All for Nothing

by Walter Kempowski

  It would have been freezing, but for the chimney above the hearth against which he could nestle. And the padding of blankets and pillows. Katharina had also put a bedside light in the cubbyhole, although they would have to be careful that not a glimmer of light got out under the tiles of the roof.

  He made himself comfortable, with the blankets wrapped round him, and when Katharina closed the door he said, ‘This reminds me of home. When we were children, we used to make ourselves caves in the bedclothes like this.’

  •

  Katharina lay down on her bed and listened. She could hear the pulse beating in her temples.

  Then he turned in the cubbyhole and cleared his throat.

  When at last all was quiet, she thought of Eberhard. Get away, just leave everything, he had said, and she was to go first thing tomorrow. How did he imagine she could do that? How could she just get up and go?

  ‘Are you alone?’ he had asked.

  And the man in his hiding place thought of the dark days ahead of him. Really, there was no chance that he could make it.

  I hope the end comes quickly, he thought.

  11

  A Single Day

  It was a long time before the man crawled out of his cave next morning. Katharina sat in her armchair and listened, but there wasn’t a sound from the cubbyhole. Now and then she thought he might be moving and turning over, and sometimes she heard his heavy breathing.

  •

  She took her jewel box out of her bedside locker and tried on rings. Should she wear her pearl necklace? She took off the locket that she usually wore all the time.

  Switch on the radio? Better not; it would wake him. Or if he was already awake it would bring him out of his cave. Then he would be sitting here, and what was she going to do with him then?

  All the long day ahead.

  She leafed through an old magazine and listened.

  •

  The household was used to her reclusive existence. ‘She’s always sitting up there.’ Now and then Auntie said she had two left hands, and didn’t see work when it was staring her in the face. So it could happen that people never thought of her when there was something to be done. But now Katharina thought: I could lend a hand downstairs. She put the magazine down and stood up.

  She wrote a note: ‘Please be very quiet! I’ll be back soon,’ and left it outside the door of the cubbyhole. Then she left quickly, without a sound, in case he emerged from his cave and called out, ‘Stop!’ Perhaps he would be glad to be alone?

  She came back once to close the bedside locker where she kept her jewellery, and went downstairs.

  •

  It was cold in the hall. The windows were open and Sonya was cleaning the room. Peter was sitting at the table looking through the microscope. He had put a drop of the water in which he had steeped hay under the lens and was looking for any kind of movement in it, but so far all was still and silent. The world had not been created yet, however much he turned the tube. He asked Sonya, who had done her hair in a braid wreathed round her head, to look through it too, but no, she couldn’t see anything either.

  ‘We have much bigger microscopes than that in the Ukraine,’ she said as she went out.

  •

  Katharina wandered from room to room.

  In the billiards room, which was cold, there were three balls lying on the table. She flicked one of them, and it rolled back from the side of the table and disappeared down a pocket.

  She thought of putting away the china. The plates were all jumbled up against each other; she didn’t see what to do about that.

  The silver – she counted the teaspoons, and how strange, there were three too few. All of them neatly embedded in velvet side by side, but not the complete set! Surely she had bought china and cutlery for twenty-four guests at the shop in Tauentzienstrasse?

  •

  At this point Auntie joined her, and when she saw Katharina busy with the box of cutlery she cried, ‘What are you doing here? What’s the idea?’ and took the box away from her.

  ‘Some of the teaspoons missing?’ She couldn’t account for it either, but it was easy to lose small spoons like that; they could get swept into the rubbish bucket along with sauerkraut left on the side of the plate . . . Maybe they were still somewhere in the kitchen?

  Or perhaps the maids had gone off with them? But no, probably not; they must expect to be supervised.

  Then she looked at Katharina and said, ‘Why, you look like Faith, Hope and Charity – as if you’d danced the night away . . .’

  •

  The peacock had died in the night. He had fallen off his perch and was lying on the floor. ‘Shall I pull out some of his tail feathers? They’d make pretty decorations,’ said Auntie.

