Group Portrait with Lady (22 page)

On being asked about Leni he became almost embarrassed. “Yes, of course, the Pfeiffer girl—do I remember her! As if I could forget her! Leni. Of course, all the men were after her, all of them it seemed, even Sonny Boy Walt” (referring to Pelzer, now seventy. Au.), “but no one really had the nerve. She was unapproachable, not in any prissy way, I must say, and because I was the oldest—I was already fifty-five or thereabouts—I never even thought I had a chance; of the others, I guess it was only Kremp who tried, the one we called ‘Dirty Berty,’ and in her cool offhand way she snubbed him so thoroughly that he gave up. How far Sonny Boy Walt tried it with her I don’t know—but you can be sure he never got anywhere, and the others, of course, were just women, conscripted for war jobs
naturally, and the women were divided pretty evenly for and against—not for or against her, but that Russian who later turned out to be the darling of her heart. Can you imagine that the whole business lasted for nearly a year and a half—and none of us, not one, noticed anything serious? They were smart and they were careful. Well, of course there was a good deal at stake: two necks, or one and a half for sure. My God, I still get ice-cold shivers running down my spine right into my arse when I think of it now, what the girl was risking. On the job? How she was on the job? Well, maybe I’m prejudiced because I was fond of her, really fond of her, the way you can be fond of a daughter you’ve never had or—I was thirty-three years older than her, remember—of a woman you love and never get. Well, she simply had a natural talent—that tells the whole story.

“We only had two trained gardeners, three if you count Walter, but all he ever thought of was his ledgers and his cash. Two, then: Mrs. Hölthohne, she was more of what you might call an intellectual gardener, Youth Movement and all that, she’d gone to university and then taken up gardening, a romantic sort of person—you know, the soil, and working with one’s hands and all that—but she knew her job all right, and then there was me. The rest were untrained, of course, Helga Heuter, Kremp, Miss Schelf, Mrs. Kremer, Marga Wanft, and Miss Zeven—a bunch of women, and they weren’t chicks either, at least there wasn’t one you’d’ve wanted to lay among the peat moss and the wire-picking material. Well, it only took me two days to realize there was one thing the Pfeiffer girl wasn’t suited for, and that was making wreath frames, that’s rough work and quite hard too, and the Heuter-Schelf-Kremp group took care of that, they were simply given a list and their pile of greens for tying, depending on supply—as time went on we couldn’t get much but oak leaves, beech leaves, and pine—and then they were told the size—usually standard, but for big funerals we had a code of abbreviations, PB 1, PB 2,
PB 3—meaning: Party Boss 1
^st
, 2
^nd
, and 3
^rd
class; when it came out later that our private code also included H 1, H 2, and H 3 for Hero 1
^st
, 2
^nd
, and 3
^rd
class, there was a row with that Dirty Berty Kremp who said it sounded insulting and took it as a personal insult because he was a Hero 2nd class: an amputee, one leg, and a few decorations and medals. So, Leni didn’t fit into the wreath-frame group, I saw that right off and put her into the trimming group, where she worked alongside Kremer and Wanft—and believe me, she was a natural genius for trimming, or, if you like, a wire-picking whiz. You should’ve seen how she handled cherry-laurel and rhododendron leaves, you could trust that girl with the most expensive material: not a scrap was wasted or snapped off—and she caught on right away to something many people never grasp: the hub, the center of gravity, of the trim must be in the top left quarter of the wreath frame; that gives a cheerful, sort of optimistic upward sweep to the wreath; if you put the center of gravity on the right, you get the pessimistic feeling of a downward slant. And it would never’ve occurred to her to mix geometric trimming designs with vegetation ones—never, I tell you. She was an either/or type—and that’s something you can see even from trimming a wreath. There was one habit I had to break her of, though, time and again and relentlessly: she had a weakness for pure geometric forms—rhomboids, triangles, and once as a matter of fact—it was a PB 1 wreath, too—she improvised a Star of David out of marguerites, just playing around with geometric designs. I’m sure it wasn’t on purpose, it just took shape under her hands and I doubt if she knows to this day why it made me so nervous that I got really mad at her: just imagine if the wreath hadn’t been checked and had got onto the hearse—and anyway, people liked the vague vegetation designs better, and Leni could make those up very nicely too: she would weave little baskets into the wreath, little birds even—well anyway, if it wasn’t exactly vegetation it was
at least organic—and when there was a PB 1 wreath that rated roses and Walt didn’t stint with the roses he let her have, and especially when they were long-stemmed beauties in bud: Leni became a regular artist: whole scenes took shape under her fingers, too bad, in a way, because they lasted such a short time: a miniature park with a pond and swans on it; well, I tell you, if there’d been prizes she’d have won them all, and the most important thing—for Walt at least—was: with very little trimming material she achieved a far greater effect than many people did with a lot. She was economical in other ways, too. Then the finished wreath would go through the checking group, that was Mrs. Hölthohne and Miss Zeven—and no wreath left the place that hadn’t eventually gone through my hands. It was Mrs. Hölthohne’s job to check the wreath frame and the trim and improve them where necessary, and the Zeven woman was what we called the ribbon lady, she would put on the ribbons that were delivered to us from town—and of course she had to watch like a hawk to be sure there was never any mix-up. If someone who’d ordered a wreath with the inscription ‘For Hans—a last farewell from Henriette’ got a wreath with a ribbon saying ‘From Emilie for my unforgettable Otto,’ or vice versa—with that quantity of wreaths that might’ve had embarrassing consequences; and finally there was the delivery van, a rickety little three-wheeler that took the wreaths to the chapels, hospitals, army headquarters, to Party branch office or funeral homes, and Walt wouldn’t let anyone else do that job because then he could goof off, pocket the money, and play hooky for a while.”

