Group Portrait with Lady (30 page)

Ilse Kremer fully confirmed Pelzer’s litanesque utterance both as to quantity and quality: “Oh yes, he used to say it so
often you didn’t even hear it any more, it was like the words in church ‘The Lord be with you’ or ‘Have mercy upon us,’ and later on he had two variations of it, ‘I’m not a monster, you know,’ and ‘Do you take me for a monster?’ ”

Grundtsch (during a subsequent short visit that unfortunately did not permit a cozy session under elderberry or similar bushes): “Yes, that’s true. Quite true. ‘I’m not a monster, you know’—’Do you take me for a monster?’—sometimes he’d even mutter it to himself when he was alone. I often heard it and then forgot about it, because in time it came to him as naturally as breathing. Well anyway” (wicked laugh on G.’s part), “maybe those gold teeth were lying a bit heavy on his stomach, and the wreaths he pinched, and the ribbons and flowers, and those little parcels of land he kept on collecting even in wartime. By the way, just think for a moment how two or three or maybe four handfuls of gold teeth of assorted nationalities can be turned into real estate that looks unprepossessing at first but today, fifty years later, is a property with a large important building of the Federal Army standing on it that pays our Sonny Boy a pretty nice rent—”

It was even possible to pick up the trail of that high-ranking member of the Weimar Government, a trail which turned up again in Switzerland, where only the politician’s widow was still to be found. A tall, extremely frail-looking lady in a Basel hotel remembers the incident exactly. “Well, for us what mattered most is that we owe our lives to him. I mean it. He saved our lives—but at the same time you mustn’t forget how high or how low one’s position had to be in those days in order to find oneself saving another person’s life. This is the aspect of favors that is always forgotten: when Göring later claimed to have saved the lives of a few Jews, we must not forget: who could
really save anyone’s life, and what conditions of dictatorship are those in which a human life depends on a favor? What happened was that in February 1933 we were tracked down while staying with friends in a house in Bad Godesberg, and this person—Pelzer? Perhaps, I never knew his name—demanded all my jewelry, all our cash, even a check as well, as coldbloodedly as a highwayman, not for a bribe, oh no, do you know how he put it? ‘I’ll sell you my motorcycle, you’ll find it down by the garden gate, and I’ll give you a tip: drive through the Eifel, not to Belgium or Luxembourg, then drive beyond Saarbrücken to the border and get someone to help you across. I’m not a monster, you know,’ he said, ‘and the question is, of course, whether my motorbike’s worth that much to you and whether you can ride it. It’s a Zündap.’ Luckily my husband had been a motorcycle fan in his young days, but they—those young days—were twenty years back even then, and don’t ask me how we drove to Altenahr and to Prüm and from Prüm to Trier, with me on the pillion—well, luckily we had Party friends in Trier who got us to the Saar territory—not they personally but through contacts. True, we owe our lives to him—but it’s also true that he held our lives in his hand. No, don’t remind me of it again please, and now go, if you don’t mind. No, I don’t wish to know the name of that person.”

Pelzer himself denies almost nothing of all this: he merely has a different interpretation of it from everyone else’s. Since he loves and needs to talk, the Au. is free at any time to call him up, go and see him, have a chat with him, for as long as he likes. Once again the reader is urged to remember: Pelzer seems in no way obscure or shifty or dubious. He is thoroughly confidence-inspiring: he would seem highly suitable as a bank manager, be accepted as chairman of the board and, were he introduced to
one as a retired cabinet minister, the only cause for surprise would be that he has already retired, for he does not look in the least like a man of seventy, more like a man of sixty-four who succeeds in looking like sixty-one.

When asked about his job with the quartermaster corps, he did not try to change the subject, but he neither denied nor admitted anything, merely resorting to a quasi-philosophical interpretation: “You see, if there’s one thing I’ve always hated, and still do, it’s senseless waste: I emphasize the senseless—waste itself is a good thing so long as it has purpose and meaning: like splurging once in a while, giving a generous gift or something, but senseless waste really burns me up, and to my mind the way the Americans carried on with their dead came under the heading of ‘senseless waste’—think of the cost in money, personnel, and material to send back to Wisconsin, in 1923 or 1922, the body of some Jimmy or other from—say, Bernkastel, where he died in a field hospital in 1919. What for? And does every gold tooth, every wedding ring, every gold amulet chain you find among the remains have to go along too? And you wouldn’t believe what we collected—a few years earlier—in the way of wallets, after the battle of the Lys and after Cambrai—do you imagine that if we hadn’t taken those dollars they’d have got much farther than the orderly room or the battalion office? And besides: the price of a motorbike is determined by the historical situation and the purse of whoever happens to need it in that historical situation.

