All for Nothing

by Walter Kempowski

  He had sent parcels home from everywhere, and Katharina sent much of their contents on to the family in Berlin. Weren’t they getting anything at all there? ‘We live on our ration cards,’ they wrote, and Katharina felt sorry for them. Even in these last few years she had repeatedly gone to Berlin to help them out. And Berlin offered her what she missed at the Georgenhof: the theatre, concerts, the cinema as well – that wonderful film Rembrandt.

  And then large, heavy packages containing books arrived at the Georgenhof.

  •

  But now the Russians were on the border – who’d have thought it? – and Katharina had withdrawn entirely into her refuge. The question was, might it not be better to go to Berlin, but Katharina shrank from the raids on the city. Furthermore, Eberhard had already sounded out the situation, and now people were saying, out loud, that in such times as these everyone ought to stay where they were.

  Although, on the contrary, the Berlin family had contemplated moving to the Georgenhof and waiting there ‘in peace and quiet to see what happened’. They had last all seen each other the week before Christmas, and tears had been shed when they parted. Elisabeth – a nice person, really, but it was not so easy with her deformed feet. Katharina hadn’t ventured to ask Ernestine whether she could take Peter back with her. She would have been asked, ‘Where would he sleep?’ So she had left the subject alone.

  Katharina had given her a fully grown goose for the Christmas holiday. Vladimir had looked as if he were wondering whether that was all right, and Auntie had to think how she could account for the fact that there was one goose less running about the farmyard. Would they get into trouble over that goose? After all, the poultry were counted. And maybe that ultra-Nazi Drygalski would find out? He seemed to have eyes everywhere. But after all, it could just as well have been the fox that got it.

  •

  It was a long time since Katharina had been bothered with any of the housekeeping. ‘Is your aunt there?’ was the question if she picked up the telephone after it had rung a dozen times, and she preferred it that way.

  ‘Leave it, Kathi,’ she had been told. ‘Auntie will do it . . .’ And she left it at that.

  Even if she had wanted to see to something herself she wouldn’t have been allowed to. ‘She’s a dreamer,’ they said of her, ‘she does everything wrong.’ Some people would have called her eccentric, and felt sorry for Eberhard. It was hard luck to be landed with a woman like that, a woman who went out walking when other people were so overworked that they hardly knew whether they were coming or going. Who lay on the terrace in the sun when labourers were bathed in sweat as they mowed the rye. Who was always reading books, and had once been seen in the woods with a paint box sketching the old oaks overgrown with ivy, and the river with willows on its banks.

  ‘Don’t you ever go to see Elfie’s grave?’ Auntie had asked, and that had caused a rift between the two women that was never going to heal.

  •

  When she first came to the Georgenhof with Eberhard, her father-in-law had shown her the ruins of the old castle in the woods. The steps of the porch and the columns that had toppled over backwards. ‘The French burnt the castle down just to warm their feet,’ he had said. He had always liked calling her ‘my little daughter’ and putting his arms round her waist. Then he had a stroke, and for a long time he was bedridden, and only Katharina was allowed to plump up his pillows. She had sat at his bedside, both of them sighing. He had remembered her specially in his will: ‘The fur cap, child, it’s Persian lamb, you’ll get that.’ The white cap that the Russian officer had left behind, a lambskin cap.

  •

  The rest of the household left her in peace, but when the Ukrainian maids wanted to pour out their hearts they turned only to her. She even let them into her room. They wept out loud there, making as much noise as when they shouted at each other in the kitchen. Katharina had given them panties – darned, yes, but with plenty of wear left in them. And last summer she had even gone down to the River Helge with them to bathe. They had been seen down there laughing together, all three of them. And Katharina had found skirts and the jacket of a skirt suit to give the Ukrainians, who had nothing of their own. The check jacket that Katharina had worn in Cranz, back in the days of the seaside café on the Baltic. Rise high, O red-winged eagle. In that unique summer, with the boats setting their sails at a slant on the bright blue sea. Sonya wore the jacket now when she visited the foreign workers at the Forest Lodge, her wreath of blonde braids round her head.

