Group Portrait with Lady (23 page)

Excellent tea, three times as strong as at the nuns, delicious petits fours, but the Au. reached too often—this was already the third time—into the silver cigarette box, although the ashtray, scarcely the size of a nutshell, would hardly hold the ashes and remains of the third cigarette. No doubt about it: Mrs. Hölthohne was an intelligent and
moderate
woman, and since the Au. did not contradict her Separatist views, nor cared to do so, it seemed that, despite his immoderate smoking and tea-drinking (this was already his third cup!), her liking for him did not wane.

“You can imagine my apprehension, though in actual fact there was little reason for it because the relatives of this Liane never showed up, but there might have been a thorough inspection of Pelzer’s accounts and personnel, and then there was also that wretched Nazi Kremp, and the Wanft woman, and that Nationalist Frieda Zeven at whose table I worked. Pelzer, who is and always was a genius at sensing an atmosphere—he must have sensed that I didn’t feel all that secure because when he began quite blatantly working his crooked deals with the flowers and the greenery I was afraid I’d find myself in serious trouble, not
because of
myself but
through
him, so I decided to give notice, and when I told him he gave me such a funny look and said: ‘You give notice? Can you afford to?,’ and I’m sure he didn’t know anything but his sixth sense told him something—and I got cold feet and withdrew my notice, but of course he saw that now I was
really
nervous and had reason to be, and he
was constantly emphasizing my name as if it were a false one, and of course he knew that the Kremer woman’s husband had been murdered in a concentration camp as a Communist, and with the Pfeiffer girl, too, he sensed that something was going on, and there again with his sixth sense he was actually onto something more momentous than he or any of us suspected. That there was a bond of understanding between the young Pfeiffer girl and Boris Lvovich was fairly clear, and that in itself was risky enough, but
that
—I would never have credited her with the courage. By the way, Pelzer also proved his sixth sense when he knew right off in 1945 that what had always been ‘Blumen’ to him were now ‘flowers,’ only with wreaths he got it wrong, he called them ‘circles,’ and for a time the Americans thought he meant ‘underground circles.’ ”

A break. Brief. A few questions by the Au., who during the break managed with some difficulty to accommodate the remains of his third cigarette in the silver nutshell and noted with approval that on the otherwise immaculate wall of books the volumes of Proust, Stendhal, Tolstoi, and Kafka seemed
very
well thumbed, not dirty, not soiled, merely well thumbed, well worn like a favorite garment that has been mended and washed over and over again.

“Yes indeed, I love to read, and I keep rereading books I’ve already read many many times, I first read Proust in the Benjamin translation back in 1929—and now about Leni: a splendid girl, of course, yes, I say ‘girl’ although she’s in her late forties; only: you couldn’t get really close to her, either during the war or after; not that she was cold, just quiet and so silent; friendly—but silent, and stubborn; I was the first one to be given the nickname of ‘the lady,’ then when Leni started work there we were known as ‘the two ladies,’ but in less than six months they’d stopped calling her ‘the lady,’ and again there was only one ‘lady’ there, me. Strange—it wasn’t till later that I realized what made Leni so unusual, such an enigma—she was proletarian, yes, I mean it, her feeling for money, time, and
so on—proletarian; she might have gone a long way, but she didn’t want to; it wasn’t that she lacked a sense of responsibility, or that she was incapable of assuming responsibility; and as for her ability to plan—well that, we might say, she proved to the full, for almost eighteen months she had this love affair with Boris Lvovich, and not one of us, not a single one, had thought such a thing possible, not once was she found out, or was he found out, and believe me, the Wanft and Schelf women and Dirty Berty watched over those two like lynxes, so that sometimes I got scared and thought,
if
there’s something going on between those two, then God help them. The only danger was at the beginning, when—simply for practical reasons—there
couldn’t
be anything between them, and I naturally sometimes doubted whether she—if she … knew what she was doing; she was rather naive, you know. And as I said: no feeling for money or for property. We all earned, depending on extras and overtime and so forth, between 25 and 40 marks a week, later on Pelzer paid us an additional ‘list premium,’ as he called it: 20 marks extra for every wreath that was ‘recycled,’ you’d call it now, so that meant a few extra marks a week, but Leni would use up at least two weeks’ wages every week just on coffee, that was bound to lead to difficulties even though she also got the revenue from her building. Sometimes I used to think, and I still think: that girl is a phenomenon. You never quite knew whether she was very deep or very shallow—and it may sound contradictory but I believe she is both, very deep and very shallow, only one thing she isn’t and never was: a light woman. That she wasn’t. No.

