Group Portrait with Lady (28 page)

“That’s the marvelous thing about Leni, that she’s so Rhenish. And I must tell you something. I’m sure you’ll think it very odd: that Boris seemed more Rhenish to me than all the rest of them, except Pelzer, Pelzer had just that blend of criminality and humanity that’s only possible here. It’s true, mind you, he never did anyone any harm, except Kremp maybe, he did give him a bad time whenever he could, and Kremp being a Nazi you might say Pelzer wasn’t such an opportunist after all, but that’s where you’d be wrong—because the Nazis were out-numbered it was highly opportune to give Kremp, and only Kremp, a bad time—nobody liked him, you see, not even the two other Nazis, he was simply an unpleasant character, always after women in that nasty way of his. And yet, and yet, I must try and be fair to him, he was a young fellow and had lost a leg back in 1940 when he was only twenty—and who’s willing to admit, or be forced to admit, that when you come right down to it, it was, or is, pointless? And we mustn’t forget that during the first few months of the war those boys were treated like heroes, besieged by women—but then, the longer the war went on, losing a leg became more and more run-of-the-mill, and later on the ones with two legs simply had better luck than the ones with only one leg or none. I’m quite a progressive woman when it comes to thinking, and that’s how I’d explain that boy’s sexual and erotic status and his psychological situation. I ask you—what, in 1944, was a man who’d lost a leg? Just a poor bastard with a miserable pension—and think for a moment what it’s like when a fellow like that takes off his leg in a crucial sexual situation? Appalling, for him and his partner, even if she’s a whore.” (Oh, that glorious tea of hers, and is the Au. to take it as a declaration of partiality that on his third visit the ashtray had at least the dimensions of a demitasse saucer? Au.)

“And then there was that Pelzer, always the picture of health, whom you can take as a classic example of
mens sana
in corpore sano
, something you find only among criminals, I mean among people totally devoid of conscience. Lack of conscience makes a person healthy, take it from me. Even the guards who brought Boris to work in the morning and picked him up in the evening, even with them he made deals on the side in brandy, coffee, and cigarettes—they used to drive pretty much every week to France or Belgium as convoy guards and bring back brandy, cigars, and coffee by the case, even cloth, you could even
order
goods from those fellows, like in a store. One of them, called Kolb, a rather dirty old man, once brought me enough velvet from Antwerp for a whole dress; the other was called Boldig and was younger, a cheery nihilist, the kind that emerged by the score from ’44 on. A lighthearted lad if ever there was one, he had a glass eye and had lost a hand, quite a nice row of medals on his gallant chest, and he was quite cynical about using his lost eye, his lost hand, and the hardware on his chest to his advantage, the way you use counters to gamble with. He cared less about Führer, Nation, and Fatherland than even I did, for after all, though I could’ve managed without the Führer, I’m all for a Rhenish fatherland, for the Rhenish people. Well, he was casual as can be about going off with the Schelf woman—who, after Leni, was the snappiest of the lot—for short spells at the far end of the greenhouse and, as he called it, ‘catching a wee mouse’ or ‘listening to a dickey-bird,’ on the pretext of having her pick him out a few flowers with Pelzer’s consent. He had lots of names for it. Not a bad type—simply: with a cynicism and a nihilism that bordered on the macabre. And he was the one who used to try and cheer Kremp up a bit, he’d slip him a few cigarettes now and then, things like that, and clap him on the shoulder, and loudly proclaim the slogan you began hearing around that time: ‘Enjoy the war, bud, peace is going to be terrible.’

