Group Portrait with Lady (27 page)

Grundtsch: “I wanted to shout for joy: that girl had guts. Damn it all, right at the outset she fought a decisive battle—probably without knowing it—and yet she must’ve had an idea: after all, she’d only known the boy for the hour and a half he’d been working at the wreath-frame table, at everyone’s mercy—and no one, not even that Nosy-Parker Marga Wanft, could’ve accused her of carrying on with him. If you ask me, and if I may use a military term, Leni created an enormous firing zone for herself before there was anything to fire. No one could find any other explanation for what she did other than pure innocent humanity, the very thing that was forbidden to be shown to subhumans, and yet, you know: even a fellow like that Kremp could see that Boris
was
human: he had a nose and two legs didn’t he? and even spectacles on his nose, and he was more sensitive than that whole
mishpokhe
put together. Through Leni’s brave deed Boris was simply made a human being, proclaimed a human being—and that was that, in spite of all the bad times ahead. As for how long it lasted: oh, it seemed to me like at least five minutes.”

The Au. felt obliged to establish the possible duration of the deathly silence by way of an experiment. Since the workroom—now in Grundtsch’s possession—is still in existence, it
was possible to take some measurements: from Leni’s to Boris’s table—thirteen feet; from Boris’s table to the faucet—ten feet; from the faucet to Leni’s table (on which the coffeepot stood)—six feet; once more the thirteen feet to Boris’s table—a total of forty-two feet, covered by Leni probably with outward calm but actually, we imagine, with dispatch. Unfortunately, the cup being dashed to the floor could only be simulated, the Au. having neither amputee nor amputee’s prosthesis at his disposal; there was no need to simulate a cup being rinsed and dried, the coffee being poured: he—the Au.—performed the experiment three times in order to leave no room for doubt and to arrive at his objective: the factual mean value. Result: first experiment—45 seconds; second experiment—58 seconds; third experiment—42 seconds. Mean value—48 seconds.

Here the Au., having once again to depart from his rule and intervene directly, would like to describe this event as Leni’s birth or rebirth, as a seminal experience, as it were. However, little material on Leni is available to him beyond that which permits the following summary: not overintelligent, perhaps, a blend of the romantic, the sensual, and the materialistic, a little Kleist-reading, a little piano-playing, a knowledge of certain secretory processes which, although amateurish, was far-reaching (or deep-seated); and even if we assume her to be (because of what happened to Erhard) a thwarted mistress, an unsatisfactory widow, three-quarters orphaned (mother dead, father in jail), even if we regard her as semi- or even grossly uneducated: not one of these dubious qualities, or their totality, explains the naturalness of her behavior at that moment which we will from now on call the “coffee incident.” Granted, she had been touchingly, warmly solicitous of Rahel until the moment when Rahel was buried in a shallow grave in the convent grounds, but Rahel had been a bosom friend, after Erhard
and Heinrich the dearest she had ever known—why, then, the coffee for a person like Boris Lvovich whom she was in turn placing in a highly conspicuous and dangerous position, for what was the situation of a Soviet prisoner of war who, on being offered coffee by a naive German girl, accepted it with the utmost
naturalness
and (so it seemed) equal naiveté? Did she even know what a Communist was if, as Margret believed, she never bothered to distinguish between Jews and non-Jews?

Miss van Doorn, who had known no more about the “coffee incident” (Leni had evidently not regarded it as worth telling her about) than Margret and Lotte, has a straightforward explanation to offer: “One thing, you know, had always been taken for granted at the Gruytens’: everyone got a cup of coffee. Beggars, spongers, tramps, welcome or unwelcome business acquaintances. There was just no question, everyone got coffee, it was that simple. Even the Pfeiffers, and that’s saying something. And—to be fair—he wasn’t the one who committed the unpardonable sin, it was she. It’s always reminded me of how it used to be taken for granted that anyone who knocked at a monastery door got a bowl of soup, without being asked about his religion or required to utter pious sayings. No, she would’ve offered coffee to anyone, Communist or otherwise … and I believe she’d have given some to even the worst Nazi. There was just no question about it—the thing was, that no matter how many other faults she may’ve had she was a generous person, and that’s a fact. And warm and human—only, in one particular point, you know what I mean, she wasn’t what he needed.”

