She thought about the phrase itself spoke to her like a person and the fact that Martya who had survived Dresden and the loss of everything that Aven implied and who had a precision of language that came from long practice in communicating exactly what was meant and nothing more had chosen those particular words not kindly or professionally or adequately but like a person as though that were the relevant category as though it were the category most in need of noting.

In the days that followed, Ranada remained in the infirmary, and the doctor’s visits to the compound became a recurring feature of Ilsa’s observation in the way that anything repeated in a small space becomes impossible to ignore.

He came twice daily, once in the morning as part of what appeared to be a general infirmary round, and once in the late afternoon for a shorter visit that she came to associate with check-ins on patients he was monitoring.

He moved through the compound with the same composed efficiency she had noted from the beginning, acknowledging guards and women with the same brief nod.

Carrying his bag when he came from the infirmary and sometimes without it when he came from the administrative building.

Always reading something or writing something in transit.

Always using the time between points as though he had long since decided that in used minutes were a resource he could not afford to waste.

She began to learn small things about him from observation and from the fragments of information that circulated through the compound in the informal exchange of details that constitutes the social life of any enclosed community.

His name was Captain William Jarvis.

He was from Philadelphia.

He had been a practicing physician for 6 years before the war internal medicine with additional training in infectious disease that made him particularly valuable in the field hospital context.

He spoke no German, which was why the orderly was always near.

But he had apparently learned enough individual words and phrases to manage the most basic direct communications.

And the women who had spent time in the infirmary reported that he used these fragments judiciously, not as performance, but as courtesy, as a small gesture toward the space between languages that cost him something to attempt, and that he attempted anyway.

What reached Ilsa about him most persistently was not any single observation, but the accumulation of them.

The way each small piece of information added to the picture without resolving it into anything simple or neat.

She had been given a story about what a black man was and what he was capable of.

And the story had been specific and consistent and had come from sources she had been trained to trust.

And now she had this other account being assembled in real time from her own observation.

and the two accounts were irreconcilable in a way that she could not indefinitely defer a dressing.

She deferred it anyway because she had not yet found the terms on which to conduct the reckoning and because the deferral was easier than the alternative.

Ranata improved slowly over the following days and word of her improvement moved through the compound in small increments.

She had sat up, she had eaten something, she was expected to return to the barracks within the week.

These updates were carried primarily by the women who had been assigned to kitchen or cleaning duties near the infirmary who had better access to the orderly and to the nurses.

And they were received with the disproportionate attention that small pieces of good news receive in enclosed places where the emotional weather of the group is sensitive to any shift in the prevailing conditions.

It was during this period on an afternoon in early May when the light was lasting longer and the yard was warm enough that women were sitting outside after the evening meal rather than retreating immediately to the barracks that Elsa found herself in conversation with a woman named Latte who had been in the compound for 3 weeks and who had a directness about her that came.

Elsa suspected from the particular freedom of someone who had already revised her assumptions several times and had stopped being embarrassed about the revision.

Latte was from Hamburg, 41 years old, with a school teacher’s habit of making her points clearly and without decoration.

She had been talking about the compound generally about the routines, the food, the guards, all of it delivered with a calm appraisal that Elsa found unexpectedly comfortable to listen to.

And then she said that she wanted to tell Elsa something about Dr.

Jarvis that she thought Elsa should know.

Latte said it without drama, looking at the yard rather than at Elsa, which made it easier to hear.

She had been in the infirmary 2 weeks ago with a chest infection that had come on quickly and badly.

Bad enough that for 2 days she had not been certain which direction things were moving in.

and Jarvis had come in on the second night, not during scheduled rounds, but at 2 in the morning, called by the night nurse who had been concerned about the change in Latte’s breathing.

Latte had been conscious enough to be aware of his arrival.

And what she remembered most clearly, she said, pressing her hands together in her lap, was that he had sat down on the chair beside her cod and stayed for nearly an hour, monitoring, adjusting, keeping watch, and that at some point in that hour she had asked him through the orderly, who had apparently also been called in at 2:00 in the morning, a fact that registered its own particular significance, whether she was going to be all right.

And he had looked at her directly and said that he was going to do his best, and that his best was considerable, and that the manner in which he said it was not a boast or a comfort offered to silence a question, but simply an accurate statement of fact, delivered with the same composure he brought to everything else, and that she had believed him, and that in believing him, she had experienced the first genuine sense of safety she had felt in a very long time.

