Experts, real and phony, piped up with pronouncements that the missing explorers would be found and rescued, or that there was no hope for them, or that it all depended on how strong the influence of the Gulf Stream was on the climate in Nordaustlandet this winter. There were reports about Herbert, about his experience of war and as a traveler, his energy and determination, but also about his recklessness: the expedition had set out far too late.

  Olga read it all, but she wasn’t interested in which rescue team set out when or from where. She just wanted to know what had happened to Herbert. In April, two members of the expedition who had set out with the captain but had given up and returned to the ship were rescued; four were dead. The two had had no news of Herbert since he embarked on the crossing of Nordaustlandet in August. In July, a rescue expedition that had focused on the search for Herbert and the routes across Nordaustlandet returned, having found no trace of him. This was now worth only a few column inches in the paper. Austria had just declared war on Serbia.

  Olga didn’t stop hoping and sending letters to Herbert in Tromsø, poste restante. She knew that the rescue operations had been suspended. But her heart beat a little faster each time the newspaper arrived, until she saw that, once again, there was no report of Herbert’s unexpected arrival in a Lapp or Danish settlement. She had read somewhere that a Danish expedition had survived two winters in Greenland. Somewhere . . . she couldn’t remember where, and she didn’t want to reread it and find that she had misread it and it had only been one winter after all.

  She suffered from the fact that Herbert’s situation remained strangely unreal. She had been able to picture German South West Africa soon after he left, because he had described it vividly in his letters and the field post had been reliable and regular. He hadn’t written much from Argentina or Karelia, but he had told her a lot about them after his return, as he had after his return from Brazil, Kola, Siberia, and Kamchatka. She couldn’t picture the Arctic—or was she refusing to do so out of pique? She was familiar with snow in winter and had seen drift ice on the Neman and in the Curonian Lagoon. But the snow fields and icebergs and glaciers, the polar bears and walruses, the men swathed in cloth and furs posing heroically with skis and sleds and dogs—the newspaper illustrator had done drawings from photographs, a few thin black lines that Olga thought looked like caricatures, as if the Arctic were a bad joke.

  The things she reproached herself with were serious. She had never spoken to Herbert about his projects and plans, never questioned them, never tried to talk him out of them. She had delighted in Herbert’s enthusiasm, his radiant face and the light in his eyes, as if he were a child, as if it were all a game. Now the game had cost four lives, or even eight if Herbert and his comrades did not return.

  23

  Then Germany declared war on Russia. The Russians occupied Tilsit and had to abandon it again; in between, people stood outside their houses and heard the cannons at Tannenberg. The war moved eastward, and daily life submitted once again to the laws of farming. In autumn they harvested, threshed, and ploughed; in spring they fertilized, harrowed, and sowed; and in the wartime summer of 1915 thistles were pulled, weeds hoed, and potato beetles picked off just as they were in peacetime summers.

  But the men were missing, and some wives and mothers were already wearing black. The old and the young were there, and had to take on what the men would usually have done. Olga’s friends in the next village were lucky. The husband was already back from the war; his left arm was gone, but he was back. His wife walked through the village with a smile, trying not to flaunt her happiness.

  Olga wasn’t really hoping anymore. Two years had passed since Herbert had set out, and the idea that he would hold out longer than the Danes had done in Greenland was a dream from which Olga awoke as soon as she began to dream it. But his death wasn’t real for Olga either. She thought about Herbert and talked to him, and her connection with him felt no different from the one she had had when she thought about him and talked to him and felt connected to him during all his many travels. She had learned to live with a Herbert who was absent a great deal and for long periods. She didn’t have a sense of any break: that now it was too much, now it was too long.

