he was off again travelling around Greece. Each time the money ran out he went back to Germany to work in one of the cities again, anywhere but Nuremberg, until he had accumulated enough to travel again. He was in Turkey when the Berlin Wall went up. He was back in Munich when the Cuban Missile Crisis blew up. Drifting back and forth for a number of years like this, meeting people, in and out of relationships, discovering as many countries as possible including Morocco and Spain, until he eventually decided to make his way up to Berlin in the late summer of 1967.
He had heard that things were happening up there and on the train to Berlin he met some young people in the same carriage who were excited about going there also. He drank beer with them and they gave him an address where he could stay in the city. Tell them you’re a friend of Lutz von Blessing Doehm, they told him. He thought it was a joke, but then he arrived at the apartment and was given a place to stay on the floor of a commune that later became quite famous because the apartment was owned by a well-known writer. A young man who introduced himself as Fritz came down the stairs to tell him he could stay as long as he liked. There was music playing all day and all night. It was hard to sleep. Everybody was stoned. He never met anyone called Lutz. Instead, he met Martin who had also run away from home under a cloud of anger and resentment.
‘I’m not German really,’ Gregor told him. ‘I’m Jewish, from Poland originally.’
‘Welcome to the club,’ Martin answered. ‘I’m half-Russian myself. My father was an officer in the Russian Army.’
Berlin was the place for everyone to begin afresh.
He feels at home here, in this orchard. Is there some distant memory of starting his life in a place like this? Or does everyone get that when they pick apples on a warm day when the summer has spilled over into extra time? That feeling of being connected to the earth in an unbroken chain going all the way back in time, doing what people have done here in this same place for hundreds of years.
The trees are old. Planted long before the war. They must have seen a few things, when this landscape was a battle zone and the farm became a last line of defence. The Russians in the nearby woods and the Germans holding out in the farmhouses. The trees would have witnessed the barn at the far end burning down with the young horses inside. They would have heard their screams. They say the apples from these trees have a unique flavour. Some of the trees are so gnarled that it’s a wonder how they can still deliver the sap to all those distant branches. They are too old to be pruned. And this year has been so dry, the branches are so frail and laden down with fruit that they crack at the touch. Even with no wind, the larger beams sometimes break off overnight.
The orchard was planned to ripen in phases through the summer – cherries, red berries, gooseberries, plum trees, apple trees and pear trees. Isn’t that what mystified the Russians most when they finally conquered these farms one by one, how well designed and logical everything was in comparison to their own? How insane it must have appeared to them that anyone would want to invade any other land when they already had such manicured farms, designed with the vegetable gardens terraced in neat rows, and the orchard facing south and west to maximise the sunlight. And those strong, brick-built farm buildings to provide shelter from the bitter winds coming from the north and the east.
Each variety of apple was chosen to blossom in staggered succession, but in the great heat this year, everything has been ripening together, more or less. Even in spring, the blossoms were all out at the same time, virtually. The birds got most of the cherries, and the berries, stripping them like strings of pearls. The apple trees have produced such a great crop this year.
When Gregor came to visit the farm in spring, they took him for a walk over to the lake, to hear the frogs. It was late afternoon, with the clouds low overhead and the hint of thunder in the air. They invited him to stay for dinner, and afterwards, when he drove home, he found himself returning to the lake to hear the muddy chorus of frogs once more in the dark. Stayed there for almost an hour listening to the sheer volume of sound around him. Frogs close by going silent for a while, making it possible to hear the ones further away, arguing back and forth. Thousands of invisible voices elaborating at once, like some enormous talk show going all the way round the rim of the lake. Flashes of sheet lightning across the water and a delayed rumble in the air. Quite deafening, he remembers. He could not see any of the frogs and that made them seem larger, more human, more unafraid of the elements out here. A brash thunderclap right above him made him jump, but the frogs were not bothered and kept on talking. He hardly noticed that he was being savaged by the mosquitoes, alone in the dark with his T-shirt over his head like an old woman. In school some days later, he got the children in class to imitate the sounds, giving each child a random word to utter in exchange for a croak, a glorious dictionary of babbling classroom frogs.
He feels the affection of this gathering in the orchard. Mara says she expected more people to come, but they will probably arrive tomorrow. There will be a huge crowd here for Sunday, she says, and maybe it’s good that they have today for themselves, just the family and their close friend Martin.
Everybody is working now in small groups, talking among themselves, telling stories and joking, discussing local events and world events. Some of them bending over, collecting the apples off the ground after the fall of the past few days. Others high on stepladders picking by hand or catching the fruit with nets on long poles. They treat the apples with great care, grasping them with an upward movement, stem and all, so as not to damage next year’s growth. Johannes, the little boy, is advising them, telling them not to mix up the good apples with the bad apples, speaking to everyone with an authority that he has heard in the voices of the adults.
‘Does that make sense to you?’ he asks, and the adults smile at the sound of their language filtered through the child’s mind.
The rotten apples are thrown onto the wheelbarrows. Those with bruises, those with too many black marks and those that appear to be damaged by worms or by wasps go into boxes and buckets to make apple juice. Thorsten maintains that you know that an apple is ripe when you see maggots inside. It seems to be timed by nature to fall at the same point. Some of the apples will be cold-pressed on the farm, but the majority will be pressed in a local factory and sterilised before being put into cartons. At Christmas, they will drink hot apple juice with cinnamon. Some of the pears seem almost comically deformed, but still very good to eat. The cooking apples go into separate boxes along with the bruised apples which will go into making cakes or stewed apple while the perfect, edible ones go into small sacks. Thorsten has got the sacks from friends in the Oder region, not far away on the Polish border. One summer when the river burst its banks and caused great flooding, the army was called out and distributed thousands of sandbags to local people so they could create dykes. Strange that time, seeing the German Army going back across the Oder River into Poland with sandbags. This year, the sacks are being put to even better use for storing apples. Over a dozen of them marked with the letters THW are already lined up at the side of the garden, ready to be carried away and stored inside the farm buildings.
Those on ladders can see out beyond the boundary wall across the fields and over to the lake. On the other side, they can see the small forest two hundred metres away where the Russians hid when the farm became the front line. They can imagine the shots being fired across the field between the farm and the forest. There is a car driving along the road, clinging on to the edge of the horizon, and above the field, a kestrel hovering. Every now and again, an apple falls to the ground with a bony kind of thud, such as the sound of a hoof on the earth. The discovery of gravity each time. The grass underneath has been cut so that the fallen apples are easier to find. There is a wide rake leaning against a tree. At the centre of the orchard, a small table set up with glasses and a jug of water which catches the sunlight. A white cloth is spread over the jug to stop the insects from landing in it and drowning.
