Visitation

THE GARDENER

IN WINTER THE gardener brings the seasoned logs from earlier years up to the house in the wheelbarrow and kindles fires in the heating stoves for the mistress of the house and her niece.

He prunes the apple and pear trees. In spring he helps the mistress of the house carry down the crates in which she has stowed everything of value, to save it from the Russians. He fetches the oars and oarlocks when she is ready to go out in the boat to sink the crates on the shoal of the Nackliger. When the Russians arrive, they place nearly two hundred horses in the garden, around seventy on the smaller meadow beside the house, and around one hundred and thirty on the larger one to the right of the path that leads down to the lake. The horses scrape at the ground that is just beginning to thaw, transforming it into a morass within a single day, the horses eat everything around them that can possibly serve as food: the fresh leaves and blossoms of the forsythia bush, the young shoots of the fir shrubs and the lilac and hazelnut buds. The Russians confiscate the entire supply of honey. By this time the potato beetle, pursuing a course diametrically opposite to the direction in which the Red Army is marching, has already reached the Soviet Union and is preparing to devastate what potato fields there were spared by the Germans.