She said all of this looking at the yard, and when she finished, she was quiet for a moment, and then she said that she had thought about what to make of it for 2 weeks and had not arrived at a single clean conclusion, and that she supposed Elsa might find it useful to know.

Elsa sat with this and found that she had nothing immediate to say, no response that felt proportionate because what Latte had described was not an argument or a contradiction or even an evidence.

It was something simpler and more difficult, which was a person doing her best to tell the truth about what had happened to her in a room at 2:00 in the morning when the question of which side anyone was on had been entirely beside the point.

The evening light was long and golden over the compound fence.

Somewhere in the yard, a woman was humming something low and half-formed.

The sound carried without words across the gravel and the still air.

And Ilsa sat and listened to it and thought about two in the morning and an hour of careful watching and a man who had been awake when he did not have to be attending to a woman who belonged.

In the official ledger of the world, they all still technically inhabited to the other side.

Ranata returned to the barracks on a Thursday morning, walking slowly but without assistance.

carrying the thin blanket from her infirmary cot folded over one arm because she had apparently become attached to it in the way that people become attached to objects that were present during difficult periods.

Not for any quality the object possesses, but for what it witnessed.

She was thinner than she had been, which for a woman who had already been thin from months of inadequate wartime rations meant that the angles of her face were more pronounced.

The hollows under her eyes deeper, her hands when she set the blanket down on her bunk looking like the hands of someone older than her 30 years.

But she was upright and she was present, and she looked around the barracks room with the slightly dazed gratitude of a person returning to ordinary life from somewhere that had briefly threatened to become permanent.

The women in the room received her with the quiet warmth of a small community that had been tracking her progress from a distance and was now able to close the distance.

Someone had saved her a portion of the morning bread.

Someone else had straightened her bunk in the day she had been away had kept the shelf clear and the blanket folded.

A gesture so small as to be almost invisible and so considered as to mean a great deal.

Ranata sat on the edge of her bunk and ate the bread and looked at these things and said, “Thank you.

” you in the way people say thank you when they mean something considerably larger than the words themselves contain.

Elsa watched this from across the room and thought about Latte’s account of the night at 2:00 in the morning, which had stayed with her in the days since the conversation with an insistence that she could not entirely account for.

It was not that the account was dramatic.

It was in fact notable for the absence of drama, for its specificity and its restraint.

It was that the account was credible.

Not because Latte was a particularly convincing speaker, though she was, but because the details she had offered were not the details a person invents when constructing a story to make a point.

They were the details a person notices when they are lying in an infirmary caught at 2 in the morning trying to determine whether they are going to survive.

Which is to say, they were the details of reality rather than of argument.

And reality had a texture that argument could not replicate.

Elsa had spent enough of her life reading closely enough to understand the difference.

What she was less certain about was what the account required of her in return.

Recognition perhaps.

Acknowledgement that the category she had placed this man in, the category constructed for her over years by a system that needed those categories to maintain itself was inadequate to contain the actual person.

This recognition did not arrive with any particular ceremony.

It arrived in the manner of most genuine reckonings, which is quietly and inconveniently without providing any immediate relief or resolution, simply depositing itself into the ongoing account of things she now knew and could not unknow.

She was a woman who had spent the last several years surrounded by certainty, by a culture that had organized itself entirely around certainty, around the conviction that the categories it had constructed were real and fixed and required no further examination.

The experience of uncertainty, of genuinely not knowing how to classify what she was observing, was in some ways more disorienting than anything else the compound had produced.

Kathy, for her part, had begun doing the shoulder exercises from Jarvis’s notepad page with the discipline of a former medical professional who understands that recovery protocols work only if followed precisely and consistently.

She did them each morning before breakfast, standing near the window in the early light with her coat off despite the chill, moving her arm through the prescribed range with a concentration that admitted nothing extraneous.

Elsa had watched her do this for several mornings without comment.

And then one morning, Cathy, without looking away from the window, had said that the adhesion was loosening, that she had regained approximately 15° of range in the posterior rotation, and that the protocol was correctly designed for the specific injury pattern.

She said this the way she said most things without apparent emotional investment, as a report rather than a reflection.

and Elsa had said that was good and Cathy had agreed that it was and that had been the end of the exchange.

