The Edge of the Continent

The salt air of Santa Monica did not smell like the salt air of the Baltic. On the northern coasts of Pomerania, the sea smelled of wet slate, decaying kelp, and the cold, metallic breath of iron-grey squalls. Here, on twelve thousand kilometers of distance and a lifetime of ruin, the Pacific smelled of cooked sugar, high-octane gasoline, and some thick, oily flower that grew out of the red clay bluffs above the sand.

Ingrid Schaefer held the rough pine side-rail of the two-and-a-half-ton truck with both hands. Her knuckles were yellowed from the grip. Beneath her feet, the floorboards vibrated with the heavy, rhythmic thrum of a Continental engine that had crossed three thousand miles of American asphalt without once encountering a crater or a pile of lime-washed rubble.

“Look down,” whispered Elsbeth. Her voice was thin, dry from the three-day rail journey through the red gorges of New Mexico and the baked orchards of San Bernardino. “Don’t look at the people. Look at the floor.”

“I see them,” Ingrid said.

“Then stop looking.”

Through the slatted sides of the transport, the world was too bright. It was June 12, 1944. Six days prior, the radio in the staging camp near El Paso had sputtered out the news of the landings in Calvados—the sky over the English Channel black with wings, the water thick with hulls. Ingrid had spent that night cleaning the mud from thirty pairs of men’s boots, her fingers stiff with grease, listening to the guards swear in that strange, drawling dialect of the Western plains. She had expected the news to bring a tightening of the knot—less bread, shorter hours, perhaps the heavy timber gallows they had heard rumors about in the transit hull from Liverpool.

Instead, they had been given three bars of yellow soap, a pack of matches, and an order to board a westbound line of boxcars.

The truck ground its gears, turning hard off the coastal highway onto a wooden ramp that led toward the sand. The tires flattened into the soft drift, the engine giving a final, shuddering cough before dying into silence.

“Alright,” a voice called from the front. It was Sergeant Williams. He was forty, maybe forty-five, with a face like a piece of salt-cured pork and a helmet that sat too low on his forehead, pushing his ears outward. He didn’t use a whistle. He simply struck the iron tailgate twice with the flat of his palm. Clang. Clang. “Down you get. Line up by the spare.”

Ingrid let go of the rail. Her legs were long and awkward in the stiff, bleached canvas trousers the Americans had given them at the port—men’s work clothes, five sizes too large, gathered at the waist with rough hemp twine. Her wool tunic, the grey-green wool of the Wehrmacht auxiliary service with the eagles torn from the breast by a pair of rusty pliers in a hangar at Cherbourg, hung over her arm.

She stepped onto the sand. It was hot—not the wet, packed silt of the German plains, but a dry, granular powder that slipped into her canvas shoes and burned the arches of her feet.

There were twelve of them. Five clerks from the maritime supply office in Brest; three telephone operators captured in the cellar of a hotel near Saint-Malo; four nurses who had stayed behind with the chest wounds at the Feldlazarett when the lines broke. They stood in a ragged circle by the rear tire, their shoulders rounded, their eyes squinting against the glare of a sun that seemed to have no shadow.

Across the beach, fifty yards away, the Pacific rolled in with a long, heavy thrumming sound like distant artillery. But there were no black smoke plumes on the horizon. There were no anti-invasion obstacles—no “Rommel’s asparagus” sticking out of the froth, no razor wire tangled in the kelp lines.

Instead, there were umbrellas. Green ones, red ones, striped ones that shook in the wind like giant flowers.

“Jesus,” Elsbeth said, her hand rising instinctively to cover her mouth. Her fingers were short and bitten down to the pink. “They have children here.”

A boy of six or seven, fat-bellied and brown from the sun, was running along the hard wet sand where the foam died. He was dragging a small wooden airplane by a string, his mouth open in an imitation of a machine gun. Pfft-pfft-pfft. He didn’t look at the truck. He didn’t look at the twelve women in grey wool and green canvas. He was entirely occupied by the wind.

“Keep your eyes front,” Williams said, though there was no weight in it. He reached into the cab of the truck and hauled out a large canvas sea-bag, dumping its contents onto the hood. A dozen bundles of blue cotton dropped onto the metal with a soft thud. “One each. They’re large, but you can tie the straps. Latrines are behind the hot dog stand—the cedar building with the green roof. You have twenty minutes to change. If any civilian speaks to you, you don’t speak back. You don’t know the language anyway. Move.”

