I know there’s no hope of your return. But I’ve been writing to you for a year now, and your not answering today is no different from your not answering before. Nothing has changed. I can’t reach you, but I couldn’t reach you before either. I see you in my mind’s eye: all bundled up, your face framed by the fur lining of your coat and hood, on skis, your hands in mittens resting on the poles, straps over your shoulders, pulling a sled. You’ve become this figure in the snow and ice, far away, white and cold, and even if I had you with me, I don’t know if I could warm you. You’ve been carried away from me. But you are not dead to me.

  Sometimes I tell Eik about your travels. I read him the letters you wrote to me. I embellish them here and there, and in Eik’s eyes you are a great adventurer. He remembers you and is proud when I tell him he’s as brave and strong as you. I ought to warn him. I don’t want him to lose himself as you lost yourself. But I can’t bring myself to do it. We sit together, I tell him stories, his eyes light up, and when I break off at a particularly exciting point, he doesn’t want to wait until the next day or the day after for the next installment; he takes my hands and begs and pleads. These are moments of closeness.

  Be safe, Herbert, wherever and however you are. I love you.

  Your Olga

  November 11, 1914

  My love,

  News of the war is coming in every day, and when the news is of victories, bells are rung and flags are waved. Two people from the village have been killed, and when I hear the news, all I can think of are the sacrifices that every day of war and every victory demand.

  Today the paper has a report about the regiments of young men who advanced on the French yesterday at Langemarck. With the Deutschlandlied on their lips, oblivious to enemy fire, they stormed the hill and took the French position. The flower of our youth fell in rich sheaves, it said, but our pride in those young men consecrates the pain of their death.

  I see you among them. I see you running, in a field-gray uniform, the ridiculous spiked helmet with the field-gray cover, the knapsack on your back, and the rifle with the fixed bayonet in your hand. The knapsack is gray too, and so are your face and hands—so are the grass and the trees, so is the sky, everything is gray. Going up a slope, you run and fall and get up and keep running, and I don’t know whether you fall because you stumble or because you’ve been hit, and whether you keep running because you’re back on your feet or although you’re already dead. There are others around you; they run and they fall too, but they don’t get back up and they don’t keep running. Only you get up and keep running, but you don’t reach the top; you stay on the slope, you run and run, and you don’t get there, not to the French position and not into the arms of Death.

  I see you as if in a dream and know that it’s a dream I will dream again and again, night after night, until you come again, until the war is over. I never dreamed of you in the Arctic; I tried to imagine you in ice and snow, but I never really could, not waking and not sleeping. I’ve sometimes dreamed that you were going away in a carriage or on a train or ship; you stand on the platform or on deck, you turn to me, but you don’t wave, you just look, and you’re farther and farther away, getting smaller and smaller. Dreams of farewell, from which I awaken sad and full of tenderness for that little chap getting smaller and smaller.

  You won’t sing when you run up the slope at night in my dream. No one will sing. Amid all that killing and dying, there is silence.

  Your Olga

  Christmas 1914

  My love,

  Last year you said you’d be back by Christmas. This year, the soldiers said they would. There’s no relying on you men.

  We have rain and mud for Christmas, no snow and no blue sky. But the church was decorated, and I sang the ‘Quem pastores laudavere’ with the choir. I’ve never seen the church so full; even old and sick people who would normally have stayed at home wanted to be in the church with the others this wartime Christmas Eve, the way sheep huddle together when the wolf is howling outside. Four families are now wearing black. When the pastor asked for God’s blessing on our guns, there was a shocked collective intake of breath.

  Sometimes I fantasize that you didn’t stay on Nordaustlandet, but set off through the Northeast Passage on skis, with the sled, to explore where the sea voyage might succeed in summer. You made it to northern Siberia, were taken in by natives during the winter and spring, and in summer, when you tried to travel to Berlin via Moscow and first encountered Russian officials, you found out that we were at war and fled back to the natives, who aren’t interested in war and peace, before you could be interned. That’s where you are, and that’s why you can’t write to me. But you’re alive, and you’ll hurry back to me as soon as the war is over.

  All the things I planned to do this year! Sanne and I earned money with the jam, and I bought a bicycle. But the fox took the chickens, and that discouraged me from keeping a goat. It’ll be the year after next at the earliest before I have enough for a piano; and Dante’s Divine Comedy starts with the Inferno, and I don’t want to read about torture and pain and death. I don’t want to read at all; cheerful books make me as sad as sad ones.

  My Siberian fantasy figure, my dream love and my nightmare, my mad, lost, frozen, fallen husband, inadequate father of my son, my hope against all reason, my beloved, I cannot, will not, let you go. Be always mine, as I am always yours,

  Olga

  July 11, 1915

  Herbert,

  The battles this summer were more terrible than anything we knew of war before now. They aren’t reporting the number of dead, but a colleague is in contact with someone in Sweden, and they say it’s in the hundreds of thousands. We see more and more women in black. We also see more and more wounded. For some the war is over, and Sanne is happy, because her husband is home again. He has lost his arm, and she says, what do we need his arm for? She won’t accept that he’s lost more than that; he doesn’t talk about the horrors of war, but they’re etched on his face.