  •

  There was a sequel to this outing to bathe in the little River Helge. Drygalski had appeared on the bank in his brown boots and called them back – or rather, told them to come out of the water, where they were shouting and splashing about. He had said there would be repercussions: bathing with foreign workers from the east? It had been a difficult time, but nothing came of it. The report had been summarily dismissed in Mitkau; Sarkander fixed that. After all, he pointed out, these women workers from the east had come to the German Reich of their own free will, and that had to be taken into account.

  •

  Katharina was still locking the door of her refuge, either from the inside or the outside, depending on where she happened to be, and she never let anyone else have the key. If someone knocked on her door she would ask, in tones of annoyance, ‘Yes, what is it, then?’ opening the door just a crack. Although she had no particular opinion on anything else, was always ready to give way and hardly knew what time of day it was, she was immovable on this point. A person must be allowed to be alone somewhere. After all, the house was large enough.

  The only thing Auntie could do if she really needed to attract her attention was to go up to the attic and march back and forth above Katharina’s room, stamping her feet until dust trickled down, disturbing her peace and quiet. But even then Katharina seldom stirred herself.

  •

  Usually Katharina lay on the bed, looking at the beautiful Madonnas in art books, or reading, or cutting silhouettes out of black card for her record of the cycle of the seasons. She did it, moreover, without drawing the outlines first. Felicitas marvelled at that, and told everyone.

  Katharina liked to have a fruit bowl full of apples, such as the one that the political economist had admired, on the table. Here was the bowl of apples, there was the Crouching Woman, and on the wall hung Feuerbach’s Medea.

  •

  Now and then radio music was heard coming from her room, the big Blaupunkt radio with the magic eye, and cigarette smoke wafted through the house. Was she lying on her bed again, reading?

  Sometimes she stood inside her door, listening, to see if there was anyone outside eavesdropping.

  ‘No one has any business here,’ she said, and she set about cleaning the place herself, not that she usually lent a hand with any other housework. Sometimes she saw Peter here when he had done his homework; she found that a nuisance, and she boxed his ears with his exercise book if he hadn’t been writing neatly, but otherwise she was easy-going with him. Historical dates? She didn’t know any of those herself.

  Just so long as he got a reasonably good report. ‘Then you can do as you like,’ she used to say, ‘just so long as your report is reasonably good.’ How else could they face his father? But since Dr Wagner the schoolmaster had taken his education in hand she had no more fears on that score.

  •

  ‘Isn’t that a picture?’ Lothar Sarkander had said when she was standing in the summer drawing room with him, watching the family picnicking in the park with cabbage white butterflies fluttering round them. It was so long ago now. Lothar Sarkander, the man with duelling scars on his cheek and the stiff leg; the man who made sure in Mitkau that the von Globig family lacked for nothing. He had wavy hair going slightly grey at the temples.

  He had been standing beside her, pointing to the bright scene out there before them: the family sitting on the grass, the children in front of the dark, silent woods, and the white butterflies overhea
d. It had stuck in her memory; she couldn’t forget it.

  Eberhard would never have said such a thing. But the Crouching Woman? – It had been Eberhard who gave her the Crouching Woman. Or had he been making himself a present of the little sculpture?

  Even the Ukrainian girls had gone up to the figure to touch it. Felicitas was always wondering out loud what it had cost. The Royal Porcelain Manufactory – it was even signed, wasn’t it?

  •

  Unfortunately people from the housing development were always using the park as a short cut on their way to Mitkau, in spite of the notice saying NO THROUGH ROAD. Drygalski in particular took the short cut, treading heavily over the lawn and spitting into the rhododendrons to right and left. He used to pass the kitchen, turn into the park, look at his reflection in the windows of the summer drawing room, glance up at Katharina and then leave again on the other side. Now, in winter, the dark semicircle that he had trodden round the house disfigured the white blanket of snow.