Ingrid reached out and picked up one of the bundles. It was a bathing suit—heavy, dark blue wool with a small white tag sewn into the neck that read U.S. Navy Surplus. It smelled of cedar shavings and mothballs.

“Is this for the bath?” asked Margarethe, the oldest of the clerks, her voice trembling. She had lost two brothers at Voronezh and her left thumb to a piece of shrapnel from a British rocket-firing Typhoon. “We are to wash in the sea?”

“It’s for the heat, Gretchen,” Ingrid said softly, her eyes traveling from the umbrellas to the long timber pier that stretched out into the water three hundred yards to the north.

On the pier, people were leaning over the rail. Men in white shirts with their sleeves rolled up above their elbows; women with wide-brimmed straw hats held against the sea breeze with one gloved hand. Some of them had small black boxes held to their eyes—cameras, their lenses catching the noon glare like the binoculars of artillery observers on the bluffs of the Cotentin.

The White Tag

The changing house smelled of old creosote and wet hair. Through the gaps in the cedar siding, Ingrid could see the underpinnings of the boardwalk—the massive redwood piles driven into the sand, black with barnacles and green slime where the high tide reached them.

She pulled the blue wool over her hips. It fit like an iron jacket, thick and scratchy against her skin, which had grown pale and dry over twelve months of grey stew and damp concrete. On her left hip, three inches below the waistline, was a small stamp in indelible purple ink: P.O.W. – ISOLATION CAMP 4A.

“We look like clowns,” Elsbeth said from the corner. She was trying to knot the shoulder straps of a suit that was too long for her short torso. “Like the girls in the circus at Stettin.”

“The circus at Stettin had horses,” Margarethe said from the dark of her stall. Her voice was dead. “And the tents didn’t smell of sugar.”

Ingrid didn’t answer. She walked out of the door into the light.

The wind had risen, carrying the scent of frying onions from a small wooden shack fifty feet away. A large painted sign on the roof read PINK’S FAMOUS CHILI DOGS—10¢. A line of people stood before the window—soldiers in tan summer uniforms with their collars unbuttoned, girls in bright cotton dresses with platform shoes that clacked on the wood.

Sergeant Williams was sitting on the running board of the truck, a small pocketknife in his hand. He was paring a yellowish apple, dropping the curls of skin into the sand between his boots. A younger guard, a private named Miller who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, stood five paces away with his Winchester carbine held loosely across his pelvis. He looked more terrified than the women; his eyes kept darting from the crowd on the boardwalk to the blue wool suits of the prisoners.

“Alright,” Williams said, not looking up from his apple. “Down to the water. Don’t go past the red flag. The life-guard says there’s a hole out by the third piling. You drown out there, I’ve got to fill out three sets of forms in quadruplicate, and the captain don’t like ink-stains.”

Ingrid led the way. The sand was hot enough to make her skip, her bare feet leaving shallow, flat prints that the wind began to fill with dust the moment she lifted her heel.

As they approached the wet line where the surf broke, the crowd seemed to part. Not with a rush, but with a slow, heavy hesitation, like cattle shifting in a lane when a strange dog enters.

A woman in a blue sun-suit with white piping was sitting on a checkered blanket, her lap filled with a large bowl of yellow wax beans she was snapping into a pot. As Ingrid passed within three paces, the woman’s hands stopped. A bean stayed gripped between her thumb and forefinger, half-split, the green thread hanging down. Her face was broad, freckled, the face of a baker’s wife from the Holstein hills or a farmer’s daughter from the Altmark. Her eyes were not angry. They were simply wide, blue, and empty of anything but an immense, heavy curiosity.

Next to her, an old man in a grey wool cardigan despite the heat looked up from a copy of the Los Angeles Times. The headline was three inches high, black as coal: AMERICANS PRESS PAST BAYEUX. He looked at the headline, then looked at Ingrid’s ankles, then looked back at his paper.

“Ingrid,” Elsbeth whispered, her hand reaching out to touch Ingrid’s elbow. “The water.”

The first wave hit them at the knees.

It wasn’t the grey ice of the North Sea. It was green, thick with brown ribbons of kelp that wrapped around their shins like soft leather straps, and it was warm. Not hot, but the temperature of milk that had sat for an hour on a kitchen table in August.

Ingrid fell forward. She didn’t dive; she simply let her knees go slack, her face hitting the foam with a small, sharp gasp.

