All for Nothing

by Walter Kempowski

  •

  She enticed the dog over, and he lay down on the floor beside her. It was pleasant for him, too, not to be alone at night in the dark hall. She looked at the flames on the hearth, and rubbed her itching knuckles. Dancing was banned, yes, dancing was banned for the German people, but did that count for private parties? Would she be in trouble if it came out that she had been dancing here? Had been dancing happily when there were soldiers fighting and bleeding to death?

  She had better keep her mouth shut.

  When you leave, say softly, ‘See you!’

  Not farewell and not adieu!

  Words like that can only hurt.

  Meanwhile, far away in Mitkau, the sirens howled, as they always did at this time of night. The population here was far from the firing line; the sirens meant nothing.

  Next morning they all said goodbye. The reserved Katharina took the violinist in her arms, and Peter watched for a long time as she went away.

  4

  Auntie

  Under her cardigans Auntie wore a limp dress, dark blue with small yellow flowers on it, now here, now there, as if they had been tipped at random out of a cornucopia. She had pinned a gold brooch on her dress. The brooch had golden arrows sticking out on all sides and a cornelian in the middle, and was a memento of her mother.

  •

  In the evening Auntie usually filled herself a hot-water bottle in the kitchen. Part of the stove acted as a boiler; it kept the water hot for a long time, and had done so today. The top of the stove had not been scoured; the maids had forgotten again, although she had reminded them heaven knew how many times. Auntie suspected that they had stolen off to the Polish carter’s room. Plump Vera was particularly fond of flirting with the thoughtful Vladimir, and she didn’t understand why he felt more attracted to slim Sonya. Sonya wound her braid round her head like a wreath, but her nose was always red.

  •

  Hadn’t there been a pan with what was left of the fried potatoes standing on the stove? Auntie had fancied finishing them now, but someone else had got in ahead of her. And sugar had been spilt in the pantry – it crunched underfoot. Moreover, a sausage had gone missing yet again.

  •

  Auntie locked the door to the farmyard outside and hung up clean tea towels. Then she picked up the newspaper, tucked the hot-water bottle under her arm, listened at the door to the main hall – all was quiet, the violinist was already fast asleep – and climbed the stairs.

  She also listened at Katharina’s door. Was there any movement in there? Why did Katharina always lock herself in? Strange woman, she didn’t suit Eberhard a bit, always so quiet, when a little cheerfulness would have done the poor boy good. On his last leave he had kept asking her: would you like to come to this or that with me? The answer had always been no. You couldn’t really call her grumpy, just quiet and introspective, as if she had a heavy burden to bear. Or a great grief?

  And yet she lacked for nothing. Did she?

  •

  The way Katharina always locked her door puzzled Auntie, making her wonder whether all that secrecy was intended for her. Anyone could have come into her room at any time. In fact she’d have welcomed anyone who walked in saying, ‘Oh, Auntie, can I sit with you for a bit?’ and then told her their troubles. Surely she, Auntie, could have understood everything.

  •

  But even Eberhard didn’t always show his best side. He could be gruff and pedantic. It was those financial matters that caused trouble. The steel shares in England, the rice-flour factory in Romania – according to Eberhard, the managers were scoundrels to a man. Only his officer’s salary kept the whole show on the road.

  •

  Auntie had the long, narrow gable room behind the pediment, with the now dilapidated finial of the spiked mace above it, and in keeping with the architecture of the whole house the ceiling was a tunnel vault.

  Under the round window from which, in earlier times, the flag had been flown – first the black, white and red flag; then, of course, the swastika banner – there was a raised platform in the old style, divided from the rest of the room by a wooden rail. A desk and an old armchair stood on it. When the spinning wheel purrs so softly / In Granny’s room by the fire . . . A crochet-work antimacassar on the back of the armchair kept the cover from getting greasy.

  From this place, which she called her lookout post, she could see the new development, house beside house, all of them the same as each other. It was on the other side of the road, so you saw any cars driving by, and sometimes it was interesting to see what went on around those houses: children playing, women hanging out their washing, drunks staggering from place to place. Last year Peter had spoilt the look of the great oak outside the manor house by building a tree house in it.

  ‘Do you have to do that, boy?’ she had asked. But Eberhard had said, ‘Leave him alone. He wants to be high up.’

  •

  If she leaned a little way forward she could also see the yard of the manor house, with its stables and the cottage near them. The Pole who joked with the maids more often than strictly necessary sawed up the firewood there.

  Whenever she looked out of the window she counted the chickens and geese running round the yard. The milk cart came in the morning, and the bus, a clumsy-looking vehicle powered by wood gas, passed twice a day.

  The poultry were kept in the big barn in this hard frost. Although the barn had been standing empty for years, there were still a few grains left lying around.

  Sometimes the peacock looked round the corner. It was a long time since he last spread his tail.

  •

  There was never much traffic on the road: a bicycle, the milk cart twice a day, the bus to Mitkau. Now and then a car driving by.

