Group Portrait with Lady (18 page)

As for Leni, let us make allowances for her and say that she simply “forgot herself” (Au.) and accepted the invitation to go for a walk along what used to be the castle moat, it was a summer night after all; and assuming that A. undoubtedly became affectionate, possibly even insistent, the worst conclusion one can reach is that Leni’s mistake was less of a moral than of an existential nature.

Since the castle moat, still a park, is still in existence and an on-site inspection presented no difficulty, this was undertaken: a kind of botanical garden has been made out of it, and one section, about sixty square yards in extent, is planted with heather (Atlantic variety). The park administration, however, claimed to be “unable to trace the planting layout for 1941.”

Leni’s sole recorded comment apropos the next three days was: “too embarrassing for words”; this phrase, spoken identically to Margret, Lotte, and Marja, was her only contribution. Other available information allows us to conclude that A. was not a very sensitive lover and certainly not an imaginative one. Early next morning he dragged Leni off to an obscure aunt, Fernande Pfeiffer, whose first name derives from her father’s francophile and Separatist (in equal proportions) inclinations which, of course, were disavowed by the family. She was living in a one-room apartment in an old-fashioned building dating from 1895, not only without bath but also without water—i.e., the latter was not laid on in the apartment but was outside in the corridor. This Fernande Pfeiffer, who still, or, more accurately, again—for at one time she had been well off—lives in one room in an old-fashioned building (this time 1902), remembers “exactly, of course, when those two turned up, and—believe me—they didn’t seem one bit like turtledoves, with those hangdog faces. I mean, surely the least he could have done for her was take her to some nice hotel, once they were through with that nature-children bit—some nice hotel where they could have had a wash, changed, and fixed themselves up. That silly boy really had no idea how to live.”

Mrs. (or Miss) Fernande Pfeiffer herself impressed the Au. most emphatically as having known “how to live.”
She
has the much-vaunted Pfeiffer hair and, although no longer
young—somewhere in her mid-fifties—and living in reduced circumstances, she too had a bottle of the finest dry sherry close at hand. The fact that Fernande is disowned by the P.s, including Heinrich, “because she tried several times—and unsuccessfully at that—to operate a bar,” renders her in no way less plausible to the Au. Her concluding remark was: “And I ask you, what sort of position was that for a nice girl—cooped up in my one-room apartment? Was I supposed to go out so the two of them could, well—let’s say—carry on with their fun or their sinning, or was I supposed to stay in the room with them? It was worse for her than in the sleaziest hotel room, where at least you have a washbasin and towel and can lock the door.”

Finally, toward evening, Alois announced his decision to “face their parents, hand in hand, firm of countenance and without regard for corrupt bourgeois morality” (F. Pfeiffer), a phrase which Leni, to judge not by her words but by her “disdainful expression,” did not seem to like. It is hard to determine objectively whether A. was just faking a bit and spouting a few phrases from his
Lion of Flanders
days, or whether a genuinely idealistic streak was showing itself in him as a result of the “pure experience” (the way he described the whole affair to his aunt, embarrassingly enough, in Leni’s presence). It was obvious that he was an inveterate bandier or inventer of phrases, and it is not hard to imagine how this kind of talk brought a frown to the brows of our earthly-materialistic, human-divine Leni. Whether the shady aunt is to be believed or not, the fact remains that, according to her, Leni appeared to have little interest in spending another night with A. either in bed or on the heather, and that, when A. went out to visit the toilet on the half-landing, Leni had taken his leave pass from his pocket and, dismayed at the length of his leave, wrinkled her little nose. One item in this report is certainly not correct: Leni does not have a little nose, she has a well-developed, impeccably shaped nose.

With Alois showing no signs of wanting to elope or anything of the sort, there remained nothing else to do late that evening, after “we had sat there like graven images and drunk up all my coffee,” than to confront the respective families. The first and most embarrassing encounter was with the Pfeiffers, who had been living in a remote suburb ever since old P. had been “transferred back into town.” P., scarcely managing to conceal his triumph, croaked out a reproach: “How could you do such a thing to the daughter of my old friend,” Mrs. P. restricted herself to an insipid “that wasn’t a very nice thing to do.” Heinrich Pfeiffer, then fifteen, maintains he clearly remembers the night being spent over coffee and brandy (Mrs. P.’s comment: “We don’t care what it costs”) and concocting detailed marriage plans, on which Leni made no comment, especially since she was not consulted. Eventually she fell asleep while further plans were being concocted. Even the size and furnishing of the apartment, down to the last detail, were discussed (“He can’t settle his daughter in anything less than five rooms—that’s the least he can do for her,” and “mahogany, nothing less will do.” “Perhaps he’ll finally get around to building himself a house, or at least one for his daughter.”)

