Group Portrait with Lady (31 page)

Mrs. Hölthohne puts it this way: “Those two young people simply streaked toward each other like rockets, and it was only the urge for self-preservation or, even stronger, the urge to preserve each other, that saved them from behaving carelessly. In principle I am against ‘affairs.’ But given those historical and political circumstances I would have approved of special leniency in their case, and against my own moral principles I would have wished they could have gone to a hotel together,
or at least to a park, I wouldn’t even have minded a hallway or something—we know that in wartime quite sordid ways and places for a tête-à-tête become acceptable again—
at the time
, I must add, I would have found an affair dishonorable,
today
I am much more progressive about such things.”

Margret verbatim: “Leni said to me: ‘You know, everywhere I go, on all sides, I see a big sign: Danger!’ And you must realize that the chances of communicating were very limited. It was really fantastic the way Leni knew as if by instinct that for a while she must keep the initiative in her own hands, in defiance of all convention, which in those days even I still adhered to. I would never have accosted a man. And not only were there words of love to be whispered, they also had to know, discover something, about each other. It really was enormously difficult ever to be alone together even for half a minute. After a while Leni simply hung up a piece of sacking between the toilet and the bales of peat moss, loosely, of course, with a bent nail stuck in it so the curtain could be drawn if necessary, and this made a little cubicle where they could stroke each other’s cheeks sometimes, or exchange a kiss, and it was a real break when she could whisper ‘my darling.’

“All the things they had to tell each other! Their background, their emotions, life in camp, politics, war, food. Then, of course, she also had contact with him on the job, she had to hand the finished wreaths over to him, and this handing over took, say, half a minute, and during maybe ten seconds of that they could quickly exchange whispers. And sometimes, with no prearrangement, they would both be busy at the same time in Pelzer’s office, when Leni read out to him the quantities of flowers used or had to check something in the ribbon closet. So that would mean an extra minute. And then they had to communicate in abbreviations, but first they had to agree on those abbreviations. When Boris said ‘two,’ Leni knew that two men had died that day in camp. Then, too, they wasted a lot of time over questions that for all practical purposes are
superfluous but for lovers are necessary, like ‘Do you still love me?’ and so forth, and that also had to be shortened. If Boris said, for instance: ‘Still—as I do?,’ Leni knew that meant, ‘Do you still love me as I love you?,’ and she could quickly say ‘yes, oh yes’—and that way a minimum of time was wasted.

“Then, of course, there were times when she had to treat the Nazi amputee—I forget his name—to a few cigarettes, to keep in his good books, and that had to be done very, very carefully, so he wouldn’t take it the wrong way: not as if she were trying to make advances or bribe him, just as a natural token of friendship among fellow workers, and after she had given the Nazi—over a period of, say, four weeks—four or five cigarettes, it was all right for her to give Boris a cigarette
openly
, and Pelzer would presumably say: ‘O.K., kids, go outside for a few minutes and have a smoke in the fresh air,’ and then it was all right for Boris to go out too and openly smoke one outside—and they could talk openly together for two or three minutes, but naturally in such a way that no one could make out the words. And every so often the Nazi would stay away sick, and that unpleasant female too, and sometimes both at once; occasionally they were in luck, and three or four would be off sick at the same time, and Pelzer away, and since Boris was doing part of the bookkeeping and Leni the other part, they could be officially in the office together for twenty minutes, or at least ten, and really talk, about their parents, their lives, Leni about Alois—it was ages, I believe they’d already ‘lain together’ as Leni called it, before she even knew his surname. ‘Why,’ she said to me, ‘why did I have to know it any sooner, there were more important things to talk about, and I told him my name was Gruyten and not Pfeiffer as on the papers.’ And the way Leni familiarized herself with what was happening in the war, so she could keep him posted on the situation at the front: she had an atlas, and in it she entered everything we heard on the British radio, and believe
me, she knew exactly that at the beginning of January ’44 the front was near Krivoi Rog, and that at the end of March there was an encirclement battle at Kamenets Podolsk, and that by mid-April ’44 the Russians had already reached Lvov, and then she knew exactly who was advancing from the west after Avranches, St.-Lô, and Caen: the Americans, and in November, when she’d already been pregnant for some time, her constant rage at the Americans for being such ‘slowpokes’—as she called them—and taking so long to get from Monschau to the Rhine. ‘It’s less than sixty miles,’ she would say, ‘why ever are they taking so long?’ Well, we were all counting on being liberated by December or January at the latest, but things didn’t go quite that fast, and she couldn’t understand it. Then the awful gloom because of the Ardennes offensive and the long-drawn-out battle in Hürtgen Forest. I explained it to her, or tried to. That the Germans were fighting tooth and nail because the Americans were now on German soil, that the terrible winter was naturally hampering the advance. We went over this so often together that I still remember every detail. Well, you mustn’t forget she was pregnant, and that we had to find a man we could trust who would pass himself off as the father of Leni’s child. She didn’t want to write down ‘Father unknown’ unless she absolutely had to.

