Group Portrait with Lady (15 page)

Is Leni devoting as much attention as ever to the products of her digestion? Probably not. She visits Rahel more often, even talks about it. “Strange goings-on,” as Margret testifies. “I didn’t believe a word of it, and then one day I went along and saw it was true. Haruspica no longer had any specific job, she wasn’t even a ‘toilet attendant.’ And was only allowed in the church when the choir wasn’t singing or a service wasn’t going on. She didn’t even have her wee little room any more, she was cooped up in the attic in a tiny closet where they used to keep brooms and brushes, cleaning materials and dusters, and you know what she asked us both for? Cigarettes! I didn’t smoke in those days, but Leni gave her a few, and she lighted one right away and inhaled deeply; then she nipped off the end—I’ve often seen people nip the end off a cigarette, but the way she could do it! It was perfect, the work of an expert, like people do in the clink or in hospital in the john, she took her scissors and very carefully snipped off the burning end and poked around in it to see if there wasn’t a shred of tobacco in there—and all into an empty
matchbox. And all the time she kept murmuring: ‘The Lord is nigh, the Lord is nigh, He is at hand.’ It didn’t sound crazy, or ironical, the way she said it, it sounded serious—she certainly wasn’t nuts, just a bit scruffy, as if she weren’t being given quite enough soap. I didn’t go again: to tell the truth, I was scared—my nerves were all shot anyway, what with the boy being dead and his cousin too; when Schlömer was away I used to hang around the soldiers’ bars and then go off with one or another; I was finished, though I was only nineteen—and that business with the nun, I just couldn’t bear to see it, she was caged like a mouse left to die, you could tell; she was more wizened than ever, she took a big bite out of the bread Lotte had taken her and kept saying to me: ‘Margret, stop it now, stop it.’ ‘Stop what?’ I asked. ‘What you’re doing.’ I didn’t have the guts any more, I couldn’t take it, my nerves were shot—Leni, of course, went on visiting her for years. She used to say funny things like: ‘Why don’t they just finish me off instead of hiding me?’ And to Leni she kept saying: ‘For God’s sake, you’ve got to live—live, I tell you, do you hear?’—and Leni would cry. She was very fond of her. Well, later on it all came out [“What?”] that she was Jewish and that the Order hadn’t even registered her, simply acted as if she’d disappeared during a transfer, they hid her, but they didn’t give her much to eat. Because, you see, she didn’t have any ration cards, yet they had that orchard, and the pigs they fattened. No, my nerves couldn’t take it. Like a little shriveled-up old mouse she was, cooped up in there—and the only reason they let Leni see her was that she was so determined, and because they knew how naive she was. She just thought the nun was being disciplined. Right to the end, Leni never bothered to distinguish between Jews and non-Jews anyway. And even if she had known, and had known how dangerous it was, she would’ve said: ‘So what?’ and would have gone on visiting her, I swear it. Leni had courage—she still has. It was terrible to hear the nun say: ‘The Lord is nigh, the Lord is nigh,’ and to see her look toward the door as if He were just coming in, that very
instant—that scared me, but not Leni—she would look toward the door, expectantly—as if it wouldn’t surprise her to see the Lord come walking in. But by that time it was early 1941, I already had a job at the military hospital, and she looked at me then and said: ‘It’s not only what you’re doing that’s not good, what you’re taking is worse, how long have you been taking it?’ And I said: ‘Two weeks.’ And she said: ‘Then there’s still time.’ And I said: ‘No, I’ll never give it up now.’ Morphine, of course—didn’t you know, or didn’t you at least suspect?”

The only person who never seems to have been in need of consolation is Mrs. Schweigert, who about this time often turns up at the Gruyten house to visit her dying sister, trying to make her understand that “Fate cannot break a person, it can only make him strong”; that her husband, Gruyten, is displaying his poor breeding by being so “broken.” She even has the nerve to expostulate with this sister who has one foot in the grave: “Think of the proud Fenians.” She talks about Langemarck, is hurt, hurt to the quick, when, after inquiring about the cause of Leni’s manifest grief, she learns from Miss van Doorn, who is our informant for all these utterances, that Leni is probably grieving for Mrs. Schweigert’s son Erhard. She is indignant that this “heather girl” (a variation, at least, of the “Oh well girl.” Au.) should have the effrontery to grieve for her son while she is not even grieving for him herself. After this “shocking piece of information” she makes no further visits and leaves the house with the remark: “That’s really too much, I must say—heather indeed!”

