All for Nothing

by Walter Kempowski

  It would be best to get out at once. He should have gone with the villagers, they’d offered to take him. His superintendent had allowed him a dispensation, although his Catholic colleague in the next village showed no signs of leaving.

  Would he have to knock the figure of Christ off the porch with a hammer and take it with him? Could he leave the beloved image that had accompanied him for so long to be destroyed by the Bolshevist hordes?

  •

  He opened Auntie’s suitcase. What on earth would the boy do with all that ladies’ underwear? Panties and vests? Handkerchiefs with little red bows? Peter had already taken two of the silver spoons, but he had the third safe. I coaxed that one out of him, thought the pastor. He would keep it as a talisman. No hallmark, but it was certainly silver.

  He picked up a packet of handkerchiefs. One more or less surely wouldn’t be noticed?

  •

  Why, why had he let himself be carried away into talking about the German Christians? ‘You’re so trusting,’ his wife had always told him. ‘You’ll talk yourself into trouble some day.’

  But hadn’t the boy himself said something that could be used against him if necessary? ‘Nazi.’ He had mentioned Drygalski ‘the Nazi’. Yes, that was it. He could strike back with that. This Drygalski was evidently high up in the Party.

  Nazi . . . didn’t anyone using a word like that incriminate himself? Hadn’t he given himself away?

  He sat down at the harmonium and tapped out a tune on the keys, but he didn’t tread on the pedals to works the bellows.

  I long for my eternal home,

  No longer in the world to roam.

  Ah, might I pass through heaven’s door

  To gaze on God for evermore.

  He was so tired of everything.

  22

  Alone

  Next morning the pastor looked out of the window and said to Peter, who was washing himself in the kitchen, ‘Snow, snow, snow . . .’ He tapped the barometer and said, ‘It’s rising.’ On the outdoor thermometer he read fifteen degrees below zero. ‘Snow, snow, snow. Those poor people, how will they ever get through? There’ll be snowdrifts a metre high.’ He went out and threw the birds a little food. But then he shook out the entire contents of the bag, as if sowing the seed broadcast, and birds came from all directions. Why keep any of the bird seed back when all was lost anyway?

  •

  Peter returned to the road, where carts were still driving along – or were driving along again – one after another, with a rumbling, crunching sound. ‘Where are we going?’ someone called. The dead gelding was already buried under the snow, his mouth open and showing his teeth. But he couldn’t just leave the animal like that, could he?

  Carts that had fallen over lay in the road, bodies among them. And more bodies in the ditches, the bodies of children.

  Peter thought of the gelding. He had always blown the chaff away from the oats, clever creature that he was. When Vladimir had lifted him up on the great horse’s back, the gelding used to nuzzle his leg affectionately. And hadn’t he even once spent the night beside him?

  How was he to dispose of the body? At the front of the trek, crows flew up from other horses that had died.

  Peter went through the empty village. Not a soul in sight.

  A war memorial. The village pond, a lime tree and an inn. Ducks and geese must splash about here in the summer. Now crows were roosting in the lime tree, and you could have skated on the pond. The doors of houses and barns had been left open. Paper was blowing out of them, and net curtains billowed from the windows.

  There was a chair in the middle of a room, an old man sitting on it, babbling. When he saw Peter he raised a hand. Peter backed out of the room. What could he do about a babbling old man whose family had left him behind? Sitting there talking nonsense.

  •

  A jeep was standing outside the village inn, and Peter heard voices in the building. Three SS men were sitting there. They had fried themselves some bacon and were drinking schnapps with it. The soldiers had stopped for a rest and were discussing what to do next. You could see from their collars that they had won the Close Combat Clasp and the Iron Cross. Two older men, and a younger one who looked like a schoolboy.

  •

  When Peter came in – Heil Hitler – the young SS man grabbed his hand, said, ‘White bread or black bread?’, held it tightly and screwed it round until he screamed.

  ‘White bread,’ said the man contemptuously, screwing it even more. Peter trod on his foot as hard as he could. The others laughed; that was the right thing to do. ‘Don’t take it lying down, boy!’

  Couldn’t a German boy like Peter stand up to a strong handshake, asked the young SS man. ‘Made of cotton wool, are you?’ Fancy being unable to take a good squeeze of his flipper! He was surprised, said the young man, he supposed Peter was a mummy’s boy, was he? Liked to sit in the warm by the stove?

  Wasn’t he a Pimpf?

  Let’s see his papers. Oh, only just twelve.

  They invited Peter to sit down with them and pushed a slice of bacon over to him.

  Did he come from this village? No, said Peter, his own village was already occupied by the Russians and all his people were dead . . . Then he said he was the only one left alive, he had hidden and then one evening the Russians were there, hunched figures as brown as earth scurrying past his hiding place. And he took his air pistol out of the waistband of his trousers, as if to say: I’d have sold my life at a high price . . .

  The men had stopped listening; they knew at once that Peter’s stories were lies, and didn’t want to listen to any more. ‘Keep your mouth shut,’ they said. They could have told different stories; they all wore the ribbons of their orders.

