Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

where darkness through the thicket broke,

with countless sombre, baleful eyes.

For her to hide him, he would have to cross the hall — and that would be out of the question. Go up the creaking staircase? Past Auntie’s room? Auntie was always on the watch. What about Jago the dog?

Going through the kitchen wouldn’t work, and in any case he’d have to pass the hall and the suspicious Jago, and then climb the creaking stairs. The more carefully you tried to slink up them the louder they would creak, the more secretly you went about it the more boisterous the dog would be.

The only possible way was to start from the park, scale the fence for the climbing roses, get into her conservatory and then into her room.

Perhaps he was an old man, and wouldn’t make it here anyway. Then she’d be sorry, but it would be the doing of a higher power.

As evening drew in she put her white Persian lamb cap on and drove to Mitkau. She would have to speak to Brahms and see if the whole thing couldn’t be called off at the last minute.

She took Dr Wagner with her. He held the little can of sausage broth between his knees. He looked sideways at her and was glad to see how boldly she handled the reins.

Like a white hand, the aurora borealis felt its way across the sky — whoosh — and an unusual roll of thunder could be heard. A winter thunderstorm?

A poem by Eichendorff went through Wagner’s head as he sat beside the beautiful woman, holding his can of sausage broth in both hands.

Katharina had to show her identity card at the Senthagener Tor, and was asked what she wanted to do in the town. ‘Ah, Frau von Globig. And who’s this gentleman? Oh yes, Dr Wagner.’

A wooden barrier was pushed aside and she drove through the echoing gateway.

*

An icy wind swept clouds of snow ahead of it down the streets. Katharina thought: I could still go back. Just turn round and get into bed at home, hear nothing, see nothing. I could simply not go to see the pastor, he would wait and wait and then give up and tell himself: The lady changed her mind.

Her warm room, the books, the radio … Why let herself in for daring ventures that were nothing to do with her?

She dropped the teacher in Horst-Wessel-Strasse, held his hand just a moment too long — he might take it for a budding interest in him. And then she tugged the bell pull of the parsonage, where Pastor Brahms was already waiting for her, his watch in his hand. The black bulk of the church stood next to the parsonage, where a load of snow was sliding off the roof.

He greeted her, looking up and down the road at the same time; a guest so late, with a horse and carriage! What would the neighbours think?

He asked her in, shaking her hand with one of his own and leading her in with the other — leading her into his dark, stuffy study.

There was a copying machine beside the wall; he had just been turning its handle.

Almost immediately he explained it all to her again in detail. Explained what it was about. It was a case of conveying a human being on the run, escaping pursuers, from one hiding place to another. It was a case of taking in an entirely unknown person of the male sex whose fate, fundamentally, was nothing to do with her. Goodness knew what he was supposed to have done.

It was a question of giving shelter, for a single night, to a human being who couldn’t show his face at an inn. For just one night, so really only for a few hours, that was what it was about. And this was the night.

Did Pastor Brahms know whether the man was something to do with the July plot, or a deserter? Or maybe even a communist, a man who had once broken the windows of the capitalist class and blasphemed against Our Redeemer? One of the Red Front? — Or a Jew? There were fugitives all over the country, passing through towns and forests, staying briefly in old factories and garden summerhouses, crouching in cellars and attics.

His informants had said, ‘For God’s sake help the man.’ That was all, even Pastor Brahms knew no more. He too would be seeing the stranger for the first time tonight. And next morning the stranger would be sent on again somewhere else.

But nothing would be the same as before.

Be that as it might, she noticed a certain callous streak in the pastor. Katharina gave him a small sausage. He immediately cut a piece off it with his penknife and pushed it behind his gums like chewing tobacco. They were sitting in his dark study, the clock on the wall struck, and on the table lay a commentary on the Revelation of St John: I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending. Pastor Brahms was preparing a cycle of sermons on the end of time for the old people in the monastery; he preached on a different apocalyptic chapter every evening. ‘And the heaven will open like a book …’ The old, sick people there, brought from somewhere in the east, barely able to understand German, now side by side in the cold monastery; they had seen better days. Now they lay in the refectory, with the gentle curve of its vaulted ceiling above them, and the blue and gold stars in the vault.

Day after day he was preaching to the old people about the Day of Judgement, when all time ends and we go to the right or the left hand of God, and only then would it be seen who was found wanting and who would stand the test. To think that so many would be cast out into the fiery lake.

He said to Katharina, seeing her tremble and hesitate, ‘It must be done, and today.’

What kind of a man would he be, she wondered, and would it be dangerous? Aren’t there laws of some kind? And then there was her husband, what would he say when he found out that she was giving shelter to someone, to a man ? In her room? Was he an officer, anyway? And was it really to be today?

‘Listen,’ said the pastor. ‘Yes, it must be so.’

After she had said everything she was feeling, she suddenly added, ‘Yes.’ She was impelled to say yes, something in her said it. She would do it, take the man in, in God’s name, and for a few seconds she became another person. Or perhaps she said yes only to get out of that dark room where the pastor sat in front of her, chewing her sausage.

He drew back the curtain over the darkened window and peered into the yard, penknife in hand, through a crack in the blackout material. He put his forefinger to his lips: a visit from Frau von Globig, who never usually came here, at this late hour? What would the neighbourhood think? Weren’t the neighbours already on the watch? — Brahms had known there to be someone crouching beside the water butt in the yard to listen in on what he had to discuss with the members of his congregation. But surely no one would think of crouching in the yard at this time of night, when the temperature was fifteen degrees below zero.

‘All right.’ The pastor took out his handkerchief and blew his nose loudly. So now this woman joined the roster of those who were to save a human life. That life would be handed on from one of them to another. And it would be done this very night.

How people can rise above themselves. He’d preach a sermon about that one day. Not yet, but the hour would come, and it would come soon, when he could announce that fact. When he could free himself of fear for his own life, like Abraham freeing the ram from the thicket.

Then they came to what he called the procedere . How and where was the man to be hidden?

Although Katharina had just said yes, listening to herself and not quite clear what it meant, it turned out that she had a good idea of how to smuggle a man into the manor house and hide him there, in spite of Auntie, the boy and the dog Jago. The Pole and the two Ukrainian girls mustn’t notice anything either, and of course on no account must Herr Drygalski, that snoop who went tramping round the house almost every day, looking up to check the blackout at the windows.