“The other one, Kolb, was a nasty bit of work, always pawing and patting. As for Pelzer—to use a contemporary
term: in view of the funeral-market situation, it was only natural for a black market to develop in everything—wreaths, ribbons, flowers, coffins, and naturally he got an allocation for the wreaths for Party bigwigs and heroes and air-raid victims. After all, who wants to have their dear departed buried wreathless? And because more and more soldiers, and civilians too, were dying, the coffins were eventually used not only over and over again but in the end as dummies: the body would be sewn up in canvas, later in sacking, then just wrapped up, more or less nude, and dropped through a flap into the bare earth, the dummy coffin was allowed to remain in place for a certain time, for appearances’ sake, and some earth would be thrown on it to make it more convincing, but as soon as the mourners, the salvo parties, the lord mayors, and the Party bigwigs—well, let’s say—as soon as the ‘inevitable cortege,’ as Pelzer called it, had moved far enough away, out of sight, the dummy coffin would be removed, dusted off, polished up a bit, and the grave hastily filled in—believe me, as hastily as at a Jewish funeral. One felt like saying: Next please, like at the dentist’s. It wasn’t long, of course, before it occurred to Pelzer, who missed out on the coffin rentals as well as the whole lucrative bag of tricks, that wreaths can be used over and over again too, and this double, triple, sometimes even quintuple use of wreaths was impossible without bribing and conspiring with the cemetery custodians. The number of times a wreath could be ‘recycled’ depended, of course, on the stability of the frame material and the tying greenery—at the same time it was a chance to have a good look at the methods and clumsy workmanship of the competition. Naturally this required organization, complicity—and a certain amount of secrecy; this was only possible with Grundtsch, with Leni, with me and Ilse Kremer—and I admit: we went along with it. Sometimes wreaths from nurseries out in the country would turn up, of truly prewar quality. So that the others wouldn’t notice anything, the whole operation was
known as the ‘reworking group.’ Eventually it extended even to the ribbons. It got to the point where Pelzer kept his eyes open and manipulated the customers when they placed their orders in such a way that the inscriptions became less and less personal, and this meant increased opportunities for recycling the ribbons. Inscriptions like ‘From Dad,’ ‘From Mum,’ can be used relatively often in wartime, and even a comparatively personal inscription like ‘From Konrad’ or ‘From Ingrid’ has some prospect when you give the ribbon a good press, freshen up the colors and the lettering a bit, and put the ribbon away in the ribbon closet, till once again a Konrad or an Ingrid has someone to mourn. Pelzer’s favorite motto at this time, as at all times, was: Every little bit helps. Finally Boris hit on an idea that turned out to be quite a little gold mine, the idea—and he can only have known about this from his knowledge of second-rate German literature—of reintroducing an old-fashioned type of ribbon inscription: ‘Gone but not forgotten.’ Well, that turned out to be what today we’d call a best seller, and we could go on using that until the ribbon was finally past freshening up or pressing. Even highly individual inscriptions such as ‘From Gudula’ were saved.”

Ilse Kremer on the same subject: “Yes, that’s right, I did go along with it. We used to work special shifts so no one would notice. He always said that it wasn’t desecrating the graves, that he got the wreaths from the rubbish heap. Well, I didn’t care. It meant a nice bit of extra money for us, and after all: was it so bad? What was the good of the wreaths rotting on a rubbish heap? But eventually someone did lay a complaint, on the grounds of desecration and grave-robbing, because, of course, there were some people who were surprised to come back three or four days later and find their wreaths gone—but
there again he was very nice about it, kept us out of the whole thing, went alone to the hearing, took the blame for everything, even kept Grundtsch out of it, and, according to what someone told me, he very cleverly used the argument of that national mumbo jumbo about the ‘penny gobbler,’ he admitted to ‘certain irregularities’ and donated a thousand marks to a convalescent home; what he said—it wasn’t a regular court, you know, just a guild committee and later a Party court of honor—what he said was, so I was told: ‘Gentlemen, Party comrades, I am fighting on a front that is unknown to most of you—and on the fronts that many of you know better than I, aren’t there times when one is willing to stretch a point?’ Well, after that he did drop it for a while, till the end of ’44 in fact, and by that time the general confusion was so great that no one paid any more attention to such trivial things as wreaths and ribbons.”

Since Grundtsch’s invitations were both cordial and standing the Au. paid him several successive visits, enjoying with him the truly heavenly silence that reigns over a walled cemetery on warm late-summer evenings. The following passages represent the verbatim summary of some four sessions that all began harmoniously and all ended harmoniously. During these sessions, of which the first took place on a bench under an elderberry bush, the second on a bench under an oleander bush, the third on a bench under a syringa bush, the fourth on a bench under a laburnum tree (old Grundtsch likes variety and claims to have at his disposal other benches under other bushes), tobacco was smoked, beer was drunk, and street noises, distant and almost agreeable, were sometimes listened to.

Résumé of the first visit (under the elderberry bush): “It’s really a joke, you know, Walt talking about financial opportunities—he’s always taken advantage of them, even at nineteen, when he was with a quartermaster corps during the first war. Quartermaster corps?—well, let’s say they clean up battlefields after the battle—there’s quite a bit to collect, stuff the army might still use: steel helmets, rifles, machine guns, ammunition,
cannon even, they pick up every canteen, every lost cap or belt and so on—and of course there are corpses lying around there too, and corpses usually have something in their pockets: photos, letters—wallets with money in them sometimes, and a buddy of Walt’s once told me that he—Walt, that is—stopped at nothing, not even gold teeth, never mind the nationality of the gold teeth—and toward the end, of course, Americans also started turning up on European battlefields—and it was in dealing with corpses that Walt gave the first proof of his business sense. Needless to say, it was all strictly prohibited, but people—and I hope you’re not one of them—usually make the mistake of thinking that what’s prohibited isn’t done. That’s Sonny Boy’s strong point: he doesn’t care a rap about regulations and laws, he just makes sure he doesn’t get caught.

