Yours, as always,

Rainer

The words swam before her eyes. She tried to focus on the uneven ink, the fussy elegance of the A and the D—a kind of pidgin Old German script he had taught himself. After everything, apparently, this pretense remained.

From where had he emerged? Missing, presumed dead. This was what she had found at the Red Cross office. Dead, she had thought. After all, she knew the Warthegau. And she knew Rainer, or at least she once had.

But here he was, on this scrap of paper, slipping into her life.

The truth will out, her father had always said. Though, so far, in Ania’s experience, this was not quite right. The truth was in God’s hands. Or the devil’s, more likely. The very word truth seemed quaint. Where had it been hiding during the reign of obedience, pride, and duty?

Ania lay on her bed and counted the rows of tiny flowers on the curtains to still the chaos in her head. But it seeped through. In her mind, doors banged open and shut. The stench of mud defrosting in the spring, the long blank horizon of the east. The cruelty of boys playing games in the cold. A baby’s hand absently pulling at her ear. Beneath this were other, softer pieces. Rainer, not as the man she had last seen, but as a boy, sitting on the horsehair sofa in her father’s waiting room, waiting for his own prematurely aged father to emerge with a new round of pills. Already he had been the man of the house. Dark haired and dark eyed, his feet barely reaching the floor, still he was in charge.

She rose abruptly and went to the desk. She had to write back. If there was one thing she had learned, it was that you had to act. To rise up and meet obstacles thrown in your path. To sit and wait was death.

She pulled a sheet of airmail paper from her desk.

I’m afraid you are mistaken, she wrote. I know no one by the names of Ania or Rainer Brandt. Best of luck.

For a long moment she sat, staring at the words and at the once intimate name, Brandt. Then she sealed the envelope and tiptoed down the hall to the room her boys shared. She stood before their door and listened. She could hear their voices within—Anselm’s low murmur, Wolfgang’s faster, more heated tone. What would they make of the news? Her boys, for whom she had done too little and from whom she had asked so much—total faith, total amnesia, total forgiveness.

Something made her hesitate. As she stood in the darkness, a new intention formed. She would shoulder this new uncertainty alone. It was hers, after all. So she listened a moment more, allowing her courage to be bolstered by the trappings of this ordinary life she had arranged: homework, supper, chores, bed.

Then, moving swiftly and quietly, she turned and went back down the hall.