The Girl Who Spoke in Numbers

• Chapter 1: The Arithmetic of Absence
• Chapter 2: The Gates of Rivesaltes
• Chapter 3: A Cipher of Four Tongues
• Chapter 4: Mud and Manifests
• Chapter 5: The Commandant’s Ledger
• Chapter 6: Whispers Behind Block 8
• Chapter 7: The Translation of Hunger
• Chapter 8: Counting the Trains
• Chapter 9: A Name Without a Country
• Chapter 10: The Red Cross Ledger
• Chapter 11: Barbed Wire Geometry
• Chapter 12: The French Lesson
• Chapter 13: A Fraction of Hope
• Chapter 14: The Bureaucrat's Ink
• Chapter 15: Lost in the Registry
• Chapter 16: The Tramontane Wind
• Chapter 17: Smuggled Syllables
• Chapter 18: The Equation of Survival
• Chapter 19: A Brother’s Shadow
• Chapter 20: The Weight of Stamped Paper
• Chapter 21: Voices in the Barracks
• Chapter 22: The False Certificate
• Chapter 23: Calculating the Distance
• Chapter 24: The Unofficial Census
• Chapter 25: Zero on the Ledger
• Chapter 26: The Final Sum

The universe, so far as twelve-year-old Ana could determine, was composed entirely of numbers that refused to add up.

There were four languages in her head: the sharp, consonant-heavy German of her mother’s cradle songs; the melodic Spanish of the Barcelona schoolyard where she had learned to write; the soft, nasal Catalan spoken by the neighbors who brought fresh figs before the bombs started falling; and the clipped, formal French of the border guards who had pointed their rifles toward the south and told her family to move along. Yet despite this wealth of words, Ana had discovered that when a nation vanishes from a map, it takes its grammar with it. In the eyes of the French Republic in the cold autumn of 1939, Ana and her family were not people with four languages. They were indésirables espagnols—a single, heavy French phrase that meant they belonged to no one, possessed nothing, and were entitled to precisely zero square feet of earth.

Numbers were safer than words. Words changed depending on which side of the Pyrenees you were standing on, but five was always five. A kilometer was always a thousand meters, whether you walked it in leather boots or in canvas sandals with soles worn down to the frozen mud.

"Count the telephone poles, Ana," her mother, Marta, murmured. Her voice was thin, raspy from three days of breathing the chalky dust of the coastal road. "If you count, the road goes faster."

"Ninety-seven," Ana said, not looking up from her boots. "Since the last bridge. But the poles are thirty meters apart, Mama. That means we’ve only gone three kilometers."

"Then don't count the meters," her mother replied, pulling her worn wool shawl tighter around her shoulders. She reached down to grasp the hand of Ana’s eight-year-old brother, Stefan. "Count the steps."

"Stefan’s steps or mine?" Ana asked. "His are shorter. It takes him three hundred more steps per kilometer."

Stefan did not offer an opinion on his stride length. He was watching his left sandal, where the burlap strap had begun to fray into thin white threads. He had a habit of dragging his heel when he was tired, leaving a long, continuous line in the dust, like a pencil mark across a blank page.

Behind them lay the crushed hopes of the Spanish Republic; ahead of them lay the department of Pyrénées-Orientales, a landscape of wind-scoured vineyards, low grey scrub, and dry riverbeds. The sky was the color of unwashed tin. Tens of thousands of refugees stretched out along the road in a slow, dark ribbon—men with hollow cheeks carrying cardboard suitcases held together with string, women hauling wicker baskets lined with wet laundry, and children who had forgotten how to ask when they would stop.

Ana adjusted the canvas sack slung across her chest. Inside were their remaining possessions, a sum so small it required no ledger: two tin spoons, a pair of spare wool socks wrapped around a bar of lard soap, a small wooden comb with three missing teeth, and a folded sheet of blue paper stamped by the Catalan municipality of Figueres. The paper declared that one family—Marta Klein, widow; Ana Klein, daughter; Stefan Klein, son—had been cleared for transit. It did not declare where they were supposed to go once transit was completed.

To the border gendarmes, the blue paper was merely trash with ink on it. To Ana, it was a problem of division. One family divided by zero recognized countries equaled three ghosts.

"Look," Stefan whispered, pointing a dirty finger past the line of walking wounded. "Soldiers."

They were standing near a wooden barrier painted with red and white stripes. A French sergeant in a dark blue coat and a tall kepi stood on a crate, holding a clipboard stacked high with yellowing forms. He was flanked by two Senegalese Tirailleurs—colonial troops in khaki uniforms and red fezzes, their bayonets fixed to their rifles, standing stoically against the biting coastal wind known as the Tramontane.

The sergeant was shouting in French, a language Ana understood far better than she let on.

