All for Nothing

by Walter Kempowski

  •

  Should they extract the manuscript about the baron’s native city? Wasn’t it right at the top? But the cheerful driver was hooting his horn. The man even got out and walked round his car to help them in. Stood beside the car door until they were properly settled.

  The baron waved grandly to the foreign workers standing side by side on the terrace of the Forest Lodge, following these farewells with watchful eyes. Wasn’t that like a kind of salute? And off they went.

  •

  The Globigs were sad to see the baron and his wife leave. Those quiet evenings by the fire had been so comfortable; such cultivated people, it had been like getting a new lease of life. They would happily have kept the couple here for ever. Even Auntie sighed heavily; it was true, she had indeed done a lot of hard work in her life, the baron was right about that. He had hit the nail on the head. And she put on an apron: there was a lot of dust to be removed from the tops of cupboards. Peter held the ladder steady for her. It all had to be left neat and clean if by any chance they themselves were to go away from the Georgenhof.

  •

  There was a great deal of telephoning next day. Uncle Josef in Albertsdorf said, ‘What, Baltic Germans? All those people were crazy.’ And he added, ‘A baron? Well, yes, if it was true – You’d better stay at home. We’re all staying here, leaving now is the worst thing to do.’ In addition, said Uncle Josef, he couldn’t leave, because the whole house was full of people, people from God knew where, thieving like magpies. Thank God none of them were from the Baltic.

  And yes, another column of tanks had gone by in the night, he thought they were Waffen-SS. They’d soon fix things. Hitler wasn’t fool enough to let the Russians into the country. He might let them in just a little way, but then he’d pull the strings of the sack closed and trap them.

  •

  Go to Berlin after all? The Globigs discussed this idea over and over again. Go to Wilmersdorf? Katharina made long, detailed phone calls to her cousin. The Globigs had always sent the Berlin cousins such lovely presents, always when they were least expecting it. For Anita’s confirmation, and the goose just before Christmas. And they’d had Elisabeth staying here for months on end when she was about to start medical studies and prepare for her first exam. The children had come to stay for ages in the holidays, riding the horses like mad. Hadn’t they crossed themselves three times when they left, as you do on entering and leaving a church?

  In particular, the possibility of sending the boy at least to Berlin was the subject of much discussion. But when it was brought up, they said in Berlin, ‘Yes, but how do you think we could manage it? When Elisabeth is still having such trouble with her feet? Two operations, and she still isn’t better. And where would he sleep? And then he’d have to go to school here, and Hitler Youth service . . .’ It was all very difficult, and somehow or other it was out of the question.

  Auntie asked what, for heaven’s sake, was to be done with all those crates that had been standing around in the drawing room for months and months. No one here could take responsibility for them, did the Berlin cousins realize that?

  To this the Berlin cousins replied that they were good solid crates, what could go wrong? They had put an inventory of contents at the top of each, and a copy of the inventory had been deposited with the Berlin cousins’ lawyer so that there could be no misunderstanding.

  Then they asked if perhaps the crates couldn’t be sent back to Berlin by horse-drawn cart. A single load should be enough to do it. They knew that no trains could leave Mitkau now, but a horse-drawn cart could surely get through? All their table linen and bed linen were there, along with underclothes, suits, dresses. And the family silver!

  They had even packed up the family Bible in one of the crates. Who would ever have guessed that things would come to this? That Bible dated back to the seventeenth century, too.

  ‘Inventory of contents?’ said Auntie. ‘Well, you certainly find what people are really like in times of need.’ And she held the telephone receiver out of the window, so that even in Berlin they could hear what was going on: the wind was blowing the sound of rumbling here from the east, and it was distinctly audible.

  ‘Are you still on the line?’ someone asked at the other end.