The salt went into her nose—not the bitter, chemical salt of the Channel ports that smelled of burnt oil and cordite, but something clean. For three seconds, four seconds, she stayed under, her eyes open in the green dark. She could see her own fingers, white and long against the sand of the bottom; she could see the shadow of the pier pilings stretching out like the trunks of pine trees in the forest at home before the timber cutters came.

When she broke the surface, she was thirty feet from the shore.

Margarethe was standing waist-deep, her arms folded across her chest as if she were still in her wool tunic, but her chin was tilted up toward the sun. Her eyes were closed. The water was splashing against her grey hair, lifting the short strands and laying them flat against her temples.

“Look,” Elsbeth called out. She was floating on her back, her small, round belly sticking out of the blue wool suit like a buoy. Her feet were kicking up small fountains of white spray. “Ingrid, look. There are no sirens.”

It was true. The sky was a pale, hard turquoise from horizon to horizon. Two miles out, a white steamship was moving north toward San Francisco, its single funnel puffing a thin, lazy pencil of grey smoke that lingered in the upper air for ten minutes before dissolving. There were no barrage balloons. There were no twin-tailed lightnings circling the masts.

From the wooden pier above them, a small object dropped into the water with a sharp plop.

Ingrid turned. A girl was leaning over the top rail—she couldn’t have been older than twenty, with short-cut black hair and a small leather notebook tucked under her armpit. In her hand she held a black camera with a large silver flash-bulb attached to the side like a tin saucer.

Click.

The sound was tiny, smaller than the crack of a dry twig, but Ingrid knew it. She had heard it in Berlin before the war, when the state photographers came to the hospital to take pictures of the new incubators; she had heard it in Paris when the officers stood on the steps of the Madeleine.

The girl on the pier didn’t smile. She wound the knob on top of the camera with a short, jerky movement of her thumb, her pencil already hovering over the notebook.

“Hey!”

The shout came from the beach. Sergeant Williams was standing at the water’s edge, his boots three inches deep in the foam, his apple forgotten in the sand. He was pointing his short, stubby finger up at the pier. “Hey! No pictures! I told you people at the gate—no press!”

The girl didn’t run. She looked down at Williams, her face cool and dark under the shadow of her brim, then wrote three long lines in her book. She looked back at Ingrid—not with the soft, bovine look of the woman with the wax beans, but with a sharp, calculating squint, as if she were measuring the distance between Ingrid’s collarbone and the water line.

“Come on,” Williams growled, his voice rising above the surf. He was wading out now, his green trousers darkening to the thigh as the water took them. “Out of the water. All of you. Elsbeth, get your fat self up off that sand. Miller, get the tailgate down.”

“Already?” Margarethe whispered. She hadn’t moved from her spot by the piling. Her skin had taken on a faint, pink flush from the noon glare. “The two hours are not gone.”

“The two hours are done when I say they’re done,” Williams said. He didn’t look angry; he looked tired, the way a conductor looks when the train has reached a small station where no one wants to get off. He reached out and grabbed Elsbeth by the wet strap of her suit, hauling her upright with a single, practiced pull. “The local rag gets a hold of this, and the colonel’s going to be having his tea out of my helmet. Move it.”

As they walked back up the sand toward the truck, the silence was different. The boy with the toy airplane had stopped running. He was standing by his mother’s blanket, his thumb stuck into the corner of his mouth, his brown eyes fixed on the purple stamp on Ingrid’s hip.

The mother didn’t look away this time. She reached into a greaseproof paper bag at her feet, pulled out a long, yellow ear of corn that was still steaming from the pot, and held it out.

She didn’t look at Ingrid’s face. She held it toward Margarethe’s missing thumb.

“Here,” the woman said. Her voice was flat, with that thick, heavy r-sound that Ingrid had heard in the voices of the guards from Ohio. “Take it for the girl.”

Margarethe stopped. Her wet feet were covered in white sand until they looked like they had been dipped in flour. She looked at the corn, then at Williams, then at the woman’s face.

“No,” Williams said, his arm coming down between them like a wooden bar. “No gifts. No communication. Section Four, Article Twelve. Move along, lady.”

The woman with the beans didn’t lower her arm. She simply laid the corn down on the corner of her blanket, next to a small heap of salt that had been spilled on the plaid wool.

“It’s just corn, Sergeant,” she said quietly. “It ain’t ammunition.”

The Ink on the Page

The newspaper arrived four days later, carried into the orderly room at the Papago Park camp near Phoenix in the back of a grocery truck that brought the weekly crate of yellow lard.