"Keep moving! Form a single line! Heads of household present your papers to the left! No baggage on the road!"

A man ahead of them, a former printer from Zaragoza with a heavy grey mustache, tried to explain in rapid Spanish that his wife was ill in a ditch two hundred meters back. He held out a handful of crumpled pesetas, as if the paper money of a collapsed government might buy a moment of pity.

The French sergeant didn't look up from his clipboard. "No Spanish. Speak French or move to the rear."

The printer looked around wildly, his hands gesturing toward the ditch. "My wife! Mi mujer! She cannot walk! Malade!"

"Back of the line," the sergeant muttered, making a tiny pencil check on his sheet. "Next."

Ana stepped forward before her mother could pull her back. She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the icy salt air, and adjusted her mental scales.

"Monsieur le sergent," Ana said, her voice small but clear, cutting through the low rumble of the crowd. Her French was stiff, learned from a second-hand primer her father had bought in Madrid three years ago, but her accent was clean. " Sa femme ne peut pas marcher. Elle est dans le fossé. Il demande seulement deux minutes pour la chercher."

The sergeant stopped his pencil. He tilted his head down, looking over the rims of his small, round spectacles at a twelve-year-old girl with dark, fierce eyes, a smudge of soot across her chin, and a jacket three sizes too big.

"You speak French, little one?" he asked, his tone shifting from bureaucratic roar to dry curiosity.

"I speak French, Spanish, German, and Catalan," Ana said plainly. "And I can count in four languages too."

The sergeant let out a short, puffing laugh that turned into a cloud of steam in the cold air. "Is that so? Well, four languages won't fix the printer's wife, nor will they clear this road before nightfall. Tell him he has five minutes. Five. If he is not back by the time I turn this page, he loses his place in the queue."

Ana turned to the printer instantly. "Tienes cinco minutos. Ve por ella. Corre."

The man didn't need to be told twice. He threw his hands up in a quick gesture of thanks and darted into the brush beside the road.

"What is your name?" the sergeant asked Ana, his pencil hovering over a blank margin on his form.

"Ana Klein."

"Nationality?"

Ana paused. The word was a trap. "We lived in Barcelona."

"That is a city, not a nation. Spanish?"

"My father was Austrian," Ana said. "My mother was born in Danzig. My brother and I were born in Valencia."

The sergeant sighed, rubbing his thumb over the edge of his paper. He didn't have a column for a girl born in Valencia to an Austrian father and a Danzig mother who lived in Barcelona. His form had three boxes: Français, Étranger, and Indésirable.

He checked the third box.

"Three of you?" he asked, glancing at Marta and Stefan.

"Three," Ana agreed. Then she looked down at the mud. "For now."

The process of becoming a number was slow, but it had a relentless logic. Every few hundred meters, another clerk with another wooden desk demanded another piece of information. They didn't want to know about the winter Stefan had the croup, or how Ana had memorized the multiplication tables up to twelve in a single weekend to impress her schoolmaster. They wanted ages, dates of birth, last known addresses, and the market value of any foreign currency left in their pockets.

Marta handed over three silver pesetas—all that remained of her husband’s savings—which a guard dropped into a iron box with a sharp, heavy clink. He did not record the deposit.

"That was thirty francs worth," Marta whispered softly, her fingers twitching against her skirt where her purse used to be.

"No, Mama," Ana corrected in a whisper. "At today's exchange rate in Perpignan, it's sixteen francs and fifty centimes. He took half for himself."

"Hush, Ana," Marta said, looking around nervously. "Do not argue with the man with the box."

"I am not arguing," Ana said. "I am calculating."

By late afternoon, the line of refugees reached a flat, grey plain flanked by the sea on one side and a wide, brackish lagoon on the other. The wind here was different; it came off the Mediterranean not as a gentle breeze, but as a relentless, howling wall of air that tore at coats and sent sand stinging into eyes.

In the distance, rising out of the salt marshes like a garden of wooden spines, were the bare ribs of a city that had not existed a month ago.

There were no houses here. There were no trees. There were only rows of long, narrow wooden barracks, their black tar-paper roofs flapping madly in the Tramontane. A perimeter of double-strand barbed wire stretched as far as the eye could see, punctuated at regular intervals by tall wooden watchtowers where guards stood wrapped in thick wool blankets.

A wooden sign, freshly painted in black lettering, hung from the main gate posts:

CAMP DE RIVESALTES
IL EST STRICTEMENT INTERDIT DE LONGÈR LES BARBELÉS

"What does it say, Ana?" Stefan asked, his small fingers tightening around hers until her knuckles turned white. He had been looking at the barbed wire for ten minutes without blinking.

"It says it's a camp," Ana said.

"Is it a school?"

"No," Ana said, watching a guard slam a heavy wooden gate shut behind a group of young men. "It's a holding place."

