Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

When more money had been coming in, the von Globigs had furnished a comfortable apartment on the first floor of the house, three rooms, a bathroom and a little kitchen. It had a warm, comfortable living room with a view of the park, where Katharina could write letters or read books. And when Eberhard came home they were undisturbed there. They could close the door and be on their own, as they put it. It meant that they didn’t always have to sit down in the hall with Auntie, who had a finger in every pie and always thought she knew best. Auntie, who was always jumping up to fetch something, or staying put when that was more of a nuisance.

*

Now, in January 1945, the Christmas tree was still standing in the hall. Peter’s godmother in Berlin had given him a microscope. He sat in the dimly lit hall at a table not far from the tree, which was dropping its needles. Looking down the tube of the microscope, he saw all kinds of things in great detail: salt crystals and flies’ legs, a piece of string, the head of a match. He had placed a notebook beside him, and he noted his observations down in it. ‘Thursday 8 January 1945: pin. Jagged edges to the point.’

He had wrapped his feet in a rug to keep the draughts away. It was always draughty in the hall, because the fireplace sucked in air, and the kitchen door was ‘left open the whole time’, as Auntie complained. Those Ukrainian women, she said, could never learn to close doors. Eberhard had found them in the east. Did they want to come to the great, powerful country of Germany, he had asked them in their village, did they want to see Berlin, with its cinemas and U-Bahn? And then they had landed here at the Georgenhof.

Peter moved the tube of his instrument up and down, and from time to time he put a ginger biscuit in his mouth.

‘Well,’ said Auntie as she hurried through the hall, ‘working hard at your science, are you?’ The snow really ought to be swept away from the entrance, she thought, but it’s easier to do these things yourself than ask someone else. Besides, the boy was busily occupied, and who knew, maybe his passion for that instrument would bear fruit later. The university in Königsberg wasn’t far away, was it? If Peter had been hanging around doing nothing, that would have been different.

‘Leave him alone,’ Katharina had said when Auntie complained that he didn’t get out and about much.

When Peter had tired of the microscope, he stood at the window and watched the birds flying around at a loss because, once again, there was no food on the bird tables, and then he used his father’s binoculars to look into the distance, although he wasn’t really supposed to do that. The binoculars weren’t a toy, he had been told, and it showed if you touched the lenses with greasy fingers, let alone adjusted the focus. ‘Someone’s been at my binoculars again,’ von Globig would say when he came home — which was seldom enough — to the Georgenhof.

Peter looked over towards Mitkau, where the chimney of the brickworks could be seen next to the church tower. The school was closed because of the cold. ‘Cold holidays’ was a new expression. Young people could stay at home, but the Hitler Youth made sure that they were not idle. They had wanted to take Peter out of doors on a cold winter’s day to shovel snow away from the big Mitkau crossroads. But Peter was suffering from one of his chills, which meant that he couldn’t take part in that operation. ‘It’s his catarrh again,’ said the members of the household.

Cold and coughs, however, didn’t keep him from sliding down the little slope behind the house time and again on his toboggan. The sun was shining in front of the house, and it would have been even better to toboggan there, but he had been told not to because every now and then a car sped past.

He returned to his microscope. The dog Jago kept close to him, resting his muzzle on the boy’s right foot, and the cat lay on Jago’s coat.

What a wonderful picture, the household said, just see the cat lying on the big dog’s back!

‘What a delightful son you have,’ said the visitors from Mitkau who liked to come to Georgenhof, although it meant a walk of an hour and a half. ‘Such a pretty boy!’ They arrived with empty bags and left with full ones.

Dr Wagner, that confirmed bachelor, dropped in quite often. He was worried about the boy now that the monastery school was closed. When young people raced boisterously past him in its cloisters, he liked to buttonhole fair-haired Peter and ask, ‘Well, my boy? Has your father written home again?’ And now, with the school closed because of the cold weather, he was concerned for him.

In summer, when the weather was warm and fine, he and his third-year boys had gone strolling through the sea of golden grain crops and along the quiet little River Helge, which flowed through the countryside in great curves to left and right, willow trees growing beside it. The boys had stripped off their trousers and shirts and plunged into the dark water. Shouting at the tops of their voices, they would often run through the wood, ending up at the Georgenhof, where they were given strawberry-flavoured water and allowed to eat their sandwiches sitting on the grass in the park, like cheerful summer birds.

The schoolmaster would take his silver flute out of his pocket and play the tunes of folk songs, while Katharina listened from the house.

Now, in the cold winter of the sixth year of the war, Dr Wagner dropped in even more often than before, coming on foot in spite of the ice and snow, and he too was in the habit of arriving with an empty bag and going away with it full. He took apples home with him, or potatoes, and sometimes a swede, which in fact he paid for, because Auntie used to say, ‘It doesn’t grow for love.’ She reckoned that a swede was worth ten pfennigs.

He enjoyed sitting with Katharina for a while if she put in an appearance. He would have liked to take her hand, but he had no real excuse for that. Auntie made a lot of noise when he visited, pulling open drawers and closing them again with a bang. The message she meant to convey was: there’s always something to be done in a big household like this, even if it looks as if we’re just idling our days away.

So Wagner was a little concerned for the boy, as he put it. He went to Peter’s room with him and taught him things that had never been mentioned at school.

Binoculars and microscope? There was a little telescope in the physics lab of the monastery school. He could take it to the Georgenhof and look at the stars with the boy, couldn’t he? No one would notice that it was missing, and then surely he could return it when everything was over?

Dr Wagner concerned himself with the boy for love, or at least he didn’t ask fifty pfennigs for an hour’s tutoring. He was happy with a few potatoes or half a head of cabbage.

One dark evening the front doorbell rang. The man who had rung it was getting on in years, wore an unusual cap and walked on two crutches.

Vladimir, using his electric torch, had already spotted him wandering round the yard in the darkness, and the two Ukrainian women had stopped what they were doing to look out of the kitchen window, wondering who was approaching the house.

Jago had got to his feet, barking once or twice, and now the stranger stood in the doorway. The bell rang once more, and Katharina opened the door to him. Next moment the man was stalking past her and into the hall on his crutches, swinging his legs back and forth, accompanied at every step by Jago. He wore a green rustic jacket, with side pockets set at a slant, and black ear muffs. The ear flaps of his cap were held together with a looped piece of twine on top of his head. He had a leather strap round his body, and a heavy briefcase resembling an accordion hung from it.