Ingrid saw it because she was cleaning the windows of the camp infirmary—a long, tar-paper barrack that sat between the gravel waste of the compound and the double line of four-foot barbed wire that separated the prisoners from the Arizona desert.

The sun here didn’t have the sea mist to soften it. It came down like an iron plate, heating the roofs until the tar melted and ran down the gravel in black, sticky tears.

Captain Evans, the camp doctor, was sitting at his desk with his shirt off, his white chest covered in grey hair that looked like wool. He had the paper spread out across his blotter, his thumb pressing down on the center fold.

“Schaefer,” he said without looking up.

“Yes, Herr Hauptmann.”

“Don’t call me that. I’m a major, and I ain’t German.” He turned the paper around so it faced the window. “Is that you?”

The photograph was four columns wide. The focus was sharp—so sharp that Ingrid could see the white tag of the U.S. Navy Surplus suit sticking up behind her left ear. She was breaking the water, her head thrown back, her mouth open in a half-smile that looked, in the grey grain of the newsprint, like a small scream. Behind her, Elsbeth’s round face was visible, floating like an apple in a tub, and above them both, through some trick of the lens or the wind, the American flag on the Santa Monica pier appeared to be growing directly out of Margarethe’s shoulder.

The headline was not three inches high, but it was dark:

“IS THIS HEAVEN?” ASK NAZI WOMEN ON L.A. BEACHES

Beneath it, in smaller type: While California Sons Die in the Mud of Normandy, Captured Auxiliary Girls Enjoy Surf Privileges and Civilian Privileges at Santa Monica. War Department Cites “Geneva Rules.” Local Mothers Outraged.

“The girl who wrote this,” Evans said, tapping a line of text with his fountain pen, “her name’s Dorothy Chen. She’s got a brother with the First Division. Lost his leg at Gela. She writes a real pretty line about how much sugar we’re giving you folks while the folks in Pasadena can’t get three ounces of lard for a pie.”

Ingrid took the rag from her pail, squeezing the grey water out between her knuckles. “The water was very warm, Major.”

Evans looked at her for a long time. His eyes were small, brown, surrounded by yellow wrinkles from thirty years of looking at the sun through the sight of an army transit. He reached into his drawer and pulled out a small packet of Camel cigarettes, tossing them onto the desk between them.

“The beach trips are done,” he said. “The general in San Francisco had a look at this on Wednesday morning. He spent twenty minutes on the horn with the commandant here. From now on, you don’t go past the ditch behind the laundry. If you want water, there’s the pump by the mule corral. You use that.”

“Yes, Major.”

“And Schaefer?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t let the boys from the second battalion see that paper. They came back from Tunisia last month. Three of ’em are in the back ward with the shakes. They don’t think the picture’s funny.”

Ingrid took the paper. She didn’t read the text—her English was still a collection of noun-fragments she had gathered from the backs of cereal boxes and the shouts of the guards—but she cut the photograph out with a pair of surgical scissors she found in the dressing tray.

She hid it in her shoe.

The camp at Papago Park was larger than the one in California. There were two thousand men here—mostly sailors from the U-boats captured in the Atlantic, along with thirty or forty officers from the Afrika Korps who spent their days marching in strict, rhythmic circles around the gravel parade ground, their sand-grey tunics immaculate despite the heat, their heels clicking against the stones as if they were still on the limestone terraces of Tripoli.

They didn’t like the women.

When Ingrid walked down the lane between the barracks to the laundry with her basket of wet sheets, the sailors would stand by the wire, their shirts off, their skins dark as old leather from the desert wind. They didn’t shout insults. Instead, they would turn their backs as she passed, their shoulders squared, their heads tilted up toward the mountains that rose like purple teeth ten miles to the north.

“They think we are soft,” Elsbeth said that night. They were sitting on the edge of their cots in the women’s section—two small rooms at the end of the hospital block, separated from the men by a partition of rough hemlock boards. “The cook told Margarethe today that we should have died at the port. He said the British girls at Liverpool would have put lime in our soup if they’d had the sand for it.”

“The cook was in a cellar at Brest for three weeks,” Ingrid said. She was unlacing her canvas shoes, her fingers raw from the soda ash in the laundry water. She pulled the folded square of newsprint from beneath her heel. The paper had grown soft, damp from her sweat, the edges grey and frayed. “He doesn’t know what the water looks like here.”

