Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

But now that old building was cold as ice, however much you tried to heat it. Those tall, damp rooms.

Instead of a Party symbol, Dr Wagner wore the ribbon of the Iron Cross, which, thank God, he had won in the Great War. With the help of that ribbon, membership of the People’s Welfare Organization and the Reich Colonial League, along with occasional talks on air-raid precautions, he had been able to turn down suggestions that he might join the Party when advances were made to him by some of his colleagues, often at first, then less and less frequently, and now not at all. He had managed to keep out of it. Had he been able to pull strings of some kind in high places?

He could play the piano, and you heard him practising if you walked past his house. Sometimes he even sang as he played. ‘I live a very quiet life,’ he used to say. He lived this quiet life in Horst-Wessel-Strasse, next door to the tax office.

The school gates were closed now. Beds for old people who had been brought from Tilsit occupied the vaulted classrooms. And Dr Wagner was surplus to requirements. So he ‘saw to Peter’s education a little’, as he put it — Peter being his favourite pupil, whom he had always liked. I’m not letting you go to the bad, he thought to himself. That thin face, fair curly hair, those serious eyes. Even if it meant walking four kilometres from Mitkau to the Georgenhof, four kilometres there and four kilometres back, he did not shrink from the daily journey on foot to see that all was well, to give the boy some coaching, arriving at three p.m. on the dot. I’m not letting you go to the bad! His father on active service, his mother so self-absorbed, those Ukrainian women in the house …

That’s a very promising boy, he thought.

Dr Wagner had been seeing to Peter’s education day after day since Christmas. He did not shrink from the long journey, he took it for granted, and moreover they always gave him a plate of bread and dripping. Something delicious to eat was welcome! Bread fried in dripping with apples and onions, and crisp crackling with it too. It wasn’t so easy for a bachelor to manage these days. At least he sat in a warm room here. And the folk at the Georgenhof, it was obvious, knew how to appreciate Dr Wagner.

Although he himself was fond of animals, as he said, Jago the dog was not a friend of his. If you offered Jago some of the bread and dripping, he growled. And on Dr Wagner’s evening visits to the kitchen — where he looked in for a minute, briefcase in hand, to say goodnight to the maids before going home — Jago even faced up to him, baring his teeth.

When he wanted to make sure all was well in the kitchen, he had sometimes found the maids holding the door shut against him on the inside. But Dr Wagner hadn’t been born yesterday; he could take a joke.

Sometimes he calculated whether the calories he had taken on board at the Georgenhof made up for the calories he had asked his body to expend: four kilometres there and another four kilometres back, come wind or weather? And he dropped hints, but no one reacted to them.

There was a short cut, as he had finally discovered, and he used it now and then, but he kept it to himself.

So Dr Wagner duly turned up day after day, and he always had ways of interesting Peter in something. For instance, he liked to take Knaur’s Encyclopaedia off the shelf and put the blade of a knife between the pages at random. Then he opened the book, which he described as a box full of treasures, and Peter had to read aloud what he found on the page chosen by pure chance. It was stichomancy, divination by opening a book at random, said Dr Wagner. Some people did it with the Bible. And whatever you found there, it was always interesting; you simply left out the uninteresting entries. ‘Saffron milk cap, fungus, see Lactarius deliciosus’, for instance. Then they talked about the riches of nature, the huge number of fungi in the world, edible and inedible, and how they were really parasites but were useful and many of them tasted good. Chanterelles, for instance, fried in butter. Or portobello mushrooms, also known as Paris mushrooms, considered a great delicacy and perfectly digestible if properly prepared.

Dr Wagner did not concern himself with the Bible. He had been prejudiced against the church since taking offence with someone in the 1920s. In his youth he had belonged to the Free Christian movement, whose members liked to meet in forests and turn to God under the crowns of the ancient trees. At the time the official church made stupid remarks about it, and withdrew from those who thought as he did, so he in turn withdrew from the church. At least that saved you the church tax.

*

A silver propelling pencil hung from his watch-chain, and he delicately pushed it out of its silver casing and back in again.

Sometimes he clenched his hand into a fist, sometimes he laid it flat on the table, always in a very correct manner. He wore a blue signet ring, its colour slightly faded in one place, probably from coming into contact with hot water.

His pointed beard could be stroked forward when opportunity offered, at thoughtful moments. It meant something like: I’m not sure you’re right there. He never said, straight out, ‘Oh, come off it!’ or ‘You couldn’t be more mistaken!’ or simply ‘Nonsense!’ He liked to leave things to chance. That was his method; he even let his pupils teach him; for instance, he got Peter to explain the model aircraft hanging from the ceiling to him, the difference between heavy bombers and dive-bombers, and the fact that the Wellington bomber has a turret from which the tail gunner cannot escape once the plane is burning. But Dr Wagner himself had actually seen the red triplane when Richthofen was flying it over the Somme — which Peter could hardly believe. Wagner imitated the high, thin sound of the MG gunfire, and with the flat of his hand he showed howRichthofen had manoeuvred his ‘crate’ at the time.

Unfortunately he kept treading on Peter’s railway; several rails were flattened, and he had already played football with the station. ‘Oh, my dear boy,’ he had said. ‘I’m so sorry. You have to bend it into shape like this …’ and he had knelt down, with his creaking joints, to get it back into its proper state. He had had a model railway in his own childhood, although he had no idea what had become of it. It had been larger than Peter’s. There had been papier-mâché passengers sitting in its open carriages, and the engine had boasted a tall chimney.

The hand-embroidered Christmas tablecloth, with swinging bells in red and fir tree branches in green, was still on the round table in Peter’s room. It was here, at that table, that his broader education went on: textbooks lay open on it. ‘What will flower indoors on tables and windowsills?’ — a schematic depiction of plants and an atlas. Where is bauxite mined? A special map showed you, and you could find out how many locks there were in the Panama Canal. ‘Life,’ said Dr Wagner, ‘is interesting from whatever angle you approach it.’

It was difficult to find the small town of Mitkau on the maps, but Königsberg stood out clearly. After all, Kant had lived in Königsberg. Kant had been a bachelor too, there’s nothing special about it.

When the moment seemed propitious, Wagner had the boy doing mathematics. ‘A cyclist goes from A to B …’ Straightforward enough in itself, the rule of three: what you have to put above the line, and what belongs under it, and then you abbreviate and multiply it. Perfectly simple, and yet Peter couldn’t grasp it, however emphatically Dr Wagner pointed it out, however gently he brought his clenched fist down on the table. The boy just didn’t grasp it.

In English: I have washed, you have washed, he has washed. To think that the British, such a cultivated nation, had razed a city like Königsberg to the ground. The cathedral. The inn called the Massacre. It was more than he could understand. His beloved Königsberg. Eating fried flounders in a little restaurant on the River Pregel, and the sirens sounding on the big ships in harbour there …