Toward morning (all according to Heinrich P.) Leni made an “obviously provocative attempt to behave like a tart. She smoked two cigarettes, one after the other, inhaled, blew the smoke out through her nostrils, and smeared on a thick layer of lipstick.” Someone went out to telephone for a taxi (this time Mr. P.: “We don’t care what it costs”) (“What?” Au.), and they all drove off to the Gruyten apartment, where—from now on we are dependent on the witness van Doorn, since Leni persists in silence—they “arrived embarrassingly early, that’s to say around seven-thirty in the morning.” Mrs. Gruyten,
who had not had much sleep (air-raid alarm and her god-child Kurt’s first cold), was still in bed and having breakfast (“coffee, toast, and marmalade, have you any idea how hard it was to get hold of marmalade in 1941?—but of course he’d have done anything for her”).

“So there she was, Leni—‘risen on the third day,’ that’s how she seemed to me—ran at once to her mother and put her arms around her, then went to her room, asking me to bring her some breakfast, and—would you believe it?—she sat down at the piano. Mrs. Gruyten, I must grant her this, ‘rose’—if you know what I mean—calmly got dressed, placed her mantilla—a wonderful piece of old lace that was always handed down to the youngest daughter of the Barkel family—around her shoulders, went to the living room, where the Pfeiffers were waiting, and asked pleasantly: ‘Yes? What can I do for you?’ Right off there was an argument about her formal manner: ‘But Helene, why so formal all of a sudden?’ and Mrs. Gruyten, ‘I cannot remember ever having addressed you informally,’ whereupon old Mrs. Pfeiffer said: ‘We’ve come to ask for your daughter’s hand for our son.’ Thereupon Mrs. Gruyten, ‘Hm.’ That was all, then she goes to the phone, calls the office, would they please locate her husband and send him home as soon as he had been found.”

Now clearly what went on for the next hour and a half was the enactment of that embarrassing blend of comedy and tragedy that is customary in middle-class marriage negotiations. The word “honor” was uttered some five dozen times (Miss van Doorn claims she can prove this, having made a mark on the doorpost for each one). “Now if it hadn’t been Leni that all the fuss was about I’d have found it funny, for the second they saw how unimportant it was for Mrs. Gruyten to restore her daughter’s honor by way of marriage to this A., they backtracked and switched to the honor of their son—making him out to be some kind of seduced virgin, besides, they said,
their son’s honor as a future officer—which he wasn’t and never would be—could only be restored by marriage. In fact, it was more than funny when they began singing the praises of his physical qualities too: his lovely hair, his six foot two, his muscles.”

Fortunately, it was not long before the dreaded appearance of Gruyten, Sr., who (“although he was known to rage like a madman”) turned out to be “immensely gentle, quiet, almost friendly, to the great relief of the Pfeiffers who, needless to say, were scared to death of him.” Words like “honor” (“We have our honor too, you know,” old P. and his wife in the same words and at the same time) he abruptly dismissed; he gave A. a long long look, smilingly kissed his wife’s forehead, and asked A. to tell him what was his division, his regiment, “became more and more thoughtful,” then went to get Leni from her room, “didn’t reproach her one bit” and asked her dryly: “What do you say, my girl, marriage or not?” Thereupon Leni (probably for the first time) looked at A. properly, thoughtfully, and as if once again she had some inkling (Has Leni already had some inkling? Au.), with pity too, for after all she had run off with him, and of her own free will, and she said ‘marriage.’ ”

“With a certain gentleness in his voice” (van Doorn), Gruyten then looked at A. and said, “all right then,” adding: “Your division is no longer near Amiens, it’s at Schneidemühl.”

He even offered to help A. obtain permission to marry, there being “some urgency.” It is easy, of course, to say with hindsight that G., Sr., had known since the end of 1940 about substantial troop movements, and that during the night before the marriage was decided upon had heard, in a conversation with old friends, that the attack on the Soviet Union was imminent;
“in his new post of ‘head of planning’ he heard a lot of things” (Hoyser, Sr.). Every objection to the marriage put forward during the day by Lotte and Otto Hoyser he waved away with a “Don’t, please … don’t.…”

The fact remains that, when A. received the wire granting him permission to marry, he was at the same time ordered to “terminate his leave forthwith and report to his division at Schneidemühl on June 19, 1941.”

Civil ceremony, church ceremony; must they be described? It may be significant that Leni refused to wear white; that it was only in a state of extreme nervous tension that A. managed to get through the wedding banquet; that Leni did not seem at all depressed over the cancellation of the official wedding night, in any event she accompanied him to the station and allowed him to kiss her. As Leni later—during a particularly heavy air raid in 1944—confided to Margret in the latter’s air-raid cellar, A. had forced Leni, only an hour before his departure, to have intercourse with him in what was then the ironing room of the G.s’ apartment, “honorably and legitimately,” with specific reference to her conjugal duties, and as a result A. “as far as I was concerned was dead before he was killed” (Leni according to Margret).

