The Language Between Us
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 9
The notice ran in the district bulletin Frau Brandt brought back from town in the second week of January, tucked between an announcement about the resumption of regular postal service and a notice regarding coal rationing for the coming month: the Munich detachment of the military government was expanding its civil-affairs staff, and applications were invited from qualified German-English translators with prior experience in registration, family-tracing, or civilian administration work.
“That’s you,” Frau Brandt said, setting the bulletin down beside Anna’s teacup with the flat certainty of a woman who did not consider the matter worth further discussion. “You’ve done that work already. Six months of it, by my count, and done it well, or so I gather from everything you’ve told me and everything that sergeant of yours hasn’t needed to say.”
“It is in Munich,” Anna said. “An hour each way, if the trains run as they ought to, which they rarely do.”
“You have legs, and Heidi has me for the daylight hours, and I don’t recall asking to be relieved of either duty.” Frau Brandt buttered her bread with the brisk efficiency of a woman closing an argument before it had properly opened. “You’ll apply. I’ll hear no more sensible objections about distances until you’ve at least seen whether they’ll have you.”
“You would truly manage her, every day, on top of everything else the garden and the house already ask of you?”
“I raised three of my own before the war took them from me one way or another,” Frau Brandt said, and something in her voice, brief and unguarded, told Anna the subject was not one to be pressed further. “A single two-year-old underfoot is hardly a burden by comparison. She keeps me from noticing the quiet too much, if I’m honest about it, and I’d rather have the noise of her than the silence I’d have without it.” She set the bread down and looked at Anna directly. “You’ve spent long enough letting other people’s opinions decide what you’re permitted to want. Decide this one for yourself, and let me worry about the garden.”
Anna applied within the week, more out of Frau Brandt’s insistence than any confidence of her own, and included with her application a brief account of her camp work — dates, location, the nature of the registration and family-tracing duties she’d performed — though she had no letter of recommendation to attach to it, no proof beyond her own account that any of it had been done well.
She mentioned the application to Larry in her next letter, more as a passing note than a matter she expected him to weigh in on, and his reply, when it came, addressed it with the same careful restraint he’d shown her from the very first week at the camp.
Heard through the ordinary channels that Munich’s short-staffed and looking, he wrote. Didn’t put your name forward or say a word to anyone on your behalf — figured you’d rather stand or fall on your own record, and figured right, knowing you. Just wanted you to know I think you’ll get it. Man’d have to be blind to read your file and not see what’s plain as day in it.
It was, Anna thought, reading the letter over a second time, exactly the right thing for him to have written — an assurance of his confidence in her that carried no weight of intervention behind it, no favor she would owe him if the position came through. She had spent enough months now cataloguing the small, careful ways he kept himself out of the machinery of her life to recognize this as one more entry in that same long list, and found, each time she added to it, that her trust in him deepened by some small, unhurried degree.
The interview came in late January, conducted by a Major Whitfield who ran the Munich office’s civil-affairs section with the brisk, overworked efficiency of a man managing three times the staff he actually had, and who asked her fewer questions about her credentials than about her judgment — how she would handle a translation she suspected was being used to disguise something, what she would do if a document’s German original and its English rendering seemed, to her eye, to say two different things, whether she had ever been asked, at the camp, to soften a translation to spare someone’s feelings, and how she had answered when she was.
He conducted the interview in a requisitioned office two floors above a street still lined, in places, with buildings that had lost their upper storeys to the bombing, and Anna found herself, waiting for his questions, watching through the window as a work crew cleared rubble from the pavement below with the slow, methodical patience of men who had been doing the same work for the better part of a year and expected to be doing it for a good while longer. It struck her, watching them, that the whole of Munich seemed engaged in some version of the same task she had been performing since May — sorting through the wreckage of what the war had left behind, piece by piece, trying to determine what could still be salvaged and what had to be cleared away entirely.
“I told the truth as it was given to me,” Anna said, in answer to his question about softening translations, “even when the truth was unkind. A translator who edits for comfort is no longer translating. She is inventing, and inventing is a poor service to offer people whose whole lives now depend on the accuracy of paperwork.”
Major Whitfield made a note on the file in front of him, the first genuine warmth crossing his tired face since the interview began. “That’s the correct answer, Frau Hoffman, and I’ll tell you plainly it’s rarer than it ought to be. I’ve had translators here who’ll shade a sentence to spare a widow bad news, and I understand the impulse, but it costs us more in the long run than it saves.” He closed the file and looked at her over it, something almost apologetic in his expression. “I’ll warn you now, the work’s not gentle. You’ll be the one telling a mother her son’s unit was overrun with no survivors, more often than you’ll be reuniting families. Can you manage that, day after day, without letting it soften your accuracy the way the others let it soften theirs?”
“I have delivered harder news than that, in worse rooms than this one,” Anna said, and did not elaborate further, and Major Whitfield, to his credit, did not ask her to.
He studied her a moment longer, the tired lines around his eyes softening slightly, as though he had, in that brief exchange, revised whatever assumptions he’d carried into the interview about the woman sitting across from him. “You’ll start Monday, if that suits. Six days a week to start, though we’ll see about arranging something lighter once the backlog clears. And Frau Hoffman — welcome aboard. We need more people who’ll tell the truth plainly, whatever it costs them to say it.”
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