Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

The sound of a solitary aeroplane was heard above the rooftops. The engine noise came closer and then went away again. Fiery signals like the Northern Lights fingered the black, starry sky. A searchlight groped through the darkness as well, and in the distance light anti-aircraft guns sent tracer fire into the sky. There were four explosions, one, two, three, four, and then the heavy Mitkau guns began firing. After that silence fell, and the solitary plane flew away, with its engine noise dying down. The bombs had fallen on Mitkau railway station; now it was burning, and rail travel would be disrupted again.

Auntie sat there for a little while longer as tongues of flame rose to the sky above Mitkau. She listened until at last the all clear sounded in the distance.

Then she drank her peppermint liqueur and went to bed. She didn’t even hear another column of tanks rumbling past.

Peter was lying in bed. He had a feather bed on top of the mattress, a quilt on top of his blankets, and two pillows. A board lay across the bed with his books on it. Stories by Karl May. Back numbers of the humorous magazine Flying Leaves ; he had found them in the attic. They contained caricatures of Sunday hunters, of students who were usually drunk, of young lieutenants who couldn’t control their horses.

This evening he was reading the story of a shipwrecked sailor who hadn’t given up, but went on and on paddling a raft until at last an island came into sight, and with it the prospect of safety.

He imagined lying in a cabin in a sailing ship — a cabin that smelt of tar — and the creak of the rigging. The Wreck of the Palmyra , he’d read that book and was still thinking about it. Never give up, that was the lesson it taught you.

Be the aim however high,

Youth will find a way …

Peter too had heard the air-raid warning in Mitkau and the four explosions: one, two, three, four. And he heard the tanks going east along the road. The whole house shook as they passed by, one after another. Big black shadows with sparks coming out of their exhausts, chains rattling, engines roaring. You didn’t see them at all in daylight, and now you saw them only as outlines.

His room was next to Auntie’s gable room. His model railway had been set up on the floor since Christmas. Its rails ran in a circle, and it had a tin station building. Peter had extended the rails out into the corridor, passing through the cat flap, and there, too, they ran in a circle. When the train went out and came back a little later, he knelt down to watch it coming. Sometimes it stopped outside and had to be wound up. Now and then there were collisions when the cat insisted on squeezing through the flap at the same time as the train. A strange animal. No one really knew what went on in his head.

Model aircraft made of paper that Peter had cut out and stuck together hung beneath the sloping ceiling. German and English planes. A Vickers Wellington and a Spitfire, the Messerschmitt 109 and Richthofen’s red triplane. That one didn’t really fit with the others, which came from a very different time. But Peter had made it, so it might as well hang there. A slight draught of air from the window moved the models so that they touched gently. Peter sometimes shot at them with his air pistol, but he took care not to score any hits. It would have been a shame after he had spent so long working on them. They rocked slightly as the projectile passed by.

His microscope stood on the table. Looking at grains of salt and sugar crystals was all very well; he knew all about that now. Beside the instrument stood a preserving jar containing a decoction of hay; Peter wanted to observe the invisible life forms in the infusion, but so far it wasn’t ripe enough. There was a whole world in there, Dr Wagner had said: birth and death, creatures eating and being eaten.

His father’s binoculars lay on the windowsill. The microscope here, the binoculars there. When crows flew up from the oak tree he counted them. He also followed the V-shaped skein of wild geese in flight through his binoculars. Lately they had begun going north again. What did that mean, in the middle of winter?

If you fly south across the sea,

Then what, ah what, will our fate be?

He checked on his tree house several times a day to make sure it was all right. He also kept the Settlement under observation. Women taking long underpants frozen stiff off the line — that was a funny sight. He had never been interested in the children over there. He didn’t know the boys, and he didn’t want to know them. Football? They wouldn’t have let him play with them even if he’d wanted to. For sport he had a rowing boat moored on the River Helge, and he sometimes went out and about on the river with it. The cows on the other bank came along to see what he was doing.

Peter never went over to the Settlement, and no one came over to see him. The road lay between them. And he would not have had a good time if he had ventured there. There were strong boys in the housing development who would have loved to pelt the young plutocrat with snowballs. Or might take him into the sweat lodge and refuse to let him out again. Auntie would certainly have opened her window to intervene.

The children had laid out a long slide there, and he would have liked to try it. Then Drygalski had come along with a bucket full of ashes and made it impossible to use the slide, which annoyed Peter, although it was none of his business.

When Peter did want to play outside at this time, he went down a small slope behind the house on his sledge, then pulled it up and came down the slope again. He had made a snowman as well, but no one had shown any interest in it.

‘Lovely, dear, lovely,’ his mother had said, hardly looking up from her book. The snowman bore a certain resemblance to the Führer and Chancellor of the Third Reich.

In summer, Peter often spent hours in his tree house, which he had fitted out as the cockpit of a plane: old alarm clocks did duty as parts of an instrument panel, a small wheel was the joystick, a tin can that he filled with water was a fuel container. At the front of his tree-house plane he had mounted the streamlined remains of a motorbike’s sidecar. He was permanently flying west. Now, in winter, the snow collected inside his aircraft.

Dr Wagner came to the Georgenhof at three p.m. on the dot every afternoon to tutor Peter. Since he had never married, he was described as a confirmed bachelor. He had a small, pointed beard, and bags under his eyes, over which he wore gold-rimmed glasses. He also wore plus fours and black ear protectors, and now, in the cold winter weather, a fur-trimmed overcoat that had seen better days. Wagner taught history, with Latin as a subsidiary subject, and German language and literature. We hear in ancient legends of many wondrous tales …

In spite of his advanced age, Dr Wagner still had to do war work, and he had had enough of working, he said, in his seventy years of life. Teaching German and history year after year, day after day. And when he was through with it, beginning all over again.

All the children in the monastery school, the milling crowds and the shouting in the venerable cloisters — and then there were his colleagues, all of them in a rut. Since the younger ones had been called up to go to the front, you could hardly ever have any useful conversation in the staff room.

The library was worth seeing. There had been some idea of sending it to Königsberg, in case the Russians came after all. But since the destruction of that city, the word had been: ‘Thank God we didn’t do it!’

When Wagner had got himself moved to that school, many, many years ago, it had been summer, the slanting rays of the sun had shone in through the windows with their pointed arches, beds of aromatic herbs had grown in the garden, and there were flowers everywhere: mallows, delphiniums, phloxes. The crooked, contorted cloisters, the refectory with its high ceiling — in summer it was wonderfully beautiful. The old medieval well still stood in the yard, with ivy climbing all over it. And he had been on good terms with his engaging young colleagues.