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different life from the one we’d imagined.” It’s only then that I notice the pictures on the wall. Five of them, in small black frames. Five children. Three girls, two boys, lying down with their eyes closed. Because they’re all dead.

5
    The house is abuzz with excitement. It’s the third week in July. The visit is imminent. You can’t communicate with Frieda; the usual order in the kitchen has given way to chaos. Baking, cooking, cleaning. Now the entire village knows: tomorrow the Westerners are coming!
    Frieda and I are bent over a mountain of leavened dough; she shows me what it should feel like when it’s just right: like the soft breast of a woman. I feel my own breast to compare; Frieda lets out a hearty laugh. There’s definitely a certain similarity in the consistency. We’re making gugelhupf and fruitcake—I can do it in my sleep these days—and for lunch we’re going to have vegetable soup with semolina dumplings, followed by roast beef with potato dumplings andred cabbage, and a sabayon with real vanilla for pudding. Henner got us the real vanilla. He was over in the West yesterday and brought us back a few presents, because Marianne is always generous toward him. When he has been feeling down she has occasionally given him something: a chicken, or a few onions and vegetables. So he’s very much in her debt. He brought me something, too: a bag of caramels and a butterfly hairclip inlaid with ruby-red stones. This earned me a suspicious glance from Marianne. Henner’s much better, they say. There’s a chance farmers will get back the land that once belonged to their parents. At least that’s what Siegfried is hoping. No one knows any details at this stage. In the GDR, the Brendels were one of the few families that were not collective farmers. Henner, on the other hand, worked for years in the agricultural collective before giving it up to be at the farm because the rest of his family had died. And that probably suited him fine.
    After expropriation Heinrich and Frieda were allowed to keep three-quarters of a hectare. That was a lot by GDR standards, and yet they had to reduce their livestock holding, which now wasn’t enough to live off, so Siegfried came up with the idea of the sawmill. The rest of the land, forty hectares at least, went to the collective. The large hay meadows down by the river were only the Brendels’ on lease. The same happened to Henner’s family.
    I’ve heard he’s been clearing up a bit at the farm. The dogs are quiet at the moment, the horses clean and well groomed. I can go for a ride if I like, he said, with Johannes of course, but I don’t trust his horses.
    Frieda releases me from the kitchen for an hour, so Johannes and I go to the river. Until only a few weeks ago the water here would look different every day—green, blue, yellow, rust-red—and it stank of rotten eggs. That was because of the chemical factory upstream, where my mother worked. Now on hot days the cattle go to the riverbank and drink their fill.
    I have discovered why Zossima prostrated himself before Dmitry. Shortly before his death he said to Alexey, “I bowed down yesterday to the great suffering in store for him.” Alexey was beside himself with worry.
    We’re sitting by the river with our feet in the water. Johannes only ever sees me through the camera lens these days. Every gesture becomes a picture, every look becomes infinity. He delivers me from time and captures a moment, which is then immediately lost forever—every picture is a small death.
    Later we wander through the meadow as far as the railway tracks. We walk along the tracks until we reach a bridge. It crosses the river diagonally and is about fifty meters long. To get to the other side you have to walk down the middle of the tracks, on the rotten sleepers; there’s barely any space to either side. We put our heads on the tracks to listen out for any humming and check for slight vibrations indicating an oncoming train.