everything else such a blur, before and after? Sometimes he cannot distinguish between his memory and what he has been told, between what he experienced and what he has read in books. He is made up of all those things that he has heard about and read about. All the things he rejected as much as the things he accepted, what he believed as much as what he didn’t believe.
This journey in the truck remains a real memory. A concrete recollection. No question about that. Gregor recalls the pictures of his grandfather at home when he grew up. The innocent appearance of Grandfather Emil in uniform just after he enlisted in the First World War, that boyish idealism before battle. He remembers the photographs of the bloated, beer-drinking grandfather, much later at the start of the Second World War, that mischievous smile for which he was so well liked.
He can remember him singing, or humming, as he drove the truck. Even though Gregor must have been half deaf with the ear infection, he could feel the vibrations broad-casting through his chest. He will never forget the warmth of this man behind him, letting him drive the truck. And maybe it’s so vivid in his memory now because that journey came to an end. In the middle of the night, the truck stopped and they had to get out, with the blanket over their heads now to hold off the rain. Is that the reason why he remembers it so well, because he wanted to get back on the truck and never get off again?
He cannot remember when he ate the second sweet, because he has no memory of a green sweet, only the red one. He thinks he lost it, because he searched for it in his pocket. He doesn’t know how it went missing.
Are the happiest memories always overshadowed by loss? Just as the bad memories must be counterweighted by good times? Maybe this missing boiled sweet is somehow caught up with the larger loss which cannot be accessed any more. It replaces all the missing people and places and events that he has forgotten. Even as an adult, he still has the recurring dream of finding the green sweet in a place where he never looked before. Some inside pocket he forgot to check.
He can recall very little else from that night. He must have fallen asleep in the truck, because the fat man woke him up, calling, ‘Gregor, Gregor.’ Again and again he heard his soft, singing voice, two descending notes that will forever be associated with the journey being over, the cruelty of waking up with a pain in his ear and the time in the truck coming to an end.
The fat man opened the door and the cold morning air came in. He lifted him down and helped the woman out. He had to stay with the woman, because the fat man had to go elsewhere. He promised to be back soon, that much he could understand from his gestures alone. The fat man smiled and held up a fuel canister, shook it to show that it was empty and pointed down the street. He saw him getting on the truck and driving away. There was a house on fire at the end of the road, he remembers. The rain was falling and the flames were going up into the sky at the same time. The sky was orange. The fire brigade was standing in front of the house spraying water through the windows. The woman took him into the train station, where they waited, wrapped in the blanket, with lots of other people in the same room and steam rising from their wet clothes. They waited and waited and waited, but the fat man never came back.
He is glad to see the shape of the house where Mara is staying. The low roof surrounded by trees and open farmlands. He has been here before, but it’s some time ago now, in the spring. This time there is a tight blonde stubble left behind in the fields by the machines and rectangular bales of hay placed at intervals. He has switched off the music in the car so he can hear the crows in the nearby woods. Nobody comes out to greet him, so he remains sitting in the car for a moment with the window open, listening. He’s not accustomed to the lack of formality in the country, with no doorbell. He wonders if he should go to the front of the house or whether it’s best to go round the back. He thinks of calling them on his mobile phone, but that seems a little absurd, a real city thing to do.
He takes the bag with the bottles of wine and the basket of mushrooms from the boot of the car. The main door of the farmhouse is facing out towards an ancient cast-iron pump in the middle of the yard. The yard is deserted, surrounded by farm buildings. The porch over the main door is half covered in creeper and some of the windows, too, are overgrown with wild roses. The place looks uninhabited, but then he sees Mara’s car parked at the other end and hears voices round the back. A child laughing somewhere. And Mara coming towards him with her arms out.
‘Gregor. We didn’t hear you coming,’ she says.
‘I thought I was in the wrong place,’ Gregor says.
He gives her the bag with the wine. Then he holds out the basket of wild mushrooms.
‘Mushrooms,’ Mara exclaims.
She seems surprised, but her smile is quick to come back. She doesn’t expect him to explain. She knows the story of mushrooms in his family.
Gregor’s father was a hunting fanatic, shaped by war, a man who wanted his son to stay close to the earth and develop heightened survival instincts. So he taught him how to collect mushrooms and berries and plants which could be cooked and eaten in times of decline. On his birthday, Gregor was often given a survival manual. He was brought up to prepare himself for catastrophe. Ready for things that had already happened and for even worse to come. He grew up with all that Boy Scout knowledge of how to light fires without matches, how to preserve food, how to live in freezing conditions. By the time he was nine, he was ready to spend his first night out in the forest alone. His father wanted him to be able to survive long after the rest of civilisation had been extinguished, though he never explained what he should do if he was the last person left on earth.
As a boy, he loved this challenge. It was a great game. His father was as tough and uncompromising as the elements. He preferred the laws of nature to the conventions of society. He trusted nobody and made comparisons between animals and human behaviour. He wanted Gregor to understand the world as a contest, to respect nature as the only guide to what was genuine and what was false. To stay alive he had to become an expert on poison, on treachery. So his father set tests for him in the forest. Contrived a family game of Russian roulette with deadly mushrooms in which Gregor would stand in front of three varieties in separate containers, all of them looking very much the same. One of them fatal. The others safe to eat.
His mother would stand looking on from the hunting lodge that his father bought for half-nothing after the war, the one place in the world where he felt his rule was absolute, this brutal contest with the environment in which he triumphed over everything.
‘Have you gone mad?’ she would say. ‘Klaus, is this really necessary? Have we not had enough of this in the war?’
But that was precisely the point of it all. His father never got past the rules of war. Those split-second judgements, those warrior instincts which people had adapted so successfully into sporting activities, were still regarded by him as the ground rules of life and death. You had to be ready to return to the wild, to the most basic forms of life. Perhaps all this was an oblique way of describing what his father went through for years in Russian captivity but never wished to speak about directly. Gregor stood there in the first glorious moment of peacetime in Europe and held his family’s life in his hands. It was his choice. And whatever he picked out would be put into the meal. ‘Are you sure?’ His father would ask him once more with a sceptical expression, because you could not guess. Guessing was defeat.
With his nervous mother looking on, he would pick the variety he thought was safe. She was a martyr, maybe half hoping they would all be poisoned one day so that she could then say to her husband, ‘Look, I told you so.’ She was also profoundly shaped by war and hunger and hated any game with food. She hated seeing food wasted and constantly made people
