Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

Drygalski had begun taking an interest in the wind and the weather himself; he had bought an anemometer, checked the temperature out of doors morning and evening, and tapped the barometer. In spite of the cold, he also wore his coat unbuttoned when he walked through the housing estate, letting it swing out behind him to show that he didn’t mind the icy temperature at all. Although he had splayed toes and flat feet, he thought: We’re a tough lot in this family. And when he met the foreign workers from the Forest Lodge, he drew air in sharply through his nose.

As head trustee of the German Labour Front on the Schlageter Settlement, he had been given a larger than usual corner property, Number 1 Ehrenstrasse, and now he felt responsible for the people who had moved there, for the young community beginning to form. The Albert Leo Schlageter Settlement — such a name pledged you to do what you could. He regularly went from house to house, collecting voluntary contributions for the Winter Aid organization — no one was to go cold and hungry — and he inspected the estate in summer to make sure that the gardens were free of weeds, and in winter to see whether snow had been swept away. Gates must be securely locked in the evening, not left open, wasn’t that so? Or what would the place look like? Snowmen are fun, yes, but who needs one in front of every house? After a while they hang their heads and collapse …

So he went on his rounds every day, even if the dogs barked at him from one fence to the next.

The position of head trustee and the house on the corner plot — the Drygalskis might have felt well off now, but since their son had lost his young life in Poland the house was terribly empty. As a child the boy had liked to watch his father slicing sausage, had crawled up and down stairs on all fours, and later had slid down the banisters. In the new house, here in the Settlement, he used to sit in his room for hours, looking thoughtfully into the distance. Sunsets aroused enraptured thoughts in him, and he put them down on paper in rhyme. One day it had been discovered that he was writing poetry, and he’d had his face slapped. And now it was very quiet upstairs. No one went into the young man’s room any more.

The Drygalskis’ parlour, furnished with large chairs and a round coffee table, was kept for best; you never knew who might drop in at No. 1. The District Leader himself had come to see them once. In his office, Drygalski had a roll-top desk, a table with a typewriter and telephone on it, and a much-used sofa stood in the kitchen that was also a sitting room. Smooth covers were stretched over the twin beds in the bedroom. A picture of the couple’s son, Egon Drygalski, hung above the beds. He had fallen in Poland, shot in the head as he stormed forward, and died at once. The picture had been copied by a comrade of his from his passport photograph, but the network of lines that had been drawn on the face to ensure that it bore some similarity to the dead man could still be seen; the artist hadn’t been able to erase them completely. An ancient bunch of sweet woodruff was wedged into the pinewood picture frame, and was dusted once a month. A crucifix hung beside the picture, his wife insisted on that.

Drygalski didn’t just make sure that all was well on the housing development; for years he had also been keeping the Globigs under observation. It was true that the centuries-old oaks of the Globig property warned the Schlageter Settlement, with its brand-new birch trees, to stay where it was, calling a halt to any further advance, as the mayor had said when laying the foundation stone of the Settlement, but what about that peculiar tree house in the branches of the oak, with sacks of some kind hanging out of it? And half a motorbike was balanced in front of the tree house, maybe even nailed to the trunk somehow? They let that boy have all the freedom he wanted; to be sure, he was a fair-haired Aryan, a real German boy, but he didn’t turn up to do his Hitler Youth service, and his mother seemed somehow disengaged from the world; she should be called to order as a matter of urgency, but she never showed her face. He had no opportunity to tell her his opinion of her.

When he thought how he had shown his son what was what. He’d been hard on him, so hard that his wife had often asked if it was really necessary. Their son would run upstairs, howling, shut himself in his room and sob.

*

‘Nothing matters to Frau von Globig,’ Drygalski told his wife. ‘She must get wind of things in advance. And just let me give her son a piece of my mind …’

Get wind of what things in advance? Since Herr Drygalski had been feeling better, his wife had been feeling worse, at first just hanging listlessly round the place — ‘Pull yourself together, Lisa’ — then lying down a good deal, and now bedridden. The doctor sometimes came with his bag, but he left shrugging his shoulders. Wasn’t there anything to be done for her?

His son fallen at the front, his wife pining away, and now rats in the cellar, if he read those tracks correctly.

The Georgenhof over there, ivy climbing all over it, and the crooked spiked-mace finial askew above the gable — what would the people who drove past think of it? On one side of the road the neat, clean housing development, roof beside roof, all set out in straight lines, and opposite it the manor house, once painted yellow but now overgrown with ivy, and with grass hanging out of the gutter.

The courtyard wall needed repairing again, too. Romanticism is all verywell and good, but a wall is a wall, and when there are cracks in it they have to be mended. And the implements that had been lying around for ever, a roller, harrows of some kind, all broken and decrepit. A rusty ploughshare — that symbol of a new era, rusty? And the yard gate hanging off a single hinge. If the gate stands open all the time, day and night, why does anyone need a wall?

He’d asked, Heil Hitler, couldn’t those tools be given away as old iron, melted down to make tanks and cannon, and Auntie had said, ‘We still need them all.’ Had even added, ‘What on earth are you thinking of?’

As for his own house, Drygalski kept it in good order. At least, if a door stuck, he repaired it at once. And he drew up a regular cropping plan every year for his garden behind the house: kohlrabi on the left, runner beans on the right. Fruit bushes along the fence; they needed pruning now. Nothing the matter but the rats. How to deal with them was still a puzzle.

There was something wrong with the gentry over the road. Putting out the swastika flag only when absolutely necessary, and then it was just a tiny little rag of a thing.

Drygalski kept looking over at the Georgenhof, the big house beyond the oak trees. It stood there like an island. When he was chopping wood behind his house he looked that way, or when he was feeding the rabbits. Even when he was getting his wife to drink soup he looked out of the window. She had been in bed for weeks, pale and suffering. He gave her oatmeal porridge, and had to be on the watch all the time in case she brought it up again. She hadn’t left her bed for months.

Yes, when Drygalski plumped up his wife’s pillows, he had a view of the grand property over there, the yellow house where Auntie sat at her window overlooking the road.

He could see the house and who went in and out of it from his desk, and when he telephoned, and from the kitchen stove as well. Even from the lavatory he could see it as he did up his trousers, and Auntie made sure to return his glances.

When Drygalski had to go into town he liked to take a short cut through the park, although it didn’t get him anywhere much, so he had made it a habit to trample round the manor house. A notice on a cracked board said NO ENTRY, but surely these people didn’t have the nerve to claim land for their sole use when they went walking for pleasure, did they? After all, the German forest was everyone’s property. And he blew his nose extra loud into the rhododendrons to right and left. In summer he had once seen the whole tribe of them here as he stood with his hands in his pockets. They were picnicking on a rug spread on the grass, drinking punch, the uncle from Albertsdorf, aunts and children dressed in white all over the place. They had waved to him as if to annoy him on purpose.