“Good God, haven’t I proved I can be generous too? And act contrary to my own interests when it’s a matter of human concern? Are you in any position to judge the spot I was in from the middle of ’44 on? Deliberately and knowingly I acted contrary to my duty as a citizen in order to make it possible for those two young people to enjoy their brief happiness. Didn’t I see how she laid her hand on him, and later on watch how they would keep disappearing for two or three or four minutes
at the far end of the greenhouse, where we kept the peat moss and straw and heather and the various tying greens—and do you think I didn’t notice something that it seems the others actually didn’t notice, that during air raids those two sometimes disappeared for an hour or more? And I acted not only contrary to my duty as a citizen but also contrary to my own sexual interests as a man, for I don’t mind admitting—I’ve never made any secret of my interest in sex—that I’d cast an eye, two eyes, in Leni’s direction myself. Even today, I don’t mind your telling her, even today I’m still quite interested. We war veterans and gardeners can be crude fellows, and in those days we called what today is described so subtly and elaborately and sophisticatedly, we called that simple ‘wrestling’—and to prove to you how honest I am I’ll revert to my way of speaking and thinking in those days. I’d like to have had a ‘wrestle’ with Leni. So, not only as a citizen, as a boss, as a Party member, but also as a man, I made sacrifices. And while I object in principle to love affairs, lovemaking, wrestling if you like, between boss and employees, when the feeling came over me I used to throw those objections overboard and behave spontaneously and, well, go to it, and every so often I’d—to use another of our expressions for it—I’d lay one of them.

“Occasionally there’d be trouble with the girls, little troubles and big ones, the biggest was over Adele Kreten, she was in love with me, had a child by me and was dead set on marrying me, wanted me to get a divorce and so forth, but frankly I don’t believe in divorce, I think it’s the wrong solution for complex problems, so I set Adele up in a flowershop in the Hohenzollern Allee, supported the child, and now Albert’s settled as a high-school teacher, and Adele’s a sensible woman, very comfortably off. That starry-eyed Adele—she was one of those idealistic gardeners, as we specialists call them, always rhapsodizing about Nature and so forth—has become a good little businesswoman. And that business with Boris and Leni
made me start sweating blood even early in 1944, out of sheer panic, and I’d be obliged if you’d find somebody, anybody, who can justly claim that I was a monster.”

As a matter of fact, not one of the persons involved has been able to claim with any conviction that Pelzer was a monster. However, it must be noted and remembered at this point that Pelzer was not economical in his sweating of fear and blood. He sweated six months too soon, and it is up to the reader to decide whether or not to give him credit for this.

Pelzer’s glassed-in office (still there and used today by Grundtsch as a despatch room, where he sets out, ready to be picked up, the potted flowers and dwarf Christmas trees for the graves) was situated at the center of his whole operation: assuming an adjusted topographical position, from east, north, and south three greenhouses abutted in their entire width onto this office, where Pelzer kept accurate records (a job later delegated to Boris) of flowers grown in the greenhouses before passing some of them on to the trimming tables, others to Grundtsch (who was in sole charge of the perpetual-grave-care business, which in those days did not amount to much yet), and some to the relatively legitimate flower trade. On the west side of the office was the wreath workshop, which ran the width of the three greenhouses and had direct access to two of the three greenhouses, giving Pelzer an unobstructed view of every movement. What he may actually have seen is Leni and Boris sometimes going, one soon after the other, either to the toilet, which was not segregated as to sex, or to pick up material from one of the two greenhouses.