  The war is wiping out my generation of men. The young colleague who came to the meeting with my female colleagues, who inherited the women’s bicycle and sold it to me, has also been killed. I sometimes thought that if you didn’t come back, perhaps I could be happy with him. We didn’t promise each other anything; we just looked at each other, and perhaps I saw more in his eyes than was really there. But it was enough to let me think my life wasn’t yet over. Work goes on, of course, the school and the church, and new pupils come each year. But I am not only your widow, and his—I am the widow of a generation.

  You belong to the generation that is being wiped out, and I am beginning to grasp that you are dead. You’re not just far away, unreachable. You really are dead, and if to me you are present, you are a figment of my memory and my longing. You are always present to me, still, and so I always have to tell myself that you are dead. I have to learn to live with this reality.

  To learn not to write to you about the summer; about June, which was too hot, and July, which was too cool; about the Russian prisoners who are working on the farms and sometimes take the farmer’s place not only on the farm and in the stable; about the children, who can see that the world is out of joint, that victory does not bring peace, that the Grim Reaper is like a godfather who makes himself at home in our families, and that fatherland, hero’s death, honor, and loyalty are just words. I have to learn not to tell you about my life. I’d been doing so less and less anyway. Perhaps not me but something in me began to understand long ago that you are dead.

  Olga

  October 9, 1915

  Grandmother died a few days ago. She was ill, and I had offered to care for her here. But she wanted to die in her own bed. Or not have me around. She raised me, but she never took me to her heart. As if I were a disappointment or a reminder of something unpleasant.

  When I got there, she was already dead. She was lying in an open coffin in the cold church. I fetched a woolen blanket, pulled up a chair, and sat down beside her. When it got dark, I lit a candle.

  They hadn’t closed her eyes and mouth in time. Her eyes weren’t just open, they had seen the face of Death and were bulging with fear and terror, and her mouth had bared its toothless gums in a scream. It was completely silent in the church, and I could hear that scream until I closed the lid on the coffin.

  But Grandmother was still beside me, and I could sense her rejection, as I have always sensed it. Sometimes she would hit me, and she would often shout at me. But even when she wasn’t doing any of that and didn’t even speak to me harshly, her rejection would hang in the air like a smell. I sat in the church, and I could smell it again, that familiar, hated odor.

  I used to wonder where this rejection came from. I tried hard to do everything to please Grandmother, was hurt because nothing I ever did for her was right, and outraged when she punished me even though I had done nothing wrong. Now I was just sad. I thought of Eik. How nice it could have been for Grandmother to watch the young me grow up; how nice it could have been for me to have had an older woman to guide me. I would have liked to have loved her, if she had let herself be loved. And what happiness it would have been to have been loved myself!

  “What happiness, ye gods, to love,” writes Goethe, setting it above being loved. Only someone who has the security of being loved can write this. I didn’t have that security, ever.

  Sometimes I felt sorry for myself, because I grew up without love, and even with you I could only live my love after a fashion. Now I think of the thousands of fallen soldiers, their unlived lives and unlived loves, and it drives away my self-pity. The sadness remains.

  I sat beside the coffin and started crying, and couldn’t stop. Everything that should have been but never was between Grandmother and me, and you and me, and the soldiers and their wives and children—how am I to bear it? What is there left for me to take pleasure in? You died again that night, for the umpteenth time. Never had things seemed so empty in the light of your death.

  After a while I got up and walked around the church. I sat at the organ I had practiced and played on so often, and in the patron’s box where I used to study and knit, and where we loved each other. I sat and cried; the memories hurt, and yet I couldn’t stop. I summoned up memory after memory and felt you beside me and missed you beside me.

  When it grew light outside, I left. I walked across the fields to our spot at the edge of the forest. Nothing had changed. I stood and looked out, waiting for something, but I didn’t know what. I saw the sun come up, illuminating first the treetops, then the trees, then the field. It was a wonderful sight.

  Your—don’t ask me how, but still your—

  Olga

  December 31, 1915

  My dearest, this is the last letter I shall write to you. I am saying goodbye to you. I am starting the new year without you. I don’t want to have you around me, within me, anymore.

  You are dead, you have been dead for a long time, and I still talk to you, and when I do, I see and hear you before me. You don’t answer, but you laugh or grumble discontentedly or murmur in agreement. You are there. I’ve heard of phantom pains felt by soldiers who’ve lost an arm or a leg. It’s gone, the arm or leg, but it hurts as if it’s still there. You’re gone, but you hurt as if you were still there.

  If I can love you, even though you’re dead, the way I loved you when you were alive, were you always a phantom? Did I always love only an image I created of you? An image for which it doesn’t matter whether you’re still alive, or dead?

  I don’t want to banish you from my life. You should still have a place in my heart, a shrine that is yours, only yours, before which I sometimes pause and think of you. But I have to be able to close the shrine and turn away from it. Otherwise it hurts too much.