She unfolded it. The face of the girl on the pier was not in the picture, but Ingrid could remember her—the short, dark hair, the sharp pencil, the way she had looked down at them as if they were a new kind of beetle found under a stone in the garden.

“Do you think she’s still there?” Elsbeth asked, leaning over to look at the grain of the print. “The reporter?”

“She’s in Los Angeles,” Ingrid said. “It has four hundred thousand people. My father said it’s where they make the moving pictures with the horses.”

“I would like to see a horse,” Elsbeth said, her voice dropping into the dark of the barrack. “A real one. Not the ones the artillery used. A brown one with a long tail that hasn’t been eaten.”

The Cistern

In August, the camp grew silent. The wind stopped coming from the mountains, and the air sat over the gravel like the heat from an open furnace. Two of the nurses came down with the yellow jaundice; their eyes turned the color of old tallow, and Captain Evans spent his afternoons sitting by their cots with a bottle of quinine and a palm-leaf fan he had bought from an Indian at the rail station.

To keep the prisoners from going mad in the barracks, the commandant ordered the construction of a fire cistern behind the motor pool.

It was to be twelve meters long, two meters deep, dug into the hard caliche clay with hand shovels and iron bars. The work was given to the women and the older men from the supply services.

Ingrid worked with an iron mattock. Every time the iron struck the earth, a tiny puff of white dust rose up into her face, tasting of lime and old bones. Her hands had stopped bleeding; the skin had turned thick, yellow, and hard as horn at the base of her fingers.

By the third week, they had reached five feet.

“Hey,” a voice said from the rim.

Ingrid stopped her swing, the mattock hanging over her shoulder.

An American nurse was standing on the pile of loose clay. She was new—she had arrived on the ambulance train from El Paso the day before. Her uniform was crisp, white, with two small silver bars on her collar and a red cross sewn into her sleeve. Her face was long, pale, with a thin, sharp nose and grey eyes that looked down into the trench with a kind of stiff, military reserve.

“You Schaefer?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m Lieutenant Evans. Margaret Evans. No relation to the doctor.” She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a small tin of zinc ointment, tossing it down into the dirt by Ingrid’s feet. “The major says your hands are split. Put that on before you go to the wash-house. If you get the desert rot in those fingers, I’m the one who has to bandage ’em, and I don’t like the smell of grease.”

Ingrid looked at the tin. The label was red, with a small eagle and the words U.S. Army Medical Corps.

“Thank you,” she said in her clumsy English.

The nurse didn’t leave. She stood on the edge of the pit, her white shoes already turning grey from the caliche dust. She looked at Margarethe, who was sitting in the shade of the excavation wall, her head between her knees, her breath coming in short, rattling gasps.

“She needs water,” Margaret said.

“The guard says no water until the bell,” Ingrid said, pointing to Miller, who was sitting on an overturned oil drum fifty yards away under a mesquite tree, his carbine balanced across his knees.

Margaret Evans walked over to Miller. She didn’t march; she walked with a strange, long-legged stride that looked like she was crossing a muddy field in Indiana. She spoke to him for three minutes, her hand rising once to point at the infirmary roof, then at the sky.

Miller didn’t argue. He got off his drum, unhooked his aluminum canteen from his belt, and walked over to the edge of the pit, dropping it down into the dirt.

“Ten minutes,” he called out, his voice cracking like a boy’s. “Then get that dirt up. The captain’s coming by at four.”

Ingrid picked up the canteen. It was cold—the outside was wrapped in wet grey felt that smelled of wool and well-water. She carried it to Margarethe, lifting her head with one hand while she held the metal cup to her lips with the other.

“Drink,” she said.

The old woman drank, the water running down her chin and darkening the grey wool of her tunic collar. “It tastes of iron,” she whispered in German. “Like the pump in the yard at home after the frost.”

Margaret Evans had come down into the pit. She didn’t care about her white skirts; she sat down on a ledge of dry clay next to Ingrid, her long fingers untying the white linen cap she wore. Her hair was light brown, the color of dried hay, gathered at the back with two steel pins.

“My brother’s in France,” she said. She wasn’t looking at Ingrid; she was looking at the opposite wall of the trench, where the marks of the mattocks showed like ribs in the grey earth. “With the infantry. The ninety-fift’ division. He writes me letters on that blue paper the army gives ’em. He says it rains every day. He says his shoes haven’t been dry since they crossed the river at Carentan.”

