Group Portrait with Lady (37 page)

“He spent most of his time at home anyway, and you should’ve seen how those two carried on with their little son: like the Holy Family. He stuck to his belief that a woman is not to be touched for three months after her confinement nor from
the sixth month of pregnancy on—so for six months they lived like Mary and Joseph with now and again a kiss of course, but other than that only the child! They fondled him and spoiled him and they sang songs to him, and then one evening they jumped the gun a bit, in June ’45, they went for a walk beside the Rhine, until curfew time. We all warned them, all of us, Hubert and I and Margret, but there was no stopping them: every evening beside the Rhine. And it was wonderful, I must say, Hubert and I often went along, too, and we’d sit there and feel something we actually hadn’t felt for twelve years: peace. No ships on the Rhine, wrecks all over the place and the bridges smashed—just a few ferries and the American army bridge—sometimes, you know, I think it’d have been best not to build any more bridges across the Rhine and let the German West finally be the German West.

“Well, things turned out differently—and for Boris too; one evening in June he was picked up by an American patrol, and stupidly enough he had his German papers in his pocket, and there wasn’t a thing we could do: my American officers couldn’t help, and Margret’s American boy friends couldn’t help, nor my going to the city commandant and telling him the whole involved story about Boris: Boris was gone, and at first things didn’t look too bad; all that happened was that he’d been taken prisoner by the Americans and would come home as Alfred Bullhorst—seeing he didn’t want to go to the Soviet Union. It was no paradise, mind you, an American POW camp—but what we didn’t know was that during the summer the Americans began to, well let’s say, hand over German prisoners to the French—it could also be called selling them, because they got themselves reimbursed in dollars for the cost of food and accommodation—and we also didn’t know that this was how Boris ended up in a mine in Lorraine, in his weakened condition—the truth is that, thanks to Leni, or shall we say, thanks to Leni’s mortgage, the boy hadn’t exactly starved,
but then he wasn’t that strong either—and now—you ought to have seen Leni: she took off right away, on an old bicycle. She got across all the zone borders, even across all the national frontiers, into the French Zone, into the Saar Territory, right into Belgium, back again into the Saar Territory, from there to Lorraine, going from camp to camp and asking each of the commandants after Alfred Bullhorst, pleading for him, courageously and stubbornly, I tell you, but she didn’t know that in Europe there were probably fifteen to twenty million German POW’s; she was on the road with her bike till November, coming home at intervals to replenish her supplies—and then she’d be off again. To this day I don’t know how she managed to get across all the frontiers and back again, with her German papers, and she never told us either. Just the songs—sometimes she’d sing them to us, and over and over again she’d sing them to the boy: ‘On Christmas Eve, this very day, We poor folk sit here as we pray, The room is cheerless here within, Outside winds blow and enter in, Lord Jesus come, be with us here, We truly need Thy presence dear’—oh the songs she used to sing! It brought tears to our eyes. Several times she rode her bike clear across the Eifel and on through the Ardennes and back again, from Sinzig to Namur, from Namur to Reims, and to Metz again and to Saarbrücken again, and once again to Saarbrücken. It wasn’t the best kind of insurance, I can tell you that, crossing and re-crossing that corner of Europe with German papers. Well, believe it or not, she found her Boris, her Yendritsky, her Koltovsky, her Bullhorst—pick any name you like. She found him, she found him in a cemetery, not in a Soviet paradise in the vaults, no, in a grave, dead, killed in an accident in an iron mine between Metz and Saarbrücken in some remote village in Lorraine—and she’d just turned twenty-three and, if you want to be exact about it, had been widowed for the third time. After that she really did become a statue, and we’d go hot and cold
all over when she sang to the boy in the evening, the songs his father had loved so much:

And then suddenly, in an impudent voice: ‘Off to Mahagonny, the air is cool and fresh. There’s whiskey there and poker, and horse- and woman-flesh, shine for us, fair green moon of Mahagonny, for today we have folding money under our belts for a big laugh from your big stupid mouth’—then suddenly, solemn enough to make your flesh creep, in a loud chant: ‘When I was a boy a god often rescued me from the shouting and the rod of men, then, safe and good, I played among the flowers of the grove, and the gentle airs of Heaven played with me, and just as Thou gladden’st the heart of the plants when they stretch out their frail arms to Thee, so didst Thou gladden my heart.’ Fifty years from now I’ll still know that by heart, we got to hear it so often—almost every evening and several times a day, and you must picture it: Leni speaking in a strict, stilted High German, whereas otherwise she spoke only in her marvelous dry Rhenish dialect. Believe me, that’s something you never forget, never, and the boy never forgot it either, nor did any of us, not even Margret, and there were some of her English and American boy friends who could never have enough of it, watching and listening to Leni recite and sing, and especially when she recited the Rhine poem to her little boy … well, she was a wonderful girl, she’s a wonderful
woman and, I think, a wonderful mother too, the fact that in the end things didn’t work out for the boy isn’t her fault, it’s the fault of those crooks, and I’m including those rotten sons of mine, the ‘united Hoysers’—and their fiendish behavior, especially the old man, my father-in-law; Hubert knew how to fix him all right, when he came to collect his rent, his forty-six marks and fifteen pfennigs for our three rooms—Hubert would laugh every time, laugh like a maniac, every time without fail—till finally they only communicated by letter, and old Hoyser brought up the usual pettifogging argument that the onus was on the tenant to bring the rent to the landlord, not on the landlord to collect the rent from the tenant—well, then Hubert started
taking
the rent to him in his villa out there on the west side, every first of the month—and he’d laugh his maniac’s laugh there too, till old Hoyser couldn’t stand it any more and insisted on having the rent sent to him. Then Hubert started a lawsuit over whether rent is a debt to be paid by bringing, collecting, or sending—he couldn’t be expected, he said, to spend ten or twenty pfennigs on a postal money order or even on a remittance to a post-office account, he was only an unskilled worker, he said, which was true enough. Well, they actually appeared in court together, and Hubert won his case, so now Hoyser could choose whether he wanted to hear that maniac’s laugh at our place or at his: he’d been hearing it now on the first of the month for forty months, till he finally hit on the idea of employing a rent collector—but believe me, Hoyser still has that maniac’s laugh in his bones, and it’s Leni who has to pay for it today; he’s tormenting her to death, and he’ll have her kicked out if we don’t do something about it.” (Sighs, coffee, cigarette—see above: hand passed over gray cropped hair.)

“For us it was a happy time, till 1948, till Hubert Gruyten got killed in that frightful accident—it was madness, and since then I haven’t been able to stand the sight of Pelzer, I never want to hear of him again, I really don’t; it was too awful;
and it was soon after that, of course, that the kids were taken away from me, the old man just wouldn’t let up, he accused me of carrying on with every man who happened to be staying with us or even just came to see us, every one of them, so he could take the kids away from me, first hand them over to the welfare, then take them over himself; he even suspected me of carrying on with that poor Heinrich Pfeiffer, that poor boy who in those days was still hobbling around without an artificial leg and used to stay with us whenever he had to go into the hospital or to the relief agency. We had to rent out rooms, you see, we had to because he raised the rent and wouldn’t let up—and it so happened that the social worker came a few times, well actually she came several times, and always without warning, and damn it all, you can think what you like, yes damn it all, she happened to catch me three times with a fellow in what she called an ‘unequivocally equivocal situation,’ that’s to say, in plain English I was in bed with Bogakov, who’d been a buddy of Boris’s and sometimes came to see us. Yes, and the third time she caught me in an ‘equivocal situation’ with Bogakov standing by the window in his undershirt, shaving, and using my pocket mirror and a wash basin that stood on the windowsill. ‘Such situations,’ she wrote in her report, ‘would indicate an intimacy not conducive to the upbringing of growing children.’ Well yes, Kurt was nine, of course, and Werner fourteen, maybe it wasn’t right, especially as I wasn’t in the least in love with Bogakov, not even particularly fond of him, we just crawled into bed together; and needless to say they questioned the kids—and then I lost them, lost them for good; at first they cried when they had to leave, but later on, when they moved from the nuns to their grandfather’s, they had no further use for me; then I was not only a whore, I was a Communist and all that, but I must say this for the old man: he saw to it that they finished high school and went on to university, and he speculated so cleverly with the piece of land
Mrs. Gruyten made over to Kurt when he was a baby that today, thirty years later, with four blocks of buildings on it and stores at street level, it’s easily worth three million, and the revenue from it would be enough for us all to live on, including Leni, and at the time it was given to Kurt it was meant as a kind of gilded teacup or something—I need hardly say that’s rather different from a tired worn-out old mum who still goes to the office every morning for eleven hundred and twelve marks a month before taxes. And I must say this for him: I’d never have been—never could have been—that smart. Yet that business with Bogakov didn’t mean a thing, not a thing, I was so tired and depressed after Hubert died in that terrible way, and poor Bogakov, he was always in tears and didn’t know whether or not to go home to Little Mother Russia and so on and sang his sad songs, like Boris—my God, all we did was crawl into bed together a few times.