"Like the train station in Portbou?"

"Smaller," Ana lied. "And with more mud."

A French officer standing near the entrance was holding a megaphone made of rolled tin. He was reading from a list of names, his voice echoing over the wind in long, distorted squawks.

"Block Eight! Women and children under twelve! Block Four! Single men! Move quickly! Do not separate your belongings!"

The crowd surged forward, driven by cold, fatigue, and the desperate hope that the black tar-paper huts contained dry blankets or hot soup. But as the crowd pushed toward the narrow turnstiles, the guards began to divide the streams of people with long ash-wood batons.

"Men to the left!" a guard roared. "Women and children to the right! Boys over twelve to the left!"

Ana felt her mother’s grip tighten on Stefan’s collar. Stefan was small for eight, but he was wearing his father's old wool cap, pulled low over his ears, which made him look older, broader.

A guard planted his baton against Marta’s chest. "This one," he said, pointing his wooden stick at Stefan. "He goes with the men."

"No!" Marta’s voice cracked, the first time Ana had heard her mother sound truly terrified since the air raids in Girona. "He's eight! He's only eight years old!"

"Il a l'air plus âgé," the guard grunted, not looking at Stefan's face, only at the length of his coat. " Over ten goes to Block Four."

"He is eight!" Ana yelled, jumping between the baton and her brother. She reached into her canvas bag, her fingers frantically searching for the folded blue paper from Figueres. "Look at the paper! Regardez le papier! Born in 1931! Nineteen thirty-one! That makes him eight! Eight is less than ten!"

The guard paused, surprised by the fierce little girl shouting arithmetic in his face. He squinted at the blue paper Ana thrust under his nose. The ink was smudged by rain and thumbprints, but the numbers were clear enough: Stefan Klein, n. 14 de novembre de 1931.

The guard grumbled something under his breath, snapped his fingers, and shoved Stefan back toward Marta. "Move along then. Block Eight. Before I change my mind."

Marta collapsed onto her knees in the cold slurry of mud and sand, pulling Stefan into her arms so tightly the boy gasped. "Thank you," she sobbed into his hair, though whether she was thanking Ana, the guard, or God was unclear.

Ana didn't wait for an answer. She reached down, grabbed her mother’s elbow with all the strength her twelve-year-old arm could muster, and yanked her back to her feet.

"Don't stop, Mama," Ana said, her face set like stone. "If we stop, someone else will count us."

They passed through the gate. The wooden post on the left had a small metal plate nailed to it, bearing a five-digit number stamped into the brass: 04012.

Ana looked at it, recorded it in her mind, and added it to the tally of the day.

Inside Block Eight, there were no beds. There were no chairs, no tables, and no stoves. There was only a floor of bare pine planks laid directly over the sand, through which the cold wind whistled up from below like a draft from a basement keyhole. A thin layer of damp straw was scattered across the wood, already trampled into grey pulp by the hundred women and children who had arrived an hour earlier.

The room smelled of wet wool, tobacco, cheap antiseptic, and the distinct, bitter tang of old sweat.

Marta found a corner near a loose wallboard where the wind was slightly less aggressive. She sank down against the wood, her knees pulled up to her chest, her eyes fixed on the ceiling rafters where the tar-paper sagged under the weight of the evening condensation.

Stefan sat beside her, his hands tucked deep into his pockets, his lips blue. "Ana?" he whispered.

"Yes?"

"Where is Papa’s watch?"

Ana sat down on the straw, cross-legged, facing them both. She pulled her canvas sack onto her lap and unzipped the rusted brass slide.

"Papa's watch was traded for the bread in Figueres," she said quietly. "You ate your half on Tuesday."

"How many hours did the watch have left?" Stefan asked. He had always been obsessed with the small ticking circle of silver his father had carried in his vest pocket before the war took him away.

"It had twelve numbers," Ana said. "Just like every watch. But it doesn't matter now, because in this place, hours don't work the same way."

"How do they work?"

"They are longer," Ana said. She took a dry twig from the straw and began to draw a straight line in the grey dust between her boots. She marked three little notches along the wood.

"This was yesterday," she said, pointing to the first mark. "We walked thirty-two kilometers. That's thirty-two thousand meters. This is today," she pointed to the second mark. "We waited four hours in line, spoke to six clerks, and gave away three pesetas."

"And what is that one?" Stefan asked, pointing to the third mark, which had no label.

Ana looked toward the high, narrow window at the end of the barracks. Outside, through the dirty glass, she could see the dark silhouettes of the watchtowers rising against the twilight sky. Somewhere out there, across the sea of mud and barbed wire, were thousands of other people—men in Block Four, families in Block Two, names written in heavy black ledgers that no one was allowed to see.

