All for Nothing

by Walter Kempowski

  ‘When are you coming?’ their companions asked. ‘We have to go on.’

  •

  While the pastor spread a blanket over Auntie, Peter went into the cold church and out again by another door, round the church and back through the main doorway. Then he sat down at the front of the church, under the pulpit. Later, he would be able to say, ‘When Auntie died I sat in the church and stayed there for a long time.’

  Auntie was dead, her life extinguished, as if a blanket had been smoothed out over it. The blanket is pulled taut, thought Peter. Gone and forgotten? He thought of fortune-telling at Christmas time, when you gradually melted a lead coin, saw it losing its original shape, and then dropped it into cold water to take new shape.

  When he offered the rooster a few extra grains of corn, she used to tap on the window up in her room. It meant there was no need for him to feed the rooster, the poultry had plenty to eat, and the rooster got his rightful share every day.

  •

  When he thought about what to do next, and went back to the road, the contents of the coach had already been looted. People near it retreated, like vultures flying up when a coyote comes along. He stood beside the wreck undecided, one hand clutching his binoculars. A friendly woman stopped for a moment when she saw him standing there alone, and told him to jump up and get on the back of her cart, quick! She was already reaching her arms down to him.

  But no, he thought, he couldn’t go with her and leave everything lying around like this, could he?

  •

  Then the French prisoners of war came marching up. Left, left, left . . . they didn’t stop. As they marched past they looked at the ruined coach. Left, left, left, two, three, four! They knew about this kind of thing: dead horses, a coach on its side. But like Napoleon’s Old Guard in 1812 they stuck together, marching all in step. The soldier guarding them did stop for a moment. ‘Are you on your own?’ he asked in kindly tones. It was difficult for Peter to hide the tears that this question brought to his eyes. Should he go with the Frenchmen?

  He collected a few things: Auntie’s big suitcase, his rucksack and the microscope.

  As for Auntie’s lute, a cart had run over it and smashed it to pieces.

  •

  As he was retrieving these things, he was asked by a Volkssturm reservist – Heil Hitler – what he was doing there. Was he looting or what? He’d better make himself scarce or the reservist would report him! The crest of the von Globigs on the door, which had fallen off the coach, meant nothing to the man.

  Peter stowed some bread and sausage away in his rucksack, put the microscope under his arm, and went away, pulling the suitcase after him.

  A couple of lines of verse went through his head, from the Evening Song by the hymn-writer Matthias Claudius. We smile at such illusions, believing them delusions . . . It was funny, he hadn’t even heard the bomb going off.

  ‘You must see to getting that dead horse out of the way,’ said the reservist. ‘It can’t stay lying there.’ Then he went off over the snow.

  •

  The parsonage was behind the church. The pastor’s name was Schowalker; he had hair cut very short, although it curled profusely at the nape of his neck.

  He had carried the dead bodies into the church, and now he took Peter into the parsonage kitchen with him.

  Everything was neat and tidy here, no crumbs lying around. A moderate fire was burning in the stove, and pots and pans were hanging side by side on the wall. You could hear cartwheels crunching over the snow on the nearby road, and the drivers of the carts calling out, but in here everything was quiet and pleasant.

  The pastor fetched soap and nailbrushes, and they washed Auntie’s blood off their hands. Peter had put his hand to his mouth, and some of her spilt blood had reached his lips. He wondered: am I connected to her now?

  Peter also had a bloodstain on his coat. It could always be washed off when he got the chance.

  •

  The pastor asked for Auntie’s personal details. Helene Harnisch, born 1885 . . .

  He wrote the information down on a piece of card and put a length of string through it. He would tie it round the woman’s wrist. The wrist that she still had.

