•
Ah, his beloved Königsberg, said Dr Wagner. Eating fried flounders in a little restaurant on the River Pregel . . . and hearing the foghorns of the big ships in harbour going wooo-wooo-wooo. He had brought his poems with him, why not offer to read them? Sitting by the fire declaiming poetry was conviviality in the old style. The dog and the cat in front of the life-giving fire, and children listening with their eyes wide.
He was civil to the new guest, who after all was, in a way, his colleague, and the man’s wife was very nice as well, in her skirt of hand-woven russet-red wool and linen. But when the man went on and on, yet again, about his stroke, Dr Wagner cast up his eyes to heaven, and then his glance met Katharina’s. He was unaware that the village teacher also cast up his eyes to heaven, if for a different reason. This was all I needed, thought Herr Hesse, a specialist in higher education who prides himself on writing poetry.
So Wagner left his poems in his pocket. Anyway, he had brought the telescope from school, where it was standing around unused. As nothing had come of the poetry idea, he went outside into the open air with the boy to look at the stars. But the sky was overcast.
‘Close the door!’ the village teacher called after him.
•
Wagner said goodnight. These days it was better to be at home within your own four walls. He tried it: he tried carrying Katharina’s hand to his lips, as the baron had done again and again. But she withdrew it with an expression of distaste.
He left the telescope at the Georgenhof. He couldn’t very well keep taking it back and forth.
•
On the way home he thought of Katharina – he would have liked to read her his poems, up in her boudoir, at her feet, so to speak, as they did in the old days. He would have liked to read her one in particular, the most successful one. He had given it to his mother on Mother’s Day. Caput mortuum . . . To think that it was women who bear all the sorrow in the world. God, how long ago was it that his mother had died? That kindly woman.
Although he could not see the stars, he was sure that a benevolent father protected him. The thunder in the distance suited his mood. The Twilight of the Gods! There was something grand in that idea.
Suppose people of some kind were billeted on him, in his own apartment? The thought filled him with anxiety.
•
That night Katharina lay on her bed fully clothed, listening to the distant rumbling. She felt the ground shake when there were explosions, and the glasses beside the washbasin clinked softly. She must talk to someone, but who? Pastor Brahms? Ask him whether everything was all right? Should she leave first thing tomorrow? Get away from any possible consequences of what she had done?
•
It was difficult to reach Lothar Sarkander these days; when Katharina phoned she was always told that he wasn’t there. And anyway, what did she think he could have said?
‘As you can imagine,’ they told her in his office, ‘the mayor has his hands full at the moment.’ That wasn’t the way they used to speak to her.
•
Katharina opened the cubbyhole. Why had she let herself in for that adventure? And then again: why hadn’t she kept the man there? If you start something you should see it through. But she had been glad to be rid of him, that was the truth.
16
Police
Next morning there was a phone call from the police in Mitkau. Katharina was still in bed when the phone rang. They had picked up a man in the monastery courtyard – a Jew! – and after denying it for a long time he had admitted being hidden by her at the Georgenhof. Was it true?
Soon after that the mayor rang. Lothar Sarkander, whom she’d been unable to reach for so long, would you believe it? This time he didn’t want to talk about the old days, he said not a word about the summer drawing room. He came straight to the point. For God’s sake . . . he had heard . . . they’d been in touch with him . . . ‘How could you, Kathi?’
The police had already been to see him, he whispered into the receiver. The pastor had been taken away.
‘How could you let yourself in for something like that . . . ? You must have known that these people walk over dead bodies!’
A note had been found on the man, a sketch showing the way to what was clearly the Georgenhof . . . ‘It’s criminal to put anything down on paper! How could you be so naïve?’
The sketch had been put in front of the man, and he’d had to admit everything. Yes; he’d tried talking his way out of it, but the sketch was conclusive.