  Those cousins weren’t living in the real world! Depositing copies of the inventories with their lawyer. You could only laugh. All their table linen and bed linen? Underclothes? Suits and dresses? The silver! – Auntie stood thoughtfully in front of the crates and wondered what else might be in them. Cognac, maybe? Nothing was easy, was it? For goodness’ sake, it was hundreds of kilometres from Mitkau to Berlin by horse-drawn cart. The horses would fall down dead!

  Anyway, the big farm cart was already loaded up with their own possessions. Vladimir had stacked them neatly, crates and boxes and suitcases, all tied up with clothes lines. He had even seen that the horses had been shod with winter shoes. No one would have thought the man could be trusted to do all that. In the evening he sat in the kitchen reading the Bible. They’d made the mistake of assuming that everyone from the east was the same. ‘Polish economy’ – it was a synonym for bad management and disorder. He’d even managed to fit the big milk cans in. Why? Well, because they were full of dripping and flour and sugar.

  •

  New refugees arrived: a village schoolteacher called Hesse, who kept shaking, and his wife, Helga (Heil Hitler), with their two boys, whom they had called Eckbert and Ingomar.

  Peter had to clear his room for them, as instructed by Drygalski, and move in with his mother. Before leaving his own room, he shot down the paper planes with his air pistol. The Wellington, the Spitfire and the Messerschmitt 109. They sailed to the floor one after another. Then he opened the window, set fire to them and let them sail out towards the tree house. True to life, they crash-landed in the yard. He packed his railway up in cartons, pushed the castle into a corner, and took the microscope with him. There was something moving now in the liquid where he had steeped some hay. Tiny animalcules were floundering about there. Would they get bigger? Would there be no room in the end for anything else on the glass plate under the lens?

  •

  The refugees stood in the hall with their luggage, looking lost, and didn’t move from the spot. Goodness, what a huge place! Is it, they wondered, some kind of castle?

  ‘And who keeps it all clean?’ they asked Auntie.

  They had been on the road for ever and a day, or rather three days, leaving everything behind. The teacher had left his collection of Stone Age artefacts from the village behind: his stone axes, scrapers and blades. All neatly numbered. His wife had left her pretty garden, where she grew dahlias every year, stocks, holly-hocks, phlox, systematically laid out in order of rotation and their requirements for light and shade.

  The man looked damaged. That was because he had suffered a stroke three years ago. He mentioned it at once, telling them how one morning at breakfast, thinking nothing of it, he had slumped sideways with his mouth distorted.

  ‘And I thought he was joking!’ said his wife.

  He wore glasses with strong lenses, and a Party symbol, and looked more like the grandfather than the father of his two sons, who both had glasses as well.

  His wife, on the other hand, gave a vigorous impression. She had white hair combed back, held in place by a tortoiseshell hoop.

  She pulled her husband’s hair back from his forehead – had a lash fallen into his eye to make him blink like that? – cleaned the inside of his ears and straightened his tie. Yes, he had collapsed, said the man, and thought it was nothing much at first, but it was a stroke. And his wife had thought he was joking.

  •

  ‘Well, that’s enough complaining of our troubles,’ she cried. Even before she had taken her coat off she was going from pot plant to pot plant, nipping something off here, adjusting something there. And then – was it imagination, or did the flowers really breathe more freely for her care of them? Had they been waiting for a loving hand
so long?

  •

  She took their ration cards out of her handbag and was about to give them to Katharina; she expected they’d have to eat here, she said, and she was happy to peel potatoes any time. There wasn’t a grocer’s shop anywhere near; they must have had to foot it to Mitkau for any extra little thing, and it was an icy road to walk.

  ‘No, never mind the cards,’ said Katharina. ‘Keep them.’ But just then Auntie came along. ‘Ration cards? Of course . . .’ They weren’t a charitable institution, she pointed out. Two adults, two children? The baron had always helped himself with a lavish hand, and then he liked to go to the kitchen and find something to nibble from time to time. She didn’t want that happening again. He never so much as mentioned the coupons. Ration cards? He didn’t even know what they were.

  ‘Well, you’d better come upstairs,’ said Auntie.