  When the golden evening sun,

  With its last bright rays was going down, going down,

  One of Hitler’s regiments,

  Came to a little town, a little town . . .

  one of them sang, as if he were making fun of the song, and he beat time to it with a beer bottle.

  Yes, those had been the days! Austria, the Sudetenland . . . Flower wars, they’d been called, because the Austrians welcomed them so enthusiastically! After Austria the Sudetenland, then put a stop to it, that would have been the thing. Now they were in the shit, and had no idea how to get out of it.

  •

  While they were sitting there, playing a game of chance with spent matchsticks, several freezing figures came limping up, and after a moment’s hesitation one of them came into the inn. He was a Russian POW. He called the soldiers ‘comrades’, and said they had been left behind. What should they do, where should they report?

  Could they help him? the Russian asked in his own language, which was hard to understand – and then he saw the SS runes on the soldiers’ collar patches and turned pale.

  •

  ‘You bet we can help you,’ said the young SS man, laughing. ‘Come with me!’

  There was a bowling alley behind the inn, and he made the Russians stand against the wall and shot them out of hand.

  He came back in, putting the pistol away.

  The others did not laugh, they just nodded. That was life.

  ‘How do you think they’d have acted let loose on German women?’ they said to Peter. ‘How do you think your figures as brown as earth will carry on when they get here?’ And they went back to their game of chance with the matchsticks.

  •

  But soon they had had enough of sitting around. They were going on, now that they had finished here.

  ‘What are you going to do next?’ they asked Peter, who shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Well, we can take you with us,’ they said. Perhaps they thought he could be a kind of drummer boy for their unit?

  They drove to the parsonage, Heil Hitler. It was entirely surrounded by fluttering birds, tits, woodpeckers and finches. The pastor was just emptying the last bag of bird food. He felt weak at the knees when he saw the SS men, Heil Hitler. So
the boy has given me away after all, he thought, and now they’ll arrest me . . . But Peter had only come to say goodbye and collect his rucksack and the microscope, which he tucked under his arm. He left the suitcase behind; he didn’t need all those women’s clothes.

  •

  ‘Are you leaving me, then?’ said the pastor. ‘I’d just made us some soup.’ He didn’t shake hands. ‘We could have gone together . . .’ Going closer to Peter, he whispered, ‘Are you going with the SS men?’

  Yes, Peter was going with the SS men, but first he looked in at the church. There were many more bodies now. Where was Auntie? He pulled the blanket back, and saw that the two rings were no longer on the finger of her torn-off arm.

  •

  Then he got into the jeep, and they were already turning into the road where the great trek of carts was moving along. The driver hooted his horn like mad, the farmers stopped their carts, and then they were racing along through them. Their back wheels spun, and they were away. Once they were stopped, by a woman who placed herself in the middle of the road. Could they take her old mother with them and get her to hospital?

  ‘Sure, we can do that,’ said the soldiers, and the old woman was lifted into their vehicle, Heil Hitler, covered with blankets, and off they went again.

  But in the wrong direction! It was some time before they realized that Peter wanted to go the other way. Then they stopped and let their drummer boy out. ‘Can’t force anyone to see when he’s in luck!’ they said. Heil Hitler. They’d happily have kept him with them, a nice fair-haired German boy like that. Then again, they were beginning to find him something of a nuisance.

  The old woman put out a hand to him from under all those blankets. Ought he to stay with her?

  •

  Peter didn’t know where to go. Left or right? He wanted to reach the Frisches Haff, where Auntie had planned to go. ‘Anything else is useless,’ she had said. Go to the Haff, yes, but what way was that? It took him a little while to work it out. Then he knew. I must go back to where I was this morning, he told himself.

  But he was reluctant simply to turn round and trudge back along the road that the SS men had taken, walking into the wind and the snow, maybe passing the dead gelding again.

  He watched the carts going along for a while. I ought to find a short cut, he thought, and he walked away from the column of carts and went uphill, over the snowfield and along a narrow path.

  Behind him, the trek wound its way along the road, cart after cart and going slowly. No one noticed him leaving the long line of vehicles.

  Soon he had reached a sparse wood of spruce trees. He could just hear the snorting of the horses, the clink of chains, the grinding of the heavy cartwheels as they went along. But then he was going through the little wood, and there was no noise at all.

  •

  Finally he came to a house; it was a village school. The door was ajar, and a dead man with vomit round his head was lying in the corridor. He must have been the teacher. Snow had blown in through the crack in the door, dusting the man’s body. The table and chairs in the kitchen had fallen over and broken china lay on the floor, with pots and pans. The embers in the stove were still glowing, and Peter carefully fanned the flames. Obviously this little house had only just been abandoned.

  He found a few pickled gherkins in the mess on the floor, and a bowl of pickled eggs in the larder.

  •

  He stood the chairs up and ate the gherkins. There wasn’t any bread; where could he find bread?

  He spent a little time looking round. A door led from the kitchen to a classroom. The authorities had placed this little school between two villages. They had done it for practical reasons, to kill two birds with one stone.

