Group Portrait with Lady (33 page)

Comment by Lotte H: “She never borrowed from me, though, because she knew I was having a hard enough time as it was, with the two kids. On the contrary: every so often she’d slip me something, bread coupons and sugar, or occasionally tobacco or a few ‘regulars.’ No, no. She was all right. Between April and October she hardly ever came home, and you could tell she had someone who loved her and whom she loved. We didn’t know who it was, of course, and we all thought she must be meeting him in Margret’s apartment. By then I’d already been gone from the firm for a year, I was working for the Employment Bureau, later for the welfare department that looked after the homeless, making just enough to be able to buy my rations. The firm had been reorganized—after June ’43 a new broom from the Ministry took over, a regular live wire, and because his name was Kierwind we all called him ‘New Wind,’ and he was always talking about ‘airing the good old comfortable ways and letting the stuffy atmosphere out of the place’! My father-in-law and I were part of that stuffy atmosphere. He told me quite frankly: ‘You two have been here too long, much too long—and I don’t want any trouble with you if we now have to start building trenches and fortifications on the western frontier. It’s going to be tough with Russians, Ukrainians, and Russian women, and German penal units. That’s not your cup of tea. The best thing you can do is quit voluntarily.’ Kierwind was the classic go-ahead type, cynical yet not entirely unattractive—a familiar type. ‘You know, the whole place still smells of Gruyten.’ So we quit, I went to the Employment Bureau, my father-in-law to the railway, as a bookkeeper.

“Well, I don’t know how to put this—whether Hoyser was showing his true colors or whether those true colors had been affected by the circumstances. He turned quite nasty, and he’s stayed that way ever since. To say that conditions in our apartment were hellish is putting it mildly. After Gruyten’s arrest
we started out with a kind of living and cooking commune in which we included Heinrich Pfeiffer, who was then still waiting to be called up. To begin with, Marja and my mother-in-law did the shopping and looked after the kids, and once in a while Marja would go out into the country, to Tolzem or Lyssemich, and bring back potatoes and vegetables if nothing else, and sometimes even an egg. For a time this worked quite well, till my father-in-law began bringing home the unrationed soup they got at noon at the railway station, and in the evening he’d warm it up and sip it with audible pleasure in front of our very eyes, in addition, of course, to what he got from the communal pot. Then my mother-in-law developed a ‘gram mania,’ as Marja called it, and began weighing everything; the next stage was when everyone locked up their own stuff in a locker with a heavy padlock—and needless to say they began accusing one another of stealing. My mother-in-law would weigh her margarine before locking it up and then again when she took it out—and every single time, without fail, she insisted that some of it had been pinched. What
I
found out was that she—my own mother-in-law—was even going for my kids’ milk, she’d water it down so as to be able to make the occasional pudding for herself or the old man. So then I teamed up with Marja and left the shopping and cooking to her, and this worked out fine for me, neither Leni nor Marja was ever petty—but now the old Hoysers began sniffing around when something was cooking or appeared on the table, and a charming new variation was added: envy. Well, I must say I envied Leni, she could go off and hide away with her lover at Margret’s—so I thought.

“But now, since being with the railway, old Hoyser began developing his connections, as he called it. He was in charge of the bookkeeping for the locomotive engineers, and in ’43, of course, they were going into practically every corner of Europe, taking goods in demand
there
and bringing back goods in demand
here
. For a sack of salt they’d bring back a whole
pig from the Ukraine; for a sack of semolina flour, cigars from starving Holland or Belgium, and wine from France of course, any amount of it, and champagne and cognac. Anyway, Hoyser was in a strategic position, and since he eventually took over the timetable coordination of all the transport trains he soon found himself in business in a big way. He’d make an exact analysis of what was in short supply in which part of Europe, and then see to it that the appropriate barter took place: Dutch cigars went to Normandy in exchange for butter—this was before the invasion, of course—and in Antwerp, say, butter would be exchanged for twice the number of cigars that had been given for the butter in, say, Normandy. And because he was then put in charge of routing, he gained control over the stokers and locomotive engineers and, needless to say, saw to it that those who collaborated best got the best routes, and of course on the domestic market, too, various items in various places brought various prices. In the cities everything fetched a good price: food and luxuries—coffee, of course, was more in demand than food in the rural areas—and through barter business, butter for coffee, say—it was possible to, as he put it, double one’s investment.

