Group Portrait with Lady (13 page)

Since Lotte Hoyser’s statements did not quite tally with Margret’s, it was necessary to interrogate the latter once again. Was it true that she had danced with the people named by Lotte on some occasions in her apartment, was it possible that she had already had a more intimate relationship with Heinrich long before that event which we will call the “Flensburg incident”? “As for the last thing,” said Margret, in whom a potent slug of whiskey had induced a gentle euphoria tinged with melancholy, “I can flatly deny that, I should know after all, and I’d have no reason to disclaim it. I did make one mistake, I introduced my husband to Heinrich. Schlömer was hardly ever home, I never really found out whether he was in armaments, or an informer, or what, he always had plenty of money whatever it was, and all he asked of me was to ‘be
there for him’ whenever he sent me a telegram. Older than I was. In his mid-thirties in those days. He wasn’t at all bad-looking, dressed smartly and all that, a man of the world, you might say, and the two of them got along quite well together. And Heinrich, he was a terrific lover but not exactly an adulterer—in those days he wasn’t
that
yet; I’d always been an adultress, but he hadn’t reached that stage yet, and it was probably because he was shy after meeting my husband that he hadn’t got around to it yet. But as for the other thing—it must’ve been Lotte who told you that, that I saw him more than twice, and I danced with him, and in the apartment with the others—it’s true, but we certainly didn’t see each other more than four times all told.”

Asked about Erhard and Leni, Margret smiled and said: “I don’t really want to know about it, and at the time I didn’t really want to know about it either. What had it got to do with me? The details certainly didn’t concern me. Do I or did I want to know if they kissed, if at least their hands took pleasure in each other, if they went to bed together, in my apartment I mean, or in Lotte’s, or in the Gruyten home? I just found it wonderful the way those two behaved together, and the poems he wrote to her and sent her, Leni couldn’t keep it to herself, and it was during those few months that for the first time she came out of her shell, after that she shut herself away again completely. Does it matter so much whether Erhard or that stupid Alois was the first, what difference does it make? Why bother? She loved him, tenderly and passionately, and if nothing happened by then it would have happened during his next leave, I guarantee, and you know, of course, how it all ended, in Denmark against a cemetery wall. Gone. Why don’t you ask Leni?”

Ask Leni! That’s easier said than done. She won’t let one ask her, and when one does ask her she doesn’t answer. Old Hoyser called the Erhard incident “a touching but purely romantic affair, although with a tragic ending. That’s all.” Rahel is dead, and that B.H.T. naturally knows nothing about Erhard’s affairs. Since it is known that Leni made frequent visits to the convent, Rahel would certainly have known something. The Pfeiffers did not enter her life until later, and she most certainly told
them
nothing of what was “precious” to her. “Precious” is how M.v.D., to whom the Au. resorted with a sigh, described the Erhard affair.

The Au. was obliged to correct some hasty judgments of her that he had made after her remarks about Mrs. Gruyten. When the subject is not Mrs. Gruyten and her husband, Miss van Doorn shows herself capable of giving quite subtle information, fine-grained, you might say. “Now please,” she said, when traced to her rural place of retirement, surrounded by asters, geraniums, and begonias, scattering feed for the pigeons, stroking her dog, an elderly mongrel-poodle, “don’t meddle with that precious thing in Leni’s life. It was like a fairy tale, you see, those two, just like a fairy tale. They were so openly in love, so at ease with each other, I saw them a few times sitting there in the living room—the room that Leni’s now rented to the Portuguese—the best china from the cabinet, and tea, drinking tea—though Leni’s never liked tea, but with him she drank it, and while he didn’t exactly complain about the army, he showed his disgust and dislike so openly that she put her hand on his arm, to comfort him, and you could tell just by looking at him that that touch was enough to cause a real revolution of his senses, or his sensibility, if you like. There were plenty of moments, believe me, when he had the chance to conquer her completely, she was, she stood—and if you’ll pardon my putting it rather crudely—she
lay
there ready, ready for him, and since I’m talking about it anyway, it was
just that Leni was getting a bit impatient, that’s all, impatient—biologically impatient too; not annoyed, no, not angry with him—and if he’d ever been there for at least two or three days in a row, well, things would’ve turned out differently, I’m sure. I’m an old maid and I’ve never had any direct experience with men, but I’ve observed them pretty closely, you know, and I ask you, what must it be like when a man turns up with his return ticket in his pocket and is always thinking of the timetable and the barracks gate he has to go through before a certain hour, or the remustering depot? I tell you—and I say this as an old maid who realized this in the first war as a girl and in the second as an observant woman: leave is a terrible thing for a husband and wife. Everyone knows, when the husband comes home on leave, what the two have in mind—and every time it’s almost like a public wedding night—and people, the ones in the villages hereabouts anyway, and in the towns too, aren’t that sensitive and keep making hints—Lotte’s husband Wilhelm, for instance, he always went scarlet, he was a very sensitive person, you see, and do you think I didn’t know what was supposed to happen when my father came home on leave during the war—and Erhard, it’s just that he’d have needed a bit more time to conquer Leni—how could he when he was always on the point of leaving, and he just wasn’t the man to take the bull by the horns. Those poems of his, they were explicit enough surely, almost too explicit. ‘You are the earth I shall one day become’—can anybody be more explicit than that? No, what he lacked was
time
, he didn’t have enough time. You must remember that he had altogether maybe twenty hours alone with Leni—and it so happened that he wasn’t a go-getter. Leni didn’t take offense at this, only she was sad, for she was
ready
. Even her mother knew that, and she
wanted
it, I tell you. I used to see how she took care that Leni wore her prettiest dress, the saffron-yellow one with the low round neck, and the jewelry to go with it: she made her wear coral earrings, they looked
like freshly picked cherries, and she bought her some smart little shoes and some perfume—she dressed her up like a
bride;
even she knew it and wanted it—but there wasn’t enough time, that’s all it was—just one more day and she’d have been his and not—oh well. It was awful for Leni.”

