Group Portrait with Lady (16 page)

What follows now might well be headed: Leni does something foolish, Leni strays from the path of virtue—or: What’s got into Leni?

On the occasion of the firm’s anniversary party, scheduled for mid-June 1941, Gruyten had included in his invitation “all staff members who happened to be on home leave at the time.” What no one could suspect, “what was, in fact, not conveyed by the invitation” (Hoyser, Sr.), “was that it could occur to anyone that
former
staff members might consider themselves invited, and even the term ‘former staff member’ would have been somewhat of an exaggeration for
him
, in 1936 he had once worked for us as a trainee for six weeks—no, he didn’t want to be called an apprentice, that was too ‘primitive’ a word for him, he had to be a ‘trainee’ right off, but he had no intention of learning anything, all he wanted was to teach us how to build—we got rid of him fast, and then pretty soon he went into the army, he wasn’t really such a bad sort, that boy, just a romancer, not a good romancer like young Erhard, say—a bad romancer with a tendency toward megalomania which didn’t suit us at all. His idea was to get away from concrete and ‘rediscover’ the
‘majesty’ of stone—well, fair enough, maybe there was something in it, but we simply had no use for him, mainly because he didn’t want to handle stone and didn’t know how to. Damn it all, I’ve been in the building game for nearly sixty years now, even in those days I’d been in it for almost forty, and I had a pretty good idea of the ‘majesty of stone’; I’ve watched hundreds of masons and mason’s apprentices handling the stuff—you ought to have a look one day at how a real mason handles stone! Fair enough—but that fellow, he simply didn’t have the right hands or the right feeling for stone: he just liked to talk big, He didn’t mean any harm by it, oh no—he was just full of highfalutin ideas, and we knew where they came from.”

A further unforeseen, unfortunate aspect of the party: Leni was dead set against going. She had lost all interest in dancing, she was ‘a very serious, very quiet girl these days, got along well with her mother, studied French with her and a bit of English and was head over heels in love with her piano” (van Doorn). Besides, she knew “all the local staff quite well enough, there wasn’t a single one of them capable of reviving her interest in dancing” (Lotte H.). It was only from a sense of duty and at the urgings of her parents that she went to the party.

The point has now been reached where, although he plays only a minor role, it is unfortunately necessary to say a few words about this Alois Pfeiffer who has been so witheringly described by Hoyser, and about his clan, his background.

A.’s father, Wilhelm Pfeiffer, had been a “school chum and wartime buddy” of Gruyten, Sr.; they came from the same village, and until Gruyten’s marriage they had carried on a casual friendship that ceased when Wilhelm P. began “to get on Gruyten’s nerves to the point where Gruyten couldn’t stand it any more” (H.). The two men had fought together in a battle
of the Great War (near the Lys, as it turned out), and after they came home from the war Pfeiffer, at that time twenty, “suddenly began” (H., including all of the following) “to drag his right leg as if it were crippled. Now I don’t mind, of course, if someone manages to wangle a pension, but he overdid it, he talked of nothing else but a ‘shell splinter the size of a pinhead’ that had hit him at a ‘critical spot’; and he certainly had stamina, for three years he dragged his leg from doctor to doctor, from pension board to pension board, till they finally gave him a pension and, what’s more, financed his teacher-training course. Fair enough. Fair enough. Nobody wants to be unjust to a fellow creature, and maybe he was—I mean, is—really crippled, but no one ever found that splinter—and that needn’t be the fault of the splinter, and I’m not saying the splinter doesn’t exist, fair enough—and of course he got his pension and became a teacher and so on, but it was a funny thing: it irritated Hubert to distraction to see Pfeiffer coming along dragging his leg; it got worse and worse, at times he would even speak of amputation, and later on his leg did, as a matter of fact, appear to be stiff—but no one ever saw or found any evidence of that ‘splinter the size of a pinhead’ even on the most sensitive X-ray screen, never. And because no one had ever seen it Hubert said to Pfeiffer one day: ‘Tell me, how d’you know the splinter is the size of a pinhead, if no one’s ever seen it?’ I must say, it was a staggering argument—and there’s no doubt that from then on Pfeiffer’s feelings were hurt beyond repair. But then he turned the whole thing into a kind of pinhead-
Weltanschauung
, and over and over and over again the kids in school out at Lyssemich were told about the splinter and about the ‘Lys,’ and this went on for ten, twenty years, and again Hubert said something very much to the point—we were always hearing things about him, you know, from the village where we all come from and have so many relatives—Hubert said: ‘Even if he has a splinter in it, that’s the phoniest leg
I ever heard of, and there he goes dragging it around; and all that talk about a battle is nonsense, I was there, wasn’t I?—we were in the third or fourth wave, and never even got into the battle—of course there were some shells and so on, but—well, we all know war makes no sense, but it wasn’t anything like as bad as he makes out, and that’s a fact, and for us two it only lasted a day and a half—surely that’s not enough to live on for the rest of your life.’ Well” (a sigh from H.), “so then Wilhelm’s son, Alois, turned up at the ball.”

