Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

At that moment the telephone rang. They both jumped at the same time. It rang so loudly. An uncanny sound! The man flinched back, and Katharina picked up the receiver quickly, in case Auntie came running. ‘What’s going on? Is everything all right?’

The call came from General Command in Königsberg. A strange voice asked if that was Frau von Globig. ‘You’re on the phone? Wait a moment, please, don’t hang up!’ Then there was a click on the line, and Katharina heard her husband asking, from very far away, ‘Is that you, Kathi? Can you hear me? Can you make out what I’m saying?’ He was sitting over a glass of wine in his quarters high above Lake Garda, looking at the starry sky — ‘Lake Garda, do you remember?’ It was the head of the battalion’s birthday … ‘Are you alone?’ Now, he said, she was to listen very carefully. ‘Pack your things at once and get away from there, understand? Get away, just leave everything … First thing tomorrow morning … The Russians are coming! You’d better go to Aunt Wilhelmine in Hamburg.’

And then the connection was broken.

‘That was my husband,’ said Katharina. ‘How odd, as if he guessed something.’ And then it all came pouring out of her: Eberhard, always so formal, wooden, cold … Things she had only felt, had never put into words, spilled out.

The stranger had turned pale, and he calmed down only gradually. ‘That was my husband, he’s in Italy,’ Katharina said.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘these things happen in a marriage.’ And whatever else he might have said, he kept it to himself.

Then he sat down at the table, and told all his own stories in a whisper: about Berlin, where he had spent months in hiding, and how he wanted to go and meet the Russians now. And Katharina gave him food and drink. Cold fried potatoes and blood sausage, which the man didn’t really like. Katharina gave him an apple too; he turned it in his hands a couple of times, smiled and bit into it.

He sat on the chair where Eberhard had always sat. But Eberhard had never looked as if he were anything but a temporary presence in the room, smoking a cigarette in his meerschaum holder until he had finished it.

He told her long stories, the stories of his whole life, and he told them in order, firstly, secondly, thirdly. He had probably often told them before. At last he stopped, and Katharina showed him the cubbyhole, explaining that he could hide in it. He tried out the hiding place, the blankets and the mattress in it. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘like being back in one’s mother’s womb!’ And he added, ‘It smells nice … there must be good things here.’ Then he lay down at once.

It would have been freezing, but for the chimney above the hearth against which he could nestle. And the padding of blankets and pillows. Katharina had also put a bedside light in the cubbyhole, although they would have to be careful that not a glimmer of light got out under the tiles of the roof.

He made himself comfortable, with the blankets wrapped round him, and when Katharina closed the door he said, ‘This reminds me of home. When we were children, we used to make ourselves caves in the bedclothes like this.’

Katharina lay down on her bed and listened. She could hear the pulse beating in her temples.

Then he turned in the cubbyhole and cleared his throat.

When at last all was quiet, she thought of Eberhard. Get away, just leave everything, he had said, and she was to go first thing tomorrow. How did he imagine she could do that? How could she just get up and go?

‘Are you alone?’ he had asked.

And the man in his hiding place thought of the dark days ahead of him. Really, there was no chance that he could make it.

I hope the end comes quickly, he thought.

It was a long time before the man crawled out of his cave next morning. Katharina sat in her armchair and listened, but there wasn’t a sound from the cubbyhole. Now and then she thought he might be moving and turning over, and sometimes she heard his heavy breathing.

She took her jewel box out of her bedside locker and tried on rings. Should she wear her pearl necklace? She took off the locket that she usually wore all the time.

Switch on the radio? Better not; it would wake him. Or if he was already awake it would bring him out of his cave. Then he would be sitting here, and what was she going to do with him then?

All the long day ahead.

She leafed through an old magazine and listened.

The household was used to her reclusive existence. ‘She’s always sitting up there.’ Now and then Auntie said she had two left hands, and didn’t see work when it was staring her in the face. So it could happen that people never thought of her when there was something to be done. But now Katharina thought: I could lend a hand downstairs. She put the magazine down and stood up.

She wrote a note: ‘Please be very quiet! I’ll be back soon,’ and left it outside the door of the cubbyhole. Then she left quickly, without a sound, in case he emerged from his cave and called out, ‘Stop!’ Perhaps he would be glad to be alone?

She came back once to close the bedside locker where she kept her jewellery, and went downstairs.

It was cold in the hall. The windows were open and Sonya was cleaning the room. Peter was sitting at the table looking through the microscope. He had put a drop of the water in which he had steeped hay under the lens and was looking for any kind of movement in it, but so far all was still and silent. The world had not been created yet, however much he turned the tube. He asked Sonya, who had done her hair in a braid wreathed round her head, to look through it too, but no, she couldn’t see anything either.

‘We have much bigger microscopes than that in the Ukraine,’ she said as she went out.

Katharina wandered from room to room.

In the billiards room, which was cold, there were three balls lying on the table. She flicked one of them, and it rolled back from the side of the table and disappeared down a pocket.

She thought of putting away the china. The plates were all jumbled up against each other; she didn’t see what to do about that.

The silver — she counted the teaspoons, and how strange, there were three too few. All of them neatly embedded in velvet side by side, but not the complete set! Surely she had bought china and cutlery for twenty-four guests at the shop in Tauentzienstrasse?

At this point Auntie joined her, and when she saw Katharina busy with the box of cutlery she cried, ‘What are you doing here? What’s the idea?’ and took the box away from her.

‘Some of the teaspoons missing?’ She couldn’t account for it either, but it was easy to lose small spoons like that; they could get swept into the rubbish bucket along with sauerkraut left on the side of the plate … Maybe they were still somewhere in the kitchen?

Or perhaps the maids had gone off with them? But no, probably not; they must expect to be supervised.

Then she looked at Katharina and said, ‘Why, you look like Faith, Hope and Charity — as if you’d danced the night away …’

The peacock had died in the night. He had fallen off his perch and was lying on the floor. ‘Shall I pull out some of his tail feathers? They’d make pretty decorations,’ said Auntie.

And something else was new as well. ‘Guess what — Drygalski has taken to peering in through the windows!’ She had seen a trail of footsteps, said Auntie, leading from the path trodden in the snow to the drawing room. He had obviously been in the park and climbed up to the terrace — the trail was clearly visible. ‘I swept it away at once, of course. One of these days he’ll be climbing right up to your window.’

Katharina put her hand to her head. His footsteps in the snow! To think that hadn’t occurred to her.