the new coat before it had even been broken in.

Anna let the comment sit without answering it, because there was no honest answer she was prepared to give, not to Greta, not yet to herself, and watched Jackson down the line, overseeing the last of the distribution with his clipboard tucked under one arm, and told herself, not for the first time, that noticing a man’s care did not obligate her to anything beyond noticing it.

The chapel stood at the edge of the camp’s grounds, a squat stone building that had survived the war with only its windows lost, replaced now with boards and, in one frame, a pane of glass someone had salvaged from elsewhere and fitted in crooked. The Red Cross ran a relief line there twice a week — clothing, mostly, sorted into piles by size, donated from towns in America that Anna had never heard of and would likely never see, alongside a scattering of toys that had survived some child’s outgrowing them an ocean away.