Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

Why hadn’t he travelled the world before the war, Dr Wagner wondered, when it was still possible? He assumed that some day Peter would go where he could breathe the air of very different places.

Dr Wagner couldn’t get the ships’ sirens and the fried flounders out of his head. And crunchy golden-yellow fried potatoes. Such a simple dish in itself.

Of course Dr Wagner also told the boy what ‘political economy’ meant. He agreed that stamp-collecting was a good idea; those small stamps, he said, are like miniature stocks and shares. Collecting them was a good idea, yes, but mending them? Replacing a single indentation — he considered such a thing impossible, out of the question. Was it outright fraud? No, surely his imagination was running away with him, wasn’t it? Well, said Dr Wagner, one must always stick to the truth. Stick to the truth, and be able to keep quiet about certain rumours that were now circulating. They originated with people who had an insight into what was going on, people who had seen developments in the east. Things so far-fetched that one really couldn’t envisage them.

Collecting stamps and coins, yes, why not? Objects of value. Long after the paper mark has given up the ghost, said Dr Wagner, the stamps would still be here, unless they had been burnt …

Inflation — millions, billions? Difficult to understand and complicated to explain.

They looked up Budapest in the atlas, because that city was in the news. How far the Russians had advanced — alignments of the fronts in the course of disengagement — and where the Americans actually were. Why not stick pins into a map? The map in question was already hanging on the wall, although marked in the other direction to show how far the Germans had advanced east, in their military formations — their ‘spearheads’ and ‘pockets’. It did not show where they were now. Whereas everyone knew where the Russians were at this moment. Not a hundred kilometres away.

Budapest was in Hungary, and some time or other it had belonged to Austria and the Imperial and Royal monarchy. Long ago. A likeable place in itself.

The Emperor Waltz — Dr Wagner had seen that film.

Katharina sometimes sat at that table with them, however quiet and reserved she was. She would bring her cup of tea with her and sit down beside the neatly bearded teacher. She herself could still learn something here. Sometimes she even put on an afternoon dress, the kind she had worn in the old days. And if the sun shone into the room, making the ice flowers on the windows glitter, the cat would turn up too and settle down on Peter’s bed with his paws tucked under him.

On occasion the conversation between the two grown-ups moved away into its own domain, going hither and thither, while Peter sat on the floor with his model railway and wound up the engine. As it went round the bend the carriages sometimes came off the rails.

‘Not too fast, my boy, not too fast …’

To think that people who knew about the east had seen what was going on there now. Our good old German fatherland. For heaven’s sake!

Katharina lit a cigarette and looked for Lake Garda on the map, trying to imagine what it would look like there now, and she thought of Venice and how she had stayed in a cold hotel with Eberhard, and it rained all day. Then she caught a chill below the waist on a gondola expedition, and came home with kidney trouble, and that was the end of that.

The plundering of Rome by the Vandals. The Italians in Forest Lodge, or were they Sicilians?

They were Catholic, anyway. A priest had once been to see them. One of the Italians had fallen ill and died in the cold German Reich, where for all they knew there might still be wolves and aurochs keeping their distance, in inhospitable Germania. They could have wished him a different fate.

Dr Wagner was always talking to Katharina over the boy’s head about the circumstances, those circumstances to which they were now exposed. He lowered his voice: the brickworks in Mitkau, the people who had to work there, prisoners in striped jackets. What would come of it all? ‘Who’d have thought it?’ There was nothing very strange about it if he touched this quiet woman’s forearm now and then. Not when he had known her so long. But it didn’t have to be like that.

‘Will you be setting off westward too?’ he asked sadly. Then he dropped hints, and cautiously framed the question of whether he might not be taken along with them on that journey. There would surely be room for him in the vehicle.

He could have gone into the Reich by rail, but when exactly should he do it? And when would the right moment come? Where exactly would he go? What reason would he give for such a journey?

Auntie had tried to make her own contribution to Peter’s lessons. She had turned up with a folder full of pictures, ‘Illustrations to BiblicalHistory’, and talked about the Saviour. But the seed fell on stony ground. The fact that the old German imperial crown bore a cross was beside the point. Here Dr Wagner joined in, mentioning the Christian west, and then talking to Auntie about Pastor Brahms in Mitkau, who was said to be most incautious, saying all kinds of wild things in his sermons — God is not mocked, and so on and so forth, instead of keeping his mouth shut. And then the words ‘concentration camp’ uttered in an undertone.

*

Dr Wagner’s idea of making up riddles was a good one.

Cling to your dear, beloved fatherland … could a syllabic riddle of some kind be based on that? Or Horror stares from empty window frames ? Schiller, anyway, was eminently suitable for such things.

Magic squares of numbers — from left to right, from top to bottom, when you add them up you always get the same result. Strange, hard to understand. Were you supposed to be able to conjure up some kind of power like that? Cast a spell to banish misfortune? Dürer had put his mind to such things. Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, the beautiful city that now lay in ruins, like Königsberg and Hamburg, Frankfurt and Cologne.

Riddles were all very well, but Peter didn’t understand why anyone would ask a riddle when you already knew what the outcome was going to be.

Well, said Dr Wagner, in dire straits you could always earn money from making up riddles. Five marks per riddle, perhaps?

Peter said that in that case they could simply copy them out of Flying Leaves and sell them, but that turned out to be the wrong approach. It led to a lecture of some length about the Ten Commandments, the iniquity of telling lies, and the fact that a good German boy must wash thoroughly, paying attention to his fingernails, wasn’t that so? ‘And always be cautious, my boy, that’s a part of life.’

It seemed that one important question was whether adding a black mark to the stamps in his collection was or was not a good idea.

‘Brig: a two-masted square-rigged ship …’

He had seen many handsome sailing ships in Königsberg. Why hadn’t he just gone away back then, when the whole world was still open to him?

But gone away where? That was the question. Where should they have gone?

Riddles: the great questions facing mankind. When Dr Wagner got around to discussing those, he leaned back and looked into the distance. Where do we come from? Where are we going? Those were questions that he had often asked himself during his seventy years of life, without ever coming a jot closer to the truth. Perhaps the meaning of life was that we must perfect whatever is our own potential? Strive for perfection, as Goethe understood that word.

Now, when he sits alone in his room, he often thinks of the good times, of home, of eating fried flounders with his mother beside the River Pregel. And he is sorry that he wasn’t nicer to her.