Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

Sarkander was invited to go shooting on the Georgenhof estate every year; it created good relations, and Katharina had once stood in the summer drawing room with him, looking at the park and the cheerful company lying in the grass there and drinking toasts. Long ago, she had even been to the seaside with him; that was in 1936, when Eberhard had to go to see to the horses at the Olympic Games in Berlin, leaving Katharina at home. She and Sarkander had been seen sitting in a beach hut drinking cocoa, Katharina in a broad-brimmed straw hat that surrounded her head like a halo, with her black hair flowing out from under it, he in white trousers, his stick between his legs. That was so many years ago that no one really knew anything about it. Or did they?

Well, she had to do something, that was the explanation. Eberhard had gone to Berlin, and she and the mayor of Mitkau had gone to the seaside.

If I’d known what I was missing,

If I’d known who I was kissing,

That midnight at the lido …

Auntie’s name was Helene Harnisch. She came from Silesia. Her gable room had flowered wallpaper and was full of mahogany furniture that came from Silesia too, a wardrobe, chairs, the plain desk, and a bed in which, said a family joke, a poet had surely died. Beside the desk hung a small pen-and-ink drawing of Hitler, the Führer and Chancellor of the Reich, with his tie featuring an eagle in a swastika, and underneath the picture his slanting signature with a slanting line under it.

Auntie sat down in her armchair, pushed the curtain aside and looked out into the night. Everything was plunged in the deepest darkness. Stars cold as ice sparkled in the sky; the moon had not yet risen. In spite of the wind and the freezing cold, the Hitler Youth had been marching round the housing development that morning: left, right, left, right. Drygalski had come stalking up and made a speech. The time to show what they could do was imminent, he told the boys, and he hoped he could rely on them when the moment came. He got them marching to Mitkau. There was plenty for young people to do there these days: carrying coal up from the cellar for the old folk, shovelling snow off the crossroads. They had come back late in the evening. Peter was supposed to have been with them, but he preferred looking through his microscope. He also had a nasty cold again.

Auntie kept the household accounts of the estate in the upper compartments of her old desk, which could be locked, and ever since Eberhard had been on active service she had dealt with the official correspondence there, because Katharina von Globig always forgot it, was easily discouraged, and looked so helpless, saying, ‘Oh, my goodness, yes! I quite forgot.’ In the end Auntie preferred to do everything herself.

She kept a bag of eucalyptus cough sweets for her bad throat in the desk, and sometimes gave Peter one, which he immediately threw away.

Her room smelt of ripe apples and dead mice, but it was comfortable, and Auntie called it her kingdom.

She liked sitting in the armchair at her desk, and looking down at the yard and the road and the housing development on the other side of it.

There was a fine old rug on the floor, and a lamp had been fitted at the desk. Its opaque glass shade was adorned with strings of green beads. When Eberhard von Globig came up here to complain to Auntie that there was nothing to be done about Katharina, his head knocked against it, and then the beads tinkled and the lampshade rocked, and took its time settling down.

A watercolour in a white frame hung over her bed, showing a white summerhouse with roses in intermingling colours clambering over it. It was a memento of her father’s estate in Silesia. As a child she had liked sitting in that summerhouse when she was either unhappy or glad about something, with her left leg tucked under her, and there she and her girlfriends used to play at sending their dolls to school.

She had wanted to be a teacher, but that idea came to nothing.

‘My beloved Silesia,’ she used to say, and, ‘Nothing’s that easy.’

Her father’s estate had been sold at auction in 1922, when everything was going downhill — the house and outbuildings, the woods and fields. A war profiteer who had made money out of others’ misfortunes had lent her father money, again and again, and then the estate had had to be sold at the worst possible moment, and that monstrous man had stood by watching. The place was going to ruin, and the summerhouse had been demolished for no reason at all. They could easily have left it alone. The old gardener shed tears when he had to leave. As a little girl she used to stand on his wooden clogs while he did a bear-like dance round the circular flower bed with her.

She had been left with a few pieces of furniture and the picture above her bed.

*

A lute with ribbons on it hung beside the picture of the summerhouse; it reminded her of her youth. There is no fairer land today …

She herself had once played music to wounded men, in 1917, almost thirty years ago; she remembered the large white wimples of the Catholic nuns and the patients’ striped pyjamas, and she too had been asked by a blind man whether he could touch her hand; it had been next to impossible to shake his own hand off. She had never heard anything of those men again. But the kindnesses she had shown them had surely not been given in vain.

Eberhard’s last leave: they had sat under the copper beech in the garden in August, Uncle Josef had come over from Albertsdorf, and dear Hanna with the children; she had played the old songs of her youth on the lute, and everyone had sung along.

A summer’s evening under the copper beech, drinking punch. Katharina had temporarily gone missing, and then she had come out of the summer drawing room with Sarkander, the mayor of Mitkau. And Eberhard had gone into the wood on his own to make sure that everything was all right. That had surprised her. As long as all that ago?

Auntie read the newspaper. One of the earpieces of her reading glasses was missing, and what she read was not reassuring. Something was brewing in the east. Who knew, perhaps they would have to leave this house, just as the old Globigs had left it in the First War.

She pulled out a large suitcase from under the bed. She had come to the Georgenhof with that suitcase all those years ago, and they had told her, ‘You can have the gable room and make yourself useful.’ That was over twenty years ago. And now, as the family joked, she was part of the fixtures and fittings. She got pocket money, had free board and lodging, and ran the whole place.

Opening the wardrobe, she took underclothes out of it and put them in the suitcase. Some of the garments were darned and mended, others had never been worn, and her handkerchiefs were still tied together with pink ribbons.

She took letters out of the desk and put them in the case as well, and photographs too. Then she closed the suitcase and pushed it back under the bed.

She sat down in her armchair. Had she forgotten anything?

The lute. She took the instrument off the wall and placed it beside the suitcase. There, now she was ready for anything.

Auntie poured herself a peppermint liqueur.

A single car drove fast along the road to Mitkau, followed by other cars and finally by trucks. Then came tanks, one after another, making the glass beads on the lampshade jingle. Then it was silent again.

Now she could hear the sirens from Mitkau, sounding an air-raid warning. The Globigs never reacted to that signal. What were they supposed to do? Get water ready and stand out in the yard in summer when there was a thunderstorm, yes, that was something else, but in an air raid? There was water in the cellar, but it was unusable. So what were they expected to do? Run into the woods? Yes, but not every night.