Group Portrait with Lady (24 page)

We must wait no longer, if we are to avoid unfounded speculation and destroy false hopes in good time, before introducing the chief male protagonist of the first section. A number of people (not only Mrs. Ilse Kremer), and thus far almost all of them in vain, have been wondering how it was possible for this individual, a Soviet individual by the name of Boris Lvovich Koltovsky, to find himself in the favored situation of being permitted to work in a German wreathmaking business in 1943. Since Leni, even on the subject of Boris, does not become what one might call talkative but can at times turn relatively communicative, she was prepared—after the joint urgings of Lotte, Margret, and Marja over a period of three years—to name two persons who might give information on Boris Lvovich.

The first of these knew Boris only slightly but intervened powerfully in his destiny. This person made him a favorite of Fortune by taking a strong and persistent hand, even to the point of personal sacrifice, in his destiny. This man is a very exalted personage in the world of industry who in any circumstances, and no matter what the cost, must not be named. The Au. cannot afford the slightest indiscretion, the cost to himself would simply
be too great, and since he has also firmly committed himself to it—discretion—toward Leni (verbally, of course), he prefers to remain a gentleman and stick by his commitment. Unfortunately it was a long time, too long, before this personage got onto Leni’s track, not until 1952, it being only then that he discovered Boris to have been a dual favorite of Fortune: not only had he been permitted to work in Pelzer’s wreath business, he was also the one for whom Leni appeared to have been waiting.

Boris has been the subject of almost every conceivable suspicion: he is said to have been an informer infiltrated by the Germans, his objective being Pelzer and Pelzer’s mixed bag of employees; in addition, of course, he is said to have been a Soviet informer. With what objective: the secrets of German wartime wreathmaking, or to report on the mixed morale of German workers? All we can say is that he was simply one of Fortune’s favorites. No more than that. At the end of 1943, when he appeared upon the scene, he was probably—here we have to rely on estimates—between five foot ten and five foot eleven in height, very thin, with fair hair, weighing (with a probability bordering on certainty) 120 pounds at most, and wearing army spectacles as issued by the Red Army. At the time when he entered Leni’s life he was twenty-three, spoke German fluently but with a Baltic accent, Russian like a Russian. In 1941 his entry into Germany had been peaceful, and a year and a half later he returned as a Soviet prisoner of war to this strange (and to some people mysterious and sinister) country. He was the son of a Russian worker who had advanced to the post of member of the Soviet trade mission in Berlin; he had memorized several poems by Trakl, even some by Hölderlin (in German of course); and as a graduate highway engineer had been a lieutenant in an engineer unit.

At this point a number of prior advantages must be clarified for which the Au. is not to blame. Who can be expected to have a diplomat for a father and an exalted personage in
the armaments industry for a benefactor? And how is it that the chief male protagonist is not a German? Not Erhard, or Heinrich, or Alois, not G., Sr., or old H., or young H., not even the remarkable Pelzer or the kindly Scholsdorff, who as long as he lives will be distressed that someone had to go to prison, nearly paid with his life even, simply because he, Scholsdorff, was such a fanatical authority on Slavic literature and could not bear to allow the name of a fictitious Lermontov employed in Denmark in fictitious bunker construction to remain on a list? Must—Scholsdorff wonders—someone, even if a single person, and as agreeable as G., Sr., at that, almost lose his life because a fictitious Raskolnikov totes fictitious sacks of cement and gulps fictitious barley soup in a fictitious cafeteria?

Well, Leni is to blame. She is the one who in this case did not want a German hero for a hero. This fact—like so many things about Leni—must simply be accepted. Moreover, this Boris was quite a decent fellow, he had even had an adequate education—even at school. He was a graduate highway engineer, after all, and even if he had never learned a word of Latin there were two Latin words he knew very well: “De profundis,” because he knew his Trakl so well. And even if his schooling cannot be remotely compared to something as priceless as matriculation, it may still be said, objectively, that it might
almost
have been a kind of matriculation. If one accepts the well-attested fact that as a youth he had even read Hegel in German (he did not come through Hegel to Hölderlin but through Hölderlin to Hegel), perhaps even culturally demanding readers will be inclined to admit that he was not to be ranked too far below Leni and at least as a lover was worthy of her and—as will be seen—worth her.

Until the last moment even he was completely bewildered by the favor that had come his way, as we discovered from the plausible statements made by his former POW fellow camp inmate Pyotr Petrovich Bogakov.

