MARLENE MUST’VE SPENT WEEKS preparing. She had maps and travel guides that she had read from cover to cover, as was clear from the yellow Post-it notes that were sticking out between the pages. And she also had a folder in her bag stuffed with papers. She had borrowed her mother’s letters from Vera and made copies of them. Anne saw her flipping through them in the lobby of their Danzig hotel and already thought of taking off, and their trip hadn’t even started.
“My greatest wish, my only one.” It was Marlene’s sixtieth birthday. Thomas had a good reason for not being there. He was traveling to Melbourne for a concert, and nothing could be done. But Anne didn’t have an excuse, so she cursed and went along.
Single rooms at least. Ten days of sharing a room and they’d kill each other.
She’d almost forgotten what it was like to travel with her mother. Marlene’s mode of walking was a working canter. She didn’t travel as other people did. She slogged, plowed through landscapes and cities until she’d seen and knew everything there was to know.
So now they were going to East Prussia, Mazuria, by minibus, and even Marlene was too young for this journey. Born after the war, she couldn’t be homesick for the land of the dark forests. Anne had no idea what Marlene was looking for.
It was Vera who ought to have made the journey. Marlene had almost begged her to accompany her, but Vera didn’t travel, since it would mean leaving her house, which was out of the question. “And I’m certainly not going there!” Vera was happy when she could forget. The last thing she wanted was to be reminded.
Marlene made a list of villages and towns that her mother had described in her letters to My dear Vera. She wanted to look for the manor house of the von Kamckes and drive in the minibus through the tree-lined avenues that Hildegard had trudged through with her children in the deep snow and at minus four degrees in January. And then go to the lagoon, of course. They all wanted that when they traveled through Mazuria in German buses. They wanted to stand at the edge of the water in their sand-colored windbreakers, refugees with white hair who had stood there once before, chilled to the bone and driven away along with their mothers.
The tour guide knew his clientele, the old folks with their broken souls, hoping for a little healing. He drove them to the lakes and the storks and the amber-stone beaches, to Nikolaiken, Heiligelinde, and Steinort. He knew that at some point during the ten days, at some lake or other, in front of an old house or in a church, a trembling voice would sing “The Land of the Dark Forests.” Someone started it off on every trip, and then he’d hand out the words, five verses, and he always joined in himself, miracles of light across wide fields. Then the whole bus would sing along and everyone would cry.
He drove them to the houses they were born in. Some were too shaken up to get out of the minibus; others worked up the courage and knocked on the door, and the interpreter accompanied them. The Polish families were friendly for the most part, asked them in, showed them around, posed in the doorway for a photo with a smile, shook their hands, and waved at the strangers as they climbed back into their buses.
The old people then sank into their seats and didn’t look as though they’d been healed. They looked to Anne like people who’d undergone surgery again, been cut open and sent home too early, at their own risk.
Marlene sat in the window seat, commented on every poppy and every street sign, and made notes in her travel journal like a model student. She sighed at every pothole and let out a moan every time they passed another vehicle. She was constantly taking her water bottle out of her backpack, and every few minutes she would dab her forehead with her handkerchief and fan herself with a sheet of paper, creating so much of a breeze, you’d think she was the only one who was sweating and being jostled during this journey. Anne closed her eyes and turned up the volume on her iPod.
And Marlene watched her daughter travel through this landscape in total silence. Anne seemed completely cut off from her, boarded up, bolted and barred, intent on showing no emotion, on sharing nothing with her. It was driving her crazy.
It was hard for both of them to bear.
Everything they did, they did to one another.
Then Marlene’s day came. It was a hot day in July, and the tour guide had ordered a taxi to pick them up from the hotel. Anne climbed in the back and Marlene got in up front with her map in hand.
They had to search for a long time, took wrong turns onto rough tracks through little villages between Rastenburg and Loetzen, which now had different names than those on Marlene’s old Prussian map. She’d added the Polish names in red but soon had trouble deciphering them.
The small places lay in the sun as though in a daze. Only the storks seemed to be awake, and a sluggish breeze leafed dreamily through the old trees. When you traveled through the tree-lined avenues, it felt as though you were in another time, another world. At some point they came across a gate made of stone and wrought iron. It looked like the one that Hildegard von Kamcke had sketched, and 1898 was engraved on the gable.
The gate didn’t seem to lead anywhere. All they could see was green undergrowth. They pushed past the rusty iron.
The taxi driver stayed beside his car, smoking in the sun.
Anne struggled through the undergrowth with Marlene. They climbed over fallen trees. Nothing remained of the tree-lined approach that Hildegard had described. They now had a direct view of the ruin.
A birch was growing out of the roof of the large manor house. The house’s walls looked as though someone had ripped the skin off them. There was hardly any light-toned stucco left, and the rough stonework was exposed. The high windows were boarded up.
Marlene stood in front of the curved gable. She’d wanted to take photos but forgot. Anne took the camera, left Marlene standing, and went to look at the back of the house. There were still large, long stables there. It was very quiet. A forest, a river, the sky, a lake. You couldn’t imagine anything bad happening here, no shooting, no bleeding. It couldn’t possibly have taken place here in this landscape that cradled you like a child.
They must have felt invulnerable in this house, Chin up!, and then they were out in the snow, running for their lives.
Anne took photos of the gardens, the stables, the house, then returned to the crumbling outside staircase, where Marlene was still standing. She had said nothing since they’d arrived.
