Group Portrait with Lady (3 page)

A further Slavic specialist, Dr. Henges, plays a subsidiary role; in any case, as an informant he lacks credibility, although he is aware of this lack and even stresses it, indeed almost enjoys it. He describes himself as “a total wreck,” a description that the Au. prefers not to adopt precisely because it comes from Henges. Unasked, Henges has admitted that, while in
the Soviet Union “recruiting” workers for the German armaments industry (he was at the time in the service of a recently murdered diplomat of aristocratic descent), he “betrayed my Russian language, my glorious Russian language.” Henges is living “in not uncomfortable financial circumstances” (H. about H.) near Bonn, in the country, employed as a translator for a variety of journals and offices dealing with Eastern European politics.

It would be going too far to enumerate all the informants in detail at this early stage. They will be introduced at the proper time and portrayed in their own context. Mention should be made, however, of one more informant, an informant not on Leni herself, but merely on an important figure in Leni’s life, a Catholic nun: a former book antiquarian who feels that he is sufficiently authenticated by the initials B.H.T.

A weak, but still living, informant, who need only be rejected as prejudiced when he is personally involved, is Leni’s brother-in-law Heinrich Pfeiffer, aged forty-four, married to one Hetti, née Irms, two sons, eighteen and fourteen, Wilhelm and Karl.

Still to be introduced at the proper time, and in such detail as befits their importance, are: three highly placed personages of the male sex, one a local politician, another from the realm of big business, the third a top-ranking official in the Ordnance Department, two pensioned female workers, two or three Soviet individuals, the proprietress of a chain of flowershops,
an old nursery gardener, a not quite so old former nursery-garden owner who (his own statement!) “now devotes himself entirely to the administration of his estates,” and a number of others.
Important
informants will be introduced with exact data as to height and weight.

The furnishings of Leni’s apartment—or such of them as remain to her after numerous seizures—are a blend of the styles of 1885 and 1920–25: inherited by her parents in 1920 and 1922, a few art-nouveau pieces, a chest of drawers, a bookcase, two chairs, are now in Leni’s apartment, their antiquarian value having so far eluded the bailiffs; they were described as “junk,” unfit for seizure. Seized and removed from the apartment by the bailiffs were eighteen original paintings by contemporary local artists from the years 1918 to 1935, almost all of them dealing with religious subjects; their value, because they were originals, was overestimated by the bailiff, and their loss caused Leni no pain whatsoever.

Leni’s wall decorations consist of detailed color photographs depicting the organs of the human body; her brother-in-law Heinrich Pfeiffer obtains them for her. He works at the Department of Health, part of his duties being the administration of teaching aids, and “although I can’t quite square it with my conscience” (H. Pfeiffer), he brings Leni the worn-out and discarded wall posters; in order to follow correct bookkeeping procedures, Pfeiffer acquires the discarded posters in exchange for a small fee. Since he is also “in charge” of the acquisition of replacements for the posters, now and again Leni manages to acquire through him a new poster which she obtains direct from the supplier, paying for it, of course, out of her own thinly lined purse. She restores the worn-out posters with her own hands, carefully cleaning them with soap and water or
benzine, retracing the lines with a black graphite pencil and coloring the posters with the aid of a box of cheap water colors, a relic of her son’s childhood days at home.

Her favorite poster is the scientifically accurate enlargement of a human eye that hangs over her piano (in order to redeem the frequently attached piano, to save it from being carried off by bailiffs’ agents, Leni has demeaned herself by begging from old acquaintances of her deceased parents, by obtaining rent in advance from her subtenants, by borrowing from her brother-in-law Heinrich, but mostly by visits to old Hoyser, whose ostensibly avuncular caresses Leni does not altogether trust; according to the three most reliable witnesses—Margret, Marja, Lotte—she has even stated that for the sake of the piano she would be prepared “to walk the streets”—an unusually daring statement for Leni). Less frequently observed organs, such as human intestines, also adorn Leni’s walls, nor are the human sexual organs, with an accurate description of all their functions, absent as enlarged tabulated wall decorations, and they were hanging in Leni’s apartment long before porno-theology made them popular. At one time there used to be fierce arguments between Leni and Marja about these posters, which were described by Marja as immoral, but Leni has remained adamant.

