Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

He found a few pickled gherkins in the mess on the floor, and a bowl of pickled eggs in the larder.

He stood the chairs up and ate the gherkins. There wasn’t any bread; where could he find bread?

He spent a little time looking round. A door led from the kitchen to a classroom. The authorities had placed this little school between two villages. They had done it for practical reasons, to kill two birds with one stone.

Benches were pushed up against the wall of the classroom, and there was straw on the floor. People had spent the night there. He might be able to sleep there too — but what about the dead man in the corridor? The straw was dirty, and stank of piss and shit.

*

He climbed the stairs. A dead woman lay in the bedroom, with a little girl close to her, also dead. The little girl had been clinging to the woman, who had her arm round the child. The wind blew through the broken window.

Don’t look, Peter told himself, but he stayed in the doorway. A gilt-framed picture of a guardian angel hung over the rumpled bed. The angel was leading a little boy over a narrow bridge.

The Drygalskis had a picture like that in their house, too.

The living room of the house contained a sideboard with glasses on it, and a picture of a moorland landscape on the wall. There was a bookcase in the study, full of books — The Teacher’s Treasury . The desk drawers had been pulled out and searched. The teacher and his wife had believed that mankind was basically good and ‘nothing will happen to us’, but they had taken rat poison in the end. And now they were lying dead in their own vomit.

Or perhaps the teacher had heard his wife’s screams and the little girl whimpering, and then it was all over for him too.

He had spent his life explaining the points of the compass to the schoolchildren, and what ‘horizon’ means. East and west. Mental arithmetic, good handwriting. An old man with a watch-chain over his paunch. The Russians had been here in the First War too, and had behaved decently.

Peter sat down at the desk. Shall I tidy up a bit? he wondered. The official seal was missing; its inkpad lay open on the table. Perhaps someone had liked the look of the seal … a royal eagle? It might seem impressive as a means of certification.

You can’t stay here, Peter told himself.

But he sat on at the schoolmaster’s desk, staring at the scene.

He was roused by the smell of a cigarette. There were two men in the house, he could hear them talking in the kitchen. Soldiers? They went away as quietly as they had come. There was nothing for them to take here. Peter wished he had gone with them, but they were out of sight.

He read the school register, which showed who had been late, when, and the timetable. There were piles of exercise books. A list of punishments. ‘For telling lies: three strokes of the cane.’

Then he rose to his feet. You must get away from here, he told himself, and he followed the trail left by the two soldiers. They’d have known which way to go. Others had also been here, and he could even make out the tracks of cartwheels, all going one and the same way.

After he had walked for two hours, he came out into open fields, and then he saw the trek again, cart after cart. He could hear people talking and calling to each other. His short cut had not saved him much time.

He soon reached the road. No one was surprised to see a boy coming down the hill on his own. They hardly even looked up; their eyes were elsewhere.

Fallen carts lay on both sides of the road, dead animals with bloated bellies, and dead people: old men and women, children. Many children. They were half covered with drifting snow.

A large, solitary oak tree stood beside the road. Some people were hanging from a spreading branch, a couple of soldiers with their coats unbuttoned and their heads bare. Were those the two soldiers from the school? They had notices hung round their necks saying, WE WERE TOO COWARDLY TO FIGHT. And beside them hung a man and a woman. The man wore a rectangular Polish cap on his head, and had a bandaged finger. The woman was Vera. The notices hanging from their necks said, WE WERE CAUGHT LOOTING.

Peter had once seen someone make the sign of the cross, and he would have liked to make it now. He wanted to stand under the tree and make the sign of the cross. But he wasn’t a Catholic. He took off his cap as if he needed to scratch his head; he had to be careful, because there was a vehicle by the roadside with military police in it. Heil Hitler. The dead dangling from the tree swayed back and forth.

The ‘watchdogs’ stopped several wounded men walking past the carts to check up on them. Heil Hitler. Was a shot in the arm really so bad? Couldn’t the man fire a gun all the same, or at least keep watch? They had paper bandages drenched with blood, and labels on their coats saying that yes, their wounds were genuine, and how bad they were. They held up their injured limbs as proof. Heil Hitler, yes, that’s in order.

No cowards, no one simply work-shy? Unwind that bandage, will you? Right, that passes muster.

A little further on there was a youth hostel built in the Lower Saxon style, a big place. A notice outside told you that it was the Johann-Gottfried-Herder Youth Hostel. Peter went over to the large building. Two long swastika banners blew in the wind outside it. This was probably the assembly area where the young people met for roll-call. German young people had looked up to the banner with shining eyes and jumped over bonfires here.

We’ll show faith and love

For our native land,

And the powers above.

The assembly area was surrounded by a wall of medium height, as if by two arms. The masons had made a wheat-sheaf out of bricks and placed it on the gable end of the main part of the building, with the date 1936 under it. The whole thing reminded Peter of the Albert Leo Schlageter fountain on the housing development opposite the Georgenhof, although that was much smaller than this magnificent building.

The military police drove up and got out to report to their superior officers: two cowards strung up along with two Russian looters.

‘Good,’ said the superior officers. They had commandeered the office of the youth hostel, which gave them a view of the road so that they could see whether the long line of vehicles was flowing smoothly. At the slightest disturbance they could have intervened to restore order. However, from their vantage position they couldn’t see the beautiful view from the youth hostel, cleverly incorporated in the whole design by the Reich architect Witterkind. That was the view from the back of the building, where the road swung round in a wide loop to the valley, with the trek winding onward towards it. And in the distance was a small town with two churches and a castle.

Discipline and good order reigned in the youth hostel. The washrooms were tip-top quality, and every group of refugees had been given a place in the great meeting hall. They sat close together in families, with their suitcases and rucksacks, and the horses were stabled in the gymnasium. Members of the National Socialist Nurses’ Association went round giving out food parcels. Peter had to show his papers, Heil Hitler, and he got a food parcel too. There was even hot soup at twelve-thirty. That was probably what kept the people here.

A single lance corporal tried to get a food parcel for himself, Heil Hitler, and was immediately sent to the military police in the office. He didn’t come out for a long time.

‘It’s come to this, has it? Leaving your unit and then trying to get hold of food!’

And what had the man done with his gun?

He’d been sent off, Heil Hitler, to report three dead Russians that he had discovered in a village.