Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

Well, then. Berlin. Wilmersdorf?

When Wilmersdorf was mentioned, Katharina looked away. She had wanted to send Peter there at Christmas time — for who knew what might yet happen? — but the family in Wilmersdorf didn’t want to have him.

The family in Berlin got in touch only when they wanted something. Potatoes, vegetables, they’d come to take all that year after year, even a goose for Christmas, but they didn’t want the boy to stay with them. And maybe that was just as well, in view of the devastating attacks on the capital.

Last summer they’d sent their two daughters here, Elisabeth and Anita. The girls had spent such a nice holiday in the country.

‘The Berlin family have broken off their relationship with us,’ said Auntie. ‘Broken it off once and for all.’

‘I see,’ said the political economist.

*

After supper he set out on a tour of the house, swinging himself nimbly up and down the hall on his crutches, even pushing the door to the next room open. Cold air blew in. It was the summer drawing room, built before the war, paid for with money from the sale of the landed properties, and never really used. Now it was full of chests and crates.

He went all round the ice-cold drawing room. ‘What are those crates?’ he asked, tapping one of them with his crutch, but then he let them be, closed the door and rejoined the others.

There was yet another room to be explored. Good heavens, a billiards room! A regular billiards table covered with green cloth. Card tables with polished surfaces by the window, and in the corner a sideboard with ornamental intarsia work on its doors. They probably kept wine and cigars in it.

The hunting trophies on the walls — horns, antlers, ranged side by side, and the stuffed head of a wild boar — had been old Globig’s. There was even a lampshade made of intertwined antlers under the ceiling. Old Globig had been a great hunter; his triple-barrelled gun and his expensive repeating rifle still hung in a modern glass case that didn’t look as if it belonged here.

Auntie kept close behind the man, following hard on his heels. After all, they didn’t know each other. She explained that in the old days the gentlemen always used to smoke their cigars and play whist in here. ‘But we’d better close the door now.’

And parties had been given in the summer drawing room, she said, not entirely accurately; the vonGlobigs had been going to give parties there, but then the war came, and now the drawing room was full of crates containing the worldly goods of the Berlin family members.

Auntie propelled the guest back into the hall, and he swung himself all round it on his crutches, looking at the Christmas tree now dropping its needles. He turned a corner of the rug over with his crutch. ‘Genuine?’

Finally he looked at the cups stacked slantways in a small cabinet, opened its glass door and asked, ‘May I?’ He examined them one by one. Some had a landscape scene painted on them, with boys skating on the ice in the foreground. There were dead flies in many of the cups. Eberhard’s meerschaum cigarette holder also lay here, rather stained, but interesting. Sepia photographs in ornate wire frames stood in front of the cups, photographs of grandfathers and grandmothers. The political economist asked who they were, and on getting no answer looked at Katharina, but she did not rise to her feet, she came no closer, she sat at the table smoking and playing with the matchbox.

Auntie went over and showed him the photo of a Tsarist officer of 1914, in a laced litevka uniform coat, holding a riding crop. There were all manner of stories about this officer. He was said to have been billeted at the Georgenhof when the Russians invaded in 1914, and he had the reputation of being a decent, well-educated man who spoke fluent French. The Globigs had much to thank him for; he had saved the manor house from being looted, and he had played billiards with them.

In the 1920s, unexpectedly, he had turned up here again, after escaping from the Soviets by way of Finland. He had looked down-at-heel, all his elegance gone, a fur cap on his head. He had pointed east, groaning, ‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ Then he had borrowed money and disappeared, leaving behind the fur cap; it was white, made of Persian lamb.

A photograph of the master of the house also stood on the folding flap of the casket; he was wearing a white uniform jacket with the Cross of Merit on the chest, although without swords. ‘Is that your husband, ma’am?’ cried Herr Schünemann to Katharina. Yes, she said, it was indeed her husband.

Eberhard von Globig was one of the specialists helping to keep supplies to the German population going, draining the resources of the eastern agricultural territories for the benefit of the Greater German Reich. This war was very different from the war of 1914–18, when the Germans had subsisted on turnips. This time bad feeling was not to be stirred up among the people unnecessarily; they would be allowed access to an adequate diet. Bread, butter, meat, whole freight trains full of melons. They came from the Ukraine, from Byelorussia — all kinds of good things were to be had there. Wheat, sunflower oil, who knows what else? But now it all lay in ruins, smoke rising from their fields.

Katharina remembered a pair of brightly painted wooden clogs that Eberhard had given her; folk art. She had never worn them.

‘Ah, the Ukraine,’ said Dr Schünemann to Katharina, with much meaning. ‘It’s as well that your husband is in Italy now. That, you know, is very, very good news.’

With expert fingers he felt the inside of the cabinet, fingering the little compartments. A secret drawer.

A secret drawer? Perhaps it contained golden guilders or Swiss francs? No, the secret compartment was empty.

Eberhard’s latest letter lay beside his photograph, with a blue airmail armed forces stamp on it. Schünemann picked up the letter and took it to the table, bringing the oil lamp closer to it. That stamp. Was he mistaken? A misprint? Was the right-hand wing of the plane shown on it disfigured by a notch? A deformity on the plate? No? Ah, well then, no. The shadow of his hands scurried over the walls as he held the letter close to the lamplight.

*

It was going a little too far to sniff the airmail letter. He was almost about to take it out of the envelope, but he caught himself in time. ‘How can anyone be so inappropriate?’ he said. ‘But it’s my passion, my enthusiasm …’ He turned to Katharina again, and told her about people cast into transports of delight by collecting all kinds of things, old books, coins, and he even knew of murders committed by those who wanted to complete their collections. There was Master Tinius who killed a wealthy widow in Leipzig. All for a few old books.

He gesticulated with his crutch, and the firelight cast very strange shadows round the room.

The hunting trophies on the wall, ranged there side by side, they too were bound up with collecting and killing.

Katharina thought of the consignments of wheat that her husband had dispatched year after year, the freight trains of soil on its way from the Ukraine to Bavaria. A layer of humus sometimes a metre thick on those fertile plains, stripped off and sent to Bavaria in long convoys of railway trains.

Sometimes Eberhard had also managed to abstract something for the family’s private use, brown sugar, for instance, several hundredweight of brown sugar.

And now he was in Italy, busily confiscating wine and olive oil to be sent away.

Katharina rose, her long limbs graceful, patting her hair into place as she stood up. Black jacket, black trousers, boots. She offered her guest a plate of ginger biscuits left over from Christmas.

Oh, not those, Auntie might well be thinking, those were the good ones, but she let it pass; after all, the guest was an academic.