All for Nothing

by Walter Kempowski

  •

  The painter then, for professional reasons, or so he said, asked about other architectural features of the house. The cellars? And was there anything else remarkable in some way or other, something worth illustrating?

  The cellar could be dismissed without more ado, although it had old vaulting and the date 1605 on a coat of arms – but it was dark and damp there. Water came up over your feet in it. At most there was the spiral staircase. Who used to climb down all those steps? A manservant sent to fetch wine? Or the bailiff, carrying a lantern and propelling a thief caught stealing wood ahead of him? Did this place have a dungeon? Had poachers or tenant farmers late with their rent languished here under lock and key, behind bolts?

  These days water dripped into the cellar, gurgling, and green mould was creeping up the walls.

  He now knew what it was like to be locked up, said the painter. He would never forget those hours in the prison. Sharing a cell with six suspect characters, for hours on end. Work-shy scum, he repeated, the dregs of society. Bread as hard as a stone, that was all he’d been offered. His companions had fallen on it like animals. Uttering hoarse sounds.

  Then he was taken on a tour of the manor house, which he called a castle. The billiard room, the ice-cold drawing room, white and gold with all those crates against the wall. And the hearth in the hall, with a fire already burning in it.

  ‘A genuine fire!’ he said, rubbing his hands.

  Katharina was busy tending the fire, cutting shavings from the firewood stacked by the hearth with a small chopper. Her profile was outlined against the leaping flames. This was one of her bad days; on many days she looked so good that people said: Dazzling! Today she didn’t look her best, and she knew it. She merely gave her guest a brief nod; he could see that she had a lot to do. Her long black hair was caught together simply with a slide. And when he began sketching her at once, she was reluctant and hid her face behind the dustpan.

  •

  The man stopped in front of the paintings. Paintings both large and small, all in gilt frames. They had been bought along with the estate in 1905. No one had ever shown any interest in them before, no one had taken them down and looked at them closely.

  He passed over the pictures of horses hanging among all the antlers that Eberhard liked so much in the billiards room, but a landscape with cows in the foreground, and the towers of Potsdam in the distance, that was something special. Such a work mouldering away here in East Prussia? He made a mental note that here, entirely unexpectedly, he had come upon a remarkable picture of Potsdam. It wasn’t really right for it to be hanging in this house. He knew the Reich Curator of Art in Potsdam personally, he said, and he felt sure he would want to buy it at once.

  That was all very interesting, but Katharina wondered why they would want to sell the picture. It’s been hanging here for ever, she said.

  Where did these things come from? Where would they end up?

  •

  Then he turned to the large, dark portraits: what about these monsters? he wondered. He took them carefully down from the wall, one by one, and stood them side by side. They were heavy – he mustn’t drop one and break its frame. ‘For goodness’ sake!’ said Auntie. ‘I hope this will be all right!’ What would Eberhard say?

  The painter wiped the pictures with a duster, but nothing else came to light. They were portraits; you could hardly even make that out. And there was no inscription of any kind, no coat of arms, no signature. They could be portraits of anyone. Dead and gone, rotting away, worm-eaten.

  He could investigate them more thoroughly, he said, given cotton wool and warm water. He would be glad to make himself useful in return for the delightful welcome he had found here, the hot milk and bread and honey.

  •

  Peter brought the painter cotton wool and water, and then he set to work on the pictures. He did it very gently, dabbing a little here and there, going very cautiously.

  ‘This is very interesting,’ he said, showing the grubby cotton-wool ball he was holding, ‘but these people are all very, very ugly. You’ll never find a buyer for their portraits.’

  He cleaned their eyes; he enjoyed doing that. It was only from the eyes that he removed the dirt, and they shone out of the brown gravy colour, reminiscent of Rembrandt’s palette, that surrounded them. Just as the gelding could roll his eyes right back when he thought something wasn’t exactly as it should be, these old ladies and gentlemen now looked around them. Where, they seemed to be asking, where the devil were they? Waking from a century of slumber and studying their whereabouts.

