Group Portrait with Lady (32 page)

Pelzer: “I was staggered. I really was. That the boy should think of such a thing. Now this was a damn ticklish business, after that fiasco with the streetcar singing, though luckily nobody noticed at the time just what he was singing, only
that
he was singing. When I asked him why he was so keen on singing and explained that, in view of the war situation, a singing Russian prisoner of war was bound to be considered a provocation—don’t forget it was June 1944, Rome was already in American hands and Sebastopol back in Russian hands—he said: ‘I enjoy it so much.’ Now I have to admit I was touched, I really was: he enjoyed singing German songs. So I said to him: ‘Listen, Boris, you know I’m not a monster, and as far as I’m concerned you can belt out your songs like Chaliapin, but you remember, don’t you, the commotion caused by Mrs. Pfeiffer’s singing (I never called her Leni in his presence), so what’s going to happen now if you.…’ In the end I did risk it, made a little speech and said: ‘Now listen, all of you, this Boris of ours has been working side by side with us for six months. We all know he’s a good worker and a shy fellow, well it seems he likes German songs, in fact all German singing, and he’d like permission to sometimes sing a German song at work. I suggest we take a vote, those in favor raise their hands,’ and I was the first to put my hand up, right away—and lo and behold, that Kremp didn’t exactly put his hand up, he just growled something under his breath—and I went on: ‘What Boris wants to sing for us is part of our German cultural heritage, and I can see no danger in a
Soviet Russian being that keen on our German cultural heritage.’ Well, Boris was smart enough not to start singing then and there, he waited a few days, and then, I don’t mind telling you, he sang arias by Karl Maria von Weber as well as I ever heard them at the opera house. And he sang Beethoven’s ‘Adelaïde’ too, flawless musically and in flawless German. Well, then he sang rather too many love songs for my taste; and then finally ‘Off to Mahagonny, The air is cool and fresh, There’s whiskey there and poker, And horse- and woman-flesh.’ He used to sing that a lot, and it wasn’t till later that I found out it’s by that fellow Brecht—and I must say that even now, all these years later, I get cold shivers down my spine—it’s a fine song, and later on I bought the record, I still listen to it often and enjoy it—but I get icy shivers down my spine just to think of it: that fellow Brecht being sung by a Russian prisoner of war in the fall of ’44, with the British already at Arnhem, the Russians already in the outskirts of Warsaw, and the Americans almost in Bologna … you can get gray hair from just remembering a thing like that. But who’d heard of Brecht in those days? Not even Ilse Kremer—he could be sure of that, of nobody knowing Brecht and nobody knowing that Trakl fellow. I didn’t tumble to it till later: they were singing love songs to each other, he and Leni! Real antiphonal singing, that’s what it was.”

Margret: “Those two were getting more and more daring, I got terribly scared. Leni was now bringing him something every single day: cigarettes, bread, sugar, butter, tea, coffee, newspapers that she folded into tiny squares, razor blades, clothing—winter was coming on, you see. You can figure that, starting in mid-March 1944, not a day went by without her bringing him something. She dug out a cavity in the bottom bale of peat moss and plugged it up with a chunk of peat moss, turned it
against the wall, of course, and this is where he had to pick up the stuff; naturally she had to get on the right side of the guards so they wouldn’t search him—that had to be done carefully, and there was this one cocky fellow, good fun but cocky, who wanted to take Leni dancing and so on and so forth, he called it ‘going into a clinch’—a cocky young pup who probably knew more than he would admit. He insisted on Leni’s going out with him, and finally there was no way out of it and she asked me to go along. So we went a few times to those honky-tonks that I knew so well and Leni not at all, and that cocky young fellow frankly admitted that I was more his type than Leni, that he found her too soulful and I was more of a ‘swinger’—well, the inevitable happened, because Leni was terrified lest that fellow—Boldig was his name—should find out and raise the roof. I—how else can I put it—well, I can’t say I exactly sacrificed myself, I simply took him over—took him upon myself, might be more accurate—but it wasn’t that much of a sacrifice for me either, and at the end of ’44 one more or less probably didn’t make all that much difference.

