All for Nothing Read online

  •

  Katharina rang the doorbell of the parsonage and gave the pastor the hare, with a kind of bobbed curtsy. ‘So here you are again for once?’ said Brahms, feeling the dead hare with his thumbs and barely saying ‘Thank you.’ He had so much to do, he said, he was afraid he couldn’t ask her in. Did she know that seven more men from Mitkau had fallen this week? He was sitting with their womenfolk, and there was no comfort. ‘Only yesterday . . . but it’s no use.’ And then there was the additional burden of the old people in the monastery. How long, he wondered, would all this go on? These were intolerable circumstances.

  •

  Katharina went over to the church.

  It was certainly icy cold inside, and Katharina didn’t stay long. From the Globigs’ traditional pew, which was usually empty, she had a good view of a likeness of Jonah which, as if miraculously, had survived Protestant iconoclasm. Jonah and the whale, an old fifteenth-century carving with some gilt still left on it. She had always liked Jonah’s cheerful face as he waved a last goodbye to the whale. Eighteen side altars had suffered at the hands of the iconoclasts, hacked to pieces and burnt, and then the main altar had been unceremoniously chopped up for fire-wood by the French later. Only cheerful Jonah and his whale had survived. Not even the French had done anything to him.

  Katharina threw a coin into the missionary box, a figure of a Moor who nodded his head in thanks. Old postage stamps wouldn’t have done for him.

  •

  Out in the porch she almost bumped into the pastor again. He led her back into the chilly darkness. There was something else he wanted to say . . . and he took her further into the dark. He had something on his mind. He approached her purposefully, and then dropped hints, and finally came out with it. It was a question of giving a man shelter for a night – a refugee. Could that be done? It was mixed up with politics, so not a word to anyone. She could think it over at her leisure and then let him know.

  One day you’ll be back with me again,

  One day you’ll be true to me again . . .

  On the way home Katharina thought of the Crouching Woman, and of Felicitas and the twilight hours spent in her own comfortable refuge. A strange man? For a night? Possibly one of those men in the striped uniforms?

  She couldn’t agree to it just like that. Shouldn’t she ask Eberhard first? But – Italy? Wouldn’t it take ages? Letters arrived six weeks after they were sent. And anyone could overhear a telephone call. ‘Not a word to anyone,’ Pastor Brahms had said. And through what hints was she to present Eberhard with the idea? A strange man?

  On the other hand, shouldn’t one help a stranger? Wasn’t it her Christian duty?

  •

  Dr Wagner was already waiting in Horst-Wessel-Strasse, and she took him up in the coach. This time he had two bags with him. The gelding looked back intently as he got in.

  Today he was going to show the boy something else, he said. He had brought some postcards of Greek art, youths throwing spears and bending bows. There is nothing sweeter than to die for your country, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. They would have to study that proposition.

  8

  The Painter

  Peter was sitting in his room watching the housing development through the telescope. House beside house, arranged in straight lines. An old woman with a bag came round the corner. She slips, and no one notices. Cars drive by on the road, women shake out their mattresses. She lies there and tries to get to her feet, like a horse that has fallen. Peter watched her lying by the roadside, he up here, she down there . . . how could he have gone to her aid?

  After a while he was tired of watching. And when he looked again, the black heap of clothes that was the old woman had disappeared.

  •

  It was cold, because the stove wasn’t drawing properly, and Peter would have liked to crawl into bed, but that wouldn’t do, because Auntie had a way of suddenly flinging open the door to see that everything was all right, particularly when it was quiet up here in his room. It wouldn’t have done for him to be lying in bed reading in broad daylight. So he sat at the window and drew shapes in the frost on the panes.

  •

  Around midday the sun came out, and Peter immediately left everything where it was and ran down to the yard, where flocks of sparrows flew up from the stable. He teased the Ukrainian maids, who finally hit out at him with the broom, and he threw the chickens some grain.