Ingrid didn’t move. She held the aluminum canteen between her knees, feeling the cold of the water through the canvas of her trousers. “My fiancé was at Stalingrad,” she said softly, her English coming with an effort, like water through a choked pipe. “In the winter. He was… a driver. For the bread.”

“Did he get out?”

“No letters,” Ingrid said. “Since January. From forty-three.”

Margaret reached out, her fingers touching the tin of zinc ointment that lay in the dirt between them. She turned it over once, looking at the instructions on the back.

“He’s probably dead, then,” she said. Her voice wasn’t cruel; it was flat, the way the doctor spoke when he told a patient that the leg had to come off. “Most of ’em are. My mother goes to the church every Tuesday in Terre Haute. She lights three candles. One for Bobby, one for the neighbor’s boy who went down in the Pacific, and one for the peace. I told her the peace don’t care about candles. It’s just an engine that runs until the grease goes dry.”

She stood up, shaking the grey dust from her skirt with two sharp slaps of her hands.

“Get that woman into the shade,” she said, pointing to Margarethe. “If she faints out here, I’m going to tell the major you did it with the shovel.”

The Fire in the Yard

The fire came on the night of November 14.

It didn’t start with a bomb or a shell. It started in the kitchen of the third battalion—a faulty oil stove that sputtered and threw a line of burning kerosene across a pile of dry pine crates behind the mess hall.

Ingrid woke to the sound of the iron rail. Clang-clang-clang-clang.

The air inside the barrack was thick, yellow with the smell of burning tar paper and wet wool. Through the window, the compound was bright as noon, but the light was orange, moving in long, greasy waves across the gravel.

“Get out!” Williams was shouting from the doorway. He didn’t have his boots on; his grey wool socks were wet from the fire buckets, his trousers held up by his suspenders over his undershirt. “Schaefer! Elsbeth! Get to the hospital! The wind’s taking the sparks toward the dispensary!”

Ingrid ran. The gravel burned her bare feet, but she didn’t feel it until later.

The yard was full of men. The German sailors from the second block had formed a line from the pump to the mess wall, their leather buckets passing from hand to hand with a rhythmic, mechanical swing. They didn’t speak. They moved in silence, their faces black with soot, their breath coming in long, unified gasps that sounded like a giant pump working in the dark.

The hospital block was thirty yards from the flames, but the heat was already cracking the glass in the dispensary windows.

Inside, the air was white with smoke. Margaret Evans was there, her white uniform gone grey, her arms filled with boxes of paper bandages and glass bottles of morphine.

“The back ward!” she yelled when she saw Ingrid. “The three boys from Tunis! They’ve locked themselves in the latrine! They think it’s an air raid!”

Ingrid didn’t look for a guard. She grabbed a wet wool blanket from the floor, threw it over her head, and ran down the narrow corridor toward the rear of the block.

The door to the latrine was heavy pine, held from the inside by a brass bolt. From behind it came a sound that Ingrid had heard only once before—in the cellar of a hospital at Saint-Lô when the American heavy bombers had dropped their loads through the clouds. It wasn’t a cry; it was a long, low whine, like a dog that had been caught in a gate.

“Open!” she shouted in German. “It is not the planes! It is the kitchen! Open the door!”

A man’s voice answered—not in German, but in that sharp, nasal English of the eastern ports. “Go away! Go away! The sky’s coming down!”

Ingrid threw her shoulder against the wood. The pine groaned, but the brass bolt held.

Margaret Evans was behind her now. She had an iron crowbar she had taken from the fire rack by the door. She didn’t speak; she shoved the flat beak of the bar into the gap between the frame and the lock, her whole body leaning into the lever until her silver bars turned sideways on her collar.

The wood split with a sound like a pistol shot.

The three soldiers were sitting on the concrete floor, their knees pulled up to their chins, their hands laced behind their necks. One of them was bald, his head covered in small, red scars from a mortar burst; the other two were boys, their faces white under the soot, their teeth chattering so hard that Ingrid could hear the clicking from the doorway.

“Get up,” Margaret said, her voice dropping into that low, flat Terre Haute drawl. She reached down and took the bald man by the arm, her fingers sinking into his flesh until the skin turned white. “Get up, soldier. The war ain’t here. It’s just the grease in the kitchen. Come on.”

The man looked at her, then looked at Ingrid. He saw the grey-green wool of Ingrid’s auxiliary skirt—she hadn’t changed into her canvas trousers—and his eyes went wide.

“She’s a Jerry,” he whispered.

