Anyway, this woman, Benita Fledermann was her name, somehow came across Clotilde’s father and this Russian. And something happened: the man attacked her or she attacked him, and the man was killed. You killed him? Clotilde had asked her father, who nodded solemnly. But he had never been a good liar. Or she killed him? Clotilde had pressed. It doesn’t matter, he answered. We killed him.

This was a crime punishable by death—the murder of a former enemy combatant, a violation of the cease-fire. So Franz buried the man. And the time being what it was, no one came looking. No one even noticed he was gone.

But the man lay on Franz Muller’s conscience, as much as any of the victims he felt responsible for in the east. He had carved a small cross on the tree above the grave, and he visited once a month. He cleared the nastiest weeds and brought flowers and, most of all, stood there and listened to the forest and tried to show respect.

At some point, her father had researched the man at the local archive and discovered an article in the town paper from around that time, more of a newsletter really, released by the occupying Americans, naming a Fyodor Ivanov, former inmate of Stalag VIIA, missing, last seen outside of Ehrenheim with his former stalag comrades. It was one of many such listings—missing persons took up a whole page. And Franz had not known how to pursue it further. He had only a grade-school education. He was not a researcher. And Ivanov was a common Russian name.

Some years ago, another body was discovered in these same woods. This was right before Franz Muller died, and he had followed the story with interest. The bones were entered into an official process run by the German Office, the state agency responsible for such findings. They were analyzed and bundled into black plastic, stored temporarily in the town’s morgue. DNA testing revealed they belonged to a German male, approximately thirty-eight years old, with evidence of combat injuries and death from a wasting sickness. No definitive identity was established. The bones were reinterred in a cardboard box in the Ehrenheim cemetery.

Were the bones of that man, whoever he was, any better off now than they were before they were found? This was the question Franz Muller asked. He honestly didn’t know. Clotilde could decide, once he was gone, what she should do. Her father’s secret is now her responsibility.

She is still undecided. Maybe someday she will go to the authorities and set the official exhuming process in motion. Maybe they will dig up the bones and discover enough information to separate this specific Fyodor Ivanov from all the others declared dead or missing at the time. Maybe his family will be tracked to some corner of what is now Belarus and contacted by a tireless employee of the German Office whose job it is to conduct this sort of postmortem search. And maybe this will bring someone closure, or stir their anger, or reopen wounds. But it won’t bring back the man.