All for Nothing

by Walter Kempowski

  To think it had been so easy.

  It was all unreal and like a phantom, thought Katharina.

  She stood at the window. Day was breaking, and there were all manner of things to be seen out there: people in the Settlement were standing in the street, listening, and telling one another about the thunder and lightning in the distance.

  •

  The road was busier now. Occasional motorbikes rattled past the Georgenhof – and there! A German Wehrmacht jeep raced along the snow-covered road. It skidded off the bend and fell down the slope to the Settlement. There was a general in it, and he died at once. Peter saw it happen through his father’s binoculars. He’d never seen a general before, with the red braid on his trousers, and now he was actually looking at a dead one. A moment ago the general had been shouting at his driver: go on, faster, drive faster! Imagine not being with his men today, of all days, and then the jeep had turned a somersault and he was lying flat and . . . dead?

  •

  The driver and the front-seat passenger carried the dead general into a house in the Settlement, one of them holding his wobbling head steady. He’d been awarded the German Cross in gold. The women of the Settlement gathered outside the house, in fact entire families joined the crowd, and the foreign workers from the Forest Lodge came to see the dead general as well.

  Drygalski shooed the foreign workers away. Really, it was the limit – such people wanting to feast their eyes on a dead German general. And he asked the women from the Settlement if they didn’t have anything better to do.

  The question was: now what? Where did you bury a general? Maybe he should be taken home to where he came from?

  And was it a hero’s death that he had died?

  Furthermore, what would the troops ahead of them do without their leader? But surely there was more than one general?

  Drygalski telephoned the office of the Party organization in Mitkau. But the Party wasn’t responsible, nor was the local headquarters, nor were the police. A pack of Hitler Youth boys arrived, but they weren’t allowed to see the dead general, however many of them gathered in front of the house where he lay. Drygalski made a little speech to them. He said they were being put to the test and must prove their mettle, and he gave them instructions: they were to march to Mitkau and report for duty there. There was plenty for young Germans to do these days. Once they had reported for duty everything else would follow. At last a car came to collect the body. The women folded their hands when invited to do so, and Drygalski the head trustee gave the Hitler salute with his arm outstretched.

  •

  The rumbling beyond the horizon, the way the ground shook. A noise of pounding and shaking, and you could tell some of the particularly violent explosions apart from one another. How many kilometres away was the front? A hundred and fifty? A hundred? Fifty? Still far off, anyway, but not as far off as all that.

  •

  And now a line of ambulances was coming along from Mitkau, driving slowly by, bearing the red cross depicted large and broad on their roofs and doors, one after another. The field hospital in Mitkau was being evacuated. A few horse-drawn carts were also trying to make their way along. And from time to time, dispatch riders raced towards them on their fast motorbikes.

  Stand firm! Stand firm in the rising storm . . .

  A solitary soldier fell out of the long column of ambulances and medical personnel.

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

  It was the one-handed pianist who had played hit songs so well at the Georgenhof with the violinist, only a few days ago, believe it or not.

  He came over to the house, stopped and clicked his heels. He was just calling in quickly, he said, to see if they were all right. And was Fräulein Strietzel still here? If so it would be a good idea for her to leave with them; he was sure that could be fixed.

  No, they told him, the violinist wasn’t there any longer; she must be in Allenstein by now. Or had she gone on somewhere else?

  •

  The soldier wore a Red Cross armband, and while cart after cart took the wounded away he told the women how wonderfully well organized it all was. The order had come to evacuate at once, and the severely wounded and those who had just had operations were immediately carried out of the local hospital, although medical instruments had to be left behind. The new and only recently installed X-ray equipment, for instance. Did the ladies have any idea, he asked, how much one of those devices cost?

  He would never forget the few hours he had spent here, he assured them again, that evening at the Georgenhof. Then he bowed to Katharina and said, ‘Make sure you get away from here – you still have time.’

  He turned to leave, and then came back again. He had one more question, he said; did they still have any of that fantastic liver sausage that he remembered? Now that everything was going down the drain . . . Yes, they did have some of it left, and some was cut off for him.

  He waved back to them from the road with his one hand, jumped into the nearest ambulance and was gone. What a nice man!

  •

  The thunder of the guns was still coming from away on the horizon in the afternoon, but they couldn’t sit about in the hall for ever; there were things yet to be done. Maybe the curtains should be washed before they left, and the whole place thoroughly cleaned?

  •

  In spite of the general confusion, Dr Wagner had ventured to steal out of the town. Mitkau was teeming like an ant heap, everyone rushing round trying to escape, to get away . . . Not so fast, that had always been his motto; you don’t want to eat your food as hot as it comes out of the oven. Despite the snow, he had managed to get through to the Georgenhof. And here he was, sitting with Peter at the table, his glasses in need of cleaning, the ribbon of the Iron Cross on his lapel, eating bread and sausage. He had a right to be here, he was doing his duty. The school might be closed, but he was giving a German boy private coaching. No one could stop him doing that.

  He was too old to be a reservist in the Volkssturm, although he still felt really young.