According to repeated statements by Mr. von den Driesch, the local air-raid warden, air-raid shelter conditions at Pelzer’s were “criminal,” the nearest shelter, which barely met requirements,
being some two hundred and fifty yards away in the cemetery administration building, and the use of this shelter—again according to regulations—was prohibited to Jews, Soviet individuals, and Poles. The ones who insisted most vehemently on keeping to this rule were—predictably—Kremp, Marga Wanft, and the Schelf woman; where, then, was the Soviet individual to go when British or American bombs were falling, bombs which, although not directed at him, could hit him? The hitting of a Soviet individual was not that important. Kremp expressed it thus: “One less, what’s the difference?” (Witness Kremer.) But then a further complication arose: who was to guard the Soviet individual while German life was being protected (if only fictitiously) in the shelter? Could he be left alone, unguarded, with a chance to make a bid for the condition that is known, if not familiar, to all: freedom? Pelzer’s solution to the problem was a drastic one. He refused point-blank to so much as set foot in the shelter, disputing that it “offered even minimal protection. It’s nothing but a coffin”—facts which even the civic authorities unofficially regarded as indisputable; during air raids he stayed in his office, guaranteeing that the Soviet individual would not find it “that easy” to make a bid for freedom. “I’ve been a soldier, after all, and know my duty.” Leni, however, who has never in her life set foot in an air-raid shelter or cellar (a further instance of similarity between her and Pelzer) said she “used simply to go out into the cemetery and wait for the all-clear.” What gradually happened was that “everyone simply went off somewhere, even the complaints of that fool von den Driesch had no effect, Sonny Boy simply saw to it that his written protests were intercepted by a good friend” (Grundtsch). “It was really a joke, that air-raid shelter in the administration building, an asphyxiation chamber, that’s all it was, a mere fiction, an ordinary cellar reinforced by a couple of inches of cement, even an incendiary bomb would’ve gone through that.” Result: when the air-raid siren sounded, anarchy ensued: work had to
stop, the Soviet individual was not to be let out of sight, and all the others ran off “somewhere.” Pelzer stayed in his office and assumed responsibility for Boris, glancing from time to time at the clock and bemoaning the passage of work time that was at his expense and totally unproductive. Since, moreover, von den Driesch was constantly finding fault with Pelzer’s blackout blinds, he “eventually simply turned out the light—and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (Grundtsch).

So what happened in this darkness?

Early in 1944, while Pelzer was already sweating blood, was some “wrestling” already taking place between Boris and Leni?

Taking the statement of the sole witness whom Leni initiated into her intimate life—Margret—as a basis, it is possible to reconstruct with something like accuracy the state of the erotic relationship between Boris and Leni as follows. After the first laying-on-of-hands, Leni often spent her evenings with Margret, finally going to live with her, and once again she entered upon a “talkative phase”—corresponding to the “extremely talkative phase” she entered upon with Boris Lvovich. Granted that Boris Lvovich did not describe the erotic situation in such detail as Leni did to Margret, the result, if we use a somewhat coarser screen in our fact-finding, is nevertheless a synchronous picture. In any event, Pelzer, whose sense of reality has remained undisputed thus far, must have suffered considerable loss of reality if he was already “sweating blood” early in 1944. It was not until some time in February 1944—six weeks after the laying-on-of-hands—that the momentous words were uttered! Leni was able to whisper quickly to Boris outside the toilet: “I love you,” and he quickly whispered back: “Me too.” This grammatically incorrect contraction must be forgiven him. He should, of course, have said: “I love you too.” Anyway: Leni understood, although “just then those damned salvos came to a climax” (Leni according to Margret). About
the middle of February the first kiss took place, sending them both into ecstasy. The first time they “lay together” (Leni’s expression, verified by Margret), was, as we know, March 18, on the occasion of a daylight air raid that lasted from 2:02
P.M
. until 3:18
P.M
. and during which only one bomb was dropped.

At this point Leni must be cleared of a quite natural but entirely unfounded suspicion, the suspicion of anything platonic in her erotic behavior. She has the incomparable directness of Rhenish girls (yes, she is a Rhinelander, and a Rhinelander “endorsed” by Mrs. Hölthohne, which is saying something) who, when they are fond of someone, let alone feel they have found the right man, are instantly willing to engage in anything, in the “most daring caresses” and, moreover, without waiting for a marriage license from either church or state. Now these two were not only in love, they were “madly in love” (Bogakov), and Boris could feel Leni’s enormous sensuality, which he described to Bogakov: “She’s willing, willing—there’s a—an incredible willingness to go along.” It may be definitely assumed that the two of them wanted to lie together, or visit with each other, as soon as possible and as often as possible, only: the circumstances demanded a caution such as a couple might, by comparison, have to use when obliged to run from opposite directions across a mile-wide minefield, meet on an unmined area of three or four square yards, and have a “lay” or a wrestle.