Group Portrait with Lady (21 page)

S. became the chief witness for the prosecution in a trial that lasted only two days, G. having pleaded guilty on all counts. He remained cool, becoming confused only when required to specify the “name supplier” (“Imagine that, ‘name supplier’ “—Scholsdorff), whom even S., although he knew precisely who it was, did not betray. Some three hours of the second day of the trial were spent in an educational test carried out by an expert in Slavic languages and literature summoned from Berlin, G. having claimed that he had obtained
the names from books—it was proved that he had never read a single Russian book in his life, “or a German book, for that matter, not even
Mein Kampf”
(S.); then it was “Henges’s turn.” It was not Gruyten who betrayed him, Scholsdorff had meanwhile run him to earth. “He was in fact working for the Army with the rank of officer on special duty, trying to persuade Russian prisoners of war to betray military secrets. A man who, as a Chekhov specialist, could have acquired an international reputation.”

Henges, who had actually volunteered to testify, appeared in court in his officer’s uniform, which “somehow didn’t look quite right on him, he’d only had it on for a month” (S.). Yes, he admitted to having supplied Gruyten with a list of Russian names when approached by him. What he failed to mention was that he had collected a fee of ten marks for each name. He had previously conferred with Gruyten’s defense attorney on this point and explained to him: “I simply can’t afford to do that now—do you understand?” Whereupon Gruyten and his attorney agreed to omit this embarrassing detail, one which, however, Henges admitted to Scholsdorff, with whom he continued his dispute in a bar near the courthouse. For in court an argument had arisen between Scholsdorff and Henges during which Scholsdorff shouted indignantly to Henges: “All of them, you betrayed all of them, except for your Turgenev and your Chekhov!” This “Russian farce” was broken off by the district attorney.

The moral of this interlude is self-explanatory: contractors who keep forged payroll lists should have a good literary background and—tax auditors with a good literary background can prove to be of undeniable usefulness and benefit to the state.

At this trial only one person was found guilty: G. He confessed to everything and made his situation more difficult by refusing to admit to greed as his motive; when asked about his motive, he refused to make any statement, asked whether he had had sabotage in mind, he denied it. Leni, later questioned several times on his motive, murmured something about “revenge” (revenge for what? Au.). G. narrowly escaped the death sentence, and only after the intensive intervention “of very, very influential friends who put forward his undisputed services to the German war construction industry” (according to H., Sr.); he was sentenced to life in the penitentiary, and his entire fortune was confiscated. Leni had to appear twice in court but was acquitted on account of proven innocence, as were Hoyser and Lotte and all friends and employees. The only object to escape confiscation was the apartment building in which Leni had been born, and for this she is indebted solely to the “otherwise very aggressive prosecutor,” who put forward her “hard fate as a war widow; her proven innocence,” and rattled on embarrassingly as he “rehashed” (Lotte H.) A.’s heroic exploits; even Leni’s association with a Nazi girls’ organization was placed by him on the side of her moral credit. “It would be unfitting, Your Honor, to rob this gravely ill mother” (meaning Mrs. G.), “who has lost a son and a son-in-law, and this courageous young German woman, whose immaculate life has been proven, of a financial asset which, incidentally, became part of the family fortune not through the defendant but through his wife.”

Mrs. Gruyten did not survive this scandal. Since she was not fit to be moved she was interrogated a few times in bed; “that did it” (van Doorn), “and she wasn’t all that sad either to leave this world—when all’s said and done a fine decent brave woman. She would’ve dearly liked to say farewell to Hubert, but it was too late, and we buried her very quietly. Church ceremony, of course.”

Leni has now reached the age of twenty-one; needless to say, she no longer has a car, she thinks it right to give up her position with the firm, her father has for the time being disappeared without trace. How does all this affect her—not at all or very much? What will become of the snappy blonde with the snappy car, who in the third year of the war appears to have had little else to do than play the piano a bit, read Irish legends to her sick mother, visit a dying nun; who has been widowed, so to speak, for the second time, with no sign of grief, and now loses her mother while her father disappears behind iron bars? Few direct utterances of hers have come down to us from that time. The impression she made on all those close to her is a surprising one. Lotte says that Leni had been “somehow relieved,” van Doorn says, “she seemed to feel freer,” whereas old Hoyser puts it this way—“she seemed somehow to breathe a sigh of relief”; the “somehow” in two of these statements does not, of course, help us much, but it does offer the imagination a crack in Leni’s reserve. Margret expresses it as follows: “She didn’t seem depressed, the impression I got was more that she was taking a new lease on life. What was much worse for her than the scandal with her father and her mother’s death was the mysterious disappearance of Sister Rahel.” Confining ourselves to the facts: Leni had to register for a job and landed up, as the result of the intervention of a well-wisher who, working quietly in the background, “could pull a few strings” and wishes to remain anonymous, but is known to the Au.—at a wreathmaker’s.