  •

  He had just been showing Peter what the barrage of drumfire meant; he had drummed on the table with all ten fingers, bringing the ball of his hand down on the table-top now and then to represent the heavy artillery. A soldier had to run about and double back like a hare. He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeve to show his bare arm, and the long scar running down it. He had got that at the battle on the Chemin des Dames ridge in 1916. Your best chance was to jump into a brand-new crater, because where a shell has gone off once another isn’t so likely to strike in the same place. He explained terms like increased firing range and break in firing, and the expression battle of matériel was also mentioned. And, he added, not every bullet hits the mark.

  The small atlas was lying on the table. They looked up the Chemin des Dames ridge, and then they tried to work out where the roar of the cannon was coming from. It must be up here somewhere.

  •

  Then the front door of the house opened, and in strode Drygalski, making more noise than necessary as he passed the startled Jago, marched straight into the hall, and shouted up the stairs, ‘Hello, is there anyone here?’ The dog’s hind paws slipped from under him as he scrabbled on the floor in his fright. Heil Hitler!

  What were all those suitcases doing in the middle of the hall, he asked. ‘Were you ladies thinking of going away?’

  He had had a dead general taken away – yes, it was all thanks to him – he’d been doing all the things that no one else thought of, he’d been on the phone for hours, shouting and keeping everything in order.

  Now he set about climbing the stairs to Katharina, who leaned over the banisters with the key in her hand and asked – Heil Hitler! – ‘What is it?’

  Auntie too opened her door. She had been busy sorting out her magazines, putting them neatly together in bundles and tying them up with string – ten years’ worth of issues, they were valuable items. What was going on,
she wanted to know, Heil Hitler. Peter looked out of his room as well.

  Drygalski hurried upstairs, stumbled over Peter’s clockwork railway in the darkness of the corridor, cried, ‘What sort of housekeeping is this?’ and kicked the carriages of the toy train out of the way. ‘It’s a positive pigsty!’

  •

  He brought the news that a married couple from the east had to be accommodated, which meant they were being billeted on the Globigs – ‘And at once! You have plenty of space here.’

  The couple would be arriving with bag and baggage this afternoon, a room must be cleared for them. ‘And at once!’ Drygalski repeated. You couldn’t very well put such people up in a cowshed.

  He took an official order out of his pocket and showed it. ‘In case of non-compliance . . .’ and so on. Then he got them to show him Elfriede’s room, which had been standing empty for two years.

  The doll’s house, with its furniture nicely arranged, the puppet theatre with Kasper, Death and the Devil lying over the front of it, even the knitted witch was there with a string a metre long coming out of her stomach. Above the door hung a white-framed picture of brownies with nothing on, holding up a sheaf of flowers.

  And on the wall above the bed was an engraving of the Saviour with the caption, ‘SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME’, MARK 10 VERSE 14. He was patting the little children’s cheeks, while the grown-ups stood thoughtfully to one side. It had been inherited from Elfriede’s grandparents.

  Her clothes were in the wardrobe, underwear and jumpers, her little dresses and the black knitted jacket with the green yoke and the silver buttons that she had wanted so much. Moths flew out of the clothes.

  •

  The bed was made up with white sheets and blankets, and there was a photograph of the dead child on the pillow, showing her with her crinkly hair in braids and her hands folded round a bunch of lilies of the valley.

  The room was large enough, said Drygalski, pulling back the curtains and opening the window to let the good fresh air in for once. They must be nice to the comrades billeted here, he told Auntie and Katharina, they’d had some bad experiences.

  •

  He stood at the window for a while listening to the rumbling. Behind him, Auntie and Katharina were listening too. But as usual, smoke was rising from every chimney in the Settlement. You could even see people sweeping the snow away. All was neat and tidy.

  What kind of people were being billeted on them, Auntie asked, and how much rent could they ask?

  That infuriated Drygalski, who shouted something about the national community, and took the most impossible tone.

  ‘Rent? What’s got into your head? These people have lost everything!’

  It was a pity the railway line had been damaged, or they could have been sent straight on into the Reich. That could easily have been organized if the line was still intact.

  •

  Now Dr Wagner the teacher also came out of Peter’s room and joined them.

  Was the front going to hold? he asked the head trustee. And at that moment the background noise in the east grew louder; it could have been because of a gust of wind intensifying the sound of the detonations.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ shouted Drygalski. Calmly sitting here in the warmth, while all hell was let loose outside. This sort of thing wouldn’t do.

  •

  Dr Wagner pointed to the east, and ventured to ask the head trustee for advice: he had experience of the World War from the Chemin des Dames ridge, he said, but all the same he’d like to know more precisely. If he wasn’t much mistaken, then what they were hearing was drumfire, wasn’t it? But from the German guns or the guns of the Red Army, that was the question.

  They all stood listening, as people used to listen to the Führer’s speeches, but the schoolmaster’s question remained unanswered. The aircraft flying over the house were German, anyway. They’d show the Russians a thing or two. Drygalski almost felt like waving his cap to them.

  •

  Drygalski closed the meeting. He turned to go and see round the rest of the house; he had to see Katharina’s room, he said.

  ‘It’s private,’ she said, pushing past him and shutting herself into it.