But what it contained, Ilsa thought, was something that Cathy was unlikely to say in plain language, which was that she had been examined competently and treated correctly, and that the person who had done these things had known what he was doing in exactly the way that mattered, which was technically and thoroughly.

The days were growing longer now, and the light was lasting past 7 in the evening, which changed the quality of the late afternoon in the compound in a way that was difficult to name, but clearly felt.

There was more time in the yard after dinner, more time for the informal gatherings that had become the primary social structure of the compound.

small clusters of women sitting on the wooden benches along the yard walls or walking the slow circuits of the perimeter that had become a kind of moving conversation, a way of talking while in motion that preserve the option to disengage without the awkwardness of leaving a seated group.

Elsa had come to appreciate these circuits.

She had walked them with Cathy, with Hilda, with Latte twice more since the evening of the infirmary account, and on one occasion with Marta, who had spoken during that walk more than she had spoken in the entire previous week.

Not about Dresden or her husband or the war specifically, but about the kitchen, about Henderson’s cooking, about a recipe he had attempted one afternoon with obvious enthusiasm and questionable results that had caused the kitchen women to exchange looks over his shoulder with the diplomatic restraint of people who understand that criticism requires a shared language they do not yet have.

It was one of these evenings, the light long and warm and the air carrying the first actual warmth of the year that Elsa encountered Jarvis outside the infirmary in a context that was not clinical.

He was sitting on the low stone step outside the infirmary side entrance.

His white coat off, his uniform jacket unbuttoned at the collar, a metal cup of coffee in his hand, looking at the middle distance with the slightly unfocused expression of a person who has been working since early morning and has finally found 15 minutes that belong to no particular task.

He had a small notebook open on his knee, not a medical chart, but something smaller and more personal, and he was writing in it in a loose, unhurried hand that was entirely different from the compressed professional script she had seen him use in the infirmary.

He did not see her immediately because she had come around the corner of the building from an angle that was outside his field of vision, and by the time he looked up, she was already close enough that stopping would have been more conspicuous than continuing.

He nodded.

the same brief professional nod she recognized.

She nodded in return.

She would have kept walking except that the orderly was sitting on the step beside him.

She had not noticed the orderly at first.

And the orderly said something to Jarvis in English.

And Jarvis looked at her again with an expression that was attentive without being demanding.

And the orderly said in German that the doctor wanted to know how she was finding the compound, whether there was anything she needed from the medical side.

It was a routine question.

clearly the kind of thing he asked because he was a physician in a facility full of people whose health was his responsibility and it required only a routine answer and she gave him one that she was well that she had no medical concerns that she was grateful for the care given to her colleague with the shoulder injury.

The orderly translated this and Jarvis listened and then said something that the orderly rendered as he was glad the shoulder was improving that it was a manageable condition with consistent attention and that she should have her colleague come back in 2 weeks for a follow-up.

That would have been the end of it.

A brief and practical exchange entirely in keeping with the professional register he maintained in all his compound interactions.

But then something small happened that was not practical and not professional and not in keeping with any register she had been prepared for.

He looked down at the notebook on his knee and then he looked back at her and said something short that the orderly translated simply as he is sorry about the war about what it has cost people on both sides and that he hopes the coming months are easier than the ones behind.

Then he picked up his coffee and returned his attention to the notebook, and the conversation was over as cleanly as it had begun.

Elsa walked away from that step with the careful pace of someone who was preventing themselves from walking too quickly, and she went to the far end of the yard and stood near the fence and looked at the road beyond it for a long time.

The road was empty.

The evening light was falling at a low angle across the fields on the other side and making the new grass look almost luminous.

that particular green of spring in Bavaria that she had known her entire life and that looked different now in a way she could not entirely attribute to the quality of the light.

She thought about what he had said, not the specific words, those were simple enough, but the fact of saying them, the choice to say them, the understanding that would have been required to arrive at the decision that this was something worth saying to a woman standing outside a building in a prisoner of war compound in Bavaria in May of 1945.

he had nothing to gain from saying it.

This was the thought that returned to her most insistently over the following hours because she was aware that one of the defenses she had maintained against the evidence accumulating around her was the argument that American treatment of prisoners was a strategy, a performance designed to produce docsil captives and favorable reports to the Red Cross.

