Chapter 5

Her release, when it finally came in the first week of August, arrived not as the single dramatic gesture she had half imagined during the long weeks of waiting, but as a form — one more form among the hundreds she had filled out or translated or corrected since May, this one bearing her own name in the space marked for the internee and a stamp, faded blue, that read RELEASED — CIVILIAN STATUS across the bottom in English and German both.

“You’ll want to register with the Bürgermeister’s office in whatever town you settle in,” the clerk told her, sliding the form across the table with the same brisk indifference he’d shown every other piece of paper that crossed his desk that morning. “Within a week of arrival. And you’ll keep this copy on your person — checkpoints still ask for papers, even now.”

Anna folded it carefully into the pocket of her coat, the green wool one from Mrs. Halloway’s donation crates, and did not feel, in that moment, the surge of relief she had expected to feel. What she felt instead was closer to vertigo, the strange dizziness of a door opening onto a room she had spent three months imagining and had not, in all that imagining, ever quite pictured clearly enough to walk into with any confidence.

Greta was waiting for her outside the office, having been released herself a week earlier, and walked with her back toward the east wing one last time to help carry the last of Anna’s and Heidi’s belongings — the wooden horse, the two donated coats, the tin cup that had traveled with them out of the forest in May and would, Anna suspected, travel with them for a long while yet, a small stubborn relic of everything that had come before. “You’ll write,” Greta said, at the gate, in the flat, unsentimental tone she used for anything that mattered to her too much to say plainly. “I mean it. I’ve no family left worth the postage, and I’d rather hear how the two of you get on than not.”

“I’ll write,” Anna promised, and meant it, and found, embracing the older woman briefly at the gate, that she would miss her more than she had expected to miss anyone she’d met inside a wire fence.

Erding was not, strictly, a real choice so much as the absence of any better one. Regensburg had yielded nothing when she’d written to her mother-in-law’s old address — the letter returned, weeks later, marked simply nicht zustellbar, undeliverable, with no further explanation offered or, she suspected, available. Munich remained half rubble, its housing office overwhelmed with claims older and more urgent than hers. But a woman from the camp, released a fortnight before her, had written back with word of a small town outside the city proper where an elderly widow was looking for a boarder to help with a large garden and a house too big for one aging pair of hands, and Anna had written back within the hour, before she could talk herself out of the boldness of accepting a stranger’s charity on the strength of a single letter.

The widow’s name was Frau Brandt, and she turned out to be sharper-eyed and less fragile than her letters had suggested, a woman who looked Anna over on the doorstep with the frank assessment of someone deciding whether a horse was worth the asking price, and then looked at Heidi, asleep against Anna’s shoulder after the long walk from the rail station, with an expression that softened considerably.

“You’ll do,” she said, which turned out to be the whole of the interview, and showed them to a small room at the back of the house that smelled of lavender and old wood, with a window that looked out over a garden gone half to weeds from a summer with no man’s hands left to tend it.

The arrangement, once it settled into its shape over the first uncertain week, proved simpler than Anna had dared hope. Frau Brandt asked no questions about the war, about the uniform Anna had once worn, about the husband whose photograph sat on the small desk by the window — she seemed, in fact, to have decided within the first hour that the details of Anna’s past were her own business and no one else’s, and confined her curiosity instead to practical matters: whether Anna knew anything of preserving vegetables for winter, whether Heidi could be trusted not to trample the seedling rows, whether Anna’s cooking ran to the heavy German fare Frau Brandt had grown up on or something lighter, more foreign, that her digestion might not forgive her for trying. Anna answered all of it honestly, learned the garden’s rhythms within a fortnight, and found, to her quiet surprise, that the work of it — turning soil, staking tomatoes, the small satisfactions of a harvest coming in despite a summer of chaos everywhere else — did more to settle her nerves than any amount of rest could have managed.