  •

  Auntie showed them Peter’s room. They’d soon feel at home there, she said. A bedstead was brought down from the attic, and mattresses, and the beds were made up with clean sheets. ‘You’ll be comfortable here with us,’ said Auntie.

  The boys were put in Elfie’s room, where they immediately began playing with the puppet theatre, by which they meant bashing the puppets together and pulling the curtain up and down until the strings working it broke. Peter asked if they would like to see his little animalcules under the microscope, but they wouldn’t. They took an interest in the Crouching Woman, though, and although they wore thick glasses they scrutinized her closely, going woo-hoo-hoo!

  •

  The teacher’s wife went to the kitchen to ask if her husband could have a hot-water bottle. ‘Oh, what a wonderful stove you have!’ she exclaimed, and said she’d like to make dumplings on it. And look at all those copper pots and pans, arranged in order of size. She would really enjoy polishing them up with Sidol metal cleaner. Wonderful! How she would like to be in charge of a wonderful kitchen like this some day. The maids were pleased with her enthusiasm, and even felt a little proud of the kitchen, which they had never examined very closely, and acted as if it all belonged to them, but when the good woman was about to open the larder door, there was Auntie suddenly standing in the way.

  •

  So the teacher’s wife hurried back up to him. He was already impatient, wondering where she was. ‘Helga!’ He took the hot-water bottle and asked her to push the chair over to the window for him. ‘Where’ve you been all this time?’ He held his hands behind his ears, the better to hear what excuse she could give.

  •

  They settled in. The Hesses had only a rucksack each and a few other oddments. It had all happened so fast. ‘My stone axes!’ wailed Herr Hesse. ‘My scrapers!’ He had been obliged to leave all those things behind.

  •

  It worried his wife to find that the Georgenhof was a real landed estate, even if a dilapidated one. And she whispered in Katharina’s ear, Do you own the estate? and wondered aloud whether they didn’t want to leave at once. The Reds made short work of landowners, killing them on the spot. Junkers, the old-established landed gentry, were a thorn in their flesh. The Globigs might do better to get away while there was still time, pack everything and leave, preferably tomorrow.

  She herself was uneasy, too: how long would she and her family be hanging around here? They had been told that someone would let them know. Outside on the road, cart followed cart, and they were stuck in this place.

  •

  Drygalski (Heil Hitler) gave the Hesses a hand moving in; he had nothing special to do at the moment. The lines of refugees came from the east of their own accord, and went on to the west of their own accord too. There was no need for him to do anything about it. He was prowling round Katharina as if he wanted to tell her something, and Katharina didn’t like it. When she looked at his brown jackboots, she wondered where he had been in them.

  Drygalski carried Peter’s box of books, and the carton containing his railway and his tin soldiers, over to her apartment with his own hands. And his coats and jackets too; he handled every one of them and asked whether this or that garment was still needed. Couldn’t some of these things be given to all those refugees?

  •

  Strange: that little chest in Katharina’s bedroom. Hadn’t it been somewhere else in the house before?

  Perhaps it would be better to move the Crouching Woman out of the field of vision? Was it a good idea for the boy to be looking at it all the time? The ancestral portraits downstairs, this Crouching Woman up here . . . they didn’t really go together. He didn’t know that the artist who had created so sensuous and frank a figure of a crouching woman was a Party comrade and had access to Hitler – no, Drygalski had no idea of that.

  •

  Peter bounced on his parents’ beds. Drygalski, standing in the doorway, watched him. He looked at the boy: blond, with a thin face, a real German boy, who would certainly soon be defending his native Germany, gun in hand, when the going got tough, just as his own son had done when he fell in Poland.

  ‘How old are you? Twelve?’ Yes, a little too soon for him to be rushing into the thick of the fighting. And he had swollen tonsils at the moment, you had to take swollen tonsils seriously. His son had also been blond, but he had never bounced on beds.

