Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

He wanted to see the cellar, did he? It dated from 1605. There was nothing to be done with the cellar, where water stood ankle-deep. It should have been possible to drain it long ago. Grudging hospitality if ever he’d seen it! That was the aristocracy for you.

He was still standing in the hall, beside the suitcases packed ready to leave, and the rumbling rose and fell again. He thought of his own wife, and what to do about her when it all got really serious. There was the Globigs’ farm cart standing in the yard — couldn’t a bedstead be loaded up on a cart like that for his wife? It was enormous! A few crates and boxes could be taken off to make space. After all, human beings came first, didn’t they?

*

When Drygalski finally left — Heil Hitler! — the whole household heaved a sigh of relief. He said that when Peter was better and the swelling of his tonsils had gone down he must report to the Hitler Youth, and ‘right away’ at that.

The dog Jago curled up again, although his ears were pricked, and Auntie bent over her suitcases — really, nothing was easy — and only then took them back upstairs to her room.

Katharina shut herself up in her apartment. Only once she had locked the door behind her did her hair stand on end. ‘It was all hanging by a thread,’ she said out loud. Suppose Drygalski had come a day earlier and found the Jew here! Then it all would have been up for her. What providence that the man had moved on in the night. He had left even before the sounds from the front began. Where was he now? she wondered. Might he, in the end, come back again? Flung back by the rampart of fire as if by a hedge full of thorns.

She threw herself on her bed.

The daring venture was over. Or would there be a sequel? Would something of it cling to her?

Katharina took her tube of tablets off the bedside table. She swallowed one, and soon she felt all right.

‘It was all hanging by a thread.’

At that moment Uncle Josef telephoned from Albertsdorf. He held the receiver out of the window and asked if she heard that? Did she know what it meant?

He advised her to set out at once. They themselves would probably stay in Albertsdorf, what with their three daughters and Hanna with her bad hip … she couldn’t be expected to take flight. ‘I don’t suppose the Russians will tear our heads off.’

Katharina immediately took another tablet from the tube. Set off with bag and baggage? Take flight?

So that afternoon Elfriede’s room was taken over by a baron from the Baltic and his wife, with Hitler Youth boys carrying their cases for them. Heil Hitler. The doll’s house and the puppet theatre could stay, said the couple, they wouldn’t be in the way. However, the baron asked whether the little girl had died two years ago in this bed, and he took the portrait photograph of her dead body off the pillow and pressed it into Auntie’s hand. Didn’t she feel that, somehow, it had now served its purpose?

The baroness, meanwhile, knelt down in front of the puppet theatre, pulled the curtain up and let it down, and arranged the pup pets inside it.‘Ah, the Devil!’she said.‘He’s always one of them.’

She arranged the chairs in the doll’s house properly. There was a round table, and a gentleman lounging in an armchair. He had been lounging in it for a long time.

The baron sat in an armchair and watched his wife. So skilful! So clever! Energetic, that was the word for her. His wife got things done, and she wasn’t to be easily deterred. She pushed the sofa over to stand beside the bed. The bed would be for her husband, she would sleep on the sofa, that was somehow or other taken for granted.

‘I don’t mind a bit.’

The only thing was that the bed could do with clean sheets, and then there would be nothing left to wish for. They hoped the bedclothes didn’t date back two years, and the sheet wasn’t a winding sheet?

The baron, who was not one of the landed aristocracy, but had been an accountant in a pharmaceuticals factory, acted as if he were an old friend of the family. ‘We’ll do fine,’ he said, and left his wife to go on fixing things. He wanted to have a look round and see where they had ended up. He went from room to room, suggesting that the old wing chair might look better somewhere else, and the cabinet could be moved to opposite its present position. He called Katharina ‘dear lady’, and when appropriate he kissed her hand in the old-fashioned way. He picked up the cat, and that animal, who usually ran like the wind from human beings, nestled in his arms.

The black parrot that the couple had brought with them was a great attraction for the household. You mustn’t get over familiar with the bird, or he pecked. Sometimes he spread his wings, first the right wing, then the left wing, and sometimes he called out ‘Lora!’ occasionally adding, ‘You old sow!’ He looked calmly at the cat. The cat looked back at the parrot with his paws tucked under him. They’d wait and see how things turned out. Take it easy was the right approach. The cat didn’t like it that the parrot was given walnuts, not that the cat fancied them himself. The baron kept the walnuts in his jacket pocket, and he cracked them against each other, two by two.

A parrot? The maids kept coming out of the kitchen to look at him. They’d never seen such a thing before: a parrot! They reached for him, but he just looked sideways at them. And of course, they claimed, there were much bigger parrots than that in their native land.

‘Oh, go on with you, get back to work!’ said Auntie.

The baron’s wife went round the house singing, chattering away to the maids in their own language and going out to see the horses: the huge gelding and the two fast bays. Peter showed her the dead peacock. He couldn’t be buried yet because the ground was frozen hard, so for now they left him on the dung heap. He showed her the chickens and the rooster, told her how trusting the rooster was, and how he understood every word. And Vladimir had a long conversation with her, heaven knows what about.

When she went back into the house, he touched his cap lightly. He knew how to behave with aristocracy.

The baron walked in the grounds for a while, breathing in the air as if it were particularly healthy. This place shows no real sense of design, he told Peter, who was accompanying him. The river! Now that should be included somehow. And with his stick he drew a plan in the snow for the way he saw the grounds redesigned.

Apparently there were ruins of some kind here. ‘Have you noticed them? Just sort of lying around?’ A broad avenue could be laid out, leading to the ruins, and a teahouse by the river, wouldn’t that be good? Some people never thought of such things, obvious as they were.

The baron had brought a very heavy suitcase with him, and never let it out of his sight. It contained material about his native city. He had collected everything to do with it: pictorial views both very old and brand new; brochures; books; menus. Photographs (the church of St Nicholas taken from every angle, the gabled town hall in the marketplace). He had all these things in his suitcase. It also contained his family papers; he could trace his forebears back over many centuries. His ancestors had come from Germany and had sought the protection of the Tsarina, who appreciated good German enterprise at the time. To return to the German Reich now seemed the obvious course.

He showed Peter some of this material, explaining the difference between a family tree and a line of descent.

He also showed Peter a kind of chronicle of his native city; he himself had written it and it was full of the life of the old days. What Once Was Ours was the title of the manuscript, and he had devoted every free minute to it in recent years. He described the customs of the country’s merchants, who used to eat swan as well as other things at their banquets, and mentioned the introduction of traction engines on the great landed estates.