And he thought of his mother’s silhouettes. He’d never looked at them properly.
•
‘No, you’re staying here,’ said Auntie, although the Silesian gentleman tried to persuade her to let him go: Peter could bring some more sausage and ham. He’d really like to taste ham again.
‘Good Silesian ham, do you remember?’
Peter was glad to have someone on his side at last, but Auntie insisted, ‘No, you’re staying here.’
No, he could not go to Mitkau. That chapter was closed. Instead, just for once, he could go to the cinema.
Auntie gave him fifty pfennigs for a seat at the back, and asked afterwards, ‘Was it good?’ She was still a fan of Beniamino Gigli, whom she had once heard in her youth, and the Silesian gentleman remembered having liked Gigli too.
‘Forget me not!’ he sang to Auntie, and he did in fact have a good singing voice.
•
Gigli! That had been ages ago. The Silesian asked Auntie to dine with him at the restaurant in the town hall cellar. You could get meat loaf and potatoes there for fifty grams’ worth of meat coupons and a ten-gram fat coupon, and Auntie agreed to provide those. Heil Hitler. She put on a different jacket specially, because she couldn’t be seen out in public in this dress, which was in urgent need of ironing. Her good clothes were in Vladimir’s cart. She put on her gold brooch with the golden arrows pointing in every direction. It was a long time since she had been asked out by a gentleman. To be honest, she had never been asked out by a gentleman before.
Auntie came back late in the evening, and she was upset. When Peter asked, ‘Was it good?’ she snapped, ‘Leave me alone!’
Nothing was easy.
•
Dr Wagner was sitting quietly in his study when he heard about the evacuation of the monastery. A large number of the old people had already been taken away, and now it was the turn of the rest.
He was sitting at his desk with the marble inkwell in front of him. There had always been plenty of ink in it, but the poems he owed it to himself to write were slow to flow out from his pen. Rilke and Stefan George kept getting in the way, so he had thought: let’s leave it at that.
Sad to say, his mother had never really supported him. Now and then he would put sheets of paper on her work basket, but she glanced at them only fleetingly. And never said a word about them.
•
He looked at the album in which he had stuck the photos of his students, and put crosses beside the pictures of those who had fallen.
He counted the number of students who had passed through his hands. He saw a long grey line before him, their heads bowed, and he thought of many a bright head, but also of dullness that couldn’t be carried away on the wings of grace and dignity.
And he thought of the endless hours he had devoted to them. He calculated the hours of his knowledge like the beads of a rosary, day by day and hour by hour. Always the same, year after year. He had not been granted release.
•
Tearing himself away from his thoughts, he put on walking shoes and trousers, wrapped his gaiters round his legs and then, wearing his good outdoor coat, set off along the familiar road to the monastery: down Horst-Wessel-Strasse, across the marketplace and past the church. The church organist was coming towards him in the marketplace. He quickly turned up his collar. Meeting that woman was all he needed! She had denied him access to the church when his mother had just died, and he had wanted to lose himself on that instrument playing his variations: in E flat minor, then by way of G flat major to B.
But she wouldn’t let him, so he had been obliged to turn to the shimmering sound of his piano, with his dead mother in the room next door.
•
He passed the town hall, and the little prison. Second floor, the second window from the left? He could make out a pale face there. Someone was waving. But Dr Wagner wasn’t looking. He went over the big new bridge that hadn’t been paid for yet. Sappers were putting explosives in place on it. He passed the never-ending processions of refugees. They walked on, not with hair flying in the wind, not stealing over borders under cover of night and fog, no, they marched past with their packs, keeping the correct distance apart. Military police showed them the way. Far below them lay the grey, icy surface of the river, with frozen landing stages on which women would beat their washing in the spring.
