Group Portrait with Lady (10 page)

If we look at the photos of the deceased Hubert Gruyten—baby pictures will be ignored here, the first photo to be seriously consulted will be the school graduation picture—we see him in 1913 as a tall, slim youth, blond, long-nosed, somehow “determined,” dark-eyed, not quite as stiff as his schoolmates in the picture, who look like recruits, and we believe instantly in the assumption that has been passed on, merely by word of mouth, in almost mythical form as having been identically uttered by teacher, priest, and family: “That boy will amount to something one day.” To what? The next photo shows him when he had just completed his apprenticeship, aged eighteen, in 1917: for the term “brooder” that was later applied to him, this photo provides some psychological nourishment. G. is a serious youth, that much is obvious at a glance, his evident good nature being in only apparent contradiction to his manifest determination and will power; since he was always photographed straight on—right up to the last pictures of him taken in 1949 with a wretched little box camera belonging to Leni’s brother-in-law, the aforesaid Heinrich Pfeiffer—the proportion of length of nose to the rest of the face is never visible or demonstrable, and since not even the famous portrait painter who painted a naturalistic portrait of him in 1941
(oils on canvas, not bad at all, although lacking in depth—it was possible to unearth and briefly view it in a private collection in highly disagreeable surroundings) took the opportunity of painting Gruyten from at least a three-quarter view, it can only be assumed that, stripped of his modern trappings, he must have looked as if he had stepped out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

While Marja only hinted at laundry secrets, she spoke openly of kitchen secrets. “She didn’t like strong flavors, while he liked everything highly flavored. That meant problems right from the start because I usually had to flavor everything twice: bland for her, strong for him. It finally ended up by his adding salt and pepper to his own food at table; even when he was a boy everyone in the village knew you could please him better with a pickle than with a piece of cake.”

The next photo worthy of mention is a picture taken on the honeymoon, during which the couple visited Lucerne. There is no doubt about it: Mrs. Helene Gruyten, née Barkel, looks charming: affecting and affectionate, gracious and ladylike; one can tell from looking at her what all the initiated, even Marja, agree on: that she has learned to play her Schumann and her Chopin, speaks French fairly fluently, can crochet, embroider, etc., and—it must be said—one can tell that in her the world may have lost an intellectual, perhaps even a potentially Leftist intellectual. Needless to say, she never “touched” Zola—as she had been taught not to, and one can imagine her horror when eight years later her daughter Leni asked about her (Leni’s)
bowel
movements
. For her, Zola and excrement were probably almost identical concepts. There was probably no latent physician in her, but she would undoubtedly have had no difficulty obtaining a degree in history of art. One must be fair: were one to invent a few conditions for her that did not exist—an education geared less to the elegiac than to the analytical, less soulfulness and more soul (if at all), and had she been spared all the prudishness that went with her boarding-school life, she might have become a good doctor after all. One thing is certain—had such frivolous books come within her reach, even if only as potential reading, she would have been more likely to become a reader of Proust than of Joyce; as it was, she did at least read Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, and copiously in that Catholic illustrated weekly which has by now acquired antiquarian value and
in those days
was the most ultramodern of the ultramodern in its category, the 1914–1920 counterpart to the
Publik
of the 1970’s, and when it is also known that on her sixteenth birthday her parents gave her a subscription to
Hochland
, we can see that she was equipped with not only progressive but the most progressive reading matter. It was probably through her reading of
Hochland
that she was so well informed on the past and present of Ireland, names such as Pearse, Connolly, even such names as Larkin and Chesterton, were not unfamiliar to her; and there is evidence, by way of her sister Irene Schweigert, née Barkel, who is still alive and at the age of seventy-five is living in a ladies’ rest home in the company of fondly warbling budgerigars, “calmly waiting for death” (her own words), that as a young girl Leni’s mother was “among the first, if not the very first, feminine readers of the German translations of William Butler Yeats, and certainly—as I personally know because I gave it to her—of Yeats’s prose that appeared in 1912, and of course Chesterton.”