A later generation may wonder how it was possible, in 1942–43, for wreaths to be considered war-essential. The answer is: so that funerals might continue to be conducted with as much dignity as possible. Wreaths may not have been in such great demand just then as cigarettes, but they were in short supply, no doubt about that, and they were in demand and important to the psychological conduct of the war. Government wreath requirements alone were vast: for air-raid victims, for soldiers dying in military hospitals, and since there would naturally be “the odd private death” too (Walter Pelzer, one-time nursery gardener, Leni’s former boss, now living in retirement on the revenue from his properties), and “quite often important Party, business, and military people were given state funerals of various categories,” every type of wreath, “from the simplest, modestly trimmed, to the rose-garlanded giant wheel” (Walter Pelzer), was considered war-essential. This is not the place for an appreciation of the state in its capacity as organizer of funerals; we may take it for granted, both historically and statistically, that there were a great many funerals, wreaths were in demand, both publicly and privately, and that Pelzer had
managed to ensure for his wreath-making business the status of a war-essential enterprise. The farther the war progressed, in other words the longer it lasted (the connection between progress and duration is to be specifically noted), the scarcer, of course, did wreaths become.

Should the prejudice exist “somewhere” that the art of wreath-making is trivial, any such notion—if only for Leni’s sake—must be firmly contradicted. When we consider that a wreath of blossoms represents the ultimate and basic design, that the unity of the total design must be unfailingly preserved; that there are different designs and techniques for forming a wreath frame, that in selecting the greenery it is important to select greenery suitable for the design that has been chosen; that there are nine principal types of greenery for the frame alone, twenty-four for the finished wreath, forty-two for bunching and wire-picking (overall category: stemming), and twenty-nine for “romanizing,” we arrive at a total figure of one hundred and twelve types of tying greenery; and although some of these may overlap in the various categories of their use, we are still left with five different categories of use and a complicated system of twining; and although one or the other greenery may be used both for tying and for the finished wreath, for stemming (which again subdivides into bunching and wire-picking), and for “romanizing,” we still find the basic principle applying here too: it is all a matter of know-how. Who, for instance, among those who look down on wreathmaking as an inferior occupation, knows when to use the green of the red spruce for the frame or the finished wreath, when he is to use arborvitae, Iceland moss, butcher’s-broom, mahonia, or hemlock fir? Who knows that in each case the greenery must form a solid layer, that skill in tying is expected throughout? So it will be seen that Leni, who has so far done nothing but light and random office work, now found herself thrust into no easily negotiable terrain, no easily learned craft, but into what almost amounts to an art studio.

It is perhaps hardly necessary to state that for a time, while the Germanic motif was being vigorously promoted, the “romanized” or Roman wreath fell into disrepute, but that the controversy came to an abrupt end when the Axis was formed and Mussolini took somewhat vehement exception to the defamation of the Roman wreath; that the verb “to romanize” could then be freely used until mid-July 1943 when, however, in view of the Italian betrayal, it was once and for all stamped out (comment by a fairly high Nazi leader: “There will be no more romanizing in this country, not even in the making of wreaths or bouquets”). Every observant reader will understand at once that in extreme political situations not even the wreathmaking business is without its perils. Since, moreover, the Roman wreath had evolved as an imitation of the carved ornamental wreaths on Roman façades, the strict ban on it was reinforced by an ideological rationale: it was pronounced “dead,” and all other wreath designs were pronounced “living.”

Walter Pelzer, an important witness for that period of Leni’s life, unsavory though his reputation may be, was able to prove with a fair amount of plausibility that at the end of 1943 and the beginning of 1944 he had been denounced to the craftsmen’s guild “by envious people and competitors” and that the following “intensely dangerous” (Pelzer) comment had been entered in his dossier: “continues to romanize.” “Good God, that could’ve cost me my neck in those days!” (P.). Needless to say, after 1945, when his unsavory past came under discussion, Pelzer tried to make out, “and not only on that basis,” that he had been “a victim of political persecution,” an attempt which—through Leni’s assistance, we are sorry to say—met with success. “For those were the wreaths which she—Leni, I mean the Pfeiffer girl—actually invented herself: firm, smooth
wreaths of heather that actually looked as if they’d been enameled, but I don’t mind telling you—they really made a hit with the public. That had nothing whatever to do with romanizing or anything else—it was an invention of the Pfeiffer girl’s. But it almost cost me my neck because it was taken to be a variation of the Roman wreath.”

