All for Nothing Page 8
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When the moment seemed propitious, Wagner had the boy doing mathematics. ‘A cyclist goes from A to B . . .’ Straightforward enough in itself, the rule of three: what you have to put above the line, and what belongs under it, and then you abbreviate and multiply it. Perfectly simple, and yet Peter couldn’t grasp it, however emphatically Dr Wagner pointed it out, however gently he brought his clenched fist down on the table. The boy just didn’t grasp it.
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In English: I have washed, you have washed, he has washed. To think that the British, such a cultivated nation, had razed a city like Königsberg to the ground. The cathedral. The inn called the Massacre. It was more than he could understand. His beloved Königsberg. Eating fried flounders in a little restaurant on the River Pregel, and the sirens sounding on the big ships in harbour there . . .
Why hadn’t he travelled the world before the war, Dr Wagner wondered, when it was still possible? He assumed that some day Peter would go where he could breathe the air of very different places.
Dr Wagner couldn’t get the ships’ sirens and the fried flounders out of his head. And crunchy golden-yellow fried potatoes. Such a simple dish in itself.
Of course Dr Wagner also told the boy what ‘political economy’ meant. He agreed that stamp-collecting was a good idea; those small stamps, he said, are like miniature stocks and shares. Collecting them was a good idea, yes, but mending them? Replacing a single indentation – he considered such a thing impossible, out of the question. Was it outright fraud? No, surely his imagination was running away with him, wasn’t it? Well, said Dr Wagner, one must always stick to the truth. Stick to the truth, and be able to keep quiet about certain rumours that were now circulating. They originated with people who had an insight into what was going on, people who had seen developments in the east. Things so far-fetched that one really couldn’t envisage them.
Collecting stamps and coins, yes, why not? Objects of value. Long after the paper mark has given up the ghost, said Dr Wagner, the stamps would still be here, unless they had been burnt . . .
Inflation – millions, billions? Difficult to understand and complicated to explain.
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They looked up Budapest in the atlas, because that city was in the news. How far the Russians had advanced – alignments of the fronts in the course of disengagement – and where the Americans actually were. Why not stick pins into a map? The map in question was already hanging on the wall, although marked in the other direction to show how far the Germans had advanced east, in their military formations – their ‘spearheads’ and ‘pockets’. It did not show where they were now. Whereas everyone knew where the Russians were at this moment. Not a hundred kilometres away.
Budapest was in Hungary, and some time or other it had belonged to Austria and the Imperial and Royal monarchy. Long ago. A likeable place in itself.
The Emperor Waltz – Dr Wagner had seen that film.
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Katharina sometimes sat at that table with them, however quiet and reserved she was. She would bring her cup of tea with her and sit down beside the neatly bearded teacher. She herself could still learn something here. Sometimes she even put on an afternoon dress, the kind she had worn in the old days. And if the sun shone into the room, making the ice flowers on the windows glitter, the cat would turn up too and settle down on Peter’s bed with his paws tucked under him.
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On occasion the conversation between the two grown-ups moved away into its own domain, going hither and thither, while Peter sat on the floor with his model railway and wound up the engine. As it went round the bend the carriages sometimes came off the rails.
‘Not too fast, my boy, not too fast . . .’
To think that people who knew about the east had seen what was going on there now. Our good old German fatherland. For heaven’s sake!
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Katharina lit a cigarette and looked for Lake Garda on the map, trying to imagine what it would look like there now, and she thought of Venice and how she had stayed in a cold hotel with Eberhard, and it rained all day. Then she caught a chill below the waist on a gondola expedition, and came home with kidney trouble, and that was the end of that.
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The plundering of Rome by the Vandals. The Italians in Forest Lodge, or were they Sicilians?
They were Catholic, anyway. A priest had once been to see them. One of the Italians had fallen ill and died in the cold German Reich, where for all they knew there might still be wolves and aurochs keeping their distance, in inhospitable Germania. They could have wished him a different fate.
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Dr Wagner was always talking to Katharina over the boy’s head about the circumstances, those circumstances to which they were now exposed. He lowered his voice: the brickworks in Mitkau, the people who had to work there, prisoners in striped jackets. What would come of it all? ‘Who’d have thought it?’ There was nothing very strange about it if he touched this quiet woman’s forearm now and then. Not when he had known her so long. But it didn’t have to be like that.
‘Will you be setting off westward too?’ he asked sadly. Then he dropped hints, and cautiously framed the question of whether he might not be taken along with them on that journey. There would surely be room for him in the vehicle.
He could have gone into the Reich by rail, but when exactly should he do it? And when would the right moment come? Where exactly would he go? What reason would he give for such a journey?
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Auntie had tried to make her own contribution to Peter’s lessons. She had turned up with a folder full of pictures, ‘Illustrations to Biblical History’, and talked about the Saviour. But the seed fell on stony ground. The fact that the old German imperial crown bore a cross was beside the point. Here Dr Wagner joined in, mentioning the Christian west, and then talking to Auntie about Pastor Brahms in Mitkau, who was said to be most incautious, saying all kinds of wild things in his sermons – God is not mocked, and so on and so forth, instead of keeping his mouth shut. And then the words ‘concentration camp’ uttered in an undertone.
