I gave Lou a cookie, the last one I had in my bag. She crunched on it and smiled.

“There’s like a yellow cream inside,” she said, showing me the dry, grainy cookie.

We kept playing through the first course, the main course, dessert, and cheese. For a few moments I managed to think only about the game.

But mostly I looked for Anna. Waited. She could appear at any moment. Walk toward me with August in her arms. He would smile with his mouth open, showing his four teeth. And she would hold him out to me so I could take him, hold him, while she hugged me. Lou would also join in. All four of us would stand like that, together.

Then the door to the barracks opened and it was our turn.

The floor was clean; it was the first thing I noticed. A hard, wooden floor, without a speck of dust. There were several cables coiling across the barracks floor. And it was cooler in here. A fan on the wall droned loudly.

A woman who was half-hidden behind the monitor of a desktop computer smiled. She pointed to two chairs in front of the desk.

I quickly explained our case: that the family had been split up when we left the south, but that we had agreed to meet here. “It was my wife’s suggestion,” I said. “She wanted us to come here.”

The woman started typing on the computer. She asked for the names and birthdates of both Anna and August and asked what they looked like.

“Look like?”

“Do they have any special characteristics?”

“No . . . Anna has brown hair. She is quite short.” It suddenly sounded like I thought there was something wrong with her. “I mean . . . relatively short. Five foot two, I think. And pretty,” I hastened to add.

The woman smiled.

“She has brown hair that gets blonder in the summertime. Brown eyes,” I said.

“And the child?”

“He’s . . . an ordinary baby. He has four teeth and still doesn’t have much hair. Perhaps he has a few more teeth now, actually. He was cranky the last few days. I believe his gums were itchy.”

What more should I say? That he had a tummy I liked to bury my face in? That he laughed loudly and shrilly? That he howled like a foghorn when he was hungry?

“When did you last see them?” the woman asked.

“When we left,” I said. “The day we left Argelès, July fifteenth.”

“The time of day?”

“Midday. Lunchtime.”

Lou had stopped looking at me now. Instead she pulled her legs up beneath her, leaning her head toward her knees.

“What happened?” the woman asked.

“What happened?”

“Yes?”

Suddenly I didn’t like her prying.

“What has happened to many people,” I said. “We had to flee, we were some of the last people to leave the city. And we got separated.”

“Was that it?”

“Yes.”

“And you haven’t heard from her since?”