Now here we must at all costs avoid giving the impression that during that wartime period of late 1943 and early 1944 there was or could have been any such thing as Russophilia
or Soviet euphoria at Pelzer’s wreathmaking business. Leni’s natural behavior can be assessed only relatively in historical terms, but in personal terms objectively. If we bear in mind that other Germans (a few) risked and suffered prison, hanging, or concentration camp for far lesser favors rendered to Soviet individuals, we are forced to realize that this was not a deliberate display of humanity but—both objectively and subjectively—a relative one, to be seen only in the context of Leni’s existence and the historical juncture. Had Leni been less unsuspecting (she had already demonstrated this aspect of her character apropos Rahel) she would have behaved—as is borne out by subsequent events and actions—in exactly the same manner. And had Leni been unable to express her naturalness in material form—by way of a cup of coffee, that is—the result would have been an inept, probably unsuccessful, stammering of empathy which might have entailed a worse interpretation than the coffee presented as if in a sacred chalice.

It is to be assumed that she derived a certain sensual pleasure from carefully rinsing the cup, carefully drying it: there was nothing pointed about that. Since in Leni’s case reflection had always come later (Alois, Erhard, Heinrich, Sister Rahel, her father, her mother, the war), much later, we must expect her not to realize until later
what
it was she had done. She had not only given the Soviet individual a cup of coffee, she had positively presented him with it, she had spared the Soviet individual a humiliation and caused a German amputee to suffer one. Hence Leni was not born or reborn in the estimated fifty seconds of deathly silence, her birth or rebirth was not a finished process, it was a continuing one. In a nutshell: Leni never knew what she was doing until she did it. She had to materialize everything. It must not be forgotten that at this moment in time she was precisely twenty-one and a half years old. She was—we must reiterate—a person who was extremely dependent on secretion and hence digestion, totally unsuited for sublimating
anything. She had a latent capacity for directness that had been neither recognized nor aroused by Alois, and which Erhard either never had the chance, or never availed himself of the chance, to arouse. The estimated eighteen to twenty-five minutes of sensual fulfillment she may have experienced with Alois had not fully mobilized her, Alois having also lacked the ability to grasp the paradox that Leni was sensual precisely because she was not altogether sensual.

There are only two witnesses to the next-most crucial experience: the laying-on-of-hands. Bogakov, who has already described it and its secretory consequences, and Pelzer, the only other person in the know.

Pelzer: “From then on, of course, the Russian got his coffee regularly, from her, and I can swear to it, when she took him his coffee the next day—but by then he wasn’t with the wreath-frame group, he was already working at the final-trim table with Mrs. Hölthohne, I can swear to it—and by then it was no longer naive or unconscious, whichever you like, for she gave quite a little look around in case anyone was watching—she simply laid her left hand on his right, and it went through him, though it only lasted a second or two, it went through him like an electric shock. He shot up like a rocket taking off. I saw it, I can swear to it, and she didn’t know I saw it, I was standing in my dark office with my eye on them because I wanted to see what was going to happen about the coffee. Do you know what I thought, it sounds vulgar, I know, but we gardeners aren’t quite as namby-pamby as some people think; I thought: damn it all, she’s rushing him—boy, is she rushing him, I thought, and I got really envious and jealous of that Russian. Erotically speaking, Leni was a progressive person, she didn’t care that it’s traditional for the man to take the initiative:
she
did it by laying her hand on him. And even though she obviously knew that in his position he simply couldn’t take the initiative, still it was both things: it was, erotically and politically, a daring act, almost brazen.”

Of both of them (of Leni through Margret, of Boris through Bogakov) it is known that each said, in identical words, that they were both “instantly on fire,” and, as we know from Bogakov, Boris reacted as a man reacts and, as we know from Margret, Leni had an experience that “was much more wonderful than that heather business I once told you about.”

Pelzer on Boris’s professional skills: “Believe me, I’m a good judge of people, and the very first day I knew that Boris, that Russian fellow, was a highly intelligent person with organizational ability. After only three days he became, unofficially, Grundtsch’s deputy as final checker, and he got along fine with Mrs. Hölthohne and Miss Zeven, who were more or less under him but of course weren’t supposed to notice they were under him. He was in his way an artist, and it didn’t take long for him to catch on to the main point: economical use of materials. And no display of emotion when he had to handle ribbon-inscriptions that must surely have gone against the grain for him. ‘For Führer, Nation, and Fatherland,’ or ‘Storm Trooper Company 112,’ and although he was handling swastikas and eagles all day long he never batted an eyelid. So one day, when there were just the two of us in my office, where later he was in sole charge of the ribbon supplies and the ribbon accounts, I asked him: ‘Boris, tell me frankly now, how do you feel among all those swastikas and eagles and things?’ He didn’t hesitate for a moment with his answer. ‘Mr. Pelzer,’ he said, ‘I hope it won’t hurt your feelings—since you ask me so openly—when I tell you: there’s a certain comfort in not
only suspecting and knowing but actually seeing that even the members of a Storm Trooper Company are mortal—and as for the swastikas and eagles, I’m fully aware of my historical situation.’