By the evening of June 24, 1941, the news was already received that A. had become a “fatal casualty” during the capture of Grodno.

The only significant aspect of all this is that Leni refused to wear mourning or show mourning; dutifully she tacked up a photo of A. beside the photos of Erhard and Heinrich, but at the end of 1942 she took A.’s photo down from the wall again.
There follow two and a half tranquil years in which Leni reaches nineteen, twenty, and finally twenty-one. She never goes dancing any more, although every now and then Margret and Lotte offer her the chance to do so. She sometimes goes to the movies, sees (acc. to Lotte H., who still gets her movie tickets for her) the films
Boys, Riding for Germany
, and
More Than Anything in the World
. She sees
Ohm Kruger
and
Sky Dogs
—and not a single one of these films draws as much as a single tear from her. She plays the piano, takes loving care of her mother (now failing again), and drives around a good deal in her car. Her visits to Rahel become more frequent, she takes along a Thermos flask of coffee, a lunch box of sandwiches, cigarettes. Since the war economy is becoming increasingly strict and Leni’s job with the firm increasingly fictitious, she is threatened early in ’42, after a searching scrutiny of the firm’s activities, with losing her car, and those in the know are aware that for the first and only time in her life Leni asks for something; she asks her father to let her “keep the thing” (meaning her car, an Adler), and when he explains that this is no longer entirely within his power, she begs and implores him until he finally “throws all the switches and wangles her a six-months’ reprieve” (Lotte H.).

Here the Au. indulges in considerable interference by taking the liberty of constructing a kind of hypothesis of fate, of wondering what Leni might have, would have, should have become if …

First of all, if Alois, as the only one of the three men thus far important to Leni, had survived the war.

It is more than likely that, since a military career appeared to be his true vocation, A. would have forged ahead not merely as far as Moscow but beyond it, become a lieutenant, a captain,
possibly—we will spare him a hypothetical capture by the Soviets—a major by the end of the war, would have survived, chest covered with medals, a POW camp, would have been forced at some point to lose his partial naiveté or would have been—possibly forcibly—deprived of it; would have worked as a returning veteran for two years, as a “delayed” returning veteran for one year—as an unskilled laborer, perhaps for Gruyten, Sr., to whom a humbled A. would certainly have been preferable to a triumphant one; would undoubtedly have soon returned to the army, now the Bundeswehr, undoubtedly have become—by now fifty-two—a general. Would he ever again have been Leni’s partner in conjugal nights, let alone passionate nights? The Au. maintains: No. The fact that Leni is so little suited to hypotheses renders this speculation difficult, of course. Had Leni not experienced an intense love (yet to be described), if … The Au. maintains: she would have experienced it, even if …

There is no doubt that A., who even at fifty-two would certainly still have been handsome, and preserved from baldness by the Pfeiffer hair, would have been able, had there been a shortage, to volunteer as an altar server in Bonn Minster or Cologne Cathedral; and what can one do with handsome generals who are expert at passing missals with the right flourish, at humbly proffering jugs of water for liturgical cleansing, and little carafes of wine? What indeed? Let us assume that Leni would have “stayed with him” even if not faithful to him and would have now and again fulfilled her conjugal duties. Would she then, with three or four “cute” youngsters, with A. as a general
-cum
-server, have attended that first (and not last) Bundeswehr service on October 10, 1956, conducted by Cardinal Frings at the Church of St. Gereon in Cologne? The Au. maintains: No. He cannot
see
Leni there, he sees A. there, even the “cute” youngsters, but not Leni. Another place where he sees A.: on the covers of illustrated weeklies or with the
handsome Messrs. Nannen and Weidemann at some Eastern bloc reception. He—the Au.—sees A. as military attaché in Washington, in Madrid even—but nowhere can he see Leni, and certainly not in the company of the handsome Messrs. Nannen and Weidemann. Perhaps it is the Au.’s visual deficiencies that make him see A. everywhere but not Leni—even her children he sees there, but Leni he does not see. No doubt his visual powers are minimal, but then why does he see A. so clearly and nowhere Leni? Since somewhere in the universe there must be an as yet undiscovered flying body in which a giant computer (probably the size of Bavaria) has been installed and is spewing out hypothetical life stories, we will presumably have to wait until the object is eventually discovered. One thing is certain: Leni, had she been forced by herself or someone else to continue her life at A.’s side, would have become stout with unhappiness, and her weight today would be not twelve to fourteen ounces below standard weight but twenty pounds above it, and then there would have to be another giant computer (the size of North Rhineland–Westphalia) specializing in the study of secretions and capable of discovering which internal and external processes might have caused a creature such as Leni to become stout. Can we see Leni as an attaché’s wife dancing and playing tennis in Saigon, Washington, or Madrid? A fat Leni perhaps, but the one we know, never.