The carts were standing outside the monastery, fresh straw in them. Old people were being lifted in, little old men and little old women separately, all in black; they were pushed in, laid down and shoved into position. Each with a few possessions, many holding apples, the gift of the Red Cross. They looked like imperial orbs, and the old people’s crutches like sceptres. When they were all sitting or lying in the carts, more straw was brought and placed over them. Now they could leave.
‘What about it?’ the man in charge of the transport asked Dr Wagner. ‘Want to come? You could take over the second cart.’
And he made up his mind: yes, he would leave at once, come what may! Did he want to see the town burning, buildings collapsing, soldateska running wild, going from house to house, showing off jewellery hanging between their fingers? And perhaps being assaulted by a Russian himself.
All that was to be avoided.
•
So he climbed up into the cart, and as it had to wait not far from Horst-Wessel-Strasse until the gate was opened to let them through, he paid a quick visit to his apartment and threw his shaving brush into the air-raid shelter bag where he kept everything that mattered to him: money, papers, and the picture of his mother as a young woman, taken at the Imperial Palace in Goslar, sitting on a wall with her wide skirt spread out round her.
Also the picture of his father, a man he had never seen and of whom he knew nothing.
Out, out into the countryside! A last look – he snatched the quilt off his bed, put the key through the letterbox and he was off.
•
Yes, he would rather have gone with the Globigs. But that wasn’t to be. He had not been invited to join them, and that was that. Hadn’t a family relationship developed between them? Didn’t they belong together?
‘But perhaps it’s better this way,’ he said out loud. ‘Perhaps it really is better this way.’
He craned his neck when he was passing the Georgenhof. The soldier beside him said, ‘That’s the Georgenhof over there.’
There was no sign of Drygalski, or the foreign workers at the Forest Lodge, once a good place to visit in summer for coffee and cakes, when the weather was warm. Carts on the trek stood in its yard, and strangers were going in and out.
‘I’ve spent many happy hours at the Georgenhof,’ he quietly said to himself, as the first yellow icicles were already showing under the car. The Baltic baron’s chronicle! He suddenly remembered it; the history of the man’s native place . . . he rushed into the house and retrieved it. It must be saved. Heavens, if he’d forgotten it! Wasn’t he a man of his word?
•
Peter was strolling around. White-painted tanks with Waffen-SS men in white camouflage clothing were driving along the high street, which was named after Adolf Hitler. ‘Right turn!’ someone called, and the horses pulling the carts began to climb.
The brave German soldiers were going towards the Russians. Were the reserves of manpower inexhaustible? They stopped in the open outside the town, in a field where the traces of a funfair could still be seen, and friendly SS-men gave the children sweets. One boy was in luck; he was even allowed to climb into the turret of a tank.
Then the tanks, those heavy, shapeless things, drove away. The area into which the Germans were crowded was small, and getting ever smaller. All the easier to defend it, said the newspapers. Never fear!
The blue diesel vapour of the fighting machines lingered over the high street for a long time.
Now the remaining shops were giving away their wares free.
•
Maybe this was the right moment to move on. Auntie reported to
the police officer, who wished her good luck. As soon as he heard anything about that Vladimir, he said, he would let her know. At the moment he had a lot on his hands: all manner of thefts had been reported – there were people going from house to house, looting – and there had even been a murder.
•
Next morning French POWs were led through the town, with scarves round their necks and hands in their pockets. In the thick, driving snow the scene looked a little like 1812. They marched all in time, quietly, in the middle of the road, and the guard with his long rifle brought up the rear, keeping in step with them. One of them, in front and on the left, carried a lantern to let cars know that a troop of Frenchmen was coming, please don’t run them down, they’re decent fellows, we have nothing against them.
The women with their net shopping bags watched them go. An old man was trying to keep up with them; he wanted to tell them that he had been a prisoner of the French in the last war, and he took cigarettes from his pocket and held them out.
No, they had plenty of cigarettes. They were even sharing them with the guard. He should keep his cigarettes.
