Group Portrait with Lady (19 page)

What a pity the celestial instruments that calculate unshed T., all P., all B., each W., L., and S., in terms of over- or underweight, have not yet been discovered. It is so inexpressibly difficult to imagine Leni in any hypothetical situation, but since these computers do exist why does science let us down (which the encyclopedias do not)?

So if the Au. sees A.’s hypothetical career with almost crystal clarity, he sees Leni nowhere, he does not—quite frankly—even see her fulfilling any conjugal duties.

Too bad, too bad, that we have as yet no access to the heavently instruments that would answer the Biblical question: Tell me how much too much or too little thou weighest, and I will tell thee whether too much or too little T., W., L., B., P., or S. in thy stomach, thy bowels, in brainstem, liver, kidney, pancreas, is converting thy wrongdoing and wrong-feeling into that too much or too little. Who is going to answer the question of how much Leni would weigh if

All we know for sure is that, had Erhard survived, that as yet undiscovered celestial instrument would have rejoiced over Leni’s weight (computers rejoice too), at the fantastic balance of Leni’s secretion. And—the most important question of all: In cases 1 to 6, would Leni have landed up in Pelzner’s nursery garden and, had conflicts of loyalty arisen, how would she have overcome them?

There is at least reason to view with skepticism Leni’s hypothetical life with A., whereas the meeting in the heather of Schleswig-Holstein that had obviously been planned by Leni would most certainly have turned out well. We may also be sure that the fact of being married would not have bothered Leni in the least if the “right man” had come along. To judge by what we know of Erhard, it is quite easy to see her as the wife of a high-school teacher (his subject: German), as the wife (or life-companion) of a producer of “think” programs, as the wife of the editor of an avant-garde journal (and, it must be stated here, Erhard would also have acquainted her with that German-language poet whom she later came to know through
someone else: Georg Trakl). We may be sure of one thing: Erhard would have always loved her, whether she would have always loved him—no twenty-year warranty of this can be given, but we may be just as sure that Erhard would not have insisted on rights of any kind, and this would have guaranteed him one thing for the rest of his life: if not the certainty of Leni’s permanent devotion, nevertheless her affection. Something else that the Au. (surprisingly for him) cannot
see
is Heinrich; he simply cannot see him anywhere in any hypothetical occupational situation—no more than could all the Jesuits combined.

At this point—in connection with certain encyclopedic data—the question must be asked: What, then, do we mean by “quality of life”? Who tells us whose values are superior, and whose inferior? There are awkward gaps in the encylopedias, even in the good ones. We know there are people for whom two marks fifty represent more value than any human life other than their own; and there are even those who, for the sake of a piece of salami that they may or may not get, will recklessly gamble away the values of their wives and children, which may be: a happy family life and the sight of a father who is for once all smiles. And how about that value extolled to us as B.? Damn it, one man is pretty close to B. when he has finally collected the three or four cigarette butts that are all he needs to roll a fresh cigarette, or when he has a chance to gulp down the remains of vermouth in a discarded bottle; another man needs—according to the Western practice of instant lovemaking, at any rate—roughly ten minutes to be happy or, more precisely: in order to have quick sex with the person desired by him at the time, he requires a private jet in which he can make a fast flight, without attracting the attention of the person whom church and state have provided as his lawful source of B., between breakfast
and afternoon coffee to Rome or Stockholm or (for this he would need until the next breakfast) Acapulco—so as to have man-to-man, woman-to-woman, or simply man-to-woman sex with the object of his desire.

So there is no getting away from the fact that many UFO’s with many computers are still to be discovered.

Where, for instance, is the mental experience of P. registered, and where the physical; where is the activity of our conjunctiva expressed as graphically as in a cardiogram; who counts our T. when we secretly give way at night to W.? And who takes note of our L. and S.? Damn it, are Au.s supposed to solve all these problems? What good to us is science when they send off those expensive objects to collect moon dust or bring back dreary rocks, while no one is in a position to as much as locate the UFO that might give us some data on the quality of life? Why for example are some women paid two villas, six cars, and a million and a half in cash for the right to have quick sex with them, while—as statistics prove—in an ancient and holy city with a considerable tradition of prostitution, around the time when our Leni was seven or eight years old, girls have, for a cup of coffee worth eighteen pfennigs (with a tip of twenty or, more precisely, 19.8 pfennigs—but what mint would ever conceive coining 0.1- or 0.2-pfennig pieces of which ten—or five as the case might be—would yield but one solitary pfennig?) and a cigarette worth two and a half pfennigs, i.e., for a total of 22.5 pfennigs, given themselves and even satisfied desires for additional caresses?

