Chapter 4

The talk started, as talk of that kind always did, somewhere Anna could not trace back to its beginning and could not silence once it had started moving. She heard the first of it secondhand, from Greta, who heard it from a woman who did the mending for the mess hall staff and had it, in turn, from one of the cooks — a chain of telling long enough that Anna suspected the story had grown teeth somewhere along its journey that it had not started with.

“They’re saying he’s sweet on you,” Greta reported, without much ceremony, while they hung wash on the line strung between the old goalposts. “The cooks, I mean. And one of the MPs, apparently, said something to that effect in front of half the guardhouse.”

“Said what, exactly?”

“That Staff Sergeant Jackson had gone soft for a Fräulein and was handing out favors because of it. Extra milk. Lighter duties. That sort of talk.” Greta pinned a shirt with more force than the shirt required. “Men will say a great deal when they’ve nothing better to occupy an idle guard shift.”

Anna kept her hands steady on the wet fabric, though something in her chest had gone tight and cold at the word — not the accusation of favoritism, which she knew to be false and could defend against with the plain record of her own work, but the word itself, Fräulein, said the way she had heard it said before, stripped of any of the ordinary courtesy the word carried in her own language and turned instead into something closer to an insult, a way of naming her as a kind of woman rather than a person with a name.

“It isn’t true,” she said. “He has never once given me anything I did not earn through the work.”

“I didn’t say it was true,” Greta said. “I said it’s being said. There’s a difference, though I grant you it rarely feels like one when it’s your name being carried around a guardhouse.”

Anna pinned the last of the wash and stood a moment with her hands still damp, looking out over the yard at the ordinary business of the camp continuing around her — women hanging laundry, children chasing each other between the lines, a guard leaning against the fence post with the bored posture of a man counting the minutes until his shift ended — and felt, for the first time since the fever in May, the old wariness she had carried out of the forest reassert itself, the sense that nothing offered to her here could be trusted to stay simple for long.

“What is it they think they know,” she said, more to herself than to Greta, “that they feel entitled to say it in a guardhouse?”

“They know nothing,” Greta said. “That’s rather the point of gossip, isn’t it. It doesn’t require knowing. Only watching, and guessing, and repeating the guess until it sounds like something that was seen rather than imagined.” She reached over and, in a rare gesture of open tenderness, squeezed Anna’s wrist once, briefly, before letting go. “I’m not telling you this to frighten you. I’m telling you because you’ll hear it eventually from someone with less care for how it lands, and I’d rather you heard it first from me.”

“Thank you,” Anna said, and meant it, though the gratitude did little to loosen the knot that had settled beneath her ribs.

She saw the effect of it on Jackson before he said a word to her about it himself. He kept his distance at the milk line the following Thursday, further back than his usual post, and when their paths crossed at the registration office he did not linger the way he had begun, in recent weeks, to linger, some small excuse always at hand for another minute of conversation. He was polite. He was correct. He was, Anna understood within a day, being exactly as careful as a man could be when he had learned that carelessness had already cost him something, even if she did not yet know what.

She found out on a Tuesday, from the corporal at her own table, who mentioned it in the flat, unbothered tone of a man passing along camp gossip that did not concern him directly.

“Jackson’s getting transferred out to the Augsburg detachment,” he said, sorting through a stack of forms without looking up. “End of the month. Word is his CO wants him somewhere he can’t be accused of running favors for the internees.”

Something in Anna went very still, the old stillness she recognized now as the shape her body took whenever the ground shifted somewhere she could not see it happening. “Is that the reason given? Officially?”

“Officially it’s a staffing need. Unofficially — “ The corporal shrugged, the universal gesture of a man who understood the difference between what was written down and what was actually true, and had long since stopped expecting the two to match. “Unofficially, I heard the captain had a word with him. Told him a staff sergeant who lets a pretty translator talk him into extra rations makes the whole detachment look like it’s got looser standards than it ought to have. Whether or not there was ever an extra ration to speak of.”