We finally arrived in uncle’s town in the middle of the night. The station was an ordinary peasant house. Uncle wasn’t waiting for us, even though we’d sent him a telegram. There was a dark forest right in front of us and not a single streetlamp on the road. Neither on the left, in a depression that had standing water in it … a regular lake that was impossible to cross … nor on the right, where the road climbed a sort of hill, beyond which it was pitch dark … We set our suitcases down on top of some logs and a coal monger’s bags in a shack next to the tracks … We took with us only the bag in which our nightshirts were packed. Since we’d been spattered with wet coal dust, we wiped ourselves off with bits of cardboard that were lying around. We stayed standing outside the closed little station to give father time to figure out which way we should go. Mother was on pins and needles. But here, in the place where he grew up, she could at least trust him a little … Yes, he suddenly recalled some shortcut, a path that he often used as a child to go to school and also to come home, when he’d return to the village. The path was up there somewhere, way at the top of a hill, and then led back down to the water …