Bogakov, now sixty-six, afflicted by arthritis, his fingers so badly twisted that he usually has to be fed and even his occasional cigarette has to be held for him and raised to his lips, chose not to return to the Soviet Union. He openly admits that he “must have regretted it a thousand times and must have regretted his regret a thousand times.” Reports on the fate of returning prisoners of war that kept cropping up made him suspicious, so he hired himself out as a watchman for the Americans, became a victim of McCarthyism, and found refuge with the British, for whom he in turn worked as a watchman, dressed in a British Army uniform dyed blue. In spite of having applied several times for German citizenship, he was still stateless. His room in a home backed by a religious charity was shared with an immensely tall Ukrainian elementary-school teacher by the name of Belenko. This Belenko, bearded and moustached, lapsed after his wife’s death into a state of permanent mourning punctuated at intervals by sobbing and now spends his time between church and cemetery and in constant search of a food item which, for as long as he has been living in Germany, i.e., twenty-six years, he has been hoping to find some day as “cheap popular nourishment, not a delicacy”: pickled cucumbers.

Bogakov’s other roommate is one Kitkin, from Leningrad, frail and, in his own words, “ill with homesickness”: a thin taciturn fellow “who,” again in his own words, “just can’t fight his homesickness.” From time to time old quarrels flare up among the three old men, Belenko saying to Bogakov “You godless fellow, you,” Bogakov, to Belenko “Fascist,” Kitkin to both “windbags,” and is himself called by Belenko an “Old Liberal,” by Bogakov a “reactionary.” Because Belenko has
only been sharing the room with the other two since his wife’s death, i.e., for six months, he is looked upon as “the newcomer.”

Bogakov was not prepared to discuss Boris and his time in the POW camp in the presence of his two roommates, so it was necessary to wait for the moment when Belenko was at the cemetery, in church, or “out looking for pickles,” and Kitkin had gone for a walk and, needless to say, “for cigarettes.” Bogakov speaks fluent German which, apart from a questionable and frequent use of the word “salubrious,” is perfectly intelligible. Since his hands, from “that damn standing around all those years at night, no matter how cold it was, and later even with a rifle over my shoulder,” are really badly twisted, the Au. and B. first spent some time speculating on how to improve B.’s opportunities for smoking. “My having to depend on someone else to light it for me may still be salubrious for me, but for every puff, no—and after all I do like to smoke my five or six a day, or, when I have them, even ten.” Finally the Au. (who, departing from custom, must here thrust himself forward) hit on the idea of asking the floor sister for one of those stands used to hang up bottles containing infusion fluids; with the aid of a piece of wire and three clothespins, and enlisting the cooperation of the (by the way charming) floor sister, a contraption was devised that the delighted Bogakov called a “salubrious smoking gallows”; two clothespins were used to loop the wire onto the gallows, the third clothespin was attached to the wire at the level of Bogakov’s mouth and to this clothespin was fastened a cigarette mouthpiece on which Bogakov now has only to draw when the “Fascist pickle-eater or the homesick fellow with the GPU kisser” have lighted his cigarette and stuck it into the mouthpiece. There is no denying that, with the rigging up of the “salubrious smoking gallows,” the Au. aroused a certain liking on the part of B. and thus encouraged him to talk, or that he helped B. stretch his modest allowance of 25 marks a month by gifts of cigarettes,
not only—he swears—from selfish motives. Now to Bogakov’s statement, interrupted as it was from time to time by asthmatic breathing-spaces and by smoking, but reproduced here for the record without pause and without a break.