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Dr Wagner’s idea of making up riddles was a good one.
Cling to your dear, beloved fatherland . . . could a syllabic riddle of some kind be based on that? Or Horror stares from empty window frames? Schiller, anyway, was eminently suitable for such things.
Magic squares of numbers – from left to right, from top to bottom, when you add them up you always get the same result. Strange, hard to understand. Were you supposed to be able to conjure up some kind of power like that? Cast a spell to banish misfortune? Dürer had put his mind to such things. Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, the beautiful city that now lay in ruins, like Königsberg and Hamburg, Frankfurt and Cologne.
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Riddles were all very well, but Peter didn’t understand why anyone would ask a riddle when you already knew what the outcome was going to be.
Well, said Dr Wagner, in dire straits you could always earn money from making up riddles. Five marks per riddle, perhaps?
Peter said that in that case they could simply copy them out of Flying Leaves and sell them, but that turned out to be the wrong approach. It led to a lecture of some length about the Ten Commandments, the iniquity of telling lies, and the fact that a good German boy must wash thoroughly, paying attention to his fingernails, wasn’t that so? ‘And always be cautious, my boy, that’s a part of life.’
It seemed that one important question was whether adding a black mark to the stamps in his collection was or was not a good idea.
‘Brig: a two-masted square-rigged ship . . .’
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He had seen many handsome sailing ships in Königsberg. Why hadn’t he just gone away back then, when the whole world was still open to him?
But gone away where? That was the question. Where should they have gone?
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Riddles: the great questions facing mankind. When Dr Wagner got around to discus
sing those, he leaned back and looked into the distance. Where do we come from? Where are we going? Those were questions that he had often asked himself during his seventy years of life, without ever coming a jot closer to the truth. Perhaps the meaning of life was that we must perfect whatever is our own potential? Strive for perfection, as Goethe understood that word.
Now, when he sits alone in his room, he often thinks of the good times, of home, of eating fried flounders with his mother beside the River Pregel. And he is sorry that he wasn’t nicer to her.
‘Time, time, you can never turn it back, my boy.’ And he would stand up and look at the cuckoo clock, with its pendulum swinging quickly back and forth, left to right and vice versa, and the little door is already opening, and the cuckoo calls out of the clock whether you want to hear it or not.
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So many things were a riddle to him. The differences between people – quite apart from the difference between man and woman. For instance, the difference between Germans and Russians. Germans, clean, industrious, honest; Russians, on the other hand, lazy, dirty, cruel? Then again, the other way round:Russians, kindly on principle, whereas Germans . . . Recently there’d been much that was hard to understand, although here and now it was better not to talk about it. Things that, in themselves, were not at all necessary.
‘Riddle’, a good Germanic word, not for the great questions that face mankind, but for the little ones, often very simple matters. That too was part of a teacher’s educational plan: it should show his pupil that some things are hard even for an adult to understand. Of course, he didn’t say so to Peter. He left it to the boy to come to his own conclusions, however wrong they might be.
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As a scholar, Dr Wagner concentrated chiefly on German literature and the German language; he got Peter to recite poems, and marked the stresses and rhythm of the lines in his book of poetry with his silver pencil, as well as the place to pause and take a deep breath.
From afár a glów, like a víllage on fíre,
Reflécting on póols as the flámes burn hígher . . .
At his request, Peter wrote a long essay about the Georgenhof, entitled My Home. It took him days. He illustrated his experiences and events with pictures. Lightning and threatening storm clouds in the sky above a haywain, the cherry harvest, with Peter himself and the girl cousins from Berlin sitting in the cherry tree, and Auntie looking out of the window. She said that it is better to preserve the cherries in jars than tear them all off their stems and put them in your mouth right away.
He said in his essay that the estate had been only an adjunct to the old Georgenhof, whose ruins still lay in the forest. It was burnt down by the French in 1807 and never rebuilt. He poked around there quite often, although he wasn’t allowed to play in the ruins; adders had been seen there, and the whole thing might collapse. All the same he went there now and then. He had already lured his cousins in and then scared them by calling out in a hollow, ghostly voice.
The Hitler Youth had once met by night in the part of the vaults still standing, holding smouldering torches and singing defiant songs.
Comrades, arise and fight,
We’ll raise our banners higher!
There had been repercussions to this episode. The police had told the local Hitler Youth that it wouldn’t do; a vaulted ruin like that could easily fall flat.
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When Peter had finished his essay, Dr Wagner wrote Good! under it in red ink, and Auntie tied the pages together with a blue ribbon, which made them almost a book. He could give it to his father for his birthday. It lay on his desk, and Peter imagined his pleasure in receiving it. His father’s birthday was in May. In the merry, merry month of May.
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There was another room next to Peter’s bedroom. It had been his little sister Elfie’s room until she died two years ago.