We must assume the indicators of the “quality of life” computer to be in a constant state of extreme agitation since they have to register such substantial differences—ranging from 22.5 pfennigs to roughly two million marks—as the price for identically the same service.

What degree of sensitivity registers, say, the quality of life of a match, not of a whole one, not of half a one, but of a quarter
of a match with which a prison inmate lights his cigarette in the evening, while others—nonsmokers at that!—have butane table-lighters as big as two clenched fists standing uselessly and futilely around on their desks?

What kind of world is this? What has happened to justice?

Well, our intention is merely to indicate that many questions remain unanswered.

Not much is known about Leni’s visits to Rahel, the nuns residing in the convent being none too keen to publicize Leni’s intimacy with Rahel because of plans at which Margret has already hinted but which have still to be revealed. In this case, too, care had to be taken over a witness who exposed himself to the Au. to some considerable extent and has had to pay dearly for it: we refer to the gardener Alfred Scheukens, who as an amputee (one leg, one arm) of less than twenty-five had been assigned to the nuns in 1941 as gardener and assistant gatekeeper and must have been fairly accurately informed on Leni’s visits. He could be interrogated only twice, after the second interview he was transferred to a convent on the Lower Rhine; and when an attempt was made to locate him there it was found that he had already been retransferred, and the Au. was given to understand, in no uncertain terms, by a forty-five-year-old, very determined nun called Sapientia, that no obligation was felt to give information on the Order’s personnel policy. Since the disappearance of Scheukens coincided closely with Sister Cecilia’s refusal to grant the Au. a fourth interview, this time exclusively about Rahel, the Au. infers manipulation, intrigues, and by now he also knows why: the Order is trying to get a Rahel-cult under way, if not actually to make the first moves toward beatification or sanctification—hence “informers” (that is what he was called) are, and Leni most
certainly is, unwelcome. As long as Scheukens talked and was still allowed to talk because no one suspected what he was talking about, he could at least testify that until the middle of 1942 he had secretly let Leni in to see Rahel twice, indeed sometimes three times, a week, into the cloister grounds by way of his gatekeeper’s cottage, and “once in the grounds, of course, she knew her way around pretty well.” Lotte, who has never “thought much of this mystical and mysterious nun,” has no information to give, and Margret seems to have heard from Leni only about Rahel’s death. “She wasted away there,” she told me, “starved to death, although toward the end I always took her some food, and then when she was dead they buried her in the garden, just in shallow earth, with no gravestone or anything; as soon as I got there I sensed that she had gone, and Scheukens said to me: ‘No use now, Miss, no use—unless you want to scratch open the ground?’ So then I went to the mother superior and asked very determinedly for Rahel, and they told me she had gone away, and when I asked where to, the mother superior got nervous and said: ‘But child, have your wits deserted you?’ Well,” Margret went on, “I’m glad I didn’t go there any more and that I managed to persuade Leni not to make a denunciation; it might have turned out badly—for Leni, the convent, and everyone. That ‘the Lord is nigh,’ that was enough for me—and when I think what it would’ve been like if He’d really come through the door—“ (here even Margret made the sign of the cross).

“I always wondered, of course” (Scheukens during my last visit, when he was still eager to talk), “who that woman was, always snappily dressed and with that snappy car; the wife or girl friend of some Party boss, is what I thought—after all, who
could still drive their own car even in those days—only Party or big business.