  Even if this meant he didn’t disappear from her life, the mass slaughter in France finally helped her to grasp the fact of his death. The friend she had made at the women’s teacher-training college wrote to tell her of the deaths of both her younger brothers and their friends in the great battles on the Marne, in Flanders, and in Champagne, and for Olga it was as if this generation were being wiped out, and Herbert along with it. She had not been able to picture him in the ice. She could easily imagine him taking part in one of the charges reported in the newspaper in which young men stormed bravely and cheerfully to their deaths.

  That autumn, her grandmother died of consumption. She had complained of abdominal pain and grown thinner and thinner, but hadn’t wanted to go and live with Olga and let her take care of her; instead, she had insisted on dying in her own bed. The neighbors, who had looked in on her regularly, found her dead one morning.

  When Olga arrived, her grandmother was already lying in her coffin in the church. Olga sat beside her and held the wake. From nightfall till daybreak she sat beside the woman who had taken her in and raised her but had not liked her. She did not mourn what had been between her grandmother and herself, which was now over, but that which had never been. She also mourned the unlived lives of those fallen young men, and the life she and Herbert would never have. For the first time, all of it was real: the loss, the farewell, the pain, the mourning. She started weeping and could not stop.

  24

  She continued to teach in her village until the land north of the Neman, split off from Germany since the Treaty of Versailles and administered by France, was annexed by Lithuania in 1923. After that she taught in a village south of the Neman.

  Her great joy during these years was Eik. He was a gifted child, an ingenious and skillful hobby craftsman who built himself a boat and a soapbox cart, and at the same time a dreamer who couldn’t hear enough about far-off seas and distant lands. When he discovered Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, Olga told him about Herbert’s travels, about German South West Africa and Argentina and Karelia and the peninsulas and Siberia. She didn’t want to tell him about Spitsbergen or that Herbert was missing, presumed dead.

  She presented Eik with a heroic Herbert, not the boy from Pomerania who had overreached himself and frozen to death, but the adventurer full of longing for great expanses and distant lands, who had not given up, who had overcome the worst of hardships and the greatest of dangers. It was as if, although Herbert had failed in the eyes of the whole world, Olga nonetheless wanted to present him to someone as he had seen himself and had wanted to be seen, as if she had forgotten the things she had reproached herself for. Later, she would fear that Eik was taking the wrong path in life, as Herbert had, ultimately taking the path to ruin and becoming the ruin of others. But by then she no longer had any influence over him.

  Because he was gifted, he made it out of the village to the city, from the elementary school to the high school and from Tilsit to Berlin. He studied architecture at the Technical University, and sometimes Olga would visit and admire him: tall, blond, with a clear face and blue eyes, athletic, skilled. Later, he won prizes, designed and built a department store in Halle, a hotel in Munich, a consulate in Genoa, and spent many years in Italy. Once she visited him, let him show her around Rome and introduce her to a young woman, a colleague: Jewish, more skilled, and, although Eik didn’t seem to realize it, cleverer than he was. Olga liked the woman, hoped Eik would be able to cope with her superiority, and would have liked to have seen them get married. At some point, though, the woman no longer featured in his letters.

  In the summer of 1936, Eik returned from Italy and joined the NSDAP and the SS. He fantasized about German Lebensraum between the Neman and the Urals, about black earth and grass steppe, rippling wheat fields as far as the eye could see, huge herds of cattle. There were fortified German villages in his fantasyland; apart from these, it was uninhabited. The workers it would need, like the oxen before the plough and the horses before the cart, would come from out of nowhere in the morning and disappear into nowhere in the evening. He would oversee, from horseback, the transformation of Slavic poverty into German splendor.

  Olga couldn’t believe it. She had supported Eik’s interests, his reading, his hobbies; she had discussed everything with him and encouraged him in everything. And now this? How could he turn his back like this on what she lived and believed? She had never joined the Social Democrats, but she had always voted for them. She had liked the Republic, in which woman teachers counted for more, could do more, and earned more than they had under the Kaiser. She had sat on the executive committee of the General German Association of Women Teachers until it preempted enforced political conformity by dissolving itself. Right from the start she had rejected National Socialism—once again, Germany was aiming to be too big. Bismarck had already wanted and made it too big in his time. And a second world war would follow the first.