“It was only natural for Leni to be the person he lent the most money to; he did warn her, it seems, but when she needed money he gave it to her. Eventually he became her source not only of money but also of goods, and he could make something on the side by charging her a bit extra, which Leni never noticed. She just kept right on signing IOU’s.

“In the end he was the one who discovered old Gruyten’s whereabouts: first he’d been a construction worker on the Atlantic coast in France, operating a cement mixer with a penal unit, later on in Berlin clearing rubble after air raids—and we finally found a way of getting the occasional parcel to him and getting news from him. The message was usually: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll soon be back.’ Then payments fell due again. The inevitable happened: around August ’44 Leni owed Hoyser twenty
thousand marks, and do you know what he did? He pressed her! He said, my transactions will come to a halt, my child, if I don’t get my money back—do you know what the outcome was? Leni took a mortgage of thirty thousand marks on her building, gave the old man the twenty thousand, and was left with ten thousand for herself. I warned her, I told her it was madness to raise money on real estate in a time of inflation—but she laughed, gave me something for the kids and a package of ten ‘regulars’ for myself, and because just at that moment Heinrich slipped into the room looking for some extra goodies, she gave him something too and did a little improvised dance with the lad, who was completely baffled. I must say, it was fantastic the way she had blossomed, how lighthearted and gay she was, and I envied not only her but also the fellow she was so much in love with.

“Soon after that, Marja moved out for a time into the country, Heinrich was called up, and I was alone with old Hoyser, who I also had to leave in charge of my kids. As for Leni, the inevitable happened: the second mortgage fell due, and then, yes, then—I’m ashamed to tell you—he actually bought the building off her, a building that was only partially damaged, and in this location, at the end of ’44, when it was already hard to get anything at all in exchange for money—he gave her a further twenty thousand marks, discharged the mortgages, which were in his name of course—and there he was, something he had apparently always aimed at being: a property owner, and now he owned the thing, a building that’s easily worth nearly half a million today, and for the first time I realized his nature when he began right away on January 1, 1945, to collect the rent. That must’ve been his dream, to go around on the first of every month and collect—except that in January ’45 there wasn’t much to collect: most of the tenants had been evacuated, the two top floors were burned out, and it was really quite funny the way he put me on his rent list too,
and the Pfeiffers of course, although they didn’t come back till ’52—and it wasn’t until he collected the first rent from me—32 marks and 60 pfennigs for my two unfurnished rooms—that it dawned on me we’d been living all those years with Leni rent-free. Sometimes I’ve thought Leni behaved far from sensibly, I warned her too—but today I think she was sensible, to spend every penny she had with the man she loved. Besides, she never starved, neither then nor in peacetime.”

Margret: “Now came what Leni herself called her ‘second troop inspection.’ She’d held the first one, so she told me, when the business with Boris began—she went through all her friends and relatives, had even gone down to the air-raid cellars in her building a few times to undertake tests there, she had ‘inspected’ the Hoysers and Marja, Heinrich, and all her fellow workers, and who emerged from this troop inspection as the only suitable lieutenant? Me. In her the world lost a strategist—when I think how she checked over each person, every single person, how she sensed a possible ally in Lotte but then eliminated her on grounds of ‘jealousy,’ old Hoyser and his wife as ‘old-fashioned and anti-Russian,’ Heinrich Pfeiffer as too ‘biased,’ and the way she was so sure that Mrs. Kremer was a potential ally and even went to see her so they could have a noncommittal talk, but then noticed she was ‘just too timid, too timid and too tired, she’s had enough, and I don’t blame her.’ She also considered Mrs. Hölthohne but had to reject her too ‘on account of her old-fashioned moral code, for no other reason,’ and ‘then, then one had, of course, also to know who was strong enough to be told a thing like that and stick it out.’ Well, she’d made up her mind to win the battle, and to her it was the most natural thing in the world to need money and strongpoints for carrying on the war, and the only
strongpoint she could find when she first inspected the troops and summed up the situation was me—a great honor and also a great burden.

