Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

Usually Katharina lay on the bed, looking at the beautiful Madonnas in art books, or reading, or cutting silhouettes out of black card for her record of the cycle of the seasons. She did it, moreover, without drawing the outlines first. Felicitas marvelled at that, and told everyone.

Katharina liked to have a fruit bowl full of apples, such as the one that the political economist had admired, on the table. Here was the bowl of apples, there was the Crouching Woman, and on the wall hung Feuerbach’s Medea .

Now and then radio music was heard coming from her room, the big Blaupunkt radio with the magic eye, and cigarette smoke wafted through the house. Was she lying on her bed again, reading?

Sometimes she stood inside her door, listening, to see if there was anyone outside eavesdropping.

‘No one has any business here,’ she said, and she set about cleaning the place herself, not that she usually lent a hand with any other housework. Sometimes she saw Peter here when he had done his homework; she found that a nuisance, and she boxed his ears with his exercise book if he hadn’t been writing neatly, but otherwise she was easy-going with him. Historical dates? She didn’t know any of those herself.

Just so long as he got a reasonably good report. ‘Then you can do as you like,’ she used to say, ‘just so long as your report is reasonably good.’ How else could they face his father? But since Dr Wagner the schoolmaster had taken his education in hand she had no more fears on that score.

‘Isn’t that a picture?’ Lothar Sarkander had said when she was standing in the summer drawing room with him, watching the family picnicking in the park with cabbage white butterflies fluttering round them. It was so long ago now. Lothar Sarkander, the man with duelling scars on his cheek and the stiff leg; the man who made sure in Mitkau that the von Globig family lacked for nothing. He had wavy hair going slightly grey at the temples.

He had been standing beside her, pointing to the bright scene out there before them: the family sitting on the grass, the children in front of the dark, silent woods, and the white butterflies overhead. It had stuck in her memory; she couldn’t forget it.

Eberhard would never have said such a thing. But the Crouching Woman ? — It had been Eberhard who gave her the Crouching Woman . Or had he been making himself a present of the little sculpture?

Even the Ukrainian girls had gone up to the figure to touch it. Felicitas was always wondering out loud what it had cost. The Royal Porcelain Manufactory — it was even signed, wasn’t it?

Unfortunately people from the housing development were always using the park as a short cut on their way to Mitkau, in spite of the notice saying NO THROUGH ROAD. Drygalski in particular took the short cut, treading heavily over the lawn and spitting into the rhododendrons to right and left. He used to pass the kitchen, turn into the park, look at his reflection in the windows of the summer drawing room, glance up at Katharina and then leave again on the other side. Now, in winter, the dark semicircle that he had trodden round the house disfigured the white blanket of snow.

Sometimes he could be heard in the kitchen scolding the maids, asking what they thought they were doing, and saying that he’d soon get them working, which was none of his business.

‘Oh, never mind him!’ Katharina had said when Auntie told her. ‘I expect the man has troubles of his own.’

When she glanced at the thermometer in the conservatory, or opened the window to scatter birdseed in the little house for her feathered friends, Katharina looked down at the semicircle he had trodden. At the front of the house, Auntie looked at Peter’s tree house, and Katharina looked down at the semicircle trodden in the pure white snow down below.

Frost-flowers formed a pattern on the windows, and the door was draped with green blankets to keep out the cold air.

In the living room, under the slope of the roof, there was a storage cubbyhole for luggage and bedclothes. This in itself spoiled the look of the room, so Katharina had placed a small artisan-made chest painted with flowers in front of it, and spread a cover over the chest.

Katharina kept the cubbyhole locked as well. It contained special provisions to which Eberhard had added from time to time: cigarettes above all, coffee and cocoa and soap too, soap from France when it couldn’t be bought at all in the shops. There were also liqueurs, cognac, and seventeen bottles of Italian red wine, a Barolo Riserva.

The existence of this store of provisions was one of the reasons she kept her room locked. Someone could have sniffed out these illicit goods — tobacco, cocoa, soap?

When Eberhard had last been here, in autumn, his heavy heart full of gloomy thoughts, he had gone all over the house, into the main hall, the billiards room, the summer drawing room — and then he had drunk coffee up here with his wife, as he had done so often before, although as Auntie said, there was plenty of room downstairs, but, soon they wouldn’t be seeing any more of each other. They had sat side by side whispering, while acorns pattered down on the roof of the summer drawing room. The English shares in steel and the rice-flour factory. The shares would be worth nothing now in the war, and as for the Romanians? A good thing he had his salary as a special officer; it would keep their heads above water.

‘Scoundrels, all of them,’ Eberhard had said. They had sat beside the stand with the Crouching Woman on it, listening to music; music to accompany dreams. The eighteenth-century waltz from Le Bal Paré , was it? And I know there’ll be a miracle some day … Had they held hands?

Eberhard had opened the door to the cubbyhole and crawled in to check the provisions. ‘Mind you’re always very careful,’ he told Katharina, putting a cigarette in his father’s charred meerschaum holder. He rubbed his boots shiny with a woollen cloth.

He often told her to ‘Mind you’re always very careful!’ When he saw his wife he warned her, ‘Mind you’re careful, Kathi,’ and she replied, ‘Yes, and you too!’ But there in Italy he was a long way from the firing line.

The question was whether he ought not to send his wife and son somewhere else, perhaps Lake Constance? That was what Eberhard asked himself, but he came to no conclusion. Things had been all right so far …

For some time Katharina had been listening to the BBC news. It was both alarming and encouraging. She listened lying on her bed — one hand on her locket, her mouth open — as she heard the news from over there, read in a calm, pleasant voice, matter-of-fact and entirely without malice. She turned the radio down very low. Who knew, Drygalski might be taking the short cut again to see whether the Ukrainian girls really were in the cottage where they ought to be at night, and not in the Forest Lodge with the foreigners there? That interested the man enormously, although it was none of his business.

There was something he didn’t like about the Georgenhof, although everything seemed to be in order. His own wife was lying sick in their living room, which was also their kitchen. And the people here lived in the lap of luxury. To think that Frau von Globig, that high and mighty lady, had asked him only once how his wife was.

Eberhard had advised his wife always to turn the radio back to the German news programme when she had been listening to the BBC. Better safe than sorry.

Now and then you could smell real coffee all over the house. Katharina was giving herself a treat upstairs.

On a cold winter’s day, Katharina put on the Russian officer’s Persian lamb cap, had the horse harnessed to the coach that still stood in the carriage house, and drove it to Mitkau. In the hot summer of 1931 the coachman Michels had brought her home from Mitkau railway station, a newly married bride, in that old-fashioned vehicle. Michels, so it was said, had been the first to fall in Poland. Her little bridal wreath still hung by the coach’s olive-shaped back window.