“I didn’t get any restitution in 1945 because it was never clarified whether I had gone into hiding as a Separatist or as a Jewess. For Separatists in hiding there was no compensation, of course—and as a Jewess, well, you just try and prove you deliberately went broke to divert attention from yourself. What I did get, and that only through a friend in the French Army,
was a permit for a nursery garden and florist’s business, and right away at the end of 1945, when Leni was having rather a thin time of it with her child, I took her into the business, and she stayed with me twenty-four years, till 1970. Not ten or twenty times, no, more than thirty times I offered to make her manager of one of the branches, even a partnership, and she could have worn a nice dress and looked after customers out front, but she preferred to stand in her smock in the cold back room, making wreaths and bouquets. No ambition to get on or ahead, no ambition. Sometimes I think she’s a dreamer. A bit crazy but very very lovable. And of course, and here again I see something proletarian, rather spoiled: do you know that, even as a worker earning at most fifty marks a week, she kept on her old maid right through the war—and do you know what that maid baked for her every day with her own hands? A few fresh rolls, crisp and fresh, and I tell you, sometimes it made my mouth water and—in spite of being quite ‘the lady’—I was sometimes tempted to say: ‘Let me have a bite, child, do let me have a bite.’ And she would have, you can be sure of that—oh, if only I had asked her, and if only, if she’s so badly off now, she wouldn’t mind asking me for money; but you know what she is as well? Proud. As proud as only a princess in a fairy tale can be. And as for her wreathmaking abilities, there she was very much overrated; she had clever fingers, I grant you, and a gift, but for my taste her trimming had too much filigree about it, it was too dainty, like embroidery, not like that lovely knitting done on big needles; she would have made a very good gold- and silversmith, but with flowers—this may surprise you—you sometimes have to treat them roughly and boldly, she never did, there was courage in her trimming but no daring. Still, when you consider that she was completely untrained, it was remarkable, subjectively quite remarkable, how quickly she picked it up.”

Since the teapot was no longer being lifted, the silver cigarette box no longer being opened and proffered, the Au. gained
the impression that the interview was (for the time being justifiably, as it turned out) at an end. He felt that Mrs. Hölthohne had made a substantial contribution to the rounding out of the Leni-image. Mrs. H. permitted him a glance into her little studio, where she had recently resumed her work as a landscape architect. For cities of the future she is designing “hanging gardens,” which she calls “Semiramis”—a term that, to the Au., seems relatively uninspired for such an avid Proust reader. In taking leave he was left with the impression that
this
visit was definitely at an end but that further ones were not out of the question, for a great deal of amiability, albeit fatigued, remained behind on the face of Mrs. H.

In the case of the ladies Marga Wanft and Ilse Kremer we can again resort to partial synchronization: both are old-age pensioners, one aged seventy, the other sixty-nine, both white-haired, both living in one-and-half-room public-housing apartments, stove heating, furniture dating from the early fifties, both giving an impression of “slender means” and frailty, but—here the differences begin—one (Wanft) with a grass-parakeet, the other (Kremer) with a shell-parakeet. Marga Wanft—here the differences become considerable—severe, almost unapproachable, tight-lipped, as if she were constantly spitting out cherry stones and, because of her small mouth, with difficulty at that, was not prepared “to say much about that hussy. I knew it all along, I sensed it, and I could still kick myself for not getting to the bottom of it. That’s a girl I’d have liked to see with her head shaved, and a bit of running the gauntlet wouldn’t have hurt her either. To take up with a Russian while our boys were at the front and her husband killed in action and her father a war profiteer of the first water—and after three months
she
was given the trimming group and it was taken away from me.
No. A slut, that’s all she was—no sense of honor, and that provocative body of hers—she drove all the men crazy; Grundtsch used to fawn over her like a tomcat, for Pelzer she was a sex nest-egg, and even Kremp, who was a good worker and always gave of his best, had his head turned by her so that he got quite unbearable. And always pretending to be a lady while actually she was nothing but a down-at-heel nouveau riche. No thanks. How well we all got along together before she came! After that there was always a kind of crackle in the air, tensions that were never resolved, a good beating would’ve been the best way to clear the air. Yes, and that sentimental amateurish dabbling in flowers, she fooled the lot of them with that. No, I was isolated, downright isolated, after she came, and she never fooled me with all that nonsense about offering coffee and so on, that’s what we call ‘sweet talk,’ that’s all she was, a trollop, a tart practically, and no better than she should be.”

This did not emerge as rapidly from the Wanft lips as it is recorded: bit by bit, stone by stone, as if pressed out through her mouth, and she wanted to say no more yet did say more, described old Grundtsch as a “frustrated faun or Pan, take your choice,” and Pelzer as the “worst scoundrel and opportunist I ever met, and to think that it was for him that I used my influence with the Party, that he was the one I vouched for. Being in a position of trust with the Party” (Gestapo? Au.), “I was always being asked, of course. After the war? When they cut off my pension because my husband hadn’t been killed in the war but in street-fighting in 1932–33? Not a word from Mr. Walter Pelzer, although he’d been in the same Storm Trooper unit as my husband. Nothing. With the help of that little tart and that Jewish
lady
he managed to wiggle out of everything, while I was in it up to my neck and stayed that way. No, don’t you talk to me about them. There’s no gratitude in this world, and no justice either, and it so happens we’re stuck with it.”