A few visits to the village of Lyssemich, to obtain some factual information on Alois, could not be avoided. Two innkeepers, about the same age as A., were interviewed, together with their wives, who still remember him. A visit to the parsonage proved fruitless: the only thing the priest knew about the Pfeiffers was that the parish register “showed them to have been living in Lyssemich since 1756,” and as Wilhelm Pfeiffer eventually moved away (although not until 1940), “not so much because of his political activities, which were rather embarrassing, but because we just couldn’t stand him any more” (Zimmermann, innkeeper in Lyssemich, aged fifty-four, a solid citizen and plausible informant), traces of the Pfeiffer family have all but disappeared; the only witnesses are unfortunately all—one way or another—prejudiced: Marja van Doorn, all the Hoysers, Leni (Margret knows nothing about the Pfeiffers); the particulars supplied by both partisan groups do not contradict one another in data, merely in their interpretation.

All the witnesses of the anti-Alois party state that, at fourteen, Alois—in this respect his career has some resemblance to Leni’s—had had to give up all idea of high school, while the Pfeiffers maintain he had been “the victim of certain intrigues.” What no one disputes, although this characteristic too is
mentioned in the most varied ironical refractions, is: that he was “handsome.” Leni has no photo of him on the wall, the Pfeiffers have about ten, and it must be said: if the term “handsome” has ever had any meaning, it fits Alois. He had light blue eyes, dark, almost blue-black hair. In the context of extremely vulgar race theories, much has been said about A.’s blue-black hair; his father was fair, as were his mother and all his ancestors (the following information all comes from the Pfeiffer parents), inasmuch as anything is known or has been handed down regarding the color of their hair. Since all the known ancestors of the Pfeiffers and the Tolzems (Mrs. Pfeiffer’s maiden name) first saw the light of day in the geographical triangle of Lyssemich-Werpen-Tozlem (a triangle with a total periphery of 16.2 miles), extended travel was not required. Two of Alois’s sisters, Berta and Käthe, who died young, were—like his still surviving brother Heinrich—fair-if not golden-haired. There must have been fantastic black-hair/fair-hair mutterings among the Pfeiffers, whose No. 1 breakfast-table topic this must have been. There was even a willingness to resort to the repulsive measure of casting suspicion on the Pfeiffer ancestors as an explanation for A.’s hair; within the geographical triangle mentioned (although in view of its dimensions no great expenditure of effort could have been required), some snooping around went on in church and municipal records (the district registry was located at Werpen), in the hope of digging up female ancestors who could be suspected of introducing—by way of amorous adventures—the dark hair into the family; “I remember,” says Heinrich Pfeiffer in talking about his family, quite without irony by the way, “that in 1936 they finally dug up a woman in the Tolzem church records whose legacy might have included my brother’s surprising dark hair: it was a certain Maria, of whom only the first name was entered although her parents are registered as ‘vagabundi.’ ”

Heinrich P. lives with his wife Hetti, née Irms, in a single-family house in a settlement of company houses with a
denominational background. He has two sons, Wilhelm and Karl, and is on the point of buying a small car. H.P. is an amputee (having lost one leg below the knee), not disobliging but a bit edgy, for which his explanation is “worrying about new acquisitions.”

Now in this geographical triangle dark hair is by no means rare; as far as can be visually ascertained and superficially assessed, it is on an average the most common, as the Au. was able with his own eyes to convince himself. But there was a family legend, a family pride, that was hawked around as the phrase “the famous Pfeiffer hair”; a woman with “Pfeiffer hair” was somehow considered favored, blessed, at any rate beautiful. Since, according to Heinrich P.’s information, the investigations within the Tolzem—Werpen—Lyssemich triangle uncovered numerous cross-connections with the Gruytens and their ancestors (not with the Barkels, they had been city-dwellers for generations), it is not impossible, in the Au.’s view, for Leni to have acquired this Pfeiffer hair by way of some such cross-connections. Now we want to be fair: seen objectively—from a barber’s point of view, as it were—A.’s hair was undeniably handsome: thick, dark, naturally wavy. The fact that it was wavy was in turn cause for numerous speculations, because Pfeiffer hair—like Leni’s!—was smooth and straight, etc., etc.

