Group Portrait with Lady (12 page)

Hoffgau, “forever indebted to Gruyten because he saved me as a young man from that German Army by making me his personal adviser, although, when the going got really tough for him later on, I could at least do him a favor in return,” hesitated a while before giving any information on the mysterious Heinrich-Erhard affair. “Since it seems to mean so much to you I’ll let you in on what happened. Mrs. Hoyser never knew about the whole dossier, or about the whole problem. All she got to see was the transcript of the trial, and an incomplete one at that, and the report of the lieutenant in command of the firing squad. As a matter of fact, the affair was so complicated that I’m going to have a hard time reconstructing it just the way it was. Let’s see now, Gruyten’s son refused his father’s protection, but Gruyten protected him against his will and saw to it—an easy matter for him—that first of all he and his cousin were transferred to a paymaster’s office in Lübeck, a couple of days after the occupation of Denmark. Now he—Mr. Gruyten senior, that is—hadn’t reckoned with the obstinacy of his son who, it’s true, went to Lübeck with his cousin but when he got there saw what he had landed up in and returned at once to Denmark, with no marching orders, no transfer—that, leniently interpreted, was going Absent Without Leave,
strictly interpreted, was desertion. That could have been fixed up; what couldn’t be fixed up was that the two boys tried to sell an antitank cannon to a Dane, and although the Dane didn’t take up the offer—it would have been suicide, of course, and utterly futile—that was a crime, and no amount of protection could help, nothing could help them now, and the inevitable happened. I’ll be frank with you and admit that, even as Gruyten’s personal adviser, and although we had large projects under way in Denmark at the time and knew almost all the generals personally, I had trouble getting at the dossier, and when I’d read it I passed it on—well, let’s say, in an expurgated or, if you like, edited version to Mrs. Hoyser, who was Gruyten’s secretary, for it contained a good many references to ‘crooked deals’—and I wanted to spare him that.”

Lotte H., who has to heave a sigh whenever she thinks of giving up her attractive little apartment with its roof garden in the center of town, had to sigh and light cigarette after cigarette, keep passing her hand swiftly over her smooth, cropped gray hair, and sip repeatedly at her coffee when she spoke “about that affair.” “Yes. Yes. They’re dead all right, no doubt about that, whether because of desertion or because they tried to flog that cannon—they’re dead, and I don’t know whether that was what they really wanted. I always felt there was a good deal of romancing about the whole thing, and I could imagine that they were quite surprised and shocked as they stood there against the wall and heard the order ‘Ready—Aim!’ When all’s said and done, Erhard had Leni, and Heinrich, well—he could have had any girl. It seems pretty German to me, what those two boys did, and right there too, in Denmark, where our really big projects were getting under way at the time. Oh well. Let’s call it ‘symbolllism,’ if you like, with three l’s, please. But
it wasn’t that with my husband, who was sent to his death near Amiens a few days later; he’d have liked to live, and not just symbolically either; and he wouldn’t have liked to die symbolically either, he was scared, that’s all, there was a lot of good in him but they destroyed that in the seminary he went to till he was sixteen to study for the priesthood, till he finally realized that that’s all a lot of crap, only it was too late. And he never lost that wretched complex of not having finished high school—they’d drilled that into him too; then we met in the Free Youth, with ‘Brothers, toward sunlight, toward freedom’ and so on, and we even knew the last verse—‘Brothers, take hold of your rifles, On to the last final fight, To Communism all honor, To it be all power and might’—the only thing was, of course, that no one had taught us that the Communism of 1897 was a different matter from the Communism of ’27–’28—and my Wilhelm, he wasn’t the kind to have ever taken hold of a rifle, never, and it was for those idiots that he had to do it, and they allowed him the privilege of being killed for that crap—there were even people in the firm who claimed that his own father, with Gruyten’s approval, took Wilhelm’s name off the list of war-essential employees, and there were even mutterings about Uriah’s wife, but I couldn’t and never could have—you can’t deceive a loyal person like Wilhelm, I couldn’t do it even right after he was dead. And now about Gruyten. Yes, something might have developed between us, even in those days. The thing that fascinated me about him was how that tall bony country boy with the plebeian features turned into a tall bony man, a distinguished-looking gentleman, not a contractor, not an architect—a strategist, if you ask me. And that was the thing about him, apart from his tall thin boniness, that fascinated me: that talent for strategy. He might just as easily have become a banker, without ‘understanding’ the first thing about money, if you know what I mean. He had a map of Europe hanging on the wall of his office, used to stick pins
in it and sometimes a little flag, and a glance was enough for him—he never bothered with details. And of course he had one very effective trick he’d simply pinched from Napoleon—I believe the only book he ever read was a pretty stupid biography of Napoleon—the trick was so simple, maybe it wasn’t even a trick, maybe there was even a bit of genuine sentiment in it. He had started in ’29, a bit on the grand side, with forty workers, foremen, and so on—and he managed, in spite of the Depression, to hang on to them all, not to fire a single one of them, and he knew every bank trick in the book, he had no scruples about stringing along his creditors, even borrowed at exorbitant rates—and so by 1933 he had about forty men who simply thought the world of him, even the Communists among them, and he thought the world of them and helped them out in all their troubles, even their political ones, and you can imagine that over the next few years they all worked their way up into pretty good jobs, just like Napoleon’s sergeants; he’d hand over whole projects to them, and he knew every one of them by name, every last one of them, even the names of their wives and kids, he’d ask after them every time he saw them, with all the details—he knew, for instance, when one of the kids had to repeat a year in school, and so on. And when he got to a construction site and saw a bottleneck he’d grab a shovel or a pick, he even drove a truck in an emergency—and he always pitched right in where help was really needed. The rest you can imagine for yourself. And another secret: money meant nothing to him. He needed it, of course, for props: clothes, cars, getting about, now and again a big party, but as soon as it came in, the big money, it was immediately reinvested, and debts were incurred over and above that. ‘Owe money, owe money, Lotte,’ he said to me once, ‘that’s the only way.’ And now for his wife: yes, she was the one who saw ‘what he had in him’—right, but
what
he had in him and what came of it simply sent her into a panic; she wanted to make a big man of him, to run a big
house, and so on, but she didn’t want to be married to the chief of a general staff. If you’ll let me put it in a funny way I think maybe you’ll understand:
he
was the abstract one and she was the realist, though it may’ve seemed the other way round. My God, I thought it was criminal, what he was doing: building fortifications and airfields and headquarters for that bunch, and whenever I go to Holland or Denmark I see the fortifications still standing there along the beach, the ones we built, and I feel sick—and yet you know: it was a time of power, an era for power, and he was a man of power to whom power itself meant nothing, no more than money did. For him the appeal lay in the game, he was a gambler all right—but he was too vulnerable: they had the boy, and that boy didn’t want to be kept out of the dirt.”

