pick the apples and she wanted him to be there.
‘Before your son disappears off to Africa,’ she said.
Their son, Daniel, has inherited money and has decided to spend some of it working in the Sudan with his girlfriend Juli.
The farm is situated outside the former East German town of Jüterbog. Daniel got a job as an extra on a film set there a few years back, where the Russian Army had been garrisoned after the war, right up to the nineties. After which everything suddenly seemed to go backwards in time. It must have been quite an event, seeing the soldiers packing up and leaving after such a long time, trucks pulling out and belching fumes for the last time. History receding and the buildings in which they were billeted for all those years through the Cold War torn down and turned into a film set, which ironically made the outskirts of the town look like ruins at the end of the Second World War. For the people living there it was one last glimpse of those terrible years before the town and the landscape finally settled back into a kind of ancient anonymity. It has become quite empty now. Everyone has fled from here into the cities and they say the land is already so deserted in some places that it will eventually be handed back to nature. The forests will grow back one day and the wolves will return, maybe even the bears. Who knows, all the fairy tales that came with them as well?
The mushroom season has begun. It has rained overnight, and Gregor thinks it might be a nice idea to arrive with some fresh wild mushrooms. He’s brought wine, but the mushrooms would be really thoughtful. He stops the car at the edge of a forest and steps out. He can smell the familiar morning scent of the earth and the vegetation. It gives him a feeling that is hard to describe. An echo of childhood? Of home? Of long ago?
From the boot of the car he takes a fruit basket which belongs to Mara. He walks off into the forest, carrying it on his arm, the way he used to do with his father and mother. He’s good at spotting the dark places where mushrooms grow, those tiny flecks of unusual colour, shades of brown and beige and white along the floor. He’s good at making the connection between varieties of trees and what might be expected to grow in the vicinity. He makes instant decisions about frilly aprons and gaudy shapes that are attractive and treacherous at the same time. A skill that he received from his father, one that he rejected for years and has only recently taken up again.
He’s good at keeping directions in mind. He has always been quick to memorise his surroundings. Always mapping. Always aware of geography. Another skill he was taught by his father, or is that a faculty which has been sharpened by the nature of his own origins?
While concentrating on the natural signposting along the floor, he comes across a bomb crater in the forest. It disturbs the sediment of his memory. He’s always had to manage his past and there were devices, certain skills he developed as a young man, that could filter out the unwanted. Sifting and sorting was a phrase he brought with him from somewhere to describe this mental activity in which each person compiles their own memories in such a way that they can live with themselves.
Here, where he least expected it, he finds himself standing in front of this random piece of evidence from the past. Lots of people would pass it by thinking it was a perfectly natural dip in the earth. There is nothing growing inside the crater, and maybe that is what has caught his eye.
The funny thing is that he instinctively wishes he could show it to Mara. Wait till she sees this, he finds himself saying almost aloud. How long have they been separated now and still he carries on reporting to her internally? They never divorced. She lived with an architect for years in Berlin, but that came to an end because she could not bring herself to divorce Gregor. He lived abroad for years, but still they continued to keep in touch. A distant, proxy sort of relationship in which they went on with their own separate lives, returning to each other from time to time in order to compare information.
He marks the place in his mind, in case he needs to come back here, should he want to show it to her. A turning to the right off the main sand track, after the spot where he saw the wild boar footprints and some bits of thick, wiry fur, where they must come to drink at night and roll around in the mud and maybe fight. Right in the heart of the forest, where the track straightens out and leads through a dark hall of mature trees. He has the impression that he’s standing in a church or a great mansion, with the occasional beam of light coming down from a high window. The silence is almost absolute. A place from which all sound has been withdrawn.
If memory has a physical shape, then it must be something like this, Gregor thinks. The interior of the forest with paths leading through vast interconnecting rooms where you can get so easily lost.
He finds himself staring into this large hole in the same way that he would stare at an animal, holding his breath and not moving. It’s like being in the presence of some great elk which will be gone again with a burst of movement as soon as he blinks. Not a sound. Not even the soft transfer of indoor air. It seems to be staring back at him, asking him questions, this bomb which has missed its target. He feels the shock of it going through him even sixty years after the event, the wind suck and the earth shower and the violent tremor underfoot. It gives him the sensation that people must get with a near-miss traffic accident, unable to figure out why they have been picked out by this contorted luck, the only person to have escaped unharmed. Standing beside such a vicious bomb crater, he feels like man living in the afterlife.
The crater itself measures about the size of a swimming pool, ten or twelve metres across but shaped like a funnel, perfectly round, almost like something produced by nature itself. There is a thin layer of branches and twigs lying at the centre. The earth has levelled off at the edges over time. There is an old, damaged oak tree standing next to it, but most of the other trees around it are conifers, reaching up straight. Who knows, maybe those trees were all saplings then or maybe didn’t even exist and the bomb actually fell in an open field, on a clear and starry night, with only the ragged oak tree to witness the thud and the scattering of soil and the thunder of planes receding into the distance.
All over the city and the region, they still find unexploded bombs from time to time, on building sites, on road-widening projects. It’s like a folk memory in the ground. Full of shrapnel. And remains. Lots of remains, buried in shallow earth. The remains of soldiers, men of whom it is hard to tell any more on which side they fought and for what? The remains of people who never belonged to any side. People who have gone beyond pain and grief and hunger and resentment. Beyond memory even.
What the hell? Gregor thinks to himself. It’s probably not a bomb crater at all. He spent long enough in forests as a child with his father to know that this might be nothing more than a dumping pit. People used to dig large holes in order to bury their refuse in the forest. And maybe this is the physical shape of memory, ultimately, a common landfill site. A hole in the ground intended for items that once clamoured to be remembered but then turn out to mean nothing after all.
He continues to collect his mushrooms until he feels he has enough. The basket is almost full, and yet so light in comparison to mass. He turns and traces his way back along that instant map he’s made for himself in the forest. By the time he comes past the crater again, he has already dismissed it in his mind. He hardly takes any notice of it now and doesn’t stop to have another look. Instead, he sees only the exit ahead of him, a small green light at the end of the path where the trees cut off and the fields begin. And when he comes back out into the open at last, he has the feeling of lights coming on again after a power cut.
As he drives on, away from the forest once more, he passes through a farm of wind turbines standing in the fields. Dozens of them spreading right across the flat, open landscape. They stretch out into the distance, all facing in the same direction, gliding across the earth in formation. The ones further away look tiny, but those up close look enormous, casting spectacular shadows across the land around them and towering over the road, making him feel small as he drives right through them. Tall, silent birds on either side, with long white necks, lazily turning
