Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

Did he really think, asked Auntie when they were down in the hall again, that the Russians might come to Mitkau?

‘Ah, well,’ said the painter, laughing, no, he didn’t think so, but all those tanks being sent out to ward them off — the Nazis wouldn’t be doing it for no reason at all.

It sounded as if he were really saying: yes, they might come.

‘Our men will throw them straight back to the Urals.’

The wind had died down, and the sun was shining strongly; thawing ice even dripped off the branches. He stepped out into the fresh air. I must be gone, I cannot stay, he said, quoting a folk song, and he immediately began sketching the battered finial in the shape of a spiked mace over the pediment. The oak and the tree house in it, the crooked door in the crumbling wall. He drew the castle that wasn’t a castle so that it was framed by the crooked door. And the spiked mace, of the morning-star type, was at the very top, in the middle.

After that he drew the two Ukrainian women as they hurried off to the Forest Lodge to tell their friends about him, scarves wrapped round their head and shoulders. Vladimir was making a rope in a leisurely way. He had tied one end to the stable door and was working along its length, with strings hanging from his belt, as he worked them in.

Peter watched the artist recording all this for posterity. A pity he’d be taking the pictures away with him.

How lovely shines the morning star … he asked Peter if he knew that hymn. Kindly, dearly … The morning star is Venus. Sometimes you can see the planets in daylight, but in the evening Venus is the evening star. O thou, my gracious evening star , as the Young Pilgrims sing in Tannhäuser . Venus, yes …

Those who got hit on the head in the Middle Ages by the morning-star kind of spiked mace no doubt saw stars of a very different kind.

Finally the artist said, ‘I’m off, then, my friend’, and put away his sketch pad. He stopped one of the carts jolting by and went off.

Where had he come from? Where would he end up? It didn’t matter. The main thing was, he was going away.

Peter was cross with himself; he wished he had told the artist about the ruins in the wood. The columns that had fallen over backwards would surely have interested the man. And now they were lost from the records for ever.

Maybe he would also have been interested in Peter’s little sister’s lonely grave in the woods? But Peter didn’t think about that any more, no one did.

*

Auntie stood by the telephone. Should she or should she not? Could a man be allowed to travel the country stirring up discord? Calling Adolf Hitler ‘that fellow’? Oughtn’t everyone to be united behind the Führer? Particularly now.

Who did you call when everyone was to unite? Who was responsible? The Gestapo or the Criminal Investigation Department of the police force?

What was the Gestapo’s phone number? The number of the police force was in the phone book. Would a call like that be handled discreetly? Would she have to appear in court?

The man was certainly over the hills and far away by now.

Perhaps she could ask Drygalski for advice, or Herr Serkander?

Katharina was sitting in her little room. Why did I go to see the pastor, she wondered, as if the devil were after me? The idea of taking in a total stranger! Then again, why didn’t I just say no? If only Eberhard had been here, if she could have asked him …

She went back and forth through the argument in her head hour after hour. And other fears were added to these new ones: that daring visit to the seaside with Sarkander, the trip that had never become publicly known. Were there people who had some idea about it? Eberhard hadn’t heard of it. Or had he? Had someone told him? There had been a certain coldness between them. Something had been lost.

Oh dear, is all our happiness gone?

She couldn’t really picture the man whom the pastor had said she might be asked to shelter here. Maybe young, maybe old? Shabby in appearance, or with a pistol in his hand?

Very interesting, really. Who would have thought of having an experience like that? What strange times these were.

*

He could sleep in the cubbyhole off her room. She pushed the chest aside, opened the little door, stuffed all sorts of cushions and blankets inside and tried out the bed. Crawled in on all fours. It smelt of tobacco and chocolate in there.

Or perhaps the idea would fall through. Brahms might call and say: It’s all over, dear lady, the man’s already been captured. Or: We’ve thought of another solution.

She thought of the man she would be asked to shelter as a little like the painter downstairs. Small, sharp-witted, something of a scamp. Or was he a skeleton with dysentery?

No, she told herself, I won’t let myself in for this.

She listened for sounds down below in the house. The man seemed to have left. She wouldn’t have wanted him breaking into her boudoir here like some kind of art expert! Perhaps he would have admired the Crouching Woman ?

She leafed through the album of silhouettes. What a good thing she hadn’t shown him that; the man would probably have made derogatory remarks. She did those little pictures just for her own pleasure, and they were nothing to do with anyone else. But just suppose she had?

That picture the man had drawn of her, with the dustpan in front of her face? She’d have liked to see it, but now it was too late. Maybe that was the last time, she thought.

She took the shavings of wood and put them in the stove. The fire had gone out; she’d have to relight it.

Drygalski had once kept a shop, Groceries and General Stores, but the international economic crisis had finished him, and his shop had gone under the hammer, leaving him out on the street with his wife and family. He had gone hither and thither looking for work, hat in hand. Southern Germany, western Germany — no luck at all in Cologne, Görlitz, Bremerhaven, and then he had felt impelled to return to his original home, the beautiful province of East Prussia, where, as he put it, his cradle used to stand.

And it was there that the National Socialist Party had taken him on. He had found a berth in the Regional Homestead Office of the German Labour Front, the Party’s own trade union organization, which replaced all former trade unions. He became head trustee of the local Labour Front, and made much of that title.

‘I’m head trustee now,’ he told his wife at the time, and she had breathed a sigh of relief. Things were looking up at last.

Head Trustee Drygalski of the Regional Homestead Office, Mitkau Branch, unemployed for a long time but now in a permanent position. He wore brown jackboots and a little moustache like Hitler’s. The family’s poverty-stricken existence had ended when the National Socialists came to power. There were still boxes full of exercise books and erasers in the attic of his house on the estate, and crates containing soap powder, nail brushes and floor-cloths from the bankrupt stock of his shop.

‘What does he think he looks like?’ said the Globigs, laughing behind the net curtains when he came down the road. ‘Oh, do look, here he is again!’ He strode along as if he had to carry a storm-tossed banner against the enemy, forging his way uphill through wind and weather, and the Globigs sat behind their net curtains laughing, and said he was a real bigwig.

It was Drygalski’s great grief that he didn’t have the aristocratic particle von in front of his surname. None of the research he carried out into his forebears showed that he was related in any way to the German polar scientist Erich von Drygalski, who had spent months in the Arctic, measuring the thickness of the ice and the direction of the wind. He had sent letters again and again to the scientist in Munich — it was only a small step from ‘Drygalski’ to ‘von Drygalski’ — might such a connection not be possible? None of his letters had been answered. Even a request to the Munich Regional Homestead Office for aid had borne no fruit, and there was no trace of a relationship in church registers either.