An attempt to bring Lotte back to the second topic of the interview, Leni’s relationship with Erhard, failed at first. Another cigarette and an impatient gesture. “I’m coming to that, let me finish. Just to make this clear: we two, we suited each other, even in those days, and there were even a few little expressions of affection, or whatever you want to call it, that for a man of forty with a woman of twenty-seven are rather touching. Flowers of course, and twice a kiss on the forearm and then something really sensational: he once danced half the night with me at a hotel in Hamburg; that wasn’t like him at all. Haven’t you ever noticed that ‘great men’ are always poor dancers? Now I’m a pretty standoffish person with men other than my own husband, and I’ve got one miserable habit that I couldn’t get rid of for the longest time: I’m faithful. It’s like a curse. No merit to it, it’s more of a disgrace—how do you think I used to lie there, alone in my bed at night, when the kids were asleep, after they’d let my Wilhelm, my husband, give his life near Amiens for that crap? And I wouldn’t let a soul, not a soul, touch me till ’45—and all against my convictions, for I’m no believer in chastity and all that, and by ’45 five years had
passed, five years, and we two, he and I, moved in together. Now about Leni and Erhard, if you like: I must’ve told you already that the shyness of that boy Erhard was something you simply wouldn’t believe—nor Leni’s shyness either, for that matter. He adored her from the very first moment, she must’ve seemed to him like some kind of mysterious resurrected Florentine blond beauty or something, and not even Leni’s extremely dry Rhenish manner of speech, not even her ultradry way of expressing herself, could bring him down to earth. And he didn’t give a damn that she turned out to be totally uneducated in his sense of the word, and that bit of secretion-mysticism she had, and still has, in her head, wouldn’t have particularly impressed him either, I imagine, if she’d ever trotted it out. Well, what didn’t we all do, we three—Heinrich, Margret, and I, I mean—to bring it off between them. There wasn’t much time, mind you: between May ’39 and April ’40 he was there maybe eight times in all. Naturally nothing was said in words between Heinrich and me, just with our eyes, after all we could see how much in love they were. It really was sweet, yes I repeat, it was sweet to see them together, and maybe the fact they didn’t go to bed together isn’t so tragic after all. I got movie tickets for them, for crappy movies like
Comrades on the High Seas
or trash like
Beware, the Enemy Is Listening
, and I even sent them to that
Bismarck
movie because I thought: What the hell, it’s a three-hour program, and it’s as dark and warm in there as in the womb, and they’re bound to hold hands, and maybe it’ll eventually occur to them” (very bitter laughter! Au.’s remark) “to try a kiss or two, and when they get that far surely it’ll go farther—but nothing doing, it seemed. He took her to the museum and explained how you tell a painting that’s only attributed to Bosch from a genuine Bosch. He tried to get her away from her Schubert tinklings onto Mozart, he gave her poems to read, Rilke most likely, I’ve forgotten just what, and then he did something that struck a spark: he wrote
poems to her and sent them to her. Well, that Leni was such an enchanting creature—she still is, if you ask me—that I was a bit in love with her myself: if you could’ve seen, for instance, how she danced with Erhard when we all went out together, my husband and I, Heinrich, Margret, and those two—it made you just long for a great fourposter bed for the two of them, all ready and waiting for them to enjoy one another—so then he wrote poems to her, and the most amazing part about it is: she showed them to me, though I must say they were pretty daring; he didn’t exactly mince matters in singing the praises of her breast, which he called ‘the great white flower of your silence’ and from which he claimed he would ‘strip the petals one by one,’ and he wrote one really good poem on jealousy that might even have been fit for publication: ‘I am jealous of the coffee you drink, of the butter you spread on your bread, Jealous of your toothbrush, and of the bed in which you sleep.’ I mean to say, those were all pretty unmistakable things, all right, but paper, paper.…”

