All for Nothing

by Walter Kempowski

  “Was everything all right now?” is the last sentence of the book—one Kempowski hesitated for some time, the story goes, before writing down.

  —Jenny Erpenbeck

  Translated by Susan Bernofsky

  ALL FOR NOTHING

  For Jörg

  To save our souls from sin, dear Lord,

  Our lives are all in vain.

  Only Thy grace and Holy Word

  Obliterate its stain.

  Martin Luther (1524)

  1

  The Georgenhof

  The Georgenhof estate was not far from Mitkau, a small town in East Prussia, and now, in winter, the Georgenhof, surrounded by old oaks, lay in the landscape like a black island in a white sea.

  The estate was a small one. All the land apart from a remnant had been sold and the manor house was far from being a castle. It was built over two floors, crowned by a semicircular pediment with a battered metal finial in the shape of a spiked mace, the weapon also known as a morning star. The house stood behind an old stone wall that had once been painted yellow. It was now entirely overgrown by ivy in which the starlings nested in summer. Early in this January of 1945, the tiles on the roof were rattling in an icy wind that swept up fine snow from far away over the fields and against the estate buildings.

  ‘You’ll have to strip that ivy off some time,’ the owners had been told. ‘It’ll eat all the plaster away.’

  Rusty, discarded agricultural implements were propped against the crumbling stone wall, and scythes and rakes dangled from the tall black oaks. A harvest cart had collided with the farmyard gate long ago, and the gate had hung askew on its hinges ever since.

  •

  The home farm, with its stables, barns and a cottage, lay to one side of the manor house, a little way off. All that strangers driving along the road saw of the place was the main house. They wondered who lived there: why don’t we just stop and say hello? And then with a touch of envy they wondered: why don’t we live in a house like that ourselves, a place that must be full of stories? Life is unfair, thought the passers-by.

  NO THROUGH ROAD, said a notice on the big barn: no one was allowed to go into the park. Peace reigned behind the house and in the little park and the wood beyond it. There has to be a place where you feel you belong.

  •

  4.5 KM, said the whitewashed milestone on the road that ran past the house to Mitkau, leading to Elbing in the other direction.

  •

  Opposite the property, on the other side of the road, a housing development known as the Settlement – or in full, the Albert Leo Schlageter Settlement – had been built in the thirties. All the houses were exactly alike, neatly aligned, each with its shed, fence and a small garden. The families who lived here had names like Schmidt, Meyer, Schröder and Hirscheidt. They were what you might call ordinary people.

  •

  The name of the owners of the Georgenhof was von Globig. Katharina and Eberhard von Globig, members of the civil service aristocracy set up under Kaiser Wilhelm II, ennobled in 1905. The estate had been bought for good money by old Herr von Globig before the First World War, and more pastures and woodland had been added to it in times of prosperity. Young Herr von Globig had sold all the land – meadows, fields and pasture – except for a small remnant, investing the money in English steel shares, and he had also financed a Romanian rice-flour factory, which enabled the couple to lead a life that, if not exactly luxurious, was comfortable. They bought a Wanderer, a car owned by no one else in the district, and they drove it mainly to the south.

  •

  Now Eberhard von Globig was a Sonderführer, a special officer in the German army, and at war. The uniform suited him, including the white coat worn in summer, although its narrower shoulder-boards marked him out from the officers of the regular army as an administrator who had nothing to do with weapons.

  His wife was famous as a languorous beauty, black-haired and blue-eyed. It was not least for her sake that friends and neighbours visited the Georgenhof from time to time in summer, to sit in the garden and feast their eyes on her: Lothar Sarkander, the mayor of Mitkau – stiff leg and duelling scars on his cheeks – Uncle Josef and his family from Albertsdorf, Dr Wagner the schoolmaster, a bachelor with a goatee beard and gold-rimmed glasses. His beard made him look like someone you felt you knew, and even strangers would pass the time of day with him in the street. He taught German and history to the older boys at the monastery school in Mitkau, with Latin as a subsidiary subject.