“He lived in style, that young fellow did: only the best hotels when he wanted to ‘have a turn with me’—another of his names for it—champagne and all the rest of it, but the chief thing was that it turned out he wasn’t only cocky, he also liked to talk big, and when he was a bit drunk he would blab the whole story. Dealt in anything you care to name: schnapps and cigarettes, that goes without saying, and coffee and meat, but his most profitable deals were in documents for medal awards, wound-tags, identification papers—during some retreat or other he’d taken along the stuff by the ton, and you can imagine that when I heard ‘identification papers’ I pricked up my ears, because of Boris and Leni. Well, first I let him rattle on, then I laughed at him till he
showed
me the stuff, and true enough: he still had a carton the size of an encyclopedia full of forms, all stamped and signed, as well as leave passes and travel permits. Good enough. I let it go at that—but now it was
we
who had a hold on
him
, while he still didn’t know anything about us. I questioned him very carefully about the Russians, he looked on them as poor bastards, and sometimes, he said, he treated them to a few ‘regulars’ “ (regular, i.e., not hand-rolled cigarettes. Au.), “and they always got his cigarette butts anyway, and he wasn’t interested in making still more enemies. For an Iron Cross First Class Boldig charged three thousand marks and considered that ‘a gift,’ and for identification papers five thousand, ‘after all, that could be a lifesaver’—he got rid of all his wound-tags during the massive retreat from France, when the deserters hid in the ruins, shooting one another—at a suitable distance, of course—in the leg or the arm so that then they were legalized with their wound-tags. At that time I’d already been working for two years in a military hospital, and I knew what happened to the fellows with self-inflicted wounds.”

Pelzer: “That was the time when business began to decline for a while. Luckily for me, Kremp, who was always having trouble with his artificial leg, had to go into the hospital for a few months. I could easily have let two or three people go—reason: not that fewer people were dying, but the evacuation of the city was now being carried out more consistently and rigorously. Instead of the wounded all being brought into the city, they were now usually taken farther away across the Rhine. Well, luckily the Schelf woman and Miss Zeven chose to be evacuated to Saxony—and finally our select little group, if I may call it that, had the place almost to ourselves; but even to keep the rest of the staff reasonably busy was hard enough. I ended up putting them to work in the greenhouses—but even then business lagged, and I hardly made expenses. In ’43 we’d had two shifts, sometimes a night shift, then came a slack period, then suddenly an upturn connected with the British stepping up their air raids—well, we do happen to be in the funeral
business—and once again there were plenty of dead in the city. I took the workers out of the greenhouses again and reintroduced double shifts, and it was during this period that Leni hit on an invention, as it may fairly be called, which gave the business a real shot in the arm. She’d discovered a few broken pots of heather somewhere and simply began making wreaths from heather without frames, little tightly woven things which naturally revived the suspicion of romanizing—but after the events of July ’44 there were only a few idiots left who still thought about such trifles—and Leni became a real expert at it, the wreaths were small, compact, almost metallic, later they were even given a coat of varnish, and Leni would weave the initials of the deceased or the donor into them—sometimes, when they weren’t too long, the full names: there was just room for Heinz, or Maria, and this made for some attractive contrasts: like green on purple, and never, not once, did she break the rule of putting the trim in the top left third of the wreath. I was delighted, the customers were thrilled—and since we could still cross the Rhine, with no one to stop us and no particular risk involved, it was no problem to get hold of a cartload of heather. Sometimes she even outdid herself by weaving in religious symbols, and anchors, hearts, and crosses.”

