Lesson 57
Back in the old country
Did the narrater find his mother's grave?
I stopped to let the car cool off and to study the map.
I had expected to be near my objective by now, but everything still seemed alien to me.
I was only five when my father had taken me abroad, and that was eighteen years ago.
When my mother had died after a tragic accident, he did not quickly recover from the shock and loneliness.
Everything around him was full of her presence, continually reopening the wound.
So he decided to emigrate.
In the new country he became absorbed in making a new life for the two of us, so that he gradually ceased to grieve.
He did not marry again and I was brought up without a woman's care; but I lacked for nothing, for he was both father and mother to me.
He always meant to go back one day, but not to stay.
His roots and mine had become too firmly embedded in the new land.
But he wanted to see the old folk againand to visit my mother's grave.
He became mortally ill a few months before we had planned to go and, when he knew that he was dying, he made me promise to go on my own.
I hired a car the day after landing and bought a comprehensive book of maps,
which I found most helpful on the cross-country journey, but which I did not think I should need on the last stage.
It was not that I actually remembered anything at all.
But my father had described over and over again what we should see at every milestone after leaving the nearest town,
so that I was positive I should recognize it as familiar territory.