Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

It was cold, and the wind blew a dusting of fine snow over the icy road. Katharina had spread the fur rug over her knees, and the gelding — clip-clop, clip-clop — cheerfully drew the light weight along. The coach was child’s play to the heavy horse, an animal of character who tried rolling his eyes to look back at anyone getting in.

Katharina liked to use the old vehicle for her drives into town, and she drove it herself. Michels had taught her how. She went into town once a week; it had become a habit of hers. ‘I need it,’ she said.

The little town of Mitkau, enclosed by a stout, sloping wall, lay on the River Helge, which wound its way through fields and meadows, its banks lined by willows. The arch of an iron bridge crossed the little river. That bridge had cost the community dear; the citizens had been paying for it since 1927, and it would be a burden on the municipal budget for many years to come.

*

Katharina was driving towards the tower of the town church. Even from a distance, you could see the green-painted arch of the bridge on your left, and straight ahead the tower of Mitkau church, with the gables of the town hall and the monastery. The chimney of the brickworks could be seen on the far right.

When the little town was to be immortalized on a stamp — a local man had won a medal in the javelin event at the Olympic Games, and Hitler had visited Mitkau twice — the Gauleiter had the bridge shown in the foreground of the design, with the church, the town hall and the monastery as subsidiary elements. The wording under the picture said GREATER GERMAN REICH. The enlarged design of the stamp had spent a long time in a glass case in the front room of the town hall. Anyone coming to the registry office there to collect ration cards, or permits for items in short supply, could look at the picture. Who’d have thought our little town would ever be on a stamp! But now, in January 1945, the glass case had been taken away, and no one talked about the stamp any more.

The Helge was only a small river, little more than a brook, winding its way through the landscape without any great drama. The monks had once used the stream to drive a watermill, but the millwheel had fallen into disrepair long ago. Boys skated on the river these days.

The Helge also flowed past the Georgenhof at a little distance. The Globigs always meant to take the rowing boat upstream to Mitkau. Going in the other direction would have been easier, letting yourself drift downstream to goodness knows where. Some time or other you would end up in the Vistula Lagoon. In summer you could sometimes cross to the other side of the little river dry-shod, and children jumped from stone to stone on their way to the monastery school instead of going the long way round over the bridge. At the moment, they could easily have gone sliding across the ice, but that wasn’t necessary because school was closed. The classrooms were full of old people sitting with their hands folded. They had been brought from Tilsit in a closed van and were now sitting here waiting for something to happen. At Christmas there had been a big Christmas tree for them in the refectory, and a group from the Bund deutscher Mädel or BDM, the League of German Girls, had sung carols and served mulled wine and cake. There was a larger-than-life statue of St Christopher on the north side of the refectory, all that was left of the once lavish furnishings of the monastery.

The school used the refectory, with its slightly vaulted ceiling, as a hall and a gymnasium, and there the old people sat at long tables spooning up their soup.

Sometimes you saw the old people walking up and down the cloisters, past the tombstones. Sometimes the old men sat in the window bays playing cards, but that had stopped entirely now that, day after day, the thermometer showed such cold temperatures.

Katharina drove past the wreck of the railway station — its ruins, still smoking from the last air raid, were being cleared away by prisoners from the brickworks — and stopped outside the town hall. A fourteenth-century Gothic brick building, it did not feature in any art book, but it was pretty. It had a stepped Gothic gable sloping down to the marketplace, with an iron bar at the top to prevent it from falling. Outside the entrance there was a granite pillar, and the iron chain used to bind malefactors to it in the Middle Ages still hung from this pillar.

Katharina exchanged greetings with an elderly couple coming out of the town hall, and asked how they were. So-so, they said, thanking her; two sons missing in the east, and their daughter could never be left on her own because of her epileptic fits.

Boys from the Hitler Youth were clearing the snow in the street. An SA man had told them how to do it, and wondered what the point of the boys pelting each other with snowballs was. Could it be reconciled with the gravity of the situation?

A unit of reservists came marching along from the marketplace: old men in a varied assortment of uniforms with hats on their heads and long rifles on their backs. Their armbands proclaimed their membership of the Volkssturm.

Katharina spread her fur rug over the gelding’s back, and the horse deposited a pile of dung on the fresh snow. His eyes followed the woman; with luck she wouldn’t be in there too long.

She was carrying a dead hare wrapped in newspaper under her arm, a present for the mayor. Secretaries hurrying back and forth along the corridor passed the time of day with her; they all recognized her, and knew that she was a close friend of the mayor. Once, when Eberhard von Globig was still in charge of sugar factories in the Ukraine, a handsome present for the town had arrived, a consignment of raw sugar although Mitkau hadn’t been due one. Wartime had made it possible to do many friends a good turn on the quiet.

So without first going to the reception room to announce her arrival, she knocked on the mayor’s door, opened it and walked straight in.

The mayor, Lothar Sarkander, a man of upright bearing with duelling scars on his face and a stiff leg, sat at his desk under a picture of Hitler, cleaning his pistol. He looked overworked and anxious. A calm, thoughtful man, every inch the lawyer from head to toe. Salt and pepper hair neatly arranged, with the help of brilliantine, in many small waves above his thin face. Much of the grey in his hair had shown only recently. He had been a supporter of the new ideas from the first, but had now been ‘healed’ of them. Too late.

They did not bother with saying ‘Heil Hitler’. Instead, Katharina put the hare on the mayoral desk, where it looked like a dead baby. Sarkander reassembled his pistol, put it away in the drawer and came round to the front of the desk. He knew about the hare coursing arranged on the Globig estate, since he had been asked for permission, and as he had immediately given it, a visitor from the Georgenhof bringing him his dues could be expected.

And there she was, Frau von Globig, Katharina, with her black hair and blue eyes, the ring with the coat of arms on her finger, the gold locket round her neck, her white Persian lamb cap on her head. Sarkander shook hands with her, then drew her to him and kissed her on the cheek, glancing at the dead hare. After that he asked after her husband: how was Eberhard doing in warm, distant Italy?

‘You should be glad it’s Italy, Kathi! He’s well away from the firing line there.’

Sarkander may have wondered why he didn’t maintain his friendship with this woman on a regular basis. But he was a decent man, and he had a wife and children.

They had stood in the summer drawing room, and the family had sat out on the lawn with Uncle Josef. The doors of the drawing room, looking out on the park, were wide open. ‘What a picture,’ he had said, pointing to the picnic. And what about the two of them there in the drawing room, strange to one another in their familiarity?