  Sometimes he could be heard in the kitchen scolding the maids, asking what they thought they were doing, and saying that he’d soon get them working, which was none of his business.

  ‘Oh, never mind him!’ Katharina had said when Auntie told her. ‘I expect the man has troubles of his own.’

  When she glanced at the thermometer in the conservatory, or opened the window to scatter birdseed in the little house for her feathered friends, Katharina looked down at the semicircle he had trodden. At the front of the house, Auntie looked at Peter’s tree house, and Katharina looked down at the semicircle trodden in the pure white snow down below.

  Frost-flowers formed a pattern on the windows, and the door was draped with green blankets to keep out the cold air.

  •

  In the living room, under the slope of the roof, there was a storage cubbyhole for luggage and bedclothes. This in itself spoiled the look of the room, so Katharina had placed a small artisan-made chest painted with flowers in front of it, and spread a cover over the chest.

  Katharina kept the cubbyhole locked as well. It contained special provisions to which Eberhard had added from time to time: cigarettes above all, coffee and cocoa and soap too, soap from France when it couldn’t be bought at all in the shops. There were also liqueurs, cognac, and seventeen bottles of Italian red wine, a Barolo Riserva.

  The existence of this store of provisions was one of the reasons she kept her room locked. Someone could have sniffed out these illicit goods – tobacco, cocoa, soap?

  •

  When Eberhard had last been here, in autumn, his heavy heart full of gloomy thoughts, he had gone all over the house, into the main hall, the billiards room, the summer drawing room – and then he had drunk coffee up here with his wife, as he had done so often before, although as Auntie said, there was plenty of room downstairs, but, soon they wouldn’t be seeing any more of each other. They had sat side by side whispering, while acorns pattered down on the roof of the summer drawing room. The English shares in steel and the rice-flour factory. The shares would be worth nothing now in the war, and as for the Romanians? A good thing he had his salary as a special officer; it would keep their heads above water.

  ‘Scoundrels, all of them,’ Eberhard had said. They had sat beside the stand with the Crouching Woman on it, listening to music; music to accompany dreams. The eighteenth-century waltz from Le Bal Paré, was it? And I know there’ll be a miracle some day . . . Had they held hands?

  Eberhard had opened the door to the cubbyhole and crawled in to check the provisions. ‘Mind you’re always very careful,’ he told Katharina, putting a cigarette in his father’s charred meerschaum holder. He rubbed his boots shiny with a woollen cloth.

  •

  He often told her to ‘Mind you’re always very careful!’ When he saw his wife he warned her, ‘Mind you’re careful, Kathi,’ and she replied, ‘Yes, and you too!’ But there in Italy he was a long way from the firing line.

  The question was whether he ought not to send his wife and son somewhere else, perhaps Lake Constance? That was what Eberhard asked himself, but he came to no conclusion. Things had been all right so far . . .

  •

  For some time Katharina had been listening to the BBC news. It was both alarming and encouraging. She listened lying on her bed – one hand on her locket, her mouth open – as she heard the news from over there, read in a calm, pleasant voice, matter-of-fact and entirely without malice. She turned the radio down very low. Who knew, Drygalski might be taking the short cut again to see whether the Ukrainian girls really were in the cottage where they ought to be at night, and not in the Forest Lodge with the foreigners there? That interested the man enormously, although it was none of his business.

  There was something he didn’t like about the Georgenhof, although everything seemed to be in order. His own wife was lying sick in their living room, which was also their kitchen. And the people here lived in the lap of luxury. To think that Frau von Globig, that high and mighty lady, had asked him only once how his wife was.

  •

  Eberhard had advised his wife always to turn the radio back to the German news programme when she had been listening to the BBC. Better safe than sorry.

  Now and then you could smell real coffee all over the house. Katharina was giving herself a treat upstairs.

