Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

The poultry were kept in the big barn in this hard frost. Although the barn had been standing empty for years, there were still a few grains left lying around.

Sometimes the peacock looked round the corner. It was a long time since he last spread his tail.

There was never much traffic on the road: a bicycle, the milk cart twice a day, the bus to Mitkau. Now and then a car driving by.

Recently there had been occasional farm carts going west. Auntie had noticed more of them these last few days. Maybe they had better get the door to the yard repaired after all. Sometimes the carts rumbled past one after another, all piled high with household goods. There were isolated pedestrians as well, strange figures, coming from who knew where, going to heaven knew what destination.

Now and then foreign labourers from the Forest Lodge came into the yard to visit Vera and Sonya in the kitchen, although it was strictly forbidden. Auntie supposed they thought no one had noticed them. She suspected that the Ukrainian girls gave them something to eat in the kitchen. Goodness only knew why they weren’t at work. Didn’t these people have anything to do?

Odd characters came from Mitkau too, hands in their pockets; they didn’t seem to mind the long walk. They appeared to be normal enough, if rather shady, and joined in when the men from the Forest Lodge sang songs, although sometimes they were perfectly quiet.

There were Czechs, Italians and Romanians among the labourers, and French and Dutch civilians. Foreigners, anyway. They all just lounged around, and the two Ukrainian maids often slunk off to join them, although there was plenty for them to do at the Georgenhof.

Vera and Sonya — never there when you needed them. Auntie had wondered whether to be stricter with them, but how was she to go about it? It was water off a duck’s back to them.

Best to take no notice, someone had said. But suppose things turned out badly? You want to go carefully with those foreigners, that had been the advice, but it was now wearing thin. Who knew what might happen? She had heard it said that the foreigners carried knives under their jackets. One of the Czechs, a man with piercing eyes — he wore a peaked cap — had come as far as the yard recently. He had even been seen in the hall once, looking up the staircase. Vladimir had driven him out with his whip, but the man kept coming back, and one day he gave Vladimir a black eye.

Although Uncle Josef in Albertsdorf had advised them against mingling with these people, Katharina exchanged a few words with them now and then. There were amusing fellows with fine dark eyes among the Italians. One of them could even play the mandolin. They felt the cold here. The Frenchmen were more thoughtful; some of them were educated men, with families at home who supported them; they were schoolteachers and pastors, men who sometimes read a book. But others were pathetic souls with melancholy expressions on their faces.

‘All this will be dealt with after the war,’ Uncle Josef had said. ‘We’ll send them home then.’

When there was an opportunity, Katharina sought out the Italians, gave them cigarettes and engaged in friendly conversation with them, in their own language. She didn’t actually say that she had visited southern Europe with the Wandervogel organization before the war, she merely dropped hints.

It was the Italians, poor bastards, who got treated worst everywhere — ‘They let us down twice!’ it was said. Katharina didn’t share this poor opinion of them, since she had spent many happy times in the south long before the war. Those warm nights beside the sea, the singing of the fishermen — that was why she disliked the poor treatment of the Italians.

‘Venezia, comprende?’ she said to the Italians. And she thought of her husband, wearing his white uniform now in the hot south and procuring olive oil and wine for the troops. She had a vague idea that it wasn’t always an easy process. He had written home saying that he expected promotion soon, and then he’d get a higher salary, thank God.

The housing development on the other side of the road had been given the name of the Albert Leo Schlageter Settlement when it was built in 1936, all the houses the same as each other, like toys taken out of their box and stood up side by side. People of no distinction lived here, keeping a goat, a pig, chickens and rabbits, and every house had its garden. Originally the development was to have been called the New Georgenhof. No one had asked Herr von Globig if he was happy with that name for the new housing estate.

However, the matter had been settled of its own accord before there were any disagreements; the authorities had decided to call the settlement after the heroic Freikorps man Schlageter, who had once spent a few days on holiday in these parts in the unhappy year of 1919. The resistance fighter Albert Leo Schlageter had faced the French, who shot him. In the middle of the development stood a granite stone engraved with the profile of the national martyr. When it was turned on, water flowed from this stone into a basin. Young people gathered around this fountain on summer evenings, singing songs in honour of the new regime. On hot days children paddled in the water. A man called Drygalski, who had joined the National Socialist Party in its early days, would chase them away. Now, in the cold of winter, the water feature was covered with boards.

Drygalski was a kind of deputy mayor of the housing development — at least, he put on the airs of a prominent personage who kept the peace, and he made a speech on Albert Leo Schlageter Day, or rather read it from a sheet of paper. It was this man who chased the children away from the water, because it wasn’t proper for them to splash about in it. And if they still did, Drygalski felt it was his business to intervene. He had a good view of the place from his kitchen window, and he would knock on the pane with the knuckles of his fingers.

Why didn’t they go through the wood to the little River Helge, where there was plenty of water? he asked them, but then the women were indignant. Did he really like the idea of the children running across the road, they asked, and who was there at the river to pull them out of the water if they looked like drowning?

Although the Globigs had opposed the building of the Albert Leo Schlageter Settlement in the year of the Olympic Games, it turned out to be a decidedly good thing for them. They had been able to sell a last tract of land, and the Georgenhof finally acquired a proper mains water supply.

But the old pond had been filled in — the romantic little pond where the ducks and the white geese used to swim, looking so ornamental. And of course the weeping willow, so romantic itself, had been chopped down. The pond had belonged to the Georgenhof from time immemorial. There was a heated exchange of letters with the head of the local district council, who said the pond had to go because it was a breeding ground for midges, and they couldn’t have such a place in a clean new development where healthy people lived. Eberhard von Globig had produced old maps, the pond marked on them. It was so practical for watering the horses in summer! The ducks, heads under the water or upright and quacking, were a familiar local sight. They were caught and slaughtered in autumn.

The head of the local district council became insistent when Eberhard von Globig claimed that the pond really belonged to him. He and Drygalski put their heads together and set about devising a plan.

One evening Lothar Sarkander, the mayor of Mitkau, a man with strict standards who had a stiff leg and duelling scars on his face, had come over in his steam-driven car for a private conversation with Eberhard von Globig; the two of them sometimes went hunting together. Sitting in the billiards room, Sarkander had talked about the new order of things, saying it would be better if Eberhard kept his mouth shut. Provoking people like Drygalski was not a good idea; they were in charge now.