Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

The two friends laughed a great deal, but sometimes their mood was muted. Then they talked about Fritz from Frankfurt, who had had to go to Switzerland under cover of darkness, and other matters on Felicitas’s mind.

There were a few matters that they never discussed; each of them kept those strictly to herself.

They toned one another down, the two friends — but then they got each other wound up and going again. Felicitas had a knack for that.

Now, in winter, they did not sit in the conservatory, but drank coffee in the comfortable little living room. Katharina had bought charming little armchairs for ladies. At Eberhard’s insistence a painting of the Treptow observatory hung on the wall.

All kinds of postcards showing works of art hung beside the picture of the observatory: Dürer’s portrait of his mother, Feuerbach’s Medea .

*

In the middle of the apartment was a china figure on an old stand meant to hold flowers. The figure was entitled Crouching Woman, and Eberhard had bought it from the Royal Porcelain Manufactory in Berlin.

Felicitas was not visiting at the moment; she was pregnant, and in the cold wind on the slippery road she could easily have fallen. Katharina sat alone in her room, reading, or she made silhouettes out of black card, mostly of flowers and birds, and stuck them in an album devoted to the seasons of the year. When she had finished one of these works of art she lit herself a cigarette and sat back, pleased with herself.

Eberhard had travelled a great deal during this war: the good days in France, time spent in the proud country of Greece, and then the Ukraine, with its great fields of sunflowers. And wheat. Everything had turned out all right, although someone had put a mine in his bed in the Ukraine. And now Italy!

He had sent parcels home from everywhere, and Katharina sent much of their contents on to the family in Berlin. Weren’t they getting anything at all there? ‘We live on our ration cards,’ they wrote, and Katharina felt sorry for them. Even in these last few years she had repeatedly gone to Berlin to help them out. And Berlin offered her what she missed at the Georgenhof: the theatre, concerts, the cinema as well — that wonderful film Rembrandt .

And then large, heavy packages containing books arrived at the Georgenhof.

But now the Russians were on the border — who’d have thought it? — and Katharina had withdrawn entirely into her refuge. The question was, might it not be better to go to Berlin, but Katharina shrank from the raids on the city. Furthermore, Eberhard had already sounded out the situation, and now people were saying, out loud, that in such times as these everyone ought to stay where they were.

Although, on the contrary, the Berlin family had contemplated moving to the Georgenhof and waiting there ‘in peace and quiet to see what happened’. They had last all seen each other the week before Christmas, and tears had been shed when they parted. Elisabeth — a nice person, really, but it was not so easy with her deformed feet. Katharina hadn’t ventured to ask Ernestine whether she could take Peter back with her. She would have been asked, ‘Where would he sleep?’ So she had left the subject alone.

Katharina had given her a fully grown goose for the Christmas holiday. Vladimir had looked as if he were wondering whether that was all right, and Auntie had to think how she could account for the fact that there was one goose less running about the farmyard. Would they get into trouble over that goose? After all, the poultry were counted. And maybe that ultra-Nazi Drygalski would find out? He seemed to have eyes everywhere. But after all, it could just as well have been the fox that got it.

It was a long time since Katharina had been bothered with any of the housekeeping. ‘Is your aunt there?’ was the question if she picked up the telephone after it had rung a dozen times, and she preferred it that way.

‘Leave it, Kathi,’ she had been told. ‘Auntie will do it …’ And she left it at that.

Even if she had wanted to see to something herself she wouldn’t have been allowed to. ‘She’s a dreamer,’ they said of her, ‘she does everything wrong.’ Some people would have called her eccentric, and felt sorry for Eberhard. It was hard luck to be landed with a woman like that, a woman who went out walking when other people were so overworked that they hardly knew whether they were coming or going. Who lay on the terrace in the sun when labourers were bathed in sweat as they mowed the rye. Who was always reading books, and had once been seen in the woods with a paint box sketching the old oaks overgrown with ivy, and the river with willows on its banks.

‘Don’t you ever go to see Elfie’s grave?’ Auntie had asked, and that had caused a rift between the two women that was never going to heal.

When she first came to the Georgenhof with Eberhard, her father-in-law had shown her the ruins of the old castle in the woods. The steps of the porch and the columns that had toppled over backwards. ‘The French burnt the castle down just to warm their feet,’ he had said. He had always liked calling her ‘my little daughter’ and putting his arms round her waist. Then he had a stroke, and for a long time he was bedridden, and only Katharina was allowed to plump up his pillows. She had sat at his bedside, both of them sighing. He had remembered her specially in his will: ‘The fur cap, child, it’s Persian lamb, you’ll get that.’ The white cap that the Russian officer had left behind, a lambskin cap.

The rest of the household left her in peace, but when the Ukrainian maids wanted to pour out their hearts they turned only to her. She even let them into her room. They wept out loud there, making as much noise as when they shouted at each other in the kitchen. Katharina had given them panties — darned, yes, but with plenty of wear left in them. And last summer she had even gone down to the River Helge with them to bathe. They had been seen down there laughing together, all three of them. And Katharina had found skirts and the jacket of a skirt suit to give the Ukrainians, who had nothing of their own. The check jacket that Katharina had worn in Cranz, back in the days of the seaside café on the Baltic. Rise high, O red-winged eagle . In that unique summer, with the boats setting their sails at a slant on the bright blue sea. Sonya wore the jacket now when she visited the foreign workers at the Forest Lodge, her wreath of blonde braids round her head.

There was a sequel to this outing to bathe in the little River Helge. Drygalski had appeared on the bank in his brown boots and called them back — or rather, told them to come out of the water, where they were shouting and splashing about. He had said there would be repercussions: bathing with foreign workers from the east? It had been a difficult time, but nothing came of it. The report had been summarily dismissed in Mitkau; Sarkander fixed that. After all, he pointed out, these women workers from the east had come to the German Reich of their own free will, and that had to be taken into account.

Katharina was still locking the door of her refuge, either from the inside or the outside, depending on where she happened to be, and she never let anyone else have the key. If someone knocked on her door she would ask, in tones of annoyance, ‘Yes, what is it, then?’ opening the door just a crack. Although she had no particular opinion on anything else, was always ready to give way and hardly knew what time of day it was, she was immovable on this point. A person must be allowed to be alone somewhere. After all, the house was large enough.

The only thing Auntie could do if she really needed to attract her attention was to go up to the attic and march back and forth above Katharina’s room, stamping her feet until dust trickled down, disturbing her peace and quiet. But even then Katharina seldom stirred herself.