“Later on I found out it’d been Hoyser who’d squealed on us to the German auxiliary police, telling them we had a supply of black-market goods. He just couldn’t get over the fact that he hadn’t got a thing from the Schnürer Gasse, and so one day, it must’ve been early ’46, those slimy German snoopers turned up at our place and of course they found our supplies in the cellar: the salt butter, the bacon, the cigarettes and coffee, and piles of socks and underwear—and they confiscated the lot; enough to see us through another two or three years, and quite nicely too. Mind you, there was one thing they couldn’t stick us with: we hadn’t sold a single gram on the black market, at most an occasional swap, and we’d even given a lot away, Leni saw to that. Our British-American connections were no help, this was a matter for those German snoopers, and they even searched the house and at Leni’s they found those comical diplomas of hers stating she was the most German girl in the school. One of those stinkers actually wanted to squeal on her, denounce her as a Nazi, all because
of those crappy diplomas she’d been given at the age of ten or twelve, mind you, but this fellow was one I’d happened to see in Storm Trooper’s uniform, and I must say he shut up quickly, otherwise it would’ve been awkward for Leni: just try and explain to an Englishman or an American that you can get a diploma for being ‘the most German girl in the school’ yet not be a Nazi. When all this happened Pelzer was really very decent, he’d stowed away his share from the Schnürer Gasse in a safe place, you see, and nobody’d squealed on him, and when he heard that all our stuff had been confiscated he gave us some of his without waiting to be asked: not for money, or services rendered, most likely to get into Leni’s good books. Whatever the reason, that gangster was nicer than old Hoyser. It was later, much later, 1954 I believe, that I found out from one of those policemen that it was my own father-in-law who’d squealed on us.”

Mrs. Hölthohne, whom the Au. had arranged to meet this time at a very fashionable little café—not only out of gallantry but also to avoid exposing himself to any internal or external limitations on his consumption of cigarettes—had found herself at the end of the war in one of those former Carmelite convents, in the cellar of the former convent church, “in one of those crypts where at one time, no doubt, the nuns spent their periods of incarceration. I noticed nothing of the looting, and to me ‘the Second’ was merely a remote, terrible, endless dull roar, bad enough but very far away, and I was bound and determined not to leave that cellar until I was positive the Americans had arrived; I was scared. So many people were being shot and hanged, and though my papers were all right and had stood up to many tests, I was scared: I was scared some patrol might get it into their heads to be suspicious and shoot me.

“So I stayed down where I was, finally all alone, and let them get on up there with their looting and celebrating. I didn’t come out till I heard the Americans were actually there, then I breathed again and wept, for joy and pain, joy at the liberation and pain at the sight of that totally and senselessly destroyed city—then I wept for joy when I saw that all the bridges, every last one of them, had been destroyed: at last the Rhine was Germany’s frontier again, at last—what an opportunity that was, it should have been taken advantage of. Simply build no more bridges, just let ferries, subject to constant inspection of course, cross back and forth.

“Well, I immediately got in touch with the American military authorities, after some phoning around located my friend the French colonel, was allowed to travel freely between the British and French Zones, and was lucky enough two or three times to be able to help the little Gruyten girl, Leni, out of rather ticklish situations, when she was naively cycling all over the countryside looking for her Boris.