Anne watched her mother take a bag out of her backpack, then a plastic spoon. She scraped some soil into the bag along with a few bits of gravel, then went over to the wall of the house, broke off a couple of pieces of stucco, and took them all with her.
Anne turned away quickly. She didn’t want to see Marlene with her plastic spoon in front of the ruined manor house, a sixty-year-old child looking for her mother.
Hildegard von Kamcke wasn’t to be found here. She didn’t want to be found by Marlene, and the house didn’t give anything about her away. It disclosed absolutely nothing. It just stood there with the birch growing out of its roof, like a wounded soldier who’d had a flower placed mockingly in his helmet. It too would soon fall.
Anne asked Marlene if she wanted Anne to take a photo of her standing in front of the house. She shook her head and went over to the taxi without looking back. Yet another person who’d undergone surgery.
They nonetheless drove on down the streets that Hildegard had described and looked for the place on the map where she had drawn a small cross. Gregor von Kamcke (11.10.1944–19.1.1945).
They stopped somewhere on a street that led to Heilsberg, “Lidzbark Warmiński!” said the taxi driver patiently. He knew that the Germans could never remember the Polish names, but he thought they should hear them at least.
He didn’t get out of the car with them.
There were a lot of mosquitoes here, and flies. Marlene thrashed the map around, and Anne sought shade under an oak tree.
What had they done with all the dead children who had been left lying at the side of the road? Who had buried them when the earth had finally thawed? The hosts of baby carriages, the slumbering dolls, what had happened to them?
You could no longer believe in the beauty of the Mazurian avenues when you started to ask questions like these. If you thought that under every oak tree and in every green ditch there were still bones, and that there were buttons and little shoes under the poppies.
They went to Frauenburg by minibus. It was the last day of their trip. From the cathedral’s tower, they looked out over the Vistula Lagoon. The homesick tourists stood there a long time, fumbling around with their handkerchiefs. Then they got onto a ferry that was to take them to the Vistula Spit.
The captain looked grim, and who could blame him? Dealing with all these distraught old people all the time, perhaps he felt like the mythological ferryman who continually transferred the dead to Hades.
That’s it, I’ve had enough, Anne said to herself. She was going to stay on the jetty.
But Marlene had already gotten on board. She seemed to have shrunk over the course of this trip.
Anne stood next to her mother at the railing. Marlene was wearing sunglasses, and even on the ship, she was holding the guidebook in her hand, with the map open and fluttering in the wind, totally useless.
There was nothing to be found in Mazuria, no answers and no solace, no trace of Hildegard von Kamcke. A mother like a strange continent, that’s how it remained. There were no adequate maps for this part of the world.
Anne stood next to her and looked at the choppy water. She put her jacket on.
Then she told Marlene what the farmers did with the blossoms when the night frost came. “Frost protection through glaciation,” she said. “It really works. You see?”
Marlene’s sunglasses were very large, and Anne couldn’t make out what she was thinking.
The women had had to become either heroes or animals. There was no other way to get across the ice with children.
How could they have sung songs to them and laughed with them after that?
They couldn’t be mothers like that anymore. They didn’t let you speak to them, told you nothing, explained nothing, and didn’t even look for a language for the unutterable. They practiced forgetting and got good at it. Trundled on in coats of ice. You didn’t need to tell them what solidification heat was.
Marlene didn’t say a thing. In Kahlberg, they disembarked for three hours, took off their shoes, and wandered along the beach. They looked at the shops, ate ice cream, and felt each other’s pain.
It was inconceivable that they’d ever walk arm in arm or make each other happy again. But ten days together without blood and tears was almost a miracle.
No healing took place in Mazuria, but Anne had seen Marlene with her plastic spoon in front of the manor house. A daughter who had nothing, who had to scrape sand and plaster and stucco together, as though it were possible to make a mother out of them. She wasn’t miserly but poor. What Anne wanted from Marlene, Marlene clearly didn’t have to give. Anne could tug at her, rummage around in her pockets, shake her down as though Marlene were a drug dealer, and she wouldn’t find anything on her of the stuff she still craved.
Anne could stop searching. It had to be possible to live without it. It was possible.
* * *
Vera picked them up at Hamburg’s central station in her Mercedes, and they drove to Marlene’s for coffee. There was some dust on the black Bechstein, and a stack of music too. “I’m just getting started again,” Marlene said. “There’s no one to hear me play the wrong notes.”
They were out in the hallway already and managed an embrace of sorts. Marlene then pressed something cool into Anne’s hand and closed the door behind her and Vera.
A little amber heart on a silver chain. A child’s necklace from a shop on the Vistula Spit.
Vera took it out of Anne’s hand and looked at it for a while, until Anne had finished with her Kleenex. Then she helped her put it on. “I had one like that once too,” she said, “it must still be around somewhere.”
They drove to Ottensen and picked up Leon. Vera just stayed in the car. Christoph was in the new apartment next door, which still had to be painted.
Carola handed Anne the collapsible crate containing Leon’s clothes. “My little brother’s in there,” Leon said, pointing at Carola’s stomach.
Anne nodded and took him into her arms. “Come on,” she said, “we’re going home.”
Vera had nodded off in the car. Nine nights in the house on her own; she hadn’t gotten much sleep.
Anne told her to get into the back with Leon. Shortly after the tunnel they were both asleep and Leon’s chubby hand was clasped in Vera’s blue hands.