  •

  In the summer holidays Cousin Ernestine from Berlin sometimes came to visit with her children Elisabeth and Anita, who always loved to go riding, and would steal away into the house and eat the curds of sour milk standing on the kitchen windowsill, flies hovering over the dish. They liked the hay wains that swayed as they came down the path and they enjoyed looking for blue berries in the wood.

  Now that it was wartime, the Berlin family came mainly to forage for supplies. They arrived with empty bags and went away with full ones.

  •

  The two Globigs had a son whom they had called Peter: thin face, curly fair hair. He was twelve years old, as quiet as his mother and as serious as his father.

  Hair all over the place, mind all over the place too, people said when they saw him, but the fact that his flyaway curly hair was blond made up for it.

  His little sister Elfie had died of scarlet fever two years ago. Her room stood empty and untouched, her puppet theatre and the doll’s house gathering dust. Her clothes still hung in the wardrobe adorned with painted flowers.

  •

  Also on the farm were Jago the dog and Zippus the tomcat, horses, cattle, pigs and a large flock of chickens, with Richard the rooster.

  The Georgenhof even had a peacock, who kept himself to himself.

  •

  Katharina, the dark beauty dressed all in black, caressed her son’s hair, and Peter had liked it when his quiet mother did that until recently, when he would ward off the caress with an energetic shake of his head. Katharina never spent a long time standing beside the boy. She left him alone, just as she herself liked to be.

  •

  Another family member was ‘Auntie’, a sinewy old spinster with a wart on her chin. She was always on the go, and in summer went around the house in a limp, washable dress. Now that it was cold, she wore a pair of man’s trousers under the skirt of the dress and two cardigans over it. Since Eberhard had become a special officer ‘in the field’, although in fact he was behind the lines, she made sure that everything went smoothly at the Georgenhof. Nothing would have functioned without her. ‘Nothing’s easy,’ she would say, and with that attitude she ran the whole show.

  ‘You must keep the kitchen door closed!’ she called to everyone in the house; she had said the same thing thousands of times before. ‘There’s a draught blowing right through the rooms,’ meaning that you couldn’t heat the place. She complained of the cold: why had she ended up here in East Prussia? Why, for heaven’s sake, hadn’t she gone to Würzburg when she still had the option?

  She kept a handkerchief tucked into her sleeve, and put it to her red nose again and again. None of it was as easy as the others might think.

  •

  At the outbreak of war, the flow of money dried up: shares in English steel? A rice-flour factory in Romania? It was a good thing that Eberhard had his position in the army, for they couldn’t have managed without the salary he drew. The few acres of land they still had, the three cows, three pigs and the poultry, provided something extra to eat, but they had to be looked after. Nothing would come of nothing.

  Vladimir, a thoughtful Pole, and two cheerful Ukrainian women kept the farm going. The Ukrainians were stout Vera, and Sonya, a blonde girl with her hair braided and pinned up around her head. Crows circled over the oaks, and the ‘dicky-birds’ got their share on the bird tables, which were fairly regularly supplied with food in winter. ‘Dicky-birds’ was what Elfie, now two years dead,
used to call them.

  •

  When more money had been coming in, the von Globigs had furnished a comfortable apartment on the first floor of the house, three rooms, a bathroom and a little kitchen. It had a warm, comfortable living room with a view of the park, where Katharina could write letters or read books. And when Eberhard came home they were undisturbed there. They could close the door and be on their own, as they put it. It meant that they didn’t always have to sit down in the hall with Auntie, who had a finger in every pie and always thought she knew best. Auntie, who was always jumping up to fetch something, or staying put when that was more of a nuisance.

