All for Nothing

by Walter Kempowski

She had been left with a few pieces of furniture and the picture above her bed.

  •

  A lute with ribbons on it hung beside the picture of the summerhouse; it reminded her of her youth. There is no fairer land today . . .

  She herself had once played music to wounded men, in 1917, almost thirty years ago; she remembered the large white wimples of the Catholic nuns and the patients’ striped pyjamas, and she too had been asked by a blind man whether he could touch her hand; it had been next to impossible to shake his own hand off. She had never heard anything of those men again. But the kindnesses she had shown them had surely not been given in vain.

  •

  Eberhard’s last leave: they had sat under the copper beech in the garden in August, Uncle Josef had come over from Albertsdorf, and dear Hanna with the children; she had played the old songs of her youth on the lute, and everyone had sung along.

  A summer’s evening under the copper beech, drinking punch. Katharina had temporarily gone missing, and then she had come out of the summer drawing room with Sarkander, the mayor of Mitkau. And Eberhard had gone into the wood on his own to make sure that everything was all right. That had surprised her. As long as all that ago?

  •

  Auntie read the newspaper. One of the earpieces of her reading glasses was missing, and what she read was not reassuring. Something was brewing in the east. Who knew, perhaps they would have to leave this house, just as the old Globigs had left it in the First War.

  •

  She pulled out a large suitcase from under the bed. She had come to the Georgenhof with that suitcase all those years ago, and they had told her, ‘You can have the gable room and make yourself useful.’ That was over twenty years ago. And now, as the family joked, she was part of the fixtures and fittings. She got pocket money, had free board and lodging, and ran the whole place.

  Opening the wardrobe, she took underclothes out of it and put them in the suitcase. Some of the garments were darned and mended, others had never been worn, and her handkerchiefs were still tied together with pink ribbons.

  •

  She took letters out of the desk and put them in the case as well, and photographs too. Then she closed the suitcase and pushed it back under the bed.

  She sat down in her armchair. Had she forgotten anything?

  The lute. She took the instrument off the wall and placed it beside the suitcase. There, now she was ready for anything.

  •

  Auntie poured herself a peppermint liqueur.

  A single car drove fast along the road to Mitkau, followed by other cars and finally by trucks. Then came tanks, one after another, making the glass beads on the lampshade jingle. Then it was silent again.

  •

  Now she could hear the sirens from Mitkau, sounding an air-raid warning. The Globigs never reacted to that signal. What were they supposed to do? Get water ready and stand out in the yard in summer when there was a thunderstorm, yes, that was something else, but in an air raid? There was water in the cellar, but it was unusable. So what were they expected to do? Run into the woods? Yes, but not every night.

  The sound of a solitary aeroplane was heard above the rooftops. The engine noise came closer and then went away again. Fiery signals like the Northern Lights fingered the black, starry sky. A searchlight groped through the darkness as well, and in the distance light anti-aircraft guns sent tracer fire into the sky. There were four explosions, one, two, three, four, and then the heavy Mitkau guns began firing. After that silence fell, and the solitary plane flew away, with its engine noise dying down. The bombs had fallen on Mitkau railway station; now it was burning, and rail travel would be disrupted again.

  •

  Auntie sat there for a little while longer as tongues of flame rose to the sky above Mitkau. She listened until at last the all clear sounded in the distance.

  Then she drank her peppermint liqueur and went to bed. She didn’t even hear another column of tanks rumbling past.

  5

  Peter

  Peter was lying in bed. He had a feather bed on top of the mattress, a quilt on top of his blankets, and two pillows. A board lay across the bed with his books on it. Stories by Karl May. Back numbers of the humorous magazine Flying Leaves; he had found them in the attic. They contained caricatures of Sunday hunters, of students who were usually drunk, of young lieutenants who couldn’t control their horses.

  This evening he was reading the story of a shipwrecked sailor who hadn’t given up, but went on and on paddling a raft until at last an island came into sight, and with it the prospect of safety.