‘Bonjour!’ he called after them. He had worked for farmers in 1917, at the foot of the Pyrenees, and there had been red wine for breakfast. In itself, that had been a good time.
Peter had seen the Frenchmen in Albertsdorf, when they had been drinking vermouth with Vladimir. Should he ask if they knew where Vladimir was? Stealing the cart in cold blood. Peter hadn’t even been able to say goodbye to the two bay horses.
•
While Peter was still thinking of asking the Frenchmen about it, they disappeared into the snowy twilight.
Auntie said, ‘So there you are. We won’t be staying here much longer.’
•
The Silesian gentleman was nowhere to be seen, and it wasn’t easy to get the gelding back. He was already sold, she was told. Herr So-and-so had sold him yesterday. And at the moment they couldn’t lay hands on the key to the fire station.
Auntie was about to go to the police when they told her that she could buy the horse back; they’d let her have him at a special price.
•
So Auntie paid the money and went off with the grateful animal. He swished his tail and looked straight ahead.
That man was a bastard, Auntie told Peter. He didn’t even come from her beloved Lower Silesia, he came from Upper Silesia, a place that was teeming with Polacks.
‘Nothing’s easy.’
•
They said goodbye to the neighbouring vehicles on the football field, Heil Hitler, and to the Party man who had been so impressed by the coat of arms on the coach door, even if he didn’t show it. Heil Hitler. And then the cry was ‘Gee up!’ and the gelding pricked up his ears.
She would never, ever let herself be taken in like that again, said Auntie out loud. ‘What a wretch!’
She had said the same to the men at the fire station, but they told her that if she repeated that remark there’d be consequences.
•
In the high street, they met the first treks coming from the west. Go back, go back, they said of Elbing. No one can get through that way. If they’d known before, said the people on their way back, they’d have stayed put here. Women driving the carts leaned down to Auntie, who was still persistently driving west. ‘Go back! You can’t get through that way.’
But Auntie didn’t want to go to Elbing; she had other plans. And many people, like her, were going neither east nor west, but hoped to find safety at the Frisches Haff, and go on from there over the ice to the spit of land known as the Frisches Nehrung.
Perhaps she would be able to sell the rest of the ration coupons for soldiers on leave at the Haff?
•
She could not have known that at the same time Uncle Josef and his party were going through Harkunen and back east home, home again! Home to Albertsdorf, where they had spent so many happy years. With his wife and three daughters. No more would ever be heard of him.
21
On the Road
They were trotting slowly along under the grey veil of snow. Now that the gelding had been fed plenty of oats, it was hard to control him, but anyway there was no chance of overtaking the long line of carts ahead of them. Why they were making such slow progress was a mystery. There were dead bodies lying by the side of the road, and some were sitting against trees frozen stiff: the bodies of old people who could go no further and of small children.
Peter was very tired. ‘It comes of all that fresh air,’ said Auntie. ‘Lie down in the back of the coach.’ She could manage on her own, she told him. ‘If we’ve made it this far we’ll get to the Frisches Haff.’
She uncorked a bottle, put it to her lips and took a couple of gulps, posing as if for a photograph. ‘Auntie in Action’. No one would have expected her to be so enterprising.
•
Peter lay in the straw, covered with rugs and coats. He was tired, in fact almost unconscious with exhaustion, alternately hot and cold. And when he moved because a suitcase was pressing against him, it made him even more exhausted, and he immediately lay back and forgot where he was.
•
Now and then they stopped to let military trucks driving the opposite way go by. Then the procession went on again. You could hear people cursing and shouting. Auntie was cursing too, swearing roundly, and now and then taking a mouthful from her bottle. Across the Frisches Haff and then along the Nehrung – that way to the west was still open.
Auntie on the box of the coach. She imagined Vladimir being caught, tied up and brought to face her – On the redoubt in Strasbourg, like the deserter waiting for execution in Mahler’s song – and she thought what she would say about him. ‘Yes, he made careful preparations, but he let us down in the end.’
