All for Nothing

by Walter Kempowski

  Grudgingly, she let them in. They were offered no more than a hot cup of tea and a piece of bread spread with onion-flavoured curd cheese. They would rest briefly, decided Auntie, and then go on.

  Yes, they heard, Uncle Josef had already left. Immediately after Auntie’s phone call from the Georgenhof he had slammed the receiver back on its stand and called to the household, ‘The Globigs are coming. That’s the last straw.’

  It was the phone call that sent them off, as Frau Schneidereit now revealed. Uncle Josef had left with his family, bag and baggage – seven carts piled high with their possessions.

  ‘Quick, quick, quick, children! We’re leaving too,’ he had called. After hesitating for weeks, saying they’d wait and see, now he couldn’t get on the road fast enough. There were papers to be burnt on the dung heap, everyone to be chivvied along, the carts so overloaded that the horses could hardly move. The carts couldn’t get out of the yard, so the horses had to be whipped all the way out to the road.

  •

  Uncle Josef had not left Auntie a letter on the table. Most of the doors were locked, and the beds had been stripped.

  So Auntie curled up on a sofa, and Peter lay down in his cousins’ room. They hadn’t left a letter either.

  Three doll’s houses stood in the corner, one for each of the girls so that they wouldn’t quarrel. And a picture of the three cousins hung over them, painted by the artist who had also done the picture of Elfie that hung in Katharina’s room.

  While they were resting, the other refugees harnessed up their horses and left the yard one after another.

  •

  Auntie wanted to leave at midday. All the strangers’ carts had left the yard by then; they would be well along the road by now. Vladimir crawled out of the hay; the French prisoners had left as well.

  Vladimir immediately saw that Vera’s wooden suitcase was missing. The tarpaulin over the cart was untouched, so far as he could tell, but the wooden suitcase had gone! He went on looking for it. It had been on the driver’s box, but it was not there now. He couldn’t believe it.

  Vera couldn’t grasp it either. She didn’t exactly strike up a howl of woe, but she cried floods of tears. All her possessions stolen. The pictures of her parents. All of it was gone.

  Vladimir went round shouting, saying what he would do to the thief if he laid hands on him, shouting into Auntie’s face in Polish. He’d slit the man open! Put out his eyes! He’d stopped in the middle of the night to help others when they fell into the ditch, and now someone had stolen Vera’s suitcase.

  •

  ‘If I can lay hands on the bastard!’ said Vladimir, uttering terrible curses in his own tongue, while Vera went on crying quietly.

  •

  A little later, they too set out. Cart was following cart on the road to Elbing, wheels crunching over the snow. They tried to thread their way into the long line of vehicles, Auntie first.

  It took them some time to push in and join the cavalcade. They had to let whole village communities go first, until at last an old man stopped his horses. He pointed to them with his whip, indicating that they could go in front of him, and hurry up about it. No time to be lost. He must be wondering about the strange coach standing at the crossroads. Perhaps it reminded him of the old days? With a coat of arms on its door – had that made him let them go first?

  But when Vladimir drove the heavy cart forward, drivers were already cracking their whips behind him. ‘What’s going on up ahead there?’ After all, people wanted to stick together; the line of carts was strictly organized. If the people in them lost sight of each other here, it was all over.

  •

  Meanwhile, at the Georgenhof, Sonya took possession of the keys. She opened the door to the Czech and asked the Hesses how much longer they thought of staying, because she for one wasn’t providing any more food. Drygalski had to be fetched to sort it out. Did she know, he asked Sonya, that he could send her packing in no time, along with her boyfriend? Right, she’d better get back to the cottage, at once too, or there’d be trouble. The Czech had already made himself scarce.

  18

  Resting

  They reached the little town of Harkunen towards evening. Cart after cart stood all along both sides of the high street, one after another, and women sitting on cushions looked out of the windows. You had to think a long way back to remember when there were last such crowds here, and that was when Hitler came through to celebrate the special day of the Gau, the local district. Kaiser Wilhelm had once been received in Harkunen with garlands and girls dressed in white.