  The painter hung the pictures back on the wall. The old ladies and gentlemen were back where they belonged; no one was going to take an interest in them again in a hurry.

  •

  Auntie said she had another picture upstairs; would he like to see it? It came from her native Silesia.

  Yes, he said, he would, but of course his time was limited; he couldn’t stay here for long. However, he’d like to look at the picture. Auntie steered him upstairs into her domain and he stood in her room admiring the mahogany furniture. But as for the picture – the thing above her bed? A pavilion in a white frame? No, it wasn’t worth more than a glance. Prettily painted, a water-colour, but probably the work of an amateur. Yes, the pavilion was attractive – the picture wasn’t.

  •

  Before he left the room he pointed to the little picture of Hitler that Auntie had hung over her desk, inconspicuously executed in pen and ink, and said, ‘You’d better take that down.’ Then he positively lost his temper: didn’t she know what sort of a fellow the man was? Hanging it up there! How can any thinking woman bear to have that Austrian looking her in the eye, day after day?

  Has she ever seen the Mitkau brickworks, he asks. No? The men who work there? ‘They don’t have such a nice room as yours . . .’ He had talked briefly to two of those poor bastards in the prison cell, had given them his bread. They’d fallen on it like animals.

  And what, he asked, did she think the Russians would say when they set eyes on that picture?

  •

  He went over to the window and pointed to the housing estate. An intolerable sight, he said, houses all marching in step with each other.

  That desk, however, was a beautiful piece of work. To think of it rotting away here.

  When they went back out into the corridor, Katharina could be heard moving quickly about in her room. She closed the door and shot the bolt. She could do without the visitor looking in to make sure everything was all right with her.

  •

  Did he really think, asked Auntie when they were down in the hall again, that the Russians might come to Mitkau?

  ‘Ah, well,’ said the painter, laughing, no, he didn’t think so, but all those tanks being sent out to ward them off – the Nazis wouldn’t be doing it for no reason at all.

  It sounded as if he were really saying: yes, they might come.

  ‘Our men will throw them straight back to the Urals.’

  •

  The wind had died down, and the sun was shining strongly; thawing ice even dripped off the branches. He stepped out into the fresh air. I must be gone, I cannot stay, he said, quoting a folk song, and he immediately began sketching the battered finial in the shape of a spiked mace over the pediment. The oak and the tree house in it, the crooked door in the crumbling wall. He drew the castle that wasn’t a castle so that it was framed by the crooked door. And the spiked mace, of the morning-star type, was at the very top, in the middle.

  After that he drew the two Ukrainian women as they hurried off to the Forest Lodge to tell their friends about him, scarves wrapped round their head and shoulders. Vladimir was making a rope in a leisurely way. He had tied one end to the stable door and was working along its length, with strings hanging from his belt, as he worked them in.

  •

  Peter watched the artist recording all this for posterity. A pity he’d be taking the pictures away with him.

 
How lovely shines the morning star . . . he asked Peter if he knew that hymn. Kindly, dearly . . . The morning star is Venus. Sometimes you can see the planets in daylight, but in the evening Venus is the evening star. O thou, my gracious evening star, as the Young Pilgrims sing in Tannhäuser. Venus, yes . . .

  Those who got hit on the head in the Middle Ages by the morning-star kind of spiked mace no doubt saw stars of a very different kind.

  Finally the artist said, ‘I’m off, then, my friend’, and put away his sketch pad. He stopped one of the carts jolting by and went off.

  Where had he come from? Where would he end up? It didn’t matter. The main thing was, he was going away.

  •

  Peter was cross with himself; he wished he had told the artist about the ruins in the wood. The columns that had fallen over backwards would surely have interested the man. And now they were lost from the records for ever.

  Maybe he would also have been interested in Peter’s little sister’s lonely grave in the woods? But Peter didn’t think about that any more, no one did.

  •

  Auntie stood by the telephone. Should she or should she not? Could a man be allowed to travel the country stirring up discord? Calling Adolf Hitler ‘that fellow’? Oughtn’t everyone to be united behind the Führer? Particularly now.

