Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

The old gentleman with his wife and young daughter stood beside the truck, their coats blowing in the wind. Paintings! Charters! Folio volumes! The truck was taken away. The curator was told that they would be careful with the cultural artefacts, of course they would. Then the daughter took over and helped her parents out on the ice. They must go on on foot. Perhaps they would be lucky.

The half-frozen Haff. Peter took his mother’s little locket out of his pocket. He had been holding it in his hand, and now he opened it. Maybe it contained a picture of him? Or of Elfriede? Or his father in his white jacket?

No, Katharina had kept a picture of herself inside the locket. Peter closed it again. And at that moment, far away in Italy, his father picked up his service pistol and shot himself.

Peter ran out on the ice after a farm cart. A woman was sitting on the box. She had come a long way, and she had put feather beds round her children to keep away the cold.

Peter jumped up to hitch a lift on the back of the cart, and let it carry him over. Water lay on the surface of the ice and spurted up.

In other lands and here

We live in great despair.

We pray the Lord to heed

Our misery and need.

Some time later, early in May, Peter was standing on the quay in a harbour, scanning the horizon through his binoculars, with his air pistol in his waistband.

The sea! Gulls, and the waves lapping against the wooden breakwaters. ‘Avant de mourir?’

Large vessels lay at anchor in the roadsteads, gradually filling up with refugees and then steaming away. Motor launches full of people went out to them from the quayside in the harbour, plying out and back again. And ship after ship steamed away. Was there a painter somewhere, recording the magnificent scene for ever?

Peter was not in any hurry. He slept in abandoned apartments, went to the cinema, got pea soup from a field kitchen, played with a stray cat and ran along the beach. Once, in a back yard, he listened to someone playing the violin. He thought he knew the tune. He meant to go into the building, but it was locked.

There was an apple tree in blossom in front of the house, and behind it the echo of that violin music.

He wandered along the streets with their front gardens in flower, and when there was an air-raid warning he went into a cellar to join the people with their cases and bags in the shelter. He listened to the anti-aircraft guns and the dull thump of bombs as they dropped, and when it was over he went back to roaming through the streets. He saw sailors with hand grenades in their belts — dating from Kiel in 1918 — and old Volkssturm reservists — Alas, you have destroyed / this lovely world — and SS men too, with their boots as shiny as if they were on parade. If all should turn disloyal, yet we will still prove true.

A swarm of deaconesses in white caps, holding the hands of children from an orphanage. ‘Where are you going? Where are you going?’ This way or that, forward or back?

Amidst all the coming and going, Peter saw a hat — a woman with a hat that he knew on her head. It was one of his mother’s hats, black with a red feather in it, and the woman was Frau Hesse. Eckbert and Ingomar were trotting along behind her. She was holding tickets for a ship, waving them in the air. Maybe we will all get lucky some time in our lives.

Peter took cover in a gateway. He didn’t want to meet these people.

Among the farm carts where they had been left after the trek, he saw a girl in white knee socks. She was perched on the shafts, rocking back and forth. Later, when he came back looking for her, she had gone.

Was it Elfie? he wondered, and counted on his fingers; she would be eight now. He remembered his mother running after the howling Elfie. A lot of screaming, all long ago. Had it been like that? Running upstairs. And then one day his sister was lying in bed, not moving, and his mother had not shed tears.

He would have liked to tell the girl with the knee socks about those hunched figures, brown as earth, and the chamber organ and the crystal chandeliers. And he would have liked to give her the last silver spoon. Had he lost it? And where had the girl gone? He found the dried-up wreath of flowers from the coach in his trouser pocket, and crumbled it to pieces. Only when he had destroyed it did he remember that those were the flowers from the coach.

If I’d known what I was missing,

If I’d known who I was kissing,

That midnight at the lido.

If I’d known who it was there

That midnight at the lido …

The Isabelle, a white hotel on the promenade now painted in camouflage colouring. One last deckchair still stood on the terrace. Peter sat in it, and watched the fast motorboats and launches taking passengers out to the big ships in the distance. But weren’t they always full?

Many old-fashioned steamships had been sunk in the bay. You could just see their masts under the surface of the water, like the horses’ heads in the ice of the Haff.

Once Peter also went to see the foreign workers playing the mandolin and dancing. They had been housed in a gymnasium, cooking themselves fry-ups and waiting to go home.

Was Marcello, the Italian from the Forest Lodge, one of them? And the Romanian who could make money disappear as if by magic? And the Czech with the leather cap? A troop of Frenchmen came marching up as well, and they were all loaded into an open barge. ‘Come with us!’ one of them called to Peter. No, he didn’t want to. He was still waiting.

Wounded men were taken to the barge as well. Peter hadn’t noticed before that there was a group of concentration camp prisoners in it. They had to crowd close together in the bows, and the soldiers with their blood-stained bandages spat in front of them.

When Peter was watching a revue film at the cinema, an air-raid warning sounded again, and bombs fell almost at once. The barge had been hit out at sea, and sank at once.

Next day the bodies floated ashore. The wounded men were surrounded by the paper bandages from their injuries; they had come adrift and were floating round them like garlands in the waves. Was there a white cap lying on the beach? White, and made from the skin of a Persian lamb?

So far Peter had not been in any hurry. But now there were many more people standing on the quayside in the harbour, waiting to be taken out to the ships, and there were no more ships in sight. The town was empty, but they still stood on the beach waiting. A torpedo boat came past to see if there was still anyone left, and even a U-boat put in an appearance.

Peter went through the empty streets one last time, and then down to the harbour. He passed the football field, which was full of house hold goods: furniture, sewing machines, grandfather clocks, all sorted according to size, as well as a solitary goat tied to a baby’s pram.

Busy Party officials made notes of all these things — how many pianos there were, how many armchairs — and checked up on occasional passers-by: Heil Hitler, what did they think they were doing here?

Soldiers were ordered around. They were given guns. ‘In your own time, quick march!’ they were told, and then they were sent off to fight the Russians. There were even members of the Hitler Youth among them, putting a brave face on it.

Many glances were cast at Peter. Couldn’t that fair-haired boy handle a weapon too? After all, it was a matter of defending the country. Hey, you, come here! It’s a matter of life and death.

Now men, stand up, and let the stormclouds break! Rise up, my friends, the flames send signals out …

No, Peter was rejected. He might have fair hair, but he was still too young.