  •

  He imagined lying in a cabin in a sailing ship – a cabin that smelt of tar – and the creak of the rigging. The Wreck of the Palmyra, he’d read that book and was still thinking about it. Never give up, that was the lesson it taught you.

  Be the aim however high,

  Youth will find a way . . .

  Peter too had heard the air-raid warning in Mitkau and the four explosions: one, two, three, four. And he heard the tanks going east along the road. The whole house shook as they passed by, one after another. Big black shadows with sparks coming out of their exhausts, chains rattling, engines roaring. You didn’t see them at all in daylight, and now you saw them only as outlines.

  His room was next to Auntie’s gable room. His model railway had been set up on the floor since Christmas. Its rails ran in a circle, and it had a tin station building. Peter had extended the rails out into the corridor, passing through the cat flap, and there, too, they ran in a circle. When the train went out and came back a little later, he knelt down to watch it coming. Sometimes it stopped outside and had to be wound up. Now and then there were collisions when the cat insisted on squeezing through the flap at the same time as the train. A strange animal. No one really knew what went on in his head.

  •

  Model aircraft made of paper that Peter had cut out and stuck together hung beneath the sloping ceiling. German and English planes. A Vickers Wellington and a Spitfire, the Messerschmitt 109 and Richthofen’s red triplane. That one didn’t really fit with the others, which came from a very different time. But Peter had made it, so it might as well hang there. A slight draught of air from the window moved the models so that they touched gently. Peter sometimes shot at them with his air pistol, but he took care not to score any hits. It would have been a shame after he had spent so long working on them. They rocked slightly as the projectile passed by.

  •

  His microscope stood on the table. Looking at grains of salt and sugar crystals was all very well; he knew all about that now. Beside the instrument stood a preserving jar containing a decoction of hay; Peter wanted to observe the invisible life forms in the infusion, but so far it wasn’t ripe enough. There was a whole world in there, Dr Wagner had said: birth and death, creatures eating and being eaten.

  •

  His father’s binoculars lay on the windowsill. The microscope here, the binoculars there. When crows flew up from the oak tree he counted them. He also followed the V-shaped skein of wild geese in flight through his binoculars. Lately they had begun going north again. What did that mean, in the middle of winter?

  If you fly south across the sea,

  Then what, ah what, will our fate be?

  He checked on his tree house several times a day to make sure it was all right. He also kept the Settlement under observation. Women taking long underpants frozen stiff off the line – that was a funny sight. He had never been interested in the children over there. He didn’t know the boys, and he didn’t want to know them. Football? They wouldn’t have let him play with them even if he’d wanted to. For sport he had a rowing boat moored on the River Helge, and he sometimes went out and about on the river with it. The cows on the other bank came along to see what he was doing.

  •

  Peter never went over to the Settlement, and no one came over to see him. The road lay between them. And he would not have had a good time if he had
ventured there. There were strong boys in the housing development who would have loved to pelt the young plutocrat with snowballs. Or might take him into the sweat lodge and refuse to let him out again. Auntie would certainly have opened her window to intervene.

  The children had laid out a long slide there, and he would have liked to try it. Then Drygalski had come along with a bucket full of ashes and made it impossible to use the slide, which annoyed Peter, although it was none of his business.

  •

  When Peter did want to play outside at this time, he went down a small slope behind the house on his sledge, then pulled it up and came down the slope again. He had made a snowman as well, but no one had shown any interest in it.

  ‘Lovely, dear, lovely,’ his mother had said, hardly looking up from her book. The snowman bore a certain resemblance to the Führer and Chancellor of the Third Reich.

  •

  In summer, Peter often spent hours in his tree house, which he had fitted out as the cockpit of a plane: old alarm clocks did duty as parts of an instrument panel, a small wheel was the joystick, a tin can that he filled with water was a fuel container. At the front of his tree-house plane he had mounted the streamlined remains of a motorbike’s sidecar. He was permanently flying west. Now, in winter, the snow collected inside his aircraft.