  Who did you call when everyone was to unite? Who was responsible? The Gestapo or the Criminal Investigation Department of the police force?

  What was the Gestapo’s phone number? The number of the police force was in the phone book. Would a call like that be handled discreetly? Would she have to appear in court?

  The man was certainly over the hills and far away by now. Perhaps she could ask Drygalski for advice, or Herr Serkander?

  •

  Katharina was sitting in her little room. Why did I go to see the pastor, she wondered, as if the devil were after me? The idea of taking in a total stranger! Then again, why didn’t I just say no? If only Eberhard had been here, if she could have asked him . . .

  She went back and forth through the argument in her head hour after hour. And other fears were added to these new ones: that daring visit to the seaside with Sarkander, the trip that had never become publicly known. Were there people who had some idea about it? Eberhard hadn’t heard of it. Or had he? Had someone told him? There had been a certain coldness between them. Something had been lost.

  Oh dear, is all our happiness gone?

  •

  She couldn’t really picture the man whom the pastor had said she might be asked to shelter here. Maybe young, maybe old? Shabby in appearance, or with a pistol in his hand?

  Very interesting, really. Who would have thought of having an experience like that? What strange times these were.

  •

  He could sleep in the cubbyhole off her room. She pushed the chest aside, opened the little door, stuffed all sorts of cushions and blankets inside and tried out the bed. Crawled in on all fours. It smelt of tobacco and chocolate in there.

  Or perhaps the idea would fall through. Brahms might call and say: It’s all over, dear lady, the man’s already been captured. Or: We’ve thought of another solution.

  She thought of the man she would be asked to shelter as a little like the painter downstairs. Small, sharp-witted, something of a scamp. Or was he a skeleton with dysentery?

  No, she told herself, I won’t let myself in for this.

  •

  She listened for sounds down below in the house. The man seemed to have left. She wouldn’t have wanted him breaking into her boudoir here like some kind of art expert! Perhaps he would have admired the Crouching Woman?

  She leafed through the album of silhouettes. What a good thing she hadn’t shown him that; the man would probably have made derogatory remarks. She did those little pictures just for her own pleasure, and they were nothing to do with anyone else. But just suppose she had?

  •

  That picture the man had drawn of her, with the dustpan in front of her face? She’d have liked to see it, but now it was too late. Maybe that was the last time, she thought.

  She took the shavings of wood and put them in the stove. The fire had gone out; she’d have to relight it.

  9

  Drygalski

  Drygalski had once kept a shop, Groceries and General Stores, but the international economic crisis had finished him, and his shop had gone under the hammer, leaving him out on the street with his wife and family. He had gone hither and thither looking for work, hat in hand. Southern Germany, western Germany – no luck at all in Cologne, Görlitz, Bremerhaven, and then he had felt impelled to return to his original home, the beautiful province of East Prussia, where, as he put it, his cradle used to stand.

  And it was there that the National Socialist Party had taken him on. He had found a berth in the Regional Homestead Office of the German Labour Front, the Party’s own trade union organization, which replaced all former trade unions. He became head trustee of the local Labour Front, and made much of that title.

  ‘I’m head trustee now,’ he told his wife at the time, and she had breathed a sigh of relief. Things were looking up at last.

  •

  Head Trustee Drygalski of the Regional Homestead Office, Mitkau Branch, unemployed for a long time but now in a permanent position. He wore brown jackboots and a little moustache like Hitler’s. The family’s poverty-stricken existence had ended when the National Socialists came to power. There were still boxes full of exercise books and erasers in the attic of his house on the estate, and crates containing soap powder, nail brushes and floor-cloths from the bankrupt stock of his shop.

  ‘What does he think he looks like?’ said the Globigs, laughing behind the net curtains when he came down the road. ‘Oh, do look, here he is again!’ He strode along as if he had to carry a storm-tossed banner against the enemy, forging his way uphill through wind and weather, and the Globigs sat behind their net curtains laughing, and said he was a real bigwig.