•
At midday, to the sound of fierce barking from Jago, a police detective turned up; a quiet, mournful man in a leather coat. He drove right up to the house in a steam-driven car, and left it outside the front door. Heil Hitler. Everyone was sitting at the table round a steaming tureen of soup. The Hesses, Auntie and Dr Wagner too. Katharina was calmly serving out the soup, which she never usually did.
•
When Wagner discovered that the newcomer was a police detective, he put down his spoon and pushed his soup plate aside. He thought it would be better not to get in the way here, but go back to Mitkau at once, even though he had only just arrived. Things that were none of his business were coming to light. He put the poems that he had been going to give Katharina back into his pocket, and strode vigorously away. He did not take the direct road back, which was icy; he didn’t want a fall and a broken hip at this late date. Standing erect, and without hesitating, he walked towards the stream of horse-drawn carts.
‘Is it much further?’ a little girl asked him. Much further to where? He shrugged his shoulders.
•
The company round the table had risen to their feet, and the Ukrainian maids came out of the kitchen. The police officer had a photograph. He held it in front of Katharina’s nose and asked if she knew the man in it. He had admitted to being hidden by her in some kind of cubbyhole on the first floor here. ‘Is there such a cubbyhole in this house? On the first floor? And did you know that the man is a Jew?’
Auntie stood up as well, and looked at the photo. So did the two Ukrainian girls, who were curious too. Did Katharina know the man, and what was all this about a cubbyhole?
The Hesses also came forward. ‘How? What?’ asked the teacher. ‘What’s going on?’ Had the time come at last? Had permission to leave come through?
‘Eckbert! Ingomar!’
Were they finally to be off on their travels?
•
Drygalski turned up as well, Heil Hitler. He left the front door open and cold air blew in. He too wanted to see the photograph. The officer had already put it away, but he brought it out again. Drygalski examined the photo, and asked Katharina whether she knew the man. ‘Do you recognize this man?’ He himself had never set eyes on him, although he knew this area so well. Auntie didn’t know him either.
Yes, Katharina had seen the man. She said so, loud and clear.
Well, said Drygalski, he’d thought as much, he knew there was something wrong here. He stood there four-square in his brown jackboots, legs apart, and he wished he had a riding crop in his right hand so that he could tap it against the shaft of his boot. They could pull the wool over your eyes for a while, but then it all comes out. You needed a sixth sense, that was the trick of it. ‘I knew there was something fishy going on,’ he told the police detective. He’d always known there was something wrong here.
•
Now the detective had to view the scene of the crime. The entire party began to move, a cavalcade climbing up to the first floor. Drygalski went upstairs first, saying that he knew his way around this place. So Drygalski was in the lead, but what with the narrow staircase and the darkness, the police officer soon overtook him. The Hesses followed, and so did the maids from the kitchen, still holding their dishcloths.
Katharina came up the stairs last of all, holding the banister rail. She wasn’t in such a hurry.
The whole pack of them stood at the top, watching her climb the stairs slowly, step
by step. She produced the key, and the door was unlocked. On view were the unmade bed, a tube of tablets and an open bottle of wine on the bedside table. Had some kind of unnatural vice been practised here? The Crouching Woman, just look at that. For heaven’s sake!
•
The police officer stood in the middle of the room and looked round. No doubt about it, this was Frau von Globig’s bedroom. Next door was the living room of the apartment, and beyond that the room with her books in it, and now her son’s as well. Gilded bronze brackets supporting the bookshelves.
He opened the conservatory window and looked down at the fence. ‘So he climbed the fence on his way here? Yes, he still had scratches on his hands; they’d been carefully dressed with sticking plaster.’ When it’s a matter of life or death, yes, anyone would climb a fence.
Drygalski pushed forward and looked down at the park himself, saw the semi-circular path he had trodden in the snow. He said he knew all about it; it had always seemed to him strange. When he was assessing the vacant living space, that little chest had been somewhere else entirely . . .
