Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

Peter was now looking at his own eye, reflected larger than life by the little mirror in the lens. ‘You can see your own eye!’ cried the boy. And when he wanted to show her how you could see your own eye looking huge through the microscope, she cried out, ‘No!’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked Auntie. ‘Why are you so touchy?’ And she got Peter to show her how you could see your own eye looking at you, looking straight back at you with a serious expression.

Katharina closed the window and sat down with the little cupboard, the photographs that stood on it and the cups. Was she supposed to throw all that away, break it? Wasn’t this where Eberhard always used to keep his meerschaum cigarette holder? She’d soon come upon it again … She took out Eberhard’s letters and sorted them into consecutive order. She didn’t read them, she knew every line; she skimmed them, but occasional words jumped off the page at her. And their life together ran swiftly before her mind’s eye. The early years, and how he had made life in the country pleasant for her. ‘You should see this!’ and so on, that was his style. She noticed how his handwriting changed in those few years from a childish hand to the writing of a man.

She remembered his habit of reading through letters for the last time when he had written them and correcting characters that he had set down too quickly. The dot of an ‘i’ here, the loop under a ‘g’ there, with his little finger crooked to one side. As if he had to approve what he had written. ‘And behold, it was very good.’

Nothing was good. The English steel shares, the Romanian rice-flour factory — all the money was gone. So was the land. And a general would be driving around in their fine Wanderer car now.

It was like the Hans Christian Andersen story: ‘Oh, my dearest Augustin, all’s gone, gone, gone.’

All the same, somehow she felt: thank God. How could all those businesses have been run now? She hadn’t the faintest idea.

She listened for any sounds upstairs. Suppose the stranger, entirely misunderstanding the situation, were to open the door of her room and appear at the top of the stairs? He hadn’t thought of the footprints either.

She must be more careful.

‘I felt a hot thrill of alarm run down my spine,’ that was how she would tell the story later. ‘The man hadn’t even removed his trail after him!’

Later, when it was all over.

*

Among the letters she found postcards from Berlin, the Olympic Games of 1936. Eberhard had gone on his own because of the horses, and she had ventured on that trip to the seaside with Lothar Sarkander. The Isabelle Hotel. They had gone for a long walk up and down the beach. He had held her hand, which he shouldn’t really have done, and it was late.

She put the postcards with the letters. ‘It’s a pity you can’t be here too,’ Eberhard had written from Berlin.

Should she write to him now? Everything all right here? It’s all fine here. Guess what, the peacock has died. Or should she phone Sarkander, remind him of that one lovely day? He had been so different from Eberhard.

No, it was a tacit agreement between them; that day would not be mentioned.

Auntie came in again with a handful of peacock feathers. She stuck them behind the ancestral portraits. Better like that or like this?

She offered Katharina one for her apartment upstairs. ‘This is the best one, shall I take it up for you?’

And once again Katharina cried, ‘No!’ louder than necessary.

Didn’t peacock feathers bring bad luck? She remembered old Globig, who had always thought so much of that bird, and how, when Eberhard had introduced her to his father as his brand-new bride, he had always embraced her in a special way in the evening. And later, when he was confined to his bed, he would reach for her.

Katharina did the letters up in a bundle and put them in the little cabinet. She joined the maids in the kitchen and watched them, much to their surprise; they weren’t used to having her come into the kitchen and watch them at work. Sonya was stirring a pan of soup, Vera was ironing the laundry.

Three teaspoons missing? Should there be a search? Should the cottage be turned upside down? But surely it all came to the same thing in the end.

Should the police be called?

The maids felt awkward when Katharina was with them, and tried to get her to go away.

Katharina herself didn’t know what she was doing in the kitchen, either.

She thought of the man upstairs.

I’ll grit my teeth, thought Katharina. After all, it was only for this one day. He would be going back to Mitkau in the night, and Pastor Brahms would send him on somewhere else. She had to get through the day and half a night.

‘The worst of it was,’ she would tell Felicitas later, ‘that I couldn’t tell a soul about it. No one was to know.’ How surprised Uncle Josef would be, and the cousin in Berlin!

It was all rather exciting really.

Now the Ukrainian maids were beginning to sing in their high voices. What on earth was that song? Was it calling on freedom fighters? No, they were singing:

One of the ancient lays

Leaves me so sad at heart.

A legend of bygone days

From my mind will not depart.

Heinrich Heine; she had learnt that song herself at school.

Eberhard had found the two girls on his last leave, telling them they were to support his wife, but they’d have done that anyway, because Katharina was a gentle soul. There had never been a quarrel, she had given the maids clothes that she didn’t wear any more, and she sometimes gave Vladimir the Pole tobacco.

The slaps that Eberhard gave the maids in their first year were another matter. ‘You have to be strict with these people from the start,’ he had said, and she was sure they had not forgotten it. Yet the maids had come of their own free will, so why slap them? At the time he had thought he must take a firm line, that was it.

Vladimir was standing in the yard chopping wood. He had been chopping wood for weeks on end, and stacking it up neatly like a rampart.

He still wore his military coat and square cap. A letter was embroidered on his jacket: P for Pole. White on a purple background.

He had been there when the Russians invaded Poland in 1939, and the Soviet soldiers had picked him up to transport him elsewhere. A woman neighbour had given him away; without a word, she had pointed to the cellar to show them that a Polish soldier was hiding there. At the last minute, however, he had managed to get away, and then he had ended up in German hands. A German motorbike had been coming towards him, and the men on it had taken him to the nearest prison camp.

Vladimir would have liked to tell people how the Russians had driven his comrades into a pit and shot them there, but he kept that to himself. He had once told the Czech in the Forest Lodge, and it had been a very bad idea. Since then he and the Czech had been at daggers drawn.

He had been given the job of distributing food in the German prison camp, and then he had gone to the Globigs, and he immediately found himself the man in charge of the yard. Eberhard had not slapped him about.

Vladimir did his work, and all was well.

He had a pair of glasses mended with sticking plaster which he put on when he wanted to read the Bible, for Vladimir was a devout man. Now and then the priest looked in and talked to him; they whispered behind the stable door. Once the priest had brought him a letter from Poland. Yes, his family were still alive, just across the border, but out of reach.

For days Vladimir had been reinforcing the big cart with planks. He had realized that they would soon be on the road.The Russians had been driven out of the East Prussian governmental district of Gumbinnen last autumn only with difficulty; that was sixty kilometres away as the crow flies. The terrible pictures of the massacre there for which they were responsible had been in all the newspapers. And that had been only a prelude; they would be back.