“As time went on, he and Leni became almost indispensable to me, I want to stress this, if I not only left him in peace but actually did him favors—and the same goes for the girl—there were business reasons for this too. I’m not really one of your starry-eyed philanthropists, never said I was. It was just that the boy had a fantastic sense of order and a gift for organization—he got along well with the staff too, even Marga and the Schelf woman didn’t mind taking suggestions from him because he did it so skillfully. Believe me, in a free-market economy he’d have gone a long way. Well, he was an engineer of course, and most likely knew his math, but he was the first person to notice, though I’d been running the place for almost ten years and Grundtsch had been in the business for almost forty—not one of us had noticed, it hadn’t even dawned on that clever Mrs. Hölthohne—that the frame—I mean the wreath-frame—group was understaffed in relation to the efficiency of the trimming table, and because he and Mrs. Hölthohne were the best checkers I could ever have wished for. So: regrouping. Miss Zeven back to the frame table, she grumbled a bit but I squared that with a raise, and the result: production rose, as the figures showed, by 12 to 15 percent. So are you surprised that I was keen to hold onto him and take care nothing happened to him? And then there were the Party comrades who let me know—sometimes directly, sometimes by hints—that I was to make sure nothing happened to him, that he had powerful protection. Well, it wasn’t all that simple; a nasty little snooper like that Kremp, and that hysterical Wanft woman—they could’ve blown the whole place sky high. And not a soul, not even Leni or even Grundtsch, ever knew that in my own little greenhouse I let him have sixty
square feet that’d been especially well manured, to grow his own tobacco, cucumbers, and tomatoes.”

The Au. must confess that, as regards the surviving witnesses from the wartime wreathmaking business, he preferred to take the path of least resistance and so visited most frequently those witnesses who were most easily accessible. Marga Wanft having turned her back on him even more ostentatiously on the second visit than on the first, he excluded her. Pelzer, Grundtsch, Ilse Kremer, and Mrs. Hölthohne being equally accessible and equally loquacious—somewhat less so in the case of Ilse Kremer—the choice, or the selection, was rendered difficult; in Mrs. Hölthohne’s case the lure was her superb tea and her meticulously furnished apartment, also her well-preserved and
soignée
attractiveness, as well as her open display of continuing Separatist feelings; the only things that made him hesitate with Mrs. Hölthohne were her tiny ashtray and her obvious dislike of chain smokers.

“Very well then, so our state” (meaning the state of North Rhineland-Westphalia. Au.) “has the highest tax income and supports other German states that have a low tax income—but does it ever occur to anyone to invite the people from the low tax income states—from Schleswig-Holstein and Bavaria, say—over here, so that for a change they can swallow not only our tax pennies but also our polluted air, the air that’s one of the reasons we make so much money here? And drink our foul, dreadful water—and how about the Bavarians with their pristine lakes and the Holsteiners with their shoreline coming here one day for a dip in the Rhine, they’d certainly come out tarred and probably feathered too. And just look at that Strauss, a man whose whole career is made up of unsolved incidents, I say unsolved and I also say obscure because it means
the same thing—the way he insults our state” (N.R.-W. Au.) “almost foaming at the mouth—why, I wonder? Well, simply because things are a little more progressive here. He should be compelled to live for three years in Duisburg or Dormagen or Wesseling, with his wife and children, so he can see where the money comes from and how it’s earned—the money he gets for Bavaria and then has the nerve to insult because we have a state government here which, while far from entrancing, is
at least
not Christian Democrat, let alone Christian Socialist—do you see what I mean? Why am I supposed to feel ‘togetherness,’ why? Did I establish the Reich, was I ever in favor of its establishment? No. Why should we be concerned with all that, I’d like to know, up north and down south and in the middle? Just think for a moment of how we got into this crowd: all because of those damn Prussians—and what’ve they got to do with us? Who sold us down the river in 1815? Was it us? Was that what we wanted, was there such a thing as a plebiscite? No, I tell you. Why doesn’t Strauss take a dip in the Rhine some day and breathe the Duisburg air—but no, he stays put in his wholesome Bavarian air, almost choking on his indignation when he starts spouting about ‘Rhine and Ruhr.’ What have these obscure provincial factors to do with us? Don’t we have our own obscurity? Just think about it!” (Which the Au. promised to do.) “No, I’m a Separatist and always will be, and I’ll accept a few Westphalians if you like, if there’s no alternative, but what would we get out of them? Clericalism, hypocrisy, and maybe some potatoes—I don’t really know what they grow there and I’m not all that interested—and their forests and fields, well, who cares, I can’t take those home with me either—they’d stay nicely where they are, but very well, a few Westphalians. That’s all. The trouble is, they’re always taking offense, feeling slighted, grumbling and whining about ‘equal time on radio’ and nonsense like that. Nothing but trouble with those people.