“An unwanted complication—and I still say unwanted because we had other things to worry about, I can assure you—was that Boris added to the confusion by one day whispering the name Georg Trakl to her. We were both completely at a loss, hadn’t the foggiest notion who he meant: could he be suggesting him as the father for Leni’s child, and who was he, where did he live? Leni had understood Trakl as Trackel, and because she knew a little English she thought it might even be Truckel or Truckle. I don’t know to this day what Boris had in mind, in September 1944. Surely he must have realized that the lives of all of us were hanging by a thread. I spent the whole evening phoning
around because Leni was so impatient and wanted the answer that very night. Nothing: not one of my friends reacted. Finally she went to her parents’ home, late that same night, and picked all the Hoyser brains. Nothing. Rather a nuisance, because the following day she had to sacrifice precious seconds to ask Boris who it was. He said: ‘Poet, German, Austria, dead.’ Whereupon Leni made a beeline for the nearest public library and promptly wrote on her request slip: Trackel, Georg—arousing the explicit and overt disapproval of an elderly female librarian but ending up in possession of a slim volume of poems which she eagerly accepted and began to read the minute she got on the streetcar. I still remember a few lines because she used to read them aloud to me evening after evening: ‘Ancestral marble has turned gray.’ I liked that, in fact I liked it enormously, and the other one even better: ‘Girls are standing at the gateways, Gazing out at life resplendent, Shyly, with moist lips a-quiver, And they wait there at the gateways.’ I used to just bawl over that one, I still do, because it reminds me more and more, the older I get, of my childhood and youth: how expectant and gay I was—expectant and gay—and the other poem suited Leni so perfectly that we soon both had it off by heart: ‘By the fountain, in the gloaming, Often is she seen enraptured, Drawing water, in the gloaming, Pail ascending and descending.’ She learned those poems from the little book by heart, you see, and she would sing them softly to herself in the workshop to an improvised tune—to give him pleasure, and it did, but there was trouble too, with that Nazi, for one day he roared at her and asked what she thought she was doing, and she said she was only quoting from a German poet, and Boris was silly enough to interfere and said he knew that German poet, he was from the Ostmark—he actually said Ostmark instead of Austria!—and was called Georg Trakl, and so forth. That really infuriated the Nazi, a Bolshevik knowing more about German poetry than he did—so he inquired
at Party headquarters or somewhere and asked whether this Trakl had been a Bolshevik, and they must have told him he was all right. And then he wanted to know whether it was all right for a Soviet Russian, a subhuman, a Communist, to know this Trakl so well, and they must have told him that the sacred German cultural heritage had no place in the mouth of a subhuman. And believe it or not, there was even more trouble because Leni—I must say, for a time she was cheeky and self-confident and looked absolutely marvelous because she was loved, as no one has never loved me, not even Schlömer—maybe Heinrich would’ve loved me like that—well, it so happened that on that particular day she sang the poem about Sonja: ‘At eventide, in ancient gardens, Sonja’s life, an azure silence’—the name Sonja occurs four times. And the Nazi shouted that Sonja was a Russian name, and that was treason or some such thing. Leni retorted, quick as a flash: Sonja Henie was also called Sonja, and only a year ago she’d seen a movie called
The Postmaster
, full of Russians, and a Russian girl. This argument was presumably cut short by Pelzer saying that was all a lot of crap and of course Leni could sing while she worked, and if there was nothing anti-German in what she sang there was no objection, and they took a vote, and because she had such a sweet little contralto voice and everything was so depressing anyway, and no one ever simply started singing like that, every one of them, every single one, voted against the Nazi—and Leni could go on singing her improvised Trakl songs.”