Asked whether there was no possibility of intimacies having occurred between Leni and Erhard of which she, Heinrich, and the others had no knowledge, Lotte blushed, surprisingly enough (the Au. admits that, in the course of what was often laborious research, a blushing Lotte gave him pleasure) and said: “No, I can be pretty sure of that—you see, a little over a year later she ran off with that Alois Pfeiffer, whom she was then stupid enough to marry, and Pfeiffer boasted later on, in fairly unmistakable terms, to his brother Heinrich, who naively passed it on to me, that he had ‘found Leni untouched.’ “ Lotte’s blushing persisted. When she was asked whether there were any chance that this Alois Pfeiffer might have been boasting to his brother Heinrich of a trophy, so to speak, which he was not entitled to claim, she became uncertain for the first time, saying: “He was a showoff all right, one can hardly deny that—and what you’ve just said makes me wonder. No,” she
said after a brief shake of the head, “no, I think that’s quite out of the question, though they had plenty of opportunity,” and, to the Au.’s astonishment, blushed again as she said: “Leni didn’t behave like a widow after his death, if you can see what I mean, she behaved, if you really do see, like a platonic widow.” To the Au. this statement was sufficiently clear, he admired her directness but was still not entirely convinced, although he regretted having taken so long to discover Lotte Hoyser, née Berntgen, in her full capacity as a witness. What amazed him was that Leni had been so communicative, one might almost say talkative, during that period of her life. An explanation for this was offered by Lotte Hoyser, now more pensive, quieter, no longer quite so voluble, from time to time giving the Au. an almost brooding look:

“It was obvious that she loved Erhard, that she loved him
expectantly
, if that conveys anything to you, and sometimes I had the feeling that
she
was on the brink of taking the initiative. Now, I’d like to tell you about something, something I’ve never told anybody: I once saw Leni clearing out a plugged-up john, and I simply couldn’t get over the girl. One Sunday evening in 1940, we were all sitting around in Margret’s apartment, having a few drinks and dancing a bit—my husband Wilhelm was there too—and suddenly someone says the john’s plugged up; horrible business, I can tell you. Someone had tossed something in—a good-sized apple that was going bad, as it turned out—that was blocking the waste pipe, so the men set to work to remedy this embarrassing mishap; first Heinrich—no luck, he poked around in there with an iron bar, then Erhard, he tried, and not so stupidly at that, with a rubber hose he got from the laundry room, and tried using mechanical pressure by blowing like crazy into the hose which he stuck, with no squeamishness whatever, into that sickening mess—and then, because Wilhelm, who had after all been a pipefitter, later
a technician, and finally a draftsman, turned out to be surprisingly squeamish, and because I and Margret were almost throwing up, do you know who solved the problem: Leni. She simply plunged her hand down, her right hand, and I can still see her lovely white arm covered with yellow muck to above the elbow, then she grabbed the apple and threw it into the garbage pail—and all that horrible mess instantly gurgled away out of sight, and then Leni washed herself—thoroughly, mind you, and over and over again, wiping eau de cologne all over her arms and hands, and she made a remark—now it comes back to me—a remark that I found quite electrifying: ‘Our poets never flinched from cleaning out a john.’ So now, when I say she could tackle any job that had to be done, what I mean is, maybe she ended up by simply tackling that Erhard: I’m sure he wouldn’t have objected. Which reminds me, by the way: not one of us ever got to see that husband of Margret’s.”