“In absolute terms, of course, our situation was not salubrious! But relatively speaking it was. As far as Boris Lvovich is concerned, he was utterly, and I do mean utterly, at a loss, and to him it was an extraordinary stroke of good luck that he wound up in our camp at all. He must have guessed that someone was behind it all, but he didn’t find out who till later, though he might have had some idea. While we were considered only just worthy, under the strictest guard, of demolishing or extinguishing burning buildings, repairing bomb damage in streets and along railway trucks—and anyone who risked pocketing so much as a nail—yes, just an ordinary nail, and for a prisoner a nail can be something precious—could, if he was caught—and he
was
caught—confidently regard his life as over—so that’s what we were doing, and that unsuspecting lad was picked up every morning by a good-natured German sentry who took him to this highly salubrious nursery. There he spent his days, later half the night too, doing light work, and he even had—I was the only one to know about this and when I heard about it I trembled for that boy’s salubrious head as if it were my own son’s—a girl, a mistress! If it didn’t make us suspicious it made us envious, and the two together, though not really salubrious, are common enough among POW’s. In Vitebsk, where I went to school after the revolution, there was one kid who got driven to school every morning in a horse-drawn carriage, a regular taxi—and that’s how Boris seemed to us. Later on, when he brought back bread, and even butter and sometimes newspapers, but always reports on the war situation—and even sensationally bourgeois garments such as can only have been worn by a capitalist—his situation improved somewhat, but it still wasn’t salubrious because Viktor Genrikhovich, the
self-appointed commissar of our camp, refused to believe that the many salubrious aspects of Boris’s situation were due to what the bourgeois call coincidences, since these—according to Viktor Genrikhovich—ran counter to historical logic. The terrible part about it was that in the end he found he’d been right. How he discovered it Heaven only knows. In any event, after seven months he had the whole story: back in 1941, in Boris’s father’s apartment in Berlin, Boris had met this friend of his father’s, a Mr.” (here the name was pronounced that the Au. has undertaken not to publicize). “After the war broke out, Boris’s father had been transferred to the intelligence service, he was a contact man for Soviet spies in Germany and used one of his numerous strings and contacts to inform that gentleman that his son had been taken prisoner and to ask for his help. In terms of the period in question: what he did was misuse his office to enter into a treasonable relationship with a leading German capitalist of the worst kind in order to wangle the most salubrious treatment possible for his son. Now don’t ask me how Viktor Genrikhovich discovered that! Most likely they had their intelligence satellites even in those days, the bastards. What came out later and what Boris never knew was: that his father was picked up for this, taken away—and rat-a-tat. So was Viktor Genrikhovich right or not, in suspecting that there is only the logic of history and not the bourgeois coincidence that my pious friend and pickle-eater Belenko would, needless to say, call Providence?

“So for Boris’s father the affair ended most insalubriously but not for Boris, for now Viktor Genrikhovich was suspecting more to it than there really was: might those fantastic garments have come
directly
from the hand of that person who was known to be against the war with the Soviet Union and in favor of a strong, durable, unbreakable alliance between Hitler and the Soviet Union, and who could even afford to accompany Boris, his father and mother and sister Lydia to the
station in Berlin, to embrace them all warmly and, as a parting gesture, suggest that he and Boris’s father use first names? Was Boris in direct contact with this person when he went to that comical nursery to make wreaths and compose inscriptions for ribbons to go on Fascist wreaths? No, no, no, he had no contacts, except with the men and women working there, so—in order for those blasted salubrious conditions to yield at least some positive result—what was the mood among them, what was the mood among the German workers? Three were clearly in favor, two were noncommittal, and probably two, though they couldn’t actually say so, were against! That, again, ran counter to Viktor Genrikhovich’s information, according to which German workers in 1944 were on the verge of rebellion. Damn it, the lad was in a complicated situation, I tell you, and paid dearly for those salubrious conditions. His position was totally beyond the logic of history, and if it had got out that he actually had a girl, and that later on he even managed, and quite often at that, to pick all the flowers that delightfully pretty girl had to offer—for God’s sake. So he stuck to his story that the gifts—which, as time went on, became quite substantial, clothing, coffee, tea, cigarettes, butter—were left for him by some unknown person hidden in a pile of peat moss, and as for the war news, he said, he got this in whispers from his boss, that florist and wreath supplier. Now Viktor Genrikhovich was incorrigible but not incorruptible: he accepted gifts of a geniune cashmere vest, cigarettes, and—this really was a sensational gift—a tiny map of Europe that had been torn out of a pocket calendar and skillfully folded into roughly the size of a flat candy—and that was a gift from Heaven; at last we knew exactly where we were and what we were up against. Viktor hid his cashmere vest under his tattered undershirt where, being gray, it looked like a dirty rag. That vest, you see, could’ve aroused the greed of the German sentry, he’d have found it most salubrious too. Now came the time when Boris
kept us supplied with reliable news on the position of the front, the advance of Soviet and Allied troops—and he became highly salubrious to Viktor Genrikhovich, who was in urgent need of such news in order to boost our morale—and because he was so salubrious to Viktor he naturally lost the confidence of the others—that goes without saying once you know the POW dialectic.”