All for Nothing

by Walter Kempowski

  •

  Then Hofer cried, ‘Tally ho!’ and disappeared past the heavy curtain. A shame to have spoilt his little pleasures.

  Peter went to the barber next to the café for a haircut. ‘Heil Hitler,’ he said, but the barber was a Dutchman and did not respond.

  ‘Want a shave as well?’ asked the barber. He meant it as a joke, because there was only a little down on Peter’s cheeks. He whistled a patriotic melody that sounded like a folk song.

  The haircut cost fifty pfennigs, and the price would have been agreed quickly if Peter hadn’t started talking about the figures as brown as earth who had run past his hiding place, keeping low, and that made the barber thoughtful. He snapped his scissors in the air and looked at Peter in the mirror. Well, to think that a young fellow like him had done so much already! And he was wondering what would happen when Peter got home. Wouldn’t he be called to account for himself? Now here was he, the barber, he’d come to Germany voluntarily to cut the Huns’ hair for them.

  He brushed Peter’s collar and said, in English, ‘So long!’

  Outside the door the man with the glass eye was waiting for him. ‘I had a son like you,’ he said. ‘Mind you don’t squander your life!’

  •

  This time it was Auntie who was late. There had been all kinds of things available in the shops, and she had bought washing powder off the ration.

  And when she was shopping she had met a nice man who helped her, and then she had chatted to him for a while. He came from Silesia, so he was a countryman of hers. The world is all a village, really.

  ‘Thank goodness you’re here, my boy. Don’t you go and get lost as well.’

  The Silesian had a slight disability, and dragged his left leg a little when he walked, but that didn’t matter. There are good souls everywhere.

  •

  Then Auntie sat in the coach with Peter, and they made themselves comfortable and had a bite to eat. There were so many good souls looking at them, with their good faces staring through the windowpanes, that Auntie drew the curtain.

  Then she wrote a postcard to the people left at the Georgenhof, saying that she hadn’t found Uncle Josef, and she was now on the way to the Frisches Haff. ‘What do you think, Vladimir has gone off! Love to Katharina!’ she added, feeling very brave, and hoping that this message wouldn’t get her into difficulty.

  She wrote a postcard to the Berlin cousins, pointing out that no one could now guarantee the safety of the crates left at the Georgenhof. Why hadn’t they taken them away long ago?

  She was also going to write to Eberhard, military postal address number so and so. She started several times, but how could she tell him that they had left the Georgenhof? And say what had happened to Katharina? Better not send the card yet, she thought, better wait and see how it turned out.

  •

  Katharina was sitting in a cell by herself, as if it were a waiting room. She was wearing her heavy coat and her white fur cap. She had put her feet on a stool, and she was twiddling her thumbs. She watched her breath rising; it was cold in the cell.

  A bit of grey sky could be seen outside the grey windowpanes. She had already tried standing on the stool to look out of the window at the marketplace, the church on the other side of it and the old town hall. If she had seen Sarkander she’d have waved, but Sarkander wouldn’t have seen her. Did he know she was in here?

  Didn’t other prisoners look out of the window too; wasn’t everyone hoping for something?

  •

  Not many words had been wasted on her case. The police officer had kept showing her the note with the sketch of the way to the Georgenhof on it, and she had nodded.

  ‘Well now,’ the officer had said, ‘this is serious, Frau von Globig.’ And he asked, ‘What did you think you were doing? And you also listened to foreign radio stations.’

  He had stopped asking about any incidents of racial defilement between Katharina and the Jew. The whole thing, he thought, was so unedifying that he began to fear for his own skin.

  •

  Far away in Italy, Eberhard had already been repeatedly questioned. His superior officer had talked to him seriously for a long time. First just the two of them were present, then the commanding officer joined them. Heil Hitler.

  ‘Your wife gave shelter to a Jew, is that correct?’ And, ‘So you supported the enemy by holding shares in English steel?’ That was a grave accusation; he should expect demotion. And he could wave goodbye to his officer’s salary.

