One autumn night, setting out in the deepest darkness, I went walking in the forest surrounding my home, following old hunters’ paths I could feel underfoot rather than see. Without the distraction of sight, I was intensely aware of the sounds around me: scuffling, scratching, creaking, in the distance a sharp, desperate yelp. I was reminded that night is not merely another face of that world we see by day, but another, completely distinct, world. I wandered in this night world for a long time.
The sky began to lighten as I circled back toward the house. First, the highest branches of the trees became visible against the paling sky, then, quite quickly, their trunks emerged from a solid dark wall into separate columns. Perspective began to reassert itself, and soon everything around me was revealed, muted but clear, in a gentle pinkish light. The night world had gone.
By sunrise I was back at my boundary fence, looking out over the meadows stretching away towards the river. The grass, grazed short, sparkled with morning dew, thousands of tiny prisms in the angled light. I stood for a time, watching without thought. The sun was still gathering its strength, and I could stare into the eastern sky. And as I stared, from out of that east a crane appeared, growing larger as it flew toward me, following its own shadow across the fields. With sweeping hefts of its wings it approached, then passed above, swift, unswerving, silent.
I felt blessed, convinced I had seen the spirit of the new day. I waited, but there was nothing more, until a crow cawed, sneering at me for standing there idle. I turned homeward. The chain securing the gate clanked loudly in the clear air.
The path back to the house wove through a wooded park, and the roofline was not visible until I emerged from the trees. A faint trickle of bluish smoke was rising from the chimney; the fire had stayed alight all night. As I approached, I saw tiny finches jinking in and out of the dense green wisteria covering the front porch. Their swift, animated movements made the empty house seem resonant with life.
* * *
At three in the morning, anxious, feeling a great pressure bearing down on me and unable to lie still for even a minute at a time, I had risen from my bed and gone outside. If I could not force myself to be calm by an effort of will, I needed to allow the excess of churning energy within me some outlet for escape. And I badly wanted to stop hearing, repeated over and over in my head, the same four bars of Bach’s Partita in D minor for violin. I loved this work, and had played it only yesterday evening, in the twilight, when it brought me peace and a sense of closeness to God. But now this small fragment was tormenting me. It seemed unjust that a part of something so sublime could be an affliction.
As I left the house, I thought of the Biblical account of the Gergesene swine; the man living in the wilderness had an excess of energy trapped within him, too, enough to give him the power to argue with Christ. And only Christ could cast this unclean energy, these demons, as the Bible has it, out of him. But I hoped that my demons could be drawn out of me by the earth, the ancient trees, the deep, dark lakes, the immense night sky. Nature could surely take this energy, cleanse it and use it for a better purpose.
I had returned here the afternoon before, driving home from Klewitz with the car’s canvas roof wound down. The country around my estate, which I had always loved, seemed even more than usually beautiful, an unexpected and fortunate glimpse into some Eden. Mist lay over the meadows, and sunbeams filtered in and out of the world. Grouse rose from the underbrush as I passed. Fine, strong horses bobbed their heads over fences. There was a smell of freshness everywhere.
But my happiness in this idyll held within it a canker, like a wasp in a rosebud. For I sensed, from every sign and signal, that war was being prepared against us across our eastern border, only a hundred miles away.
I had done my best to ignore this, to pretend it was not so, and succeeded most of the time. The small landholders of the district seemed to have been even more successful in this pretence than I, as life was being carried on here just as it had for generations. Horses were being trained, cattle bred, crops sown, as though the cycle of the seasons would certainly continue uninterrupted. Evidently, no thought was being given to defence, or even what preparations might be needed for defence. This troubled me, but I could understand it; after all, our people had lived and prospered here for nearly a thousand years, surviving every adversity.
But I knew that if war did come, all this would be brought to an end in a moment. Bloodlines would be extinguished, homes ruined, carefully manured fields laid waste, befouled with oil and rusted metal, fertilised only by corpses.
I had seen war in Western Europe, thirty years before, and I knew that places where war is waged, or even passes over, are ravaged beyond recognition. War is cruel enough to its combatants, but when war reaches a civilian population, the damage and suffering are multiplied in horror. Everything that makes up normal human life is devoured. Today, I could regard with pleasure my house, my library, my violins, the new apiaries on the western boundary. But if war came, all these things would be immediately lost, and I would not even think of them, because my life, and the lives of my family and friends, would be in peril, and possessions would be beneath any consideration.
I thought of the inhabitants of the towns and villages of western Poland at the start of this war. They had refused to believe what was facing them squarely; they ignored all the speeches, the newspaper articles, the troop movements, the bluntest and most direct threats. Then in the middle of a warm September night, while they were sleeping, boom, a jolting explosion, then another and another, and their peaceful world was shaken to pieces. Homes were blasted, children killed, family heirlooms scattered like rags. Men who had come to subjugate them marched grinning through their streets. We had sown this, back then, and now it seemed we were going to reap it tenfold.