  •

  Now, in January 1945, the Christmas tree was still standing in the hall. Peter’s godmother in Berlin had given him a microscope. He sat in the dimly lit hall at a table not far from the tree, which was dropping its needles. Looking down the tube of the microscope, he saw all kinds of things in great detail: salt crystals and flies’ legs, a piece of string, the head of a match. He had placed a notebook beside him, and he noted his observations down in it. ‘Thursday 8 January 1945: pin. Jagged edges to the point.’

  He had wrapped his feet in a rug to keep the draughts away. It was always draughty in the hall, because the fireplace sucked in air, and the kitchen door was ‘left open the whole time’, as Auntie complained. Those Ukrainian women, she said, could never learn to close doors. Eberhard had found them in the east. Did they want to come to the great, powerful country of Germany, he had asked them in their village, did they want to see Berlin, with its cinemas and U-Bahn? And then they had landed here at the Georgenhof.

  •

  Peter moved the tube of his instrument up and down, and from time to time he put a ginger biscuit in his mouth.

  ‘Well,’ said Auntie as she hurried through the hall, ‘working hard at your science, are you?’ The snow really ought to be swept away from the entrance, she thought, but it’s easier to do these things yourself than ask someone else. Besides, the boy was busily occupied, and who knew, maybe his passion for that instrument would bear fruit later. The university in Königsberg wasn’t far away, was it? If Peter had been hanging around doing nothing, that would have been different.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Katharina had said when Auntie complained that he didn’t get out and about much.

  •

  When Peter had tired of the microscope, he stood at the window and watched the birds flying around at a loss because, once again, there was no food on the bird tables, and then he used his father’s binoculars to look into the distance, although he wasn’t really supposed to do that. The binoculars weren’t a toy, he had been told, and it showed if you touched the lenses with greasy fingers, let alone adjusted the focus. ‘Someone’s been at my binoculars again,’ von Globig would say when he came home – which was seldom enough – to the Georgenhof.

  •

  Peter looked over towards Mitkau, where the chimney of the brickworks could be seen next to the church tower. The school was closed because of the cold. ‘Cold holidays’ was a new expression. Young people could stay at home, but the Hitler Youth made sure that they were not idle. They had wanted to take Peter out of doors on a cold winter’s day to shovel snow away from the big Mitkau crossroads. But Peter was suffering from one of his chills, which meant that he couldn’t take part in that operation. ‘It’s his catarrh again,’ said the members of the household.

  Cold and coughs, however, didn’t keep him from sliding down the little slope behind the house time and again on his toboggan. The sun was shining in front of the house, and it would have been even better to toboggan there, but he had been told not to because every now and then a car sped past.

  He returned to his microscope. The dog Jago kept close to him, resting his muzzle on the boy’s right foot, and the cat lay on Jago’s coat.

  What a wonderful picture, the household said, just see the cat lying on the big dog’s back!

  •

  ‘What a delightful son you have,’ said the visitors from Mitkau who liked to come to Georgenhof, although it meant a walk of an hour and a half. ‘Such a pretty boy!’ They arrived with empty bags and left with full ones.

  Dr Wagner, that confirmed bachelor, dropped in quite often. He was worried about the boy now that the monastery school was closed. When young people raced boisterously past him in its cloisters, he liked to buttonhole fair-haired Peter and ask, ‘Well, my boy? Has your father written home again?’ And now, with the school closed because of the cold weather, he was concerned for him.

  •

  In summer, when the weather was warm and fine, he and his third-year boys had gone strolling through the sea of golden grain crops and along the quiet little River Helge, which flowed through the countryside in great curves to left and right, willow trees growing beside it. The boys had stripped off their trousers and shirts and plunged into the dark water. Shouting at the tops of their voices, they would often run through the wood, ending up at the Georgenhof, where they were given strawberry-flavoured water and allowed to eat their sandwiches sitting on the grass in the park, like cheerful summer birds.

  The schoolmaster would take his silver flute out of his pocket and play the tunes of folk songs, while Katharina listened from the house.