"That's tomorrow," Ana said. She snapped the twig in two and placed the pieces side by side in the dust. "Tomorrow we start counting what's left."

A morning inside Block Eight did not begin with light, but with a sound like iron pots dropped onto flagstones. At five o’clock, two guards walked the length of the central corridor, striking the pine floorboards with the heels of their boots and beating the tin stove-flues with willow sticks. The stove had no fire in it—wood was a commodity distributed only to the administrative barracks on the north side of the compound—so the sound was entirely hollow, a metallic clang that reverberated through the hollow space under the planks.

Ana woke before the second clang reached their corner. Her knees were stiff; sleeping on a single layer of unthreshed rye straw over open planking meant that every draft coming off the salt marshes entered directly into her joints. She looked down at her hands. The knuckles were raw, chapped red by the alkali wind, but her fingers could still curl into an exact fist.

Beside her, Marta had not moved, though her eyelids fluttered in small, anxious tremors. Stefan was curled like an unbaked loaf of bread against their mother’s wool skirt, his thumbs tucked into the armpits of his oversized coat. Ana calculated the temperature by their breath: each exhale formed a distinct grey plume that lingered for three seconds before dissolving into the ceiling’s tar-scented condensation. That meant the room was five degrees above freezing. Outside, it was likely two.

The room held seventy-two women and forty-one children. Ana had made the count twice before falling asleep: nineteen Catalan mothers from the suburbs of Gerona, thirty-four women from Madrid who still wore the black mourning aprons of the previous winter, and a small knot of foreign wives—Poles, Austrians, Czechs—who had followed their volunteer husbands into the International Brigades and now found themselves dumped like excess ballast into the scrub of southern France.

"Out! Debout! Tout le monde dehors!"

The gendarme at the door was thirty years old, with grease spots on his collar and a mustache clipped short above his upper lip. He held a brass bell by its handle, swinging it without enthusiasm. Behind him stood an auxiliary guard with a stack of grey zinc ration disks.

The movement toward the door was not a line, but a heavy, shuffle-paced clot. People in the camp had already learned that to walk quickly was to invite a baton to the ribs, but to walk too slowly meant the zinc disks would run out before the tail of the group cleared the lintel. Ana stood up, shook the clinging yellow straws from her coat, and reached down to pull Stefan’s collar.

"Up, Stefan," she said in German, the language they used when they wanted things to happen immediately. "Feet on the floor. Now."

The boy grumbled, his eyes still gummy with sleep, but his boots hit the wood with an obedient thud. Marta rose with the slow, creaking deliberate movement of an old woman, though she was thirty-four. She patted her hair, tucked the graying wisps behind her ears, and smoothed the front of her apron as if she were stepping out onto the Carrer de Pelai to buy radishes instead of stepping into a muddy trench behind a latrine ditch.

"The paper," Marta said, her fingers fluttering to her collarbone where the Figueres transit slip was pinned inside her bodice with a rusty safety pin.

"I have it in my head," Ana said. "They won't ask for it this morning. Morning is only the bread count."

"Bread has a list, too," Marta said dryly.

They were herded out of the barracks into the raw light of the courtyard. The space was called l'îlot—an island of trampled yellow dirt three hundred paces long by one hundred paces wide, bounded by a three-strand wire fence that separated Block Eight from Block Seven. In the middle of the island stood a low concrete basin with six iron spigots. Four of the spigots were dry; from the fifth dripped a reddish, brackish water that smelled of sulphur and rust; the sixth had frozen solid during the night, a thick finger of ice hanging from its lip like tallow from an untrimmed candle.

The line for the bread led toward a wooden lean-to knocked together from crate timber. On the crates, still legible in blue ink, were the stencils: Bordeaux - Matériel du Génie.

A French corporal with hair the color of turnip skins sat behind a plank supported by two lard tubs. Beside him was an open wooden crate filled with rectangular loaves of brown bread, their crusts powdered with a greyish dust that was either mildew or dried turnip flour. A second crate held small, greasy chunks of salt pork, cut into cubes no larger than two sugar lumps.

"One per head," the corporal barked. He was not looking at the people, only at the space between his hand and their palms. "Take it and clear the lane. Do not return for seconds. Names are marked."

He had no ledger. Ana watched his eyes. He had only a wooden stick with five notches cut into its edge, which he turned in his fingers like a rosary. He wasn't keeping names; he was keeping a tally of forty loaves per box.

When Marta reached the plank, she reached out both hands, palms cupped together as if receiving communion. The corporal dropped one piece of bread into her hands—hard, dark, roughly three hundred grams—and one piece of pork.

"Three," Ana said, stepping forward. Her voice was flat and steady. "Nous sommes trois."

The corporal looked at Stefan, who was hiding his chin behind his mother’s hip. "The brat looks seven. Half rations under eight."