  7

  Mitkau

  On a cold winter’s day, Katharina put on the Russian officer’s Persian lamb cap, had the horse harnessed to the coach that still stood in the carriage house, and drove it to Mitkau. In the hot summer of 1931 the coachman Michels had brought her home from Mitkau railway station, a newly married bride, in that old-fashioned vehicle. Michels, so it was said, had been the first to fall in Poland. Her little bridal wreath still hung by the coach’s olive-shaped back window.

  It was cold, and the wind blew a dusting of fine snow over the icy road. Katharina had spread the fur rug over her knees, and the gelding – clip-clop, clip-clop – cheerfully drew the light weight along. The coach was child’s play to the heavy horse, an animal of character who tried rolling his eyes to look back at anyone getting in.

  Katharina liked to use the old vehicle for her drives into town, and she drove it herself. Michels had taught her how. She went into town once a week; it had become a habit of hers. ‘I need it,’ she said.

  •

  The little town of Mitkau, enclosed by a stout, sloping wall, lay on the River Helge, which wound its way through fields and meadows, its banks lined by willows. The arch of an iron bridge crossed the little river. That bridge had cost the community dear; the citizens had been paying for it since 1927, and it would be a burden on the municipal budget for many years to come.

  •

  Katharina was driving towards the tower of the town church. Even from a distance, you could see the green-painted arch of the bridge on your left, and straight ahead the tower of Mitkau church, with the gables of the town hall and the monastery. The chimney of the brickworks could be seen on the far right.

  When the little town was to be immortalized on a stamp – a local man had won a medal in the javelin event at the Olympic Games, and Hitler had visited Mitkau twice – the Gauleiter had the bridge shown in the foreground of the design, with the church, the town hall and the monastery as subsidiary elements. The wording under the picture said GREATER GERMAN REICH. The enlarged design of the stamp had spent a long time in a glass case in the front room of the town hall. Anyone coming to the registry office there to collect ration cards, or permits for items in short supply, could look at the picture. Who’d have thought our little town would ever be on a stamp! But now, in January 1945, the glass case had been taken away, and no one talked about the stamp any more.

  •

  The Helge was only a small river, little more than a brook, winding its way through the landscape without any great drama. The monks had once used the stream to drive a watermill, but the millwheel had fallen into disrepair long ago. Boys skated on the river these days.

/>   •

  The Helge also flowed past the Georgenhof at a little distance. The Globigs always meant to take the rowing boat upstream to Mitkau. Going in the other direction would have been easier, letting yourself drift downstream to goodness knows where. Some time or other you would end up in the Vistula Lagoon. In summer you could sometimes cross to the other side of the little river dry-shod, and children jumped from stone to stone on their way to the monastery school instead of going the long way round over the bridge. At the moment, they could easily have gone sliding across the ice, but that wasn’t necessary because school was closed. The classrooms were full of old people sitting with their hands folded. They had been brought from Tilsit in a closed van and were now sitting here waiting for something to happen. At Christmas there had been a big Christmas tree for them in the refectory, and a group from the Bund deutscher Mädel or BDM, the League of German Girls, had sung carols and served mulled wine and cake. There was a larger-than-life statue of St Christopher on the north side of the refectory, all that was left of the once lavish furnishings of the monastery.

  The school used the refectory, with its slightly vaulted ceiling, as a hall and a gymnasium, and there the old people sat at long tables spooning up their soup.

  •

  Sometimes you saw the old people walking up and down the cloisters, past the tombstones. Sometimes the old men sat in the window bays playing cards, but that had stopped entirely now that, day after day, the thermometer showed such cold temperatures.

  •

  Katharina drove past the wreck of the railway station – its ruins, still smoking from the last air raid, were being cleared away by prisoners from the brickworks – and stopped outside the town hall. A fourteenth-century Gothic brick building, it did not feature in any art book, but it was pretty. It had a stepped Gothic gable sloping down to the marketplace, with an iron bar at the top to prevent it from falling. Outside the entrance there was a granite pillar, and the iron chain used to bind malefactors to it in the Middle Ages still hung from this pillar.