Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

The sketch had been put in front of the man, and he’d had to admit everything. Yes; he’d tried talking his way out of it, but the sketch was conclusive.

At midday, to the sound of fierce barking from Jago, a police detective turned up; a quiet, mournful man in a leather coat. He drove right up to the house in a steam-driven car, and left it outside the front door. Heil Hitler. Everyone was sitting at the table round a steaming tureen of soup. The Hesses, Auntie and Dr Wagner too. Katharina was calmly serving out the soup, which she never usually did.

When Wagner discovered that the newcomer was a police detective, he put down his spoon and pushed his soup plate aside. He thought it would be better not to get in the way here, but go back to Mitkau at once, even though he had only just arrived. Things that were none of his business were coming to light. He put the poems that he had been going to give Katharina back into his pocket, and strode vigorously away. He did not take the direct road back, which was icy; he didn’t want a fall and a broken hip at this late date. Standing erect, and without hesitating, he walked towards the stream of horse-drawn carts.

‘Is it much further?’ a little girl asked him. Much further to where? He shrugged his shoulders.

The company round the table had risen to their feet, and the Ukrainian maids came out of the kitchen. The police officer had a photograph. He held it in front of Katharina’s nose and asked if she knew the man in it. He had admitted to being hidden by her in some kind of cubbyhole on the first floor here. ‘Is there such a cubbyhole in this house? On the first floor? And did you know that the man is a Jew?’

Auntie stood up as well, and looked at the photo. So did the two Ukrainian girls, who were curious too. Did Katharina know the man, and what was all this about a cubbyhole?

The Hesses also came forward. ‘How? What?’ asked the teacher. ‘What’s going on?’ Had the time come at last? Had permission to leave come through?

‘Eckbert! Ingomar!’

Were they finally to be off on their travels?

*

Drygalski turned up as well, Heil Hitler. He left the front door open and cold air blew in. He too wanted to see the photograph. The officer had already put it away, but he brought it out again. Drygalski examined the photo, and asked Katharina whether she knew the man. ‘Do you recognize this man?’ He himself had never set eyes on him, although he knew this area so well. Auntie didn’t know him either.

Yes, Katharina had seen the man. She said so, loud and clear.

Well, said Drygalski, he’d thought as much, he knew there was something wrong here. He stood there four-square in his brown jackboots, legs apart, and he wished he had a riding crop in his right hand so that he could tap it against the shaft of his boot. They could pull the wool over your eyes for a while, but then it all comes out. You needed a sixth sense, that was the trick of it. ‘I knew there was something fishy going on,’ he told the police detective. He’d always known there was something wrong here.

Now the detective had to view the scene of the crime. The entire party began to move, a cavalcade climbing up to the first floor. Drygalski went upstairs first, saying that he knew his way around this place. So Drygalski was in the lead, but what with the narrow staircase and the darkness, the police officer soon overtook him. The Hesses followed, and so did the maids from the kitchen, still holding their dishcloths.

Katharina came up the stairs last of all, holding the banister rail. She wasn’t in such a hurry.

The whole pack of them stood at the top, watching her climb the stairs slowly, step by step. She produced the key, and the door was unlocked. On view were the unmade bed, a tube of tablets and an open bottle of wine on the bedside table. Had some kind of unnatural vice been practised here? The Crouching Woman , just look at that. For heaven’s sake!

*

The police officer stood in the middle of the room and looked round. No doubt about it, this was Frau von Globig’s bedroom. Next door was the living room of the apartment, and beyond that the room with her books in it, and now her son’s as well. Gilded bronze brackets supporting the bookshelves.

He opened the conservatory window and looked down at the fence. ‘So he climbed the fence on his way here? Yes, he still had scratches on his hands; they’d been carefully dressed with sticking plaster.’ When it’s a matter of life or death, yes, anyone would climb a fence.

Drygalski pushed forward and looked down at the park himself, saw the semi-circular path he had trodden in the snow. He said he knew all about it; it had always seemed to him strange. When he was assessing the vacant living space, that little chest had been somewhere else entirely …

Was all this about the cubbyhole true? asked the detective. Surely there was some mistake? Oh no, there wasn’t. A cubbyhole …?

Drygalski got down on his knees and pushed himself, breathing heavily, into the hole. A mattress. Pillows, blankets? And here was a bedside lamp. A lamp in a cubbyhole? Then he began rooting about under the sloping roof like a boar scenting truffles, and said, ‘Here!’ Packets of tobacco, cigarettes — he even brought the bottles of wine rolling out. ‘Look, Italian wine!’

‘So if it comes from Italy …’ he told the police officer accusingly. And the police officer saw it all.

Katharina was standing beside the Crouching Woman, underneath the indoor palm. Auntie was in the doorway, along with the Hesses and the two maids from the kitchen. Herr Hesse was saying, loud and clear, that he too had always thought it odd — all that locking of doors, and he thought he had heard the radio on more often than was normal, in the middle of the night at that. He mentioned his stroke, the difficulty his handicap gave him, how badly he needed peace and quiet. He had no feeling on the left, and he sometimes felt so strange. It was thanks to his wife that he was still on his own two feet. She’d told him she saw saliva dripping from his mouth, and then she knew what had happened to him.

Drygalski joined the interrogation. The police officer was a little too polite for his liking, with that conciliating smile. Shouldn’t the woman be questioned rather more sharply? Harbouring a Jewish fellow from who knew where? Yes, where did he come from? Was there a whole gang of them to be discovered? Had Jews been going in and out of this house for weeks? Laughing heartily at the German nation’s struggle for survival, eating and drinking their fill? Barolo Riserva, Giacomo Borgogno. ‘And you gave the man your hand, did you? Did you? Perhaps at the same moment as a German soldier was sacrificing his life at the front?’

He looked at the unmade bed. ‘It’s disgusting!’ A German woman screwing a Jew. ‘Wouldn’t you call that disgusting, inspector?’

And what, he would like to know, was her blameless husband up to? There he was in Italy, basking in the sun, while the German Reich fought for its very existence.

‘It can’t be any coincidence that he happens to be in Italy now!’

He took Eberhard’s photo off the bedside table and threw it on the bed. It lay there, with the opened bottle of wine on the bedside table too, and all those people standing in the doorway, wondering what would happen now.

That, of course, was as clear as day.

The police officer didn’t like this turn of events. He had really meant to begin by giving Katharina messages from Felicitas, who sent her love, and approach the matter slowly and indirectly, investigating according to his own ideas of the case.

He looked at the label on the wine bottle and picked up the tube of tablets. Then he closed the conservatory window and examined the book on German Cathedrals . It was almost as if he wanted to console Katharina. Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as all that? ‘We don’t bite anyone’s head off …’ He preferred to make inquiries in peace and calm. Maybe that fellow had made it all up? However, if the Jew had climbed the fence, and crawled into the cubbyhole … And there was the sketch, neatly drawn in red pencil. By Katharina herself?