He often drives there. But there’s not much sense in his visits.

She just sits in her comfortable wheelchair and stares at some distant point. The doctor says that her brain is like a mouldering autumn leaf. But the care she gets there is good. He had tried to look after her right here, at home, but she fell and broke her hip. It can’t be helped – each of us must carry our own cross. To the bitter end.

The mornings and evenings are sad. The days he fills in somehow. Now and then his sons visit him. With them he has to speak English because they’ve forgotten German. When they were small his wife tried to teach them German, but as soon as they started to attend American school, the language vanished.

He talks in Latvian to himself. No one else in his life has had any use for his Latvian. That’s how it’s turned out to be.

He lost his leg serving in the Latvian legion. Latvian women didn’t want a cripple like him.

Klibkāji, klibiķi, klibi, klibzaķi, klinkatu, kluburu, klumburu, sleini, kleini – so many words for ‘cripple’ in Latvian!

He found himself a German woman and took her to America. She very much didn’t want to go, but who ever asked her. On the whole, he hates the Germans as much as the Russians. Deep down, he can’t get rid of the feeling.

Between them, they made mincemeat of us – his inner voice bluntly keeps telling him.

The worst was the first half year in the New York suburb, on the other side of the Hudson River. The days spent on those stones with the blacks who hated the whites, the whites who, with hate, turned away from the blacks. On Sundays he was able to meet with some old war cronies, who would then stuff themselves with sauerkraut and sausages, get drunk and whine about the past. But nothing could be changed any more. So he stopped meeting them. He started looking for cheap land in some remote out-of-the-way American village. And he found it – the mountainous Vanetten.

He came here for the first time in autumn. Pristine countryside, fawn-coloured fields, mountains clad in purple and gold. A heavy mist, momentarily pierced by the sun. Not a house for miles around. This was the place. He bought land here and started to build a house. Everything would be their own – fall asters, potatoes and black currants in the garden, a piglet in the sty, roosting chickens, two dogs and a cat.