  The rooster, a fiery red fowl with a blue tail, was called Richard, and he was Peter’s friend. When Peter appeared the bird moved a little way aside, so that the hens couldn’t see him, and then Peter bent down and held out a few grains of corn to him in the hollow of his hand. However well fed he was, the rooster would peck them up and nestle his head into Peter’s hand. It was a friendship of equals.

  Peter picked up a new-laid egg in the henhouse and tipped the contents down his throat. Auntie wouldn’t have liked that either. You boil or fry eggs – it’s disgusting to drink them from the shell raw. He also liked eating the sliced turnips that were thrown to the cattle.

  •

  The peacock was nowhere to be seen; he had moved into the furthest corner of the barn to get out of the cold. Even the corn that Peter was throwing to the chickens couldn’t tempt him out. He sat high up in his corner and didn’t move.

  •

  The dovecote was uninhabited, and all was still, bar the odd feather wafting around the opening through which the birds flew in and out. Only a few swallows nested in the dovecote. Old Herr von Globig had been a bird fancier. The peacock with his tail and his little crown, a turkey and his family. Geese. When he couldn’t go hunting any more, pigeons had been his pleasure. He would lie on the terrace, offering them grain, and he was pleased when they came down to him, cooing and nodding their heads.

  •

  Pigeons: their heavy bodies, their elegant flight. Of course the old man had noticed that they didn’t have nice natures; they were always friendly to him, but they would peck each other until they bled. ‘Just like human beings,’ he said, ‘one of them tormenting another.’

  He had tried to persuade his cousin Josef in Albertsdorf to get pigeons of his own. Then they could exchange news by pigeon post, he said, without paying for postage and packing. From the Georgenhof to Albertsdorf and back. They could tie letters to the birds’ legs. Pigeons have an extraordinary sense of direction.

  But what kind of news, Josef asked, would they be exchanging? Anyway, what was the telephone for?

  When the old gentleman died, the family got rid of the birds. On the housing estate, however, everyone who wanted pigeons could have them, and they flew in flocks, sometimes right and sometimes left, turning and wheeling in the air.

  •

  The cottage stood next to the big old barn that hadn’t been in use since the sale of the landed property. Its lower floor was the laundry room-cum-kitchen, and the Ukrainian women slept on the top floor. You got to it by climbing a ladder. Peter liked teasing the women; he called them ‘maid’ until they hit out at him with the dishcloth. Sometimes he climbed up to their bedroom, where they kept their wooden chests and put their things tidily away in an empty cupboard. There were coloured postcards on the wall, depicting a prima ballerina in different ballet positions. He teased skinny Sonya rather more than stout Vera, who had a mysterious smell. Sonya smelt too, but her odour was not uninteresting. However, if she managed to get hold of him that was no fun at all. She hit out, and hard.

  •

  The two women argued. Sonya screeched, and Vera answered her back more calmly. Sometimes they both sang the melancholy songs of their native land together. Sonya took the soprano part in her high voice, Vera sang the lower part in a dark, velvety tone. They were probably remembering the sunflowers at home, and how they had volunteered to come to Germany, a stupid thing to do. Eberhard himself had found them and asked if they wouldn’t like to go to Germany, saying that he could fix it. And their whole village had said: don’t be silly, give
it a go. Germany. A chance like this doesn’t come along every day. You’re not getting anywhere here. And their mothers had urged them to accept the offer, while Grandpa hummed and hawed. In fact it hadn’t been such a stupid idea to go voluntarily after all, because a few weeks later they’d have been taken to Germany anyway, with no choice in the matter.

  Now their native land was far away and the Red Army was back there. The two girls didn’t know that their mothers had been deported under cover of night for collaborating with the enemy in the east. No letter had come through, no message – even pigeon post wouldn’t have been any use. Now the girls were in a foreign land, quarrelling and singing. And when Peter annoyed Sonya she hit out really hard.