  •

  Auntie drove the coach into the fully occupied football field, part of a sports complex, and stopped in front of a goal. The Bund deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, were running a soup kitchen. Vladimir drove the heavily laden farm cart into a side street.

  ‘We’ll leave again at five in the morning,’ Auntie told Vladimir. ‘And mind nothing else gets stolen!’

  ‘Right, five in the morning,’ he said, and told her not to worry.

  ‘We’ll wait here for you,’ said Auntie. ‘In this football field. Come here at five in the morning, and then we’ll go on. Five on the dot!’

  Party officials were going from cart to cart, Heil Hitler, with forms to be filled in. They were asking all these people if they needed anything, whether everything was in order. There was considerable confusion on the football field, but people were managing; they’d make it somehow. On the whole everyone was reasonable. Complaining was kept within bounds.

  The Party stewards found fault with Auntie’s coach because it was blocking access to the field. Hadn’t she been allotted a place to park in conformity with the rules? No, she had not been allotted a place, she had simply parked the coach where it was.

  ‘That won’t do. People can’t act just as they like here.’

  Even in this situation, unusual as it was, you couldn’t do just as you liked; even here you had to follow rules. Otherwise everything would end in unimaginable chaos.

  ‘Surely you realize that!’

  So she moved the coach again, and the Party steward went ahead and directed her to a place in the lee of the wind, at the side of the gymnasium of the sports complex. He probably felt sorry for the coach – such an old-fashioned vehicle. But it had a coat of arms on the door, and that meant something, after all.

  •

  Auntie thanked him for showing her where to go, and she said ‘Heil Hitler!’ She added, ‘There’s a farm cart in the third street on the right with a Pole and a Ukrainian woman in it. They’re with us, if anything happens.’ She said ‘Heil Hitler’ again, and the Party man put his hand to the peak of his cap; he knew what was what now. The only question was whether, at five in the morning, Vladimir would realize that they were not in the same place. Peter stationed himself in front of the goal, with the binoculars dangling from his neck and the air pistol in his belt, but he couldn’t stand there for ever.

  ‘Why are you hanging around here, boy?’ he was asked.

  ‘We’ll tell your friend Vladimir where to look when he turns up in the morning,’ someone told him. ‘Trust us for that!’

  •

  As chance would have it, a young war widow from Mitkau was fetching soup at the same time as Auntie. They didn’t know each other, they’d never met before, but both were from Mitkau. That kind of thing creates a bond.

  The young woman had made a spontaneous decision to get on her horse and ride away, leaving everything behind just as it was. She had nothing with her but a small bundle. She had the Iron Cross awarded to her husband who had fallen at Demyansk in a bag round her neck. She showed the Iron Cross to everyone, and said that she had ridden away because there was a whiff of Russians in the air.

  Then she mounted her horse again and rode off. She couldn’t stand it here any more. ‘Perhaps I’ll get through yet,’ she said.

  •

  Meanwhile Peter went into the town: it had a long high street, a marketp
lace and a church. Sure enough, their big farm cart was standing in the third street on the right, and the two bay horses swished their tails when they saw him. Peter told Vladimir that they weren’t in front of the goalposts any more, but outside the gymnasium. Then he went in search of a pharmacy, because he had left his toothbrush behind. There must surely be a pharmacy somewhere here.

  He asked local people where he could find a pharmacy. The local people looked different from those on the trek, who were now described as refugees. The local people went to their offices carrying briefcases, and there were ladies wearing hats sitting in a café. They were friendly and gave Peter information. One lady took a fancy to him, and accompanied him to the pharmacy. Did he think, she asked, that the Russians would get as far as this? She was so worried, she didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Are you all on your own?’

  Peter would have liked to tell her about his mother, who had been taken away, but she might yet come back . . .

  •

  People were queuing outside the pharmacy – Heil Hitler – and it was some time before he could buy his toothbrush. He also bought some toothpowder and a cake of soap. You were really supposed to be on a list of regular customers to do that, but the pharmacist made an exception for him because he was a refugee. He also bought a bag of Italian liquorice, which cost five pfennigs and tasted nice.

