Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

Then she mounted her horse again and rode off. She couldn’t stand it here any more. ‘Perhaps I’ll get through yet,’ she said.

Meanwhile Peter went into the town: it had a long high street, a marketplace and a church. Sure enough, their big farm cart was standing in the third street on the right, and the two bay horses swished their tails when they saw him. Peter told Vladimir that they weren’t in front of the goalposts any more, but outside the gymnasium. Then he went in search of a pharmacy, because he had left his toothbrush behind. There must surely be a pharmacy somewhere here.

He asked local people where he could find a pharmacy. The local people looked different from those on the trek, who were now described as refugees. The local people went to their offices carrying briefcases, and there were ladies wearing hats sitting in a café. They were friendly and gave Peter information. One lady took a fancy to him, and accompanied him to the pharmacy. Did he think, she asked, that the Russians would get as far as this? She was so worried, she didn’t know what to do.

‘Are you all on your own?’

Peter would have liked to tell her about his mother, who had been taken away, but she might yet come back …

People were queuing outside the pharmacy — Heil Hitler — and it was some time before he could buy his toothbrush. He also bought some toothpowder and a cake of soap. You were really supposed to be on a list of regular customers to do that, but the pharmacist made an exception for him because he was a refugee. He also bought a bag of Italian liquorice, which cost five pfennigs and tasted nice.

He was sure to be all right now.

‘Close the door!’ called the pharmacist.

He’d have to hide the liquorice from Auntie. He was squandering money when he bought it.

Old-fashioned gravestones in the shape of crosses stood crooked in the churchyard beside the little whitewashed church, and there were new wooden crosses there too. A man came along with a bundle; it was a dead child. The pastor arrived and said, ‘Leave the body there, and I’ll see to it later.’ Then he turned back and asked for the child’s name, wrote it on a piece of paper and put his note with the bundle.

The bundle lay there in the draughty church porch, and the note blew away.

In the church, someone was trying to play the organ, which was out of tune.

Eternity, O mighty word,

Running my heart through like a sword,

Beginning without end …

Peter looked at the crooked crosses. Did the dead lying under them have crooked legs, like Christ in the Mitkau church, whose feet crossed at the ankles? Were Elfie’s feet crossed like that in her grave, or were they lying side by side, straight?

Dead bodies sweat. Had someone washed her feet with warm water? Had her whole body been washed with a warm sponge? Had her hair been brushed for the last time and plaited into braids?

Eternity, great is my grief,

I know not where, with my belief

In God, my thoughts to send.

He couldn’t remember now what his little sister had looked like. No stone had been placed on her grave. Plenty of time for that, they had said. But no stone on her grave? No name, nothing?

They had buried her with a bunch of lilies of the valley in her hands.

Who would ever come looking for her?

There was a bar outside the church, the stumps of two linden trees in front of it. They sold weak beer in the bar. Two men staggered across the street with a drunk between them. They were refugees too, speaking so broad a dialect that Peter couldn’t understand it.

The woman who had taken him to the pharmacy met him again, and this time she couldn’t restrain herself. ‘Poor boy,’ she said. ‘Going around here all by yourself? Don’t you have anyone left in the world?’ And she invited him to go home with her, saying she had some cake that she thought he would like.

She lived up two flights of stairs, in an apartment looking down into a back yard. The clock on her wall chimed, ding-dong ding-dong, with the hands pointing to four. Then Peter was sitting on an old green sofa trimmed with tassels, eating cake and telling long stories of all that had happened to him. His village — ‘you wouldn’t know it,’ he said — had been captured overnight by the Russians, and he had taken refuge in the woodshed with the Russians outside, sort of hunched figures brown as earth. They were scurrying past, and he huddled into a corner and didn’t move. His heart was in his mouth!

The woman listened, fascinated. So he went on and on about the hunched, brown figures of the Russians scurrying past, and the screaming of the women. And in the night, he said, he had crawled through the snow at a temperature of minus twenty-five degrees until he finally reached the German lines, where an officer congratulated him in person.

Here the old grandpa from next door joined them, and made doubtful noises over Peter’s stories as he listened. So then it was time — ‘Oh, my word! I must be going!’ — for Peter to make himself scarce. ‘His unit’, he said, was waiting for him, and he showed his air pistol. The woman gave him a book about the World War, saying she was sure it would interest him. It contained old-fashioned pictures of old-fashioned soldiers. The book, she said, had belonged to her son, who was now a prisoner in Karelia. ‘Hmm,’ said the old man. ‘Hmm. Figures as brown as earth?’

Perhaps the boy’s stories were true.

At the same time, the telephone was ringing at the Georgenhof. The Hesses had lit a fire in the hall and were sitting comfortably beside it. It was the teacher who finally picked up the receiver and shouted, ‘What?’down it. ‘What did you say?General Com mand?’ There was a rushing sound far away, a distant voice; he couldn’t make anything out. FrauHesse took the receiver from her husband, but she couldn’t understand what the voice was saying either, except that it was Eberhard vonGlobig beside Lake Garda, trying to get in touch with his wife. ‘Er — Herr von Globig …’ said Frau Hesse — for a brief moment the curtain of interference was lifted — ‘your wife isn’t here any more … we don’t know …’ But that was as far as she could get. And what should she have told him? There was one more croaked phrase … ‘In the cellar …’ and that was the end of the call.

What did he mean was in the cellar? Frau Hesse took an electric torch and went down the cellar steps. There was water at the bottom of them, nothing else in sight.

At middayLotharSarkander turned up. HeilHitler. No, he wouldn’t sit down. This was just a flying visit. He walked round the room, looking at everything. He had sat here so often: the billiards room to one side of it, the hearth. He opened the door of the summer drawing room as well; frost glittered inside it. He stood there for a moment looking out at the silent, melancholy park, and then he slowly climbed the stairs to the first floor. So this was where Katharina had lived. And was that the daughter’s room opposite? Elfie. Was the photo that used to lie on the pillow still there? He opened the wardrobe where the little girl’s clotheswere still hanging.

The Hesse boys were standing in the doorway behind him. When he picked up the knitted witch they looked at each other. Was this man allowed simply to nick it? Would that have to be reported to Herr Drygalski?

He hadn’t been able to find out any more about Katharina. So far as he knew, she must still be in the police cells in Königsberger Strasse. Probably with all sorts of rag, tag and bobtail, whores, termagants, beggar women. Thank God, said Frau Hesse, they’d given her something to take from here at the last minute: bread and dripping, sausage.