  •

  Sometimes Peter watched Vladimir the Pole feeding the horses. The two brown mares and the gelding; you had to be careful not to stick the pitchfork in the horses’ legs when you were mucking out the stable. The smell of their fodder was appetizing: a mixture of oats and chaff. The gelding blew the chaff away before he began eating.

  When Peter was smaller, he had been found one day sleeping beside the gelding in the bay. That huge animal, who liked to push uninvited guests up against the fence.

  •

  Only the heavy farm carts and the old coach stood in the carriage house now. All the other implements and vehicles had been sold when the family parted with its landed estates.

  The coach looked like one of the horse-drawn cabs in Berlin, with leather upholstery, and carbide lanterns in brass holders to left and right of the coachman’s box. The narrow wheels were covered with white rubber, and the little bridal wreath hung in the small, oval window. The coach belonged to the old inventory of the property, and had probably been there for ever, but the little wreath dated only from 1932. When the cousins from Albertsdorf came over and played hide-and-seek, Peter slipped into the coach and it took them ages to find him. Stay put and don’t move, that was the way to play the game.

  •

  Once Peter had shot at some crows with the air pistol. One of the birds dropped to the ground, but was still alive. It flapped its wings and went on living, until at last it lay dead. Then Vladimir came out of the cowshed and looked long and gravely at the boy.

  If you were going to kill something you had to do it properly. From time to time Vladimir came along with the axe, picked up a chicken, and one blow was enough to kill it. None of the chickens strode past their comrades to save their lives, like the legendary medieval privateer Störtebecker after his beheading; there was no saving anyone’s life here. Some time or other every chicken’s turn came, and the axe went chop-chop. The cat, who otherwise kept out of the way, came running at the sound; he knew it meant something for him. He had a rightful claim to the head of the fowl.

  •

  When Peter looked to see if the tree house in the oak was still in good order and wondered whether to climb up to it and leave a stock of chopped turnips there, a farmer’s cart stopped in the road, and a little man jumped down. The man said goodbye to the farmer who had given him a lift, walked round the manor house and came in through the back door to the kitchen, where the maids were quarrelling again. When they saw him they stopped shouting, and stared at him in silence.

  The man in his long coat seemed rather strange. But when he had unwound the scarf wrapped round his head, he looked perfectly normal, indeed smart. He laughed and asked the Ukrainian girls, ‘What are you shouting for? Surely things aren’t as bad as all that?’

  Then he addressed them as ‘ladies’ and asked whether he could warm himself up a bit.

  They cleared him a place at the kitchen table, and even gave him a mug of hot milk and a piece of bread and honey.

  •

  Where had he come from? the women asked. Where was he going? He asked in return where did they come from? Where were they going? And when Auntie came along, with a brooch on her pullover and wrist-warmers on her wrists – where had he come from? Where was he going? – he stood up, told her his name and said he was an artist, a painter, and added that it was wonderful to be allowed to warm himself here in this traditional old kitchen, you didn’t usually meet with such hospitality these days. To think he’d been offered milk and honey, he’d never known such a thing before. There was an almost biblical touch to it.

  He came from Düsseldorf, he said, and he had been travelling through the German provinces for months, drawing ‘what was left standing’, as he put it. The mayor of Mitkau had given him a friendly welcome and let him do as he liked in his town. And it had also been the mayor who directed him to the Georgenhof, with its finial in the shape of a spiked mace, the morning-star type, set high above the gable room, telling him that nice people lived there.

  Where had all this come from? Where would it all end? That was the question.

  When he heard that Auntie was from Silesia, he said he knew Silesia like the back of his hand. He had been occupied for the last two years illustrating that great work The German Provinces, drawing the provincial buildings still standing. It was supported by the Party, he explained, and he had three extensive portfolios ready in Düsseldorf. He had begun his work in Swabia, then he had gone along the Weser, and so to Thuringia. And Silesia too. All that was already on record, now it was the turn of East Prussia, in winter at that, but he was nearly finished. In the next few days he would continue his work with Allenstein, and then conclude it in Danzig.