We may take it as objectively proved that from the very day of his birth too much fuss was made over this Alois. Quite in accord with Pfeiffer practice, a virtue was swiftly made of necessity, and he was regarded as “our gypsy,” but only until 1933, from then on he counted as “classic Mediterranean”; the Au. considers it important to note that A. was in no sense a Celtic type, it being easy to take this mistaken view since Celts often have light eyes and dark hair. A. simply lacked—as we
shall see later—Celtic sensibility and imagination; if he really must be placed in a racial category, the only description he merits is: substandard Teuton. He was shown around, held up, and for months—probably years—described as “cute”; even before he could speak with reasonable articulation fantastic careers were being dreamed up for him, artistic ones mostly, he was weighed down with high expectations: sculptor, painter, architect (writing did not enter the family’s field of speculation until later. Au.). Everything he did was added to his credit a few sizes too large. Since, naturally, he was also a “cute altar boy” (we imagine that his first name makes any mention of denomination unnecessary), aunts, cousins, etc., already saw him as a “painter-monk”; perhaps even as a “painting abbot.” There is evidence (by way of the Lyssemich innkeeper’s wife, Mrs. Commer, now aged sixty-two, as well as her mother-in-law, Grandma Commer, now eighty-one, whose good memory is extolled throughout the village) that church attendance rose steadily as long as A. was altar boy in Lyssemich, i.e., during the years 1926 to 1933.

“Would you believe it, sometimes we went to Crystalation on weekdays as well as Sundays, it was just too cute to see that dear little boy” (Grandma Commer; what religious exercise was meant by “Crystalation” is something we have not yet been able to ascertain. Au.).

A number of interviews had to be conducted with Mr. Pfeiffer and his wife Marianne, née Tolzem. Suffice it to say that the P.s’ milieu was “one degree above that of their son H.: a slightly larger row house and the car already in the garage. P., Sr., now retired, still drags his leg. Since the P.s are eager to supply information there was no difficulty at all in gathering material on A. from his parents; everything he ever produced is kept, like relics, in a glass showcase. Among the fourteen drawings on
display, perhaps two or three were not too bad: colored pencil drawings of the countryside around Lyssemich, the extreme flatness of which—variations in level of twenty to thirty feet (such as depressions caused by streams), unavoidable even on plains, are quite a sensation—seems to have provided a constant motivation for A. to draw. Because the sky in these parts always comes down to the earth, a fertile earth, A.—whether consciously or unconsciously could not, of course, be ascertained—looked for the secret of light to be found in Dutch painting, a secret that on two or three of the sheets he had approached, taking (with some originality) as a source of light the Tolzem sugar factory, shifting it closer to Lyssemich and hiding the sun in its white steam. The P.s’ claims that there had been hundreds of these drawings could not be verified, merely noted with skepticism. A few elementary woodworking jobs done by A.: a cactus bench, a jewelry box, a pipe stand for his father, and an enormous lamp (fretwork), left—to put it mildly—an embarrassing impression. Other objects on display were: some half-dozen respectable sports diplomas—track and field, swimming—a citation from the Lyssemich Football Club. A mason’s apprenticeship begun by A. in Werpen and discontinued after six weeks was described by Mrs. P. as his “practical training” that “came to naught because of the intolerable rudeness of the foreman, who failed to understand his suggested innovations.” In a nutshell: quite obviously A. was considered by others and by himself to be destined for “higher things.”

Also displayed in a showcase at the P.s’ were a few dozen poems by A. which the Au. prefers to pass over in silence: there was not one, not one line, which even began to approach the expressive power that Erhard Schweigert had been known to possess. After quitting his apprenticeship, “Alois threw himself heart and soul” (P., Sr.) into a career that for one of his character, which was weak at the best of times, turned out to be disastrous: he wanted to become an actor. A few successful
appearances on the amateur stage in which he played the leading role in
The Lion of Flanders
have left behind in the P. showcase three newspaper clippings in which he received “unqualified praise”; the fact that it was one and the same critic writing for three different local papers under differing initials has to this day escaped the P.s’ notice. The reviews all have the same wording—except for a few minute variations (“unqualified” is once replaced by “unalloyed,” another time by “undisputed”). The initials are B.H.B., B.B.H., H.B.B. Needless to say, the acting also came to naught, because of people’s failure to understand A.’s “intuition”; also because of their envy of his “wonderful good looks” (Mrs. P.).