We travelled a while by train. Not much longer than an hour. The announcements were made in both Polish and German. We got off at a station that seemed quite rural, somewhere on the outskirts of a town, perhaps. Nothing but the sound of birds. A gust of wind in the leaves. The voices of other passengers who got off at the same station – a group of schoolboys with their Scout leader, an elderly couple and three young women returning from the city. At the end of the platform, a man wearing sunglasses got off and stood at the shelter examining the timetable.
The station house with its waiting room and café had long been closed down and boarded up. All that remained of that service was a ticket machine and a line of waiting taxis. The three women were the first to get there and they sped off in the direction of the town. Lena spoke to the second driver. We passed by the troop of schoolboys walking in single file and drove along straight roads lined with trees on both sides. Every now and again we passed by those road signs where a graphic car is seen crashing into a graphic tree with exclamation marks.
The taxi dropped us off at the edge of a forest. When it drove away, we were left with the horizontal depth in the trees all around us. The screech of a jay could be heard, the bird children call the forest policeman. There was no other sound apart from their footsteps along the sandy path, two people in unison, not speaking a word. Nothing to add to the interior of the forest but more silence.
It was only when we got a bit further into that expanding silence that Lena began to wonder if they were alone. A car door was heard closing behind them on the road. Perhaps it was another taxi. Somebody else being delivered to this remote place for no apparent reason. Once the car drove away and the silence was restored, the emptiness seemed to hold the presence of an unidentified watcher, like the eyes of a predator keeping them in sight without ever showing up.
Lena turned around several times.
Are we being followed? she asked.
She answered her own question with a laugh. It was nothing but her imagination, she said. Coming from such an overcrowded city as New York, she must have found it difficult to believe a place could be so empty of human beings. They continued walking and came to a clearance in the trees with a set of stables and a paddock. The neighing of horses produced an echo of other horses further away. Lena stood at the fence and her hand reached into her bag.
Let’s give them an apple, she said.
She threw the apple, but it bounced off one of the horses and she laughed at her own clumsiness while they took fright, galloping away as though it was a stone that had been hurled at them. They made a circle around the paddock and came back cautiously to watch.
She was waiting for one of them to find the apple. Waiting for the crack of it inside the mouth of a horse, the ungainly brown teeth crunching sideways, trying to hold on to all that sweetness spilling across the lips. But the horses took no notice of the apple at their feet.
Come on, Lena said to the horses. What’s wrong with you. It’s a nice apple.
They don’t know it’s an apple, Armin said.
Before he could join his sister in Amsterdam, Armin was having to stay in Berlin while he got a clearance letter to board international flights. In the meantime, he was busy with logistics, in touch with tour promoters, arranging accommodation and flights, shipping the equipment to Holland by road.
They continued walking deeper into the forest. At one point they stopped to eat a pastry. Along the side of the path, the earth had been dug up by wild boars. Lena said it looked as though the ground had been ploughed by a tractor. How many wild boars did it take to do all that work? The earth was still fresh, turned during the night, maybe that morning at dawn.
When they moved on again, Lena once more felt they were being followed, and this time she turned suddenly to face the unseen stalker.
Mike, she called. Is that you?
There was no answer. She told Armin that she must be going crazy. You could be on a street full of people and not ever think you were being followed or even looked at. Why, in a place so empty and unpopulated, is there always such an illusion of the invisible?
Call him, Armin said.
On his phone, you mean?
She wanted this landscape of trees to remain honest. She took out her phone and made the call. There was no answer. No reciprocal ringtone in the still interior of the forest drawing him out like a man exposed. The trees held on to what was imagined.
What am I doing? she said. He’s in mid-air, on a flight to Romania by now.
A while later, they left the forest and found themselves in the open. They came to an industrial pig farm. A series of long single-storey buildings with no windows. There seemed to be nobody around. Only the noise of a thousand pigs, maybe many thousands more, inside those barracks. They seemed to be there on their own, rearing themselves in this remote place without any human intervention, feeding from containers of food that were filled on demand, drinking from automated water troughs. Their pink faces looking up to see if anyone would visit them, like a hall full of children waiting for their mothers and fathers. They were grunting and squealing among themselves, communicating with each other in large separated pens, unaware that there was a world outside with daylight, sunshine, air, trees, mud, stray food to be discovered. What if the rumour of such a world were to spread through the crowded pens? How would the news of freedom impact on their contentment?
I think we have this wrong, Lena said.
No, hang on, Armin said.