  •

  A Jew hidden in her room?

  Eberhard did some calculations, and realized that it must have been on the evening when he was drinking wine with that little Italian girl.

  After the war, when all this was over, he might go back to Italy. What about the Georgenhof? Get the estate back into good shape and forget it! What about this business with the Jew? The dust could settle on that as well.

  There was something else on Eberhard’s mind. Katharina, and the way she had avoided his kiss when they said goodbye. What sort of woman doesn’t even give her husband a goodbye kiss on the cheek?

  Get the gate of the yard and the morning-star finial repaired. Put his life in order, those would be his priorities.

  20

  The Old People

  Next day Auntie went to the police again. She’d had about enough of this, she told Peter, and the friendly police officer had had enough of her.

  She wondered whether Vladimir might come back after all. Perhaps there had been a mistake of some kind? Perhaps he had thought he was acting for the best?

  ‘If that’s so, I’ll keep quiet about it,’ said Auntie. Everyone can do something stupid now and then. ‘D you hear me, Peter? If he comes back we’ll say no more about it.’

  Although her curses couldn’t simply be withdrawn.

  When Auntie’s new acquaintance, the limping Silesian, came to see them he stabled the gelding, who was still inclined to turn his head behind him, in the fire station. The horse could even be locked in there. The Silesian told the people there that it was all right, and even brought in some straw. The man had all kinds of connections. He might even be able to get his new friends a room, he said. But that wasn’t necessary; if they’d wanted a room they might as well have stayed at the Georgenhof. They didn’t intend to put down roots here, they wanted to move further on.

  •

  He turned up for breakfast in the morning, saying it was only natural for friends to keep company in these hard times. He listened calmly to the full story of the loss of the farm cart, and he helped to repack the suitcases in the coach. There was a lot of useless stuff to be sorted out – away with all those summer clothes! It was ridiculous to be carting them around in the middle of winter.

  ‘But what will we do in summer? Although heaven only knows where we’ll be when summer comes.’

  ‘You’ll have been home again long ago next summer,’ said the gentleman. But Auntie wasn’t so sure of that. She thought she would never see the Georgenhof again. She didn’t want to see the Georgenhof again. Hadn’t she sacrificed over twenty years of her life to the place, more or less? And all for nothing. She hadn’t been paid a proper salary; what she got was more like pocket money. Nor had anyone ever stuck social security stamps into a booklet for her: life insurance or a funeral benefit fund. She had no savings under her mattress.

  She had been an outsider all her life. Back when she had been turned out of her parental home by Raffke, who stood in the road with a nasty look on his face. In those days she might have trained to be a teacher. She’d always enjoyed playing schools in the garden arbour. But no one had helped her except for old Globig. You’ll come to us, he had said, and so she did. It felt like being liberated. However, no salary, just some money put down now and then for her, and a muff or knitted gloves at Christmas.

  And later, when Eberhard had bought that wonderful car, the Wanderer, dark blue with a split windscreen . . . couldn’t he have taken her for a drive in it some ti
me?

  ‘See what a lovely car we have, Auntie,’ he might have said, hooting the horn as they drove out of the gate. Going south, to the sea, into the mountains! She’d have liked to go to Italy, too.

  •

  The Silesian told her how he’d love to taste Silesian ham again. He brought a jar of pickled gherkins with him; delicious. Pickled in the Silesian style. And he bought Peter a bowl of ersatz honey. It tasted extremely sweet and surely wasn’t good for his teeth. You couldn’t eat much of it.

  Wouldn’t he like to sell his microscope, asked the Silesian, or swap it? And he gave Peter a couple of rifle bullets, all polished and shiny. There were Polish, Belgian and German bullets too. They were made of copper and brass; one even had an eyelet at the back so that you could hang it round your neck.