  Drygalski was about to go downstairs again, but then he said no, he must insist. He hammered on the door, and Katharina was obliged to let him in. Her bed was still unmade.

  ‘Aha!’ said Drygalski, shaking his head. He didn’t put up with unmade beds at home.

  ‘This is a real self-contained apartment! A bedroom, a living room and another room as well? That’s just wonderful! And a toilet of its own?’ Then if necessary the boy could move in with her, and so could Auntie! If more room was needed, then people just had to squeeze up together.

  His eye fell on the books lying on the table. Heinrich Heine? Stefan Zweig? Surely Heine had been Jewish? Well, this was all very, very interesting.

  ‘German Cathedrals, however . . .’ And he picked up the book of pictures and held it out to Dr Wagner, who had come up behind him. ‘Now this is the kind of thing you should be teaching!’ he cried.

  •

  Dr Wagner wanted to see Katharina’s apartment too, and this was a good opportunity. He stood on tiptoe. Wasn’t that an open tube of tablets lying on the table? He managed to get a glimpse of the Crouching Woman; a female figure, naked? Her attitude was unnatural. The Medea on the wall was very different from this distorted figure on her plinth.

  This woman lived very comfortably, Dr Wagner thought. Little armchairs, a plate with a pattern of fruit, and with apples on it. A pretty conservatory, with the cold, clear sunlight flooding in. He thought of his own dark apartment in Mitkau, in Horst-Wessel-Strasse, where there were always farm carts going by on their way to the abattoir and so forth. Now he saw what a lovely place Katharina had, and he thought: some people have everything.

  Of course he lived comfortably, with his study, which might be dark but was spacious, the dining room with the seascape over the sideboard, the smoking room and the bedroom. There was even another little room looking out on the back yard. His mother had died in that room, and a hyacinth vase was still there with a dead hyacinth in it. The water in the vase must be full of plankton. All very nice, but farm carts frequently drove past – often there was no bearing it.

  And here everything had its unique style. Orange shutters! Why hadn’t he thought of having orange shutters? She had a view of the park too.

  •

  Drygalski went downstairs again and looked at the summer drawing room – impossible to heat, he assumed, and crammed with crates and boxes. Also, as Auntie commented, ‘You can’t get it properly blacked out.’ He glanced at the billiards room, nudged one of the balls, which nudged another, and that one struck a third. Was Drygalski a man who never missed his mark?

  He inspected the hall as if he were going to put chalk marks on the furniture ready for an auction sale.

  Aha, pictures. ‘Are those your distinguished ancestors?’

  The ancestors looked back with their eyes wide open. Ancestors who might well have upheld good German values all their days.

  Straw could be spread in the hall for a large contingent, he said thoughtfully, accommodation still had to be found for the inmates of the Tilsit orphanage. Here, however, Auntie was quick to get her word in. ‘But the toilets,’ she said. ‘There aren’t nearly enough of them for so many people.’ And those that they did have, she added, were stopped up all the time. She blamed the Ukrainian maids.

  •

  Drygalski stood thinking right in the middle of the hall, under the candelabra made of antlers, wondering whether the summer drawing room couldn’t be made fit for use somehow or other, and the hall and the billiards room too, and the women stood round him thinking of ways to prevent it, and watching him as he stood there thinking. There was no denying it, the head trustee had bow legs.

  It was a funny thing, said Drygalski, how the general hadn’t fallen fighting among his men but ha
d died in a car accident. And now of all times, when the red tide was catching fire, such a man would be hard to replace. He, Drygalski, hadn’t been able to save his life, but in a way he had saved his death. It was he who had seen to having him carried into a house. And who had told his wife in Hamburg. Seven children!

  The driver, he said, would certainly be called to account. It might have been better for him if he had died with the general.

  He wanted to see the cellar, did he? It dated from 1605. There was nothing to be done with the cellar, where water stood ankle-deep. It should have been possible to drain it long ago. Grudging hospitality if ever he’d seen it! That was the aristocracy for you.

  •

  He was still standing in the hall, beside the suitcases packed ready to leave, and the rumbling rose and fell again. He thought of his own wife, and what to do about her when it all got really serious. There was the Globigs’ farm cart standing in the yard – couldn’t a bedstead be loaded up on a cart like that for his wife? It was enormous! A few crates and boxes could be taken off to make space. After all, human beings came first, didn’t they?

  •

  When Drygalski finally left – Heil Hitler! – the whole household heaved a sigh of relief. He said that when Peter was better and the swelling of his tonsils had gone down he must report to the Hitler Youth, and ‘right away’ at that.

  The dog Jago curled up again, although his ears were pricked, and Auntie bent over her suitcases – really, nothing was easy – and only then took them back upstairs to her room.

  Katharina shut herself up in her apartment. Only once she had locked the door behind her did her hair stand on end. ‘It was all hanging by a thread,’ she said out loud. Suppose Drygalski had come a day earlier and found the Jew here! Then it all would have been up for her. What providence that the man had moved on in the night. He had left even before the sounds from the front began. Where was he now? she wondered. Might he, in the end, come back again? Flung back by the rampart of fire as if by a hedge full of thorns.