  •

  They sat at the kitchen table. The pastor placed a glass of hot elderberry juice in front of Peter, and then they ate some of his sausage. ‘There’s no one left in the village,’ said the pastor. ‘All the carts went away yesterday.’ He rubbed his hands; they were blue with cold. He had sent his wife and daughter off to the Ruhr in autumn, after the Russians broke through at Gumbinnen, he told Peter. But he hadn’t had any news of them for a long time. Were there air raids in the Ruhr? He didn’t know whether they were still alive.

  He’d always thought he must stay where he was, but now he wondered what there was left for him to do here.

  He asked Peter’s advice: should he, the pastor, go away too?

  He pointed to a photo of his wife and daughter pinned to the wall above the kitchen table. A perfectly normal woman and a perfectly ordinary girl. He unfolded a brightly coloured road map from a tourist company, and showed Peter just where they were. ‘We’re here, and over there is Danzig.’ The Frisches Haff was only a few kilometres away. And he showed Peter how the Russian tanks had come from the south, by way of Allenstein, and gone right through to the coast.

  •

  The map depicted famous sights in colour: the Crane Gate in Danzig; Marienburg Castle on the Nogat; Frauenburg on the Vistula Lagoon; Braunsberg. Above the Baltic coast there was a picture of a wickerwork beach chair, and a young woman wading into the sea with a rubber animal under her arm.

  •

  After supper they looked at the contents of Auntie’s suitcase. Right at the top was Katharina’s gold locket, and under it were handkerchiefs, panties, vests, blouses, along with letters and photographs. The photo of the Silesian donkey cart. And three silver teaspoons. When the pastor saw the teaspoons he said, ‘We had teaspoons just like that at home, when I was a child. They came from our great-grandparents, thin silver, because of the bad times.’ Three of them? He picked up one of those fine, thin, slightly dented spoons. Could he have one? he asked; it would make him so happy. They’d had spoons just like that at home. They ate greengages with them, greengages as dessert every lunchtime. Semolina pudding with greengages.

  •

  Peter took his microscope out of its box and set it up. What did Auntie’s blood look like? He scraped it off his coat and looked at it. It was a crusted substance with nothing mysterious about it.

  •

  When the pastor heard that Peter’s name was von Globig and he came from the Georgenhof, he was astonished. A young woman had been here two days ago, a violinist. She had mentioned the Georgenhof, saying she’d been given nothing to eat there and had been thrown straight out. The people there were unfriendly, stupid, miserly aristocrats.

  •

  Didn’t that give Peter something to think about, asked the pastor. He welcomed the boy here with hot elderberry juice, and there was a bed ready for him, while a few days ago his family at the Georgenhof had sent a lonely girl packing.

  •

  No, said Peter, it wasn’t like that at all. They’d given her fried potatoes and blood sausage, and gooseberry compote afterwards.

  The pastor didn’t believe him, judging by the little smile on his face, which clearly meant: I understand you, my boy, you don’t want to foul your own nest. And he stuck to his version. It would make the basis of a good sermon.

  •

  So Peter talked about the Georgenhof, and the hospitable welcome given there to other refugees. He told the pastor about the finial over the gable in the shape of a spiked mace; the tea-house on the banks of the River Helge; parties in the park with Chinese lanterns; and his sister’s white mausoleum. ‘It has seven steps leading up to it, and a path to it through the forest.’ He talked about suites of rooms in the Georgenhof, and the crystal chandeliers. And there was the chamber
organ in the library, but no one had played it since his grandfather’s death . . .

  ‘Does it have one manual or two?’ asked the pastor at this point, but Peter was at a loss for an answer. However, he said it was a strange thing, but sometimes it seemed to him as if someone were playing the instrument in the night. And a deliberately dreamy look came into his eyes. When he was sitting under the light in his room, reading or looking through his microscope, he had thought he heard the organ playing loud and clear down below.

  He was using the past tense, but at that moment he really did seem to hear the instrument that had never existed.

  This time he didn’t tell the story of the hunched figures, brown as earth, who had scurried past him. He kept it to himself.