  Do you remember the first time we made love? We wanted to go for a walk, but we only got as far as our spot at the edge of the forest where we used to meet and talk and study and where we realized that we belonged together. We stopped and put our arms around each other, and lay down in the grass, and it was all so natural, and it was all so surprising. We were inconceivably happy. Then evening came; one of your bosses, a friend of your father’s, was visiting your estate, and you had to go. I watched you leave. You turned and looked back at me. Then you were gone.

  Go, my darling. Look back once more for my sake, but go.

  Olga

  July 27, 1936

  Eik. He’d written to me that he wanted to see the Olympic Games, and perhaps he’d been working in Italy long enough and it was time to live in Germany again. He spent the week with Sanne, came to me for the weekend, and left for Berlin today. He will see the Olympic Games. He will stay in Germany. It was only when we were saying goodbye at the station in Tilsit that he told me he was in the NSDAP and was joining the SS. He leaned out of the train window and acted as if it was some small thing that had just occurred to him and that he quickly wanted to mention.

  What cowards you men are! You didn’t have the courage to tell me beforehand about your overwintering nonsense, and he didn’t either, to talk to me about his political madness. You both knew that I would argue with you, and you couldn’t bear the argument. Snow and ice, guns and war—you men feel up to those, but not to a woman’s questions.

  These last few years I’ve often wondered what you would make of it all. I don’t get the impression that the Nazis have colonial or Arctic dreams; perhaps that would save you from them. But everything is too grand with them, and where things are too grand, castles in the air are never far away. Perhaps you would want to teach them to dream of colonies and the Arctic.

  I am bitter, toward Eik and toward you. He is bone of your bones and flesh of your flesh. He is as stupid as you, and as cowardly as you. He can also be as sweet as you. But sweetness cannot compete with stupidity and cowardice.

  Olga

  July 29, 1936

  Another letter immediately after the last one—we’ve had that before, I know. But this letter doesn’t retract what was in the first, and you should read not just this one, but both of them.

  Eik’s announcement affected me so much that I had to write to you. To my husband, his father. Eik is your son as he is mine, but he is more my son than yours, and Eik’s letter was a shameful reminder to me of this. He wrote to me while he was still on the train, to justify himself. I was the one who had taught him to delight in adventure, setting out for far-off places, life in the great expanse. That was what he had sought, and that was what he had found. Germany didn’t need colonies. His Lebensraum was between the Neman and the Urals; for his generation, that was where adventure awaited, that was where he wanted to go, that was where he wanted to settle.

  It’s not you I reproach, but myself. He lived with me for a long time after the war, when he was at the high school, and I should have raised him better. I should have talked differently to him about you. Not as a hero, but as a melancholy knight who was not to be emulated, who missed out on his own life by emulating others. You wanted to be Amundsen, and if not Amundsen, then Scott, instead of living your own life. Now Eik too wants to live a life that isn’t for him. It won’t end in ice and snow, but it will lead him into war.

  It’s strange. You don’t feel any different from the way you did twenty years ago. You haven’t aged in that time either, but I have; and that might be enough, but isn’t. Perhaps I’ve written to you because I’m lonely. Germany has become alien to me, and many people I used to be close to I no longer am, in the village, at church, in the choir. The old school inspector shook his head worriedly when I refused to teach racial theory; the new one wants me out of the school.

  I don’t like going to church anymore. I go for the organ and the choir. The pastor is a Nazi who drives all the joy of faith out of me. I don’t believe in heaven and hell and life after death anyway. So you are simply in my heart, and I send my love to you there.

  Your Olga

  October 15, 1939

  Herbert, dear,

  I wrote to you three years ago. Soon after that I fell ill, and since then I haven’t been able to hear. I was dismissed from teaching, went to the school for the deaf in Breslau, and now earn my living as a seamstress.

  But that’s not why I’m writing to you. I’m writing to you because of Eik.

  He visits me every few months and is sweet and caring. If I weren’t too proud, he would give me money and spare me the sewing. He didn’t tell me what his work was, and I didn’t ask, until his last visit, when he was too conceited to keep quiet about it. He works in the Reich Security Main Office; he started two years ago with the security police, is climbing the ladder, and was promoted once last year and once this.

  In the basement of the Reich Security Main Office they torture prisoners. I know it; everyone knows it. He said it had to be this way and I didn’t understand it because I didn’t understand the new times.

  I understand the new times only too well. They are the old times, only now Germany is supposed to get even bigger, has even more enemies, and has to triumph even more. And the screaming is even louder; I hear it even though I’m deaf.

  I endured Eik’s tirades about blood and soil. I cannot endure his sitting at a desk on the bel étage while people are being tortured in the basement. Does he visit the basement himself?

  I wrote and told him I didn’t want to see him anymore. He came anyway; I said all I had to say, and he sat there obstinately in front of me. He reminded me of my schoolchildren when I would tell them off for being mean, and they knew I was right but didn’t want to stop their meanness. If it had been about something less important, his childish obstinacy would have moved me.

  I have learned to live without you, and I will learn to live without Eik. It hurts.

  Olga

  April 1, 1956

  Herbert,

  You should know that Eik is alive. He was released from captivity in Russia last year, one of the last ten thousand.