An Unfamiliar Uniform
He was a *Hauptmann* in the Wehrmacht. She was sure of his rank later, when she had gone home and looked at the small chart of insignia that Jiří the sacristan had brought her in May folded inside a prayer card, but at the moment he stepped down to the landing she knew only that he was an officer, that he was perhaps forty, and that he was alone.
It was a Tuesday in the first week of August, in the middle of a heat wave. The river was low. The stone of the landing was warm under her feet through the leather of her shoes. She had done twenty-seven crossings already that morning and she was sitting on her bench with her sleeves pushed up, drinking a cup of water from the tap behind the signalman's hut, when she saw him coming down the steps.
He had a leather map case under his arm. His boots were dusty. He wore the field-grey summer tunic, open at the collar in the heat, and he carried his cap in his hand. He was not young. He had grey at the temples and the weathered skin of a man who had spent time outdoors in several countries. He did not look like the officers she had seen at a distance in Malostranské náměstí — not like the clean young lieutenants who patrolled the quarter in pairs and spoke to each other in a German she could hear two streets away. He looked, in fact, like a tired man at the end of a morning's walk.
He addressed her in German. She understood enough to