Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

Vladimir chopped wood and the Ukrainian maids sang. Auntie hung up the sausages in the larder in order of size. ‘There’ll be fewer and fewer,’ she said out loud. ‘And the apples must be turned or they’ll get rotten places on them.’

Then Dr Wagner dropped in, knocked the snow off his shoes, said ‘Good day’ and commandeered Peter. ‘Irregular verbs today, my boy,’ he said. ‘Come along upstairs with me.’Dr Wagner could have used some apples, but no one offered him any this time. ‘What are those peacock feathers doing?’ he asked. ‘Dear lady, don’t you know they bring bad luck?’ Katharina threw them away at once.

She climbed the stairs, stopped outside her door and listened. All was still. And when she was about to unlock the door, she re alized that it wasn’t locked, only latched!

Her guest was standing right in front of her, by the stove. He had been turning his jacket pockets inside out and knocking the dust out of them into the coal scuttle.

‘Are you afraid?’ he whispered.

He seemed slightly embarrassed. He was short but well made, with the coarse black stubble of a wiry beard on his chin. Pale. A Jew? He was not what Katharina had expected a Jew to look like; this man didn’t resemble the phenotypical Jews in the caricatures. Black hair, and the nice lines round his eyes — were they twinkling at her? Encouraging her to cheer up. What was going to happen? Or was he thinking of something else? When he had turned out his jacket pockets, it was his trouser pockets next. Then he said, ‘It will soon be over,’ as if he had to comfort her.

No, she wasn’t just afraid — she was terrified to the bone! Leaving the door unlocked. Why? So as not to lock him in?

He’d hardly slept at all, he said, not a wink, because of the aromas in the cubbyhole. Chocolate, tobacco! He supposed it was some kind of treasury. It reminded him of his aunt’s general stores with the bell inside the shop door.

And now, at last, he could wash. At this time of day no one would notice the sound of running water; it could have been Katharina. He spent ages washing, and then shaved with Eberhard’s razor.

Katharina found one of Eberhard’s shirts, woollen underpants and socks, and handed them round the bathroom door to him. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘clean underwear!’ She gave him the pullover that Eberhard wore for gardening, too, with EvG embroidered on it.

Washed, clean and freshly shaven, he finally sat down at the table. Bread, eggs, butter and sausage. Such delicacies, he said, he could hardly even remember what they were called. He ate it all, chewing sometimes on one side of his mouth, sometimes on the other, and showed Katharina his teeth — ‘Here, at the back on the left!’ — he had pulled the molar out himself.

*

His long sleep, the food, his shaven face. There was only the hair growing wildly in the nape of his neck. Katharina wondered whether she should cut it for him.

He kept helping himself to the ‘delicacies’, as he called them. ‘Such delicacies!’ They lived in the lap of luxury here! ‘I don’t suppose there’s anything hot I could have?’

Pastor Brahms, he told her, hadn’t even let him rinse his fingers. A piece of bread put into his hand, and off he had to go. ‘No one in Germany thinks of anyone but himself, it’s egotism writ large. He wouldn’t even shake hands with me.’

Then he told her about all his escapes, going from hiding place to hiding place, for in Germany everyone thought only of himself. More out of fear, he added, than love of the fatherland. And he began whispering his stories again, his firstly, secondly, thirdly.

Before long the man was telling her about terrible things far to the east, and Katharina heard these incredible tales for the first time, in every detail. She knew nothing about those operations, people being taken away, transports. Or did she? Hadn’t Felicitas dropped hints; mysterious stories that she hadn’t really understood?

And Eberhard, on his last leave, telling her to be sensible? He had been in the Latvian city of Libau, and he knew about things that had happened there; Katharina was to keep it all to herself, for heaven’s sake.

Things that you couldn’t even imagine.

‘I’m glad that the administrative centre there has been closed down,’ Eberhard had said, even though the place was flowing with milk and honey.

The stranger kept telling her about such things, and meanwhile he looked out of the window and listened at the door.

He had marked places on the floorboards which didn’t creak, and he walked up and down with great strides as if he were stepping over large puddles, while he ran through the misfortunes of his life. His narrative was like the way he moved from one floorboard to another, bit by bit, long or short, always carefully picking his way, and accompanying his progress by mime and gesture, as he went over all that had happened to him.

He had been all right in the old days. He had been a bookbinder, restoring damaged books in the state library, but they had fired him overnight. He had been able to do a little more work as best he could in a cellar, but that came to an end as well.

His wife and children. The archivist had come over to him one day and said, ‘I’m afraid it’s reached the point where we can’t keep you on any longer.’ Had put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Dear Herr Hirsch, we have nothing against you personally …’ And then he had given him another few days of work down in the cellar, but that was it. Fired overnight. He had had to give back his bookbinder’s tools.

Then he told the story, again and again, of all that had happened to him, telling it in short bursts, rhythmically, and his account had something anecdotal about it; it was shaped dramatically, with the aid of accents and effective gestures. He’d had enough of it, he told Katharina, looking her in the face, he’d absolutely had enough of it.

He told some of it twice or three times. Katharina had already heard this or that before.

Three years in different hiding places, and so on, and so on, sometimes weeks in one place, sometimes only days. Attics, cellars. And days on foot, walking from one part of a city to another. Sitting in the cinema. He told these stories over and over again, and he had noted clearly the different kinds of reception he got. Hard-hearted, unfeeling specimens of humanity …

His wife! His children!

Yes, thought Katharina, but there were also people who helped you, my friend. Meanwhile she listened — ssh! — to hear whether Auntie was busy in the attic overhead.

His wife. ‘Why did I have to go and marry a Jew?’ she had said, forgetting the good years, abusing him and complaining. She even talked about the Führer. And then she had left him, went away with the children and everything else. ‘I’ll have the sheet out from under you,’ she had said. ‘Why did I have to marry a Jew?’ And when he was going to caress the children, she had cried, ‘Don’t you touch them!’ They were half-Jews. It wasn’t so simple.

The boys had been dreadfully sad because they couldn’t join the Hitler Youth.

While Katharina was still wondering how she could have failed to lock the door, he kept saying he hadn’t slept a wink all night. The mice made him nervous, scurrying about, squeaking and scratching. He hadn’t dared to yawn for fear one might get into his mouth.

There was a hole in the roof where the icy wind blew through, and the gap was right above his head. Katharina handed him some knitting wool so that he could stop the gap up, but he proved very clumsy. ‘How do I do it?’ He could repair old sixteenth-century folio volumes, but not a gap in the roof. Katharina crawled into the cubbyhole herself and stopped up the hole. It wouldn’t have taken much for him to follow her.