  Benches were pushed up against the wall of the classroom, and there was straw on the floor. People had spent the night there. He might be able to sleep there too – but what about the dead man in the corridor? The straw was dirty, and stank of piss and shit. He climbed the stairs. A dead woman lay in the bedroom, with a little girl close to her, also dead. The little girl had been clinging to the woman, who had her arm round the child. The wind blew through the broken window.

  Don’t look, Peter told himself, but he stayed in the doorway. A gilt-framed picture of a guardian angel hung over the rumpled bed. The angel was leading a little boy over a narrow bridge.

  The Drygalskis had a picture like that in their house, too.

  •

  The living room of the house contained a sideboard with glasses on it, and a picture of a moorland landscape on the wall. There was a bookcase in the study, full of books – The Teacher’s Treasury. The desk drawers had been pulled out and searched. The teacher and his wife had believed that mankind was basically good and ‘nothing will happen to us’, but they had taken rat poison in the end. And now they were lying dead in their own vomit.

  Or perhaps the teacher had heard his wife’s screams and the little girl whimpering, and then it was all over for him too.

  He had spent his life explaining the points of the compass to the schoolchildren, and what ‘horizon’ means. East and west. Mental arithmetic, good handwriting. An old man with a watch-chain over his paunch. The Russians had been here in the First War too, and had behaved decently.

  •

  Peter sat down at the desk. Shall I tidy up a bit? he wondered. The official seal was missing; its inkpad lay open on the table. Perhaps someone had liked the look of the seal . . . a royal eagle? It might seem impressive as a means of certification.

  You can’t stay here, Peter told himself.

  But he sat on at the schoolmaster’s desk, staring at the scene.

  •

  He was roused by the smell of a cigarette. There were two men in the house, he could hear them talking in the kitchen. Soldiers? They went away as quietly as they had come. There was nothing for them to take here. Peter wished he had gone with them, but they were out of sight.

  He read the school register, which showed who had been late, when, and the timetable. There were piles of exercise books. A list of punishments. ‘For telling lies: three strokes of the cane.’

  Then he rose to his feet. You must get away from here, he told himself, and he followed the trail left by the two soldiers. They’d have known which way to go. Others had also been here, and he could even make out the tracks of cartwheels, all going one and the same way.

  •

  After he had walked for two hours, he came out into open fields, and then he saw the trek again, cart after cart. He could hear people talking and calling to each other. His short cut had not saved him much time.

  He soon reached the road. No one was surprised to see a boy coming down the hill on his own. They hardly even looked up; their eyes were elsewhere.

  Fallen carts lay on both sides of the road, dead animals with bloated bellies, and dead people: old men and women, children. Many children. They were half covered with drifting snow.

  •

  A large, solitary oak tree stood beside the road. Some people were hanging from a spreading branch, a couple of soldiers with their coats unbuttoned and their heads bare. Were those the two soldiers from the school? They had notices hung round their necks saying, WE WERE TOO COWARDLY TO FIGHT. And beside them hung a man and a woman. The man wore a rectangular Polish cap on his head, and had a bandaged finger. The woman was Vera. The notices hanging from their necks said, WE WERE CAUGHT LOOTING.

  Peter had once seen someone make the sign of the cross, and he would have liked to make it now. He wanted to stand under the tree and make the sign of the cross. But he wasn’t a Catholic. He took off his cap as if he needed to scratch his head; he had to be careful, because there was a vehicle by the roadside with military police in it. Heil Hitler. The dead dangling from the tree swayed back and forth.

  •

  The ‘watchdogs’ stopped several wounded men walking past the carts to check up on them. Heil Hitler. Was a shot in the arm really so bad? Couldn’t the man fire a gun all
the same, or at least keep watch? They had paper bandages drenched with blood, and labels on their coats saying that yes, their wounds were genuine, and how bad they were. They held up their injured limbs as proof. Heil Hitler, yes, that’s in order.

  No cowards, no one simply work-shy? Unwind that bandage, will you? Right, that passes muster.

  •

  A little further on there was a youth hostel built in the Lower Saxon style, a big place. A notice outside told you that it was the Johann-Gottfried-Herder Youth Hostel. Peter went over to the large building. Two long swastika banners blew in the wind outside it. This was probably the assembly area where the young people met for roll-call. German young people had looked up to the banner with shining eyes and jumped over bonfires here.

  We’ll show faith and love

  For our native land,

  And the powers above.

  The assembly area was surrounded by a wall of medium height, as if by two arms. The masons had made a wheat-sheaf out of bricks and placed it on the gable end of the main part of the building, with the date 1936 under it. The whole thing reminded Peter of the Albert Leo Schlageter fountain on the housing development opposite the Georgenhof, although that was much smaller than this magnificent building.

  •

  The military police drove up and got out to report to their superior officers: two cowards strung up along with two Russian looters.

  ‘Good,’ said the superior officers. They had commandeered the office of the youth hostel, which gave them a view of the road so that they could see whether the long line of vehicles was flowing smoothly. At the slightest disturbance they could have intervened to restore order. However, from their vantage position they couldn’t see the beautiful view from the youth hostel, cleverly incorporated in the whole design by the Reich architect Witterkind. That was the view from the back of the building, where the road swung round in a wide loop to the valley, with the trek winding onward towards it. And in the distance was a small town with two churches and a castle.