“So evidently I was strong enough. In the air-raid cellar, at home, and with the Hoysers and Marja, she systematically tested their attitude by departing from her usual reluctance to talk and offering a variety of stories: she began with a German girl who’d got involved with an Englishman, a prisoner of war, and though the outcome of her tests was devastating enough—most people were in favor of shooting, sterilizing, withdrawal of citizenship, and so on—she then tried it out with a Frenchman, who came off better ‘as a person, as a lover worthy of consideration’ “ (probably because of the French talent
pour faire l’amour
. Au.) “and prompted a smirk, but then was totally rejected as an ‘enemy.’ But she persisted and produced her Poles and her Russians, or should I say threw them to the lions, and there was only one opinion there, nothing less than ‘off with her head.’ Within the family circle itself, if you include the Hoysers and Marja, people expressed themselves more openly, more honestly, less politically. Surprisingly, Marja was in favor of Poles because she saw in them ‘dashing officers,’ Frenchmen she considered ‘depraved,’ Englishmen ‘probably useless as lovers—Russians inscrutable.’ Lotte thought as I did, that it was all a lot of crap, or shit I might’ve called it. ‘A man’s a man,’ was her comment, and Lotte said she thought that, while Marja and her parents-in-law weren’t free of national prejudices, they certainly had no political ones. Frenchmen were described as sensualists but parasites, Poles as charming and temperamental but faithless, Russians as faithful, faithful, very faithful—but the situation being what it was everyone, including Lotte, thought it was ‘at the very least dangerous to start something with a western European and risking one’s very life to do so with an eastern European.’ ”

Lotte H: “Once, when she happened to be at our place to transact some financial business with my father-in-law, I opened the bathroom door to find Leni standing naked in front of the mirror, considering the firm lines of her body; I threw a bath towel over her from behind, and as I went up to her Leni turned crimson—I never saw her blush before—and I put my hand on her shoulder and said: ‘Be glad you can love someone again, if you ever did love that other one, forget him. I can’t forget my Willi. Take him, even if he is an Englishman.’ I wasn’t so dumb that I didn’t have a notion, in February 1944, that there was something going on with a man, and probably with a foreigner, when she started coming out with her funny make-believe stories. To be honest, I’d have advised her strongly, very strongly, against a Russian or a Pole or a Jew, that would’ve meant risking your very life, and to this day I’m glad she never told me about it. It wasn’t safe to know too much.”

Margret: “Even Pelzer had emerged as a potential ally from Leni’s first troop inspection. Grundtsch might have been a possibility too, but he talked too much. Now came the second inspection, and again I was the only reliable one when it came to Leni’s pregnancy and its consequences. We ended up by bearing Pelzer in mind as a kind of strategic reserve and eliminating the older of the two guards, the one who usually brought Boris to work, because he couldn’t keep his hands to himself or his mouth shut, and then we considered Boldig the swinger, I was still seeing him on and off and his business was flourishing—but not for long, he overdid it and got picked up in November ’44—with his entire stock of forms and stationery—and shot on the spot behind the railway station where they’d caught
him red-handed in a deal, so he was out, and his sets of identification papers too, sad to say.”

In order to be fair to Leni and Margret, a few comments must be interjected here relating to prevailing social attitudes. Strictly speaking, Leni was not even a widow, she was the bereaved lover of Erhard, with whom she occasionally even compared Boris. “Both of them were poets, if you ask me, both of them.” For a woman of twenty-two who had lost her mother, her lover Erhard, her brother, and her husband, who had gone through approximately two hundred air-raid warnings and at least a hundred air raids, who, far from spending
all
her time carrying on with her lover in the chapels of family vaults, was obliged to get up in the morning at five-thirty, wrap herself up against the cold and walk to the streetcar to go to work through darkened streets—for this young woman, Alois’s victory-prattle, still faintly audible in her ear perhaps, must have seemed like some fading sentimental hit tune to which one might have danced some night twenty years ago. Leni—contrary to all expectation and in defiance of the circumstances—was provocatively gay. The people around her were petty, morose, despondent, and if we bear in mind that Leni might have sold her father’s fine-quality clothing with considerable profit on the black market but chose instead to give it not only to
him
but also to the cold and needy members of a declared enemy power (a Red Army commissar was running around in her father’s cashmere vest!)—then even the most skeptical observer of the scene is bound to approve the word “generous” as a second adjective for Leni.