1. It was already summer, when we left Flensburg. Sailboats filled the bay, and out on the shoreline piers, over open water and the fishing boats there was a shimmer of heat. And once we'd made our way out to Gluecksburg, the children there were noisily splashing in a thick-grown forest of reeds. We felt the pull of distance. War was just over, with its last shells, its last bomb blasts still echoing off the slopes. Past stations in rubble, and gutted, charred little towns, we kept moving on, pushing our way in among women and children, war prisoners and miserable soldiers squatted down in muggy heat, slumped together with the swarms of refugees on grimy floors, with hunger and thirst to stretch our hands out toward any well or cup of water, and snatch up tiny, under-ripe green apples gritty and battered off railroad embankments, or out of ditches below the tracks. So, slowly, we pushed on that summer, laying in at every train stop, beside each bridge, trudging down blackened knolls and out along narrow fieldpaths, spending the nights on burned-out platforms and charred tracks. You remember. That time we were in Hanover, sprawled out where the station had burned to the ground, looking up at the bright nightsky that June, hearing those heavy wornout ravings, freightyard hoisting-cranes, the wrenching sad city noises filled with uncertain steps, with death and grief: staring at a pale moonlit night that felt so worn out, worked over, scorched and shattered from what not long before had been the proud the core and center of Europe. With eyelids dropping, the feeling gone from each nerve-end, we kept on pushing south that summer through heavy rumblings, beyond exhaustion, and each town, each horizon, each trainstop along the way gave off a lingering stench of death and smoke, now with brokendown, burned-out tanks and fortified trenches, highways blown up and bomb craters midfield -- deep hollows staring back black death -- the only scrawny vague surviving witnesses under the first flowers of spring. On and on we kept pushing through towns in rubble, past wrecked horizons with villages razed, acres of cannon and truck, whole graveyards of steel, and squads of an occupying army, their painted guardrails around town squares glaring white. So we pushed on and saw people starved down to nothing come out from under the broken brickwork, in clusters up from the dust, in vivid stripes of concentration-camp inmates, death-like, their hands shrunk to nothing, the women and children surfacing in swarms. And the war prisoners. Ringed in by shabby, grimy barracks they sang in a pale haze under the sun, played cards while waiting for the last trucks, freedom bound, to take them home. There was one young German soldier, still a child, all of a child standing there inside the burned-out Hanau station, staring at the heaped up brick and stone, the skeletal steel, treetrunk, smokestack and dirt charred the same overall black, windows wrenched out of their frames, a meshwork of iron and steel sagging down -- his childhood in shreds, all that was left of it. Tears ran like water down his face, just like water. We had crossed salt-marshes up north, desolate fields, black Ruhr Valley skylines, to push farther south, through dense midGerman towns. So that now it was August, maybe only the end of July -- time went and faded out -- we found ourselves in Würzburg. It was still morning, yet the air flared a real summer flame. All tired out, we stood on a platform and stared at the stubs of masonry left, the rolling hills, the gold summer shimmer: and felt this sudden urge to go out in the fields! It was the pull of summer, the burning Bavarian sky and sunlight -- and taking what was left of our memories with us, our pitifew packings for the trip (the towel mother made us take, a scarf from our sister, some snapshots now faded), we were suddenly high up inside the orchards. Now here we were months later, after all that death, eyeing orchard slopes, trees, and villas that hugged the hillsides, not believing any of it yet, still full of the road we'd gone, the swarm of pounding noises. And yet these apples, ripe and full, were not the charred green apples from the railroad tracks. This was Bavaria we were in. Look, my brother was saying: how green the fields and trees all around! As we climbed on up to the top of the orchards and walked the fields half crazed, drinking in the smell of wild roses, the shade of the orchards. This was life reviving, in every apple bough and vineslope. And the people, the grown girls, women in gaudy summer kerchiefs, with wicker baskets full, ripe as orchards alongside the men, making their way down into town. Dizzy with summer blossoming, all that vitality, that vineland fragrance, we sat there on a hillside, looking down the deep track the stream of the Neckar had carved, and out past the ruins of Würzburg, reflecting on the years of suffering, death and despair, and marveled at the life coming back -- each sign we saw of it -- and the earth's strength.

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