Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

How was he to dispose of the body? At the front of the trek, crows flew up from other horses that had died.

Peter went through the empty village. Not a soul in sight.

A war memorial. The village pond, a lime tree and an inn. Ducks and geese must splash about here in the summer. Now crows were roosting in the lime tree, and you could have skated on the pond. The doors of houses and barns had been left open. Paper was blowing out of them, and net curtains billowed from the windows.

There was a chair in the middle of a room, an old man sitting on it, babbling. When he saw Peter he raised a hand. Peter backed out of the room. What could he do about a babbling old man whose family had left him behind? Sitting there talking nonsense.

A jeep was standing outside the village inn, and Peter heard voices in the building. Three SS men were sitting there. They had fried themselves some bacon and were drinking schnapps with it. The soldiers had stopped for a rest and were discussing what to do next. You could see from their collars that they had won the Close Combat Clasp and the Iron Cross. Two older men, and a younger one who looked like a schoolboy.

When Peter came in — Heil Hitler — the young SS man grabbed his hand, said, ‘White bread or black bread?’, held it tightly and screwed it round until he screamed.

‘White bread,’ said the man contemptuously, screwing it even more. Peter trod on his foot as hard as he could. The others laughed; that was the right thing to do. ‘Don’t take it lying down, boy!’

Couldn’t a German boy like Peter stand up to a strong handshake, asked the young SS man. ‘Made of cotton wool, are you?’ Fancy being unable to take a good squeeze of his flipper! He was surprised, said the young man, he supposed Peter was a mummy’s boy, was he? Liked to sit in the warm by the stove?

Wasn’t he a Pimpf?

Let’s see his papers. Oh, only just twelve.

They invited Peter to sit down with them and pushed a slice of bacon over to him.

Did he come from this village? No, said Peter, his own village was already occupied by the Russians and all his people were dead … Then he said he was the only one left alive, he had hidden and then one evening the Russians were there, hunched figures as brown as earth scurrying past his hiding place. And he took his air pistol out of the waistband of his trousers, as if to say: I’d have sold my life at a high price …

The men had stopped listening; they knew at once that Peter’s stories were lies, and didn’t want to listen to any more. ‘Keep your mouth shut,’ they said. They could have told different stories; they all wore the ribbons of their orders.

When the golden evening sun,

With its last bright rays was going down, going down,

One of Hitler’s regiments,

Came to a little town, a little town …

one of them sang, as if he were making fun of the song, and he beat time to it with a beer bottle.

Yes, those had been the days! Austria, the Sudetenland … Flower wars, they’d been called, because the Austrians welcomed them so enthusiastically! After Austria the Sudeten land, then put a stop to it, that would have been the thing. Now they were in the shit, and had no idea how to get out of it.

While they were sitting there, playing a game of chance with spent matchsticks, several freezing figures came limping up, and after a moment’s hesitation one of them came into the inn. He was a Russian POW. He called the soldiers ‘comrades’, and said they had been left behind. What should they do, where should they report?

Could they help him? the Russian asked in his own language, which was hard to understand — and then he saw the SS runes on the soldiers’ collar patches and turned pale.

‘You bet we can help you,’ said the young SS man, laughing. ‘Come with me!’

There was a bowling alley behind the inn, and he made the Russians stand against the wall and shot them out of hand.

He came back in, putting the pistol away.

The others did not laugh, they just nodded. That was life.

‘How do you think they’d have acted let loose on German women?’ they said to Peter. ‘How do you think your figures as brown as earth will carry on when they get here?’ And they went back to their game of chance with the matchsticks.

But soon they had had enough of sitting around. They were going on, now that they had finished here.

‘What are you going to do next?’ they asked Peter, who shrugged his shoulders.

‘Well, we can take you with us,’ they said. Perhaps they thought he could be a kind of drummer boy for their unit?

They drove to the parsonage, Heil Hitler. It was entirely surrounded by fluttering birds, tits, woodpeckers and finches. The pastor was just emptying the last bag of bird food. He felt weak at the knees when he saw the SS men, Heil Hitler. So the boy has given me away after all, he thought, and now they’ll arrest me … But Peter had only come to say goodbye and collect his rucksack and the microscope, which he tucked under his arm. He left the suitcase behind; he didn’t need all those women’s clothes.

‘Are you leaving me, then?’ said the pastor. ‘I’d just made us some soup.’ He didn’t shake hands. ‘We could have gone together …’ Going closer to Peter, he whispered, ‘Are you going with the SS men?’

Yes, Peter was going with the SS men, but first he looked in at the church. There were many more bodies now. Where was Auntie? He pulled the blanket back, and saw that the two rings were no longer on the finger of her torn-off arm.

Then he got into the jeep, and they were already turning into the road where the great trek of carts was moving along. The driver hooted his horn like mad, the farmers stopped their carts, and then they were racing along through them. Their back wheels spun, and they were away. Once they were stopped, by a woman who placed herself in the middle of the road. Could they take her old mother with them and get her to hospital?

‘Sure, we can do that,’ said the soldiers, and the old woman was lifted into their vehicle, Heil Hitler, covered with blankets, and off they went again.

But in the wrong direction! It was some time before they realized that Peter wanted to go the other way. Then they stopped and let their drummer boy out. ‘Can’t force anyone to see when he’s in luck!’ they said. Heil Hitler. They’d happily have kept him with them, a nice fair-haired German boy like that. Then again, they were beginning to find him something of a nuisance.

The old woman put out a hand to him from under all those blankets. Ought he to stay with her?

Peter didn’t know where to go. Left or right? He wanted to reach the Frisches Haff, where Auntie had planned to go. ‘Anything else is useless,’ she had said. Go to the Haff, yes, but what way was that? It took him a little while to work it out. Then he knew. I must go back to where I was this morning, he told himself.

But he was reluctant simply to turn round and trudge back along the road that the SS men had taken, walking into the wind and the snow, maybe passing the dead gelding again.

He watched the carts going along for a while. I ought to find a short cut, he thought, and he walked away from the column of carts and went uphill, over the snowfield and along a narrow path.

Behind him, the trek wound its way along the road, cart after cart and going slowly. No one noticed him leaving the long line of vehicles.

Soon he had reached a sparse wood of spruce trees. He could just hear the snorting of the horses, the clink of chains, the grinding of the heavy cartwheels as they went along. But then he was going through the little wood, and there was no noise at all.

Finally he came to a house; it was a village school. The door was ajar, and a dead man with vomit round his head was lying in the corridor. He must have been the teacher. Snow had blown in through the crack in the door, dusting the man’s body. The table and chairs in the kitchen had fallen over and broken china lay on the floor, with pots and pans. The embers in the stove were still glowing, and Peter carefully fanned the flames. Obviously this little house had only just been abandoned.