Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

After supper they looked at the contents of Auntie’s suitcase. Right at the top was Katharina’s gold locket, and under it were handkerchiefs, panties, vests, blouses, along with letters and photographs. The photo of the Silesian donkey cart. And three silver teaspoons. When the pastor saw the teaspoons he said, ‘We had teaspoons just like that at home, when I was a child. They came from our great-grandparents, thin silver, because of the bad times.’ Three of them? He picked up one of those fine, thin, slightly dented spoons. Could he have one? he asked; it would make him so happy. They’d had spoons just like that at home. They ate greengages with them, greengages as dessert every lunchtime. Semolina pudding with greengages.

Peter took his microscope out of its box and set it up. What did Auntie’s blood look like? He scraped it off his coat and looked at it. It was a crusted substance with nothing mysterious about it.

When the pastor heard that Peter’s name was von Globig and he came from the Georgenhof, he was astonished. A young woman had been here two days ago, a violinist. She had mentioned the Georgenhof, saying she’d been given nothing to eat there and had been thrown straight out. The people there were unfriendly, stupid, miserly aristocrats.

Didn’t that give Peter something to think about, asked the pastor. He welcomed the boy here with hot elderberry juice, and there was a bed ready for him, while a few days ago his family at the Georgenhof had sent a lonely girl packing.

No, said Peter, it wasn’t like that at all. They’d given her fried potatoes and blood sausage, and gooseberry compote afterwards.

The pastor didn’t believe him, judging by the little smile on his face, which clearly meant: I understand you, my boy, you don’t want to foul your own nest. And he stuck to his version. It would make the basis of a good sermon.

So Peter talked about the Georgenhof, and the hospitable welcome given there to other refugees. He told the pastor about the finial over the gable in the shape of a spiked mace; the tea-house on the banks of the River Helge; parties in the park with Chinese lanterns; and his sister’s white mausoleum. ‘It has seven steps leading up to it, and a path to it through the forest.’ He talked about suites of rooms in the Georgenhof, and the crystal chandeliers. And there was the chamber organ in the library, but no one had played it since his grandfather’s death …

‘Does it have one manual or two?’ asked the pastor at this point, but Peter was at a loss for an answer. However, he said it was a strange thing, but sometimes it seemed to him as if someone were playing the instrument in the night. And a deliberately dreamy look came into his eyes. When he was sitting under the light in his room, reading or looking through his microscope, he had thought he heard the organ playing loud and clear down below.

He was using the past tense, but at that moment he really did seem to hear the instrument that had never existed.

This time he didn’t tell the story of the hunched figures, brown as earth, who had scurried past him. He kept it to himself.

*

The pastor knew Mitkau. He had once preached there. ‘My colleague Brahms in that city was a German Christian; do you know what that means?’ A German Christian? You had to go cautiously with those. Yes, Brahms had been a German Christian, swore loyalty to Hitler and then changed his mind. Awake, awake, thou German land, too long hast thou been sleeping … When St Mary’s Church was reconsecrated after its renovation, he had given the Hitler salute. Heil Hitler, arm in the air and so on …

Some people had very flexible consciences.

And now he’d been arrested on some dubious pretext, nothing precise was known about it. A matter of morality, maybe?

The violinist … the pastor was enthusiastic about that young woman. She had taken her instrument out of its case, he said, and played it in the church. All the people who were going on the road again next day had streamed in to hear her. It was standing room only, she played so well. The notes might have come from the world beyond! Such music had never been heard in his church before.

The audience had been rooted to the ground. They knew, at that moment, that it was time to say goodbye to their own country. Now fare thee well, my native land … Imagine turning a sweet creature like that away from your door! ‘Did your family stop to think what they were doing?’

‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘she played hit songs too, with a one-armed soldier accompanying her on the piano, and she had two helpings of blood sausage.’

‘One-armed?’ said the pastor. ‘You mustn’t exaggerate like that, my boy. A one-armed man can’t play the piano.’

His thoughts were still with his violinist. Shaking back her blonde hair, and then playing so powerfully. At the first note, the eternity of German music — however you like to put it — had filled the church.

‘Many of the local farmers’ wives came to me later,’ he said, ‘and said they’d never heard anything so beautiful.’

There was a harmonium in the pastor’s study. The pastor pulled out the enamelled stops and played a hymn. So take my hands and lead me / to my everlasting rest. There was something about the eternity of German music here too. The left-hand bellows of the harmonium was torn, and the pastor could work only the pedal for the right-hand bellows, which made the tune rather jerky, but you could tell what it was.

‘Shall we pray, my boy?’

This was very odd. Sitting at a kitchen table in front of a glass of elderberry juice, and praying?

Peter thought of his mother’s gold locket at the top of Auntie’s suitcase. He had put it in his pocket, and the chain lay in his hand like a rosary.

In the evening Peter went over to the church where the dead were lying. There were more of them now, including two babies. He wanted to look at the girl with the suspenders again.

Auntie didn’t belong to him any longer. She lay under the blanket with her legs twisted, and snow drifting round her. The snow had drifted in under the door, covering the dead bodies. The arm that had been blown off lay beside her, with the rings on her finger, and her twisted legs.

He searched the wreck of the coach again by the light of the electric torch. He noticed the little wreath of flowers on the oval back window, and took it with him.

The gelding lay on his back, legs outstretched, entirely covered by snow.

At this moment Katharina was sitting in the overheated room occupied by the police officer — Heil Hitler — wearing her white Persian lamb cap, with her black trousers tucked into her black riding boots. She had a packet of sandwiches on her lap. Someone had sent them. The officer wasn’t allowed to say who it was.

He was looking at the file in front of him. It was a thin one, with only two or three sheets of paper in it. Frau von Globig has admitted to sheltering a Jew , said one of them. She had signed it.

‘And you also tuned in to foreign radio stations, Frau von Globig? That’s what Head Trustee Drygalski said.’

No, she had not, and she hadn’t signed anything saying so either. Copenhagen, yes, but not the BBC.

Questions went back and forth. She did not ask, ‘What will become of me?’ It was more as if she wanted to say: oh, leave me in peace.

Perhaps the police officer was thinking: what will become of me ? How am I going to get out of this situation, with the Russians at the gates? How can I reach safety? With the whole place full of criminals — they’ll get the upper hand if things go wrong, and then they’ll cut my throat!

The whole city was getting out, and here he was stuck with twenty-seven prisoners. People who could make short work of you.