  •

  Dr Wagner came to the Georgenhof at three p.m. on the dot every afternoon to tutor Peter. Since he had never married, he was described as a confirmed bachelor. He had a small, pointed beard, and bags under his eyes, over which he wore gold-rimmed glasses. He also wore plus fours and black ear protectors, and now, in the cold winter weather, a fur-trimmed overcoat that had seen better days. Wagner taught history, with Latin as a subsidiary subject, and German language and literature. We hear in ancient legends of many wondrous tales . . .

  •

  In spite of his advanced age, Dr Wagner still had to do war work, and he had had enough of working, he said, in his seventy years of life. Teaching German and history year after year, day after day. And when he was through with it, beginning all over again.

  All the children in the monastery school, the milling crowds and the shouting in the venerable cloisters – and then there were his colleagues, all of them in a rut. Since the younger ones had been called up to go to the front, you could hardly ever have any useful conversation in the staff room.

  The library was worth seeing. There had been some idea of sending it to Königsberg, in case the Russians came after all. But since the destruction of that city, the word had been: ‘Thank God we didn’t do it!’

  •

  When Wagner had got himself moved to that school, many, many years ago, it had been summer, the slanting rays of the sun had shone in through the windows with their pointed arches, beds of aromatic herbs had grown in the garden, and there were flowers everywhere: mallows, delphiniums, phloxes. The crooked, contorted cloisters, the refectory with its high ceiling – in summer it was wonderfully beautiful. The old medieval well still stood in the yard, with ivy climbing all over it. And he had been on good terms with his engaging young colleagues.

  But now that old building was cold as ice, however much you tried to heat it. Those tall, damp rooms.

  •

  Instead of a Party symbol, Dr Wagner wore the ribbon of the Iron Cross, which, thank God, he had won in the Great War. With the help of that ribbon, membership of the People’s Welfare Organization and the Reich Colonial League, along with occasional talks on air-raid precautions, he had been able to turn down suggestions that he might join the Party when advances were made to him by some of his colleagues, often at first, then less and less frequently, and now not at all. He had managed to keep out of it. Had he been able to pull strings of some kind in high places?

  He could play the piano, and you heard him practising if you walked past his house. Sometimes he even sang as he played. ‘I live a very quiet life,’ he used to say. He lived this quiet life in Horst-Wessel-Strasse, next door to the tax office.

  •

  The school gates were closed now. Beds for old people who had been brought from Tilsit occupied the vaulted classrooms. And Dr Wagner was surplus to requirements. So he ‘saw to Peter’s education a little’, as he put it – Peter being his favourite pupil, whom he had always liked. I’m not letting you go to the bad, he thought to himself. That thin face, fair curly hair, those serious eyes. Even if it meant walking four kilometres from Mitkau to the Georgenhof, four kilometres there and four kilometres back, he did not shrink from the daily journey on foot to see that all was well, to give the boy some coaching, arriving at three p.m. on the dot. I’m not letting you go to the bad! His father on active service, his mother so self-absorbed, those Ukrainian women in the house . . .

  That’s a very promising boy, he thought.

  •

  Dr Wagner had been seeing to Peter’s education day after day since Christmas. He did not shrink from the long journey, he took it for granted, and moreover they always gave him a plate of bread and dripping. Something delicious to eat was welcome! Bread fried in dripping with apples and onions, and crisp crackling with it too. It wasn’t so easy for a bachelor to manage these days. At least he sat in a warm room here. And the folk at the Georgenhof, it was obvious, knew how to appreciate Dr Wagner.

  •

  Although he himself was fond of animals, as he said, Jago the dog was not a friend of his. If you offered Jago some of the bread and dripping, he growled. And on Dr Wagner’s evening visits to the kitchen – where he looked in for a minute, briefcase in hand, to say goodnight to the maids before going home – Jago even faced up to him, baring his teeth.

