Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

The boys were put in Elfie’s room, where they immediately began playing with the puppet theatre, by which they meant bashing the puppets together and pulling the curtain up and down until the strings working it broke. Peter asked if they would like to see his little animalcules under the microscope, but they wouldn’t. They took an interest in the Crouching Woman , though, and although they wore thick glasses they scrutinized her closely, going woo-hoo-hoo!

The teacher’s wife went to the kitchen to ask if her husband could have a hot-water bottle. ‘Oh, what a wonderful stove you have!’ she exclaimed, and said she’d like to make dumplings on it. And look at all those copper pots and pans, arranged in order of size. She would really enjoy polishing them up with Sidol metal cleaner. Wonderful! How she would like to be in charge of a wonderful kitchen like this some day. The maids were pleased with her enthusiasm, and even felt a little proud of the kitchen, which they had never examined very closely, and acted as if it all belonged to them, but when the good woman was about to open the larder door, there was Auntie suddenly standing in the way.

So the teacher’s wife hurried back up to him. He was already impatient, wondering where she was. ‘Helga!’ He took the hot-water bottle and asked her to push the chair over to the window for him. ‘Where’ve you been all this time?’ He held his hands behind his ears, the better to hear what excuse she could give.

They settled in. The Hesses had only a rucksack each and a few other oddments. It had all happened so fast. ‘My stone axes!’ wailed Herr Hesse. ‘My scrapers!’ He had been obliged to leave all those things behind.

It worried his wife to find that the Georgenhof was a real landed estate, even if a dilapidated one. And she whispered in Katharina’s ear, Do you own the estate? and wondered aloud whether they didn’t want to leave at once. The Reds made short work of landowners, killing them on the spot. Junkers, the old-established landed gentry, were a thorn in their flesh. The Globigs might do better to get away while there was still time, pack everything and leave, preferably tomorrow.

She herself was uneasy, too: how long would she and her family be hanging around here? They had been told that someone would let them know. Outside on the road, cart followed cart, and they were stuck in this place.

Drygalski (Heil Hitler) gave the Hesses a hand moving in; he had nothing special to do at the moment. The lines of refugees came from the east of their own accord, and went on to the west of their own accord too. There was no need for him to do anything about it. He was prowling round Katharina as if he wanted to tell her something, and Katharina didn’t like it. When she looked at his brown jackboots, she wondered where he had been in them.

Drygalski carried Peter’s box of books, and the carton containing his railway and his tin soldiers, over to her apartment with his own hands. And his coats and jackets too; he handled every one of them and asked whether this or that garment was still needed. Couldn’t some of these things be given to all those refugees?

Strange: that little chest in Katharina’s bedroom. Hadn’t it been somewhere else in the house before?

Perhaps it would be better to move the Crouching Woman out of the field of vision? Was it a good idea for the boy to be looking at it all the time? The ancestral portraits downstairs, this Crouching Woman up here … they didn’t really go together. He didn’t know that the artist who had created so sensuous and frank a figure of a crouching woman was a Party comrade and had access to Hitler — no, Drygalski had no idea of that.

Peter bounced on his parents’ beds. Drygalski, standing in the doorway, watched him. He looked at the boy: blond, with a thin face, a real German boy, who would certainly soon be defending his native Germany, gun in hand, when the going got tough, just as his own son had done when he fell in Poland.

‘How old are you? Twelve?’ Yes, a little too soon for him to be rushing into the thick of the fighting. And he had swollen tonsils at the moment, you had to take swollen tonsils seriously. His son had also been blond, but he had never bounced on beds.

Drygalski switched Katharina’s radio on; it was tuned to Copenhagen. But it was forbidden to listen to foreign radio stations. The news in Danish? Weren’t there plenty of German transmitters; did she have to listen in to Copenhagen? However, German soldiers were marching through the streets of Copenhagen, weren’t they? They were sitting in Danish cafés eating whipped cream, and that was a fact. There was even a Danish Waffen-SS, fighting shoulder by shoulder with their German comrades against the Bolshevists. Danes, Dutch, French, Slovakians, even Russians! Ukrainians! Cossacks! Man beside man! All Europe had risen against the Red Peril. The forces would hold together with an iron will.

And it was the same here. It was obvious that the Globigs were welcoming refugees, that was to their credit.

But if someone tunes her radio to a Danish station, wasn’t it to be assumed that she might listen to the BBC now and then too? Perhaps by accident. Copenhagen, it wasn’t so far from the BBC. Drygalski couldn’t make up his mind. He’d better report it to the district leader and ask for orders.

Shouldn’t she be honest, asked Drygalski, and admit that she listened in to the BBC now and then?

Katharina pushed the little chest in front of the cubbyhole again and sniffed. Tobacco? Chocolate? No, there was no smell of either.

The head trustee liked the conservatory. What a wonderful view! Everything perfect. It must be glorious in summer, even if it looked bleak now, of course. He glanced down at the path he had trodden in the snow, and was surprised by the regularity of the semicircle. As if it had been drawn with a pair of compasses. Frau Hesse, who had made her way into Katharina’s conservatory with him, was looking critically at the cacti and flowering plants. What a sad sight they were. Dusty, with dead flies everywhere. They all urgently needed repotting.

Drygalski was about to say what a fine group the Globig family had been, sitting on the grass in summer drinking coffee. So peaceful and contented. Had that been before the war? He didn’t say it was a picture.

‘I suppose you’ve never used the arbour?’ he asked.

But Katharina was guiding him towards the door. Was there anything else?

Unfortunately he’d had bad luck with his refugee girl, he said as he was going out. In herself, she was pretty and neat and a willing worker. A nice girl, she could have had whatever she wanted from him. He’d thought of offering her a home for ever. But she’d been overcome by lust! All of a sudden, lying in wait for him, following him down to the cellar and so on. Rotten through and through. He’d had to do something about that, of course. The hussy had been turned out on the street, immediately. He made short work of that kind of thing. A pity, really; otherwise she was a nice girl, trim and neat. He’d have liked to keep her.

‘That girl could have asked me for anything …’ It had been sad to see her standing in the road all alone. But his wife, sick as she was, might have got wind of something, and that would have been terrible.

Sick, shaky Herr Hesse was lurking in the corridor to speak to the head trustee. Heil Hitler, his name was Hesse and he had been a Party member since 1939. He told Drygalski the symptoms of his stroke, how it had happened and what he had felt about it. His wife had told him that his mouth had been slanting right down. And at first she had thought he was only joking. ‘If it hadn’t been for my wife!’ he cried, and then he asked himself and Herr Drygalski, ‘What are we supposed to be doing here? We have a referral certificate for Danzig, but the railway line to Danzig isn’t open.’ What did he think they should do now? He supposed there was nothing for them to do here, and he couldn’t very well just stand at the roadside.