Then she began running through the list of what had been on the cart. But hard as she thought about it, what she mainly remembered was how Vladimir had taken a heavy chest of drawers off the load again at the last minute, just before they left the Georgenhof. The Georgenhof, the crows roosting in the oak tree and the finial of the spiked mace that didn’t stand up straight.
•
She thought of what Katharina would say some day: ‘Auntie did it all on her own . . . she excelled herself.’ Deep down inside, she was rejoicing. ‘How quick off the mark Auntie was!’ Eberhard would say. ‘She saved Peter’s life.’ She’d saved the briefcase of papers and photographs as well.
The photograph album from the Ukraine: Eberhard and his comrades out riding in white uniforms. A group photo, with an arrow added in ink to the deckle-edged photograph (the ink had run), pointing to ‘Our general’.
•
If I’d had to set off in the farm cart I wouldn’t have made it, thought Auntie, what with the weight of the cart and two horses – even harnessing them up would have been a problem, and all those reins to be disentangled.
She was glad that, at her age, she could still drive the coach through the countryside. In these circumstances, too.
As she reined in the gelding, keeping behind the cart ahead, she even had time to glance at the landscape, the frost on the trees and the few crows.
When all this is over I’ll go back to Silesia, she thought. Some day I’ll eat poppy-seed cake in Silesia again. Here we’ve been on the run from the Devil.
•
They were now approaching a village with a small church, a Neo-Gothic church built of Prussian brick, and above the porch a cement figure of Christ was giving his blessing.
•
A solitary aircraft came slowly flying above the road and the long line of carts on the trek. It was moving erratically from side to side as it dropped bombs on the column of vehicles; you could see the bombs come sailing down. One of them fell beside the little coach containing Auntie and the sleeping Peter. The gelding reared up, neighing, and slumped over the shafts. What was left of the animal stretched flat on the ground. The coach toppled over, throwing Peter out into the open air.
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The plane came back once more; the pilot probably wanted to see what hits he had scored. Did he make marks on his notepad? One, two, three, four, five horse-drawn carts full of fascist murderers and incendiaries finished off?
To make sure, he fired the plane’s machine gun along the column. Then he flew a loop above the fields and went to get more bombs.
•
The bomb had hit Auntie. Helene Harnisch was dead. Born 1885, died January 1945, unmarried. Two months before her sixtieth birthday. It had smashed her chest open.
Traffic was building up into a jam behind the coach. Other carts were lying on their sides, and lamentations filled the air. At last men came along to push the wrecked vehicles off the road and make way for the great trek that wanted to get past them.
Women laid the dead, including the body of Auntie, in the ditches at the roadside. Now, for heaven’s sake, the other carts could go on.
•
Peter sat down beside Auntie. One of her arms had been blown off. There were two gold rings on its hand. Red blood stained the snow. Ought he to pray an Our Father? ‘Nothing was easy . . .’
The carts went on past him, one after another. He saw them all, and they all saw him: the boy with the binoculars round his neck and the air pistol stuck in his belt. He sat there sprinkled with washing powder that had been blasted into the air.
After a while a man arrived from the village, the local pastor coming to take the dead away. He helped Peter to roll Auntie into a blanket, and put the arm that had been torn off, her left arm, into the blanket with her. It had come right away from her shoulder joint, and was broken as well.
They carried the old woman to the church and laid her in the vestibule, beside the offertory box and the frame that held the numbers of hymns to be sung. On the wall was a plaque bearing the names of the dead who had fallen in the wars of 1870-71 and 1914-18.
•
There were already several other bodies in the church – a number of them still bleeding – arranged in order of size, among them children; one was a girl with long brown stockings. Part of her skirt had gone, exposing the suspenders holding the stockings up, and some bare skin. Weeping people lingered by the corpses, but they couldn’t afford to stay for long.
All for Nothing Page 28