  When he wanted to make sure all was well in the kitchen, he had sometimes found the maids holding the door shut against him on the inside. But Dr Wagner hadn’t been born yesterday; he could take a joke.

  Sometimes he calculated whether the calories he had taken on board at the Georgenhof made up for the calories he had asked his body to expend: four kilometres there and another four kilometres back, come wind or weather? And he dropped hints, but no one reacted to them.

  There was a short cut, as he had finally discovered, and he used it now and then, but he kept it to himself.

  •

  So Dr Wagner duly turned up day after day, and he always had ways of interesting Peter in something. For instance, he liked to take Knaur’s Encyclopaedia off the shelf and put the blade of a knife between the pages at random. Then he opened the book, which he described as a box full of treasures, and Peter had to read aloud what he found on the page chosen by pure chance. It was stichomancy, divination by opening a book at random, said Dr Wagner. Some people did it with the Bible. And whatever you found there, it was always interesting; you simply left out the uninteresting entries. ‘Saffron milk cap, fungus, see Lactarius deliciosus’, for instance. Then they talked about the riches of nature, the huge number of fungi in the world, edible and inedible, and how they were really parasites but were useful and many of them tasted good. Chanterelles, for instance, fried in butter. Or portobello mushrooms, also known as Paris mushrooms, considered a great delicacy and perfectly digestible if properly prepared.

  •

  Dr Wagner did not concern himself with the Bible. He had been prejudiced against the church since taking offence with someone in the 1920s. In his youth he had belonged to the Free Christian movement, whose members liked to meet in forests and turn to God under the crowns of the ancient trees. At the time the official church made stupid remarks about it, and withdrew from those who thought as he did, so he in turn withdrew from the church. At least that saved you the church tax.

  •

  A silver propelling pencil hung from his watch-chain, and he delicately pushed it out of its silver casing and back in again.

  Sometimes he clenched his hand into a fist, sometimes he laid it flat on the table, always in a very correct manner. He wore a blue signet ring, its colour slightly faded in one place, probably from coming into co
ntact with hot water.

  His pointed beard could be stroked forward when opportunity offered, at thoughtful moments. It meant something like: I’m not sure you’re right there. He never said, straight out, ‘Oh, come off it!’ or ‘You couldn’t be more mistaken!’ or simply ‘Nonsense!’ He liked to leave things to chance. That was his method; he even let his pupils teach him; for instance, he got Peter to explain the model aircraft hanging from the ceiling to him, the difference between heavy bombers and dive-bombers, and the fact that the Wellington bomber has a turret from which the tail gunner cannot escape once the plane is burning. But Dr Wagner himself had actually seen the red triplane when Richthofen was flying it over the Somme – which Peter could hardly believe. Wagner imitated the high, thin sound of the MG gunfire, and with the flat of his hand he showed how Richthofen had manoeuvred his ‘crate’ at the time.

  •

  Unfortunately he kept treading on Peter’s railway; several rails were flattened, and he had already played football with the station. ‘Oh, my dear boy,’ he had said. ‘I’m so sorry. You have to bend it into shape like this . . .’ and he had knelt down, with his creaking joints, to get it back into its proper state. He had had a model railway in his own childhood, although he had no idea what had become of it. It had been larger than Peter’s. There had been papier-mâché passengers sitting in its open carriages, and the engine had boasted a tall chimney.

  •

  The hand-embroidered Christmas tablecloth, with swinging bells in red and fir tree branches in green, was still on the round table in Peter’s room. It was here, at that table, that his broader education went on: textbooks lay open on it. ‘What will flower indoors on tables and windowsills?’ – a schematic depiction of plants and an atlas. Where is bauxite mined? A special map showed you, and you could find out how many locks there were in the Panama Canal. ‘Life,’ said Dr Wagner, ‘is interesting from whatever angle you approach it.’

  •

  It was difficult to find the small town of Mitkau on the maps, but Königsberg stood out clearly. After all, Kant had lived in Königsberg. Kant had been a bachelor too, there’s nothing special about it.