  •

  The pastor knew Mitkau. He had once preached there. ‘My colleague Brahms in that city was a German Christian; do you know what that means?’ A German Christian? You had to go cautiously with those. Yes, Brahms had been a German Christian, swore loyalty to Hitler and then changed his mind. Awake, awake, thou German land, too long hast thou been sleeping . . . When St Mary’s Church was reconsecrated after its renovation, he had given the Hitler salute. Heil Hitler, arm in the air and so on . . .

  Some people had very flexible consciences.

  And now he’d been arrested on some dubious pretext, nothing precise was known about it. A matter of morality, maybe?

  •

  The violinist . . . the pastor was enthusiastic about that young woman. She had taken her instrument out of its case, he said, and played it in the church. All the people who were going on the road again next day had streamed in to hear her. It was standing room only, she played so well. The notes might have come from the world beyond! Such music had never been heard in his church before.

  The audience had been rooted to the ground. They knew, at that moment, that it was time to say goodbye to their own country. Now fare thee well, my native land . . . Imagine turning a sweet creature like that away from your door! ‘Did your family stop to think what they were doing?’

  ‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘she played hit songs too, with a one-armed soldier accompanying her on the piano, and she had two helpings of blood sausage.’

  ‘One-armed?’ said the pastor. ‘You mustn’t exaggerate like that, my boy. A one-armed man can’t play the piano.’

  His thoughts were still with his violinist. Shaking back her blonde hair, and then playing so powerfully. At the first note, the eternity of German music – however you like to put it – had filled the church.

  ‘Many of the local farmers’ wives came to me later,’ he said, ‘and said they’d never heard anything so beautiful.’

  •

  There was a harmonium in the pastor’s study. The pastor pulled out the enamelled stops and played a hymn. So take my hands and lead me / to my everlasting rest. There was something about the eternity of German music here too. The left-hand bellows of the harmonium was torn, and the pastor could work only the pedal for the right-hand bellows, which made the tune rather jerky, but you could tell what it was.

  ‘Shall we pray, my boy?’

  This was very odd. Sitting at a kitchen table in front of a glass of elderberry juice, and praying?

  Peter thought of his mother’s gold locket at the top of Auntie’s suitcase. He had put it in his pocket, and the chain lay in his hand like a rosary.

  •

  In the evening Peter went over to the church where the dead were lying. There were more of them now, including two babies. He wanted to look at the girl with the suspenders again.

  Auntie didn’t belong to him any longer. She lay under the blanket with her legs twisted, and snow drifting round her. The snow had drifted in under the door, covering the dead bodies. The arm that had been blown off lay beside her, with the rings on her finger, and her twisted legs.

  He searched the wreck of the coach again by the light of the electric torch. He noticed the little wreath of flowers on the oval back window, and took it with him.

  The gelding lay on his back, legs outstretched, entirely covered by snow.

  •

  At this moment Katharina was sitting in the overheated room occupied by the police officer – Heil Hitler – wearing her white Persian lamb cap, with her black trousers tucked into her black riding boots. She had a packet of sandwiches on her lap. Someone had sent them. The officer wasn’t allowed to say who it was.

  He was looking at the file in front of him. It was a thin one, with only two or three sheets of paper in it. Frau von Globig has admitted to sheltering a Jew, said one of them. She had signed it.

  ‘And you also tuned in to foreign radio stations, Frau von Globig? That’s what Head Trustee Drygalski said.’

  No, she had not, and she hadn’t signed anything saying so either. Copenhagen, yes, but not the BBC.

  Questions went back and forth. She did not ask, ‘What will become of me?’ It was more as if she wanted to say: oh, leave me in peace.

  Perhaps the police officer was thinking: what will become of me? How am I going to get out of this situation, with the Russians at the gates? How can I reach safety? With the whole place full of criminals – they’ll get the upper hand if things go wrong, and then they’ll cut my throat!

  The whole city was getting out, and here he was stuck with twenty-seven prisoners. People who could make short work of you.

  He had noticed what nice fillings Frau von Globig’s sandwiches had.

