Group Portrait with Lady (11 page)

One thing he never did: regard Leni as a “silly goose.” Her rage over the administering of the First Communion did not annoy him in the least, he laughed aloud over it (something he was known to have done very rarely during his lifetime), and his comment was: “That girl knows exactly what she wants” (Lotte H.).

While his wife becomes paler and paler, a bit tearful and even a bit pietistic, he is entering on “his prime.” One thing he has never had and never will have as long as he lives: feelings of inferiority. He may have had dreams—for his son certainly and, as to his hopes for his son’s knowledge of Spanish, most certainly. Thirteen years after conjugal relations between him and his wife have ceased (according to Marja van Doorn) to exist, he still does not deceive his wife, at least not with other women. He has a surprising aversion to dirty stories, an aversion he shows openly on the occasions when he is obliged to attend “stag dinners” and inevitably, toward two or three in the morning, a certain stage is reached at which one of the men demands a “hot-blooded Circassian maiden.” Gruyten’s coolness toward dirty stories and “Circassian maidens” earns him a certain amount of ridicule, which he accepts without protest (Werner von Hoffgau, who for the space of a year sometimes accompanied him to stag dinners).

What kind of fellow is this, the reader must be wondering with increasing impatience, what kind of fellow is this who lives a life of chastity, so to speak, makes money out of preparations for war, out of war itself, whose turnover (according to Hoyser) rose from approximately one million a year in 1935 to one million a month in 1943, and who in 1939, when his turnover presumably amounted to one million every quarter, did everything he could to exclude his son from a business at which he himself was making a fortune?

During 1939 and 1940 a certain tension, amounting even to bitterness, arises between father and son. Heinrich is now back home, having come down from the three mountains of the Western world and, at a distance of four hours by train, is occupied somewhere draining marshes, capable though he has meanwhile become—at the insistence of his father, who has paid a Spanish Jesuit tutor a fat fee for the purpose—of reading Cervantes in the original. Between June and September the son visits the family some seven times, between the end of September 1939 and the beginning of 1940 some five times, and has refused to make use of the frankly proffered “pull” of his father, for whom it “would have been no trick” (all quotations from Hoyser, Sr., and Lotte) to have him “transferred to a more suitable job” or to effect his discharge once and for all as a war-essential employee. What kind of son is this who, when asked at the breakfast table about his health and what life in the army is like, draws from his pocket a book entitled: Reibert,
Handbook of Army Regulations, Edition for Tank Gunners
, revised by a Major Allmendiger, and proceeds to read a section from it that he has not yet committed to a letter: a dissertation covering nearly five pages headed “Military Salutes” and
describing in detail every type of salute to be performed while walking, lying, standing, on horseback, and in an automobile, and who salutes whom and how? It must be borne in mind that this father is not one who spends all his time sitting around the house waiting for his son’s visits; this is a father who now has a government aircraft at his disposal (Leni enjoys flying enormously!) and, as a man occupied with matters of great, sometimes extreme, sometimes supreme, importance, must get out of commitments as occasion arises, cancel important engagements, cancel appointments with cabinet ministers (!), often by using threadbare excuses (dentist, etc.), so as not to miss seeing his beloved son—and who then has to listen to a passage on regulation saluting by some fellow called Reibert, revised by a certain Major Allmendiger, being read aloud to him by a beloved son whom he really wanted to see as director of the History of Art (or at least Archeological) Institute in Rome or Florence?

Is any further comment required on the fact that these “coffee gatherings,” these breakfasts and midday dinners, became “for all concerned not merely uncomfortable but increasingly agonizing, nerve-racking, and finally ghastly” (Lotte Hoyser)? Lotte Hoyser, née Berntgen, then aged twenty-six, daughter-in-law of the much-quoted manager and head bookkeeper Otto Hoyser, worked as a secretary for Gruyten, who also for a time took on her husband Wilhelm Hoyser as a draftsman. Since Lotte was already in Gruyten’s employ during the crucial months of 1939 and was sometimes present at the coffee gatherings with the son who was on leave, her assessment of Gruyten himself, whom she described as “simply fascinating but in those days, when you got right down to it, a crook,” ought perhaps to be mentioned only marginally. Old Hoyser loves to hint at the “erotic but of course platonic relationship” between his daughter-in-law and Gruyten, Sr., “in whose erotic sphere of interest she naturally belonged, since they were barely fourteen years apart in age.” Theories have even been voiced (strangely enough by Leni, although not directly, only indirectly,
confirmed by the unreliable Heinrich Pfeiffer) that “even in those days Lotte probably represented a genuine temptation for Father, by which I don’t mean she was a
temptress.”
In any event, Lotte describes the family coffee parties, for which Gruyten, Sr., sometimes flew in from Berlin or Munich, even from Warsaw, it is said, as “simply ghastly,” “downright unbearable.” M.v.D. describes them—the meals—as “horrible, simply horrible,” while Leni’s only comment is “awful, awful, awful.”

