She pulled the ribbon from her hair and rolled it into a ball. ‘I came fourteen years too late to enjoy you all. Fourteen years, Horst! The unlucky surprise. The gravest mistake Mamma ever made was thinking that she was safe because she had reached thirty-nine! Poor Papa! One last burst of passion and, lo and behold, me! The ewe lamb, the outsider, the changeling, the only girl child … what to do with her? But not you, my dearest Horst, my saviour, my safety valve. You were so good and sweet to me, always; and for that reason I am here today, and for that reason I will never forget you. But the rest …’ she threw the ball of twisted ribbon into the shadows ‘… I obliterate. Tonight, you know, it was just as if I had never left. An endless strip of film, continually running, like the thing in the Reichstag Museum, you know? A continuous loop; as soon as it finishes it starts all over again, endless, endless. The history of the German people, repeated every fifteen minutes, lest you forget. The same this evening; the Land, the Wall, the perfidy of Eisenhower for allowing the Russians to take Berlin, the squalor of the Vulgarian and his SS, the nostalgia, the looking back. And after dinner, Horst, the same music on the gramophone! The same as when I was knee high … as when Mamma and Papa used to have their evening concerts. Wagner, eternal Wagner … Schumann; Papa reading from Schiller, and then, before we went to bed, lighter things, Willi Fritsch, Lilian Harvey, Leander, Hans Albers … those voices are still in my head. I sing the songs to this day! That is all the dead, Horst, the time has gone. But this evening the same thing again. Not the Schiller, to be sure, but Fritsch, Leander … operetta, nostalgia! God! The continuous belt of film …as if nothing had happened, as if the Wall through the orchard was not really there.’

‘Oh, it is there.’ He was smiling. ‘It is there. We see it, feel it every moment of the day. Perhaps, you know, that is why we look back all the time? The present is not so beautiful. But we are aware, have no fear of that. We have been here on this land long before Charlemagne, before the Danes, before the Prussians. We are the Wends! The warrior race, true Mecklenburgers, you cannot forget that. And we have stayed, whatever came, whoever came. We are not little grey mice. We shall stay.’

She shook her head. ‘I shall not.’

‘One day you will come back, of that I am certain. When you have done all that you want to in the world beyond these fields, you will come home; because it is your heritage, and your blood. We hold fast, you see? Your place is here for always, remember that, and remember, too, that I love you.’