Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

Now the remaining shops were giving away their wares free.

Maybe this was the right moment to move on. Auntie reported to the police officer, who wished her good luck. As soon as he heard anything about that Vladimir, he said, he would let her know. At the moment he had a lot on his hands: all manner of thefts had been reported — there were people going from house to house, looting — and there had even been a murder.

Next morning French POWs were led through the town, with scarves round their necks and hands in their pockets. In the thick, driving snow the scene looked a little like 1812. They marched all in time, quietly, in the middle of the road, and the guard with his long rifle brought up the rear, keeping in step with them. One of them, in front and on the left, carried a lantern to let cars know that a troop of Frenchmen was coming, please don’t run them down, they’re decent fellows, we have nothing against them.

The women with their net shopping bags watched them go. An old man was trying to keep up with them; he wanted to tell them that he had been a prisoner of the French in the last war, and he took cigarettes from his pocket and held them out.

No, they had plenty of cigarettes. They were even sharing them with the guard. He should keep his cigarettes.

‘Bonjour!’ he called after them. He had worked for farmers in 1917, at the foot of the Pyrenees, and there had been red wine for breakfast. In itself, that had been a good time.

Peter had seen the Frenchmen in Albertsdorf, when they had been drinking vermouth with Vladimir. Should he ask if they knew where Vladimir was? Stealing the cart in cold blood. Peter hadn’t even been able to say goodbye to the two bay horses.

While Peter was still thinking of asking the Frenchmen about it, they disappeared into the snowy twilight.

Auntie said, ‘So there you are. We won’t be staying here much longer.’

The Silesian gentleman was nowhere to be seen, and it wasn’t easy to get the gelding back. He was already sold, she was told. Herr So-and-so had sold him yesterday. And at the moment they couldn’t lay hands on the key to the fire station.

Auntie was about to go to the police when they told her that she could buy the horse back; they’d let her have him at a special price.

So Auntie paid the money and went off with the grateful animal. He swished his tail and looked straight ahead.

That man was a bastard, Auntie told Peter. He didn’t even come from her beloved Lower Silesia, he came from Upper Silesia, a place that was teeming with Polacks.

‘Nothing’s easy.’

They said goodbye to the neighbouring vehicles on the football field, Heil Hitler, and to the Party man who had been so impressed by the coat of arms on the coach door, even if he didn’t show it. Heil Hitler. And then the cry was ‘Gee up!’ and the gelding pricked up his ears.

She would never, ever let herself be taken in like that again, said Auntie out loud. ‘What a wretch!’

She had said the same to the men at the fire station, but they told her that if she repeated that remark there’d be consequences.

*

In the high street, they met the first treks coming from the west. Go back, go back, they said of Elbing. No one can get through that way. If they’d known before, said the people on their way back, they’d have stayed put here. Women driving the carts leaned down to Auntie, who was still persistently driving west. ‘Go back! You can’t get through that way.’

But Auntie didn’t want to go to Elbing; she had other plans. And many people, like her, were going neither east nor west, but hoped to find safety at the Frisches Haff, and go on from there over the ice to the spit of land known as the Frisches Nehrung.

Perhaps she would be able to sell the rest of the ration coupons for soldiers on leave at the Haff?

She could not have known that at the same time Uncle Josef and his party were going through Harkunen and back east home, home again! Home to Albertsdorf, where they had spent so many happy years. With his wife and three daughters. No more would ever be heard of him.

They were trotting slowly along under the grey veil of snow. Now that the gelding had been fed plenty of oats, it was hard to control him, but anyway there was no chance of overtaking the long line of carts ahead of them. Why they were making such slow progress was a mystery. There were dead bodies lying by the side of the road, and some were sitting against trees frozen stiff: the bodies of old people who could go no further and of small children.

Peter was very tired. ‘It comes of all that fresh air,’ said Auntie. ‘Lie down in the back of the coach.’ She could manage on her own, she told him. ‘If we’ve made it this far we’ll get to the Frisches Haff.’

She uncorked a bottle, put it to her lips and took a couple of gulps, posing as if for a photograph. ‘Auntie in Action’. No one would have expected her to be so enterprising.

Peter lay in the straw, covered with rugs and coats. He was tired, in fact almost unconscious with exhaustion, alternately hot and cold. And when he moved because a suitcase was pressing against him, it made him even more exhausted, and he immediately lay back and forgot where he was.

Now and then they stopped to let military trucks driving the opposite way go by. Then the procession went on again. You could hear people cursing and shouting. Auntie was cursing too, swearing roundly, and now and then taking a mouthful from her bottle. Across the Frisches Haff and then along the Nehrung — that way to the west was still open.

Auntie on the box of the coach. She imagined Vladimir being caught, tied up and brought to face her — On the redoubt in Strasbourg , like the deserter waiting for execution in Mahler’s song — and she thought what she would say about him. ‘Yes, he made careful preparations, but he let us down in the end.’

Then she began running through the list of what had been on the cart. But hard as she thought about it, what she mainly remembered was how Vladimir had taken a heavy chest of drawers off the load again at the last minute, just before they left the Georgenhof. The Georgenhof, the crows roosting in the oak tree and the finial of the spiked mace that didn’t stand up straight.

She thought of what Katharina would say some day: ‘Auntie did it all on her own … she excelled herself.’ Deep down inside, she was rejoicing. ‘How quick off the mark Auntie was!’ Eberhard would say. ‘She saved Peter’s life.’ She’d saved the briefcase of papers and photographs as well.

The photograph album from the Ukraine: Eberhard and his comrades out riding in white uniforms. A group photo, with an arrow added in ink to the deckle-edged photograph (the ink had run), pointing to ‘Our general’.

If I’d had to set off in the farm cart I wouldn’t have made it, thought Auntie, what with the weight of the cart and two horses — even harnessing them up would have been a problem, and all those reins to be disentangled.

She was glad that, at her age, she could still drive the coach through the countryside. In these circumstances, too.

As she reined in the gelding, keeping behind the cart ahead, she even had time to glance at the landscape, the frost on the trees and the few crows.

When all this is over I’ll go back to Silesia, she thought. Some day I’ll eat poppy-seed cake in Silesia again. Here we’ve been on the run from the Devil.

They were now approaching a village with a small church, a Neo-Gothic church built of Prussian brick, and above the porch a cement figure of Christ was giving his blessing.

A solitary aircraft came slowly flying above the road and the long line of carts on the trek. It was moving erratically from side to side as it dropped bombs on the column of vehicles; you could see the bombs come sailing down. One of them fell beside the little coach containing Auntie and the sleeping Peter. The gelding reared up, neighing, and slumped over the shafts. What was left of the animal stretched flat on the ground. The coach toppled over, throwing Peter out into the open air.