  Recently there had been occasional farm carts going west. Auntie had noticed more of them these last few days. Maybe they had better get the door to the yard repaired after all. Sometimes the carts rumbled past one after another, all piled high with household goods. There were isolated pedestrians as well, strange figures, coming from who knew where, going to heaven knew what destination.

  •

  Now and then foreign labourers from the Forest Lodge came into the yard to visit Vera and Sonya in the kitchen, although it was strictly forbidden. Auntie supposed they thought no one had noticed them. She suspected that the Ukrainian girls gave them something to eat in the kitchen. Goodness only knew why they weren’t at work. Didn’t these people have anything to do?

  Odd characters came from Mitkau too, hands in their pockets; they didn’t seem to mind the long walk. They appeared to be normal enough, if rather shady, and joined in when the men from the Forest Lodge sang songs, although sometimes they were perfectly quiet.

  There were Czechs, Italians and Romanians among the labourers, and French and Dutch civilians. Foreigners, anyway. They all just lounged around, and the two Ukrainian maids often slunk off to join them, although there was plenty for them to do at the Georgenhof.

  •

  Vera and Sonya – never there when you needed them. Auntie had wondered whether to be stricter with them, but how was she to go about it? It was water off a duck’s back to them.

  Best to take no notice, someone had said. But suppose things turned out badly? You want to go carefully with those foreigners, that had been the advice, but it was now wearing thin. Who knew what might happen? She had heard it said that the foreigners carried knives under their jackets. One of the Czechs, a man with piercing eyes – he wore a peaked cap – had come as far as the yard recently. He had even been seen in the hall once, looking up the staircase. Vladimir had driven him out with his whip, but the man kept coming back, and one day he gave Vladimir a black eye.

  •

  Although Uncle Josef in Albertsdorf had advised them against mingling with these people, Katharina exchanged a few words with them now and then. There were amusing fellows with fine dark eyes among the Italians. One of them could even play the mandolin. They felt the cold here.
The Frenchmen were more thoughtful; some of them were educated men, with families at home who supported them; they were schoolteachers and pastors, men who sometimes read a book. But others were pathetic souls with melancholy expressions on their faces.

  ‘All this will be dealt with after the war,’ Uncle Josef had said. ‘We’ll send them home then.’

  •

  When there was an opportunity, Katharina sought out the Italians, gave them cigarettes and engaged in friendly conversation with them, in their own language. She didn’t actually say that she had visited southern Europe with the Wandervogel organization before the war, she merely dropped hints.

  It was the Italians, poor bastards, who got treated worst everywhere – ‘They let us down twice!’ it was said. Katharina didn’t share this poor opinion of them, since she had spent many happy times in the south long before the war. Those warm nights beside the sea, the singing of the fishermen – that was why she disliked the poor treatment of the Italians.

  ‘Venezia, comprende? ’ she said to the Italians. And she thought of her husband, wearing his white uniform now in the hot south and procuring olive oil and wine for the troops. She had a vague idea that it wasn’t always an easy process. He had written home saying that he expected promotion soon, and then he’d get a higher salary, thank God.

  •

  The housing development on the other side of the road had been given the name of the Albert Leo Schlageter Settlement when it was built in 1936, all the houses the same as each other, like toys taken out of their box and stood up side by side. People of no distinction lived here, keeping a goat, a pig, chickens and rabbits, and every house had its garden. Originally the development was to have been called the New Georgenhof. No one had asked Herr von Globig if he was happy with that name for the new housing estate.

  However, the matter had been settled of its own accord before there were any disagreements; the authorities had decided to call the settlement after the heroic Freikorps man Schlageter, who had once spent a few days on holiday in these parts in the unhappy year of 1919. The resistance fighter Albert Leo Schlageter had faced the French, who shot him. In the middle of the development stood a granite stone engraved with the profile of the national martyr. When it was turned on, water flowed from this stone into a basin. Young people gathered around this fountain on summer evenings, singing songs in honour of the new regime. On hot days children paddled in the water. A man called Drygalski, who had joined the National Socialist Party in its early days, would chase them away. Now, in the cold of winter, the water feature was covered with boards.

  •

  Drygalski was a kind of deputy mayor of the housing development – at least, he put on the airs of a prominent personage who kept the peace, and he made a speech on Albert Leo Schlageter Day, or rather read it from a sheet of paper. It was this man who chased the children away from the water, because it wasn’t proper for them to splash about in it. And if they still did, Drygalski felt it was his business to intervene. He had a good view of the place from his kitchen window, and he would knock on the pane with the knuckles of his fingers.

  Why didn’t they go through the wood to the little River Helge, where there was plenty of water? he asked them, but then the women were indignant. Did he really like the idea of the children running across the road, they asked, and who was there at the river to pull them out of the water if they looked like drowning?

  •

  Although the Globigs had opposed the building of the Albert Leo Schlageter Settlement in the year of the Olympic Games, it turned out to be a decidedly good thing for them. They had been able to sell a last tract of land, and the Georgenhof finally acquired a proper mains water supply.