“She’s a nurse,” Margaret said, pulling him toward the door. “And she’s got the blanket. Now move your legs before I use the bar on you.”

They carried them out into the gravel.

The wind had shifted, throwing the black smoke toward the mountains, and the sailors had reached the roof of the mess hall with the wet sacks. The fire was dying into a heap of red embers that hissed as the water took them.

Ingrid sat down on an empty oil drum by the cistern. Her feet were black, the skin of her right heel torn by a sharp piece of gravel, her hands covered in the greasy soot of the tar-paper walls.

Margaret Evans sat down next to her. She had a bottle of rubbing alcohol in her hand; she poured a generous splash onto a piece of cotton gauze and began to wipe Ingrid’s knuckles, her movements rough but precise.

“You’re a fool, Schaefer,” she said softly.

“The boys,” Ingrid said, her head hanging down between her shoulders. “They are safe?”

“They’re back in the ward,” Margaret said. “The doctor gave ’em a shot of the needle. They’ll sleep until Sunday.” She threw the soiled gauze into the dirt. “The bald one—his name’s Miller. Same as the guard. He’s from Pennsylvania. He had a bakery before they took him. He told me he used to make five hundred loaves of rye bread every Saturday night.”

She looked at the fire cistern. The water inside was six inches deep—the runoff from the fire buckets had collected in the bottom, black and greasy with ash, reflecting the stars like a broken mirror.

“It ain’t the Pacific,” Margaret said.

“No,” Ingrid said. She reached into her apron pocket, her fingers finding the small, soft square of the newspaper photograph she had carried from Santa Monica. “It is the desert.”

“Well,” Margaret said, her hand rising to touch the steel pins in her hair, which had come loose during the rush. “The desert’s what we got.”

The Separation of the Water

The war ended on a Tuesday afternoon in May 1945.

The radio in the orderly room didn’t sputter this time; it played a long program of military marches from Washington, followed by a speech by a man with a heavy, old-fashioned voice who spoke about the “unconditional surrender of the German land forces.”

The prisoners didn’t march that evening.

The sailors sat on the steps of their barracks, their hands idle between their knees, looking at the double line of wire that still stood between them and the highway. There was no shouting. There were no songs. From the officers’ block came the sound of a small mouth-organ playing Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden, but the wind took the notes and broke them against the gravel before they reached the gate.

“We go home now?” Elsbeth asked as they sat in the laundry block.

Margarethe was ironing an officer’s shirt, her iron moving with a slow, heavy drag across the collar. “There is no home, Elsbeth. My sister wrote from Essen. She says the church has fallen into the canal. She says the people are living in the iron pipes under the railway station.”

Ingrid didn’t look up from her tub. She was washing the major’s sheets, her arms white with soap up to the elbow. “We stay until the ships are ready,” she said.

The ships took ten months.

It was February 1946 when the trucks came to carry them back to the rail line. The camp was nearly empty by then; the sailors had been sent east in October, and the long rows of tar-paper barracks stood with their doors open to the wind, the gravel paths already growing a thin, green beard of desert grass where the water buckets had been spilled.

Margaret Evans came to the gate to see them off. She wasn’t in her white uniform; she wore a grey wool coat with a small plastic brooch shaped like a bluebird on her lapel, her hair tied up with a green silk scarf.

“Bobby’s home,” she said to Ingrid as they stood by the tailgate of the transport. “He’s back in Terre Haute. He’s working the night shift at the engine works. He says his ears still ring when the hammers start.”

She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a small, heavy parcel wrapped in brown butcher’s paper, tied with a bit of red string.

“Don’t open it until you get to the coast,” she said.

“What is it?” Ingrid asked.

“It’s just something from the beach,” Margaret said. She didn’t hug her; she took Ingrid’s right hand—the one with the yellow horn skin at the base of the fingers—and gave it a single, hard squeeze. “Don’t let those British girls at the port take it from you. Tell ’em it’s medical supplies.”

The ship that carried them back across the Atlantic was an old Liberty hull named the Canton Victory. It smelled of onions, diesel oil, and the vomit of four hundred women who had been collected from the isolation camps of Utah and Wyoming.

Ingrid stayed on the lower deck, near the hatch where the air came down from the ventilators. On the third night out from New York, when the sea was rough and the iron plates of the bow were groaning against the northern rollers, she untied the red string of Margaret’s parcel.

Inside was a glass bottle—an old pint jar that had held mayonnaise or relish.

