Back in the Old Country

更新：2023-11-22

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[00:01.50]Lesson 57
[00:03.54]Back in the old country
[00:12.65]Did the narrater find his mother's grave?
[00:18.18]I stopped to let the car cool off and to study the map.
[00:22.74]I had expected to be near my objective by now, but everything still seemed alien to me.
[00:29.09]I was only five when my father had taken me abroad, and that was eighteen years ago.
[00:35.66]When my mother had died after a tragic accident, he did not quickly recover from the shock and loneliness.
[00:43.50]Everything around him was full of her presence, continually reopening the wound.
[00:49.58]So he decided to emigrate.
[00:52.06]In the new country he became absorbed in making a new life for the two of us, so that he gradually ceased to grieve.
[01:00.53]He did not marry again and I was brought up without a woman's care;
[01:05.56]but I lacked for nothing, for he was both father and mother to me.
[01:10.71]He always meant to go back one day, but not to stay.
[01:14.80]His roots and mine had become too firmly embedded in the new land.
[01:20.03]But he wanted to see the old folk againand to visit my mother's grave.
[01:25.18]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.
[01:34.85]I hired a car the day after landing and bought a comprehensive book of maps,
[01:40.32]which I found most helpful on the cross-country journey, but which I did not think I should need on the last stage.
[01:48.05]It was not that I actually remembered anything at all.
[01:51.41]But my father had described over and over again what we should see at every milestone after leaving the nearest town,
[01:59.86]so that I was positive I should recognize it as familiar territory.
[02:04.87]Well, I had been wrong, for I was now lost.
[02:09.94]I looked at the map and then at the milometer.
[02:13.52]I had come ten miles since leaving the town and at this point, according to my father,
[02:20.09]I should be looking at farms and cottages in a valley,
[02:23.57]with the spire of the church of our village showing in the far distance.
[02:28.47]I could see no valley, no farms, no cottages and no church spire-only a lake.
[02:36.71]I decided that I must have taken a wrong turning somewhere.
[02:40.94]So I drove back to the town and began to retrace the route, taking frequent glances at the map.
[02:48.24]I landed up at the same corner.
[02:51.50]The curious thing was that the lake was not marked on the map.
[02:56.28]I felt as if I had stumbled into a nightmare country, as you sometimes do in dreams.
[03:02.48]And, as in a nightmare, there was nobody in sight to help me.
[03:07.01]Fortunately for me, as I was wondering what to do next,
[03:11.00]there appeared on the horizon a man on horseback, riding in my direction.
[03:16.72]I waited till he came near, then I asked him the way to our old village.
[03:22.56]He said that there was now no village.
[03:26.05]I thought he must have misunderstood me, so I repeated its name.
[03:30.87]This time he pointed to the lake.
[03:34.02]The village no longer existed because it had been submerged, and all the valley too.
[03:41.37]The lake was not a natural one, but a man-made reservoir.