Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

Grudgingly, she let them in. They were offered no more than a hot cup of tea and a piece of bread spread with onion-flavoured curd cheese. They would rest briefly, decided Auntie, and then go on.

Yes, they heard, Uncle Josef had already left. Immediately after Auntie’s phone call from the Georgenhof he had slammed the receiver back on its stand and called to the household, ‘The Globigs are coming. That’s the last straw.’

It was the phone call that sent them off, as Frau Schneidereit now revealed. Uncle Josef had left with his family, bag and baggage — seven carts piled high with their possessions.

‘Quick, quick, quick, children! We’re leaving too,’ he had called. After hesitating for weeks, saying they’d wait and see, now he couldn’t get on the road fast enough. There were papers to be burnt on the dung heap, everyone to be chivvied along, the carts so overloaded that the horses could hardly move. The carts couldn’t get out of the yard, so the horses had to be whipped all the way out to the road.

Uncle Josef had not left Auntie a letter on the table. Most of the doors were locked, and the beds had been stripped.

So Auntie curled up on a sofa, and Peter lay down in his cousins’ room. They hadn’t left a letter either.

Three doll’s houses stood in the corner, one for each of the girls so that they wouldn’t quarrel. And a picture of the three cousins hung over them, painted by the artist who had also done the picture of Elfie that hung in Katharina’s room.

While they were resting, the other refugees harnessed up their horses and left the yard one after another.

*

Auntie wanted to leave at midday. All the strangers’ carts had left the yard by then; they would be well along the road by now. Vladimir crawled out of the hay; the French prisoners had left as well.

Vladimir immediately saw that Vera’s wooden suitcase was missing. The tarpaulin over the cart was untouched, so far as he could tell, but the wooden suitcase had gone! He went on looking for it. It had been on the driver’s box, but it was not there now. He couldn’t believe it.

Vera couldn’t grasp it either. She didn’t exactly strike up a howl of woe, but she cried floods of tears. All her possessions stolen. The pictures of her parents. All of it was gone.

Vladimir went round shouting, saying what he would do to the thief if he laid hands on him, shouting into Auntie’s face in Polish. He’d slit the man open! Put out his eyes! He’d stopped in the middle of the night to help others when they fell into the ditch, and now someone had stolen Vera’s suitcase.

‘If I can lay hands on the bastard!’ said Vladimir, uttering terrible curses in his own tongue, while Vera went on crying quietly.

A little later, they too set out. Cart was following cart on the road to Elbing, wheels crunching over the snow. They tried to thread their way into the long line of vehicles, Auntie first.

It took them some time to push in and join the cavalcade. They had to let whole village communities go first, until at last an old man stopped his horses. He pointed to them with his whip, indicating that they could go in front of him, and hurry up about it. No time to be lost. He must be wondering about the strange coach standing at the crossroads. Perhaps it reminded him of the old days? With a coat of arms on its door — had that made him let them go first?

But when Vladimir drove the heavy cart forward, drivers were already cracking their whips behind him. ‘What’s going on up ahead there?’ After all, people wanted to stick together; the line of carts was strictly organized. If the people in them lost sight of each other here, it was all over.

Meanwhile, at the Georgenhof, Sonya took possession of the keys. She opened the door to the Czech and asked the Hesses how much longer they thought of staying, because she for one wasn’t providing any more food. Drygalski had to be fetched to sort it out. Did she know, he asked Sonya, that he could send her packing in no time, along with her boyfriend? Right, she’d better get back to the cottage, at once too, or there’d be trouble. The Czech had already made himself scarce.

They reached the little town of Harkunen towards evening. Cart after cart stood all along both sides of the high street, one after another, and women sitting on cushions looked out of the windows. You had to think a long way back to remember when there were last such crowds here, and that was when Hitler came through to celebrate the special day of the Gau, the local district. Kaiser Wilhelm had once been received in Harkunen with garlands and girls dressed in white.

Auntie drove the coach into the fully occupied football field, part of a sports complex, and stopped in front of a goal. The Bund deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, were running a soup kitchen. Vladimir drove the heavily laden farm cart into a side street.

‘We’ll leave again at five in the morning,’ Auntie told Vladimir. ‘And mind nothing else gets stolen!’

‘Right, five in the morning,’ he said, and told her not to worry.

‘We’ll wait here for you,’ said Auntie. ‘In this football field. Come here at five in the morning, and then we’ll go on. Five on the dot!’

Party officials were going from cart to cart, Heil Hitler, with forms to be filled in. They were asking all these people if they needed anything, whether everything was in order. There was considerable confusion on the football field, but people were managing; they’d make it somehow. On the whole everyone was reasonable. Complaining was kept within bounds.

The Party stewards found fault with Auntie’s coach because it was blocking access to the field. Hadn’t she been allotted a place to park in conformity with the rules? No, she had not been allotted a place, she had simply parked the coach where it was.

‘That won’t do. People can’t act just as they like here.’

Even in this situation, unusual as it was, you couldn’t do just as you liked; even here you had to follow rules. Otherwise everything would end in unimaginable chaos.

‘Surely you realize that!’

So she moved the coach again, and the Party steward went ahead and directed her to a place in the lee of the wind, at the side of the gymnasium of the sports complex. He probably felt sorry for the coach — such an old-fashioned vehicle. But it had a coat of arms on the door, and that meant something, after all.

Auntie thanked him for showing her where to go, and she said ‘Heil Hitler!’ She added, ‘There’s a farm cart in the third street on the right with a Pole and a Ukrainian woman in it. They’re with us, if anything happens.’ She said ‘Heil Hitler’ again, and the Party man put his hand to the peak of his cap; he knew what was what now. The only question was whether, at five in the morning, Vladimir would realize that they were not in the same place. Peter stationed himself in front of the goal, with the binoculars dangling from his neck and the air pistol in his belt, but he couldn’t stand there for ever.

‘Why are you hanging around here, boy?’ he was asked.

‘We’ll tell your friend Vladimir where to look when he turns up in the morning,’ someone told him. ‘Trust us for that!’

As chance would have it, a young war widow from Mitkau was fetching soup at the same time as Auntie. They didn’t know each other, they’d never met before, but both were from Mitkau. That kind of thing creates a bond.

The young woman had made a spontaneous decision to get on her horse and ride away, leaving everything behind just as it was. She had nothing with her but a small bundle. She had the Iron Cross awarded to her husband who had fallen at Demyansk in a bag round her neck. She showed the Iron Cross to everyone, and said that she had ridden away because there was a whiff of Russians in the air.