It was filled with white sand.

Beneath the glass, tucked against the bottom where the white grain was packed tight, was a small square of paper. It was a postcard of Santa Monica Beach—the long timber pier with its green umbrellas, the red roof of the chili dog stand, and the long, green rollers of the Pacific breaking against the clean white drift.

On the back, the handwriting was long, leaning to the right, written with a hard pencil that had driven deep into the cardboard:

The sea is still there, Ingrid. Write me when you get to the village.

The Baltic Slate

The village was named Gristow. It sat on the edge of the Greifswalder Bodden, six miles from the ruins of the sugar refinery at Anklam.

The houses here were made of red brick with thatched roofs that had turned black from the winter salt. There were no cars. There were no trucks. The only engine was a small, three-horsepower diesel that belonged to the fishery inspector, and it spent its days sitting in a shed by the wooden quay because there was no oil to be had since the Russians had taken the lines at Stettin.

Ingrid lived in two rooms behind the bakery. The baker was gone—he had died at Kiev—but his widow, a woman with a face like a dried apple named Frau Kersten, let Ingrid stay in exchange for her help with the garden and the cleaning of the big flour bins.

Ingrid was the village nurse. She had a small leather bag that Captain Evans had given her at the port—a surplus field kit with six rolls of gauze, a pair of steel scissors, and three tubes of zinc ointment that she used sparingly, like gold.

On an afternoon in November 1947, she walked down to the water.

The Bodden was grey—the color of an old zinc pail that had been left out in the frost. A thin skim of ice had begun to form along the reeds, crackling like paper as the tide moved it. The air smelled of wet stone, turf smoke, and the cold, rotting weed that the northern storms brought from the Danish islands.

She sat down on a timber balk that had been part of a boat landing before the fire-rafts came.

From her apron pocket, she pulled out the jar of California sand. The glass was cold against her fingers, but the sand inside was still dry, white, and loose. She had never opened the lid; she was afraid that if she let the air of Gristow into the bottle, the white grains would turn grey, taking on the smell of the turf smoke and the lime-washed walls of her rooms.

“Ingrid!”

She turned. Claraara, her sister, was running down the lane from the church. She was fifteen now, but her legs were short, her feet wrapped in rags inside a pair of old leather boots that had belonged to their father. She held a grey envelope above her head, her face red from the wind.

“From the post!” she yelled. “The man from Anklam brought it on the bicycle!”

The letter was from Terre Haute, Indiana.

The stamp was red, with the face of an American president Ingrid didn’t recognize, and the ink was blue—the same bright, chemical blue that Margaret Evans had used for her orders on the infirmary clipboard.

Ingrid didn’t open it by the water. She waited until they were back in the small room behind the bakery, the small iron stove fed with three pieces of brown peat that gave off a thick, yellow smoke.

She sat by the window, where the light was fading into the grey of the northern dusk.

Dear Ingrid, Margaret wrote. The snow’s three feet deep here in Indiana. Bobby got married last week to a girl from the dairy. They had a white cake with two small sugar birds on top that his mother made out of her own ration. He looks good, but he don’t like the sound of the train when it blows for the crossing.

I went to California in September. I took the bus. The girl with the camera—the one from the paper? Her name was Chen. I saw her in the office of the Times. She’s got a picture of you on the wall behind her desk. Not the one from the paper with the flag, but another one she didn’t print. She says you were looking at the water as if you were trying to see the other side of the world.

I told her you were just cold.

Write me back when you get the lard. I sent two tins by the red cross box on Tuesday.

Yours, Margaret.

Ingrid folded the paper. She didn’t show it to Claraara, who was sitting by the stove, trying to toast a piece of dry potato bread on a fork over the embers.

She walked to her small desk—an old packing case that had held Russian small-arms ammunition—and picked up her pen. Her ink was black, made from old carbon dust she had gathered from the chimney of the refinery, mixed with vinegar.

Dear Margaret, she wrote in her neat, stiff school-hand. The potato bread is very hard this winter, but the zinc ointment is good for the children’s ears. My sister has a new pair of boots.

She looked out the window. The sky over the Bodden was entirely gone now, dissolved into a thick, dark slate that had no stars.

We have no umbrellas here, she wrote. But the water is the same water. It just takes a long time to cross.

She picked up the jar of Santa Monica sand, setting it down on the wood next to her paper. In the reflection of the oil lamp, the white grains looked like small pearls, bright and separate in the dark, held together by nothing but the glass.