  And something else was new as well. ‘Guess what – Drygalski has taken to peering in through the windows!’ She had seen a trail of footsteps, said Auntie, leading from the path trodden in the snow to the drawing room. He had obviously been in the park and climbed up to the terrace – the trail was clearly visible. ‘I swept it away at once, of course. One of these days he’ll be climbing right up to your window.’

  Katharina put her hand to her head. His footsteps in the snow! To think that hadn’t occurred to her.

  •

  Peter was now looking at his own eye, reflected larger than life by the little mirror in the lens. ‘You can see your own eye!’ cried the boy. And when he wanted to show her how you could see your own eye looking huge through the microscope, she cried out, ‘No!’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked Auntie. ‘Why are you so touchy?’ And she got Peter to show her how you could see your own eye looking at you, looking straight back at you with a serious expression.

  •

  Katharina closed the window and sat down with the little cupboard, the photographs that stood on it and the cups. Was she supposed to throw all that away, break it? Wasn’t this where Eberhard always used to keep his meerschaum cigarette holder? She’d soon come upon it again . . . She took out Eberhard’s letters and sorted them into consecutive order. She didn’t read them, she knew every line; she skimmed them, but occasional words jumped off the page at her. And their life together ran swiftly before her mind’s eye. The early years, and how he had made life in the country pleasant for her. ‘You should see this!’ and so on, that was his style. She noticed how his handwriting changed in those few years from a childish hand to the writing of a man.

  She remembered his habit of reading through letters for the last time when he had written them and correcting characters that he had set down too quickly. The dot of an ‘i’ here, the loop under a ‘g’ there, with his little finger crooked to one side. As if he had to approve what he had written. ‘And behold, it was very good.’

  Nothing was good. The English steel shares, the Romanian rice-flour factory – all the money was gone. So was the land. And a general would be driving around in their fine Wanderer car now.

  It was like the Hans Christian Andersen story: ‘Oh, my dearest Augustin, all’s gone, gone, gone.’

  All the same, somehow she felt: thank God. How could all those businesses have been run now? She hadn’t the faintest idea.

  •

  She listened for any sounds upstairs. Suppose the stranger, entirely misunderstanding the situation, were to open the door of her room and appear at the top of the stairs? He hadn’t thought of the footprints either.

  She must be more careful.

  ‘I felt a hot thrill of alarm run down my spine,’ that was how she would tell the story later. ‘The man hadn’t even removed his trail after him!’

  Later, when it was all over.

  •

  Among the letters she found postcards from Berlin, the Olympic Games of 1936. Eberhard had gone on his own because of the horses, and she had ventured on that trip to the seaside with Lothar Sarkander. The Isabelle Hotel. They had gone for a long walk up and down the beach. He had held her hand, which he shouldn’t really have
done, and it was late.

  She put the postcards with the letters. ‘It’s a pity you can’t be here too,’ Eberhard had written from Berlin.

  Should she write to him now? Everything all right here? It’s all fine here. Guess what, the peacock has died. Or should she phone Sarkander, remind him of that one lovely day? He had been so different from Eberhard.

  No, it was a tacit agreement between them; that day would not be mentioned.

  •

  Auntie came in again with a handful of peacock feathers. She stuck them behind the ancestral portraits. Better like that or like this?

  She offered Katharina one for her apartment upstairs. ‘This is the best one, shall I take it up for you?’

  And once again Katharina cried, ‘No!’ louder than necessary.

  Didn’t peacock feathers bring bad luck? She remembered old Globig, who had always thought so much of that bird, and how, when Eberhard had introduced her to his father as his brand-new bride, he had always embraced her in a special way in the evening. And later, when he was confined to his bed, he would reach for her.