  •

  It was Drygalski’s great grief that he didn’t have the aristocratic particle von in front of his surname. None of the research he carried out into his forebears showed that he was related in any way to the German polar scientist Erich von Drygalski, who had spent months in the Arctic, measuring the thickness of the ice and the direction of the wind. He had sent letters again and again to the scientist in Munich – it was only a small step from ‘Drygalski’ to ‘von Drygalski’ – might such a connection not be possible? None of his letters had been answered. Even a request to the Munich Regional Homestead Office for aid had borne no fruit, and there was no trace of a relationship in church registers either.

  •

  Drygalski had begun taking an interest in the wind and the weather himself; he had bought an anemometer, checked the temperature out of doors morning and evening, and tapped the barometer. In spite of the cold, he also wore his coat unbuttoned when he walked through the housing estate, letting it swing out behind him to show that he didn’t mind the icy temperature at all. Although he had splayed toes and flat feet, he thought: We’re a tough lot in this family. And when he met the foreign workers from the Forest Lodge, he drew air in sharply through his nose.

  •

  As head trustee of the German Labour Front on the Schlageter Settlement, he had been given a larger than usual corner property, Number 1 Ehrenstrasse, and now he felt responsible for the people who had moved there, for the young community beginning to form. The Albert Leo Schlageter Settlement – such a name pledged you to do what you could. He regularly went from house to house, collecting voluntary contributions for the Winter Aid organization – no one was to go cold and hungry – and he inspected the estate in summer to make sure that the gardens were free of weeds, and in winter to see whether snow had been swept away. Gates must be securely locked in the evening, not left open, wasn’t that so? Or what would the place look like? Snowmen are fun, yes, but who needs one in front of every house? After a while they hang their heads
and collapse . . .

  So he went on his rounds every day, even if the dogs barked at him from one fence to the next.

  •

  The position of head trustee and the house on the corner plot – the Drygalskis might have felt well off now, but since their son had lost his young life in Poland the house was terribly empty. As a child the boy had liked to watch his father slicing sausage, had crawled up and down stairs on all fours, and later had slid down the banisters. In the new house, here in the Settlement, he used to sit in his room for hours, looking thoughtfully into the distance. Sunsets aroused enraptured thoughts in him, and he put them down on paper in rhyme. One day it had been discovered that he was writing poetry, and he’d had his face slapped. And now it was very quiet upstairs. No one went into the young man’s room any more.

  •

  The Drygalskis’ parlour, furnished with large chairs and a round coffee table, was kept for best; you never knew who might drop in at No. 1. The District Leader himself had come to see them once. In his office, Drygalski had a roll-top desk, a table with a typewriter and telephone on it, and a much-used sofa stood in the kitchen that was also a sitting room. Smooth covers were stretched over the twin beds in the bedroom. A picture of the couple’s son, Egon Drygalski, hung above the beds. He had fallen in Poland, shot in the head as he stormed forward, and died at once. The picture had been copied by a comrade of his from his passport photograph, but the network of lines that had been drawn on the face to ensure that it bore some similarity to the dead man could still be seen; the artist hadn’t been able to erase them completely. An ancient bunch of sweet woodruff was wedged into the pinewood picture frame, and was dusted once a month. A crucifix hung beside the picture, his wife insisted on that.

  •

  Drygalski didn’t just make sure that all was well on the housing development; for years he had also been keeping the Globigs under observation. It was true that the centuries-old oaks of the Globig property warned the Schlageter Settlement, with its brand-new birch trees, to stay where it was, calling a halt to any further advance, as the mayor had said when laying the foundation stone of the Settlement, but what about that peculiar tree house in the branches of the oak, with sacks of some kind hanging out of it? And half a motorbike was balanced in front of the tree house, maybe even nailed to the trunk somehow? They let that boy have all the freedom he wanted; to be sure, he was a fair-haired Aryan, a real German boy, but he didn’t turn up to do his Hitler Youth service, and his mother seemed somehow disengaged from the world; she should be called to order as a matter of urgency, but she never showed her face. He had no opportunity to tell her his opinion of her.