"He was eight on the fourteenth of November," Ana said, her French vowels snapping like dry twigs. "The decree of the Prefect of Perpignan, dated October twelve, specifies that children of eight years and older receive the adult complement of three hundred grams of bread and twenty grams of fat. Decrees are not split into halves, Monsieur."

The corporal’s hand hovered over the crate. He looked at Ana, then at the gendarme with the bell, who was leaning against the fence picking a bit of dried tobacco from his rear teeth.

"You're a sharp little goat, aren't you?" the corporal said. He did not sound angry; he sounded intensely, profoundly bored, with the vast and ancient boredom of a village clerk whose life had been reduced to counting lard. "Where did you get that French? Not from the ditch in Portbou."

"From books," Ana said. "And the decree was posted on the pillar at the station yesterday. Section four, paragraph two. Three portions, please."

The corporal reached into the crate, took out two more pieces of bread and two lumps of pork, and dropped them into Ana’s canvas sack with a heavy clonk. "Move along before I find a rule about insolent children."

"Thank you, Monsieur," Ana said, without an ounce of gratitude in the phrase. It was a transaction. Words for grams. A fair trade.

They took their breakfast to the shelter of the eastern wall of Block Eight, where the Tramontane wind hit the pine planks and split into two whistles, leaving a small pocket of dead air in the corner. Stefan broke his bread with his teeth, making a dry, cracking sound like a dog chewing a stick. Marta took tiny, mechanical bites, staring across the low barbed wire toward the road that ran through the camp’s central spine.

Between Block Eight and the administrative center lay the broad mud track known as the Avenue des Marais. It was empty except for a mule cart loaded with empty oil drums and two Senegalese soldiers walking with long, rhythmic strides, their bayonets catching the first pale rays of the November sun.

Beyond the road stood the gates.

They were not magnificent gates. They were merely two massive posts of peeled pine, sunk into the hard clay and braced with diagonal timbers, holding a pair of five-bar gates made of rough-sawn ash. Over the top ran a single timber upon which someone had tacked the camp regulations on six sheets of white paper, now curling at the edges from the damp. To the right of the gate stood the guardhouse: a square hut of tongue-and-groove boards with a sheet-metal chimney poking through the tar-paper roof. A blue spiral of woodsmoke drifted from the chimney—the only woodsmoke in the entire four square kilometers of Rivesaltes.

Around the guardhouse stood thirty or forty people. They were not waiting for bread. They were the ones who still believed in the existence of mail.

"Ana," Marta said, her fingers still holding the half-eaten crust. "Your father."

"Papa is not at the gate, Mama," Ana said gently. She was chewing her pork slowly, trying to coat her tongue with the grease so the salt would last through the morning. "Papa was in the hospital at Cerbère. That's sixty kilometers south. To get here he would need a pass from the Gendarmerie, two railway vouchers, and an escort. They do not give railway vouchers to men who cannot walk without two sticks."

"He has his cousin in Perpignan," Marta whispered. It was a fantasy she took out three times a day, like a small silver thimble from her pocket. "The cousin who had the glove business. On the Rue des Fabriques."

"The cousin moved to Oran five years ago," Ana said. "You know that. You wrote the address on the back of the sewing card."

Marta did not argue. She merely looked down at her fingers, where the grey camp mud was already working its way into the whorls of her fingerprints, making her hands look like the hands of someone who dug potatoes for a living.

"Someone has to ask," Marta said.

"I will ask," Ana said. She swallowed the last of the bread and stood up. She shook the dust from her coat—her father’s old overcoat, its sleeves turned back three times and pinned with safety pins so her wrists could clear the cuffs. "Stay with Stefan. If they call a roll, stand him on a box so he looks tall."

"Don't speak too much," Marta warned, her eyes darting toward the wire. "They don't like girls who talk like lawyers."

"I don't talk like a lawyer," Ana said. "Lawyers use adjectives. I only use the numbers."

The walk from Block Eight to the gate took one hundred and forty paces across the sticky mud. The mud at Rivesaltes was unlike the red dirt of Valencia or the gritty gravel of the Catalan foothills; it was a grey, plastic silt left behind by the Agly river over thousands of years of floods. It stuck to the soles of leather boots in thick, heavy cakes that grew thicker with every step until one’s feet felt like lead weights. Ana walked on the tips of her toes where the sand had drifted over the ruts, keeping her boots light.

At the barrier separating the women’s section from the central avenue, a guard was sitting on an overturned barrel, cleaning his fingernails with the point of an iron nail. He did not look up as Ana approached.

"Permission to speak to the clerk at the gate," Ana said in French.

The guard flipped the nail in his hand. "No passes today. The commandant is inspecting the water lines."