  •

  Katharina did the letters up in a bundle and put them in the little cabinet. She joined the maids in the kitchen and watched them, much to their surprise; they weren’t used to having her come into the kitchen and watch them at work. Sonya was stirring a pan of soup, Vera was ironing the laundry.

  Three teaspoons missing? Should there be a search? Should the cottage be turned upside down? But surely it all came to the same thing in the end.

  Should the police be called?

  The maids felt awkward when Katharina was with them, and tried to get her to go away.

  Katharina herself didn’t know what she was doing in the kitchen, either.

  •

  She thought of the man upstairs.

  I’ll grit my teeth, thought Katharina. After all, it was only for this one day. He would be going back to Mitkau in the night, and Pastor Brahms would send him on somewhere else. She had to get through the day and half a night.

  ‘The worst of it was,’ she would tell Felicitas later, ‘that I couldn’t tell a soul about it. No one was to know.’ How surprised Uncle Josef would be, and the cousin in Berlin!

  It was all rather exciting really.

  •

  Now the Ukrainian maids were beginning to sing in their high voices. What on earth was that song? Was it calling on freedom fighters? No, they were singing:

  One of the ancient lays

  Leaves me so sad at heart.

  A legend of bygone days

  From my mind will not depart.

  Heinrich Heine; she had learnt that song herself at school.

  Eberhard had found the two girls on his last leave, telling them they were to support his wife, but they’d have done that anyway, because Katharina was a gentle soul. There had never been a quarrel, she had given the maids clothes that she didn’t wear any more, and she sometimes gave Vladimir the Pole tobacco.

  The slaps that Eberhard gave the maids in their first year were another matter. ‘You have to be strict with these people from the start,’ he had said, and she was sure they had not forgotten it. Yet the maids had come of their own free will, so why slap them? At the time he had thought he must take a firm line, that was it.

  •

  Vladimir was standing in the yard chopping wood. He had been chopping wood for weeks on end, and stacking it up neatly like a rampart.

  He still wore his military coat and square cap. A letter was embroidered on his jacket: P for Pole. White on a purple background.

  He had been there when the Russians invaded Poland in 1939, and the Soviet soldiers had picked him up to transport him elsewhere. A woman neighbour had given him away; without a word, she had pointed to the cellar to show them that a Polish soldier was hiding there. At the last minute, however, he had managed to get away, and then he had ended up in German hands. A German motorbike had been coming towards him, and the men on it had taken him to the nearest prison camp.

  Vladimir would have liked to tell people how the Russians had driven his comrades into a pit and shot them there, but he kept that to himself. He had once told the Czech in the Forest Lodge, and it had been a very bad idea. Since then he and the Czech had been at daggers drawn.

  •

  He had been given the job of distributing food in the German prison camp, and then he had gone to the Globigs, and he immediately found himself the man in charge of the yard. Eberhard had not slapped him about.

  Vladimir did his work, and all was well.

  He had a pair of glasses mended with sticking plaster which he put on when he wanted to read the Bible, for Vladimir was a devout man. Now and then the priest looked in and talked to him; they whispered behind the stable door. Once the priest had brought him a letter from Poland. Yes, his family were still alive, just across the border, but out of reach.

  •

  For days Vladimir had been reinforcing the big cart with planks. He had realized that they would soon be on the road. The Russians had been driven out of the East Prussian governmental district of Gumbinnen last autumn only with difficulty; that was sixty kilometres away as the crow flies. The terrible pictures of the massacre there for which they were responsible had been in all the newspapers. And that had been only a prelude; they would be back.

  •

  Vladimir chopped wood and the Ukrainian maids sang. Auntie hung up the sausages in the larder in order of size. ‘There’ll be fewer and fewer,’ she said out loud. ‘And the apples must be turned or they’ll get rotten places on them.’

  •

  Then Dr Wagner dropped in, knocked the snow off his shoes, said ‘Good day’ and commandeered Peter. ‘Irregular verbs today, my boy,’ he said. ‘Come along upstairs with me.’Dr Wagner could have used some apples, but no one offered him any this time. ‘What are those peacock feathers doing?’ he asked. ‘Dear lady, don’t you know they bring bad luck?’ Katharina threw them away at once.

