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garish PW letters on their fronts and backs, and they might have passed for an equivalent batch of American GIs. The entire spectacle made her feel peculiar.
    She did not, however, have much time for such speculation. The Germans’ arrival had revealed the holes in their preparations. American soldiers streamed into the administration building, asking for decisions on this or that policy, requisitioning needed supplies, requesting clarification about a policing issue. The military questions she passed on to her father; the simple maintenance requests she tried to field with the cooperation of Lieutenant Peters. The entire day had been a mad scramble, and now in the late afternoon she felt tired and short-tempered, like a bear, she imagined, with bees swarming around it.
    She put on the teakettle. Whenever she felt at odds with herself, she brewed a cup of tea. It was something her mother had taught her. No one, she had promised, could feel grumpy after a cup of tea or a long walk. Both remedies served her well. Tea, right now, in the darkening afternoon, seemed exactly the needed thing.
    Perhaps it was the change in her position, but when she looked out at the common again, her hip against her desk, the teakettle sputtering and beginning to heat, her eyes fell on a handsome boy. At first, at least, he appeared to be a boy. He was tall and lithe, with a great thatch of blond hair, and he looked—what was she seeing?—somehow more groomed than the men around him. Perhaps it was only styling, or his trim physique, but his uniform did not hang and sag in the ghastly manner of the other men. The PW on his blouse appeared bright and solid, and when he turned to speak to one of his fellow prisoners she observed his splendid profile. Yes, he was very handsome, she realized, and he was not a boy after all but a young man about her age. Watching him, her mind drifted; she was conscious of watching him, while at the same time the world went on around her. She heard drops from the kettle sizzle and spatter against the hot stove, and she heard the distant drone of her father’s voice on the telephone. Those noises registered on her senses, but she traveled down the line of her sight, taking in details that she wanted to recall later, seeing this young man apart from all the other men around him. She had often experienced this mild sense of being out of one’s body when on the water in canoes, drifting with the summer breeze, looking down as her fingers dragged furrows in the still surface. It had always amused her to drift that way, half conscious and half given over to revelry, but she had never experienced it while looking at a young man. It was a faintly disturbing sensation.
    The kettle brought her out of it, and as she fixed a cup of tea and knocked on the door to inquire if her father would like one, she tried to look out again and force her eyes to be clinical in their assessment. Yes, the young man was handsome, there was no mistaking that, but he was a German, too, and as she took the orders for her father and Lieutenant Peters, she mentally swept the young man into a pile with the other prisoners. She turned her attention to the pleasant job of fixing tea, and by the time she delivered two cups for the men, and one for herself, the German boy was gone anyway.
    As she returned to work, the tea warming her, she imagined the letter she could write to Estelle.
This young man
, she thought, then erased that and began again . . .
This young German soldier.
Estelle would see right through her.
    By sundown she had done as much as she could for one day. Her eyes hurt and her bottom felt sore from sitting. Her father planned to stay a little longer, and Lieutenant Peters was housed on the camp, so he would not return to the village. The weather had cleared and she decided to walk. Her father protested mildly, but he relented in the end.
    â€œYou put in a long day,” he said as she left his office.