Mrs. Kremer, who could be visited the same day, had little information to yield concerning Leni, merely calling her “the poor dear thing—the poor dear unsuspecting thing. And that Russian, well I must say I was very suspicious and still would be today. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t a Gestapo informer in disguise. The way he could speak German and was always so helpful, and why should he of all people be assigned to a nursery and not sent out on suicide missions like removing bombs or repairing railway tracks? A nice lad of course, but I never dared talk to him much, at any rate no more than was necessary for the job.”

Mrs. Kremer must be pictured as a washed-out erstwhile blond with eyes that must once have been blue and are now practically colorless. Soft face, the outlines dissolving in softness, not spiteful, only a little peevish, troubled, not in trouble, offering coffee but drinking none; she spoke slackly, letting the words flow lightly, a bit lukewarm, almost disregarding punctuation in the rhythm of her speech. What was not merely surprising but downright electrifying was the extraordinary precision with which she rolled her cigarettes: with moist honey-gold tobacco, immaculately, without need of scissors to cut off loose shreds.

“Yes, that’s something I learned to do early in life, it may have been the first thing I ever learned, for my father in the clink in 1916, later for my husband in jail, then when I spent six months in jail myself; and during the Depression of course, and again during the war—I never got out of practice rolling cigarettes.” At this point she lighted one, and all of a sudden, seeing the freshly rolled white cigarette between her lips, one could imagine she had once been young and very pretty; she offered one too, of course, casually, simply pushing a cigarette across the table and pointing to it.

“No, no, I’ve had enough. I’d had enough even in 1929; I never had much strength, now I’ve none at all, and during the war it was only my boy, my Erich, who kept me on my feet, I’d always hoped he wouldn’t be old enough before the war was over, but he was, and they took him away even before he’d finished his mechanic’s apprenticeship; a quiet, silent, solemn boy, never said much, and before he left I said something political for the last time in my life, taking a risk: ‘Go over,’ I said, ‘the minute you can.’ ‘Go over?’ he asked, frowning as usual, and I explained what ‘go over’ means. Then he gave me a funny look, I got scared he’d talk about it somewhere somehow, but even if he’d wanted to I dare say he didn’t have time. In December ’44 they took him off to the Belgian frontier to dig fortifications, and it wasn’t till the end of ’45 that I heard he was dead. Seventeen. Always looked so solemn and glum, that boy. Illegitimate, I ought to tell you, father a Communist, mother the same. He got to hear it often enough at school and in the street. His father dead since ’42, his grandparents had nothing of course. Oh well. I met Pelzer back in 1923. Like to guess where? You’ll never guess. In the Communist Party. It seems Pelzer had seen a Fascist propaganda film that was supposed to act as a deterrent; but on him it acted as an attraction. Walter took the revolution in the movie for a chance at looting and stealing, he’d got it all wrong, he was kicked out of the Red Front, joined the Liberation Corps, then the Storm Troopers, way back in 1929. For a while he was a pimp too. He could turn his hand to anything. He was a gardener too of course, and a black-market operator, you name it. A lady-killer. Think for a moment what the staff at the nursery consisted of: three rabid Fascists—Kremp, and the Wanft and Schelf women; two neutrals—Frieda Zeven and Helga Heuter; myself as a disabled Communist; the
lady
as a Republican and a Jewess; Leni, politically unclassified but nevertheless marked by the scandal over her father and a war widow, after all; then the Russian,
whom he really did make rather a fuss over—what could possibly happen to him when the war was over? Nothing. And nothing did. Till 1933 he called me Ilse, when we met he’d say: ‘Well, Ilse, who’s going to come out on top, your lot or ours?’ From ’33 to ’45 he called me Miss Kremer, and the Americans hadn’t been there five days before he had a permit again, came to see me, started calling me Ilse again, and said he thought I ought to be on the city council now. No, no, no—I waited too long, I should’ve quit when the boy left. I’d had enough, more than enough. At the end of ’44 Leni came to my place one day, sat and smoked a cigarette, smiling at me all the time a bit nervously as if she wanted to say something, and I knew more or less what she might’ve said but I didn’t want to know about it. One should never know too much. I didn’t want to know anything and because she sat there without a word and with that nervous smile I finally said: ‘Well, it’s obvious you’re pregnant and I know what it means to have an illegitimate child.’ Oh and then after the war all that fuss about resistance and pensions, restitution and a new Communist Party with people who I know had my Willi on their conscience. You know what I called them? Altar boys. No, no—and that unsuspecting Leni caught up in the middle, the poor dear thing, they actually talked her into being a kind of blonde election-mascot by calling her the ‘widow of a brave Red Army fighter.’ And by calling her little boy Lev Borisovich Gruyten—well, I imagine her friends and relatives all tried to talk her out of it and she dropped it, but she had more to live down then than during the war. Years later people were still calling her ‘the blonde Soviet whore’—the poor dear thing. No, she’s never had an easy time of it, and she still hasn’t.”