“No one was supposed to know, of course, and I used to let her in secretly through the garden, through my cottage here and out again through here too; but it got out because they found cigarette butts up there in the nun’s room and because it smelled of cigarette smoke, and once we had a row with the air-raid warden, he insisted he’d seen light in one of the windows—it must’ve been the matches when those two sat up there smoking, you can see that for miles in the blackout. There was a big fuss, and the old girl was moved down into the cellar.” (“The old girl?”) “That’s right, the little old nun who I only got to see once, when she switched rooms—she had a prie-dieu and a bed, she didn’t want to take along the crucifix; No, she said: ‘That’s not Him, that’s not Him.’ It was weird all right. But that snappy blonde kept on coming, she meant business, I tell you, she tried to talk me into helping her abduct the little nun. She wanted to carry her off, just like that. Well, I did a stupid thing, I let her bribe me—with cigarettes, butter, coffee—and went on letting her in, even into the cellar. At least there you couldn’t see when they smoked, the window’s lower than the level of the chapel, see? Well, one day she was dead, and we buried her in the little cemetery in the garden.” (“With coffin and cross and priest?”) “Coffin yes, no priest, no cross. I just caught Mother Superior saying: ‘Now at least she can’t pester us any more about her tiresome cigarette rations.’ ”

So much for Scheukens. He did not make too good an impression, but his volubility had aroused hopes that in the end were not fulfilled; items of information from gossips have a qualified value in their sum total, when one has discovered at what point
they become “revealing,” and Scheukens was indeed beginning to reveal himself—but just then he was forcibly separated from the Au., and even that gracious Sister Cecilia, from whom the Au. had gained the impression that the attraction was mutual, dried up as a source.

We can be quite sure, however, that toward the end of ’41 and early in ’42 Leni reached the acme of her taciturnity and reticence. Toward the Pfeiffers she shows open contempt by simply leaving the room as soon as they appear. Their visits, and a cloying solicitude for Leni, were such that it took a down-to-earth person like Miss van Doorn six weeks to suspect the object of their attentiveness: it was not merely to check up on Leni’s behavior as a widow—the real reason was their hopes for an heir. Within six weeks of A.’s death, at a time when old Pfeiffer’s “proud grief had reached a point at which his pride and grief were about to make him start dragging the other leg just as phonily—whether the left or the right was the sound one I couldn’t tell you, but he had to have one good leg, didn’t he, so as to be able to drag the other, right? Well, they were forever turning up with their revolting soggy homemade cakes, and because no one paid any attention to them, neither Mrs. Gruyten nor Leni nor the old man, and least of all Lotte, who couldn’t stand the sight of the whole bunch of them, they would settle down in my kitchen, and I must confess that, whenever they asked if there was any ‘change’ in Leni I always thought they were talking about her being a widow, whether she had a lover or something; I didn’t get it till it finally dawned on me that they were almost prepared to have a peek at Leni’s laundry. So that’s what they wanted to know, and when I tumbled to what they were after I led them a bit of a dance, I told them Leni had changed quite a bit, and when they fell on me like ducks with their beaks and asked
how
she had changed I told them without batting an eyelid that she had changed inwardly, and they backed off again. After two months there
came a point where that Tolzem woman—Mrs. P., I mean, you must remember that to me she’s always the Tolzem woman, since we all come from the same village—was on the verge of challenging Leni direct, I mean head on, so I got fed up and said: ‘No, I know for a fact that it’s no use your hoping she’s in the family way.’ Just what they’d’ve liked, of course, to smuggle a little Pfeiffer into the nest—only the funny thing was that Hubert was showing the same kind of curiosity, just that he wasn’t quite so blatant about it, more wistful, I’d say, he’d have liked a grandson, I expect, even if it’d been from
that
fellow. Well, he got his grandson in the end, of course—and one who bore his name at that.”

Here the Au. is completely stymied because he would have liked to consult the encyclopedia about a quality that he thinks Leni possesses and that is generally known as innocence. There is a good deal in the encyclopedia about “innocent converter,” “innocent conveyance,” while “innocent party” and “innocent passage” are also fully defined. Furthermore, “nocence” and “nocent” are given as archaic terms for guilt and guilty. All in all, the information on these terms exceeds the total information on T., W., L., B., P., and S. combined. Not a word about innocence, no mention of it whatever. What kind of world is this? Do people find archaic guilt more important than laughter and weeping, pain and suffering and bliss combined? The omission of innocence is highly annoying, for without an encyclopedia it is very difficult to apply this term correctly. Does science let us down after all? Is it perhaps enough to say that everything Leni did she did in all innocence, and simply omit the quotation marks? Leni, of whom the Au. is extremely fond, cannot be understood without this term. On the other hand, the fact that she was not deprived of the chance to attain consciousness
is something that will soon—in about a year—come to light, when she is almost exactly twenty-one.