Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

‘Time, time, you can never turn it back, my boy.’ And he would stand up and look at the cuckoo clock, with its pendulum swinging quickly back and forth, left to right and vice versa, and the little door is already opening, and the cuckoo calls out of the clock whether you want to hear it or not.

So many things were a riddle to him. The differences between people — quite apart from the difference between man and woman. For instance, the difference between Germans and Russians. Germans, clean, industrious, honest; Russians, on the other hand, lazy, dirty, cruel? Then again, the other way round: Russians, kindly on principle, whereas Germans … Recently there’d been much that was hard to understand, although here and now it was better not to talk about it. Things that, in themselves, were not at all necessary.

‘Riddle’, a good Germanic word, not for the great questions that face mankind, but for the little ones, often very simple matters. That too was part of a teacher’s educational plan: it should show his pupil that some things are hard even for an adult to understand. Of course, he didn’t say so to Peter. He left it to the boy to come to his own conclusions, however wrong they might be.

As a scholar, Dr Wagner concentrated chiefly on German literature and the German language; he got Peter to recite poems, and marked the stresses and rhythm of the lines in his book of poetry with his silver pencil, as well as the place to pause and take a deep breath.

From afár a glów, like a víllage on fíre,

Reflécting on póols as the flámes burn hígher …

At his request, Peter wrote a long essay about the Georgenhof, entitled My Home. It took him days. He illustrated his experiences and events with pictures. Lightning and threatening storm clouds in the sky above a haywain, the cherry harvest, with Peter himself and the girl cousins from Berlin sitting in the cherry tree, and Auntie looking out of the window. She said that it is better to preserve the cherries in jars than tear them all off their stems and put them in your mouth right away.

He said in his essay that the estate had been only an adjunct to the old Georgenhof, whose ruins still lay in the forest. It was burnt down by the French in 1807 and never rebuilt. He poked around there quite often, although he wasn’t allowed to play in the ruins; adders had been seen there, and the whole thing might collapse. All the same he went there now and then. He had already lured his cousins in and then scared them by calling out in a hollow, ghostly voice.

The Hitler Youth had once met by night in the part of the vaults still standing, holding smouldering torches and singing defiant songs.

Comrades, arise and fight,

We’ll raise our banners higher!

There had been repercussions to this episode. The police had told the local Hitler Youth that it wouldn’t do; a vaulted ruin like that could easily fall flat.

When Peter had finished his essay, Dr Wagner wrote Good! under it in red ink, and Auntie tied the pages together with a blue ribbon, which made them almost a book. He could give it to his father for his birthday. It lay on his desk, and Peter imagined his pleasure in receiving it. His father’s birthday was in May. In the merry, merry month of May.

There was another room next to Peter’s bedroom. It had been his little sister Elfie’s room until she died two years ago.

Everything had been left as it was when she was alive: her doll’s house, her puppet theatre. Even the knitted witch with a metre-long cord dangling from her stomach. Elfie’s clothes still hung in the wardrobe, and until recently clean sheets had regularly been put on the bed. Her photograph lay on the pillow. She had had frizzy hair in braids, not fair like Peter’s hair but raven-black.

When she died the cat went missing and didn’t come back for three days.

What a pity, Peter sometimes thought when he was lying in bed. I could have knocked on the wall now, and then she would have knocked back.

Since Eberhard had been called up, Katharina had been living in the ‘refuge’, as they both called their private little apartment. Auntie had begun looking in on her for afternoon coffee and a nice chat, talking about Silesia and what it had been like to be driven away from her old home — she had turned up every day to discuss the sorrows of this world. Every day from three to four. When it threatened to become an established habit, Katharina locked her door. ‘I need time for myself,’ she said. Not just for a few hours but for days and weeks. She always needed time for herself. We all live our own lives, and further more, as she had said all along, she was not a countrywoman, she’d have liked to be a bookseller. She had never heard about lime and nitrogen. As for milking cows — oh, for heaven’s sake!

She was living in this comfortable little apartment, and Auntie had her own lovely room — sunshine all round!

Anyway, they ate meals together down in the big hall, and they could talk then.

The little apartment consisted of a living room, the bedroom and a study, with bookshelves supported on golden-bronze brackets lining the walls. The shelves held novels, side by side, and they had all been read, because Katharina had been a bookworm since childhood. As she always said, she had wanted to be a bookseller, not the mistress of an estate. And it was in a bookshop that Eberhard had seen her again in Berlin, where she and he were looking at one and the same book at ten one morning, and that, as it said in an account written to commemorate their wedding, was ‘the book of life’.

She regularly got fresh supplies of books from Mitkau; they were the luxury she allowed herself. The bookseller there always had something extra for her as well. Konrad Muschler, Eckart von Naso, Ina Seidel. And also the Blue Books — pictorial volumes that she liked leafing through: The Provinces of Germany …

The study contained the little desk at which she wrote letters to her family in Berlin, telling them that she was fine, but how was all this going to end? Or to her husband in distant Italy. They had gone to Italy before the war in the brand-new Wanderer car, and now Eberhard had been there for months.

Photographs of her parents stood on the table, and a picture in oils of little Elfriede. It had been painted shortly before she was snatched away by scarlet fever in 1943, when no one was expecting any really serious childhood illness. She would be nearly eight years old now; Katharina was always working out her age.

Attached to the refuge was a conservatory that brought light into the little apartment. From there, you looked out over the flat roof of the summer drawing room and the terrace, and so to the park, the lawn surrounded by rhododendrons, and Auntie’s green and white summerhouse. They had had it put up in 1936, when everything looked likely to improve. The village carpenter had put it together in three days for Auntie’s birthday — it had been a great surprise. And it had been used only once.

Katharina liked to sit in the conservatory, looking down on the black forest that stood like a wall beyond the meadowland of the park. She often sat there with her friend Felicitas, who laughed so prettily, and chattered cheerfully — here you were undisturbed, yet somehow at the same time in the middle of nature.

Felicitas with her bright aquamarine pendant round her neck, and Katharina with her gold locket, both of them in the conservatory among cacti and geraniums.

Felicitas, blonde, a pretty little face with a pointed nose, was always so happy, and she made the more phlegmatic Katharina laugh with her stories. She managed to find something amusing in all her experiences — and there were a great many of them. She told her stories with a wealth of gestures, to Katharina, who could only marvel at her friend’s imagination. Anyone standing down on the terrace could have heard every word spoken up here, and would have had something to laugh at.