  But the old pond had been filled in – the romantic little pond where the ducks and the white geese used to swim, looking so ornamental. And of course the weeping willow, so romantic itself, had been chopped down. The pond had belonged to the Georgenhof from time immemorial. There was a heated exchange of letters with the head of the local district council, who said the pond had to go because it was a breeding ground for midges, and they couldn’t have such a place in a clean new development where healthy people lived. Eberhard von Globig had produced old maps, the pond marked on them. It was so practical for watering the horses in summer! The ducks, heads under the water or upright and quacking, were a familiar local sight. They were caught and slaughtered in autumn.

  The head of the local district council became insistent when Eberhard von Globig claimed that the pond really belonged to him. He and Drygalski put their heads together and set about devising a plan.

  One evening Lothar Sarkander, the mayor of Mitkau, a man with strict standards who had a stiff leg and duelling scars on his face, had come over in his steam-driven car for a private conversation with Eberhard von Globig; the two of them sometimes went hunting together. Sitting in the billiards room, Sarkander had talked about the new order of things, saying it would be better if Eberhard kept his mouth shut. Provoking people like Drygalski was not a good idea; they were in charge now.

  •

  Sarkander was invited to go shooting on the Georgenhof estate every year; it created good relations, and Katharina had once stood in the summer drawing room with him, looking at the park and the cheerful company lying in the grass there and drinking toasts. Long ago, she had even been to the seaside with him; that was in 1936, when Eberhard had to go to see to the horses at the Olympic Games in Berlin, leaving Katharina at home. She and Sarkander had been seen sitting in a beach hut drinking cocoa, Katharina in a broad-brimmed straw hat that surrounded her head like a halo, with her black hair flowing out from under it, he in white trousers, his stick between his legs. That was so many years ago that no one really knew anything about it. Or did they?

  Well, she had to do something, that was the explanation. Eberhard had gone to Berlin, and she and the mayor of Mitkau had gone to the seaside.

  If I’d known what I was missing,

  If I’d known who I was kissing,

  That midnight at the lido . . .

  Auntie’s name was Helene Harnisch. She came from Silesia. Her gable room had flowered wallpaper and was full of mahogany furniture that came from Silesia too, a wardrobe, chairs, the plain desk, and a bed in which, said a family joke, a poet had surely died. Beside the desk hung a small pen-and-ink drawing of Hitler, the Führer and Chancellor of the Reich, with his tie featuring an eagle in a swastika, and underneath the picture his slanting signature with a slanting line under it.

  •

  Auntie sat down in her armchair, pushed the curtain aside and looked out into the night. Everything was plunged in the deepest darkness. Stars cold as ice sparkled in the sky; the moon had not yet risen. In spite of the wind and the freezing cold, the Hitler Youth had been marching round the housing development that morning: left, right, left, right. Drygalski had come stalking up and made a speech. The time to show what they could do was imminent, he told the boys, and he hoped he could rely on them when the moment came. He got them marching to Mitkau. There was plenty for young people to do there these days: carrying coal up from the cellar for the old folk, shovelling snow off the crossroads. They had come back late in the evening. Peter was supposed to have been with them, but he preferred looking through his microscope. He also had a nasty cold again.

  •

  Auntie kept the household accounts of the estate in the upper compartments of her old desk, which could be locked, and ever since Eberhard had been on active service she had dealt with the official correspondence there, because Katharina von Globig always forgot it, was easily discouraged, and looked so helpless, saying, ‘Oh, my goodness, yes! I quite forgot.’ In the end Auntie preferred to do everything herself.

  She kept a bag of eucalyptus cough sweets for her bad throat in the desk, and sometimes gave Peter one, which he immediately threw away.

  Her room smelt of ripe apples and dead mice, but it was comfortable, and Auntie called it her kingdom.

 
She liked sitting in the armchair at her desk, and looking down at the yard and the road and the housing development on the other side of it.

  •

  There was a fine old rug on the floor, and a lamp had been fitted at the desk. Its opaque glass shade was adorned with strings of green beads. When Eberhard von Globig came up here to complain to Auntie that there was nothing to be done about Katharina, his head knocked against it, and then the beads tinkled and the lampshade rocked, and took its time settling down.

  •

  A watercolour in a white frame hung over her bed, showing a white summerhouse with roses in intermingling colours clambering over it. It was a memento of her father’s estate in Silesia. As a child she had liked sitting in that summerhouse when she was either unhappy or glad about something, with her left leg tucked under her, and there she and her girlfriends used to play at sending their dolls to school.

  She had wanted to be a teacher, but that idea came to nothing.

  ‘My beloved Silesia,’ she used to say, and, ‘Nothing’s that easy.’

  Her father’s estate had been sold at auction in 1922, when everything was going downhill – the house and outbuildings, the woods and fields. A war profiteer who had made money out of others’ misfortunes had lent her father money, again and again, and then the estate had had to be sold at the worst possible moment, and that monstrous man had stood by watching. The place was going to ruin, and the summerhouse had been demolished for no reason at all. They could easily have left it alone. The old gardener shed tears when he had to leave. As a little girl she used to stand on his wooden clogs while he did a bear-like dance round the circular flower bed with her.