Pelzer, now seventy, living in retirement on the revenue from his properties, twenty-six years after the events, began to look genuinely nervous and had to put aside his cigar for a minute in apparent preparation for a coughing fit. “And anyway—the things I did for her, the things I covered up—that really was appallingly dangerous, worse than the suspicion of romanizing.”

Of the ten persons with whom Leni worked for a long time in close daily contact, it was still possible to trace five, including Pelzer himself and his head gardener Grundtsch. If Pelzer and Grundtsch are taken, quite correctly, to be Leni’s superiors, of the eight with whom she worked more or less as an equal there still remain three.

Pelzer lives in an architectural structure which, although he personally calls it a bungalow, may without hesitation be described as a bombastic villa, a yellow-tiled building that had merely the appearance of a single story (the finished basement contains a sumptuous bar, a recreation room where Pelzer has installed a kind of wreath museum, a guest suite, and a well-stocked wine cellar); next to yellow (the tiles), the predominant color is black: wrought iron, doors, garage door, window trim—all black. The association with a mausoleum does not seem unfounded. Pelzer lives in this house with a rather sad-looking wife, Eva née Prumtel, who appears to be in her mid-sixties and mars her pretty face with bitterness.

Albert Grundtsch, now eighty, still lives, “withdrawn into his shell,” virtually in the cemetery (G. about G.), in a large two-and-a-half-room stone (brick) shed from which he has easy access to his two greenhouses. Grundtsch has not, as Pelzer has done, profited from the cemetery expansion (nor does he wish to, let it be added) and grimly defends “the acre of greenhouses I was fool enough to give him at the time” (Pelzer). “You could almost say that the parks and cemetery administration will heave a sigh of relief when he kicks the—when he pegs—well, when he departs this life, let’s put it that way.”

In the heart of the cemetery, which has swallowed up not only the few hectares of Pelzer’s nursery garden but also other nurseries and stonemasons’ yards, Grundtsch leads an almost autarkical existence: the recipient of an old-age pension (“Because I kept up his contributions,” P.), he lives rent-free, grows his own tobacco and vegetables and, since he is a vegetarian, has little trouble providing his own food; clothing problems are almost nil—he is still wearing a pair of old Gruyten’s pants which the latter had made in 1937 and which Leni passed on to Grundtsch in 1944. He has switched entirely to the (his own words) “seasonal potted-plant business” (hydrangeas for Low Sunday, cyclamen and forget-me-not for Mother’s Day; for Christmas, small potted firs trimmed with ribbons and candles to put on the graves—“the stuff they bring along to put on their graves—you wouldn’t believe”).

The Au. felt that the parks administration, if it really is speculating on G.’s death, will have a longish wait. For he is not at all the kind of person he is made out to be, “an indoor type, always shut away in his greenhouses” (municipal park employee); on the contrary, he uses the now immense cemetery “after business hours when the bell’s rung, and that’s usually pretty early, as a private park; I go for long walks, smoke my pipe on a bench some place, and when I feel like it sometimes go to work on a grave that’s been neglected or forgotten and
give it a decent foundation—moss or spruce green, sometimes I even lay a couple of flowers on it, and, believe it or not, apart from thieves looking for copper and such, I’ve yet to meet a soul; of course there’s the occasional crazy person who refuses to believe a certain person’s dead when that person is dead; they climb over the wall so that even at night they can cry and curse and pray and wait beside the grave—but in fifty years I’ve only run across two or three of those—and then of course I make myself scarce, and every ten years or so some couple turns up with no fear or prejudice, lovers who’ve grasped the fact that there’s scarcely a place in the world where you can be so undisturbed—and then I’ve always made myself scarce too, of course, and these days naturally I’ve no way of knowing what goes on in the outlying parts of the cemetery—but believe me, even in winter it’s beautiful, when it’s snowing, and I go for a walk at night, all muffled up and wearing my felt boots and smoking my pipe—it’s so quiet, and they’re all so peaceful, so peaceful. As you can imagine, I’ve always had problems with girl friends, when I wanted to take them back to my place: nothing doing, I tell you—and the more tarty they were the less there was doing, even for money.”