That the kindness and the food and the medical care were investments rather than gestures.

It was a coherent argument and she had found it useful.

But a man sitting on a stone step with his jacket unbuttoned and a personal notebook on his knee saying to a stranger that he was sorry about what the war had cost was not performing for any audience.

The orderly was there but the orderly was not an audience in any meaningful sense.

There was no one to impress, no report to affect, no calculus of prisoner management that required this particular exchange.

It was simply a person saying something true to another person and then returning to his coffee and his notebook because that was apparently the kind of person he was.

She stood at the fence until the light went flat and the fields across the road lost their luminosity and became simply fields in the early evening, ordinary and particular and thoroughly themselves.

Behind her, she could hear the sounds of the compound settling into its nighttime state, voices diminishing, the creek of Barack doors, the footsteps of the guard rotation moving along the perimeter.

She thought about her father’s shop in Munich, the smell of it, the glass case of mechanisms, the quality of attention he had brought to small and intricate things.

He had been a man who said what he meant and meant what he said.

and she had valued this in him without fully understanding what it meant to value it until she was older, until she had lived long enough to encounter the alternative.

She thought about the years of official language she had moved through, the language that said one thing and men another, that named things incorrectly, so consistently that the incorrect names had come to seem correct, that had built an entire description of the world on the premise that certain categories of people were less than what they were.

and she thought about a physician from Philadelphia sitting on a stone step with a notebook and saying I am sorry about the war said simply and without expectation of anything in return offered into the space between them as the only honest thing available in a moment that could have contained nothing at all.

She walked back to the barracks slowly in the last of the light.

Marta was already on her bunk reading something from the shelf in the recreation room.

Kathy was at the window doing the last of her evening shoulder exercises with the same focused economy she brought to everything.

Hilda was asleep or close to it, her breathing slow and her face carrying and sleep the particular openness that worry usually obscured.

Elsa sat on her bunk and unlaced her boots and set them side by side under the shelf and laid back and looked at the ceiling and listened to the compound going quiet around her.

She did not try to organize what she was feeling into conclusions.

She only lay with it.

The way you lie with something that is too large and too newly arrived to be put into the correct order yet.

And let the darkness come in around the edges of the window.

And let the sounds of the night outside the fence be what they were, which was ordinary, which was the sound of a world that continued regardless of what any particular person had believed about it.

a world that had always been more complicated and more various than the story told about it.

And that was only now in the specific and irreversible way of direct experience, beginning to make itself known to her in its actual dimensions.

The morning Ranata was well enough to walk the yard circuits was a Monday, 12 days after her return to the barracks, and there was nothing ceremonial about it.

She simply appeared after breakfast in the yard with her coat on and her hands in her pockets and began walking slowly with the deliberate pace of someone relearning a thing the body has temporarily forgotten.

Elsa fell into step beside her without being asked because the yard circuits had become her own habit.

And because Ranata’s pace matched the pace she had settled into herself, that particular speed that is not quite slow enough to seem purposeless, but not fast enough to preclude attention to things on either side.

They walked without speaking for the first circuit, which suited them both, and the morning air was cool enough to see their breath, and the gravel was still damp from overnight rain, and the guard in the nearest tower was reading something.

his rifle leaning against the rail beside him with the posture of a tool set down between uses.

On the second circuit, Ranata said without preamble that she wanted to tell Elsa something about the infirmary, about the night she had spent there, and Elsa said that she was listening.

Ranata spoke slowly, choosing her words with the care of someone who has rehearsed a thing internally many times, and is now discovering that the rehearsed version and the spoken version are different in ways that require adjustment.

She said that there had been a night, the third night, when the fever had been at its worst, when she had been conscious enough to know what was happening to her, but not conscious enough to manage the fear that came with that knowledge, and that Jarvis had come in and had sat beside the cod, and had spoken to her through the orderly in a voice that was low and steady, and that did not contain any of the specific reassurances she had been expecting.

none of the it will be fine or you will recover that people say in those situations because they cannot think of what else to say.

What he had said instead was a series of precise and accurate statements about what her body was doing and what the treatment was addressing and what the likely progression of the following hours would be.

And he had said these things not because he thought clinical information was what she needed emotionally, but because he understood, she thought that what she actually needed was to be treated as someone capable of receiving accurate information, as someone whose intelligence and dignity were, not suspended by the fact of being ill and frightened in an enemy facility in a foreign country.