Margret: “I need hardly say that Leni had her ulterior motives when she started on the heather wreaths. The way she put it was: she wanted her bridal bed to be of heather and, since they were forced to remain within the cemetery grounds, they had no alternative but to decide on one of the huge family vaults for their rendezvous; their choice fell on the large private chapel of the Beauchamps, already considerably damaged by that time; it contained benches and a little altar that screened the heather behind it, and it was a simple matter to remove a stone from
the altar and fix up a small cache of supplies, with cigarettes and wine, bread, candy, and cookies. At the same time Leni was getting craftier, for some time she’d only been bringing Boris a cup of coffee every four or five days instead of every day. Sometimes she skipped him when she handed in a wreath, she scarcely ever came near him at work, the whisperings had stopped, and the hiding place in the peat-moss bale was abolished and removed to the altar in the Beauchamp chapel. May 28 was their lucky day: there were two air-raid alarms, one right after the other, both daylight raids, between about one and four-thirty—not many bombs were dropped, just enough to make it a real air raid. Anyway, that evening she came home all smiles saying: ‘Today was our wedding day—March 18 was our engagement day, and d’you know what Boris said to me? “Listen to the British, they don’t lie.” ’ Then there came a tough time, for more than two months there were no daylight raids, most of them being at night, a few just before midnight, and we’d lie in bed with Leni cursing under her breath: ‘Why don’t they come during the day, when are they going to come again during the day, why are the Americans such slowpokes, why is it taking them so long to get here, it’s not that far, is it?’ She was already pregnant, and we were worrying about finding a father for her child. At last, on Ascension Day, there was another big daylight raid, lasting two and a half hours—I believe—and plenty of bombs, some even fell on the cemetery, and a few splinters whistled through the glass windows of the Beauchamp chapel over the heads of those two. Then came the period Leni called ‘glorious,’ the ‘month of the glorious rosary’—between October 2 and 28 nine major daylight raids. Leni’s comment: ‘I have Rahel and the Virgin Mary to thank for that, they’ve neither of them forgotten my devotion to them.’ “
Here we must present, by way of a quick summary, a few facts of practical interest: Leni was twenty-two years old, and in bourgeois terms the three months between Christmas 1943 and the first “visit” on March 18, 1944, might justifiably be called the engagement period, while, starting with Ascension Day 1944, we must describe them as “newlyweds,” as a couple that has placed its destiny entirely in the hands of Air Marshal Harris, then unknown to them. Infallible statistics are of more use to us here than Pelzer’s and Margret’s statements. Between September 12 and November 30, 1944, there were seventeen daylight raids, with approximately 150 aerial mines, slightly more than 14,000 explosive bombs, and approximately 350,000 incendiary bombs being dropped. It must be realized that the inevitable chaos favored the couple: by that time no one was looking that carefully to see who crawled in where and who crawled out with whom, even if it was the chapel of a family vault. Finicky lovers were stymied at such times and—obviously neither Leni nor Boris was finicky. Needless to say, they now had plenty of time to discuss parents, brothers and sisters, background, education, and the war situation. With the aid of air-raid statistics it is possible to calculate with almost scientific accuracy that, between August and December 1944, Leni and Boris spent almost twenty-four full hours together—three consecutive hours on October 17 alone. Should it occur to anyone to pity these two, let him quickly disabuse himself of this sentiment, for if we bear in mind how few couples, whether legally or illegally joined, whether at liberty or not, were able to spend that much time together in such close intimacy, we cannot but cite this as yet another instance of this couple’s being favorites of Fortune—a couple that was shameless enough to long for daylight raids by the British Air Force in order to come together again in the Beauchamp chapel.

What Boris never suspected, and probably never found out, was that Leni was getting into considerable financial difficulties. Considering that her monthly wages were worth scarcely more than half a pound of coffee, that the revenue from her building was worth roughly a hundred cigarettes, but that her coffee consumption amounted to two pounds, her cigarette consumption—including those she constantly had to “slip” this person or that—to presumably three or four hundred, it will readily be seen that one of the simplest laws of economics was being manifested with the speed of an avalanche: increased expenditure coupled with reduced income. To be accurate, at least with a probability bordering on accuracy: Leni needed nearly four thousand, sometimes five thousand, marks a month to cover the cost of coffee, sugar, wine, cigarettes, and bread—taking the blackmarket prices for 1944. Her income (wages and rents) amounted to some one thousand marks a month; the consequences are obvious: debts. And if we further calculate that in April 1944 she discovered the whereabouts of her father and wanted to “see he got something too” from time to time, through devious channels, then from June 1944 her monthly budget rose to almost six thousand marks in expenses as compared to a thousand marks in income. She had never been one to economize, and even her own consumption—before Boris and her father made additional expenditures necessary—had far exceeded her income. In a nutshell: in September 1944 she is known to have already had debts of twenty thousand marks, and her creditors were becoming impatient. It was just at this time that her mania for extravagance assumed a new dimension: she craved such luxury items as razor blades, soap, even chocolate—and wine, an endless supply of wine.