  She tried to talk Eik out of his fantasies. Arable and livestock farming? As a child, hadn’t he preferred reading and making things to helping out on the farm? When he was a student, hadn’t his geraniums died and his cat run away? Hadn’t he studied architecture instead of agriculture? What was this dream of the far horizon and emptiness from sunrise to sunset? There were people living there already, and there was plenty of wheat and cattle in Germany. But she couldn’t reach him. He treated her with the affectionate condescension reserved for those who are too old to read the signs of the times.

  During the summer holidays Olga caught a fever, thought it was influenza, went to bed, woke up the next morning and could no longer hear. The doctor did this and that. Later, Olga wondered whether he had actually believed in the possibility of recovery or had simply been trying to accustom her slowly to the fact that she was deaf.

  She was dismissed, at fifty-three. The school board wanted to get rid of her anyway. She didn’t suit the new age. She wouldn’t have stopped teaching if she hadn’t had to. But for some time she had assumed that the Nazis would dismiss her, and since then the school had felt increasingly alien to her. And she had been a teacher for more than thirty years—perhaps it was enough.

  She moved to Breslau, because the school for the deaf there had a good reputation, and thanks to her linguistic skill and vocabulary she became an expert lip-reader. She would have liked to have stayed in the city after graduating from the school; she had lived long enough in the countryside. But then she moved to a village after all, where life was less expensive. She was a talented and skillful seamstress who had sewn all her own clothes since her time at teacher-training college. She found customers in Breslau; some she worked for at their house, while for others she collected the items and brought them back a few days later. The journey took an hour by train.

  She resigned herself to her life. She cooked, read, tended her garden, went for walks, and sometimes received visits from former pupils, from her friends in the Memel region and their children, from Eik. She missed music every day. She had sung with the children at school, conducted the choir and played the organ at church, and loved the occasional concerts in Tilsit. She read scores and played the music in her head, but it was a pitiful substitute. She had loved the sounds of nature too: birds, the sighing of the wind, waves breaking in the sea. She had liked being woken by roosters in summer and by church bells in winter.

  But she was glad she couldn’t hear the loudspeakers anymore. Under the Nazis the world had become noisy; they had installed loudspeakers everywhere that were constantly pursuing you, blaring out speeches and exhortations and marches. But nothing is so bad that, in order not to hear it, one would wish to give up hearing the good things as well.

  25

  The war didn’t reach Olga’s Silesian village until February 1945. The mayor had reassured them and exhorted them to stay, until one morning he disappeared. Olga couldn’t hear the front, but the others could, and she did what the others were doing: packed her bags and left. When soldiers passed by in trucks and tanks, she got out of the road, and when low-flying aircraft passed overhead, she threw herself into the ditch. The locomotive pulling the train that finally took her was hit by a bomb and exploded.

  Amid all the hurrying and jostling on the road, the clattering and grinding of tank tracks, the howling whistle of low-flying aircraft, the rattling of machine guns, the panic of people fleeing for cover, their screams when they were wounded, the explosion that ripped the locomotive’s boiler apart—amid all this snarling and bellowing of war, Olga was cloaked in utter silence. People’s panic was inaudible, their lacerated faces emitted no scream. The tanks silently carved out their path, the planes were soundless shadows flitting over the refugees, and bullets were straight lines of little puffs of dust, until someone was hit and, uncomplaining, acquiescent, sank to the ground or convulsed in the ditch. The explosion of the locomotive was a soundless, brightly colored ball of fire.

  When the locomotive exploded and the train ground to a halt, and she and the others had to continue on foot, it began to snow. At first it snowed softly and was barely visible. Then the snow fell thick and wet, and soon lay knee-deep. Every step was an effort, every step was agony. Added to this was the wind: when they were out of the forest, it drove the snow into their faces like needles.