There was no getting around it, Mrs. Schweigert had to be called on once more; asked over the telephone by the concierge, she consented to see him, she consented not all that ungraciously but with obvious impatience, over a cup of tea yet without offering any, “to answer a few more questions”; yes, her son had once presented that “Oh well” girl to her, she stressed the distinction between being
introduced
and
presented;
besides, there had been no need for an introduction, she had known the girl for quite a while and had gained some insight into her educational background and career; there had, of course, been “some talk of a love affair,” but again she rejected any idea of a permanent relationship, marriage in other words, as being out of the question, a relationship such as the permanent one between her sister and the girl’s father; she volunteered the information that the girl had also visited her once alone, she had—in all fairness—behaved very properly as she drank her tea, the sole topic of conversation had been—yes, it sounded extraordinary but it was true—heather; the girl had asked her when and where the heath was in bloom—was it just then, for instance? “It was toward the end of March, you must realize, and I felt as if I were talking to an idiot”; imagine asking whether the heath was in bloom at the end of March—and in 1940, during wartime, at that—in Schleswig-Holstein; the girl had been totally ignorant of the difference between Atlantic and rock heather, also of their differing soil requirements; in the end, said Mrs. Schweigert, everything had turned out for
the best—she evidently found her son’s death at the hands of a German Army firing squad preferable to his possible marriage to Leni.

It must be conceded that, in her brutally succinct way, Mrs. Schweigert did throw light on much of the background. She explained the obscure business of the “Fenians,” or at least contributed to the explanation—and when we bear in mind that at the end of March 1940 Leni actually took the trouble to go and see Erhard’s mother and talk to her about heather in Schleswig-Holstein, furthermore that, according to Miss van Doorn’s statement, she was
prepared
—even in Lotte Hoyser’s opinion prepared—to take the initiative, and if we think back to her experience in the heather under that starry summer sky—we are justified in concluding, even objectively, that she was toying with the idea of visiting Erhard up north and finding fulfillment with him in the heather; and even if we objectivize the botanical and climatological conditions and come to the conclusion that any such plan was doomed on account of damp and cold, the fact remains that in March, according to the Au.’s experience at least, certain parts of the heath in Schleswig-Holstein are actually, if only for a short time, warm and dry.

Finally, after repeated urgings, Margret was induced to admit that Leni had asked her for advice as to how one went about getting together with a man; and when Margret referred her to her parents’ spacious and often undisturbed seven-room apartment, which caused Margret, not Leni, to blush, Leni shook her head; when she was finally referred to her own room in that apartment, a room she could lock and to which she need admit no one, Leni again shook her head; and when Margret, becoming impatient, then pointed out with considerable bluntness
that there were after all such things as hotels, Leni reminded her of her misadventure (still quite recent) with the young architect and expressed a notion that Margret was reluctant to pass on, “as Leni’s most intimate communication to date,” the notion that “it” must and should not happen “in bed” but out of doors. “In the open, in the open. This whole business of going to bed together is not what I’m looking for.” Leni conceded that, when two people happened to be married, the bed would at times be unavoidable. Only: with Erhard, she didn’t want to go to bed the very first time. She was all set to go to Flensburg but changed her mind and decided to wait until May—so her rendezvous with Erhard remained a Utopia thwarted by military history. Or did it? No one knows for sure.

Judging by the statements of all family and nonfamily witnesses, the year from April 1940 to June 1941 merits but one description: grim. Leni lost not only her good spirits but her talkativeness, even her appetite. Her pleasure in driving vanishes for a time, her delight in flying—she flew with her father and Lotte Hoyser three times to Berlin—vanishes. Once a week only does she get into her car and drive the few miles to Sister Rahel. Sometimes she stayed there quite some time; nothing is known of her conversations with Rahel, not even via B.H.T., who after May 1941 sees no more of Rahel in the antiquarian bookstore and—presumably from lethargy or lack of imagination—never thinks of going to see her. A huge convent orchard in summer, in fall, in the winter of 1940–41, a girl, eighteen and a half, who now wears nothing but black, whose sole product of external secretion is a complex one: tears. Because of the arrival only a few weeks later of the news of the death of Wilhelm Hoyser, Lotte’s husband, the circle of weepers is widened by old Hoyser, his wife (then still living), by
Lotte and her five-year-old son Werner; whether the youngest son, Kurt, then still in his mother’s womb, cries too, no one ever knew.

Since the Au. neither is in a position to meditate on tears nor considers himself suited to do so, information on the origin of tears, their chemical and physical composition, can best be obtained from a handy reference work. The seven-volume encyclopedia put out by a controversial publisher, 1966 edition, gives the following information on tears:

“Tears, Lat. lacrimae, the fluid secreted by the T.-glands that moistens the conjunctiva, protects the eye from desiccation, and continuously washes small foreign bodies out of the eye; it” (probably the fluid. Au.’s note.) “flows into the inner corner of the eye and thence out through the nasolacrimal duct. Irritation (inflammation, foreign bodies) or emotional stimulus increases the flow of T. (weeping).” Under
Weeping
we read in the same reference work: “Weeping—like
Laughter, form of expression in time of crisis, i.e., of grief, emotion, anger, or happiness;
psychologically”
(italics are not the Au.’s), “an attempt at mental or emotional release. Accompanied by the secretion of tears, by sobbing or convulsive heavings, is related to the sympathetic nervous system and the brainstem. Takes the form of compulsive W. and uncontrollable W.-spasms in general depression, manic-depressive-illness, multiple sclerosis.”