Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

It seemed to her incredible that the Russians could be interested in such an insignificant town as Mitkau. This was the back of beyond. And how was such a little place to be defended? She couldn’t see what there was here to defend. The two women knew nothing about the ammunition depots along the Helge. Nor did they know that substitute units of the National Socialist Motor Corps were camping in the Forest Lodge.

Above the radio hung a photograph of Franz, her friend’s husband, an attractive lieutenant, his cap with the lieutenant’s cord round it sitting jauntily on his head. The radio was French; he had brought it back from France in the hot summer of 1940, and it was elegantly curved. It had a streamlined look, and was far more stylish than any German radio set.

One day you’ll be back with me again,

One day you’ll be true to me again …

Both women sighed repeatedly at the slow foxtrot being played. Felicitas put a shovelful of coke into the stove and stirred up the embers. Perhaps Franz would be standing at the door some day? Who could tell? He was in that wretched dump Graudenz, in a fortress where he had to deal with German shirkers and deserters. ‘They’ll all be shot, of course,’ he had said. Felicitas could have visited him, but in a place like that where there wasn’t even a cinema?

As for Eberhard in Italy … nothing could happen to him there. ‘You’re lucky,’ said Felicitas, and Katharina sighed deeply. Yes, she was really lucky.

The doorbell rang, and a girl came in. She saluted, Heil Hitler, bobbed a curtsy and asked if she could help with anything. Her hands were blue with cold. ‘Oh, it’s lovely and warm in here …’

The girl belonged to the ‘Help for Mothers-to-Be’ organization set up by the Party. Boys were sent to shovel snow and keep the main road clear; girls were to lend a hand to pregnant women.

Yes, she could fetch a bucket of coke, and here were the ration cards; could she buy bread, butter and sausage, and she was to count the change and make sure the shop didn’t cut too much off the coupons.

Katharina said she had just been to see the mayor, but when she was about to say more her friend put a finger to her lips: ssh! She had a refugee family from Lithuania in the next room, on the other side of the sliding door, a woman and three children, and they were eavesdroppers! Lower-class people who had recently made themselves at home in the kitchen as well, using the good china and putting it away all anyhow.

‘And you should see the loo!’

Their presence here, making themselves at home, treating the china roughly and failing to keep the lavatory clean, was all to do with the ‘community of nations’. One must observe that, naturally, but not in a way like this. Felicitas suspected that these people had never used a proper toilet before. No doubt in the east they had a little shed outdoors.

At this moment the sirens howled. Felicitas put her hand to her belly and said, ‘Oh, how it goes through one!’ Would it be bad for the baby?

They both stood up at once, switched off the radio, covered up the canary, opened the window just a crack. ‘We can’t even talk in peace for a few minutes!’

The air-raid shelter in the cellar smelt of potatoes. It was a vaulted cellar; in earlier centuries the house had belonged to the Senthagener Tor, and in the past people under arrest had been put in here, vagrants and those who couldn’t show any papers, dubious characters who had to be expelled from the town to take themselves somewhere else.

The rest of the household had already gathered in the cellar, the fat refugee woman with her screaming children — a group reminiscent of the work of the illustrator Heinrich Zille — a sick young man and a miserable old woman.

The French prisoners were crowding into the cellar as well. For them, it was a welcome opportunity to take time off work. The non-commissioned officer grumbled a bit that it wasn’t really right, but he wasn’t so keen on standing out in the snow himself, so they sat down and thawed out a bit.

The other prisoners, the ones in striped uniforms, had to stay outside.

The Frenchmen looked at the two women. So elegant, so ladylike? And the women tried to dredge up their French vocabulary. They knew how to say ‘Good day’ and ‘I love you’ in French, but that was all.

The refugee children looked at the prisoners with great interest, and were soon crowding round them. The brass buttons on their uniforms … The men put the children on their laps, which wasn’t really right.

Did these Frenchmen have any idea that Napoleon had forced the people here to pay war contributions, and used St Mary’s Church as a stable?

The sick young man sitting in the corner would probably have liked to stroke the children’s hair as well, and he could have talked French to the Frenchmen. But was he to tell them that better times were coming? They knew that for themselves.

The non-commissioned officer’s nose was dripping. He was absorbed in his own thoughts.

After the all clear went, there was tumult outside. The young man had gone out to the prisoners in striped uniforms and given them bread. This was intolerable! Did he know, he was asked, that they had committed serious offences? But for the presence of the Frenchmen it could have been a bad business.

Before Katharina went home she had to deliver a third hare, which was for the pastor. Eberhard had said so in writing. ‘Don’t forget the pastor; who knows what we may yet need him for?’

The pastor, whose name was Brahms, was a doctrinarian who sometimes, when something like extra sausage was being considered, unexpectedly came out with very old-fashioned principles. When Elfriede died, in the winter of the scarlet fever, he had objected to a grave for her in the forest. And it had been difficult to make him change his mind. A solitary cross? A grave mound overgrown with flowers in the middle of the forest?

‘It will soon be forgotten,’ he had said. And, ‘In death we are all equal,’ and other such things. Lothar Sarkander had intervened and had made it possible.

When the German soldiers went to Poland in 1939, there had been some idea of Brahms giving them a blessing in a little service. Or at least those of them who wanted it. The organist had already looked out some sheet music.

No, that was not something he could do, the pastor had said. There was no provision for an ecclesiastical occasion of that kind in the evangelical state church, and he was not minded to strike out on his own. Someone would have had to make up a special liturgy for it.

It had been rather bold to say such a thing. Even the Party had asked about it. But no one really bore him a grudge. The church was the church and Pastor Brahms was thought of as fractious, and a fractious person was somehow very German. ‘Here stand I, I can do no other …’ Sarkander had pointed out that Martin Luther had also been a fractious man.

Katharina rang the doorbell of the parsonage and gave the pastor the hare, with a kind of bobbed curtsy. ‘So here you are again for once?’ said Brahms, feeling the dead hare with his thumbs and barely saying ‘Thank you.’ He had so much to do, he said, he was afraid he couldn’t ask her in. Did she know that seven more men from Mitkau had fallen this week? He was sitting with their womenfolk, and there was no comfort. ‘Only yesterday … but it’s no use.’ And then there was the additional burden of the old people in the monastery. How long, he wondered, would all this go on? These were intolerable circumstances.

Katharina went over to the church.

It was certainly icy cold inside, and Katharina didn’t stay long. From the Globigs’ traditional pew, which was usually empty, she had a good view of a likeness of Jonah which, as if miraculously, had survived Protestant iconoclasm. Jonah and the whale, an old fifteenth-century carving with some gilt still left on it. She had always liked Jonah’s cheerful face as he waved a last goodbye to the whale. Eighteen side altars had suffered at the hands of the iconoclasts, hacked to pieces and burnt, and then the main altar had been unceremoniously chopped up for firewood by the French later. Only cheerful Jonah and his whale had survived. Not even the French had done anything to him.