Now there can be no question of using a person’s literary background or lack of it either for or against him, its only use
is to throw light on a scene that around 1927 was already casting tragic shadows. Of one thing there is no doubt when one studies the honeymoon picture taken in 1919: whatever else of her and in her may have been frustrated—Leni’s mother was most certainly not a frustrated courtesan. She appears to be not very sensual and far from bursting with hormones, whereas he obviously is bursting with hormones. It is quite possible that both of them—whose mutual love we have no right to doubt—were, erotically speaking, totally inexperienced when they embarked on the adventure of marriage, and it may very well be that during the first few nights Gruyten proceeded, if not exactly roughly, perhaps a little impatiently.

As far as
his
acquaintance with books is concerned, the Au. is far from inclined to rely on the opinion of a surviving business competitor who, described as a “giant in the construction field,” expressed himself in these words: “That fellow and books—his ledger maybe, that might have been a book that interested him.” Indeed, we have reason to believe that Hubert Gruyten did in fact read very few books: the technical literature he was obliged to read during his engineering studies, and otherwise, as can be verified, a popular biography of Napoleon, and apart from that, according to the identical testimonies of Marja and Hoyser, “all he wanted was the newspaper and later on the radio.”

After old Mrs. Schweigert had finally been tracked down, an explanation presented itself for a phrase of Marja’s that had thus far been unexplainable and unexplained, a phrase that had remained so long in the Au.’s notebook without being checked off that it very nearly fell victim to impatience: for Marja accused Mrs. Gruyten of having been “just crazy about her Finns.” Since not a single one of the available statements
could be found to contain even the remotest reference to Finland, this expression must have been meant to denote the “Fenians,” Mrs. Gruyten’s partiality for Ireland having subsequently taken a romantic and to some degree even sentimental turn. In any event, Yeats had always been her favorite poet.

There being a complete absence of any exchange of correspondence between Gruyten and his wife, and nothing beyond the statements of Miss van Doorn (which in this case must be regarded as highly dubious), we are left with the superficial analysis of the photograph of the honeymoon taken on the lakeside promenade at Lucerne, and expressed in negative terms: erotic, let alone sexual, harmony does not appear to exist between these two. Emphatically not. Moreover, even this early photo clearly indicates something that is confirmed by many later ones: Leni takes more after her father, Heinrich took more after his mother, although, apropos spices and even rolls, Leni takes more after her mother, and there is even evidence that in her poetic and musical sensibility she also takes more after her mother. The hypothetical question as to what kind of children would have resulted from a possible marriage between Marja and Gruyten can be answered more easily in the negative than in the positive: most certainly not the kind whom parchment-skinned nuns and Jesuit fathers would have remembered, even decades later, at the very mention of their names.

Whatever went wrong or whatever misunderstandings arose between the two spouses, it has been testified by the persons with the most intimate knowledge of the Gruytens’ family life, even by the jealous van Doorn woman, that: never at any time did he show lack of courtesy, chivalry, or even affection toward her, and that she always “idolized” him seems to be a matter of record.

Mrs. Schweigert, née Barkel, an old lady who has nothing whatever of Yeats or Chesterton about her, frankly admitted that she had “not been particularly keen” to associate with her brother-in-law or even her sister after their marriage: she would have much preferred to see her sister married to a poet, painter, sculptor, or at least an architect; she did not say outright that she had found Gruyten too low-class, she expressed it negatively: “not refined enough”; when asked about Leni she would utter no more than two little words: “Oh well,” and on being urged to say more about Leni she stuck to her “Oh well,” whereas she made no bones about claiming Heinrich for the Barkels; not even the fact that her son Erhard was “to all intents and purposes on Heinrich’s conscience, he would never have done such a thing on his own,” could lessen her liking for Heinrich; she declared him to have been “extreme, very extreme, but gifted, almost a genius,” and the Au. gained the ambiguous impression that she did not particularly bemoan her son’s premature death, tending rather to resort to such phrases as “hour of Destiny,” especially since she went so far as to make a statement which, applied to her son and even to Heinrich, was exceedingly odd and would require much checking and historical correction. “They both looked”—these were her very words—“as if they had fallen at the Battle of Langemarck.” When we consider the ambiguities surrounding not only Langemarck but the very myth of Langemarck, the discrepancy between 1914 and 1940, and finally roughly four dozen complicated misunderstandings (which do not all have to be gone into here), we are hardly surprised that the Au. took leave of Mrs. Schweigert courteously but coolly, although not finally: and since he later learned from the witness Hoyser that Mrs. Schweigert’s husband, a hitherto shadowy figure, had been severely wounded at Langemarck, had spent three years in an army hospital—“he was simply shot to pieces” (Hoyser)—and in 1919 had married Irene Barkel,
his volunteer nurse; that this marriage had produced the son Erhard but that Mr. Schweigert—“so morphine-addicted and emaciated that he could hardly find another spot to stick a needle in” (Hoyser)—had died in 1923 at the age of twenty-seven, official occupation student, it may occur to some that this uncommonly ladylike Mrs. Schweigert might have secretly harbored the wish that her husband had fallen at Langemarck. She had earned her living as a real-estate agent.