Was all this about the cubbyhole true? asked the detective. Surely there was some mistake? Oh no, there wasn’t. A cubbyhole . . . ?
•
Drygalski got down on his knees and pushed himself, breathing heavily, into the hole. A mattress. Pillows, blankets? And here was a bedside lamp. A lamp in a cubbyhole? Then he began rooting about under the sloping roof like a boar scenting truffles, and said, ‘Here!’ Packets of tobacco, cigarettes – he even brought the bottles of wine rolling out. ‘Look, Italian wine!’
‘So if it comes from Italy . . .’ he told the police officer accusingly. And the police officer saw it all.
•
Katharina was standing beside the Crouching Woman, underneath the indoor palm. Auntie was in the doorway, along with the Hesses and the two maids from the kitchen. Herr Hesse was saying, loud and clear, that he too had always thought it odd – all that locking of doors, and he thought he had heard the radio on more often than was normal, in the middle of the night at that. He mentioned his stroke, the difficulty his handicap gave him, how badly he needed peace and quiet. He had no feeling on the left, and he sometimes felt so strange. It was thanks to his wife that he was still on his own two feet. She’d told him she saw saliva dripping from his mouth, and then she knew what had happened to him.
•
Drygalski joined the interrogation. The police officer was a little too polite for his liking, with that conciliating smile. Shouldn’t the woman be questioned rather more sharply? Harbouring a Jewish fellow from who knew where? Yes, where did he come from? Was there a whole gang of them to be discovered? Had Jews been going in and out of this house for weeks? Laughing heartily at the German nation’s struggle for survival, eating and drinking their fill? Barolo Riserva, Giacomo Borgogno. ‘And you gave the man your hand, did you? Did you? Perhaps at the same moment as a German soldier was sacrificing his life at the front?’
He looked at the unmade bed. ‘It’s disgusting!’ A German woman screwing a Jew. ‘Wouldn’t you call that disgusting, inspector?’
And what, he would like to know, was her blameless husband up to? There he was in Italy, basking in the sun, while the German Reich fought for its very existence.
‘It can’t be any coincidence that he happens to be in Italy now!’ He took Eberhard’s photo off the bedside table and threw it on the bed. It lay there, with the opened bottle of wine on the bedside table too, and all those people standing in the doorway, wondering what would happen now.
That, of course, was as clear as day.
•
The police officer didn’t like this turn of events. He had really meant to begin by giving Katharina messages from Felicitas, who sent her love, and approach the matter slowly and indirectly, investigating according to his own ideas of the case.
He looked at the label on the wine bottle and picked up the tube of tablets. Then he closed the conservatory window and examined the book on German Cathedrals. It was almost as if he wanted to console Katharina. Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as all that? ‘We don’t bite anyone’s head off . . .’ He preferred to make inquiries in peace and calm. Maybe that fellow had made it all up? However, if the Jew had climbed the fence, and crawled into the cubbyhole . . . And there was the sketch, neatly drawn in red pencil. By Katharina herself?
He took a booklet off the shelf. Its title was What We Have Lost, and there was a picture of Strasbourg Cathedral on the cover. An inscription to Katharina ran, ‘Never forget.’ And the writer had added, ‘All for nothing.’
•
Katharina was standing by the doorpost. Drygalski avoided her eyes. He looked at all that tobacco and chocolate, at everything he had brought out of the cubbyhole. Delicacies that she had been giving to the Jew. He would have to take those luxury goods and give them to the old and infirm, that was obvious. He’d been meaning for some time to go to the monastery and make sure all was well there.
He switched on the radio. The BBC? No, all you could hear was the time signal of the German Shipping Forecast, followed by the Wehrmacht report, read slowly enough to be written down for the benefit of those who couldn’t follow the broadcast easily.
•
There was no more to be found here. They all turned round and went down to the hall together. Herr Hesse withdrew to his room, saying it was high time for him to take his drops.
