The Pages by Hugo Hamilton

Author:Hugo Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-06-01T21:15:32+00:00

27

Henning finally comes to the map at the back and speaks about how they found the place. It’s out there near the Polish border, he says. Near the Oder river. Your grandfather eventually worked it out by studying the annotations in the margins. He was too old to undertake the journey himself at that stage, so he asked us to find the place for him.

We went there, your father and me, one day in the summer after your grandfather died. It was a matter of honouring his wish more than anything else. We found the religious shrine. We found the small river with the bridge, just as it is pictured in the diagram. Henning shows Lena the map and says – we followed that path and came to the farmhouse. We were quite certain we had the right place, but then a lot of those farms out there look the same. The single-storey house, the barns erected in an oblong around the inner yard, the walled orchard.

The people living there had taken over the farm during the Nazi period. The family of Angela Kaufmann had been dispossessed, so the records showed. At first we were in two minds whether to go up to the farmhouse itself, but your father was braver than I was and insisted we talk to the new owners. There was a dog on a chain in the yard. He started barking at us and pulling on the chain which was attached to an old water pump with a long handle.

A woman came out of the house and stood on the steps by the door. She wanted to know what we were doing there, so we told her we were out walking and that we had lost our way. We were looking for a path that might lead us to the next village, and she pointed us in the right direction. She told us to keep going along the path, we would come across an oak tree with a bench underneath. All we had to do is carry on, then we would eventually come to the village, a walk of maybe half an hour, she said.

This confirmed that the place corresponded with the map in the book.

We thanked her and apologized for disturbing her.

She said it was not a problem, then she continued watching as we made our way back out towards the path.

At the last minute, Henning goes on, your father turned around to ask another question. He just wanted to make absolutely sure that we had found the right place. Ideally, we would have loved to take out the book and show her the map, perhaps ask if we could walk around to have a look. But she was not all that friendly and the dog was continuing to lunge at us, making a lot of choking noises as the chain cut into his neck. And then your father decided quite spontaneously, since we had come all that way, to ask the woman something that would put everything beyond doubt.

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