He had talked to her, she said, the way you talk to someone you respect.

Elsa listened to this and walked and said nothing for a while.

And then she said that she believed her, that it was consistent with what she had observed.

And Ranata nodded, and they continued walking.

The sun had come through the clouds by this point, and the wet gravel was beginning to dry in patches, the lighter patches spreading slowly as the morning warmed around them.

The yard was filling with the midm morning activity of women who had finished their assigned work for the first half of the day.

Some sitting against the south wall in the sun, some in small groups talking.

One woman near the recreation building attempting to teach another woman a card game and meeting with what appeared to be patient resistance.

Ordinary life or the closest approximation to it that the compound structure permitted.

Elsa looked at all of it and thought that this was something she would not have been able to name 2 weeks ago and could name now, which was that ordinary life was not a thing that belonged to one side of a fence or one side of a war.

that it asserted itself in enclosed spaces and strange places with the same persistence it showed everywhere else.

And that the women sitting in the sun against the south wall were not performing normaly as a defense against their situation but were simply factually normal human beings spending a morning in a yard in the way that human beings spend mornings when the acute emergency has passed and the longer slower work of continuing has begun.

She thought about Hilda, who had been frightened of these soldiers, specifically frightened with the particular vividness of someone whose fear had been constructed from images and language rather than from experience, and who had spent the past 2 weeks quietly and incrementally replacing those images with other ones.

with the private who handed her bread without looking at her, with the corporal who had helped a woman carry a heavy crate without being asked, with the accumulated minor.

Evidence of men doing a job and doing it without cruelty, without the specific dangers that the propaganda had promised were inherent and inevitable.

Hilda had not articulated any of this as a revision or a conclusion.

She would not probably she was not constitutionally a person who summarized her own changes of mind.

But the fear had changed its quality had lost the particular edge of anticipatory dread and become something more like ordinary uncertainty.

The uncertainty of someone in an unfamiliar situation rather than someone in a specifically threatened one.

Elsa had noticed this the way she noticed most things gradually and without announcement, filing it alongside everything else.

She thought about Kathy, whose shoulder exercises had become a kind of daily testimony, performed each morning with the same consistency and precision that she brought to everything she valued, which meant that the notepad page from Jarvis’s examination had been placed in the category of things Cathy valued, a category that was not large and that did not admit objects of questionable quality.

Cathy had said very little about any of this and would continue to say very little, but the doing was its own kind of statement.

The 15 degrees of recovered range of motion, its own kind of evidence.

And Elsa had learned to read Cathy in the currency.

She actually delved in, which was action rather than declaration.

She thought about Martya, who had come back from the kitchen one evening the previous week, and sat on her bunk and said in the quiet way she said all things, that Henderson had taught her an American recipe for cornbread.

That she had made it herself that afternoon, and that it was very good, different from anything she knew, sweeter and denser than German bread, with a texture that was difficult to describe, and that she was going to write it down and keep it.

She had said this without apparent larger meaning in the same tone she might have used to report any practical information.

But Elsa had understood that the keeping of the recipe was not about the bread.

It was about the acknowledgement that something encountered on this side of the fence was worth carrying back, worth preserving, worth the small act of recording it in her own hand so that it could travel with her when she eventually went home to whatever home had become.

They were approaching the end of their third circuit of the yard when Ranata said something that had been sitting in Ilsa’s own mind for days without finding its way into language.

She said that what she kept returning to lying in the infirmary at night with the sounds of the compound outside and the low light of the night nurse’s lamp and the particular silence of a medical space in the small hours was not gratitude exactly, though gratitude was part of it and not guilt exactly.

Though guilt was part of it too, but something that sat between the two and was harder to name.

The recognition that she had been given a story about the world that was not the world and that the gap between those two things had nearly cost her the chance to discover the difference.

That she had spent years inside a description of reality that served a particular purpose.

And that she had inhabited that description with the unquestioning acceptance of someone who does not know they are inside a description because they have never been shown the outside of it.

And that the outside of it, when it finally presented itself, had not presented itself as an argument or a reputation or an ideological counterposition, but simply as a man sitting beside a cot in the middle of the night, doing his job with competence and care, speaking to her as though she were a person worth speaking to carefully.