  Peter would have liked to make a collection of such bullets, and the Silesian promised to get him some more. ‘I know a man who can get hold of them in return for a bit of ham.’ He had a whole cupboard full of them, said the Silesian. He even asked whether Peter would like to have a Finnish dagger. Would it come in useful?

  •

  The ration coupons for soldiers on leave that the political economist had given Auntie at the Georgenhof turned out to be invaluable for buying bread. Five or six sheets of them! At the time Auntie had been going to turn down the political economist’s offer, but when he still held them out to her, smiling, she had readily accepted. The man hadn’t said where he came by them. They looked brand new, and a little different from ordinary coupons.

  They were very welcome now.

  One time the baker looked at the coupons rather more closely, and Auntie realized that there was something wrong with them. After that she was more careful, sending Peter or the Silesian gentleman to buy bread, and always from a different baker. The baker at the post office was the least suspicious; he was a good-tempered fat man with a red face. His name was Bartels, and he was known as ‘the post-office baker’. He had hung the certificate qualifying him as a master baker over the door in a golden frame. He tore off as many coupons as necessary with his thumb, and then pushed the warm, fragrant bread over the counter. He even took an interest in his customers – where did they come from? Where were they going? – and Peter told him stories about the Russians, hunched figures as brown as earth, who had stormed past him, keeping low.

  •

  Peter went up and down the high street, past the rows of carts. Perhaps Vladimir had come back, and would be standing here as if nothing had happened. I’m sorry, it was like this . . .

  A farmer took a pee under his cart, where else could he do it?

  People moved aside a bit.

  •

  There was no piano music coming from the town café now. The place was being aired. An officer wearing the Knight’s Cross went in. Heil Hitler. He came straight out again; he had probably thought he could sit in the warm and drink coffee, but all the windows were open to let fresh air in.

  A man had been awarded the Knight’s Cross for annihilating a Russian detachment by pressing boldly forward with the tanks in the armed wedge formation, and now he couldn’t get a coffee here?

  He had unbuttoned his coat so that everyone could see his medal.

  Peter was in luck. The officer spoke to him. ‘Boy, is there another café anywhere in this dump?’

  Peter would have liked to go to the restaurant at the railway station with the officer, but the bearer of the Knight’s Cross didn’t want his company. He wanted to sit in a café listening to piano music and smoking a cigarette, perhaps being approached by a young lady who would ask him where he won the Cross. Then he would buy her a slice of rye-flour tart and ask whether she knew her way round this town, and what she did with herself all day.

  He’d heard that there was music in this café – and now they were airing the place!

  •

  The Dutch barber stood in the doorway of his shop, snapping his scissors in the air. Perhaps he was thinking of the hunched figures, keeping low, as brown as earth, who had run past Peter in his stories. And Peter had heard screaming women, had he? Or perhaps the barber was thinking of his village at home in the Netherlands, where they had given him funny looks last time he went back on holiday.

  His friend Jan was lucky. He wouldn’t be considered a collaborator. He had spent a couple of days in prison for grinning when he’d been told he wasn’t allowed to give the Hitler salute. He had it in writing, too! That would make a difference one of these days.

  •

  In the stationer’s shop they sold puzzle books, the right size to go by military post. They were for soldiers at the front, sitting in their trenches and waiting for the enemy. The booklets had titles like Clever Dick and Mastermind. You could buy stamp albums there as well, and stamps in clear film envelopes, neatly sorted like the scores of the card game Skat. A hundred and fifty stamps for one Reichsmark. Austrian Republic and Danzig Free State stamps, used and unused. General Government of Poland stamps consisting almost entirely of the postmark.

  Peter thought of buying a stamp album, and held it for so long that the salesgirl got impatient. Herr Schünemann had advised him to invest his money in stamps.

  But in the end he didn’t, because he could see that the assortments of stamps included some with the picture of the Führer on them.

  •

  The pharmacy was sold out of liquorice. Heil Hitler!