Since Leni never complained about her work either to Miss van Doorn or Margret, or even to old Hoyser or Heinrich Pfeiffer, it must be assumed that in fact she enjoyed it. The only thing
that seems to have worried her was that her fingers and hands took a real beating: after she had used up her mother’s and father’s supply of gloves, she asked around in the whole family for “cast-off gloves.”

It may be that she used to think quietly about her dead mother, about her father, that many thoughts were devoted to Erhard and Heinrich, possibly even to the deceased Alois. She is described as “nice and friendly and very quiet,” as far as that year was concerned.

Even Pelzer describes her as “silent, my God, she scarcely ever opened her mouth! But she was nice, friendly and nice and the most efficient help I had at that time, apart from Grundtsch, who was a real old pro, of course, and that Mrs. Hölthohne, but with her there was something so damned pedantic, so academic, about the way she sometimes corrected good ideas. Besides the Pfeiffer girl wasn’t only good at designing, she also had a feeling for the botanical side, she knew by instinct that you can—in fact must—handle cyclamen blooms differently from a long-stemmed rose or a peony, and I don’t mind telling you it was always a financial sacrifice for me when I had to let them have red roses for wreaths—there was a nice little black market, you see, for young blades who thought roses were the only possible gift from an admirer—you could’ve really cleaned up, specially in the hotels where young officers went with their girl friends. How many times did I get phone calls from hotel porters, they’d offer me not only money but good merchandise for a bouquet of long-stemmed roses. Coffee, cigarettes, butter, even cloth—genuine worsted—was offered me once, somehow it seemed a shame, really, that slmost everything went for the dead and hardly anything was left for the living.”

In the meantime, while Pelzer was having his rose problems, Leni was on the verge of becoming a victim of housing control: the authorities regarded the occupation of a seven-room apartment with kitchen and bath by a total of seven
persons (Mr. Hoyser, Sr., Mrs. Hoyser, Sr., Lotte with Kurt and Werner, Leni, Miss van Doorn) as insufficient. Up to this point the city had, after all, gone through more than five hundred and fifty air-raid alarms and a hundred and thirty air raids, and the entire Hoyser clan was allocated three—admittedly large—rooms, and Leni and Marja van Doorn, “after every possible string had been pulled, were allowed to keep one room each” (M.v.D.). It may be assumed that the high-placed local government official who would rather remain anonymous played a part in this, although he modestly denies “having been of assistance.” Be that as it may, two rooms remained to be “controlled,” “and those awful Pfeiffers, who had meanwhile been driven out of their rabbit hutch by a bomb explosion” (Lotte H.) “moved heaven and earth ‘to live under the same roof as our dear daughter-in-law.’ Old Pfeiffer enjoyed being an air-raid victim as much as he enjoyed his gammy leg, and he had the bad taste to say: ‘Now I’ve also sacrificed my humble but honestly acquired possessions to the Fatherland.’ “ (Lotte H.) “Needless to say, we all got a scare, but then Margret found out through her friend at city hall” (??A.) “that old Pfeiffer was about to be transferred to the country with his class, so we gave in—and actually had them on our necks for three weeks, then in spite of his game leg he had to go off to the country, taking his mopey old missus with him, and we were left just with that nice Heinrich Pfeiffer, who had volunteered and was only waiting to be called up, and just after Stalingrad at that” (Lotte H.).

A number of difficulties arose in obtaining reliable information on Leni’s chief adversary at the nursery; it did not occur to the Au. to solicit the services of the war-graves commission until he had thoroughly and unsuccessfully ransacked the citizens’ registration lists, regimental records, etc. An inquiry at the war-graves commission yielded the information that one Heribert
Kremp, aged twenty-five, had been killed in March near the Rhine and buried close to the Frankfurt-Cologne
Autobahn;
to progress from the address of Kremp’s grave to the address of his parents was not difficult, although the conversation with them was disagreeable in the extreme; they confirmed that he had worked at Pelzer’s nursery, that there, “like everywhere else that he lived and worked, he had dedicated himself to order and decency—and then there was no holding him when the Fatherland was so woefully threatened, he volunteered in mid-March ’45 for the Home Guard, in spite of having lost a leg above the knee, and died the finest death he could ever have wished for.” The Kremp parents seemed to regard their son’s death as perfectly normal and expected something from the Au. that he could not offer: a few words of appreciation, and since he was unable to react very cordially, even when confronted by the photo they showed him, it seemed best—as with Mrs. Schweigert—to take a hasty departure; the photo showed a (to the Au.) rather unprepossessing person, with a wide mouth and low forehead, woolly fair hair, and button eyes.