  Now, in the cold winter of the sixth year of the war, Dr Wagner dropped in even more often than before, coming on foot in spite of the ice and snow, and he too was in the habit of arriving with an empty bag and going away with it full. He took apples home with him, or potatoes, and sometimes a swede, which in fact he paid for, because Auntie used to say, ‘It doesn’t grow for love.’ She reckoned that a swede was worth ten pfennigs.

  He enjoyed sitting with Katharina for a while if she put in an appearance. He would have liked to take her hand, but he had no real excuse for that. Auntie made a lot of noise when he visited, pulling open drawers and closing them again with a bang. The message she meant to convey was: there’s always something to be done in a big household like this, even if it looks as if we’re just idling our days away.

  •

  So Wagner was a little concerned for the boy, as he put it. He went to Peter’s room with him and taught him things that had never been mentioned at school.

  •

  Binoculars and microscope? There was a little telescope in the physics lab of the monastery school. He could take it to the Georgenhof and look at the stars with the boy, couldn’t he? No one would notice that it was missing, and then surely he could return it when everything was over?

  •

  Dr Wagner concerned himself with the boy for love, or at least he didn’t ask fifty pfennigs for an hour’s tutoring. He was happy with a few potatoes or half a head of cabbage.

  2

  The Political Economist

  One dark evening the front doorbell rang. The man who had rung it was getting on in years, wore an unusual cap and walked on two crutches.

  Vladimir, using his electric torch, had already spotted him wandering round the yard in the darkness, and the two Ukrainian women had stopped what they were doing to look out of the kitchen window, wondering who was approaching the house.

  Jago had got to his feet, barking once or twice, and now the stranger stood in the doorway. The bell rang once more, and Katharina opened the door to him. Next moment the man was stalking past her and into the hall on his crutches, swinging his legs back and forth, accompanied at every step by Jago. He wore a green rustic jacket, with side pockets set at a slant, and black ear muffs. The ear flaps of his cap were held together with a looped piece of twine on top of his head. He had a leather strap round his body, and a heavy briefcase resembling an accordion hung from it.

  •

  He would just like to warm up a little, he told Katharina and Auntie, who was bringing in the supper-time soup at that very moment. Could he do that? No buses, no trains, the way was heavy going in this icy wind. He came from Elbing, he said, and had made his way here on foot from Harkunen. What a journey it was, to
o! Who’d have thought it? Fifteen kilometres, in this weather, and at this time of day.

  He was bound for Mitkau, and had expected to find an inn along his way, the Forest Lodge; it was marked on his map as a good place for family parties out on excursions.

  And he had indeed passed it, but it was closed and the doors and windows bolted. There were strange folk in those parts and he’d heard confused scraps of all kinds of languages, Czech and Romanian.

  Hands in their pockets, they had watched him go.

  •

  The man’s name was Schünemann, and he had come a considerable distance by train, then he had been given a lift in a farmer’s cart from Harkunen, and he had travelled the very last part of the way here on foot. In this snow, too!

  All he wanted, he said, was to warm himself and take a little rest, and then he’d be off again. He’d find shelter for the night somewhere along the way, he said, looking around him.

  Why on earth had he set off through the countryside at this time of the year? Going to Mitkau, of all places?

  •

  Katharina looked at the man. A visitor at this time of day? And the man looked back at her, not without interest. Good heavens, a woman like this hidden away in the country. She belonged somewhere else by rights. Berlin, Munich, Vienna!

  He walked stiffly over to her, legs swinging back and forth, said that his name was Schünemann, he was an economist by profession, a political economist, and she wasn’t to worry, he only wanted to rest and get his breath back.

  ‘Ah, warmth!’ he said, unhooking the briefcase from the strap over his shoulder and putting it down by the fireside seat. He unbuttoned his jacket and, now free of his crutches, went close to the fire and let his body soak up its warmth. Warmth! The dog Jago, wondering what the man might be seeing there in the fire, went to sit beside him, and wagged his tail briefly. The man might be all right.