The official message from the governor’s office was that everyone should remain where they were, as the border would be strongly and effectively defended. But a week ago my friend Paul Wedel in Berlin, with whom I corresponded regularly, sent me a chess problem which contained a clear, unmistakable warning. I did not have to set out the pieces to understand its meaning. With black’s next move, white would lose its remaining knight – military defeat was imminent – and to save its queen, white must, with its next move, place her behind a rook – it was imperative to go to a safer place immediately.
Paul was well connected, and was no fantasist or defeatist. But even so I resisted his warning. Our people, German people, had civilised this land, made it what it was. I rather saw myself as a knight preparing to hold the fortress against barbarians, as my ancestors had done in former days. We had overcome all kinds of attacks, trials and difficulties here, and if it were required of us, we would do so again.
No, I would not leave this place. After all, I told myself, I am not called von Klewitz for nothing; I am of here. Like all of us, I felt so deeply planted in the East Prussian soil that I could not imagine being uprooted. Our awareness of our long presence here had grown around us, like thick bark on an ancient tree; we thought of our ancestors as akin to those entombed warriors of legend, who would return to save us in times of real need.
I did not deceive myself quite so much that I allowed Emilie and the girls to remain. I arranged for them to go to Danzig, with travel permits from there all the way back to Berlin should that become necessary. At first Emilie did not wish to leave, but I ordered her to go. Taken aback by my unusual sternness, she obeyed. I told her that I would send for her when it was time to return.
* * *
It was now broad daylight. In the kitchen I made coffee. Over the last week I had got used to making it for myself, and while it was not as good as Emilie’s coffee, it was getting better. Wanting some activity, I decided to check, clean and oil all the guns. If invaders did come, sporting rifles would hardly be useful against tanks, but I felt better for doing it all the same. Although I had scarcely slept, I felt no need for rest, so after finishing with the guns I went outside to prune my roses. I had laid out a wide bed of them, brought here from the Kordes nursery in Hamburg, some years before. I enjoyed the feeling of the autumn sun on my back, and my dark feelings of the night before began to dissipate.
But just as I was tending to a Crimson Glory rose, a shadow fell across me. Startled, more jittery than I thought, I looked up. Another crane had flown overhead. Toward noon another two came, then a squadron of them, all heading west. It was not yet their migrating season.
The message was clear. To the east, across the border, the cranes had been forcibly disturbed from their nesting places. There could be no further pretence; war was being prepared there.
I wondered if my dark feelings the night before had arisen because, like the cranes, like all wild creatures, I had instinctively sensed danger heading toward me. The answer, though, was more prosaic; I knew very well what was coming, but was trying to ignore it. In the small hours, unpleasant truths rise to the surface, and break through our optimistic veneer. My anxiety and distress last night were simply reality knocking loudly on my door.
A voice told me, as I stood in the garden watching the cranes disappear westward, that to remain here now was foolishness; I should leave, after all. If invaders did not come, well and good, I would return, but if they did, it was better to be elsewhere. Not merely to save my personal skin, but to act as a responsible husband and father, and, it might be said, to preserve some inherited learning about bee-keeping and horse-breeding, and a good deal of local history and lore.
Once again, however, I resolved that I would not leave. At that time, of course, I believed that even if war came, and we were driven out, we would one day return. I did not know then that our home and these lands would be lost to us, and lost to Germany, forever.
* * *
A week after I saw the cranes, bombers came from the east, following exactly the same flight path as the birds, and circled above us. They seemed to drop their bombs carelessly, randomly, but even so they killed people and livestock, and destroyed homes and barns and waterways. This caused terrible distress. But it was nothing compared to what was to come.
Three days after the bombing, tanks and soldiers appeared. Soldiers, or rather men wearing uniforms, men of the most debased and bestial type. Every kind of horror was visited on the place. Essentially by chance, I was not killed, but lived to witness it. There was a general slaughter. Householders died defending their homes, some burned alive inside them. I do not speak about what was done to the women. The town of Klewitz was shelled and bombed to rubble. My estate was razed; the house, the barns, the books, the violins, the roses all destroyed for wanton amusement. Lakes were fished with grenades, trees chopped down and left to lie, not even used for firewood, bloodstock horses were shot or mutilated or ridden to death. It wearies and distresses me beyond any telling to think of all that happened there.
I survived, and I escaped, but that story is long and tedious and I pass over it here.
I never saw Emilie and the children again. I could find no trace of them in Danzig, or Dresden, where I last heard they had gone, or in Berlin.
So now I live alone in another country, distant, and I do my best to maintain some sort of life. I keep bees, and I even try to grow roses in this stony soil. But the life of an exile is dry, and cold, and does not allow for hope. What is a man, torn away from his home, his family, the land of his ancestors? My heart is, you may say, wintry.
I have not played the violin again. I think my belief that music brought man closer to God was entirely corroded by the events of those days. But I wish that I could stop hearing, repeated over and over again in my head, those same four bars of Bach’s Partita in D minor.