Needless to say, movies are being shown this year too, and every now and then Leni goes to the movies. She sees
Comrades on the High Seas, Dancing Through the Night
, and
Bismarck
again.

The Au. doubts whether even a single one of these movies brought her anything like consolation or even distraction.

Did the hit tunes of the day, “Brave Little Soldier’s Wife,” “We’ll Storm the Coasts of England,” console her? It is doubtful.

At times all three Gruytens, father, mother, daughter, lie in bed, in darkened rooms, not leaving their rooms even for air-raid warnings, and “staring for days, weeks, at the ceiling” (van Doorn).

Meanwhile all the Hoysers have moved in with the Gruytens, Otto, his wife, Lotte, her son Werner—and an event takes place which, although it could be foreseen, in fact precisely calculated, is nevertheless regarded as a miracle and even contributes to the general recovery: Lotte’s child is born, in the night of December 21 to 22, 1940, during an air raid; it is a boy, weighing seven pounds two ounces, and since he arrives a little earlier than expected and the midwife is not prepared, “busy elsewhere” (with the birth of a girl, as it turns out), and the determined Lotte proves, surprisingly enough, to be as weak and helpless as the van Doorn woman, a further miracle occurs: Mrs. Gruyten leaves her bed and gives her instructions to Leni in a precise, firm, yet pleasant voice; while the final labor pains assail Lotte, water is heated, scissors are sterilized, diapers and blankets are warmed, coffee is ground, brandy set out; it is an icy, dark (the darkest) night of the year, and the emaciated Mrs. Gruyten, “now hardly more than a disembodied spirit” (van Doorn), has her finest hour, in her sky-blue bathrobe, continually checking the necessary instruments laid out on the chest of drawers, dabbing eau de cologne on Lotte’s forehead, holding her hands, spreading Lotte’s legs apart without any embarrassment, then helping
her into the prescribed squatting position; quite unafraid she receives the baby as it is born, washes the mother down with vinegar and water, cuts the umbilical cord, and sees to it that the baby is kept “warm, warm, warm” as it is placed in a laundry basket that has been well padded by Leni. She is not in the least bothered by the bombs exploding not very far away, and the air-raid warden, a certain Mr. Hoster, who keeps demanding that the lights be put out and everyone go down to the cellar, is dismissed by her so summarily that all the witnesses to this event (Lotte, Marja van Doorn, old Hoyser) unanimously state, independently of one another, that she acted “like a real sergeant major.”

Did the world lose a doctor in her after all? In any event, she “cleans up the maternal parts” (Mrs. Gruyten according to Hoyser, Sr.), checks the expulsion of the afterbirth, has coffee and brandy with Leni and Lotte; to everyone’s surprise the vigorous van Doorn woman “proved to be a broken reed” (Lotte) and found flimsy excuses for spending most of her time in the kitchen serving coffee to Gruyten and Hoyser and, by speaking constantly of “we” (“We’ll see to that, we’ll manage all right, we won’t let it upset us, we etc.”—with a very subtle dig at Mrs. Gruyten: “I hope her nerves can stand it! Let’s hope it’s not too much for her!”), she keeps her distance from where the action is, Lotte’s bedroom, only appearing on the scene when the worst is over. When Mrs. Gruyten looks around, as if doubting her own capacity for tackling the job, she comes into the bedroom with little Werner and whispers to him: “Now let’s have a look at our baby brother, shall we?” As if someone had doubted it, Mr. Gruyten said to old Hoyser: “I’ve always known and always said that she’s a wonderful woman.”

A certain tension sets in some days later when Lotte positively insists on having Mrs. Gruyten as godmother but refuses to have the boy, whom she would like to call Kurt (“That’s what Willi wanted if it was a boy—a girl would have been
called Helene”) christened. She inveighs against the churches, “especially that one” (an expression that could never be properly explained; with a probability bordering on certainty we may assume her to have meant the Roman Catholic Church, she hardly knew any others. Au.). Mrs. Gruyten is not angry about it, only “very, very sad,” consents to be godmother, and attaches great importance to giving the boy something really good, tangible, and lasting. She makes him a gift of a vacant building lot on the outskirts of the city that she had inherited at the death of her parents; she does all this very correctly, through an attorney, and Gruyten, Sr., makes a promise that he certainly would have kept but will not be able to keep: “And I’ll put up a building for him on it.”

