Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

‘No, you’re staying here,’ said Auntie, although the Silesian gentleman tried to persuade her to let him go: Peter could bring some more sausage and ham. He’d really like to taste ham again.

‘Good Silesian ham, do you remember?’

Peter was glad to have someone on his side at last, but Auntie insisted, ‘No, you’re staying here.’

No, he could not go to Mitkau. That chapter was closed. Instead, just for once, he could go to the cinema.

Auntie gave him fifty pfennigs for a seat at the back, and asked afterwards, ‘Was it good?’ She was still a fan of Beniamino Gigli, whom she had once heard in her youth, and the Silesian gentleman remembered having liked Gigli too.

‘Forget me not!’ he sang to Auntie, and he did in fact have a good singing voice.

Gigli! That had been ages ago. The Silesian asked Auntie to dine with him at the restaurant in the town hall cellar. You could get meat loaf and potatoes there for fifty grams’ worth of meat coupons and a ten-gram fat coupon, and Auntie agreed to provide those. Heil Hitler. She put on a different jacket specially, because she couldn’t be seen out in public in this dress, which was in urgent need of ironing. Her good clothes were in Vladimir’s cart. She put on her gold brooch with the golden arrows pointing in every direction. It was a long time since she had been asked out by a gentleman. To be honest, she had never been asked out by a gentleman before.

Auntie came back late in the evening, and she was upset.

When Peter asked, ‘Was it good?’ she snapped, ‘Leave me alone!’

Nothing was easy.

Dr Wagner was sitting quietly in his study when he heard about the evacuation of the monastery. A large number of the old people had already been taken away, and now it was the turn of the rest.

He was sitting at his desk with the marble inkwell in front of him. There had always been plenty of ink in it, but the poems he owed it to himself to write were slow to flow out from his pen. Rilke and Stefan George kept getting in the way, so he had thought: let’s leave it at that.

Sad to say, his mother had never really supported him. Now and then he would put sheets of paper on her work basket, but she glanced at them only fleetingly. And never said a word about them.

*

He looked at the album in which he had stuck the photos of his students, and put crosses beside the pictures of those who had fallen.

He counted the number of students who had passed through his hands. He saw a long grey line before him, their heads bowed, and he thought of many a bright head, but also of dullness that couldn’t be carried away on the wings of grace and dignity.

And he thought of the endless hours he had devoted to them. He calculated the hours of his knowledge like the beads of a rosary, day by day and hour by hour. Always the same, year after year. He had not been granted release.

Tearing himself away from his thoughts, he put on walking shoes and trousers, wrapped his gaiters round his legs and then, wearing his good outdoor coat, set off along the familiar road to the monastery: down Horst-Wessel-Strasse, across the marketplace and past the church. The church organist was coming towards him in the marketplace. He quickly turned up his collar. Meeting that woman was all he needed! She had denied him access to the church when his mother had just died, and he had wanted to lose himself on that instrument playing his variations: in E flat minor, then by way of G flat major to B.

But she wouldn’t let him, so he had been obliged to turn to the shimmering sound of his piano, with his dead mother in the room next door.

He passed the town hall, and the little prison. Second floor, the second window from the left? He could make out a pale face there. Someone was waving. But Dr Wagner wasn’t looking. He went over the big new bridge that hadn’t been paid for yet. Sappers were putting explosives in place on it. He passed the never-ending processions of refugees. They walked on, not with hair flying in the wind, not stealing over borders under cover of night and fog, no, they marched past with their packs, keeping the correct distance apart. Military police showed them the way. Far below them lay the grey, icy surface of the river, with frozen landing stages on which women would beat their washing in the spring.

The carts were standing outside the monastery, fresh straw in them. Old people were being lifted in, little old men and little old women separately, all in black; they were pushed in, laid down and shoved into position. Each with a few possessions, many holding apples, the gift of the Red Cross. They looked like imperial orbs, and the old people’s crutches like sceptres. When they were all sitting or lying in the carts, more straw was brought and placed over them. Now they could leave.

‘What about it?’ the man in charge of the transport asked Dr Wagner. ‘Want to come? You could take over the second cart.’

And he made up his mind: yes, he would leave at once, come what may! Did he want to see the town burning, buildings collapsing, soldateska running wild, going from house to house, showing off jewellery hanging between their fingers? And perhaps being assaulted by a Russian himself.

All that was to be avoided.

So he climbed up into the cart, and as it had to wait not far from Horst-Wessel-Strasse until the gate was opened to let them through, he paid a quick visit to his apartment and threw his shaving brush into the air-raid shelter bag where he kept everything that mattered to him: money, papers, and the picture of his mother as a young woman, taken at the Imperial Palace in Goslar, sitting on a wall with her wide skirt spread out round her.

Also the picture of his father, a man he had never seen and of whom he knew nothing.

Out, out into the countryside! A last look — he snatched the quilt off his bed, put the key through the letterbox and he was off.

Yes, he would rather have gone with the Globigs. But that wasn’t to be. He had not been invited to join them, and that was that. Hadn’t a family relationship developed between them? Didn’t they belong together?

‘But perhaps it’s better this way,’ he said out loud. ‘Perhaps it really is better this way.’

He craned his neck when he was passing the Georgenhof. The soldier beside him said, ‘That’s the Georgenhof over there.’

There was no sign of Drygalski, or the foreign workers at the Forest Lodge, once a good place to visit in summer for coffee and cakes, when the weather was warm. Carts on the trek stood in its yard, and strangers were going in and out.

‘I’ve spent many happy hours at the Georgenhof,’ he quietly said to himself, as the first yellow icicles were already showing under the car. The Baltic baron’s chronicle! He suddenly remembered it; the history of the man’s native place … he rushed into the house and retrieved it. It must be saved. Heavens, if he’d forgotten it! Wasn’t he a man of his word?

Peter was strolling around. White-painted tanks with Waffen-SS men in white camouflage clothing were driving along the high street, which was named after Adolf Hitler. ‘Right turn!’ someone called, and the horses pulling the carts began to climb.

The brave German soldiers were going towards the Russians. Were the reserves of manpower inexhaustible? They stopped in the open outside the town, in a field where the traces of a funfair could still be seen, and friendly SS-men gave the children sweets. One boy was in luck; he was even allowed to climb into the turret of a tank.

Then the tanks, those heavy, shapeless things, drove away. The area into which the Germans were crowded was small, and getting ever smaller. All the easier to defend it, said the newspapers. Never fear!

The blue diesel vapour of the fighting machines lingered over the high street for a long time.