  When evening came and there was no light, no destination in sight, some gave up. They lay down a little way away, under a tree or in a hollow, on their side or back, rucksack under their head, as one would lie down to sleep. Olga had read how people get tired in the snow, sit and lean against a tree to rest for a while, don’t feel the cold, and fall asleep, and she had thought it must be a good death. Now she saw them lying there, and whether they were still sleeping or were already dead, it was the same: they were reconciled. They were inviting Olga to lie down with them—with them and with Herbert, who had also died in the snow.

  But then the thought of Herbert’s death made her angry; that stupid death, crossing an island where no one wanted to live, or in a passage no one wanted to use, or heading to the North Pole—whatever Herbert had gotten into his stupid head. She was so angry that she kept going. No, she didn’t want to die like Herbert.

  Olga followed the others westward, on foot, by horse and cart, on trucks, by train. The others would know where to go, she told herself, and if the others were wrong, she didn’t know any better. She managed to get across the Elbe before the capitulation, then across the Main, as far as the Neckar. The city was undamaged, and after all the cities with bombed-out, burned-out, collapsed houses, charred trees lining the streets and in the gardens and parks, ruined wastelands punctuated by chimneys or a church tower or a high-rise bunker, cellars into which people darted like rats, Olga felt she had reached the end of her journey.

  The refugee office assigned her a room, and within a few days she was settling in there with her few belongings, and, with joyful amazement, into the city. She was walking down the main street when she passed a photographic studio and went in on a whim. The picture shows a dignified woman with a clear, open face, wrinkles only around the eyes and from the sides of her nose to the corners of her lips, a focused gaze, and determined mouth. Her still-thick white hair is gathered in a bun, as in the photograph of her as a young girl the day before her Confirmation, and she is wearing a black dress with a white collar, not high-necked but with a slightly low neckline. She isn’t leaning back or resting on anything; she stands upright, her right hand hanging down and the left held over her bosom in a regal gesture. Nothing, no tension or self-consciousness in her face or bearing, betrays the fact that she is deaf.

  She was a quick and meticulous seamstress and soon had enough customers, but no other social contacts, and her life after her flight was even lonelier than before. Her efforts to locate friends from the Memel region through the Red Cross yielded nothing. She took an interest in history and politics, read the paper regularly and attentively, borrowed books and musical scores from the public library. She discovered her love of film and was content to imagine what she couldn’t read from the actors’ lips.

  She sewed for several families until, in the early 1950s, after some back and forth over lost papers and destroyed records, she received the small pension to which she was entitled as a former elementary-school teacher in the Prussian school system. After that she only sewed for our family, where she felt particularly welcome; the money she earned with us was sufficient extra income.

  Part Two

  1

  She came every two or three months for several days. She would alter dresses, skirts, and blouses, jackets, trousers, and shirts discarded by my aunts and uncles to fit my older sisters and brother and, when my brother grew out of them, to fit me. She mended holes that barbed wire or a thorn hedge or a ski pole had ripped, backed fabric, sewed on leather patches. She cut threadbare bedsheets down the middle and sewed them together again along the edges. She also darned stockings and socks if my mother, who didn’t really like asking her to do this as it was beneath a seamstress’s dignity, couldn’t find the time.

  When she came, the sewing machine was fetched from my parents’ bedroom and set up by the window in the piano and dining room. It was a Pfaff: the name was inlayed in pale wood on the dark wood of the case, gleamed white against the gleaming black of the machine, and was incorporated into the matte black, cast-iron ornamentation that connected the rods and pedal under the table. For my sisters and brother, the sewing machine was an irritation; it made the room too small and got in the way of their piano, violin, and cello practice. I loved it. I thought it was a marvelous device, like the old range in the kitchen with the white enamel front and black hob, the steamroller on freshly tarred streets, the grand black taxis in the nearby square, the black locomotives and green carriages at the station.