Chapter 8

The letter came in the second week of November, later in the month than his usual writing days, and shorter again than his letters had grown to be over the autumn — a pattern Anna had learned, by now, to recognize as the shape his handwriting took whenever he was working up to something difficult.

I’ve been turning something over, it began, and I don’t quite know how to say it without it sounding like I’m picking at a wound that isn’t mine to pick at. So I’ll just say it plain, the way you’d say it to me, and you can tell me if I’ve overstepped.

I don’t want to reopen anything you’ve already closed. But I keep wondering — have you had the chance to actually grieve Rolf? Not just survive losing him, which I know you’ve done, better than most people could have managed. I mean sat with it. Let it be as bad as it was, instead of setting it aside because there wasn’t room, what with the war and the camp and Heidi needing you every hour of every day. I ask because I don’t want to be something you’re using to avoid a grief that’s still waiting for you somewhere. I’d rather be something you choose once you’ve made your peace with what came before, if that makes sense. Not instead of making that peace.

I’m not asking you to forget him. Wouldn’t want you to, and couldn’t respect a man who’d ask that of the mother of his child. Just asking whether you’ve let yourself feel the whole of it yet, or whether some part of it’s still waiting in a room you haven’t opened.

Anna read it twice, then set it down on the small desk and sat a long while with her hands folded in her lap, looking out at the garden gone bare and brown with the turn of the season, and found that the letter had done exactly what she suspected he’d feared it might — reached into a room she had, in fact, kept closed, not out of denial so much as necessity, because a woman walking four days through a forest with a toddler on her hip did not have the luxury of falling apart, and by the time the walking had stopped, the habit of not falling apart had hardened into something she no longer knew how to set down.

She wrote back that evening, more honestly than she had written anything in months. You have not overstepped, she told him. I think, if I am honest, I have been waiting for someone to ask me this question directly, because I did not know how to ask it of myself without a door falling open that I was not certain I could close again. I loved Rolf. I do not know, some days, whether I have fully grieved him, or whether I have only grown accustomed to carrying his absence the way one grows accustomed to a limp. I would like to speak of this with you, properly, when you are next here. I do not think it is a conversation for a letter, after all — not this part of it.

She sealed the envelope and sat with it a while before walking it out to the postbox, turning over the strangeness of having written something so plainly true to a man she had known, in the whole of things, less than a year — and thought that perhaps this was simply what trust looked like, once it had been tested enough times to stop asking for proof: the willingness to hand someone a door key before you’d fully decided, yourself, what waited on the other side of it.

But the letter, once sent, did not settle her the way she had hoped it would. If anything it did the opposite, prying at something she had kept shut so long she had forgotten there was a door there at all, and the days that followed found her quieter than usual, slower with Heidi, prone to standing at the kitchen window with a task half-finished in her hands, staring at nothing at all. She slept poorly. She found herself, more than once, near tears over something too small to explain — a burnt pot of potatoes, a button that wouldn’t sew back on straight — and understood, distantly, that the smallness of the trigger was beside the point, that grief postponed long enough simply waited for any door left unlatched.

Frau Brandt noticed, as Frau Brandt noticed most things, though she said nothing for the better part of a week, watching Anna with the patient, unhurried attention of a woman who understood that some doors opened faster with silence than with questions. It was a Thursday evening, nearly a fortnight after the letter had gone out, when she finally set down her mending and looked across the kitchen table at Anna, who had been staring at the same page of her French novel for the better part of an hour without turning it.

“You’ll tell me what’s wrong,” the widow said, “or you’ll sit there wearing that face until the both of us go to bed unhappy. I’d rather hear it.”

Anna opened her mouth to say it was nothing, the automatic deflection of six years’ practice, and found the words would not come, found instead that the whole of it rose up at once, too large to hold back any longer. “Larry wrote to ask whether I had truly grieved Rolf,” she said, “or only survived losing him. And I have been turning the question over for two weeks now, and I find I do not know the answer, and the not knowing has made a hollow of me that I do not know how to fill.”

Frau Brandt did not soften her expression, did not reach across the table with any of the easy comfort another woman might have offered, but there was something in her stillness that felt, to Anna, more useful than comfort would have been. “Tell me, then. Not the answer. Just tell me what you remember of the day the notice came.”

And so Anna told her — haltingly at first, then with a rush that surprised her, the words coming faster than she could arrange them into any orderly shape. She told her of the numbness that had greeted the news, six months pregnant and alone in a flat in Munich, and the shame she had carried since for that numbness, as though a proper wife should have wept and she had only felt a strange, cold clarity about what needed doing next. She told her of the years since — the birth, the bombing, the flight from Cham, the camp, the slow accumulation of Larry’s kindnesses — and how, in all of it, she had never once set the managing aside long enough to simply miss her husband, had instead folded him into a photograph kept in a pack and taken out once a day, a ritual of grief small enough not to interfere with the business of staying alive. And she told her, last and hardest, of the newer shame, the one that had arrived with the newsreels and the trials now beginning in Nuremberg, the creeping fear that grieving a man who had worn that uniform, however honorably he had worn it, made her complicit in something too vast and too monstrous to properly name.