In order to trace the three surviving female witnesses from Leni’s wartime employment at the nursery, all that was needed was a straightforward request for information at the citizens’ registration bureau, which, after payment of an appropriately modest fee, was duly complied with.

The first, Mrs. Liane Hölthohne, who had been in charge of the wreath-checking unit and is now seventy, is the owner of a chain of florists with four outlets. She lives in a remarkably pretty little bungalow, four rooms, kitchen, hall, two bathrooms, in a suburb that is still almost rural; the rooms are furnished in impeccable taste, color and contours harmonize, and since she is almost suffocating in books anyway she has been spared the problem of interior decoration. She was
matter-of-fact but not curt, silver-haired and
soignée;
and from the photo of an office party taken in 1944 and shown by Pelzer, it is doubtful whether anyone would have recognized in that short, rather dumpy woman wearing a head scarf and a severe expression the fine-drawn venerable beauty who now presented herself to the Au. with dignity and reserve; earrings of fine silver filigree, shaped like tiny baskets with a loose coral bead trembling in each, made her head—her still strongly pigmented brown eyes being in continual movement—a point of focus that in its fourfold movement was very hard on the eyes: the earrings quivered, inside the earrings the corals quivered, her head quivered, and in her head the eyes quivered; her makeup, the slightly withered skin at neck and wrists, gave an impression of good grooming, but not at all as if Mrs. H. were trying to conceal her age. Tea, petits fours, cigarettes in a silver box (that had barely room for eight cigarettes), a lighted wax candle, matches in a hand-painted porcelain container showing the signs of the Zodiac but only eleven pictures, the center one depicting a stylized archer standing out in pink against the other signs, painted in blue, made it reasonable to assume that Mrs. H. was born under the sign of Sagittarius; curtains of old rose, furniture light brown, walnut, rugs white, on the walls—where the books had left any space—engravings with views of the Rhine, carefully hand-tinted, six or seven engravings (the Au. cannot guarantee perfect accuracy on this point) measuring at most two and a half by one and a half inches, exact and with a gemlike clarity: Bonn seen from Beuel, Cologne seen from Deutz, Zons from the right bank of the Rhine between Urdenbach and Baumberg, Oberwinter, Boppard, Rees; and since the Au. also remembers having seen Xanten, moved by the artist somewhat closer to the Rhine than geographical accuracy would have permitted, there must have been seven engravings after all.

“Yes indeed,” said Mrs. Hölthohne, offering the silver box to the Au. and looking almost, it seemed to him, as if she were
expecting him not to take a cigarette (he had to disappoint her and noticed a very, very faint clouding of her brow). “You see correctly, views of the left bank of the Rhine only” (thus in her perceptiveness swiftly outstripping the Au.’s speed of grasp, awareness, and interpretation!). “I used to be a Separatist, and still am, and not only theoretically; on the fifteenth of November, 1923, I was wounded near the Ägidienberg, not for the honorable side but for the dishonorable one which to me is still the honorable side. No one can talk me out of my belief that this part of Germany doesn’t belong to Prussia and never has, nor in any kind of so-called Reich founded by Prussia. A Separatist to this day, not for a French Rhineland but for a German one. The Rhine as the border of the Rhineland, with Alsace and Lorraine forming part of it too, of course; for a neighbor, an unchauvinistic France, republican naturally. Well, in 1923 I fled to France, where I recovered, and even in those early days I needed a false name and false papers to return to Germany, that was in 1924. Then in ’33 it was better to be called Hölthohne than Elli Marx, and I didn’t want to leave again, emigrate again. Do you know why? I love this part of Germany and the people who live in it: it’s just that they’ve ended up in the wrong history, and you can quote all the Hegel you want” (the Au. had no intention of quoting any Hegel!) “and tell me that no one can end up in the wrong history. I thought the best thing for me to do after 1933 was to forfeit my flourishing business as a landscape architect, I simply let it go bankrupt, that was the simplest and least obtrusive way, though it was hard because the office was doing well. Then came that business with the Aryan pass, tricky, risky, but of course I still had my friends in France and I had them look after it. You see, this Liane Hölthohne had died in a Paris bordello in 1924, and Elli Marx from Saarlouis was simply allowed to die in her stead. I had this nonsense with the Aryan papers done by a lawyer in Paris, who in turn knew someone at the embassy, but although it was done very discreetly a letter
turned up one day from a village near Osnabrück, and in this letter a certain Erhard Hölthohne wrote to this Liane offering “to forgive her everything, please come back to your own country, I’ll build a new life for you here.” Well, we had to wait till all the papers for the Aryan pass had been assembled and then have this Liane Hölthohne die in Paris while in Germany she went on living as an employee at a nursery garden. Well it worked. I was fairly safe but not a hundred-percent safe, and that’s why it seemed wisest to lie low at a Nazi’s like Pelzer.”