“You’re an American!” He spoke in perfect English.
She nodded. “How did you know?”
“I’m from America, too. Ohio, ma’am. Cincinnati.”
She raised her brows. “But how did you know an American lives here?”
He pointed to the paint on the cement stairway leading up to the door, a blight on the once-pristine exterior. “Nicht plündern. You’re one of the few houses around here without the comings and goings of a bunch of Jerries.” He looked around as if nervous. “Say, listen, can I come in?”
Isa looked too, but behind her, wondering where Clara had gone. She saw no reason to turn him away. “We don’t have much food, but we have bread and tea. Would you like some?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She stood back to let him into the kitchen, where he took a chair as she moved to the cookstove to light a flame under a pot of water. Then she retrieved two mugs from a cupboard and went into the pantry for the bread. Back at the table, she set about cutting several slices and glanced at the young man sitting before her.
“Why are you here, in Belgium?”
He hesitated. “We’re alone?”
She nodded, handing him a piece of bread.
“I came over with the Canadians,” he said. “I think it stinks what the Jerries did to Belgium, and so I joined up to fight. Got all the way to the front. Trouble is, I got separated from my unit. We were fighting over at Ypres.” He pronounced the town as if it rhymed with wipers, and Isa had to catch her bottom lip to suppress a rude giggle. He certainly sounded American!
The young man looked suddenly serious as he set the uneaten bread aside and leaned forward, running his hands over his face as if rubbing away what he saw in his mind. When he looked at her again, his eyes were wet, the rims red. “I’ve been hiding out for months now, blending in here and there. But I have to go back. My men need me.”
“Your men?”
“Well, the men I was with. I’m not an officer or anything. ’Course you couldn’t even tell I’m a soldier in these civilian clothes. I stole ’em off somebody’s clothesline. But even though I’m just a private, I’m a pretty good shot and I don’t want them to think I deserted. I’ve got to get back.”
“Then what are you doing as far behind the lines as Brussels?”
He leaned back in his chair. “I couldn’t just walk back to the right side, you know? So I kept going, getting as far away from the fight as I could. As I figure it, I’ll have to go all the way up to Holland and rejoin the Allies from there. They can put me wherever they want, so long as I’m fighting again.”
It was a sound plan, and he seemed sincere, especially since his English was so natural.
She added tea to the hot water and let it sit, watching him eat his bread. He did so slowly, as if he’d been raised in a proper, polite home.
“Why should you want to go back? It’s not as if you’ve deserted. Certainly you have nothing to fear of your name being tainted.”
“I’ve got to go back, ma’am. It’s a point of honor. And I sure don’t want to be caught by the Jerries.”
“I see.” She poured the flavored water through a sieve to collect the loose tea fragments. Then, offering him the cup, she looked directly at him. “I wish I could help you, but of course you know I cannot.”
“What?”
“Just because I’m an American doesn’t mean I know how to get out of this country.”
“But—but you haven’t been here from the beginning, have you? I’ve been watching all the big houses around here for weeks, and it seems to me you just got here.”
She frowned. “Perhaps, like you, I’ve been in hiding. Germans were living here until a couple of weeks ago.”
He shifted in his seat, taking a cautious sip of the hot liquid. “Yeah, sure. Nobody wants to help out a soldier, not with the Jerries ready to pounce on anybody who does. But I heard talk about how an American just showed up one day and moved back into her big house. They said you left the country before the war, and now all of a sudden you’re back. I figure you came in the same way I can get out.”
“But I have no idea how to help you!” She leaned close to him, adding quietly, “And further, I should