"I don't need a pass," Ana said. "I have an inquiry regarding the manifest from the train that arrived at noon yesterday from Portbou."

The guard raised his eyebrows. He was an older man, a reservist from some village in the Aude, with the heavy, red-veined cheeks of a man who drank half a liter of rough red wine before ten in the morning. "The train? What train?"

"The train with eight cattle trucks," Ana said. "Numbered MIDI 402 through 409. It stopped on the siding behind the brickworks at eleven forty-five. The men were unloaded and marched to Block Four. The manifest was carried into the guardhouse by a sergeant with a yellow pencil behind his ear."

The guard stared at her. "You saw all that through the wire?"

"Block Eight looks directly at the siding," Ana said. "The train had forty-two men per car. That's three hundred and thirty-six men. I only want to know if there is an Austrian name on the list for car six."

The guard spat into the dust. "Go ask the yellow pencil, then. But if the lieutenant comes out, you ran past me while I was looking the other way. Understood?"

"Understood," Ana said.

She slipped through the gap where the wire met the pine post. It was twenty paces across the open road to the guardhouse. The Tramontane was stronger here, unobstructed by the barracks; it smelled of dried sea-grass and the cold, diesel-soaked gravel of the rail line.

The guardhouse smelled of tobacco, chicory coffee, and wet woolen coats. A cast-iron stove in the center of the room was glowing dull cherry-red around its lower rim, radiating a dry, delicious heat that made the hair on Ana’s neck tingle through her shawl. Behind a counter made of raw floorboards sat two men. One was a sergeant in the colonial infantry, his jacket open to reveal a grey wool undershirt; the other was a young man in civilian clothes—a dark wool suit, threadbare at the elbows, with a stiff celluloid collar that had cut two red grooves into the skin of his throat.

The civilian had five ledgers open before him, each bound in black oilcloth with marble-paper edges. He was dipping a steel-nibbed pen into a square inkpot, making tiny, cramped notations in a script so precise it looked like rows of dead ants.

Outside the window, a group of fifteen or twenty men stood in the wind, their faces pressed against the glass, their breath misting the panes so that the clerk occasionally had to reach out with a dirty rag and wipe the inside of the window to see who was standing there.

Ana did not stand at the window. She stepped through the door, which was latched only with a piece of tarred string, and stood just inside the threshold, out of the draft.

"Out," the sergeant said, without looking up from his coffee mug. "No children in the bureau."

"I am an interpreter," Ana said.

The civilian with the pen stopped. A drop of purple ink hung from the split nib of his pen, trembling for a second before falling with a small, neat plip onto the blotter. He looked up. His eyes were pale grey, like rainwater in a lead bucket, and he wore small, oval spectacles that sat crooked on his nose.

"You are an interpreter?" he asked. His French had the nasal, singing cadence of the north, entirely different from the rough Catalan-tinted French of the local guards. "For whom do you work, mademoiselle?"

"For anyone who cannot say 'my leg is broken' or 'my brother is nine,'" Ana said. "Currently, for the sergeant at the barrier. But also for you, if you are working on the list from Portbou."

The sergeant laughed, a short bark that ended in a cough. "The brat has nerve, Delmas. Give her that."

The clerk—Delmas—did not laugh. He looked at the sheet under his hand. "Can you read German?"

"Yes."

"Gothic script?"

"The Fraktur or the Kurrent?" Ana asked. "The old people write Kurrent, with the long s that looks like an f. The newspapers use Fraktur."

Delmas pushed his spectacles up his nose with the knuckle of his middle finger. He reached into a wire basket on the corner of his desk and pulled out a bundle of papers. They were not official French forms; they were index cards, postcards, scraps of wrapping paper, and margins torn from newspapers, all written in pencil and covered with German names, addresses, and five-digit numbers.

"The Red Cross in Geneva sent these three days ago," Delmas said, his voice dropping into the quiet, flat register of a man who has too much work and too little ink. "They are inquiries from families in Zurich, Basel, and London looking for volunteers from the Thälmann Battalion. The battalion was disbanded in November. Some went to the beach at Argelès, some came here, some are in the fortress at Collioure. I cannot read the handwriting. The names are all consonants."

"They are not all consonants," Ana said, stepping toward the desk. The heat from the stove struck her face like a warm hand. "They are names from Saxony and Silesia. They have vowels, but the Germans put them in the middle where you can't hear them."

"Look at this one," Delmas said, sliding a grey postcard across the wood.

Ana looked. The handwriting was tiny, slanted violently to the right, written with a soft pencil that had smudged where someone’s wet thumb had rested.

"It says: Searching for Heinrich Meyer, born eighteen ninety-eight in Chemnitz. Last seen at the crossing of the Ebro, sector five. If alive, write to his sister, Grete Meyer, care of the Swiss Postal Bureau, Geneva."

