Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

Peter opened the baron’s suitcase. At the very top was the booklet on Roads and Footpaths in the Baltic States, and inside was his father’s name, Eberhard von Globig. Well, thought Peter, so the baron helped himself to that.

There was no chamber organ in the writer’s house, but there was a grand piano. Wagner sat down at it and tried to play his E minor variations. But the piano was badly out of tune. All the same: ‘Listen,’ he told Peter. ‘E minor — G major — enharmonically changing to F major … can you hear that?’

Peter put his microscope on the piano.

The schoolmaster laughed. ‘You won’t get any further with a microscope.’ From F major it wasn’t far to B flat major … and then the whole world was open to you! But exactly how had he done it before? How did it go? And how had he managed to infuse the whole thing with melancholy? He played so loud a flourish that Peter shushed him. For goodness’ sake, someone might hear.

At this moment Katharina was being marched along the road down below. In her white Persian lamb cap she could easily have been seen among the prisoners. Perhaps she was looking up at the house. A lakeside villa with a bronze deer on the terrace, and now piano music?

Her black boots had already been taken away from her, and she was trudging along in a worn-out pair of men’s shoes. Whenever she slipped, the guard beside her told her to watch out.

From all sides, onlookers shot the prisoners hostile glances. It’s the fault of people like that, they thought. They stirred everyone else up against us, they fanned the flames setting the world alight.

A farmer even reached out towards her with his whip. He had tied little knots in the lash, to make it sting more, and it caught Katharina’s cheek.

Wagner was seeing the boy as he never had before: the black grand piano, the bright pictures on the wall, and the fair-haired boy, still a child, with his thin, grave and merry face. Why hadn’t he taken better care of him when there was still time?

He would have liked to take Peter hiking, as he used to go hiking with his students in the valley of the Helge.

Now it was too late.

Although, come to think of it, he was hiking with the boy at this moment. He had him all to himself now.

‘I tell you what,’ he said. ‘We’ll go on now.’

They left the baron’s suitcase behind. The chronicles would be all right here, thought Wagner. If the master of the house came back, the first thing he saw would be the suitcase. ‘What’s this?’ he would say. ‘Old papers? Chronicles?’ A writer could do something with those. He thought of Adalbert Stifter, My Great-Grandfather’s Portfolio , or maybe it was in the works of Gottfried Keller or someone — who was it who wrote about finding a case full of old writings in the attic? Was there anything like that in Herder?

Peter thought: I’ll build myself a house like this some day, light and airy, not at all like the dark, gloomy Georgenhof. He sat on the sledge and slid downhill, and the old man ran down after him, laughing and holding on to his hat. His own father had never run after him. He had stood in the doorway wearing his white jacket with the Cross of Merit (no swords). Once he had come up to his room after a ride, bending his riding crop into a semicircle. ‘Well, you have a kingdom of your own here,’ he had said, and he looked out of the window and added, ‘But you must tidy up. What a mess it is in here!’

The little town was full of farm carts. They stood in every street, and more and more kept crowding in. Refugee women went into the houses begging. If the people living in those houses had already fled, they took them over. One house was burning, with flames hissing as they shot out of the windows; no one took any notice.

In the marketplace, surrounded by pretty little gabled houses with the town hall to the north, carts stood packed close together, but the people had gone off to be ‘transported’ according to regulations. The horses had just been taken out of the shafts, Heil Hitler, they would be handed over to the army. Party officials went up and down between these rows of carts with their shafts tilted upright. They were all being registered, and had numbers chalked on them for the refugees’ return journey.

For the time being, everyone was camping on straw in a cinema wondering what next. Apparently they were to board ships. If so, they hadn’t needed to come all this way, so far from home, with all their worldly goods. Could he just go and collect his briefcase from the cart? someone asked. No, that wasn’t allowed.

‘I have to see to my horses …’

The Volkssturm reservists stood outside the cinema, and wouldn’t let anyone out.

*

A man appeared on the balcony above the porch of the town hall, behind the clock that had been shot to pieces. His name was Lothar Sarkander. He was leaning on the balustrade, looking out over the empty carts, and delivering a speech, making large gestures and hoarsely calling out slogans that no one could hear properly. He seemed to be urging his audience to repent and mend their ways, something of that sort.

If I’d known what I was missing,

If I’d known who I was kissing,

That midnight at the lido …

Someone took him by the sleeve and pulled him back into the building. The man had obviously lost his mind. He would have to be taken away.

A Wehrmacht truck stood in a side street. The former bailiff’s residence, a very old, squat building that had served as a museum, was just being emptied. The back hatch of the truck’s load area had been let down, and soldiers were carefully carrying old chests and paintings out to the vehicle. Demolishing the bailiff ’s residence had been suggested in the nineteenth century, but then the townsfolk decided that they could still make use of it as a museum.

While Dr Wagner went looking for a pharmacist selling ointment for his piles, Peter entered the old building. ‘Wait for me, I’ll be back in a minute!’ A huge First World War cross full of nails hung in the entrance hall. It represented help rendered by the home country to the men at the front; black nails had cost five marks each, gilded nails ten marks. The idea had been to raise money for arms and munitions, not for the dead. It bore witness to better times.

*

A framed document hung on the wall. In it, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, the German author Gotthardt Baron von Erztum-Lohmeyer declared that, in grateful thanks for the freedom of his native town now bestowed on him, he was leaving it his library and all his manuscripts after his death.

The museum curator, Heil Hitler, an old gentleman wearing pince-nez and a Party symbol, watched the building being cleared. He went from one man to another, wringing his hands. ‘For God’s sake go carefully!’ he cried. But there were no outbursts of anger; they could easily have been misinterpreted.

In one large hall — it had probably been a law court; iron yokes hung from the wall — glass showcases had already been emptied. They had held rare books on display, and, coins, seals and charters. Querns weighing several hundredweight each and dating from the pre-Germanic period were lined up along the corridors. After all, they bore witness to the meagre lives of our ancestors: grinding corn into flour, mixing gunpowder for firearms. They were to be left behind, however valuable they might be, because of their weight, but the round pestles used with them were taken away. If anyone looted the querns they wouldn’t be much good without the pestles.

The chandelier made of antlers hanging from the ceiling was left behind as well. It was probably seventeenth century; its day was past.