The period of deepest melancholy seems to be over. Mr. Gruyten’s hitherto passive-apathetic melancholy becomes active: “triumphantly, gleefully you might even say” (Hoyser, Sr.) he accepts the information that early on the morning of February 16, 1941, his office building has been hit by two bombs. Since these were not followed by incendiary bombs and the explosion did not start any fires, his hope “that the whole bloody place will burn to the ground” remains unfulfilled; after a week of salvaging operations, in which Leni takes part with no particular enthusiasm, it turns out that scarcely a file has been lost, and after a further four weeks the building has been restored.

Gruyten never enters it again, to the amazement of all those around him he becomes something he has never yet been, “not even in his young days, really—he turned sociable” (Lotte Hoyser). Lotte Hoyser goes on: “He got really nice, it surprised us all. Every day he insisted we all get together for coffee between four and five, in the apartment, Leni had to be there, my mother-in-law, the kids, everyone. After five he
stayed behind with my father, who brought him up-to-date on all the details of the business, the bank position, receivables, future plans, construction sites—he had a balance sheet prepared and spent hours with attorneys, as well as other legal experts, to figure out a way of turning the firm—which was in his name only—into a company. An ‘old-timers’ list’ was drawn up. He was smart enough to know that at forty-two—and in perfect health at that—he was still liable to be called up, and he wanted to ensure a position for himself as consultant on the board. On the advice of his customers—pretty big brass, a sprinkling of generals among them too, who all wanted the best for him, it seems—he changed his title to ‘head of planning’; I was made personnel manager, my father became treasurer—but with Leni, then just eighteen and a half, there was nothing doing: she refused to be made a director. He thought of everything—there was only one thing he forgot: to make Leni financially secure. Later, at the time of the scandal, we all knew, of course, why he had fixed things the way he had, but Leni and his wife were left high and dry. Well, anyway, he was nice—and another thing, even more amazing: he started talking about his son; for nearly a year the name had never been mentioned, wasn’t allowed to be mentioned. Now he talked about him; he wasn’t so stupid as to talk about Destiny or any such nonsense, but he did say he thought it was a good thing Heinrich had died ‘actively’ rather than ‘passively.’ I didn’t know quite what he meant because after more than a year that whole Danish business was beginning to have a sour taste in my mouth, I found it pretty stupid, or, let’s say, I would have found it stupid if those two hadn’t died for it—today I feel that ‘to die for something’ doesn’t make that something any better, greater, or less stupid; to me it just leaves a sour taste, that’s all I can say. Finally Gruyten had completed his ‘reorganization’ of the firm, and in June, the twelfth anniversary of the founding of the firm, he gave this party where he
planned to announce the whole thing. It was on the fifteenth, right between two air raids—as if he’d had a premonition. The rest of us suspected nothing. Not a thing.”

Leni resumed her attempts at the piano, with concentration and an “expression that had suddenly become very determined” (Hoyser, Sr.), and Schirtenstein, who has already been mentioned, and who (all this according to his own statement) had listened to her, “not entirely without interest but by and large rather bored” as he stood meditating at the window, “suddenly pricked up my ears and then one evening in June I heard the most astonishing interpretation I have ever heard. All of a sudden there was a discipline in the playing, an almost icy discipline, such as I had never heard before. If you’ll allow me—an old man who has torn many a performer to shreds—a comment that may surprise you: I was hearing Schubert as if for the first time, and whoever was playing—I couldn’t have told you whether it was a man or a woman—hadn’t merely learned something but had understood something—and it’s very rare for a nonprofessional to achieve that kind of understanding. That wasn’t someone playing the piano—that was
music happening
, and again and again I found myself standing by the window and waiting, usually in the evening between six and eight. Soon after that I was called up and was gone for a long time, a very long time—and when I got back the apartment was occupied by the military, 1952—yes, I was gone eleven years, a prisoner of war—in Russia, where I strummed away far, far below my level—didn’t have too bad a time of it—dance music, hit tunes—terrible stuff; do you know what it means for an ‘intimidating music critic’ to play ‘Lili Marleen’ about six times a day?—and four years after I returned, it must have been in ’56, I finally got back my old apartment—I happen to love
these trees in the courtyard, and the high ceilings—and what do I hear and recognize after fifteen years—the moderato from the Sonata in A minor and the allegretto from the Sonata in G, with greater clarity, discipline, and depth than I had ever heard them, even in 1941 when I suddenly began paying attention. It was playing of the very highest caliber.”