They stood a while looking over the map, then Armin worked out that the pig production plant had to be a recent addition, built on land that had once belonged to the farm. It replaced a section at the edge of the forest where the religious shrine had once stood. Armin found the path leading away beyond those enormous buildings. They followed it and came eventually to the small river with the footbridge. Once they crossed the bridge, they could see a farmhouse that matched the diagram on the last page.
The farmhouse was boarded up. Weeds had taken over the driveway and there were creepers growing across the steps leading up to the door. Nature beginning to reclaim the farm, rewilding bit by bit the places that had once been kept in such good order. A tractor stood abandoned in the yard, with grass growing around the wheels, a sycamore sapling standing in its path. Other farm machinery parts were scattered around the perimeter. The wooden barns had fallen into disuse. Some of the doors had been left open. Inside were the remains of what had once been pens for cattle and pigs, the troughs and the baskets for hay left empty. A dove scattered from the loft and flew away across the fields.
It was Armin who decided to open the big sliding doors to one of the barns. The swing was still there. The wooden seat was warped and cracked, held in place at a slight angle. The two long ropes were suspended from the frame, over four metres high. They were intact, though frayed. Perhaps they had been replaced at some point over the years.
Lena didn’t trust herself on the swing – she was expecting it to collapse. So Armin decided to have a go. He cautiously sat on the seat and it remained in place. Lena gave him a push and the ropes creaked as though they were under great strain, aching with the lack of use and about to break. As he got more courageous, it must have felt like swinging right out across the fields towards the horizon. Into the bright sunshine where his face lit up and he had to blink. Then back inside to the shade of the barn. Swinging in and out, from darkness into light and back again. The swing released small clouds of fruit flies that had been nesting in the ropes.
Lena stood leaning against the frame of the door with Armin passing her by, going higher and higher. She was looking over the map.
The map had been drawn one afternoon in April of 1933. David Glückstein had come here on his bike from Berlin to visit his fiancée, Angela Kaufmann. The place was vibrant with life then. The cattle were out. Geese and chickens wandering around the inner yard, the dog asleep on the steps of the house. From the barn, David and Angela watched her brother lead the bridled horse back out after lunch to plough the earth.
They spoke about their plans for a wedding. It should be held at the farm, he said, a simple wedding with tables out in the open, under the stars. They spoke about having a family and living in the country. She sat swinging in the doorway of the barn and the air around her was so calm it was almost too much to bear. As if something would give and one of the ropes would break.
Angela watched her future husband move the granite pillar with the sundial aside. There was a stone slab underneath to provide a base. He lifted the slab and began digging the ground underneath with a spade. Once he had dug deep enough, he went inside and came back with a metal box. Angela jumped off the swing and left the two long rope shadows moving on their axis along the floor of the barn. She stood beside him as he placed the metal box into the pit he had dug.
Let’s disown everything but ourselves, he said.
He took his time covering the soil back over again. Finally, he spread out a small sack of sand followed by a bag of pebbles on the surface, like the top layers of a cake. He replaced the stone slab and she helped him move the pillar with the sundial back into position. He pulled a handkerchief out to clean his hands.
On a warm day in spring of that year when Hitler came to power, they stood by the sundial looking across the field at her brother with the horse. He waved at them and she waved back. The professor then reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out the stub of a pencil. It was no longer than a cigarette. Something a carpenter might have kept tucked over his ear. He opened the blank page at the back. It was the only thing to hand, his copy of Rebellion by Joseph Roth. She had read it and given it back to him that afternoon when he arrived, saying she loved that passage where the barrel organ player was cranking up his melodies and the money came floating down from the windows in the Berlin courtyards.
With the stub of his pencil, he drew a map of the place where he had concealed the metal box. He drew it not so much to provide directions back to that exact location but to keep this day from disappearing. No matter what happened, no matter where they might go or be taken, this slow afternoon in the country would be preserved in a simple map. It was drawn without any recognizable geographical markings, to be deciphered only by insiders, by those who knew how much they loved each other. He stood with his shoulder against the doorway of the barn to get the angles right. The lines remained faithful to that afternoon, down to the slope of sunlight. He included only those features that were relevant to them – the sundial, the twin rope lines of the swing, the barns, the farmhouse, the religious shrine, the forest, the oak tree with the bench underneath. An arrow pointing to the next village, left unnamed. It was a day like no other, in a place like no other, from which they stepped out of sight and left no trace of themselves but a suggestion of the swing moving.