  Could he have soup that was rather more nourishing given to everyone tomorrow morning, and then go out of town on police business?

  Could he fix that somehow?

  •

  Katharina wasn’t thinking of Peter – he would be all right, she was sure – or of Auntie either. And certainly not of Herr Hirsch, who had climbed the old rose fence to her room. Should she ask how he was? Perhaps he was only a few cells further away. She remembered his scratched hands; she had put sticking plaster on them. And his fingernail clippings on the rim of the washbasin.

  She would have liked to talk to the police officer about something else entirely, about that single day at the seaside. But it was nothing to do with this case, and the police officer wouldn’t know about it. She would have liked to tell him. Who else could she talk to? Who took any interest, now, in the fact that the mayor of Mitkau had sat in a wickerwork beach chair with Frau von Globig?

  •

  A great many things went through her mind. She thought of the water in the cellar and the foreign workers in the Forest Lodge.

  How would Eberhard take this? His own wife in prison? Would he pick fluff off his uniform tunic and say, ‘It can’t be true’?

  •

  The police officer took the key and stood up. ‘Come with me,’ he said. Then he went out into the yard. Stood in the doorway with her, watching the snowflakes floating softly and steadily down in front of the wall. Voices came from the cells. Was that someone laughing?

  He opened another door, and they were standing in the marketplace. People were passing by, and didn’t even look up. From the north-east the long line of the trek was moving over the marketplace, like Katharina herself, and then it disappeared through the Senthagener Tor again.

  A few carts began assembling in the marketplace as if forming a stockade. They were preparing to spend the night there.

  The officer was letting her have a little fresh air. And allowing her to walk a few steps up and down.

  •

  Doesn’t anyone here know me? Katharina wondered. But she knew none of the passers-by. There was a man over there in the town hall who knew her very well. A friend? But there was no sign of him.

  •

  The police officer pointed to the church. ‘There,’ he said. ‘You can thank his reverence Pastor Brahms for all this. A fine sort he is!’ He stood with her for a few long minutes, letting her breathe in and out. And he thought of the black-haired Jew they had shot in the cellar: he had crumpled at the knees before he slumped sideways
.

  I’m dancing to heaven with you,

  To the seventh heaven of love.

  Katharina thought of Felicitas. Just fifteen minutes’ walk, past the cinema and the post office, and she would be with Felicitas . . .

  But she’d never persuade the police officer to go on such an expedition. Her friend’s chatter, and her laughter, and story after story. In fact by this time, as Katharina was not to know, Felicitas was far away. She had thrown in her lot with the refugees billeted on her, who turned out to be resourceful. They had eaten Katharina’s hare together, and that had paid off. ‘We’ll stick together,’ Felicitas had said to the refugee woman, who was happy to agree.

  •

  ‘There it is,’ said the police officer, ‘you can’t rely on anyone. The pastor was not an innocent. You’ve no idea of all the stuff we found at his place.’

  Forming an alliance with a man like this, she thought, would be playing with fire. But what did he want? she wondered when she was back in her cell. Did he want to let her go? Was she supposed to console him?

  •

  Peter spent the night in the pastor’s bed. He had put the two teaspoons, the little dried-up wreath of flowers and the gold locket on its chain on the bedside table, and then went to sleep at once.

  The pastor himself had got up several times in the night to look out of the window. Was he thinking of his violinist? Were his thoughts with the church?

  The pastor thought of what he had told Peter about the German Christians. And he had spoken so disparagingly of them . . . this boy was bound to be a Pimpf, in the junior branch of the Hitler Youth. Hadn’t children denounced their own parents for an incautious word?

  But von Globig? Weren’t all those aristocrats against Hitler? 20 July and so on?

  •

  Imagine if he did something stupid at the last moment. He’d survived the local rural district leader, who had always been sitting under the pulpit listening carefully to his sermons, even making notes, and now was he going to be handed over to the executioner by a child?