  He was sure to be all right now.

  ‘Close the door!’ called the pharmacist.

  He’d have to hide the liquorice from Auntie. He was squandering money when he bought it.

  •

  Old-fashioned gravestones in the shape of crosses stood crooked in the churchyard beside the little whitewashed church, and there were new wooden crosses there too. A man came along with a bundle; it was a dead child. The pastor arrived and said, ‘Leave the body there, and I’ll see to it later.’ Then he turned back and asked for the child’s name, wrote it on a piece of paper and put his note with the bundle.

  The bundle lay there in the draughty church porch, and the note blew away.

  •

  In the church, someone was trying to play the organ, which was out of tune.

  Eternity, O mighty word,

  Running my heart through like a sword,

  Beginning without end . . .

  Peter looked at the crooked crosses. Did the dead lying under them have crooked legs, like Christ in the Mitkau church, whose feet crossed at the ankles? Were Elfie’s feet crossed like that in her grave, or were they lying side by side, straight?

  Dead bodies sweat. Had someone washed her feet with warm water? Had her whole body been washed with a warm sponge?

  Had her hair been brushed for the last time and plaited into braids?

  Eternity, great is my grief,

  I know not where, with my belief

  In God, my thoughts to send.

  He couldn’t remember now what his little sister had looked like. No stone had been placed on her grave. Plenty of time for that, they had said. But no stone on her grave? No name, nothing?

  They had buried her with a bunch of lilies of the valley in her hands.

  Who would ever come looking for her?

  •

  There was a bar outside the church, the stumps of two linden trees in front of it. They sold weak beer in the bar. Two men staggered across the street with a drunk between them. They were refugees too, speaking so broad a dialect that Peter couldn’t understand it.

  •

  The woman who had taken him to the pharmacy met him again, and this time she couldn’t restrain herself. ‘Poor boy,’ she said. ‘Going around here all by yourself? Don’t you have anyone left in the world?’ And she invited him to go home with her, saying she had some cake that she thought he would like.

  She lived up two flights of stairs, in an apartment looking down into a back yard. The clock on her wall chimed, ding-dong ding-dong, with the hands pointing to four. Then Peter was sitting on an old green sofa trimmed with tassels, eating cake and telling long stories of all that had happened to him. His village – ‘you wouldn’t know it,’ he said – had been captured overnight by the Russians, and he had taken refuge in the woodshed with the Russians outside, sort of hunched figures brown as earth. They were scurrying past, and he huddled into a corner and didn’t move. His heart was in his mouth!

  The woman listened, fascinated. So he went on and on about the hunched, brown figures of the Russians scurrying past, and the screaming of the women. And in the night, he said, he had crawled through the snow at a temperature of minus twenty-five degrees until he finally reached the German lines, where an officer congratulated him in person.

  Here the old grandpa from next door joined them, and made doubtful noises over Peter’s stories as he listened. So then it was time – ‘Oh, my word! I must be going!’ – for Peter to make himself scarce. ‘His unit’, he said, was waiting for him, and he showed his air pistol. The woman gave him a book about the World War, saying she was sure it would interest him. It contained old-fashioned pictures of old-fashioned soldiers. The book, she said, had belonged to her son, who was now a prisoner in Karelia. ‘Hmm,’ said the old man. ‘Hmm. Figures as brown as earth?’

  Perhaps the boy’s stories were true.

  •

  At the same time, the telephone was ringing at the Georgenhof. The Hesses had lit a fire in the hall and were sitting comfortably beside it. It was the teacher who finally picked up the receiver and shouted, ‘What?’ down it. ‘What did you say? General Command?’ There was a rushing sound far away, a distant voice; he couldn’t make anything out. Frau Hesse took the receiver from her husband, but she couldn’t understand what the voice was saying either, except that it was Eberhard von Globig beside Lake Garda, trying to get in touch with his wife. ‘Er – Herr von Globig . . .’ said Frau Hesse – for a brief moment the curtain of interference was lifted – ‘your wife isn’t here any more . . . we don’t know . . .’ But that was as far as she could get. And what should she have told him? There was one more croaked phrase . . . ‘In the cellar . . .’ and that was the end of the call.

