Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

When you leave, say softly, ‘See you!’

Not farewell and not adieu!

Words like that can only hurt.

*

No question about it, this was Lance Corporal Hofer from Munich.

Peter put a hand on his shoulder, and the soldier stopped playing at once and went to sit at a table with him.

‘Peter! What a coincidence!’

He had been supposed to organize bandages and distilled water for the field hospital that had moved on long ago, and now that he had all the stuff together he should have been out on the road, following the hospital. People were waiting for him. But — ‘You know how it is. When I see a piano I just can’t resist. And are you travelling with your crazy old auntie?’ he asked Peter, who didn’t like that description. He thought that Auntie was all right, really.

Almost at once, Hofer asked whether Peter had heard anything of the violinist. ‘I wonder what’s become of her?’ said the soldier. ‘She planned to go to Allenstein, but the Russians have been there for some time now … I’m afraid she’ll be dead. The Russians don’t beat about the bush; her violin won’t have done her much good there.’

Then he told Peter, who at his age had no idea of such things, that the young woman had had her charms, was amazingly affectionate and so on and so forth, and he even said she had jumped ‘straight into bed’ with the medical superintendent in Mitkau.

‘Wildly sexy!’ was his verdict.

Then he gave Peter advice about women and how to win them over. He himself, said Hofer, could win any woman over, and wouldn’t hold it against his young wife in Munich if she found a replacement for him some day.

‘What use is life if you don’t enjoy it?’

Then he told Peter how much at home he’d felt in the Georgenhof, the fire in the hearth, the summer drawing room … and he described all sorts of things that Peter had no idea of. He mentioned a chamber organ, crystal chandeliers and endless suites of rooms … which all sounded very nice, but surprised Peter. What was the man talking about? A chamber organ at the Georgenhof?

Hofer also mentioned the Ukrainian girls. He described Vera as ‘that fatso’ and Sonya as a ‘pert little hussy’. Sonya with her hair braided round her head and her red nose, yes, he’d have liked to play games with her …

‘But at heart they’re all the same.’ And Vladimir had gone off with the cart? That was typical. ‘These eastern folk steal like magpies.’

Then he took a charred meerschaum cigarette holder out of his pocket — you could see a man and a woman carved on it — and lit a cigarette. He told Peter about his time in Poland, about Warsaw and its dark side streets. And about lice and fleas.

Peter didn’t bring out the story of the hunched figures as brown as earth here, and how he had crawled through the snow. While Hofer spoke of bumping someone off and putting another ‘away’, he looked out of the window at the street. Suppose Dr Wagner came past now? Not understanding but interested in everything. The moon, filling woods and vales again with her misty light … Were they all going to come by in procession out there? One after another. The stamp collector, swinging himself along on his crutches. Drygalski with his heavy tread — Be proud; I bear the banner ; his father in his white uniform; and a troop of prisoners with his mother in the middle of them. All carrying, with difficulty, a huge chain.

Then he thought of the coloured picture on the door of Elfie’s room, and the naked brownies holding up a garland of flowers. Not a chain, it had been made of flowers.

By this time Hofer had put the meerschaum cigarette holder back in his pocket, and was sitting at the piano again and playing something jazzy with his left hand. He went on until a man said Heil Hitler, and asked him if, in these hard times, it was right for the street to be full of all those refugee carts, while he sat here playing ‘nigger jazz’.

The man had a glass eye. He had been sitting at the back of the room for some time, shaking his head.

And he asked Peter what he thought he was doing here; sitting in a café, when he couldn’t be more than twelve. The Hitler Youth would have something to say about that; they’d sort him out.

Is that what German young people are like these days, he asked the others in the café who were clinking their coffee cups, is that what the young are like when their native land is fighting for survival?

Then Hofer stood up — Heil Hitler — and the man saw that he had only one arm. And Hofer closed the piano and asked the man what he thought he was doing here, sitting behind the stove in a nice warm room far from the firing line. He should be at the front, and so on. He dismissed any protests, asked the waiter for his bill, took his wallet out of his pocket and opened it as the one-armed did, with thumb and forefinger. He was surprised, he said to the ladies in hats sitting around, that a wounded man wasn’t allowed to have the slightest pleasure.

Peter wanted to help him open the wallet. But Hofer wouldn’t let him, and paid two marks fifty for his beer and Peter’s helping of mousse. ‘Good thing I don’t have a stomach wound,’ he said, and he hastily wrote down his military address for Peter, just in case, using a beer mat and a silver propelling pencil. The pencil seemed familiar to Peter as well.

Then Hofer cried, ‘Tally ho!’ and disappeared past the heavy curtain. A shame to have spoilt his little pleasures.

Peter went to the barber next to the café for a haircut. ‘Heil Hitler,’ he said, but the barber was a Dutchman and did not respond.

‘Want a shave as well?’ asked the barber. He meant it as a joke, because there was only a little down on Peter’s cheeks. He whistled a patriotic melody that sounded like a folk song.

The haircut cost fifty pfennigs, and the price would have been agreed quickly if Peter hadn’t started talking about the figures as brown as earth who had run past his hiding place, keeping low, and that made the barber thoughtful. He snapped his scissors in the air and looked at Peter in the mirror. Well, to think that a young fellow like him had done so much already! And he was wondering what would happen when Peter got home. Wouldn’t he be called to account for himself? Now here was he, the barber, he’d come to Germany voluntarily to cut the Huns’ hair for them.

He brushed Peter’s collar and said, in English, ‘So long!’

Outside the door the man with the glass eye was waiting for him. ‘I had a son like you,’ he said. ‘Mind you don’t squander your life!’

This time it was Auntie who was late. There had been all kinds of things available in the shops, and she had bought washing powder off the ration.

And when she was shopping she had met a nice man who helped her, and then she had chatted to him for a while. He came from Silesia, so he was a countryman of hers. The world is all a village, really.

‘Thank goodness you’re here, my boy. Don’t you go and get lost as well.’

The Silesian had a slight disability, and dragged his left leg a little when he walked, but that didn’t matter. There are good souls everywhere.

Then Auntie sat in the coach with Peter, and they made themselves comfortable and had a bite to eat. There were so many good souls looking at them, with their good faces staring through the windowpanes, that Auntie drew the curtain.

Then she wrote a postcard to the people left at the Georgenhof, saying that she hadn’t found Uncle Josef, and she was now on the way to the Frisches Haff. ‘What do you think, Vladimir has gone off! Love to Katharina!’ she added, feeling very brave, and hoping that this message wouldn’t get her into difficulty.