Since it will sooner or later be necessary to broach the subject of Leni’s attitude toward metaphysics, let it be said at the outset: metaphysics present no problem whatever for Leni. She is on intimate terms with the Virgin Mary, receiving her almost daily on the television screen, and she is invariably surprised to find that the Virgin Mary is also a blond, by no means as young as one would like her to be; these encounters take place in silence, usually late at night when all the neighbors are asleep
and the TV stations—including the one in the Netherlands—have signed off and switched on their test patterns. All Leni and the Virgin Mary do is exchange smiles. No more, no less. Leni would not be in the least surprised, let alone alarmed, if one day the Virgin Mary’s Son were to be introduced to her on the TV screen after sign-off time. Whether indeed she is waiting for this is not known to this reporter. It would certainly come as no surprise to him after all that he has meanwhile found out. Leni knows two prayers that she murmurs from time to time: the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria. Also a few scraps of the Rosary. She does not own a prayer book, does not go to church, believes that the universe contains “creatures with souls” (Leni).

Before proceeding to a more or less piecemeal account of Leni’s educational background, let us glance at her bookcase, the bulk of whose contents, inconspicuously gathering dust, consists of a library once bought by her father as a job lot. It is on a par with the original oil paintings and has so far escaped the clutches of the bailiff; it contains among other things some complete sets of an old Catholic church-oriented monthly which Leni occasionally leafs through; this periodical—an antiquarian rarity—owes its survival solely to the ignorance of the bailiff, who has been taken in by its unprepossessing appearance. What has unfortunately not escaped the bailiff’s notice is the complete sets for 1916–40 of the periodical
Hochland
, together with the poems of William Butler Yeats that had once belonged to Leni’s mother. More attentive observers such as Marja van Doorn, who for many years was obliged to handle them in the course of her dusting, or Lotte Hoyser, who during the war was for a long time Leni’s second-most intimate confidante, do, however, discover in this art-nouveau bookcase
seven or eight surprising titles: poems by Brecht, Hölderlin, and Trakl, two prose volumes of Kafka and Kleist, two volumes of Tolstoi (
Resurrection
and
Anna Karenina
)—and all of these seven or eight volumes are so honorably dog-eared, in a manner most flattering to the authors, that they have been patched up over and over again, not very expertly, with every conceivable kind of gum and gummed tape, some of them being merely held together loosely by a rubber band. Offers to be presented with new editions of the works of these authors (Christmas, birthday, name day, etc.) are rejected by Leni with a firmness that is almost rude. At this point the Au. takes the liberty of making a remark that goes beyond his scope: he is firmly convinced that Leni would have some of the prose volumes of Beckett there too if, at the time when Leni’s literary adviser still had an influence over her, they had already been published or known to him.

Among Leni’s intense pleasures are not only the eight daily cigarettes, a keen appetite (although kept within bounds), the playing of two piano pieces by Schubert, the rapt contemplation of illustrations of human organs—intestines included; not only the tender thoughts she devotes to her son Lev, now in jail. She also enjoys dancing, has always been a passionately keen dancer (a fact that was
once
her undoing in that it led her into the everlasting possession of the, to her, distasteful name of Pfeiffer). Now where is a single woman of forty-eight, whom the neighbors would be quite happy to see gassed, to go dancing? Is she to frequent the haunts of youthful devotees of the dance, where she would undoubtedly be mistaken for, if not mishandled as, a sex-granny? She is also barred from joining in church activities where there is dancing, having taken no part in church life since her fourteenth year. Were she to dig
up friends of her youth other than Margret—who is probably barred from dancing to the end of the days—she would probably end up in various kinds of strip or swap parties, without a partner of her own, and for the fourth time in her life would blush. To date Leni has blushed three times in her life. So what does Leni do? She dances alone, sometimes lightly clad in her bed-sitting room, sometimes even naked in her bathroom and in front of that flattering mirror. From time to time she is observed, surprised even, at this activity—and this does nothing to enhance her reputation.