  He had been in Silesia a year and a half ago, in summer, when deep peace reigned there. All those pretty little churches. Where had all this come from? Where would it all end?

  •

  Königsberg was done for now, but he had turned to depicting that city and what remained of it. There was still a great deal he could put on record and he had been able to save so much for posterity. Burnt-out granaries, a flight of steps with a banister rail rising from the rubble, and of course the ruins of the cathedral and the castle. The British had done a thorough job, you couldn’t deny that. A lovely city, but finished now.

  •

  And he had just left the little town of Mitkau, which was on the defensive.

  He had been arrested there! He had been asked what he was doing, shut up in a filthy cell with six other men, and not so much as a plate of soup. Just for drawing the tank barrier outside the Senthagener Tor. As if he were a spy. They had tried to confiscate his drawings, he said. There’d been a lot of telephoning. The mayor had rescued him, with many apologies, and had even given him an auxiliary police officer.

  Fancy shutting him up like a spy. In a cell with six other men. And shady characters they were, at that.

  •

  In Mitkau he had been interested in the tower of St Mary’s Church from the south-east, a view not shown on any picture postcard. Pastor Brahms was an impressive man, a kind of Luther, but why hadn’t he let him in? Standing four-square outside the parsonage, not even inviting him inside. Asking, ‘What do you want?’ instead of being friendly and letting him into the parsonage. It was the fault of the pastors themselves if they lost their congregations.

  •

  Once inside the church – which otherwise was rather bleak and gloomy – he had sketched the capitals of a few columns and some finials, and then the amusing carving of Jonah with his funny whale. Was there a photo of it? he wondered. You couldn’t really draw something like that.

  •

  The artist had turned to the monastery as well, with its draughty cloisters and the refectory, crooked with age. Old people had been shuffling about in it, coughing and spitting. The refectory with its St Christopher and the cloisters.

  He had drawn, from all sides, the marketplace with its uneven surface, the town hall and the cosy little houses round it. And the Smithy Inn, with its curving gable end. He didn’t think the big bridge so interesting; the old wooden bridge with the Dutch curve to its central section would have been a more attractive subject. But it had had to give way to modern times. He had sketched it only to please the auxiliary police offi
cer.

  He had noticed it when sketching the tricky subject of the Senthagener Tor, when he was drawing the tree trunks lying diagonally in front of it.

  He showed Auntie the sketchbook, as if it were evidence of his industry, and she identified the Mitkau buildings without any difficulty. The town walls, the Senthagener Tor – he’d never seen anything like it before – and the monastery with the doddery old folk in the cloisters. Why, soon that sort of thing, she said, would be on a par with Rembrandt.

  But the refectory? The St Christopher? The columns with their capitals? The finials? She wasn’t familiar with those. It had all been so different in her native Silesia. Much more appealing and cheerful than anything here.

  And the gate? And what were those figures in the picture?

  •

  He had Mitkau in the can now, said the painter. Danzig would be the last great task he had set himself. He just had to visit Allenstein first, then go on to Danzig and maybe Elbing. Then he would pack everything up and go home ‘to the Reich’, as he put it, and then he would have a good sleep for once and see what else could be done with his wealth of material.

  He was really interested in all that had happened to him here. Hours on end in prison, sharing a cell with six subhumans. For hours on end! Work-shy scum, mere rabble . . .

  •

  The Ukrainian maids were curious to see his art as well, and looked over his shoulder, but Auntie said, ‘Come on, what’s all this?’ and they got back to work: peeling potatoes, washing the dishes, cleaning the mighty stove, both in front of it and behind it.

  •

  It was the kitchen range that made the painter reach for his crayon, a real traditional range – gigantic, and the Esse cooker. He immediately began sketching the range, and he also sketched the two maids at work near it. He paid most attention to plump Vera, drawing her in profile, whereupon Sonya ran off to the cottage to fetch her check jacket.