The evidence is, even from so prejudiced a witness as M.v.D., that these leave-periods “simply destroyed” Mrs. Gruyten; “what went on there was just too much for her.” Lotte Hoyser speaks unequivocally of an “intellectual variation of patricide” and maintains that the politically destructive motive for quoting from the aforesaid Reibert had “hit Gruyten hard because he was in the thick of politics, was often hearing of, had often heard of, top political secrets such as the construction of barracks in the Rhineland long before it was occupied and the planned construction of giant air-raid shelters—and this was precisely why he didn’t want to hear about politics at home.”

Leni experienced these bitter nine months not quite so overwhelmingly, possibly not quite so attentively, as did other observers. She had meanwhile—approximately in July 1939—yielded to a man, no, she would have yielded to him had he asked her; true, she did not know whether this was really the right man, the one whom she was so ardently awaiting, but she did know that she would not find out until he had asked her. It was her cousin, Erhard Schweigert, son of the Langemarck victim and the lady who maintained that he had looked as if he had fallen at the Battle of Langemarck. Erhard, “because of a hypersensitive nervous disposition” (his mother), had failed to scale as rugged an educational barrier as matriculation; furthermore,
he had been temporarily sent home from as remorseless an institution as the Reich Labor Service and was now aiming for what he regarded as the “repulsive” (his own word, according to M.v.D.) profession of grade-school teacher, having taken the first step by starting to study at home for an aptitude test. But then in the end he was drafted into that rugged institution where he met his cousin Heinrich, who took him under his wing and, while they were both on leave, tried quite openly to pair him off with his sister Leni. He bought them movie tickets with which he “sent them off” (M.v.D.), he arranged to meet them after the show “but then didn’t turn up” (see above). Since this meant that Erhard spent not only the greater part of his leave but his entire leave with the Gruytens, paying only brief sporadic visits to his mother, the latter is still bitter about it; with outright indignation she rejected the possibility that a love affair “with serious intentions” might have existed between her son and Leni. “No, no, and again no—that Oh-well girl—no!” Now, if one thing is certain it is the indisputable fact that right from the first leave—in about May 1939—Erhard absolutely adored Leni; there are tried-and-true witnesses to this: in particular Lotte Hoyser, who frankly admits that “Erhard would certainly have been better than what came later, anyway than what came in 1941. Maybe not better than what came in 1943.” On her own admission she repeatedly tried to entice Leni and Erhard into her apartment, to leave them alone there “so that—damn it all—it would finally happen. For God’s sake, the boy was twenty-two, healthy, unusually thoughtful and kind. Leni was seventeen and a bit, and she was—I tell you straight—she was ripe for love, she was a woman, a marvelous woman even in those days, but the shyness of that Erhard was something you wouldn’t believe.”