From 1933 on, the Gruyten business began to take an upward turn, at first steadily, from 1933 steeply, from 1937 vertically; according to statements made by his former staff members and a number of experts, he made money “hand over fist” with the “Siegfried Line,” but according to Hoyser he had spent large sums as early as 1935 to buy up “the best available experts on fortifications and concrete dugouts,” long before he could actually “put them to work.” “We constantly worked with loans so big that it still makes me dizzy to think of them.” Gruyten was quite simply betting on what he called the “Maginot complex” of all statesmen; “years after the Maginot myth has been destroyed, it will” (Gruyten’s words quoted by Hoyser) “persist and continue to persist. The Russians are the only ones who don’t have this complex; their frontier is too long for them to be able to afford it, but whether this will spell their salvation or their doom remains to be seen. Hitler at any rate has it, however much he may propagate and practice a war of mobility,
he personally
has the dugout and fortifications complex, you wait and see” (early 1940, statement made before the conquest of France and Denmark).

Be that as it may: by 1938 the Gruyten firm was six times as large as it had been in 1936, when it had been six times as large as in 1932; in 1940 it was twice as large as in 1938, and (Hoyser) “by 1943 you couldn’t have established any ratio at all.”

One characteristic of Gruyten, Sr., is confirmed by everyone, although in two different terms: some call him “courageous,” others “fearless,” a certain minority of perhaps two or three call him “a megalomaniac.” Experts testify to this day that without any doubt Gruyten, at a very early stage, hired or lured away the best fortifications experts on the market, later ruthlessly employing even French engineers and technicians who had been involved in the building of the Maginot Line, and that he had “known perfectly well” (a high-ranking official of the Ordnance Department who also would prefer to remain anonymous) that: “to economize on wages and salaries during a time of inflation is nonsense.” Gruyten paid well. At the time in question he is forty-one years of age. Custom-made suits of “expensive, but not ostentatiously expensive material” (Lotte Hoyser) have turned a “fine figure of a man” into a “fine figure of a gentleman”; he was not even ashamed of being nouveau riche, expressing himself as follows to one of his colleagues (Werner von Hoffgau, an architect from an old-established family), “all wealth was at one time new, even yours, at the time when your family was becoming wealthy but hadn’t yet attained wealth.” Gruyten refused to build himself a villa (to the end of his days he referred to a house as a “home”) in that part of town which was then mandatory for those well on the way to prosperity.

It would be irresponsible to regard Gruyten as a naive, crude self-made man; among his abilities is one that cannot be learned and cannot be inherited: he understands human nature, and all his staff—architects, technicians, businessmen—admire him, and most of them respect him. The education and upbringing of his son are carefully planned and closely watched by him, he keeps an eye on them; he visits the boy frequently, seldom
bringing him home because—surprising statement, verified by Hoyser—he does not want the boy to soil his hands with business. “What he had in mind for the boy was a scholarly career, not just any old professor, more like the one we built that villa for.” (Hoyser; according to H.’s statement this referred to a fairly well-known specialist in Romance languages, whose library, cosmopolitanism, and “straight-forward cordial manner with people” must have impressed Gruyten.) With some impatience he finds that at fifteen his son “doesn’t speak Spanish as well as I had expected.”