Everything had been left as it was when she was alive: her doll’s house, her puppet theatre. Even the knitted witch with a metre-long cord dangling from her stomach. Elfie’s clothes still hung in the wardrobe, and until recently clean sheets had regularly been put on the bed. Her photograph lay on the pillow. She had had frizzy hair in braids, not fair like Peter’s hair but raven-black.
When she died the cat went missing and didn’t come back for three days.
What a pity, Peter sometimes thought when he was lying in bed. I could have knocked on the wall now, and then she would have knocked back.
6
Katharina
Since Eberhard had been called up, Katharina had been living in the ‘refuge’, as they both called their private little apartment. Auntie had begun looking in on her for afternoon coffee and a nice chat, talking about Silesia and what it had been like to be driven away from her old home – she had turned up every day to discuss the sorrows of this world. Every day from three to four. When it threatened to become an established habit, Katharina locked her door. ‘I need time for myself,’ she said. Not just for a few hours but for days and weeks. She always needed time for herself. We all live our own lives, and further more, as she had said all along, she was not a countrywoman, she’d have liked to be a bookseller. She had never heard about lime and nitrogen. As for milking cows – oh, for heaven’s sake!
She was living in this comfortable little apartment, and Auntie had her own lovely room – sunshine all round!
Anyway, they ate meals together down in the big hall, and they could talk then.
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The little apartment consisted of a living room, the bedroom and a study, with bookshelves supported on golden-bronze brackets lining the walls. The shelves held novels, side by side, and they had all been read, because Katharina had been a bookworm since childhood. As she always said, she had wanted to be a bookseller, not the mistress of an estate. And it was in a bookshop that Eberhard had seen her again in Berlin, where she and he were looking at one and the same book at ten one morning, and that, as it said in an account written to commemorate their wedding, was ‘the book of life’.
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She regularly got fresh supplies of books from Mitkau; they were the luxury she allowed herself. The bookseller there always had something extra for her as well. Konrad Muschler, Eckart von Naso, Ina Seidel. And also the Blue Books – pictorial volumes that she liked leafing through: The Provinces of Germany . . .
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The study contained the little desk at which she wrote letters to her family in Berlin, telling them that she was fine, but how was all this going to end? Or to her husband in distant Italy. They had gone to Italy before the war in the brand-new Wanderer car, and now Eberhard had been there for months.
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Photographs of her parents stood on the table, and a picture in oils of little Elfriede. It had been painted shortly before she was snatched away by scarlet fever in 1943, when no one was expecting any really serious childhood illness. She would be nearly eight years old now; Katharina was always working out her age.
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Attached to the refuge was a conservatory that brought light into the little apartment. From there, you looked out over the flat roof of the summer drawing room and the terrace, and so to the park, the lawn surrounded by rhododendrons, and Auntie’s green and white summerhouse. They had had it put up in 1936, when everything looked likely to improve. The village carpenter had put it together in three days for Auntie’s birthday – it had been a great surprise. And it had been used only once.
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Katharina liked to sit in the conservatory, looking down on the black forest that stood like a wall beyond the meadowland of the park. She often sat there with her friend Felicitas, who laughed so prettily, and chattered cheerfully – here you were undisturbed, yet somehow at the same time in the middle of nature.
Felicitas with her bright aquamarine pendant round her neck, and Katharina with her gold locket, both of them in the conservatory among cacti and geraniums.
Felicitas, blonde, a pretty little face with a pointed nose, was
always so happy, and she made the more phlegmatic Katharina laugh with her stories. She managed to find something amusing in all her experiences – and there were a great many of them. She told her stories with a wealth of gestures, to Katharina, who could only marvel at her friend’s imagination. Anyone standing down on the terrace could have heard every word spoken up here, and would have had something to laugh at.
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The two friends laughed a great deal, but sometimes their mood was muted. Then they talked about Fritz from Frankfurt, who had had to go to Switzerland under cover of darkness, and other matters on Felicitas’s mind.
There were a few matters that they never discussed; each of them kept those strictly to herself.
They toned one another down, the two friends – but then they got each other wound up and going again. Felicitas had a knack for that.
Now, in winter, they did not sit in the conservatory, but drank coffee in the comfortable little living room. Katharina had bought charming little armchairs for ladies. At Eberhard’s insistence a painting of the Treptow observatory hung on the wall.
All kinds of postcards showing works of art hung beside the picture of the observatory: Dürer’s portrait of his mother, Feuerbach’s Medea.
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In the middle of the apartment was a china figure on an old stand meant to hold flowers. The figure was entitled Crouching Woman, and Eberhard had bought it from the Royal Porcelain Manufactory in Berlin.
Felicitas was not visiting at the moment; she was pregnant, and in the cold wind on the slippery road she could easily have fallen. Katharina sat alone in her room, reading, or she made silhouettes out of black card, mostly of flowers and birds, and stuck them in an album devoted to the seasons of the year. When she had finished one of these works of art she lit herself a cigarette and sat back, pleased with herself.
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Eberhard had travelled a great deal during this war: the good days in France, time spent in the proud country of Greece, and then the Ukraine, with its great fields of sunflowers. And wheat. Everything had turned out all right, although someone had put a mine in his bed in the Ukraine. And now Italy!