Mrs. Hölthohne, Ilse Kremer, and Grundtsch all testify, in differing formulations, that they had found Leni’s singing pleasant. Mrs. Hölthohne: “Heavens above, in those cheerless days it was heartwarming: that child with her nice contralto, singing
away—without being ordered to; well, it wasn’t hard to tell that she knew her Schubert by heart, and what clever variations of him she produced with those beautiful, moving words.” Ilse Kremer: “It was a regular ray of sunshine when Leni sang one of her songs. Not even Marga Wanft or the Schelf woman objected; you could see and hear and feel too, that she wasn’t only in love but was loved in return—but who it was none of us would ever have guessed, with that Russian always standing there so quietly, stolidly working away.”

Grundtsch: “I used to laugh myself sick, on the inside as well as on the out, over the fury of that Dirty Berty Kremp. Did he ever get mad about Sonja! As if there weren’t hundreds, thousands of women called Sonja, and I must say that was pretty quick of Leni to come right back with Sonja Henie. It was like a sunflower bursting into bloom on a wintry cabbage field when that girl began to sing. Glorious, and we all, all of us, could sense that she was loved and that she loved in return—the way she blossomed in those days. Needless to say, apart from Sonny Boy no one had any idea of who the lucky man was.”

Pelzer: “Of course I enjoyed her singing, I’d had no idea she had such a nice little contralto voice—but if I could only begin to tell you the trouble it gave me! The phone calls I got—and being constantly asked whether those were really Russian songs, whether the Russians were behind it, and so forth. Well, eventually things calmed down, but there was trouble enough, and not without danger either. I don’t mind telling you: in those days nothing was without danger.”

At this point it is necessary to correct an impression that may have mistakenly arisen, namely: that Boris and Leni spent their lives in a permanent state of gloom, or that Boris was overly concerned with testing or improving Leni’s education in terms of German poetry and prose. As he told Bogakov every day at the time, he looked forward to his work and was always cheerful because, if there was one thing he could be sure of, it
was that he would see Leni again and, depending on the war situation, air raids, and things in general, could hope for a “visit.”

Following on the severe reprimand he had received because of his singing in the streetcar, he was smart enough to suppress, albeit with difficulty, any spontaneous desire to burst into song. He knew a number of German folk songs and nursery songs which he could sing in a melancholy voice, and that in turn meant trouble for
him
with Viktor Genrikhovich and some of his fellow camp inmates, who were not necessarily in the mood (understandably enough. Au.) for specimens of Germany’s musical heritage. Eventually agreement was reached: since “Lili Marleen” was approved, in fact was in demand, and Boris’s voice was acknowledged, he was allowed to sing one other German song for every “Lili Marleen” he sang (a song that, acc. to Bogakov, did not appeal to him. Au.). His favorite songs, acc. to Bogakov, were: “The Linden Tree,” “The Boy and the Rose,” and “Upon a Meadow Fair.” It may be taken for granted that what Boris would have really liked to sing out over the heads of the gloomy-looking early-morning streetcar passengers would have been something like “Hark, What Enters from Without?” However, one consolation remained to him after that one occasion when his singing had been so painfully misunderstood, so rabidly suppressed: the German worker who had whispered words of comfort to him rode almost every morning in the streetcar. Naturally they could not exchange a word, they could merely look every so often deeply and honestly into each other’s eyes, and only those who have been in a similar situation can gauge the meaning of a pair of eyes when they can be looked into deeply and honestly. So before starting to sing at work himself (Bogakov), he took some shrewd precautions. Since it was unavoidable for almost everyone in the workshop to
speak
to him occasionally, even Kremp and Marga Wanft—even if it was only a “There” or “Hurry up” or “Well” growled in his direction; and
since Pelzer was obliged from time to time to engage in lengthy dialogues with him—about ribbons, wreath- and flower-bookkeeping, about the work rhythm to be adopted, one day Boris approached Pelzer with a request for permission to “sing a song for them” now and again.