  ‘Haven’t you been here before?’ asked the pharmacist. He thought it was odd that a boy who was a stranger to the town came wanting to buy liquorice twice running, when the stuff was sold out.

  ‘I’m a refugee,’ said Peter. He seemed to himself abandoned and all alone as he said that, and in fact it was the first time he had done so. The pharmacist thought that was sad, and opened up his display case to see if there was a little bag of Italian liquorice left there after all.

  •

  Looking through the shop window, Peter saw Auntie walking down the other side of the street with the Silesian gentleman. Auntie in her black hat, wearing her muff and her rubber over-shoes, the gentleman limping slightly. Which of them was supporting the other? Had the Silesian taken Auntie’s arm?

  •

  The first cartloads of old people arrived from Mitkau. They were being evacuated from the monastery. The old folk were transported in open horse-drawn carts, sitting on straw packed well round them. They were nodding their heads, as if in time to cheerful tunes played on a concertina. They had never thought they would have to go on the road again in their old age, with cannulas sticking out of them like hedgehog prickles, with colostomy bags and devices for getting air into their thoracic cavities. They were bad on their feet and had trouble with their waterworks.

  It hadn’t been so bad in Mitkau; they had got used to the place. Why, they thought, can’t people leave us in peace?

  They were surely thinking, too, of their pretty home town of Tilsit. It used to be so nice, sitting outside their houses in summer, watching horses being ridden down to the river to drink.

  Perhaps their evacuation had gone wrong?

  The sun had always been shining in Tilsit. There were always sunflowers in Tilsit growing beside the fences.

  •

  The locals lined the streets as the carts of old folk arrived one by one. No one called out ‘Heil.’ Good heavens, what a sad load of poor old people. Coughing and spitting. They hadn’t imagined that the evening of their days would be like this. What, wondered the spectators, will happen to us when we’re old and weak? And the local old folk in the church care home, hearing that they were to have new arrivals, were wondering: when will they take us away? Lord, let me know the number of my days . . .

  And many of the passers-by were probably thinking: terrible! Wouldn’t it be a mercy to put these sick people out of their misery? Useless mouths to be fed, lives not worth living. The expression vegetables fit for the graveyard did the rounds.

  •

  Doctors in white coats arrived. Hei
l Hitler. Nothing had been prepared, nothing was organized. Should the seats be ripped out of the cinema? No, there were objections to that. The cinema was still needed; people needed something to take their minds off the present. They wanted to see a film to entertain them and make them laugh wholeheartedly.

  What will our lives be now, dear heart?

  Happy or sad, say the powers above?

  What course does our life take, must we part?

  Or may we yet come to the land of love?

  They would have to call on the school; plenty of room there. The headmaster wrung his hands, and jubilant children ran down the street.

  The local pastor put in an appearance, standing in his church porch like the post-office baker standing outside his shop, and sure enough he was needed: some of those taken out of the carts were dead, with their bread rations clutched in their hands, and they were laid at his feet. The problem was how to get them buried. For the time being they must be left lying here, side by side; when they thawed they would begin to stink.

  Ding-dong ding-dong, rang the bell. ‘We will meet here at six for silent prayer,’ the pastor told those hurrying by, who couldn’t believe that there were dead men and women lying outside the church. News of it went from mouth to mouth.

  •

  Peter too saw the old people sitting in the carts, and being lifted down. The carts were already being turned to fetch the rest of the old folk from Mitkau. They couldn’t be left to fall into the hands of the Russians. It occurred to Peter that he could go home to Mitkau with the empty carts, pay a quick visit to the Georgenhof and come straight back again. He could give the others who were still there a surprise. The Hesses, Sonya and Jago the dog. Take another look at the family home, see it with new eyes. And then, next day, he could come back here with the last load of old folk.

  Perhaps he could bring something from home back as well. Peter thought of the new locomotive he had been given at Christmas for his railway. He’d have liked to have it with him now.