At this point, in order to avoid misunderstandings again, or yet again, it is necessary to describe Lotte Hoyser. Born 1913, height five feet four and a half inches, weight 122 pounds, graying brown hair; powder-dry, dialectically inclined if not trained, she may be called a person of remarkable candor, even more candid than Margret. Since she lived with Gruyten on fairly intimate terms during the Erhard period, she would seem to be a far more reliable witness than Miss van Doorn, who, in everything concerning Leni, inclines to iconolatry. Lotte, when queried about her controversial relationship with Gruyten, Sr., spoke candidly about that too: “Well, something might have developed between us two even in those days, I admit, he might have developed into what he became in ’45; I disapproved of almost everything he did, but could understand it, if you know what I mean. His wife was too timid, besides she was scared by all that armaments stuff, it filled her with panic, paralyzed her; if she’d been an active woman and less of a daydreamer she would’ve hidden her son somewhere in Spain in some monastery or maybe in that land of the Fenians where she could’ve made a trip to see everything for herself, and in the same way, of course, it would’ve been possible to put my husband and Erhard beyond the reach of German history. Don’t get me wrong: Helene Gruyten was not only nice, she was kind and clever, but history was too much for her, if you know what I mean, too much—whether it was politics or the business or the appalling self-destruction that boy was deliberately heading for. It’s true, of course, what others have told you” (Margret’s name was not betrayed. Au.). “He had devoured the whole Western world—and what was he left with? A little pile of shit, if you ask me, and he was confronted with that indescribable crap. Too much Bamberg Rider and too little Peasants’ War. Even when I was a kid of fourteen in night school, back in 1927, I had a course in the sociopolitical background to the Peasants’ War and took all kinds of notes—and I know, of
course, that the Bamberg Rider has nothing to do with the Peasants’ War—but I ask you, cut off his curls and give him a shave—and what’ve you got? A pretty cheap and sentimental Saint Joseph. In other words: too much Bamberg Rider in the boy and too much Rosa Alchemica—she once gave me that to read, it was really beautiful, she was a marvelous woman all right, and probably all she needed was a few hormone injections; and the boy, Heinrich: that was a boy to fall in love with, that’s for sure, and I don’t suppose there was a woman for miles around who didn’t give a strange little smile when she saw him; it’s only a few smart homosexuals and women, you know, who can smell a poet. Of course it was sheer suicide the way he was carrying on, no question, and sometimes I wonder why he dragged Erhard into it—but maybe Erhard wanted to be dragged into it. One can’t tell, two Bamberg Riders who wanted to die together, and God knows they did: they put them up against a wall, and you know what Heinrich shouted before they shot him? ‘Shit on Germany.’ And that was the end of an education and an upbringing that must have been unique, and since he was in that shit army maybe it was the best thing: God knows there were enough chances of dying between April 1940 and May 1945. The old man had plenty of pull and got hold of the file, some old general or other wangled it, but he never opened it, he just asked me to tell him the gist of it: what had happened was that those two boys simply offered to sell a whole antiaircraft cannon to the Danes, or rather, they wanted its fictitious scrap value, something in the neighborhood of five marks, and d’you know what that quiet, shy Erhard said during the trial? ‘We are dying for an honorable profession, for the arms trade.’ ”

The Au. felt the necessity of paying another visit to Mr. Werner von Hoffgau, aged fifty-five, who, “after being temporarily employed by the Federal Army, at whose disposal I had placed my experiences in an official capacity as a construction expert,” was now living in a wing of the little moated castle that had belonged to his ancestors and in which he maintained a small architect’s office “that serves peaceful purposes only, i.e., designing housing estates.” One must picture von H. (who did not voluntarily describe himself as unvital, but might have) as a gentle, gray-haired person, a bachelor, for whom, in the Au.’s modest opinion, the “architect’s office” is only an excuse to spend hours watching the swans in the moat and the activities inside and outside the leased estate, to go for walks through the meadows (more precisely: sugar-beet fields), to glower at the sky whenever another of those Starfighters flies overhead; who avoids associating with his brother (who lives in the castle) “on account of certain transactions he wangled, using my name but without my knowledge, in the department I then headed.” Von H.’s plumpish, sensitive features reveal bitterness, not of a personal kind, rather an abstract moral bitterness which, so it seemed to the Au., he deadens with a drink that, when consumed in quantity, is among the most dangerous: old sherry. In any event, the Au. discovered a surprisingly large number of empty sherry bottles on the garbage heap and a surprisingly large number of full ones in von H.’s “draftsman’s cabinet.” It required numerous visits to the village inn to obtain, at least in colportage form, the information that was refused by von H. with the words “my lips are sealed.”

The following is the synopsis of conversations conducted by the Au. with approximately ten Hoffgausen villagers during three visits to the inn; the sympathy of the villagers was clearly on the side of the unvital Werner, their esteem, their respect, expressed in almost trembling voices, on the side of the apparently very vital brother Arnold. Apparently—according
to the villagers—Arnold, with the aid of Christian-Democrat deputies, bankers, and lobbyists representing various groups in the defense committee, and by exerting sufficient pressure on the Minister of Defense himself, had managed to persuade the planning board for the construction of military airfields, of which his brother was head, to choose the “famous and ancient Hoffgau Forest,” plus the requisite large number of adjacent fields, as the site for a NATO airfield. That—according to statements made by the villagers—had been a “fifty-, forty-, at the very least thirty-million-mark deal,” and all this took place (villager Bernhard Hecker, farmer)
“in
his department
against
his wishes
with
the approval of the defense committee.”