"Is there an eight in the date?" Delmas asked, his pen hovering.

"Eighteen ninety-eight," Ana repeated. "August twenty-second. The number is eight, two, two, nine, eight."

Delmas wrote it down in his ledger. His pen made a dry, scratchy sound on the cheap wood-pulp paper.

"And this one?" He slid another scrap.

"Not German," Ana said, glancing at it. "Polish. But written by someone who went to school in Vienna. He is looking for a boy named Tadeusz. Ten years old. He has a scar on his left eyebrow."

"There are eighty boys named Tadeusz in Block Six alone," the sergeant remarked, stirring his coffee with the handle of a teaspoon. "Half of them have scars. Half of them don't have mothers."

Ana did not look at the sergeant. She kept her eyes on the ledger. The ledger was organized into six columns: Nom, Prénom, Date de Naissance, Nationalité, Provenance, Destination.

In the Nationalité column, the clerk had written the same word over and over again until his hand had clearly grown tired: Apatride. Apatride. Apatride.

"What does it mean?" Ana asked, pointing a small, brown finger at the word. "I know étranger. I know réfugié. What is apatride?"

Delmas looked down at his own handwriting, as if seeing it for the first time. "It means without a country. From the Latin patria. Legally, it means the state from which you originated has withdrawn its protection, and no other state has accepted the obligation to provide it."

"A country can withdraw its protection?" Ana asked.

"Germany did it to three hundred thousand people two years ago," Delmas said plainly. "Austria no longer exists to have an opinion on the matter. Spain is... well, General Franco has his own views on who belongs to Spain, and those people are currently behind our wire."

"So it is a zero," Ana said.

Delmas paused, the pen suspended half an inch above the inkpot. "A zero?"

"In arithmetic," Ana explained. "When you take four from four, you have zero. If you have no country, you are zero on the line. But a zero is still a number. You cannot multiply by it, but you can add it to an equation if you put it after another digit."

Delmas stared at her for three seconds. The oval spectacles slid a millimeter down the bridge of his nose. "Where did you learn arithmetic, mademoiselle?"

"My father," Ana said. "He had a shop in Vienna that sold scales. Large scales for grain, small scales for gold. He said that everything in the world had a weight, and if you knew the weight, you could find the price. When the men in brown shirts came to the shop, they broke the gold scales first, because they were the most delicate. Then they took the brass weights."

"And the father?" the sergeant asked, his voice less gruff now.

"He went to Spain," Ana said. "To drive an ambulance. He said an ambulance was just a scale on wheels—you put four wounded in, you take four wounded out. It should always balance."

"Is he here?" Delmas asked, his finger touching the edge of the large black ledger marked Entrées - Hommes.

"I don't know," Ana said. "He was at Cerbère. But my brother is here. He is eight. He has no shoes, only sandals made of string. And his name is not on any card from Geneva."

Delmas pulled the large ledger toward him. It was three inches thick, its spine reinforced with grey linen tape. "What was the father's name?"

"Karl Klein. Born in Linz, nineteen hundred and two."

Delmas turned the pages backward. The paper made a dry, rustling sound, like dead leaves in a gutter. His finger ran down the column of names—dozens of them, hundreds of them, all written in the same purple ink, all marked with the same designation: Indésirable.

He stopped near the bottom of page forty-six.

"Karl Klein," Delmas read. "Arrived thirty October. Camp de Saint-Cyprien."

Ana’s heart gave a single, hard thump against her ribs, like a stone dropped into a deep well. "Saint-Cyprien? That's on the beach."

"It was on the beach," Delmas said. "The storm three weeks ago washed out the south barracks. Half the camp was transferred to Gurs, the other half to the hospital at Perpignan. There is a note here in red ink."

He tilted the book toward the light from the small window.

"Transferred to the infirmary at Rivesaltes, sector C," he read. "Dated fifth of November."

Ana leaned over the counter. Her hands gripped the raw pine board so hard that a splinter entered the soft flesh beneath her thumbnail, but she did not let go. "Sector C? Where is Sector C?"

The sergeant looked up from his mug and pointed with his thumb toward the north window, where the double fence of barbed wire stretched out toward the low hills of the Corbières.

"Behind the old artillery park," the sergeant said. "Past the ditch. It's where they put the ones with the spots."

"The spots?"

"Typhus," Delmas said quietly. He closed the ledger with a heavy, flat sound that raised a small cloud of chalk dust from the desk. "No one goes into Sector C without an order from the Chief Medical Officer. And the Chief Medical Officer does not give orders to twelve-year-old girls."

"He gives orders to people who can speak to the patients," Ana said immediately.

"The patients are Spanish," the sergeant said.