Going downstairs, the police detective held Katharina’s elbow gently in two fingers, but he stayed beside her. ‘How could you do such a thing, Frau von Globig . . . sheltering a Jew?’ he whispered to her. ‘Did your husband know? A Jew!’ Her husband in Italy would have to be questioned; a telex had already been sent. He would surely be interested to know that the man had been wearing a tennis pullover of his; they had worked that out from the monogram EvG. He would certainly think this or that about it. This or that? What actually had been going on here?
It was possible that she might be confronted with the pastor; they’d already had to lock him up.
‘Helping a Jew . . . what a thing to do, what made you take it into your head? If it had been an ordinary criminal . . .’
‘It was only one night,’ said Katharina.
Her door on the first floor was wide open now.
•
The police officer looked round the hall again for a while, examined the contents of the little cabinet – and all the letters in it that would have to be read. The ornamental cups, the wire frame with the photo of the Tsarist officer . . . all very strange. The landed gentry lived in a world of their own.
•
Peter had not gone upstairs with the others. He could hear what was going on anyway. He stood by the billiards table, rolling balls against the cushion.
The hunting trophies, horns and antlers lined up side by side, the stuffed wild boar’s head, all dating from the time of old Herr von Globig.
Katharina took off her locket and placed it in the dish on the fireside table. She put on her coat and the white Persian lamb cap. With her arms round Peter, she looked gravely at him. Was it going to take long?
‘Will she be back soon?’ Auntie asked the police officer, speaking as if Katharina had already left.
Jago the dog snapped at the officer’s hand.
‘Get away,’ he said, wiping his hand.
•
The foreign workers were standing on the terrace of the Forest Lodge. The Czech in his leather cap, the Italian with his Badoglio hat, the Romanian with toothache. They were smiling. Did these people take pleasure in the misfortunes of others? They looked behind them and called to their friends to come out; there was something worth seeing here.
•
When Katharina was already in the car, Auntie came running after her, saying, ‘The key, Katharina! You won’t be needing it any more now.’
At the last minute, Vera gave her some bread and sausage. She knew what it was like to be taken away and not have so much as a bit
of bread with you.
The car drove off, and the ancestors in the hall stared after it.
•
The Hesse family clustered round Drygalski. If only they’d left long ago. They asked the head trustee whether they would be able to leave tomorrow.
‘Why not?’ said Drygalski. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘But won’t we have to be questioned?’ asked the teacher. Since he had not done anything wrong, he would have liked to be questioned. ‘And the official permit? Has the official permit arrived?’
‘I wish we hadn’t come here,’ said his wife. But it had been the doing of a higher power. Drygalski himself had told them to move in.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ said Drygalski, who was still searching cupboards, ‘it will be best for you to go out into the road at once and get away from here. At once, do you hear me? At once.’
Then he himself left, to go and tell his wife the news of this extraordinary incident.
•
That day his wife was wearing a white blouse, and the brooch that her husband had given her in Braunlage. She had heated the stove well, and there was good soup in the old style on the table. He could give her a bar of chocolate now, but he didn’t; he ate it himself.
She was astonished by the news, and praised her husband. But – Frau von Globig arrested? And she said, very loud and clear, ‘Poor woman, she didn’t deserve that!’ Then Drygalski slammed the door.
•
Meanwhile horse-drawn carts were driving into the yard of the Georgenhof. The leader of their trek held a permit under Auntie’s nose saying that they could stay the night there.
Women and children jumped down from the carts and streamed into the house, asking whether there was somewhere they could wash. Grave-faced men negotiated with Vladimir over grease for the axles of their carts.
The horses were taken out of the shafts and put in the big barn, breathing heavily. The cows being led behind the carts on halters got under cover too. Pedigree cattle of the finest breeds! They were bleeding around their hooves. The teacher’s wife mixed water and vinegar, ointment and other ingredients in a bucket and washed their feet.
All for Nothing Page 23