“Well, the boy came home from World War I, at nineteen, with a respectable little fortune, a nice little packet of dollars, pounds, and Belgian and French francs—and a nice little packet of gold too. And he gave proof of his business sense by showing his instinct, his uncanny nose, for real estate, developed and undeveloped, he liked the undeveloped lots best, I mean undeveloped not in the horticultural sense but ones that hadn’t been built on, but in a pinch he would take the developed ones too. At that time the dollars and pounds came in very handy, and fields, say on the outskirts of town, were dirt cheap, here an acre, there an acre, as close as possible to the main road leading out of town, and a few small buildings belonging to bankrupt tradesmen and business people in the center of town. Then off went Sonny Boy to do his peacetime work, if you like to call it that: he exhumed American soldiers and packed them in zinc coffins to be sent to America—and there was as much illegal business to be done there as legal, for some exhumed bodies also have gold teeth; with their mania for hygiene the Americans paid fantastic sums for this job, and again there were a lot of legal and illegal dollars at a time when dollars
were few and far between, and again a few little properties for our man, tiny little lots, this time in the center of town where small grocers and tradesmen were going bust.”

Résumé of the conversation under the oleander bush: “Walter was four when I began my apprenticeship, at the age of fourteen, with old Pelzer, and all of us, including his parents, called him Sonny Boy—and the name’s stuck. They were nice folk, his parents, she overdid it a bit with her religion, was forever in church and so on, he was quite deliberately a heathen, if you’ve any idea what that meant in 1904. He’d read Nietzsche, of course, and Stefan George, and while he wasn’t exactly a crackpot he was a bit of a crank; he wasn’t specially interested in business, only in breeding, in experiments—to coin a new phrase: he was searching not only for the blue flower but the new flower. He’d been in the Socialist Youth Movement from the word go, and got me involved in it too: I can still sing you all the verses of ‘The Workingmen’ “ (Grundtsch sang:) “ ‘Who hauls the gold above ground? Who hammers ore and stone? Who weaves the cloth and velvet? Who plants the wine and grain? Who gives the rich their daily bread, Yet lives in poverty instead? It is the workingmen, the proletariat. Who toils from early morning Till far into the night? Creates for others riches, A life of ease and might? Who turns the world’s great wheel alone, Yet rights within the state has none? It is the workingmen, the proletariat.’

“Well, anyway, as a lad of fourteen, coming from the wretchedest Eifel village you can imagine, I turned up at Heinz Pelzer’s as an apprentice. He fixed up a little room for me in the greenhouse, with a bed and a table and a chair, right next to the stove—I got my board and a little money—and even Pelzer ate no better and had no more money than I did. We were communists, without knowing the word or really knowing what it means. Pelzer’s wife Adelheid used to send me packages when I had to do my stint in the army from 1908 to 1910, and where did they send me? You guessed it, to coldest Prussia, to
Bromberg, that’s where; and where did I go when I got leave? Not home, that miserable priest-ridden hole, no, I went to the Pelzers’—well, Sonny Boy was always playing outside and forever getting under our feet in the greenhouse, a cute little fellow, quiet, not friendly but not unfriendly either, and you know, if I stop to think what made him so completely different from his father: it was fear. He was afraid. There was always trouble with the bailiffs and checks that bounced, and sometimes we few helpers would scrape our meager savings together to prevent the worst from happening. A nursery garden was never a gold mine, it’s only become that since the flower craze has broken out all over Europe. And that Heinz Pelzer always after his new flower. He believed the new age needed a new flower, he had visions of something way out that he never found, though he spent years pottering over his flowerpots and flowerbeds, as secretive as any inventor, fertilizing, taking cuttings, crossing breeds: yet all he got for it was debased tulips or degenerate roses, ugly mongrels. Well anyway, when Sonny Boy got to be six and went to school, he had only one word in his head, ‘baily’—that was his abbreviation of bailiff. ‘Mum, is the baily coming today? Dad, is the baily coming again today?’ Fear, I tell you, fear’s what’s made him the way he is.