"And Germans," Ana said, pointing to the ledger. "And Austrians. And Poles. The doctors are French. If a man from Linz has the fever, he cannot tell a French doctor where the pain is. He will say Kopfschmerzen, and the doctor will think he is asking for cabbage."

Delmas took off his spectacles and began to wipe them with the hem of his waistcoat. His eyes looked smaller without the glass, pale and tired, surrounded by dark, purple circles that showed how many hours he spent by the kerosene lamp.

"She has a point, Delmas," the sergeant muttered. "The medical officer was screaming yesterday because he couldn't get the names of the dead ones from the night shift. He had six bodies and four names. It makes the registers untidy."

Delmas put his spectacles back on, carefully hooking the thin gold wires behind his ears. He looked at Ana—not at her oversized coat, nor at her dirty chin, but directly into her eyes, which were steady, dark, and utterly devoid of tears.

"There is an intake office in Block One," Delmas said, speaking very slowly. "Every morning at eight, the medical officer, Dr. Morlot, attempts to complete the civil registry for the isolation barracks. He speaks only the French of Saint-Étienne, which is barely French at all. He needs someone who can tell the difference between a village in Galicia and a village in Silesia."

"I know them all," Ana said. "Silesia has two i’s and ends in a. Galicia can be in Spain or in Poland, depending on whether it has an e or an i."

Delmas picked up a small scrap of grey cardboard—a blank ration slip—and dipped his pen into the purple ink. He wrote three lines in his neat, microscopic hand:

Laissez-passer intérieur.
Pour la fille Ana Klein.
Service de traduction sanitaire.

He did not sign his own name. He stamped it with the circular blue rubber stamp of the Commandement Militaire du Camp, which sat in an open wooden box beside his elbow. The stamp was faint, the ink having dried out during the night, but the words RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE were clearly visible around the perimeter.

"This is not a permit to leave," Delmas said, handing her the slip. "If you try to go near the main road to Perpignan, the Senegalese will shoot you without asking for your grammar. This is only to let you walk between Block Eight and Block One without being put in the lockup."

Ana took the card. The ink was still wet; she blew on it twice, exactly as she had seen her father blow on his ledger pages after writing down the weight of a shipment of watch movements.

"What is your name?" she asked the clerk.

"I told you. Delmas."

"Your first name."

"Jean," he said, already dipping his pen again to return to his list of dead ants. "Jean-Luc. Not that it matters to the register."

"It matters," Ana said, slipping the card into the inner pocket of her coat, right beside the blue paper from Figueres. "Now there are three names in this camp that I know. Stefan, Marta, and Jean-Luc."

"Go," Delmas said, though his pen didn't move until she had turned toward the door. "Before the lieutenant comes back from his tea."

Ana stepped out into the wind.

The Tramontane had shifted slightly, coming now from the northwest, off the snow-covered peaks of Mount Canigou which rose like an enormous white molar against the southern horizon. The air was colder now, but cleaner.

She walked back along the Avenue des Marais, her boots moving easily over the mud. She did not run; running attracted the batons. She walked with the steady, measured stride of a girl who had eighty kilometers behind her and thirty-two thousand meters ahead.

As she passed the corner of Block Seven, she saw Stefan.

He was standing by the wire, his hands through the links, his small face pressed against the galvanized steel until his nose was flattened white. On the other side of the wire, in the courtyard of Block Six—the boys' barracks—three children were throwing a ball made of old newspapers wrapped in telephone wire.

Stefan wasn't watching the ball. He was watching their feet. One of the boys was wearing a pair of boots made of real calfskin, though the left toe had separated from the welt and flapped with every kick like the mouth of a hungry carp.

"Stefan," Ana called softly.

The boy turned. His cheeks were grey with dust, and his nose was running, but his eyes were bright.

"Ana," he whispered through the mesh. "The boy with the red cap says there's a horse behind the kitchen."

"There are no horses here," Ana said, reaching through the wire to wipe his upper lip with the corner of her sleeve. "Only the commandant's car, and that runs on petrol."

"He says it died yesterday," Stefan insisted. "He says if you have an iron spoon, you can scrape the tallow from the wheels of the water cart."

"We don't need tallow," Ana said. She took his cold, small hand through the wire and held it against her ribs, where the little piece of grey cardboard was tucked inside her coat like an extra layer of wool. "We have work."

"What work?"

"We are going to find where they keep the names," Ana said. "And when we find the names, we will find where they put the people who belong to them."

Stefan looked at her with the absolute, unquestioning trust of an eight-year-old who had never known a world where adults didn't have papers. "Is Papa a name now?"

"Yes," Ana said, looking toward the distant rows of low black huts in Sector C, where the smoke from the isolation stoves was just beginning to rise into the cold sky. "He is on page forty-six. That means he has a number. And as long as he has a number, he cannot be zero."