  Drygalski switched Katharina’s radio on; it was tuned to Copenhagen. But it was forbidden to listen to foreign radio stations. The news in Danish? Weren’t there plenty of German transmitters; did she have to listen in to Copenhagen? However, German soldiers were marching through the streets of Copenhagen, weren’t they? They were sitting in Danish cafés eating whipped cream, and that was a fact. There was even a Danish Waffen-SS, fighting shoulder by shoulder with their German comrades against the Bolshevists. Danes, Dutch, French, Slovakians, even Russians! Ukrainians! Cossacks! Man beside man! All Europe had risen against the Red Peril. The forces would hold together with an iron will.

  And it was the same here. It was obvious that the Globigs were welcoming refugees, that was to their credit.

  But if someone tunes her radio to a Danish station, wasn’t it to be assumed that she might listen to the BBC now and then too? Perhaps by accident. Copenhagen, it wasn’t so far from the BBC. Drygalski couldn’t make up his mind. He’d better report it to the district leader and ask for orders.

  Shouldn’t she be honest, asked Drygalski, and admit that she listened in to the BBC now and then?

  Katharina pushed the little chest in front of the cubbyhole again and sniffed. Tobacco? Chocolate? No, there was no smell of either.

  •

  The head trustee liked the conservatory. What a wonderful view! Everything perfect. It must be glorious in summer, even if it looked bleak now, of course. He glanced down at the path he had trodden in the snow, and was surprised by the regularity of the semicircle. As if it had been drawn with a pair of compasses. Frau Hesse, who had made her way into Katharina’s conservatory with him, was looking critically at the cacti and flowering plants. What a sad sight they were. Dusty, with dead flies everywhere. They all urgently needed repotting.

  •

  Drygalski was about to say what a fine group the Globig family had been, sitting on the grass in summer drinking coffee. So peaceful and contented. Had that been before the war? He didn’t say it was a picture.

  ‘I suppose you’ve never used the arbour?’ he asked.

  But Katharina was guiding him towards the door. Was there anything else?

  •

  Unfortunately he’d had bad luck with his refugee girl, he said as he was going out. In herself, she was pretty and neat and a willing worker. A nice girl, she could have had whatever she wanted from him. He’d thought of offering her a home for ever. But she’d been overcome by lust! All of a sudden, lying in wait for him, following him down to the cellar and so on. Rotten through and through. He’d had to do something about that, of course. The hussy had been turned out on the street, immediately. He made short work of that kind of thing. A pity, really; othe
rwise she was a nice girl, trim and neat. He’d have liked to keep her.

  ‘That girl could have asked me for anything . . .’ It had been sad to see her standing in the road all alone. But his wife, sick as she was, might have got wind of something, and that would have been terrible.

  •

  Sick, shaky Herr Hesse was lurking in the corridor to speak to the head trustee. Heil Hitler, his name was Hesse and he had been a Party member since 1939. He told Drygalski the symptoms of his stroke, how it had happened and what he had felt about it. His wife had told him that his mouth had been slanting right down. And at first she had thought he was only joking. ‘If it hadn’t been for my wife!’ he cried, and then he asked himself and Herr Drygalski, ‘What are we supposed to be doing here? We have a referral certificate for Danzig, but the railway line to Danzig isn’t open.’ What did he think they should do now? He supposed there was nothing for them to do here, and he couldn’t very well just stand at the roadside.

  Drygalski said, ‘We’ll find out.’ There was some kind of reception camp in Danzig providing medical care, and that would solve it all. As he said so, he was wondering whether there was really any such camp, and if so whether it would be the place for his own constantly ailing wife. It was to be assumed that such a place did exist; the Party would surely splash out on such things.

  •

  Herr Hesse wasn’t letting go of Drygalski so easily. There was something else on his mind, he said: his collection of old Germanic artefacts – couldn’t a car be sent to collect them from the Hesses’ apartment? Irreplaceable old stone axes and scrapers. Maybe a troop of Hitler Youth lads, ready for anything, could be sent?