  •

  She climbed the stairs, stopped outside her door and listened. All was still. And when she was about to unlock the door, she realized that it wasn’t locked, only latched!

  Her guest was standing right in front of her, by the stove. He had been turning his jacket pockets inside out and knocking the dust out of them into the coal scuttle.

  ‘Are you afraid?’ he whispered.

  He seemed slightly embarrassed. He was short but well made, with the coarse black stubble of a wiry beard on his chin. Pale. A Jew? He was not what Katharina had expected a Jew to look like; this man didn’t resemble the phenotypical Jews in the caricatures. Black hair, and the nice lines round his eyes – were they twinkling at her? Encouraging her to cheer up. What was going to happen? Or was he thinking of something else? When he had turned out his jacket pockets, it was his trouser pockets next. Then he said, ‘It will soon be over,’ as if he had to comfort her.

  No, she wasn’t just afraid – she was terrified to the bone! Leaving the door unlocked. Why? So as not to lock him in?

  He’d hardly slept at all, he said, not a wink, because of the aromas in the cubbyhole. Chocolate, tobacco! He supposed it was some kind of treasury. It reminded him of his aunt’s general stores with the bell inside the shop door.

  And now, at last, he could wash. At this time of day no one would notice the sound of running water; it could have been Katharina. He spent ages washing, and then shaved with Eberhard’s razor.

  •

  Katharina found one of Eberhard’s shirts, woollen underpants and socks, and handed them round the bathroom door to him. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘clean underwear!’ She gave him the pullover that Eberhard wore for gardening, too, with EvG embroidered on it.

  Washed, clean and freshly shaven, he finally sat down at the table. Bread, eggs, butter and sausage. Such delicacies, he said, he could hardly even remember what they were called. He ate it all, chewing sometimes on one side of his mouth, sometimes on the other, and showed Katharin
a his teeth – ‘Here, at the back on the left!’ – he had pulled the molar out himself.

  •

  His long sleep, the food, his shaven face. There was only the hair growing wildly in the nape of his neck. Katharina wondered whether she should cut it for him.

  He kept helping himself to the ‘delicacies’, as he called them. ‘Such delicacies!’ They lived in the lap of luxury here! ‘I don’t suppose there’s anything hot I could have?’

  Pastor Brahms, he told her, hadn’t even let him rinse his fingers. A piece of bread put into his hand, and off he had to go. ‘No one in Germany thinks of anyone but himself, it’s egotism writ large. He wouldn’t even shake hands with me.’

  Then he told her about all his escapes, going from hiding place to hiding place, for in Germany everyone thought only of himself. More out of fear, he added, than love of the fatherland. And he began whispering his stories again, his firstly, secondly, thirdly.

  Before long the man was telling her about terrible things far to the east, and Katharina heard these incredible tales for the first time, in every detail. She knew nothing about those operations, people being taken away, transports. Or did she? Hadn’t Felicitas dropped hints; mysterious stories that she hadn’t really understood?

  And Eberhard, on his last leave, telling her to be sensible? He had been in the Latvian city of Libau, and he knew about things that had happened there; Katharina was to keep it all to herself, for heaven’s sake.

  Things that you couldn’t even imagine.

  ‘I’m glad that the administrative centre there has been closed down,’ Eberhard had said, even though the place was flowing with milk and honey.

  •

  The stranger kept telling her about such things, and meanwhile he looked out of the window and listened at the door.

  He had marked places on the floorboards which didn’t creak, and he walked up and down with great strides as if he were stepping over large puddles, while he ran through the misfortunes of his life. His narrative was like the way he moved from one floor-board to another, bit by bit, long or short, always carefully picking his way, and accompanying his progress by mime and gesture, as he went over all that had happened to him.