  What did he mean was in the cellar? Frau Hesse took an electric torch and went down the cellar steps. There was water at the bottom of them, nothing else in sight.

  •

  At midday Lothar Sarkander turned up. Heil Hitler. No, he wouldn’t sit down. This was just a flying visit. He walked round the room, looking at everything. He had sat here so often: the billiards room to one side of it, the hearth. He opened the door of the summer drawing room as well; frost glittered inside it. He stood there for a moment looking out at the silent, melancholy park, and then he slowly climbed the stairs to the first floor. So this was where Katharina had lived. And was that the daughter’s room opposite? Elfie. Was the photo that used to lie on the pillow still there? He opened the wardrobe where the little girl’s clothes were still hanging.

  The Hesse boys were standing in the doorway behind him. When he picked up the knitted witch they looked at each other. Was this man allowed simply to nick it? Would that have to be reported to Herr Drygalski?

  He hadn’t been able to find out any more about Katharina. So far as he knew, she must still be in the police cells in Königsberger Strasse. Probably with all sorts of rag, tag and bobtail, whores, termagants, beggar women. Thank God, said Frau Hesse, they’d given her something to take from here at the last minute: bread and dripping, sausage.

  ‘Good,’ said Sarkander, and the duelling scar on his cheek twitched.

  Pastor Brahms, he said, had been taken away. Apparently he had belonged to an underground association. Sarkander lowered his voice to a whisper. An operation on a major scale. He’d probably end up shorter by a head.

  ‘Oh, don’t say . . . !’ exclaimed Frau Hesse, cupping her chin in her hand. ‘But Frau von Globig? I mean, she’s innocent really. I’m sure she just slipped into it by accident.’

  ‘They’ll certainly lean on her hard.’

  He would ask Wagner to t
ry to get more supplies to her, said Sarkander, and then he left with his stiff-legged gait.

  •

  Drygalski also dropped in. Heil Hitler. It wasn’t news to him that the Globigs had left. They ought to have gone long before, and then none of that business with the Jew would have happened.

  He himself had made out a permit for the whole household to leave, days ago, but Auntie wouldn’t hear of going.

  What interested him was the fate of all those crates standing in the drawing room. Surely sequestration of property was the penalty for sheltering a Jew? Maybe he had better find out just what was in them.

  Was Sonya going to get uppity again? Should he dispose of her?

  Quietly going about it, he took a quick look at Katharina’s apartment, just to check up on it, but there was nothing more to find. He crawled into the cubbyhole, but there was no chocolate any more, and the tobacco was gone as well.

  He took the shotguns with him to give them to the Volkssturm reservists. However, he couldn’t find any ammunition for them.

  •

  At three in the afternoon, ‘the usual time’, as he said, Dr Wagner arrived.

  ‘What, all of them gone without a word?’ he asked. Hadn’t they left a letter behind? Nothing! ‘After all, we were friends,’ he said.

  He sat down with the Hesses up in Peter’s former room. He had talked to the boy so often here. They had read Goethe together – Goethe writing about the moon. Filling woods and vales again with her misty light . . . No, it hadn’t been a waste of time; they had made the most of it.

  He would happily have gone with the Globig party, but he supposed there wouldn’t have been room on their cart for an extra passenger. He’d been literally left standing. Well, they’d all have to wait and see what happened.

  He for one hadn’t gone haring off! He hadn’t left the Globigs in the lurch! That was a comfort.

  •

  Frau Hesse said, ‘We’ll be leaving too as soon as our permit comes. Somehow or other we’ll get away from here.’ Yes, Drygalski had already told her to start at once, but he hadn’t given her a piece of paper to take with them, that was the snag. If they were stopped and their credentials were checked, then they’d be at a loss.