Elsa stopped walking, not dramatically.

She simply stopped and Ranata stopped beside her and they stood in the middle of the yard in the late morning sun and Elsa looked at the infirmary building at the north end of the compound, the red cross on the roof catching the light.

And she held what Ranata had said alongside everything she had been accumulating since the road outside Reagansburg, since the farmyard and the soup and the barn and the intake desk and the mess hall and the examination room and the step outside the infirmary where a man had closed his notebook briefly and said something about the war and the cost of it and then opened his notebook again.

All of it together, the full weight of it, which was not the weight of a single dramatic revelation, but the accumulated weight of many small ones, each unremarkable in isolation, each adding its increment to a total that had been building for weeks without her permission.

She did not cry.

She had not cried since the road, and she would not cry now.

Not because she was suppressing anything, but because what she was experiencing was not the kind of thing that produces tears, which tend to accompany acute events, sudden arrivals of emotion.

What she was experiencing was something slower and more fundamental, a long structural shift, the kind of change that happens below the surface in the loadbearing parts of things.

And that makes itself known not through eruption, but through the quiet and irreversible settling that follows when a false weight has been removed and the true shape of something can finally be seen.

The Germany she had served was gone.

She had known this intellectually since the surrender, since the news had moved through the barracks with its strange mixture of devastation and relief.

But knowing it intellectually was different from knowing it in the way she was knowing it now, standing in this yard, which was that the Germany she had served had been built on a description of the world that the world itself had declined to confirm.

Everything it had told her about who was dangerous and who was capable and who deserved what treatment under what circumstances had been tested here against actual evidence and had failed the test so consistently and completely that the failure could not be attributed to exception or anomaly.

It was systemic.

The lie was structural, and the truth assembled piece by piece over these weeks from observations so ordinary and undramatic as to seem almost insufficient to the size of what they were dismantling, was simply that the categories had been false, and the people placed inside them had always existed outside their boundaries, living their actual lives with actual competence and actual humanity in the space between what the categories claimed and what the world contained.

She began walking again and Ranada walked beside her and they completed the circuit in silence and then stood near the entrance to the barracks building where the morning sun fell warmly on the stone wall.

From inside the compound came the sound of a door and then footsteps and Jarvis came out of the infirmary carrying his bag and his chart folder moving toward the administrative building with his characteristic focused pace reading as he walked the stethoscope swinging slightly with each step.

He did not look up.

He had patience to attend to and notes to write and rounds to complete and a day full of the work that had been his before the war and would be as after it.

The work that he had carried with him through everything and that existed entirely independently of what any government or doctrine or propaganda apparatus had ever said about what he was or was not capable of.

Ilsa watched him cross the yard until he reached the administrative building and went inside.

And then she looked at the door for a moment after it had closed behind him.

And then she looked at the road beyond the fence, which was empty in the clear morning light, and at the fields beyond the road, where the spring grass was growing with the steady and indifferent abundance of things that do not wait for human events to resolve before continuing.

Somewhere in those fields, a bird was calling.

the same bird or another bird.

Or perhaps birds had been calling every morning and she was only now hearing them clearly now that certain other sounds had grown quieter.

She turned and went inside.

The barracks room was warm and carried the smell of the morning.

Coffee from the mess hall still faint in the fabric of the walls, the wool of blankets, the clean wood of the shelf where her Schiller sat beside the small collection of objects she had accumulated since arriving.

a button, a folded letter from home, not yet replied to, a pebble from the road outside Reagansburg that she had picked up without fully understanding why, and had carried in her coat pocket until it had become too habitual to remove.

She sat on her bunk and picked up the pebble and held it in her palm.

It was unremarkable, gray, and smooth, the kind of stone that exists in its millions on every road in Bavaria.

She had picked it up on the morning of April 22nd before the trucks came around the bend when the world she had been living in was still technically intact.

She had been carrying it since.

She would carry it home, she thought, when home became a possibility again, not as a symbol of anything particular, simply as a thing that had been with her through this, that had occupied the same coat pocket as her fear and her confusion and her slow, reluctant, necessary revision of the story she had been given about the world, a small gray stone from a road in Bavaria, picked up at the end of one thing and the beginning of something else, the nature of which she did not yet fully know, and could not yet fully name, but that she understood.

 

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