Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

The plane came back once more; the pilot probably wanted to see what hits he had scored. Did he make marks on his notepad? One, two, three, four, five horse-drawn carts full of fascist murderers and incendiaries finished off?

To make sure, he fired the plane’s machine gun along the column. Then he flew a loop above the fields and went to get more bombs.

The bomb had hit Auntie. Helene Harnisch was dead. Born 1885, died January 1945, unmarried. Two months before her sixtieth birthday. It had smashed her chest open.

Traffic was building up into a jam behind the coach. Other carts were lying on their sides, and lamentations filled the air. At last men came along to push the wrecked vehicles off the road and make way for the great trek that wanted to get past them.

Women laid the dead, including the body of Auntie, in the ditches at the roadside. Now, for heaven’s sake, the other carts could go on.

Peter sat down beside Auntie. One of her arms had been blown off. There were two gold rings on its hand. Red blood stained the snow. Ought he to pray an Our Father? ‘Nothing was easy …’

The carts went on past him, one after another. He saw them all, and they all saw him: the boy with the binoculars round his neck and the air pistol stuck in his belt. He sat there sprinkled with washing powder that had been blasted into the air.

After a while a man arrived from the village, the local pastor coming to take the dead away. He helped Peter to roll Auntie into a blanket, and put the arm that had been torn off, her left arm, into the blanket with her. It had come right away from her shoulder joint, and was broken as well.

They carried the old woman to the church and laid her in the vestibule, beside the offertory box and the frame that held the numbers of hymns to be sung. On the wall was a plaque bearing the names of the dead who had fallen in the wars of 1870-71 and 1914-18.

There were already several other bodies in the church — a number of them still bleeding — arranged in order of size, among them children; one was a girl with long brown stockings. Part of her skirt had gone, exposing the suspenders holding the stockings up, and some bare skin. Weeping people lingered by the corpses, but they couldn’t afford to stay for long.

‘When are you coming?’ their companions asked. ‘We have to go on.’

While the pastor spread a blanket over Auntie, Peter went into the cold church and out again by another door, round the church and back through the main doorway. Then he sat down at the front of the church, under the pulpit. Later, he would be able to say, ‘When Auntie died I sat in the church and stayed there for a long time.’

Auntie was dead, her life extinguished, as if a blanket had been smoothed out over it. The blanket is pulled taut, thought Peter. Gone and forgotten? He thought of fortune-telling at Christmas time, when you gradually melted a lead coin, saw it losing its original shape, and then dropped it into cold water to take new shape.

When he offered the rooster a few extra grains of corn, she used to tap on the window up in her room. It meant there was no need for him to feed the rooster, the poultry had plenty to eat, and the rooster got his rightful share every day.

When he thought about what to do next, and went back to the road, the contents of the coach had already been looted. People near it retreated, like vultures flying up when a coyote comes along. He stood beside the wreck undecided, one hand clutching his binoculars. A friendly woman stopped for a moment when she saw him standing there alone, and told him to jump up and get on the back of her cart, quick! She was already reaching her arms down to him.

But no, he thought, he couldn’t go with her and leave everything lying around like this, could he?

Then the French prisoners of war came marching up. Left, left, left … they didn’t stop. As they marched past they looked at the ruined coach. Left, left, left, two, three, four! They knew about this kind of thing: dead horses, a coach on its side. But like Napoleon’s Old Guard in 1812 they stuck together, marching all in step. The soldier guarding them did stop for a moment. ‘Are you on your own?’ he asked in kindly tones. It was difficult for Peter to hide the tears that this question brought to his eyes. Should he go with the Frenchmen?

He collected a few things: Auntie’s big suitcase, his rucksack and the microscope.

As for Auntie’s lute, a cart had run over it and smashed it to pieces.

As he was retrieving these things, he was asked by a Volkssturm reservist — Heil Hitler — what he was doing there. Was he looting or what? He’d better make himself scarce or the reservist would report him! The crest of the von Globigs on the door, which had fallen off the coach, meant nothing to the man.

Peter stowed some bread and sausage away in his rucksack, put the microscope under his arm, and went away, pulling the suitcase after him.

A couple of lines of verse went through his head, from the Evening Song by the hymn-writer Matthias Claudius. We smile at such illusions, believing them delusions … It was funny, he hadn’t even heard the bomb going off.

‘You must see to getting that dead horse out of the way,’ said the reservist. ‘It can’t stay lying there.’ Then he went off over the snow.

The parsonage was behind the church. The pastor’s name was Schowalker; he had hair cut very short, although it curled profusely at the nape of his neck.

He had carried the dead bodies into the church, and now he took Peter into the parsonage kitchen with him.

Everything was neat and tidy here, no crumbs lying around. A moderate fire was burning in the stove, and pots and pans were hanging side by side on the wall. You could hear cartwheels crunching over the snow on the nearby road, and the drivers of the carts calling out, but in here everything was quiet and pleasant.

The pastor fetched soap and nailbrushes, and they washed Auntie’s blood off their hands. Peter had put his hand to his mouth, and some of her spilt blood had reached his lips. He wondered: am I connected to her now?

Peter also had a bloodstain on his coat. It could always be washed off when he got the chance.

The pastor asked for Auntie’s personal details. Helene Harnisch, born 1885 …

He wrote the information down on a piece of card and put a length of string through it. He would tie it round the woman’s wrist. The wrist that she still had.

They sat at the kitchen table. The pastor placed a glass of hot elderberry juice in front of Peter, and then they ate some of his sausage. ‘There’s no one left in the village,’ said the pastor. ‘All the carts went away yesterday.’ He rubbed his hands; they were blue with cold. He had sent his wife and daughter off to the Ruhr in autumn, after the Russians broke through at Gumbinnen, he told Peter. But he hadn’t had any news of them for a long time. Were there air raids in the Ruhr? He didn’t know whether they were still alive.

He’d always thought he must stay where he was, but now he wondered what there was left for him to do here.

He asked Peter’s advice: should he, the pastor, go away too?

He pointed to a photo of his wife and daughter pinned to the wall above the kitchen table. A perfectly normal woman and a perfectly ordinary girl. He unfolded a brightly coloured road map from a tourist company, and showed Peter just where they were. ‘We’re here, and over there is Danzig.’ The Frisches Haff was only a few kilometres away. And he showed Peter how the Russian tanks had come from the south, by way of Allenstein, and gone right through to the coast.

*

The map depicted famous sights in colour: the Crane Gate in Danzig; Marienburg Castle on the Nogat; Frauenburg on the Vistula Lagoon; Braunsberg. Above the Baltic coast there was a picture of a wickerwork beach chair, and a young woman wading into the sea with a rubber animal under her arm.