Henning finally comes to the map at the back and speaks about how they found the place. It’s out there near the Polish border, he says. Near the Oder river. Your grandfather eventually worked it out by studying the annotations in the margins. He was too old to undertake the journey himself at that stage, so he asked us to find the place for him.
We went there, your father and me, one day in the summer after your grandfather died. It was a matter of honouring his wish more than anything else. We found the religious shrine. We found the small river with the bridge, just as it is pictured in the diagram. Henning shows Lena the map and says – we followed that path and came to the farmhouse. We were quite certain we had the right place, but then a lot of those farms out there look the same. The single-storey house, the barns erected in an oblong around the inner yard, the walled orchard.
The people living there had taken over the farm during the Nazi period. The family of Angela Kaufmann had been dispossessed, so the records showed. At first we were in two minds whether to go up to the farmhouse itself, but your father was braver than I was and insisted we talk to the new owners. There was a dog on a chain in the yard. He started barking at us and pulling on the chain which was attached to an old water pump with a long handle.
A woman came out of the house and stood on the steps by the door. She wanted to know what we were doing there, so we told her we were out walking and that we had lost our way. We were looking for a path that might lead us to the next village, and she pointed us in the right direction. She told us to keep going along the path, we would come across an oak tree with a bench underneath. All we had to do is carry on, then we would eventually come to the village, a walk of maybe half an hour, she said.
This confirmed that the place corresponded with the map in the book.
We thanked her and apologized for disturbing her.
She said it was not a problem, then she continued watching as we made our way back out towards the path.
At the last minute, Henning goes on, your father turned around to ask another question. He just wanted to make absolutely sure that we had found the right place. Ideally, we would have loved to take out the book and show her the map, perhaps ask if we could walk around to have a look. But she was not all that friendly and the dog was continuing to lunge at us, making a lot of choking noises as the chain cut into his neck. And then your father decided quite spontaneously, since we had come all that way, to ask the woman something that would put everything beyond doubt.
Is there a barn here with a swing in the doorway?
The woman stared with instant suspicion. Her eyes narrowed. She took a long breath and said – how do you know that?
Her answer told us everything. It confirmed to us right away, however unwillingly, that there was a swing in one of the barn doorways.
The woman said – who are you?
In a raised voice, she wanted to know what we were doing there and why we had come all the way to her farm to ask such a specific question. Perhaps she thought we had come to accuse her of taking over the farm from the original owners after the war. She became quite agitated. The dog almost strangled himself. She turned back into the house to call her husband – Karl, Karl.
We left as quickly as we could. We found the path and made our way past the oak tree. There was no time to sit down on the bench, Henning says. We had to keep moving. We heard shouting from behind us in the farmyard, and when we looked back there was a man running after us carrying a farm implement. Perhaps it was a scythe, we couldn’t see with the sun in our eyes. He was joined by two young boys also carrying farm implements as weapons.
We had no option but to run, Henning continues. It was a while before the dog was released from his chain, so we had a good head start by the time he came bounding out of the farmyard and overtook the man and his sons. We continued running along the path towards the village and then we decided to split up. Because your father was carrying the book, we thought it best that I run across the open fields to distract the dog, so that he could make his way back through the forest. I was worried when I got home to Magdeburg and he was still out. He got lost in the forest and only returned late that night.
We were glad to have found the place. We told ourselves the map had been drawn to remember a good day. We never thought of going back there again. When the Wall came down, there was too much else to think about. Your father went away with the book and I stayed behind with the library. Maybe it was the only thing your father had to connect him to his place of birth, like an unsolved memory.