On one occasion she danced with one of the boarders, a minor official of the judiciary, the prematurely bald Erich Köppler; Leni would
almost
have blushed had not the gentleman’s palpable advances been altogether too clumsy; in any event she had to give him notice because—he was not without intelligence and certainly not without intuition—he had recognized Leni’s enormous sensuality and, ever since the “impromptu little dance” (Leni) that had resulted so spontaneously from his coming to pay the rent and catching Leni while she was listening to dance music, had stood every evening whimpering outside the door of her room. Leni would not yield because she did not like him, and ever since then Köppler, who found himself a room in the neighborhood, has been one of her most malicious denouncers, from time to time, during his confidential chats with the proprietress of the small general store that is about to succumb to the economic trend, enlarging on the intimate details of his imaginary love affair with Leni. These details arouse the proprietress—a person of ice-cold prettiness whose husband is absent during the daytime (he works in an automobile factory)—to such a state of excitement that she drags the bald-headed judiciary official (who has meanwhile been promoted) into the back room, where she commits repeated assaults on him. This person, Käte Perscht by name, aged twenty-eight, is Leni’s most vicious vilifier, she
makes libelous moral accusations against her although she herself, through the good offices of her husband, hires herself out to a night club at times when an overwhelming majority of male trade-fair visitors flood the city. Here she does a “Trade Fair Strip” for which she is well paid and, before her appearance, she lets it be known through the medium of an unctuous announcer that she is prepared to follow through and satisfy any and all states of excitation brought on by her performances.

Recently Leni has had the odd opportunity to dance again. As a result of certain experiences, she now only rents rooms to married couples or foreign workers, and so has rented two rooms to a nice young couple whom for simplicity’s sake we will call Hans and Grete, at a reduced rent—and this despite her financial position! And it is this Hans and Grete who, while they were listening to dance music with Leni, correctly interpreted both her external and internal twitchings, so now and again Leni goes to them for an “innocent little dance.” Hans and Grete sometimes even cautiously try to analyze Leni’s situation for her, advise her to update her clothes, change her hair style, advise her to look for a lover. “Just spruce yourself up a bit, Leni, a snappy pink dress, some snappy nylons on those fabulous legs of yours—and you’d soon find out how attractive you still are.” But Leni shakes her head, she has been too badly hurt, she no longer goes to the store to buy groceries, lets Grete do her shopping for her, and Hans has relieved her of her morning walk to the bakery by quickly, before he goes to work (he is a technician with the highways department, Grete works in a beauty parlor and has offered Leni her services free of charge, so far without success), picking up her vitally essential fresh crisp rolls which she refuses to forgo and which are more important to Leni than any sacrament could ever be to anyone else.

Needless to say, Leni’s wall decoration does not consist solely of biological posters, she also has family photographs on the walls; photos of deceased persons: her mother, who died in 1943 at the age of forty-one and was photographed shortly before her death, a woman bearing the marks of suffering, with thin gray hair and large eyes, wrapped in a blanket and seated on a bench by the Rhine near Hersel, close to a landing stage on which the place-name is legible; in the background, monastery walls; Leni’s mother, it is plain to see, is shivering; one is struck by the lack-luster expression in her eyes, the surprising firmness of her mouth in a face that hardly gives an impression of great vitality; it is clear that she has lost the will to live; were one asked to guess her age, one would be embarrassed, not knowing whether to say that this is a woman of about thirty who has been prematurely aged by hidden suffering, or a fine-boned sixty-year-old who has retained a certain youthfulness. Leni’s mother is smiling in this photo, not exactly with difficulty, but with effort.

Leni’s father, likewise photographed with a simple box camera shortly before his death in 1949 at the age of forty-nine, is also smiling, with not even a trace of effort; he is to be seen in the frequently and painstakingly mended overalls of a mason, standing in front of a ruined building, in his left hand a crowbar of the kind known to the initiated as a “claw,” in his right a hammer of the kind known to the initiated as a “mallet”; in front of him, left and right beside him, behind him, lie iron girders of various sizes, and possibly it is these that make him smile, as a fisherman smiles at his day’s catch. As a matter of fact they do—as will subsequently be explained in detail—represent his day’s catch, for at the time he was working for the above-mentioned former nursery-garden owner who was quick to sense the coming “scrap boom” (statement by Lotte H.). Leni’s
father is shown bareheaded, his hair is very thick, only just turning gray, and it is very hard to apply any relevant social epithet to this tall, spare man whose tools lie so naturally in his hands. Does he look like a proletarian? Or like a gentleman? Does he look like someone doing an unaccustomed job, or is this obviously strenuous work familiar to him? The Au. tends to think that both apply, and both in both cases. Lotte H.’s comment on this photo confirms this, she describes him in this photo as “Mr. Prole.” There is not the slightest suggestion in the appearance of Leni’s father that he has lost his zest for life. He looks neither younger nor older than his age, is in every way the “well-preserved man in his late forties” who could undertake in a marriage advertisement “to bring happiness to a cheerful life companion, if possible not over forty.”